liamentary reforms, Auguste Comte and Thomas Carlyle were brooding over evils which lay beneath the roots of all dynasties and all parliaments. They appear to have arrived at their conclusions independently, but they concurred in the main as to the nature of the social disease which attracted their attention. The fact which arrested the notice of both may be briefly described as a progressive strengthening of the tendencies to personal indulgence, and a progressive weakening of the restraints by which selfish impulses are subordinated to a supreme law. Under these two processes society is gradually losing the character of a cohesive and fruitful soil, and becoming dried and ground up into separate grains of barren sand. Such is the evil, the wide-spread existence of which is indeed a great truth. What is the remedy? What is to be the new power for binding men together? M. Comte and Mr. Carlyle have each a remedy, and the differences between the two are just such as might have been expected to arise from the difference between the mathematical intellect and the poetic, if, indeed, one should not rather call it the prophetic, soul.

Remedy of Comte.

Personally M. Comte is entitled to all the respect which is due to a simple, austere, and disinterested life. Bending his great faculties to the humble daily duties of a teacher of mathematics, he even lays it down as a sort of law, that, in a rightly-constituted society, the highest instructors should stand on a footing of brotherly equality and sympathy with those who live by the sweat of their brow, leaving power and wealth to an intermediate class, to whom those much-coveted objects are everything. But, with all this force of character, he does not understand the power of the living Person in human affairs. In the Lutheran Reformation, for instance, he sees nothing but the introductory act to the great drama of Progressive Anarchy, of which the most striking scenes were furnished by the French

Revolution. It may be safely pronounced, that he looked at the Lutheran Reformation from the outside. He did not, and does not, know the deep import of those solitary struggles which took place in the convent of Erfurt. He condemns Protestantism without knowing what it means. Imagining that what is amiss arises chiefly from intellectual error, his remedy is adapted to this view. Mankind is to be regenerated, and society cemented anew by dint of demonstration. At this point, however, he passes from the region of experience to that of hope and anticipation; and those who take a different view of human nature will be of opinion, that if the reconstruction of society is only to come from the completion and diffusion of the Positive Philosophy, it will previously have time to pass, twice over, through the last and most revolting stages of moral decay.

Remedy of Carlyle.

Mr. Carlyle differs from M. Comte not only in understanding, but in understanding more clearly than any one, as a general fact, the nature of personal influence; but it is strange that he should fail, or seem to fail, in appreciating the highest form in which that influence has been or can be felt by man. His writings tend to excite the hope that the disordered affairs of mankind are to be set right through the principle of heroworship, by which it must be meant either that men are to wait till the heroes come and assume their authority, or that they are to search for and set up heroes for themselves. In either view I think that hero-worship would be both an error and an immorality'. Certainly the living examples which

The exquisite critic of the English humorists, who is himself inferior to none in the series, has lent the weight of his authority to another form of this principle, which seems to me to be not only erroneous, but practically very mischievous. If my ears did not, and my memory does not, deceive me, Mr. Thackeray said in effect, that " we love Fielding even the more for his vices." My admiration for the genius

illustrate the creed will never establish it in the hearts of men. They will not consent, for some special greatness, to whitewash all sorts of crimes. One may feel that there was a great soul in Mirabeau, and yet not be blind to, nor hesitate to shriek at, his scandalous profligacy. For my own part I think Cromwell was a hero, and yet that his heroism did not warrant, ought not to conceal, but is permanently stained by, his cruelty and his falsehood. No, if we wait for the heroes, we shall do nothing. If we choose them for ourselves, it will happen, as

