was preached. This is simply impossible: for the truth of Christ is one, and each of its parts necessarily implies all the rest. But certainly these various phases came into successive prominence in Christian teaching and faith. The order of preaching of these various acts of His manifestation is, it will be noted, exactly the opposite to the order of their occurrence in actual fact, which is followed in the recital of them in the complete creed of the Church; just as, in digging down through the crust of the earth, we uncover first the strata which were last deposited, and come only at last to the primeval rock, on which all else actually

rests.

This order is no arbitrary thing. It follows a plain natural development. For the resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ belong to the region of visible fact; they were testified to by eye-witnesses, who were as sure of them as of their own existence, who had been called simply to bear witness of them, and for that witness were ready to live and to die. The sitting at the right hand of God was that which the ascension implied; the coming to judgment our Lord had repeatedly foretold, as the only possible completion of the mediatorial kingdom, to which in His human nature He had been exalted. All these things, however strange and miraculous, were plain, tangible, comprehensible; and, moreover, they were just the things which, for conversion, it was absolutely necessary to grasp. For to those called to give up all for Christ, the question must always be, not what He was, but what He is, as a living Saviour. The uninstructed common-sense of Festus taught him to put his finger on the crucial point of difference, whether Jesus was one who had been alive and was dead, or one who "had been dead, and was alive for evermore."

But when this truth has been acknowledged, when Christ has been accepted as a King, giving a new life to all who will so accept Him-then the inquiry will naturally arise, "How can He be thus a deliverer from sin, from its guilt and from its bondage? How can He really bring back sinners to the embrace of the Fatherhood of God." To that inquiry the only answer is in the great doctrine of "Christ crucified." In that doctrine there is the outward fact of the Passion represented before the eyes of men, the cruel eyes of persecution, as well as the "sad and wondering eyes" of faith. But the inner reality of the atonement is not, like the miracle of the resurrection, a doctrine of

...

evidence. It is a doctrine of faith, ulti-
mately faith in the words of Him, who, in
two sayings-"The Son of Man came
to give His life a ransom for many "—"This
is my blood, which is shed for the remis-
sion of sins"-marked out the two lines
on which all Apostolic preaching was to
move. As such it was emphatically declared;
and in it, though "to the Jews a stumbling-
block and to the Greeks foolishness," was
found the gospel, which a world like ours.
needs. To the foundation truth of all religion,
"There is one God," was added the declaration
of" one mediator between God and man, the
Man Christ Jesus."

Still even here the mind cannot reach. The more it studies the reality and the stern limitations of all human mediation, the more it comes to realise the inconceivable greatness of the claim to an absolute and universal mediation, bearing, for all the millions of souls who ever had been or should be born, the apparently incommunicable burden of guilt, and intervening in the one region which seems sacred from all intervention, the meeting ground with God of the countless spirits which He has made for Himself. The question must rise, "Who is this, for whom such infinite power is claimed ?" "Clearly He is the Son of man; but what is He more?" To that question there is but one answer, in the doctrine of the Incarnation, as the tabernacling of the Godhead in human flesh, and by necessary inference, of the pre-existence of the eternal Son, the eternal Word, in the bosom of the Father, in which He is the same "yesterday, to-day and for ever." At last the soul is face to face with the ultimate truth, led to it by degrees through the lesser truths of universal royalty and universal mediation. How great even then was the sense of its mystery, we may see by the quasi-Gnostic speculations upon it, which began even in the Apostolic age. But humanly speaking, it must have been impossible for the world in any sense to grasp it, had it not, in the manifold wisdom of God, been led to it in this order of development of doctrine.

For the perfect study of this development the Epistles of St. Paul are not indeed perfectly sufficient. We ought to prefix to them the records of the earliest apostolic preaching in the Acts of the Apostles; to consider side by side with them the Epistles of St. James, St. Peter, and St. Jude, and the Epistle to the Hebrews: to add to them the final completion of the canon of the New Testament in the teaching of St. John. Yet in

themselves, as I hope to show hereafter, they contain a substantially complete exhibition of this primary development of doctrine, in which "any way, and every way, Christ is preached."

It will only be necessary to glance briefly at two other phases of development, important in themselves but subordinate to this. Necessarily dependent on these different forms of the manifestation of Christ in Himself, we find corresponding variations in the view of the application of that manifestation to the redemption of humanity. For this subjective application of His salvation to the soul must be simply the reflection of the objective manifestation of the Saviour Himself. Thus to the preaching of Him as risen and ascended to be "the Lord and Christ," not of the Jews only, but of all the nations of the world-in the kingdom foretold by Daniel as "an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away," "that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him -naturally corresponds the simple conception of the call unto that kingdom as a call to a newness of life, wrought in the soul by the very presence of the Light which bids men "cast off the works of darkness," and surrender themselves "as begotten again to a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." But soon deeper thought, searching into the means by which this regeneration is to be actually brought home to our sinful and death-stricken humanity--which is too often able, indeed, to see the light and know that it is Divine, and yet unable to break the bondage, which prevents the soul from arising and going forth to meet it-leads on to the contemplation of the mysterious atonement and the universal mediation of Christ crucified; and then this simple conception of newness of life divides itself into a twofold consciousness. There is the sense of the need and the gift of a free and absolute Justification, wiping away the guilt of the sinner by the free mercy of God. There is also the sense of a distinct, though inseparable, gift of Sanctification, not absolute and complete, but progressive through the whole spiritual experience of life; not resting on the sole love of God, but needing the cooperation of the will of man. Then, lastly, as these truths work themselves deep into the soul, the complete Revelation of Christ, as the Incarnation of the Eternal Godhead, uniting with that Godhead the humanity which He was pleased to assume, naturally suggests the deeper thought of Christian life as being a growing unity with Christ, through

