"THE IMMORALITY OF THE RELIGIOUS NOVEL." AN INDICTMENT OF THE ORTHODOX.

MRS. AUBREY RICHARDSON, in the Humanitarian, prefers a sweeping indictment against the religious novel. Her article bears the above startling title. She refers not to romances of the type of " Hypatia "and" Ben Hur," nor to such novels are "Robert Elsmere" and " Donovan," but rather to those religious novels " which breathe neither the spirit of tolerance nor that of controversy, but which adhere rigidly to prescribed forms of religious phraseology, and to well-defined rules of so-called 'Christian' conduct." In these lurks a "subtle and deep-seated immorality of thought and action." Indeed, it is the writer's opinion that "there are few more effectual opponents of the development of the human race than the writers of religious novels."

THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE LARGE FAMILY.

An incalculable amount of misery and discontent has been engendered by the apotheosis in religious novels of the abnormally large family, of the type regarded generally by the civilised world as peculiarly English. The impression created in the youthful mind by the ordinary religious novelist is that there is but one fitting milieu for a properly conducted heroine, i.e., the bosom of a large family. The mother of this storybook family is inevitably a confirmed invalid; yet, in spite of her afflictions, she, with an invincible patience and cloying sweetness of demeanour, occupies her time in presenting a succession of little brothers and sisters to the long-suffering heroine, till at length, worn out by the process, she dies in childbed. The heroine has then to play "mother" to the last born, and take upon her shoulders all the responsibilities of the household. The father is invariably represented as abstracted and pre-occupied, though the religious novelist never so far forgets herself as to stigmatise the indifferent progenitor of all the family woes with the epithet selfish.

Mrs. Richardson declares that in stories written with the avowed object of imparting a high moral tone to the plastic minds of growing girls and maturing women, it is a scandal and a shame that wholly false views of life should be embodied, and that since there is a pill concealed in the jam that pill should not be of a salutary nature. "The shame and misery of unhealthy marriages and reckless propagation, as well as their possible pathos, should be clearly shown, and the physical, mental and moral deprivations which large families with limited means have to undergo should bear their part in the story of family life."

GLORIFYING FALSE RELATIONSHIPS.

Among other false relationships upheld and glorified by religious novelists is the marriage of a young girl and an elderly man, preferably a widower with children; and the writer holds that it is a wicked thing to give an impression that it is more fitting and more seemly for a self-respecting girl to be proposed to by an elderly man-a man of experience, grave, sedate and fatherly. The stirring up of a false pity for the widower Jeft with young children seems to be a favourite task of religious novelists, yet it is a work fraught with consequences harmful to the woman and disastrous to the race. Then, too, the widower who marries " to provide a mother for his children" is a favourite figure in the religious world, both in and out of books. On this point Mrs. Richardson says:

It would be better if the fact were more clearly recognised that only in the smallest possible minority of cases does a man-even 3 godly" man-marry with that object. Widowers may occasionally marry for love, but quite frequently they take unto themselves the second or third wife,

for the reason perhaps that they took the first, to satisfy their passions. Yet, after all, the man who marries for the reasons referred to in that part of the marriage service which, in this refined age, only a few clergymen still insist upon reading, does better-i.e., acts more in accord with Nature's teachings -than he who marries to "give his children a mother." It is the most callous, the most cold-blooded act a man can commit, for by it he deprives an unsuspecting maiden of the glorious possibilities of her womanhood. He takes from her her most sacred possessions-her love, her truth, her purity, and gives her in return, a lifeless form, a caricature of passion, a mockery of love. Yet it is this hideous compact, this shameless traffic, that the religious novelist approves, blesses and commends to her readers when she makes her heroine gratefully accept the proposals of a man who condescendingly asks her to become the mother to his children."

