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RECENT WORKS OF TRAVEL.

of the northern provinces of Western India); Sir John Francis Bowring's "Kingdom and People of Siam;" and Mr. John Davis's valuable "Sketches of China” and his "General Description of the Empire of China and its Inhabitants." With the last must, of course, be placed Mr. Robert Fortune's books on China, and Mr. George Wingrove Cooke's, both telling of what their writers knew and saw. Lady Eastlake, while Miss Rigby, published some gracefully written letters descriptive of a "Residence on the Shores of the Baltic." Our standard library should also contain the "Narrative of the Voyages of the 'Adventure' and the 'Beagle,'" by Captains King and Fitzroy, and by Charles Darwin, the illustrious naturalist; Atkinson's "Oriental Siberia," Spencer's "Travels in Circassia," and William Gifford Palgrave's "Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia" (1862-63), which he made in the disguise of a Mohammedan hakim. Nor must we forget Captain Wood's "Travels to the Source of the Oxus," or the writings of Mr. T. W. Atkinson. An extensive literature has accumulated about our Arctic expeditions, the latest additions being Sir George Nares's "Voyage of the 'Albert' and 'Discovery in 1875-76," and Captain Markham's "Great Frozen Sea." With African discovery will always be associated the names of Captain R. F. Burton ("Lake Regions of Central Africa "), Captain Speke ("Journal of the Discovery of the Sources of the Nile," 1863), Captain Grant ("A Walk across Africa," 1864), Sir Samuel Baker ("The Albert Nyanza" and "The Nile Tributaries," 1866-67), Dr. Livingstone ("Researches in South Africa," 1857, "Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi," 1864, and "Last Journals," 1875), Henry M. Stanley ("How I Found Livingstone," 1872, and "Through the Dark Continent," 1878), and Lieutenant Cameron ("Across Africa," 1876).

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Among more recent works of travel I would venture to recommend to the student Major Burnaby's "Ride to Khiva" and "Ride through Asia Minor," Sir Samuel Baker's " Cyprus," Lieutenant-Colonel Baker's "Turkey in Europe," Sir J. D. Hooker's "Journal of a Tour in Morocco," Mr. Boddam Whetham's "Roraima and British Guiana," Captain Gill's Journey through China to Burmah," Mrs. Scott Stevenson's "Our Home in Cyprus," and Oswald Craufurd's "Portugal, Old and New." Captain Burton is one of the most indefatigable and independent of travellers, and his characteristic dogmatism lends a piquant flavour to his narratives, of which the latest is, I believe, "Midian Revisited." Mr. A. Wilson's "Abode of Snow" (the Himalaya), Mr. Drew's "Cashmir Valley," Mr. A. W. Hughes's "Country of Beloochistan," Captain Forbes's "British Burmah," C. Lambert's "Trip to Cashmere," Mr. Val Prinsep's "Imperial India," and Commander Cameron's "Our Future Highway to India," must necessarily possess an interest for every intelligent citizen of that far-reaching imperial State which counts India among its depend

encies. But every year, nay, every month, every week, brings forth an ever-increasing crop of travel-books, and there is no department of literature in which selection is more imperative or more difficult. Unless newcomers have something novel to tell of the people and places their predecessors have already described, or something to say about corners of the world that have never before been visited (and these how few !), unless they can open up to us fresh channels of observation or reflection, it will be as well to leave them undisturbed in the tranquil glory of the circulating library.

CHAPTER VII.

ENGLISH THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, AND METAPHYSICS :
A COURSE OF READING.

COUPLE moral philosophy with theology because I do not see how it is possible for a Christian student to consider them separately; he can accept no ethical system which is not based upon the laws laid down by Christianity. Nor can the training of the moral nature be properly dissociated from the education of the spiritual nature; the highest morality must be that which is shaped and inspired by religious principles. A scheme of morals which makes no reference to religion, whether it be formulated by a Bentham or a Stuart Mill, is, as Professor Blackie says, a very unnatural sort of divorce, and a plain sign of a certain narrowness and incompleteness in the mental constitution of those who advocate it. It is an attempt, moreover, to reverse the teaching of eighteen centuries; nay, it is an attempt to revolt against history and sweep aside that Christianity which makes such an attempt possible. I mean that, in so far as modern ethical systems differ from or are superior to those propounded by the ancient moralists, the difference, the superiority, is due to that gradual elevation of the standard of thought and sentiment which Christianity has effected. "The fountain of all the nobler morality is moral inspiration from within, and the feeder of this fountain is God."

It is to be wished that the study of theology and moral philosophy entered more largely and more frequently than it does into our plans of intellectual culture and our educational courses. How that can be called "the higher education" which deliberately ignores the investigation of the problem of the greatest importance to the individual and to the society of which he is a member, I do not profess to understand. The issues in regard to a man's ultimate destiny, to his origin, to his work in life-the why," the "whence," the "whither," the questions which affect the constitution of society, and govern a man's relation to his fellows, would seem to be not inferior in interest, not less in value, than discussions of the agrarian laws of Rome or the polity of +he Greek commonwealths. It may be pointed out, moreover,

""
THE JUDICIOUS HOOKER.”