which our very life is hid with Him in God, in which we actually sink all thought of self, rejoicing in the declaration, "I live; yet not I: but Christ liveth in me ;" and accordingly, knowing Him as "the Life," so that, even in what we call death, "he that believeth in Him shall never die." It is impossible, as it appears to me, not to trace this gradual development in the character of St. Paul's preaching of "salvation by grace."

Lastly, as in its character, so there is also a natural development in its scope. Clearly at first we have its representation in what we call Personal Christianity; in which the soul is by faith face to face with God in Christ, conscious only of Him and of itself, and of the mediation which, as by a spiritual attraction, draws it up the bright track of the light of the Ascension to the heaven opened to us by the ascended Saviour. Then, by a natural succession, out of the consciousness of this individual unity there grows the sense of fellowship with all who have similarly been drawn to Christ; and this broadens out into the conception-perhaps less vivid, less inspiring, but larger and grander than the former of the whole Catholic Church as really one body, drawing its guidance and its life from Christ the Head, and (as especially in the Sacraments) able to minister to the individual members blessings, which even the personal unity with Christ cannot wholly supply. Yet even this is not enough. As the thought of the Godhead of Christ grows upon the soul, there comes also the belief that even this larger conception of his Headship must be far below the reality. It is seen that His Headship must be extended beyond even the wide precincts of the Catholic Church to embrace all humanity, and beyond the utmost range of humanity to include all created beings, even in the highest hierarchies of "thrones and dominions, principalities and powers;" finally, that even this Headship is not sufficient, without the yet higher conception of Him as the fountain of all being, "through whom all things were made," and "in whom all things consist." Thus from the central individual consciousness the conception of the work of the Son of God spreads out wider and wider till it fills all things. In the former lies the secret of a living personal faith; in the latter, the largest cravings of the human mind after the Infinite are so satisfied, that it can rest in adoration.

Such are in general outline the chief developments of doctrine which are to be traced. To fill up in some degree that outline will be the object of the succeeding papers.

THERE

HERE are no sadder landmarks, to prove to us the progress we are making through the afternoon of life, than the graves that appear one by one in our way, opening up at our very feet. In youth, perhaps, we lose as many friends, but the sensation is very different. It is the impassioned grief of personal loss and suffering, or it is the awe with which, out of our flush of life, we witness that silent withdrawal into the unknown, and cessation henceforward of all human sight or knowledge which is incredible till it happens, and even when it happens to another, impossible to realise as likely for ourselves. Later we are more callous, yet far more deeply interested. Our seniors have gone, we stand in the position in which our fathers stood, and it is our comrades who go on disappearing out of the ranks in which we all travel steadily towards that conclusion which every day comes more visibly to a measurable distance. We see the limit of our own horizon as we perceive beyond it how, one by one, our fellow-travellers pass beyond the verge.

There has been in England for many years no name that has been better known than that of Anthony Trollope. Out of the way, and almost closed to all outside intercourse must that house have been into which something from his hand did not tell among the pleasures, and expectations of life, or furnish some material for talk, and the drawing forth of individual opinion. The creations of his fancy have been to many of us like friends familiarly known. We have discussed the actions and the motives of those airy nothings to whom he gave not only local habitation and a name, but many of the experiences and difficulties of existence, with a warmth and partisanship which ought to be ridiculous from a common-sense point of view, but is not ridiculous at all, considering that half the persons we meet in life are less real and less interesting than these beings of the imagination. In this way the novelist becomes the acquaintance of all the world. We are thankful for his company not only when all is well with us, but when we are sick or sorry, and shut out less familiar friends. This is true even of the poorer professors of the art, but how much more of him in whose works there was always a true reflex of the actual existence in which he took a manful share-not that of a scholar in his study, but of a living and energetic member

of the society he described. Mr. Trollope was no specialist, to use a word which has not much acceptance with the English mind, yet in literature has always given its professors a decided advantage. He was not a philosopher like George Eliot, nor a humorist like Thackeray. His mind did not concentrate upon any individual view of existence, nor was there that relation between the different parts of his work which some great novelists have aimed at. We might almost say that his selection of subjects was accidental, and that he took whatever came uppermost with a general sense of capacity to deal with what he took up, rather than a particular impulse within to search into the depths of human motive, or to discover its endless discrepancies and shortcomings. He was a story-teller rather than an analyst or moralist, although no man ever took more pains to show the way in which the mind justified to itself a certain course of action. Wherever he held his lantern there came into light within its circle a little world, a microcosm, with everything going on in little which goes on at large in the universe. Spots that had been dim before thus came into sight, all throbbing with life and motion. When he did concentrate the light the illumination was worth almost as much as the best, and Barchester comes in many points little short of the streets and booths of Vanity Fair. But though he did not always do this, he was always capable at a moment's notice of clearing a little plot around him from out the undiscovered, and showing us groups as animated, as restless in their busy pre-occupations, loving and hating and pursuing their personal objects with all the ease and unconsciousness of real life.