It needs something more than veneration of imaginary qualities on the part of the woman and approbation even of real gifts and graces on the part of the man to make a true marriage and found a real home. Yet religious novelists, reflecting perhaps the commonplace views of the world of goody-goodies, either do not or will not see this. It is to be hoped that some day their eyes will be opened, and that they will abandon their present method of making their heroines choose their husbands, not for the essential qualities of true manhood, but for certain minor characteristics of the "Sunday cold dinner" and "weekly prayer-meeting" order, which, by writers of a certain school, are raised to the rank of cardinal virtues.

PROFESSOR BONNEY ON THE NEW HEDONISM. PROFESSOR T. G. BONNEY publishes in the Humanitarian an article on "The New Hedonism." It is apparently a reply to Mr. Grant Allen's article in the Fortnightly last March. He says that the device adopted by the prophet of the New Hedonism is the useful sophism of setting up for assault caricatures of the opinions held by your opponent; these can be easily battered, shaken to pieces, and trampled under foot. Thus the field is left apparently clear, and your own forces in undisputed possession. That the caricature is gross matters not; ninety-nine people out of a hundred will never find it out, and if any do so, you have only to pay no heed to criticism or correction, and to repeat your misstatements with unblushing confidence. The faith of the multitude will remain unshaken.

Professor Bonney says that while it is quite true that complete Hedonism-or doing as you please-has never existed, at any rate in historical times, still in a great number of cases Hedonism in social matters has had a fairly free field. Any one with a fair knowledge of Greek and Latin literature will know that it failed in ancient Greece and Rome:—

Christian self-denial rests on the same basis as all true self-denial in this life; it is a condition of existence, a part of the training which is necessary for the spiritual as for the physical athlete. We repudiate the excesses of some ascetics as a mere caricature, and so great a corruption of a good as the result in its opposite; but we plead in excuse that this extreme and exaggerated asceticism was a reaction-and one hardly unnatural-against the awful and general corruption which had been the outcome of the nearest approach which we have seen to a reign of Hedonism.

We maintain also that the facts of history, when scientifically treated, testify that the frequent perversion of Christianity, and its comparatively small success, alike proceed from the inherent defects of human nature, and not from faults in the creed itself They indicate that nations have advanced in genuine civilisation in proportion as these have been true to the law of Christ. They suggest also that the results of the domination of Hedonism, at best, would be selfish dilettantism, at worst, vices which once were no disgrace, and cruelty which was an ordinary matter.

It is best in this place, as we are on the subject, to settle, once and for all, this question as to Louis Napoleon's right to sit in the seat of his "uncle." He had no such right; and there can be no doubt that he was the son of Charles Henri Verhuel. It may be as well to remind the reader that Verhuel was a well-known Dutch admiral, who first met Hortense when as president of a deputation from Holland (one of those national deputations so subservient and dutiful when Napoleon I. was at his prime) he humbly requested the conqueror's brother to graciously reign over Holland. This proposal was accepted, and after Louis the elder and his wife had taken up their abode in their adopted country Verhuel became one of the many lovers of that modern "Messalina," as her husband terms her in a letter to the Pope.

This fact, which Mr. Graham says has never been stated positively before, explains a great deal, and accounts for much in Napoleon's character that would be otherwise inexplicable.

His whole character cried, as it were, his Dutch parentage upon the housetops. His virtues, as his faults, were all Dutch. His phlegm, his courage (for courageous he undoubtedly was, in his way, whatever our great historian, Kinglake, may say, but with that I shall deal later), his courage, I say, was distinctly à la Hollandaise. His patience under imprisonment, his good-nature, too, both were Dutch. His whole character was Dutch.

Napoleon took after his parents in the matter of morality, and Mr. Graham devotes some pages to a description of one of his favourite mistresses.

It has frequently been said of Napoleon III. that, notwithstanding his tendresse for the opposite sex, he never allowed the amiable weakness to affect him politically. But there was an exception to this, and that was in the case of the beautiful Countess de Castiglione. This lady seems, from the testimony of all who knew her in her prime, to have been one of those extraordinary beauties who have dazzled and enchanted the world, and she was the only woman, except the Empress, who had any influence over the Emperor as regards his public life. Madame de Castiglione was a niece of Cavour, but she laughed at Cavour, she laughed at Victor Emmanuel when either was spoken of as the creator of Italian independence; she claimed herself to be the founder of modern Italy.

