fails to perform its trust, to use its opportunities, to listen to the warnings which it receives, will incur the condemnation of all unfaithful servants. It will be stripped of its authority, cast down from its place of honour, and its name will become a hissing and a byword.

But what should we do that such evils may not come upon us? The remedy is plain-no legislative nostrum-no ingenious device of the socialist projector, for enabling evil hearts to carry out the Divine law-no novel stimulant to make an empty life supportable; no, something homely, old, and familiar, but often tried in individual cases, and always found effectual PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY. This is the subject, the marrow of the whole. Those who have followed thus far will not be surprised to find themselves at this centre. Those who do no more than hastily strike open a leaf, should not judge rashly whether it be well or ill done to touch at all on this highest matter. Above all, let no one who may have joined with interest in the analysis of a difficult problem in economics, think that, that once completed, the rest might have been spared; that the work is good and would have been welcome, but the appendix impertinent; for indeed this is no appendix, but rather that which was designed to be the substance of the work. The economical analysis was no more than the dissecting of a dead body, a task disclosing many beautiful adaptations, but, upon the whole, repulsive, and only to be undertaken in the hope of getting at some life-giving truth.

When one of the graver maladies afflicts the human organization, especially with symptoms unwonted, mysterious, suggesting despair, the cause is to be looked for far in, near the source of life itself. So it is now. If anything be wrong with England, you must look deep into her moral constitution to find out the cause. Her fierce commercial paroxysms are but the symptoms of a deep-lying disease, for which it is in vain to seek a cure in any external applications. In this lies Carlyle's

greatest truth; a negative one, yet most prolific, uttered by him at least as long ago as 1829, namely, that no good will come from merely mechanical alterations. Social machinery will do nothing in such cases. An inward change is what is wanted, if that could only be brought about. For in this great English people it is the functions of the heart that are disturbed, and the brain, unconsciously yet closely sympathizing therewith, wanders and cannot find rest. In a word, our specific malady at this present time, notwithstanding our active but rather noisy philanthropy, must be described as an aversion of the national heart to practical Christianity.

But let none be attracted or repelled by a phrase. These are no catch words. Those whom they might catch are the very parties who, if they read these pages, will be most pained by what is to follow. Sympathy touching the highest themes is amongst the highest of human enjoyments, but it is not to be obtained upon false pretences. It is therefore necessary for the writer of these pages to say, that his own creed would not satisfy any orthodox church in Great Britain. It might possibly satisfy a Neander or a Lücke, and certainly would not have caused the right hand of Christian fellowship to be withheld by Schleiermacher or De Wette; but in England it will appear open to the two very strong though apparently contradictory objections, that it includes too little, and that it includes too much.

Agreement of Comte and Carlyle.

It must be considered highly remarkable that that great fact of a progressive or incipient social decomposition, which is more or less observable in every country in Europe, should have become, some five-and-twenty years ago, the central idea in two great minds, separated from each other by the widest intellectual, moral, and national differences. While France was hoping all things from dynastic changes, and England from par

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.