It would be vain to calculate what Mr. Trollope might have done had he been shut up, by nature and circumstances, within one circle, and left us only the half-dozen stories which embody the History of Barset, with the more careful elaboration which leisure and concentration would have given. Our own opinion is that every artist finds the natural conditions of his working, and that in doing what he has to do according to his natural lights he is doing the best which can be got from him. But it is hopeless to expect from the reader either the same attention or the same faith for twenty or thirty literary productions which he gives to four or five. The

it quickens here and slackens there with a genuine and natural fluctuation; nobody will fail specially to remark Mr. Harding's delicate old figure in the road, the delightful, energetic bustle of the Archdeacon, or that less excellent, because more conventional, but most popular of all, Mrs. Proudie, at the palace; but even their eminence does not make us at all indifferent to all the other innumerable human folk who inhabit the little episcopal town, and the fresh-breathing country with its muddy lanes and long distances. Even Thackeray, with his finer and more powerful touch, has not done just the same for the history of the age; for all his dealings are with Society, the modes of which are more artificial and its laws more continuous. Old Lady Kew is so real that we know the very sound of her voice, and regard her with a mixture of affection and abhorrence, which is more genuine than our sentiments towards many of our most familiar friends, but there is not very much distinction between that wonderful old figure, and the old Baroness of the early Georgian age, whom we meet in "The Virginians;" the species continues for ever. And such is to a certain extent the case with all expositions of that fine mixture of the artificial and the savage, of hungry human self-interest and fictitious restraint, which is called Society. But Barchester is as entirely the England of our time as Bath in "Northanger Abbey" represents the England of Miss Austen's. The one picture is larger, not so delicate as the other, and they are as different in sentiment as in costume; but when the world is as far in advance of Trollope, as we are now of Miss Austen, it is scarcely possible to doubt that the little cathedral town, with its dignitaries, the country parsonages, the poor clergy, the little social circles all about, will form as important a contribution to the history of the time as hers is to that of the beginning of the century: and it is difficult to say more for a novelist.

The note of defence, even of excuse, which creeps into what we say belongs to the fact that Mr. Trollope wrote a great deal besides, to which indeed the same words are applicable, but in a less satisfactory way. He produced many books of which it may be said that they were honest supply for a demand, on the best principles of political economy, executed with care and skill and transgressing no law of honourable work; characteristic too, yet on a very much lower level. Many of these we will willingly allow to drop back again into mother earth, and be seen no more, with no reproach to the writer if no glory. But

the best of Anthony Trollope will be inscribed in the historic and social annals of the country, and will show our great grandchildren many a characteristic picture of those days when Victoria was Queen.

The readers of GOOD WORDS have had special links of connection with the friend whom we have all lost. Twenty years ago he began to contribute to these pages some of the short stories in which he was excellent. In 1863 there occurred an almost romantic episode in literature, when the first important story written by him for these pages was found unsuitable by our highminded editor, Norman Macleod, and omitted, though at a large pecuniary sacrifice. Mr. Trollope was then at the height of his reputation, and it was a bold thing to do. But Dr. Macleod's courage and conscientious determination to admit nothing contrary to the principles of the periodical were in their way heroic. So far as we are aware the episode is unique in the history of periodical literature. Since then many a page from his hand has entertained our readers, and the last of his published stories had just appeared in GOOD WORDS when his life, too, ended; not without warning, nor prematurely, yet at an age when he was still in full vigour, and might still have lived, and rode, and written, for many a day to come. It is curious to remember how recently he had played with the idea of an arbitrary conclusion to life at the age he just lived to reach, in the amusing and original chapter of imaginary history called the Fixed Period. It was probably because he felt how little occasion there was for dying, and how well adapted a man was to enjoy life at sixty-seven, that he put forth at that age the elaborate scheme of the colonial legislator for the honourable extinction of existence; but the coincidence is curious. The great novelist is dead, at peace and in honour with all men, leaving nothing behind him that is bitter or painful, but an honourable name, a reputation which there is every reason to believe will increase rather than diminish, and the example of a life full of useful exertion. He did much in his life to restore character and credit to the literary profession, while at the same time he was no mere writer, but a man thoroughly experimented in the world, and knowing the life which he illustrated. There is no Westminster Abbey for the novelist, but its roll contains many a less notable name than that of Anthony Trollope, who has in his generation been as much the faithful servant of England as if he had fought half a hundred battles.