We have all read Kinglake's famous description of the coup d'état, but according to Mr. Graham, it was not Fleury but De Morny who compelled Napoleon at the pistol's point to consent to the massacre:

De Maupas and the future Emperor wanted to back out. The occans of blood, which now they could see would have to be shed, required for the shedding the nerves of very strong men; the nerves of soldiers like De Morny, St. Arnaud, or the dashing charmeur Fleury. Such effusion of the ruddy tide of blood was hardly reckoned on in the platonic dreams of Louis. There was another room leading off from the study, and Morny requested his brother to step inside in order that he might gently reason with him. And this was his gentle reasoning. Drawing a revolver from the pocket of his overcoat, thrown over the arm of his dress coat, he placed himself before the door and remarked, "If you attempt to leave this room, Louis, I will blow your brains out; and then later on, having to go out in order to take possession of the Home Office for telegraphing purposes, he told Fleury to mount guard over both of these too tender-hearted men till his return. But it was not Fleury, as Kinglake thinks, who stood with revolver pointed at the President's head, it was the President's own brother.

The end of the sixth decade of this century," the scandal and the cry" arose with a vengeance, and the man who led the wild dance of pleasure, the master of the revels, the Petronius and the Crassus combined of the nineteenth century, was De Morny. The doctors called De Morny's complaint internal disease. It was. It was an internal disease caused by the passage of a sword through the interior-a most painful complaint, no doubt. Morny avait fait une bonne fortune de trop, and the husband, an old general, after a severe altercation, called him out, says one story. They fought a duel immediately afterwards in the garden at the back of the statesman's house, and the result was as mentioned above. But this is not true either. What really took place was more tragic than that. The old general, in a fit of fury at the interview mentioned, stabbed Morny, where-well, where Hedda Gabler's lover shot himself. This, the true version of De Morny's death, has of course never even been hinted at in print before, but I am quite certain as to my facts, though as the lady who caused the tragedy is still living I prefer to give

no names.

THE DOOM OF BOOKS;

OR, WHAT THE PHONOGRAPH WILL DO. IN Scribner's Magazine for August, Octave Uzanne writes an amusing article, not less amusingly illustrated, as to the effect which the phonograph will have upon literature. Mr. Uzanne declares that the phonograph is destined to abolish the printing press. The following are some of the predictions in which he indulges. Fantastic though they may seem, they are by no means outside the range of possibility :

Men of letters will not be called Writers in the time soon to be, but rather, Narrators. Little by little the taste for style and for pompously decorated phrases will die away, but the art of utterance will take on unheard-of importance.

Libraries will be transformed into phonographotecks, or rather, phonostereotecks; they will contain the works of human genius on properly labelled cylinders, methodically arranged in little cases, rows upon rows, on shelves. The favourite editions will be the autophonographs of artists most in vogue; for example, every one will be asking for Coquelin's Molière." Irving's "Shakespeare," Salvini's" Dante," Eleonora Duse's "Dumas fils," Sara Bernhardt's " Hugo," Mounet Sully's "Balzac;" while Goethe, Milton, Byron, Dickens, Emerson, Tennyson, Musset, and others will have been "vibrated upon cylinders by favourite Tellers."

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Journalism will naturally be transformed; the highest situations will be reserved for robust young men with strong, resonant voices, trained rather in the art of enunciation than in the search for words or the turn of phrases; literary mandarinism will disappear, literators will gain only an infinitely small number of hearers, for the important point will be to be quickly informed in a few words without comment.

In all newspaper offices there will be speaking halls where the editors will record in a clear voice the news received by telephonic despatch; these will be immediately registered by an ingenious apparatus arranged in the acoustic receiver; the cylinders thus obtained will be stereotyped in great numbers and posted in small boxes before three o'clock in the morning, except where by agreement with the telephone company the hearing of the newspaper is arranged for by private lines to subscribers' houses, as is already the case with theatrophones.

