the individual self, that he may live in a higher personality, in whose purpose all the ends of our true personality are secure. The sayings in the Gospels to this effect will readily occur to every one. Some glimpse of the same truth had visited the mind of the speculative Greek poet four hundred years before the Christian era when he said:

Τίς οἶδεν εἰ τό ζῆμ μέν έστι κατθανεῖν,

Τὸ κατθανεῖν δὲ ζήν;

"Who knoweth whether life may not be death,

And death itself be life?"

There is but one other thought I would submit to you. Those who build their chief hope for humanity on culture rather than on religion would raise men by bringing them into contact and sympathy with whatever of best and greatest the past has produced. But is not a large portion of what is best in the literature and the lives of past generations based on faith in God, and on the reality of communion with him as the first and chief good? Would this best any longer live and grow in men if you cut them off from direct access to its fountain-head, and confined them to the results which it has produced in past agesif, in fact, you made the object of the soul's contemplation not God, but past humanity? Are we of these latter days to be content with the results of the communion of others, and not have direct access to it ourselves-to read and admire the high thoughts of à Kempis, Pascal, Leighton, and such men, and not to go on and drink for ourselves from the same living well-heads from which they drank? Not now, any more than in past ages, can the most be made of human character, even in this life, till we ascend above humanity

"Unless above himself he can

Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"

I cannot close without expressing a feeling which I dare say has been present to the minds of many here, as throughout this discourse they listened to the oft-repeated word perfection. Perfection! the very word seems like mockery when applied to such as we. For how poor a

thing must any perfection be that is reached this side the grave! Far truer is that word of St. Augustine-" That is the true perfection of a man to find out his own imperfection." Yes, the highest perfection any one will attain in this life is to be ever increasingly sensible how imperfect he is. As perfection is put forward in the theory I have been examining, one cannot but feel that there is a very inadequate notion of the evil in the human heart that is to be cured, and of the nature of the powers that are needed to cope with it. And in this respect we cannot but be struck with how greatly Christianity differs from culture, and differs only to surpass it; its estimate of the disease is so much deeper, and the remedy to which it turns so far transcends all human nostrums. Christianity, too, holds out perfection as the goal. But in doing so its view is not confined to time, but contemplates an endless progression in far-on ages. The perfection the Culturists speak of, if it does not wholly exclude the other life, seems to fix the eye mainly on what can be done here, and not to take much account of what is beyond. That was a higher and truer idea of perfection which Leighton had: "It is a union with a Higher Good by love, that alone is endless perfection. The only sufficient object for man must be something that adds to and perfects his nature, to which he must be united in love; somewhat higher than himself, yea, the highest of all, the Father of spirits. That alone completes a spirit and blesses it-to love Him, the spring of spirits."

To sum up all that has been said, the defect in Mr. Arnold's theory is this: It places in the second and subordinate place that which should be supreme, and elevates to the position of command a power which, rightly understood, should be subordinate and ministrant to a higher than itself. The relation to God is first, this relation is last, and culture should fill up the interspace-culture, that is, the endeavor to know and use aright the nature which he has given us, and the world in which he has placed us. Used in such a way, culture is transmuted into something far higher, more beneficent, than it ever could become if it set up for itself and claimed the chief place.

I might now conclude, but there is a poem of Arch

bishop Trench's, one of his earliest, and most interesting, which so well embodies much that I have said, that I hope you will bear with me while I read a somewhat lengthy passage from it. The lines are simple, not greatly elaborated, but they are true, and they may, perhaps, fix the attention of some who by this time have grown weary of abstract and prosaic argument-according to that saying

"A verse may find him who a sermon flies."

A youth, a favored child of culture, when he has long sought and not found what he expected to find in culture, wanders forth desolate and desponding into the eastern desert. The irrevocable past lies heavy on him-his baffled purpose, his wasted years, his utter misery. So heart-forlorn is he that he is on the verge of self-destruction. At length, as he sits inconsolable beside a ruined temple in the desert, an old man stands by his side, and asks, "What is your sorrow?" The youth, lured by some strange sympathy in the old man's mien and voice, unburdens to him his grief, tells how he has tried to make and keep himself wise and pure and elevated above the common crowd, that in his soul's mirror he might find

"A reflex of the eternal mind,

A glass to give him back the truth,"

how he has followed after ideal beauty, to live in its light, dwell beneath its shadow, but at length has found that this too is vanity and emptiness.

"Till now, my youth yet scarcely done,
The heart which I had thought to steep
In hues of beauty, and to keep

Its consecrated home and fane,

That heart is soiled with many a stain,
Which from without or from within
Has gathered there till all is sin,
Till now I only draw my breath,
I live but in the hope of death."

After an interval the old man replies:

"Ah me, my son,

A weary course your life has run;
And yet it need not be in vain
That you have suffered all this pain;
Nay, deem not of us as at strife,
Because you set before your life
A purpose, and a loftier aim

Than the blind lives of men may claim
For the most part; or that you sought,
By fixed resolve and solemn thought,
To lift your being's calm estate
Out of the range of time and fate.
Glad am I that a thing unseen,
A spiritual Presence, this has been

Your worship, this your young heart stirred.
But yet herein you proudly erred,

Here may the source of woe be found,
You thought to fling yourself around
The atmosphere of light and love
In which it was your joy to move;
You thought by efforts of your own
To take at last each jarring tone
Out of your life, till all should meet
In one majestic music sweet;

And deemed that in your own heart's ground
The root of good was to be found,
And that by careful watering

And earnest tendance we might bring
The bud, the blossom, and the fruit,
To grow and flourish from that root.
You deemed you needed nothing more
Than skill and courage to explore
Deep down enough in your own heart,
To where the well-head lay apart,
Which must the springs of being feed,
And that these fountains did but need
The soil that choked them moved away,
To bubble in the open day.
But thanks to Heaven it is not so:
That root a richer soil doth know

Than our poor hearts could e'er supply—
That stream is from a source more high;
From God it came, to God returns,
Not nourished from our scanty urns,
But fed from His unfailing river,
Which runs and will run on forever."

GOLDWIN SMITH

THE LAMPS OF FICTION

[Address of Goldwin Smith, author and professor of history (born in Reading, England, August 23, 1823; -), delivered on the centenary of the birth of Sir Walter Scott.]

Ruskin has lighted seven lamps of Architecture to guide the steps of the architect in the worthy practice of his art. It seems time that lamps should be lighted to guide the steps of the writer of Fiction. Think what the influence of novelists now is, and how some of them use it! Think of the multitudes who read nothing but novels; and then look into the novels which they read! I have seen a young man's whole library consisting of thirty or forty of those paper-bound volumes, which are the bad tobacco of the mind. In England, I looked over three railway bookstalls in one day. There was hardly a novel by an author of any repute on one of them. There were heaps of nameless garbage, commended by tasteless, flaunting woodcuts, the promise of which was no doubt well kept within. Fed upon such food daily, what will the mind of a nation be? I say that there is no flame at which we can light the Lamp of Fiction purer or brighter than the genius of him in honor to whose memory we are assembled here to-day. Scott does not moralize. Heaven be praised that he does not. He does not set a moral object before him, nor lay down moral rules. But his heart, brave, pure, and true, is a law to itself; and by studying what he does, we may find the law for all who follow his calling. If seven lamps have been lighted for architecture, Scott will light as many for Fiction.