since this proves he has the power to solve it; and Cormack, from his papers, was such an one. The worst of all sins is, perhaps, stolid indifference to the truth.] When a man acts under doubt, then his action is but a wheel revolving within himself to his own destruction. This state of living doubt is damnation ; a guilty conscience; a being condemned in our own beings. The finest hand is but a fairer foot. Art is the science of spiritual insulations; it makes a single point of time the conducting line and medium of eternal truth. Perhaps in electricity, science for the first time becomes truly poetical. Mrs. Barrett Browning's "great God Pan" is not without a significant relation to this. Words are but bubbles moving on the stream of thought and life, which yet always indicate motion at the bottom; the more smoothly and silently they float along, however, the deeper the current. The moral of a work of art is its truly vital part, and therefore hidden from ordinary vision as the vital spark in man, which, too, only betrays its presence by his action, his healthy development. The criticaster deals merely in "opinions;" the critic, again, with "laws." The one is subjective, the other objective; while the one loudly asserts a clearly-defined relation between his own thought and the new work, the other indicates possible points of profitable contact with it; and as a sieve lets the worthless pass away, retaining only the valuable, so he. This is the mark or note by which the two classes are distinguished from each other. The true critic must be dramatic, and, in a sense, a poet. Shakespeare painted many coarse phases of life. His L sonnets are of value, to show posterity what was the real heart of the man. In his plays, living sentiment appears struggling against the rudeness of the instrumental words; it was not with him, as among us, careful polishing of the words till the reality of the passion or experience seems doubtful. In the sonnets, we find how he could sacrifice for love itself, and for its sake how he could bear up against cir cumstance. Man's destiny is a sky often obscured by cloud and storm, but in which the stars may come out just as the earth is darkened. I really do not see what there is in the Rationalistic movement so to distress good Evangelical people. It is a necessity of the contact of belief with a science very imperfect, but over-elaborated at certain points where it seems to lap over old, long-accepted theories. It is the full-armed attempt to make reason commensurate with miracle, which involves, in the face of it, a contradiction, since the very possibility of miracles is postulated in the fact of reasoning against them. But one great and beneficial influence of Rationalism in the future is already very clear to me. By and through it the educated of infidel nations are to be lifted up into the sphere of Christian faith, with a deeper root in and hold of the vital facts than they could ever have had, had they facilely accepted Christian dogmas. The philosophical Jews, for instance, must be affected by the present movement in a special and quite wonderful way; and so, ultimately, of the Brahmins, the Chinese, and the Persians. At first Christianity appealed from the wise and the rich to the ignorant and the poor; now it is making Rationalism its medium of appeal from the poor and the ignorant to the educated and the rich. Strauss and Hegel are not lost, any more than Fichte; they were workers together with those they laughed at, for the end that a grander gospel might be more widely received- -a gospel of human tenderness- -a gospel of light and love, as Christianity was meant to be, but had almost ceased to be under the cold formalism of a selfconscious apery of religion.* * Cormack, I understand, repeatedly spoke with great hope of the rich ingot the Rationalistic wave was yet to throw up on the shore of Christian belief; and the topic is often glanced at in his papers. He believed, by instinct, in the good that lies in evil, and was most tender with defects of doubt and sins of the intellect; not that he did not hold firmly enough by the good old-fashioned doctrines of the Church he loved, only he had seen more clearly than most men their relation to all the spiritual movements of the time. He would have rejoiced in an expression Mr. George MacDonald somewhere makes use of, to the effect that a door is often opened from behind, and men are pulled into life backward.. "Earnestly follow out the Rationalistic idea to the extreme, if you are so disposed," he would have said, "and I am sure you will somewhere find the point where it meets with, and is embraced by, the old doctrines. There is only one thing I fear-indifference flowing from indulgence. Some make Rationalistic ideas a mere cover for a life of cold disregard; and then they profess themselves earnest about rectifying the old forms of truth. From such lukewarm souls little is to be expected, whatever dogmas they may hold; and Evangelicalism loses as little as Rationalism gains by them." Somewhere Cormack remarks that Rationalism, while it has done little practically for the truth, has given a new basis and supplied quite new material for a grander and more real, because more expansive, philosophy of Christianity-an application to it of the new methods of science, which will only end in showing how infinitely higher it is than any other system. I cannot help thinking that Cormack was here glancing at the possibility of an "Ecce Homo." Evangelicalism and Rationalism are the two necessary poles of Christian thought in an artificial scientific age like ours; and the great error and danger lay in the manner in which the leaders on both sides sought to widen the breach, by dwelling on differences instead of on vital points; their tendency was to details, to forms; they made for the circumference, instead of striving towards the centre with steady pace and calm hopeful Christian spirit, where they would at least always have been coming nearer to each other. The electric line between the two, wanting as it was in insulation, conveyed false messages, and the currents ran off wholly on their return course. "Ecce Homo" is a new and sufficient insulator, compelling both parties to meet on common standing-ground, and to listen to each other. It is an Eirenicon of wondrous and magic power, which proceeds from the fact that the writer at once casts eyes to both poles, with a full sense of the merits and the defects of the temperature of both. There is, no doubt, some truth in Cormack's view of the benefits Rationalism will yet confer. Rationalism has made an "Ecce Homo" possible; and when we think of the effect of an "Ecce Homo" upon minds like that of the young eloquent Brahmin, Baboo Khesab Chunder Sen, in whom Dr. Duff, by his accounts, interested the public lately, we cannot measure the great, fruitful, and blessed results that may ere long ensue-the conversion of India and the whole East, and through them of the world. God does not work to results as men would force them; and we only injure ourselves and our cause when we rave and refuse to acknowledge the possibility of God working through neutral or even seeming-opposite means. -EDITOR. Third Stage. "In Guatemala legends, the first men ate the earth, and found it deliciously sweet."-Emerson. "What our age seems most to admire are those things which specially pertain to it as vices; for truly the homeliness of antique pathos and the simplicity of antique passion are sought for in vain; and the best advice one can give a young aspirant in literature is to recognise and appreciate these by a careful and generous study of the productions of past ages,—and not those alone of Greece and Rome either, but the early poetry and ballad-literature of as many other nations as are within reach." -Free translation from Sainte-Beuve. "I love every thing that's old: old friends, old tunes, old manners, old books, and old wine."-Goldsmith: She stoops to conquer. "Simplicity is the acme of perfection."-Coleridge. "This triteness of novelty [which comes of false originality] is enough to make any man of common sense blaspheme at all ideas of less than a century's standing, and pray that the world may be petrified and rendered immovable in precisely the worst moral and physical state that it ever yet arrived at."-Hawthorne. "Caule suburbano qui siccis crevit in agris Dulcior; irriguo nihil est elutius horto. *** "O, for men with heart, head, hand, Like some of the simple great ones gone INTRODUCTORY. WILLIAM HOPE. A MAN of middle size, thin, pale, and stooping, though evidently still young, with wealth of long brown hair shading worn cheeks, of shape and texture plainly announcing that nature meant them to be full and rounded, and bright hazel eyes of a rather dreamy cast, which seemed to look beyond every object on which they dwelt, sat opposite me—my only companion-in the little mail-gig which carries a passenger |