The phonography of the future will be at the service of our grandchildren on all the occasions of life. Every restaurant table will be provided with its phonographic collection; the public carriages, the waiting-rooms, the state-rooms of steamers, the halls and chambers of hotels will contain phonographotecks for the use of travellers. The railways will replace the parlour car by a sort of Pullman Circulating Library, which will cause travellers to forget the weariness of the way while leaving their eyes free to admire the landscapes through which they are passing.

FOR AND AGAINST WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW.

THE Century publishes two articles-one, "The Right and Expediency of Woman Suffrage," by Senator Hoare, and the other, "The Wrongs and Perils of Woman Suffrage," by Dr. Buckley. Senator Hoare entrenches himself behind the declaration of Abraham Lincoln, who said, "I go for all sharing the privileges of the Government among those who assist in bearing its burdens, by no means excluding women."

POLITICS AND THE BUSINESS OF LIFE.

Senator Hoare explains the absurdity of the common contention that, if you give any one the vote, that person must forthwith forsake their business in life to devote themselves to the study of abstract political questions. The majority of male citizens who have the franchise at present do not feel that it conflicts with their everyday duties. He says:—

They attend a political meeting two or three times a year, and vote with their party. They love their country, and would give their lives, if they were needed, to preserve the Union, or to preserve the honour of the flag. Somehow and someway an intelligent and wise government, which deals pretty well with most public questions, is the result, whatever party is in power. Even those persons whose spirit is a public spirit, and who give much labour and thought to the common weal, deal with some one matter alone, and leave other things to other men.

WOMAN'S WORK IN POLITICS.

our

Now I maintain that the management of schools, whether it depend on legislation or administration; the management of colleges; the organisation and management of prisons for women, of hospitals, of poor-houses, of asylums for the deaf and dumb and the blind, of places for the care of feeble and idiotic children; the management and improvement of the hospital service in time of war; the collection and management of libraries, museums, galleries of art; the providing for lectures on many literary and scientific subjects in lyceums and other like institutions; the regulation-so far as it can be done by law-of the medical profession, and of the composition and sale of drugs; the management of factory system, and the employment of children; and a great many other kindred matters which I might mention, taken together, ought to make up, and do make up, a large part of the function of the State. To these we may add what has not been in this country for some generations a part of the duty of the State, but still is a political function of the same kind, the government of parishes and churches. Now for all these things women are as competent and as well qualified as men. I do not see why a woman like Clara Leonard or Clara Barton, who knows all about the management of hospitals and the care of the sick and wounded, is not performing a public function as truly and as well as a West Point graduate like General Hancock, who can lead an army, but who thinks the tariff is a local question.

WHERE IS THE DEGRADATION OF CITIZENSHIP?

If women keep themselves to these things, and keep off the ground which the opponents of woman's suffrage seem to dread to have them occupy, they still are helping largely in the work of the State. I do not see how it is to degrade them to have their votes counted, or why their votes, when they are counted, are any more likely to work an injury to the State than the vote of a man who knows nothing except the management of a ship or the management of an engine.

If 95 per cent. of the school teachers of Massachusetts are women, why should not their votes be counted in the choice of the governor who appoints the Board of Education? If women have charge of the stitching-rooms in our shoe-factories, why

should not their votes be counted when the laws which determine for what hours and for what part of the year children may be employed in those factories, or even when the laws on which some of us think the rate of wages in these factories depend are to be framed?

The vote of the father has not yet quite accomplished the rescue of the children of our manufacturing States from overwork in crowded and heated factories. It might be well to have the voice of the mother also.

THE CURSE OF WOMAN'S INFLUENCE.