of him who said this being of old date, and not less strong now when all the world feels the same, I will take the liberty of expressing my conviction, that no doctrine was ever uttered more likely to do harm, at a time when the confused and anarchical state of opinion renders so many young men doubtful upon all points except this, that "pleasure is pleasant." An intellect so subtle and moral perceptions so refined and just as those of Mr. Thackeray, ought to have saved him from being caught by so poor a fallacy. No man ever did love Fielding or anybody else the more on account of his vices. What we do love is the genial and generous heart, and that diffuses its charm over the sensualities, but can derive no attraction from them or from any other selfish accompaniment. We do love Fielding, and in spite of his vices, better than a starched and sour precisian; but if the time which he wasted, and the genius which he impaired by debauchery, had been applied to higher aims, the love would have been all the deeper. Schiller is not less loveable for the purity of his life, or because literature had for him the sanctity of a religion. Shelley would not have been more attractive for greater likeness to Byron; and Collingwood would not have been adored as he was by every one who came near him, if, besides the heroism of Nelson, he had had the other qualities which make Nelson's private history so painful. There is, perhaps, no one whose case shows the power of pleasant vices to strip off gradually every quality which is really a cause of love so strikingly as Sheridan's. In spite of his genius and his irresistible personal fascinations, the joyous and honoured manhood was followed by the sad and disgraced old age. Men are not left to bailiffs on their death-beds without a cause, and the cause in his case was something not loveable. No accurate analysis will ever make out a selfish habit which inspires love. It is only after-dinner logic which lets pass the notion that a few vices must be thrown into the composition of a character to give it zest and flavour. Far truer upon the subject of licentious self-indulgence is Burns, who is, indeed, as great as he is depicted in one of Carlyle's greatest Essays,

"But och it hardens a' within,

And petrifies the feeling."

I hope, or rather I feel sure, that Mr. Thackeray will forgive me. An error of his must be highly contagious, and the moralist, with all that he can do, has to limp after such a law-breaker with a sadly halting foot.

it did in the old paganism, that the idol will reflect the weaknesses of the worshipper.

Something better than either.

But happily there is no need to wait. The choice is already made. It was made by a higher than human wisdom, when more than eighteen hundred years ago a DIVINE LIFE was exhibited in a human form, and mingled for ever with the general life of humanity. Then was laid the only foundation for all human reforms and all human hopes. That is what I believe. I am not ashamed to wear what have been called those "Hebrew old clothes." I believe that they never will grow old. But the proof? The proof lies in the fact, patent to every eye, that this, and this only, has been the regenerating influence in the history of the world. Except this, the Greeks had everything: philosophy, poetry, history, eloquence, art— and all could not avert decay. If decay is now to be averted, this Christian faith alone can do it. It is this which is doing the saving work, so far as it is done, even now. While philanthropists are planning in their easy chairs--while philosophers are speculating, economists calculating, and statesmen making laws those true ministers of Christ, who show his spirit in their lives, whether they be or be not marked out by formal ordination, are actually, in the abodes of poverty and ignorance and sorrow, carrying on that process of individual personal communication, without which nothing effectual is accomplished for the moral redemption of mankind.

Practical Argument for Christianity.

In the original design of the present work, it was intended that an attempt should be made to exhibit the position in which Christianity now stands in reference to the latest forms of scepticism both in England and in Germany. That design, to be adequately executed, would, indeed, have required a scholarship

to which in the present case no pretension exists; but such a piece of work, even in the brief and popular form which was contemplated, was found to be too large for combination with what the reader has before him. But, in truth, this is not a critical, but a practical question. The proof, which, as Paley said, clenches the matter, must always be that practical one which touches not the head but the heart. Put the critics and commentators on the shelf, and study the Christian evidences in the lives of Oberlin, and Neff, and Howard, and Mrs. Fry; or, if picked specimens do not seem fair, go into the Sunday school, where neither fame nor philosophy comes in to confuse the result. In a word, find out and examine what persons they are, who, upon any large scale, exhibit practical energy and self-denial in the cause of humanity.

The Practical Argument not for Sects.

Numbers would heartily concur in this practical conclusion, who will recoil and fly off to all points of the compass from the inference to which it inevitably leads. That inference is, that this argument, decisive as it is in behalf of Christianity, is worthless in support of the exclusive pretensions of any one church. It will not make out the case of the Church of Rome against the Church of England, nor of the Church of England against the Church of Rome, nor serve in the least degree to sustain any one of the forms of Dissenting infallibility. It follows that Christianity must be looked at, not as some one sect would have it, but as the world actually has had it. The warfare against it has been moved off to new ground. The old bulwarks are built up in a quarter where the contest no longer rages. That work of defence which was carried on before by isolated and mutually hostile champions, will no longer avail if it cannot be conducted on some principle of combination. The basis of any successful defence against the modern scepticism must be the conception of Christianity in its historical integrity. It did not dive under ground, as has been sometimes supposed, for ten