this, definite enough to be imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here

we shall move with an assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake, because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition in knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the hard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by which generation after generation has added some small piece to the temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or beautiful character,-those who have an eye for all this may indeed have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion, but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude, and sovereign pitifulness.

And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly chills of spiritual reaction. They will

bring forth abundant fruit in new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds, brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life, and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger participant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty, practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how much our destiny is shaped by the

generation of the dead who have prepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and the direction of our activity for the generations that are to fill the future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it. Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most scientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with the eternal chain of the destinies of man. "This contemplation," he wrote and felt, "is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity adorns with all purest delights."1

This, to the shame of those wavering souls who

1 Condorcet's Progrès de l'Esprit Humain (1794). Euv. vi. 276.

despair of progress at the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days, when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism. But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the dawning life are suddenly lighted

up with a glow of aspiration towards good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry indifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate these fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and still sublime possibilities of the human destiny.-that imperial conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in all its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do you ask for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from youth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain cast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which he has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have become the ruling harmony of his days.

CHAPTER VI.

ENGLAND.1

THERE is in an English collection a portrait of Jean Jacques, which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincial artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and elsewhere, which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of the statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of the dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard struggles with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep furrows in the brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half penetrating and defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances have sprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been with his own passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the eye and the facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat which is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and weakness, and leaves only eternal desola

1 Jan. 1766-May 1767.