Dr. Buckley, who takes the other side, sets forth the old arguments in the old way, nor is there much that calls for notice in his paper. I therefore only quote the concluding passages :—

Should the suffrage be extended to women the grant can never be recalled. Experiments in legislating upon economic questions, even if unwise, need not be permanently harmful, for they may be repealed; but in dealing with the suffrage, or with moral questions, new laws, if bad, are exceedingly dangerous. They will develop a class lowered in tone, or deriving personal, pecuniary, or political advantages from the new environment, who will vehemently declare that the effect of the innovation is beneficial, and resist all efforts to return to the former state.

Should the duty of governing in the State be imposed upon women, all the members of society will suffer; children, by diminished care from their mothers; husbands, from the increase of the contentions, and the decline of the attractions of home; young men and maidens, from the diminution or destruction of the idealism which invests the family with such charms as to make the hope of a home of one's own, where in the contrasts of the sexes life may be ever a delight, an impulse to economy and virtue-but the greatest sufferer will be woman. Often those who recollect her genuine freedom of speech, "the might of her gentleness," the almost resistless potency of her look and touch and voice, will long for the former proud dependence of woman on manliness, reciprocated by man's reverence for womanliness; while "the new generation, to whom such sweet recollections will be unknown, will blindly rave against their fate or despondently sink under it. as women have never done (from similar causes) under the old régime." Meanwhile the office-holding, intriguing, campaigning, lobbying, mannish woman will celebrate the day of emancipation, which, alas, will be the day of degradation, -when, grasping at sovereignty, she lost her empire.

The true woman needs no governing authority conferred

upon her by law. In the present situation the highest

evidence of respect that man can exhibit toward woman, and the noblest service he can perform for her, are to vote NAY to the proposition that would take from her the diadem of pearls, the talisman of faith, hope, and love, by which all other requests are won from men, and substitute for it the iron crown of authority.

The editor of the Century allows each of the disputants to reply in a postscript.

"THE HEAVENLY TWINS."-The Church Quarterly Review, which thinks that the moral of the "Yellow Aster" is a noble one, regards "The Heavenly Twins" as a work of dangerous tendency, not so much for its elaborated theories as for its undertone and the obiter dict that are scattered through its pages. A self-satisfied acquiescence in the persuasion that there is no such thing as freewill, and that religious ethics are only an ecclesiastical muddle; and a profound conviction of the superiority of women to the coarser sex, whose injustice and brutality it is her mission to expose and correct. Such is the moral outcome of Mrs. Sarah Grand's teaching, and she bids us to look forward to a religion of the future, unconscious that she is in its essentials accurately describing exactest elements of Christian truth, viz., "the deepest reverence for moral worth, the tenderest pity for the frailties of human nature, and the most profound faith in its ultimate perfectibility." (P. 265).

THE HOMELESS WOMAN OF 1894. THE EVIL EVOLUTION OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE. IN the New Review Mrs. Sparrow has an extremely interesting paper upon the Doss-House Girl. The paper

is not only interesting but alarming. Mrs. Sparrow, who knows what she is writing about, says that English women are more and more revolting against the restraints of home, and this is visible in the enormous increase of the numbers of women who habitually live in common lodging-houses. The shiftless irresponsible life which the inmates lead seems to be in accordance with the restlessness pervading every rank. A home is no longer the aim and ambition of the working woman, she aspires to lead a hand-to-mouth existence.

From some cause or other, into which we need not enter now, the very centre of home-life among the poor has received a shock from which it will never rally. The streets at night swarm with girls of fourteen or fifteen years of age, who either have no home to go to, or, if they have, won't enter it. So the doss-house girl-essentially a fin de siècle product-has her bed made for her, her floor scoured, her kitchen utensils provided, she never thinks of patching her clothes, but renews her raiment from the pop-shop, domestic duties are unknown, the little unselfishnesses of family life never come in her way, and she grows up thriftless, improvident, defiant of authority, ignorant of the rights of property, bold, shameless, and unconcerned. Even sickness does not soften or bind closer Nature's ties, for the poor are learning to depend less and less on each other, and not at all on themselves. There's the hospital to go to if they are ill, where, without the cost of a penny, they can have their malady attended to, and they are shoved off thither at a moment's notice by landlady, husband, or father, eager but in one thing-to get rid of the invalid, and with her all responsibility and expense.

