follow Christ; else he would not bid them follow him. We do not affirm that all men can follow him into all his experiences; but we think it perilous to attempt to draw the line and affirm that he had some experiences into which we may not follow him. If one begins to attempt such a discrimination, it is quite impossible to say where the attempt will cease; it has led some critics to the conclusion that men cannot follow him in loving their enemies, because to love one's enemies is divine, and we are human. Certainly it is not alone in outward conduct that we are to follow him; at least Paul did not so think. We are to be conformed to his image, and so conformed that he may be seen to be the firstborn among many brethren; we are to be not only heirs of God but joint heirs with Jesus Christ, inheriting from the Father-at least this is the plain implication-what he inherited. This implication is confirmed by the fact that nearly if not quite all the phrases used in the New Testament concerning Jesus Christ are used in a modified form of his disciples: he is the Son of God, we are sons of God; he is in the image of God, we bear the image of the heavenly; he is the Great High Priest and King of kings, we are to be priests and kings unto God; in him the spirit of the Godhead dwelleth bodily, we are bid to pray that we may be filled with all the fullness of God. What Paul implies Christ explicitly affirms in his prayer that we may be one in him and in his Father, as he is one in the Father.

We do not affirm that there is not in the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Father something which is not and cannot be in the relationship between the disciples of Christ and the Father: on that subject we neither affirm nor deny. But we do not think it is safe to affirm that there is anything in that relationship impossible for the disciple to desire, to aspire after, and even devoutly and humbly to expect. To say that Jesus Christ was simply a devout man is one matter; to say that the devout man can become what Jesus Christ was is quite another matter. We do not even affirm this last, but we do affirm that no one knows enough of either Jesus Christ or the Infinite Father or the relationship between the two to deny it. Our

correspondent in his letter by no means exhausts the possible alternatives respecting the person of Christ. It may be that he is neither God nor a good man richly endowed by God, but a man in whom God so dwelt that in him the world beholds the express image of God's person.

The statement with which our correspondent closes his letter, namely, that "Jesus Christ was God," he will not find anywhere in the New Testament. The only approximation to it is the outcry of Thomas, "My Lord and my God;" and it is quite clear that this is the language of adoration, not of metaphysical definition. The New Testament declarations are such as, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," "the Son of God," "the express image of his person," "God was in Christ," "God was manifest in the flesh." Jesus Christ is the supreme historical manifestation of God; but God is greater than the sum of all manifestations of God, as Gladstone was greater than all his statecraft, and Phillips Brooks was greater than all his sermons. Combining the New Testament's characterizations of Jesus Christ, what we get would be a statement something like this: The Infinite and Eternal was so in Jesus of Nazareth that Jesus of Nazareth was, in all that he said and did and thought and felt, an image of the Eternal, the supremest manifestation of God possible in a human life, so that looking upon him we see the Eternal in miniature, as in looking through a telescope we see the moon so reduced in size that its image can be imprinted on the retina of the eye. In common parlance it is legitimate to say, "This is the moon;" in exact definition that phrase is not legitimate; what we see is an image of the moon. In common parlance it is legitimate to say, In Jesus Christ I see my God; but if we are to use exact definition, what we see is a manifestation or image of God, God revealed to human experience because God revealed in and through a human life.

Nor does it appear to us any serious objection to this New Testament interpretation of Jesus Christ as God manifest in man, that if one holds it "love and worship and surrender would go over the head of Jesus Christ straight to God." This language does not seem to us felicitous; for it seems to ignore the fact that God is seen in Jesus Christ and through

Jesus Christ, not merely beyond him. But, barring this serious criticism, it appears to suggest what Paul suggests in the statement that "through him [Jesus Christ] we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father;" and what Jesus Christ himself suggested in his declaration, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." Jesus Christ is not a substitute for God; he is access to God; and we are to bring to God all our love and all our worship and all our surrender, because we no longer worship an unknown God, but God made known to us through his Son.

The

We do not object to our correspondent's theory of metaphysical unity, though we do not understand very clearly what it means; but we do object to making this or any other intellectual hypothesis a standard for measuring either Christian experience or Christian teaching. standard of the New Testament is very different; it is practical, not metaphysical. It is following Christ, not merely in his ethical principles and in his humane sympathies and activities, but also in his spiritual experiences and in his fellowship with the Father; it is loving and honoring and serving Jesus Christ; it is loving and honoring and serving the Father in Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ; it is following his example, sharing his life, being conformed to his character. The New Testament knows no other standard than this standard of life, and the Church has no right to substitute in Christ's name any other.

