peare, even in this sense, as a prophet? Can you speak of him in any sense even as a religious man?

My friends, I should not care to speak of him in this place at all if I did not think that he was both.

If the underlying and almighty essence of this world be good, then it is likely is it not?-that the writer who most deeply approached to that essence will be himself good.

There is a religion of week-days as well as of Sundays, a religion of "cakes and ale" as well as of pews and altarcloths. This England lay before Shakespeare as it lies before us all, with its green fields, and its long hedgerows, and its many trees, and its great towns, and its endless hamlets, and its motley society, and its long history, and its bold exploits, and its gathering power; and he saw that they were good.

To him, perhaps, more than to any one else, has it been given to see that they were a great unity, a great religious object; that if you could only descend to the inner life, to the deep things, to the secret principles of its noble vigor, to the essence of character, to what we know of Hamlet and seem to fancy of Ophelia, we might, so far as we are capable of so doing, understand the Nature which God has made. Let us, then, think of Shakespeare, not as a teacher of dry dogmas, or a sayer of hard sayings, but as

"A priest to us all

Of the wonder and bloom of the world "

-a teacher of the hearts of men and women; one from whom may be learned something of that inmost principle that ever modulates

"With murmurs of the air,

And motions of the forest and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day and the deep heart of man.”

Shakespeare was not a prophet or preacher, of course, in the same sense as Mrs. Barbauld, or Dr. Doddridge, or Dr. Watts, or even John Keble But perhaps he was something better and higher. He rises above mere morals, and preaches to us, prophesies to us of life.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, remember, is not morality only, not a book of morals, but the story of a life; a life in which all men can see the perfection of human character, the divinity of forgiveness, of perpetual mercy, of constant patience, of endless peace, of everlasting gentleness; and is there any prophet of our modern dispensation who knew these things better, or could prophesy of them more vividly through life, than did Shakespeare?

In an evil day too, remember, Shakespeare prophesied; he taught the most gracious and gentle precepts—too good, I fancy, almost to have been listened to, if men had quite known what they were receiving. There are some things in Shakespeare I almost fancy he might have been burnt for had he been a theologian-just as, certainly, there are things about politics, about civil liberty, which, had he been a politician or a statesman, would have brought him to the block. But God made him a player and neither of these other things. And so he could teach a message to his age which it much needed,―lessons of peace, gentleness, mercy, patience, longsuffering. He was no priest, it is true, he waved no censer, yet who can tell, when we consider the thousands of souls who have learned the lessons of Shakespeare, how much he has done to humanize, nay, to Christianize mankind. His doctrine may not be preached to men in set dogma and maxim. It may rather, perhaps, distil as dew. Yet many a man who has read "The Merchant of Venice," or pondered over that sad drama of a sinful soul in "Macbeth," or

watched that terrible attempt of the wicked king to pray, in "Hamlet," or in "Measure for Measure" has grasped the key to that marvellously sad but most moral story in the lines:

"He who the sword of Heaven would bear
Must be holy as severe,'

—has heard sermons more precious probably than any homilies of the pulpit,-lessons, I venture to think, as sweet or sweeter than any that have fallen on the world since the days of the Apostles. For think of it for a moment in this way.

We are all familiar with the thought that it is Christ's life which gives to the Master's words their force, and we confess that love of Jesus himself is the only motive strong enough to make men keep his Commandments. St. John sums up the significance of all that in the phrase " The Word was made flesh."

It is not irreverence, I think, to point out that Shakespeare's teaching has the same advantage over that of the ordinary preacher that the teaching of the Evangelists has over the teaching of Solomon. He gives us a man to know instead of a proverb. It is through words made flesh that he teaches us.

The time at our disposal is all too short, alas! to make this special interpretation of Shakespeare's method as a teacher, as a national prophet, plain to you.

But let me take two concrete examples of his method, which will at any rate furnish, I think, each one of us with two practical lessons for our own every-day working lives. And the first lesson is an appropriate one for St. George's Day. For it is a lesson of chivalry.

I am sure that many of you must be familiar with that noble passage in Mr. Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies" in which

that great writer calls attention to the fact that, in the strict sense of the word, Shakespeare has no heroes-only heroines. "There is not one entirely heroic figure," Mr. Ruskin says, "in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose; Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity."

Now the lesson of this fact is not, I think, what Mr. Ruskin apparently conceives it to be. It is not, that is to say, that women are perfect in character-" infallibly faithful, and wise counsellors-incorruptibly just and pure examplesstrong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save "-in a way which is not possible to men. But the lesson is surely this, that Shakespeare evidently thought them so. That is the point to be grasped. Shakespeare kept true through his whole life to the youthful, the chivalric, ideal of a good woman, expressed in words which, in "Measure for Measure," he puts into the mouth of the jesting Lucio, describing Isabella,—in her virginal strength and self-possessed dignity, perhaps the noblest of all the heroines of the plays:

And, my friends, what is worth remembering about this reverence of Shakespeare for women, which surrounds them for him to the end of his days,-it is in " Winter's Tale," one of his latest plays, that he draws for us the gracious simplicity, the wifely perfection, of Hermione, and in "The Tempest,"

B-Orations. Vol. 25

the latest of his plays, the peerless purity, the maiden sweetness, of the most admired Miranda,—with an almost divine light and glamour, is that it is just what the ordinary man of he world too often despises as the mistake of his inexperienced youth.

And yet who was more the man of the world" than Shakespeare? His knowledge of human nature was immense and infallible, and in no sense did he avoid the world and its temptations. He lived, too, in the midst of London town life, of theatrical life, such as we know it to have been in Elizabeth's day, coarse, corrupt, feculent; and yet he preserved in his heart the feeling-natural, I venture to assert, to uncorrupted youth-of the divinity and sacredness of womanhood, so that in his latest as in his earliest plays his strong spirit, so keen to detect human weakness and sin, pays woman the involuntary homage of laying aside, in face of her excellence, its weapon of criticism. It is Iago, who is nothing if not critical, who dares to doubt of Desdemona's truth. He, it is true, as Mrs. Jameson says in her " Characteristics of Women," would have "bedevilled an angel." But alas! there are men in our own day, who, with none of Iago's wickedness, in either intention or act, are still tainted by the evil spirit of the world, and in their inmost thought dare to judge as he did of the virtue of woman. But such a man was not Shakespeare. He, at fifty years of age, still feels, in presence of his heroines, like a lover before his first love.

Seriously, then, do I beg you to ponder this fact, that the reverence for woman, which too many men affect to lose in their teens, was retained by the myriad-minded Shakespeare to the end of his days.

One further word and lesson. You remember the char