So there is the revolt of the Working Woman against home life and home cares, and, in consequence, doss-houses for women multiply and are crammed, and this great floating population of toiling females is a serious and an important fact that will have to be faced by some body of legislators; its crying claims will have to be heard, its wants catered for, its demands supplied, or some day soon there will be a terrible fissure in our social system which will not be easily closed. Till lately the female doss-house was supposed to be, and to a great degree was, the night refuge of the tramp, the vagrant, the houseless wanderer, who, through accident or want, found herself without a shelter, and almost anything was considered good enough for her. Many will find it difficult to realise even now that they are the systematised homes of thousands and thousands of our working women, who have no other intention than to live in them, labour from them, and move out of them only when compelled to pay the last debt of Nature in workhouse or hospital.

The facts being so, Mrs. Sparrow suggests that it would be well to make certain reforms in the administration of the women's doss-house. She sums up the case as follows:

Female doss-houses are a need of the times, and the demand must create a supply. But as a more varied assortment of lodgers will fill them, they require to be constructed on different lines to what has hitherto been deemed sufficient.

I. The replacing of men inspectors by women seems a step necessary and wise.

II.-The women managers should be selected from a class above those for whom they cater.

III.-Some provision should be made whereby girls of tender years need not have to consort with those grown old in crime; special dormitories might be assigned them, and special efforts made by delicate kindliness and tact, to prevent these girls from joining permanently the rank and file that overrun our

streets.

IV., and lastly, if female doss-houses are permitted to have a floor for married couples alone, the rules of separation should be stringently enforced, a different exit and entrance should be managed, and a fixed closing hour adhered to.

HOW WRECKED VESSELS ARE SAVED: BY PATIENCE, PERSEVERANCE, PUMPS AND PONTOONS. GUSTAV KOBBÉ describes in the Engineering Magazine the method in which stranded vessels are saved. He points out that in ancient times, so far as we know, when a vessel went to the bottom, she stayed there. We have made advances since then, though not to so great an extent as might have been expected. If a vessel sinks inside a harbour or sound where there is comparatively smooth water we can raise her. But if one goes down at sea, we are still as helpless as the ancients. The "tools" for "outside work," as the wreckers say, do not exist. The surge would simply rip pontoons and chains to pieces. It is the unceasing motion of the sea, and not the depth, that makes it impossible to raise a vessel that has gone to the bottom of the ocean.

HOW IT IS DONE.

While the raising of a sunken ship requires operations on a somewhat larger scale than getting a stranded vessel off a beach or reef, the latter calls for a vast amount of ingenuity. The number of difficulties to be overcome and sudden emergencies to be met would surprise one not conversant with the subject. Moreover, a stranded vessel must usually be got off in a storm but little less severe than that through which it came to grief, so that a wrecker must have the courage to face possible death by the very elements which wrecked the ship. When a vessel goes on "light" she is of course cast up much farther on the beach than if she had been heavily laden, and the difficulty of getting her off is correspondingly greater. Launching a ship off the ways and getting her off a beach are two very different operations. There is an instance of wreckers having worked eighteen months over a stranded vessel.

The procedure sounds very simple, but details requiring instant decision are constantly coming up, where a wrong decision might be fatal to the enterprise. Briefly, you attach cables, with anchors seaward, to the vessel, and, as the sea strikes her, she "goes to the cables." After you have lightened her of cargo or ballast, you stay on her and meet the elements; that is, fight what put her there.

Four cables, all told, are utilised in working off a stranded vessel. They are of manilla, are from fifteen to twenty inches thick and 200 fathoms long, and have anchors with immense flukes weighing from 6500 to 7000 pounds. Two of these great cables are attached to the vessel itself, one to each of her quarters. It is calculated that, when there is a strain on these 200 fathoms of cable, an elasticity of from six to ten fathoms is developed, and it is this elasticity which causes the vessel to go to the cables when she is struck by a sea.