The Spectator

The Spectator notices without surprise, though with admiring interest, the novel developments of feminine industry that have lately come under his observation. It might be thought that when the four hundred and odd professions, vocations, and occupations of the sterner sex were opened to feminine enterprise, the EternalWomanly would be satisfied with such a variety of choice. But no! it does not content woman's soul to be a blacksmith, a notary public, a sea-captain, or even a mayor. These are commonplace; these have been done before. There are

fields that no mere man has ever trodden, or even thought of as possible or profitable, and these are now being explored by feminine feet.

The most interesting new occupation. that has come under the Spectator's notice thus far is that of the "sunshiner." Let this not be confounded with the "moonshiner" of Southern fiction. Spirits are concerned in it, indeed; but they are spirits of an irreproachable and untaxable kind. The lady who "scatters sunshine" at so much a ray is an extremely lawabiding person, and not in hiding from the revenue officers. Her spirits are proof, though-proof against the blues, against rainy days, against all the ills that flesh is heir to-and this calm and cheer she communicates to invalids, to the lonely, to all the depressed and melancholy souls, old and young, that can afford her ministrations. She goes and sits with her clients, and envelops them in her "aura," as the Theosophists would perhaps put it, and reads aloud to them, and plays games, and discusses current events, and teaches them the last stitch. in crochet or Battenberg (the Spectator will not vouch that Battenberg is a stitch, but he thinks it is), and so fills the air with microbes of cheer that the contagion is irresistible and immediate. Whether she ever takes a day off and has a good cry all to herself the Spectator cannot find out; but one would think that the reaction from such determined good spirits must come at times. Some call her a "professional cheerer," but this name has a certain sound of forced and business-like gayety about it that would seem to defeat its object. A man (if he ever had dreamed of the possibility of such an occupation) might be a professional cheerer, but his sunshine would be of inferior quality anyway, without the spontaneous charm of the feminine rays.

While the purveyor of mental and spiritual sunshine thus caters to the souls of her fellows, the Spectator has lately heard of another enterprising feminine worker who has taken up the task of providing food for the family needs. The "co-operative marketer," as she calls

needs was the prime necessity, yet simultaneously the desire for ultimate unity was dimly felt. The first uncertain attempts in this direction were suggested by the circumstance that, while all the young colonies imposed customs duties for revenue purposes, their tariffs differed, and there arose in consequence perpetual irritation over the cumbrous system of collecting intercolonial duties. A customs union or Zollverein would have removed many obstacles in the way of early Australian progress, but all efforts to that end were frowned upon by the Colonial Office in London. As time went on, the policy grew of protection to native industries in nearly all the colonies, and the resulting inequalities of taxation served to sever yet more widely provinces whose interests should have been one. As fate willed, the two most powerful colonies, adjacent in situation, New South Wales and Victoria, were those in which the tariffs differed most.

The question remained in abeyance for many years, kept alive, it may be, by the fierce speechifying of such men as Dr. Lang, of New South Wales. He was still living, a very old man, in my childhood, and I can remember hearing him spoken of as a theorist, a dreamer, and a very talkative and polemic debater. His speeches gave timid folk the idea that federation of the colonies and severance from Great Britain meant one and the same thing, and meant it at once, and he was accordingly looked at askance by many. Although working legislators always asserted that federation had not yet come "within the sphere of practical politics," every one believed that it must arrive sooner or later, and every person said so most emphatically at the chance moment when the shoe pinching his particular corn made him feel his isolation most keenly. For instance, break of gauge on the intercolonial railways was felt to be an absurd and unbrotherly arrangement; the professions recognized that separate examinations for doctors or lawyers or surveyors were a serious drawback. Even the casual traveler's colonyloving soul became wrathful when, on crossing the border, his buggy had to be impounded and registered, and his or her tin box or other paltry belonging searched for mythical cigars, or when he had to buy

a new sort of postage-stamp every six hundred miles.

Then came echoes of after-dinner speeches in London, mostly by men who had never been near Australia, of an unreal, intangible, and wholly artificial bond between England and her colonies, to be called Imperial Federation, which seems no nearer accomplishment to-day, and can never be accomplished until there has been a great deal of hard thinking concerning such trifling matters as the representation or non-representation of colored races in Britain's many colored dominions, to say nothing of direct representation of the over-sea dominions in the Imperial Parliamentary institutions. It presupposes, too, for its happy and successful continuance a far more intimate knowledge of British colonial possessions, their local needs, their internal policy, than most Englishmen, or even most English statesmen, can lay claim to as yet.