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that, these subjects having naturally attracted the attention of the finest intellects, he who takes no account of them necessarily remains ignorant of much which is greatest and best in English literature. And this reminds me of the difficulty of the task I undertake in attempting to sketch a course of reading in them. Not only does the vastness of the field to be traversed put me at a disadvantage, but I am called to sit in judgment, as it were, upon men whose latchets (not to speak profanely) I feel unworthy to unloose. The reader must understand, therefore, that the following remarks are offered with profound deference; that they do not aspire to be accepted as critical; that they are intended only as indications of the nature of the authorities which he should consult. They suggest a tolerably elaborate scheme of reading, and the student must contract it according to his needs. It is based, moreover, on the supposition that, before entering upon it, he will have gone through one or two text-books upon each of the two great subjects which it comprehends.1

I shall again adopt, as nearly as possible, a chronological order. And that you may get a notion of the state of English theology at that stage of the Reformation which was reached in the reign of Henry VIII., I recommend, to begin with, Bishop Latimer's "Sermons." They are pleasant reading, for the style is homely and clear, with illustrations which are always familiar and often amusing; the teaching is practical, and enforced by many shrewd and sensible remarks. It is a characteristic of our literature that it flowered all at once, attained at a sudden bound to the highest excellence; and that the age which, within less than a century of the establishment of Caxton's printing-press under the shadow of Westminster Abbey, gave us Spenser and Shakespeare, gave us also Richard Hooker and Lord Bacon. Hooker's treatise "Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," begun (I suppose) about 1580 and finished about 1599-he died in 1600-is one of those masterpieces which, I fear, few read, and everybody talks about. It is essentially a wonderful book-wonderful in the solidity and force of its arguments, the wise liberality of its sentiments, the stateliness of its eloquence. The present writer first met with it, along with many other choice old authors, in the library of an old Devonshire parsonage, and he well remembers the delight with which he followed up the rhythmical harmony of its periods. He was still in his boyhood, and, of course, much of it he did but imperfectly understand or appreciate; but it was not the less a revelation to him of a world of thought, of the existence of which he had had no conception. Hooker's treatise is so broad in its plan, that, while professedly vindicating the lawfulness of Episcopacy, it really includes a statement of all the principles on which

1 Such as George Henry Lewes's "Biographical History of Philosophy," and Dr. Whewell's "Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England."

our moral and political systems should be grounded. It is a grand and irrefragable defence of, and plea for, law and order, and at the same time a protest against any attempt of Authority to put down Reason.1 "Hooker," says Hallam, "like most great moral writers both of antiquity and of modern ages, rests his positions on one solid basis, the eternal obligation of natural law.” He adds:- "He stood out at a vast height above his predecessors and contemporaries in the English Church, and was, perhaps, the first of our writers who had any considerable acquaintance with the philosophers of Greece, not merely displayed in quotation, of which others may have sometimes set an example, but in a spirit of reflection and comprehensiveness which the study of antiquity alone could have infused." Elsewhere Hallam speaks of his magnificent diction. "So stately and graceful," he says, "is the march of his periods, so various the fall of his musical cadences upon the ear, so rich in images, so condensed in sentences, so grave and noble his diction, so little is there of vulgarity in his racy idiom, of pedantry in his learned phrase, that I know not whether any later writer has more admirably displayed the capacities of our language, or produced passages more worthy of comparison with the splendid monuments of antiquity." 2

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Eleven years after the publication of the first part of Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" appeared "The Two Bookes of Francis Bacon, of the Proficiencie and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human." These in 1623 were translated into Latin (and expanded) as the "De Augmentis Scientiarum, Libri ix.," and, so translated and expanded, they form a portion of his magnum opus, the "Instauratio Magna, or Great Reconstruction of Science." Bacon wrote in Latin, believing that it was more permanent than those "modern languages which would one day play the bankrupt with books," but his writings have frequently been translated, and are accessible in Bohn's "Standard Library." The Advancement should, of course, be read in Bacon's own English, which, if less stately than Hooker's, is rich and strenuous. The first book enlarges on the excellence of knowledge, and explains that the defects commonly ascribed to it originate in human errors, in the mistaken choice of subjects of study, or in unwise modes of dealing with them. Knowledge was not to be sought, he said, as if it were a couch whereon a searching and restless spirit might repose; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground for

1 It is interesting to compare his defence of "the star of reason and learning" with Dryden's invective against reason in his "Religio Laici," where it is but as the "dim uncertain light" of moon and stars.

2 The "Ecclesiastical Polity" is in eight books; the present sixth book is believed not to be Hooker's, and the seventh and eighth did not have the benefit of his revision. The first four are the best.