MANY A SLIP."

How dangerous an operation this is may be gathered from the fact that in one case described, twenty-eight out of the thirty-two men engaged lost their lives. And the patience required is well illustrated by the instance of the Wells City, an English steamer, which sank near New York in 1887.

Just as the vessel, after numerous accidents, was lifted off the bottom, her keel cut through one of the chains as smoothly and cleanly as a knife cuts through an apple, and click, click, went the others, unable to bear the extra weight put upon them. At the first attempt to raise the Atlas, which was sunk by a ferry-boat, a sudden surge grated one of the chains between the keel and some rocks on the bed of the river, and the keel cut through the chain like a cold chisel, the other chains bursting with the sudden. excess of strain put upon them. It is, of course, an important point in the operations to equalise the strain on the chains. This is accomplished by thirty-ton hydraulic jacks and levers on the pontoon decks. The pontoons are connected by heavy timbers, and at the right moment a man rapidly makes the circuit of them and tests the strain. Experience enables him to tell at a touch if all is right. Thus a strain of tons is as delicately adjusted to the touch as is the key of a piano.

DEAN STANLEY: THE PROPHET OF MODERNISM.

THE Edinburgh Review gives the first place to an article upon the lives of Dr. Pusey and Dean Stanley. The writer is very enthusiastic in his devotion to Dean Stanley, whom he declares possessed

the noblest qualities that can adorn humanity. Whether regard be had to his great intellectual gifts, or to his moral and social qualities; whether, again, we consider the manysided directions of his energies and activities; whether, ie., we estimate him by his life or by his work and writings, he emphatically deserves to be classed among the greatest of English churchmen, English politicians, and English scholars which the present century has seen.

Intellectually, as we have seen, he does not represent to us the very highest type of mental greatness and power. He was inferior in this respect to Arnold, to Coleridge, to Maurice, perhaps even to Whately. He had not in him the faculties needed for making a philosopher. He could never have become the founder of a School of Thought. His intellectual shortcomings were too markedly conspicuous, as no one would have admitted more readily than himself His deficiency on its mental side in its originality; his incapacity for business; his inability to understand mathematics, or even arithmetic; his hatred of syllogistic logic, or, indeed, for that matter, of any processes of pure ratiocination; his determination of all conclusions by pure impulsiveness, by instinct and intuition, rather than by reason and judgment-all betray defects in intellectual strength, in mental solidity. At the same time-and this is one compensating feature on which his biographers have hardly laid sufficient stress-that very defect in mental greatness was the basis of what was for a man in his position another class of excellences.

If Dr. Pusey is the seer of the past, looking backward on ages of so-called faith and tradition with a melancholy mixture of regret and half-despondent hope, the other is the prophet of the future. He looks onward with serene, happy, confiding demeanour, with a joyous, eager expectancy, with an aspiration and an unfaltering faith, begotten of trust in the rule of the world, to the continued advance of mankind in the paths of genuine Christianity, in other words, in the well-recognised direction of liberty, independence, justice, mutual tolerance and love.

Pusey's notion was that of ecclesiasticism and sacerdotalism. Stanley's conception of the Church, on the contrary, was not a community based on exclusiveness, but on comprehension. The outcome of this creed was an enthusiastic belief in the union of Church and State, in the cultivation of morality and virtue as the bases of religion, and in the toleration, not merely of distinctive creeds and dogmas, but of lives, aspirations, and tendencies which had goodness for their aim. efforts and energies which, in the oft-quoted words of Matthew Arnold, made for righteousness.

It is, of course, too soon as yet to attempt a prognosis of English culture, whether regarded from its religious or secular side; but interpreting the future from the revelation of the past, the oracles give us no uncertain voice.