But I digress. It had continually been reiterated by Australian federationists that, once faced with war at our doors, federation would become the question of the hour, with only one solution possible, though few, perhaps, realized the disadvantages that must be attached to any form of federation arising as the premature offspring of necessity and danger. Yet, if union has been accomplished without that dread motive as auxiliary, it was troubles in the Pacific and the episode of the disputed annexation of New Guinea by Queensland which helped to bring matters to a head, and in 1883 the first intercolonial conference was held. It would only weary the reader to drag him through an account of variously styled conventions, conferences, and councils that led up to the Federation Bill of 1898. Apart, too, from these a great deal of quiet, educative, constructive work was going on. The late Sir Henry Parkes, whose influence as a popular speaker was surpassed by none, threw his influence into the scale. Mr. Edmund Barton addressed public meetings all over his own colony, New South Wales. The strong men of South Australia, Mr. C. G. Kingston and Mr. F. W. Holder, gave in their adhesion; while the most powerful political body in Victoria, the Australian Natives' Association, with Messrs. Alfred Deakin, J. L. Purves, A. J. Peacock, and Dr. Quick among their

The bill of 1898 was submitted to a referendum in the four colonies to be federated-New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania. Queens land had not then cast in her lot with the rest. It passed in all of them, but in New South Wales the figures fell short of the required minimum of eighty thousand affirmative votes a not altogether unanticipated result in view of the strong opposition of many prominent politicians in New South Wales. At one eventful moment on that June evening the returning officers somehow doubled certain figures, and great was the jubilation of the crowd surrounding the newspaper offices in both Melbourne and Sydney when the magic numbers went up. The excitement when the bill did pass two years later had lost a good deal of its edge by repetition.

And why, with the admitted need for federation, was the bill of 1898 not accepted by the people? For two different classes of reasons. Each class had its own chief spokesman. One was Mr. George Houston Reid, the finest, the most incisive, the jolliest of Australian debaters. An ardent free-trader, he perambulated his own free-trade colony of New South Wales, urging that the financial basis of the proposed Constitution would involve for New South Wales an abandonment of her free-trade faith, and a check to the course of the prosperity she had achieved under it. He had other and serious objections, but this was the point on which he stood firm. Indeed, he may be said still to stand firm, for his influence has been unremittingly in the direction of a lowered tariff all round. In the bill of '98 stood a clause scathingly termed "the Braddon blot," after Sir Edward Braddon, of Tasmania. It directed that of the customs revenue collected at all seaports by the federal government only one-fourth should be retained for federal expenditure, three-fourths being credited to the respective treasuries of the contributing States. This clause in the Constitution as it has been adopted is modified by being alterable after ten years, but as long as it stands it implies a fairly heavy tariff.

Yet it was in Victoria, where federation became such a parrot cry that the more

possible difficulties were howled down as

unpatriotic "or as" Little Australians ”— it was in Victoria that was found the man who of all its critics deserved and deserves to be most carefully heeded. This was Henry Bournes Higgins, a North of Ireland man by birth, but by training and residence an Australian. Still in middle life, he is a barrister whose law is too sound for any opponent to belittle, but who has somehow, from a variety of causes, just fallen short of the highest success as a politician. He is so lacking in policy that, while his friends are found lamenting his want of tact, his enemies ascribe his occasional changes of opinion, and not occasional but persistent championing of every weak and unpopular cause, to want of principle. By temperament he is forced into the rôle of Cassandra, and he meets with Cassandra's fate. A cold, unimpressive speaker, without a trace of humor save of the esoteric sort, with no notion of playing to the gallery, he was the man who above all others tried to save Australia from repeating needlessly and with her eyes open the mistakes which the United States made a hundred years ago under pressure of dire necessity, and which the great bulk of Americans would willingly undo to-day. Readers in the United States will think it strange that in framing a federal constitution the experience of the United States in regard to the difficulty of amending it should have been overlooked or neglected. The very significant fact that you find it almost impossible to amend your Constitution without the awful help of a civil war seems to have been unknown to most of the men concerned in framing ours.

What Mr. Higgins fought against was fixing upon ourselves and our children a rigid, unalterable, unimprovable Constitution. What he pleaded for was to trust the good sense of posterity, whose difficulties we cannot foresee, and whom we have no right to bind in iron fetters. Given this flexibility, it did not matter very much what were the provisions regarding finance or defense, or even the Constitution itself. But the whole bill as first molded bore the impress of this conservative, provincial, unpatriotic idea that change was dangerous, and, being dangerous, should be made practically impossible by