The Church of the English nation is bound to be the Pantheon of religious liberalism as well as of secular culture and knowledge-the Church, to revert to our parallelism, not of Pusey but of Stanley. Englishmen and English Churchmen will certainly never again take Romanism, or the hybrid semiRomanism which Pusey advocated in his various writings, as the religion of the national Church, they will never again bow their necks to fanaticism or to priestly and sacramental rule. The principles of the Protestant Reformation, with whatever drawbacks it may be accompanied, will never again lose their hold on the affections of our countrymen. The ground thoughts of the New Testament, the earliest and most fundamental teachings of duty, divine and human, will never again recede from the points of vantage it seems to us they have occupied in this country during the last half-century. In other words, Pusey is, and must continue to remain, the representative of a Church and creed altogether alien to the

great body of our countrymen; while Stanley will be found to minister to the imperative wants of their religious culture and aspiration for an indefinite future.

DR. PUSEY.

THE PROPHET OF THE PAST.

THE Quarterly Review devotes a long and appreciative article to the life of Dr. Pusey. The most interesting passage is that in which the reviewer attempts to describe the spiritual genesis of his religious life :—

The

The child naturally docile, frail in physique, timid and reserved in disposition, grew up in this atmosphere, which gave the sanction of duty and religion to self-repression and submission. Taught to distrust emotions, the free exercise of even natural and innocent affections was looked upon with suspicion.. Such a nature is exposed early to disappointment, and to the experience of that free thought which he had been taught to look upon with horror, and from which his docile and diffident nature would almost without education have recoiled. For such an one the world was full of evil shapes, which might lure him from the side of good. Among these shapes none were so evil or so disastrous in their influence as the spirit of independence. The gateway of submission was the only gateway of safety. Self-distrust, and dread of what might befall selfsufficiency or disobedience, stood as the guardian figures which pointed to this gateway of safety. Only for one brief time did hope of any wider road dawn upon his mind; but the remembrance of even the temporary indulgence of this hope was pain and grief to him. All through his life the one ruling emotion was that of humble fear. He saw the world estranged from faith through self-will and self-confidence. Pride of intellect and pride of soul were written upon the portals of those palaces of evil in which the world delighted. Holiness had, as its first feature, docility and submission. Whatever had not this mark was to be suspected. These feelings grew into guiding principles. They unconsciously but very really determined his conduct. They coloured his thoughts. They influenced the view he took of every question. Did domestic misfortune befall him, it was a chastisement for his sins. advantage of subscription to his mind was its witnessing to the principle that religion is to be approached with a submission of the understanding. Those who subscribed were not to reason. but to obey; and this quite independently of the degree of accuracy, the wisdom, etc., of the articles themselves. He is easily aroused to misgiving lest the religious ceremonial of his wife's baptism may not have been fitly performed. He keeps her practically excommunicate for a period till he has settled this momentous question. He finally settles it by having her baptized again. The attraction which Rome has had for him is due to his dread of the growing neologism at Oxford. Round his life the spirit of awe kept watch. When he thought of the Eternal, “clouds and darkness were round about Him, righteousness and judgment were the habitation of His seat." The wars which fascinated the years of his youth sounded loud with the voice of Him who arose to judgment. The movements of the political world were watched lest the signs of national apostasy or sacrilegious measures should be seen in them. The sense of sin was deep. The thought of it deepened into gloom. The awful description of wilful sin, given in the Epistle to the Hebrews, was taken as the text of his sermon on sin after baptism, and was made to convey to the hearer the stupendous conception that for sin after baptism there remained no more sacrifice. The key-note," writes Mr. Mozley, who heard the sermon, "the key-note was the word 'irreparable,' pronounced every now and then with the force of a judgment." The dread of sin, the sensitiveness of conscience which feels the least sin to be a stain and a dishonour, is the sure sign of holiness of heart. But here we have dread raised to the pitch of horror, and sensitiveness in danger of being paralysed by terror. The prevailing characteristic tends to assume an exaggerated position among other emotions and influences, and the result is an unbalanced estimate of life. Reverence has become dread; and dread has adopted a theory which is too narrow for the facts of life. It has created its owa dilemma, and is imprisoned in the work of its own hands.