able part of the mind from which Emotion proceeds is a teeming source of delusion and illusion which involve either instinctive power or motive. For instance, anger commonly involves the delusion that the offender had option, that he chose to offend, that he is a culprit, that he deserves punishment; and this delusion instigates retaliation. I say "commonly," for the great bulk of men, as I shall show in the next chapter, are puppets of unconscious force. Knowledge of this truth does not exempt from the delusion: it may show through anger of the milder degrees, and so substitute an illusive sentiment of the offender for the delusive one; but an opposite knowledge leaps like lightning from the higher degrees of anger. To arrest the "intermittency" of a species of heart-knowledge and make the latter a constant possession is one of the main ends of Christian conduct, a discipline by the way as practicable for the peasant as for the philosopher. The causes of this" intermittency" are potent obstacles to growth in Wisdom, and chiefly as being obstacles to detachment." How easy would "detachment" be to one enjoying a thorough and unintermittent heartknowledge that men are, with rare exceptions, puppets of unconscious force; for Ambition, the coxcombry that longs to figure before the World, must sicken in a heart possessed by that knowledge. Our liability to sane delusion points to our subjection to law and to the impossibility of becoming masters of ourselves except through art in the application of which we treat ourselves rather as things than persons.

Wisdom involves a vigilance that is known to those who have tried to become perfect as "recollection." Let this vigilance be distinguished as Moral. Moral vigilance is a look-out for occasions of action in respect

of which Instinct might steal a march upon Duty and Will. It resembles Attention except as not involving effort or an appearance of effort. The brain keeps the soul vigilant without effort and for the most part with a pleasant feeling of self-possession. The vigilance tends to pass for a continuous action of Will: but it is not an act; it is not a volition.

2. Wisdom is the cardinal constituent of the Summum Bonum. The other constituents are Generosity, Courage, Fortitude, and Circumstances that enable prudence and industry to exclude pain. Confining our view to nature, excluding the supernatural and the aspirations which it evokes,-we can soberly imagine no human condition transcending as to dignity and happiness that of a society of perfectly wise men so equipped and circumstanced. Wisdom, Magnanimity, Health, and Beauty, constitute the perfect man, and the condition of a society of perfect men so prosperously circumstanced as to be able to exclude pain is the Summum Bonum. Though this happiness were unattainable, it is of the first importance that it be well considered, that it be regarded as determining a direction in respect of which every advance is an enhancement of human nature, and every recession a victory of the Infernal in Nature. For it is necessary that the dignity of the humility of Wisdom be cordially known in order that Fierceness shall cease to make us enemies one of another: so long as fierceness, under the form of indignation, seems morally beautiful, so long we yield the devil the inch that enables him to take the ell. Consider the perfect man as member of an unwise society. Charity makes him invulnerable to insult and injury,—as unreachable by the missiles of wickedness as Jove by those of the Titans. He under

stands that in the intercourse of strength with infirmity, strength owes all the submissive accommodation needful, without injustice to self or injury to public welfare, for the preservation of harmony and peace. In so far as his neighbours are qualified by moral goodness for companionship with the perfect, he is companionable to them, but otherwise his relation to them is that of the good physician to the insane patient. What good the circumstances commission him to do them he does with all his heart; what surgery they demand he executes with a hand made firm by charity as well as courage. Parents, brothers, sisters, children, friends, he loves abundantly. Beauty, humour, wit, delight him. He rejoices in the possession and increase of Knowledge. I refer to these things because the militant and hospital work of Christianity have begotten a belief that the mood of this work is essential to Wisdom,-that Wisdom prohibits Pleasure. "Man's inhumanity to man" is the alternative of Wisdom. Our propensities and circumstances make it the interest of every man to prey upon his neighbour. As though, like the Siamese twins, we were organically tied to one another, we are held by certain propensities in a vicinity and intercourse that enables us to envenom each other's life. It has been well said that War is the natural state of man; the war to which Hobbes referred, that of tribe upon tribe, of nation against nation, may be said to be almost innocuous compared with the unremitting war of neighbour upon neighbour. The predatory scheme to which all life conforms shows rife in the nature and history of man. Devoid of Wisdom the species preys upon itself, is self-torturing, and incapable of its own distress. Philosophers have undertaken to make

men wise by exhibiting to prudence the advantage which the race would derive from wisdom, and by showing the pulchro-moral faculty the beauty of wisdom. But there exists no prudential faculty that is concerned about the advantage of the race, and in the bulk of men occasions of self-denial put the pulchro-moral faculty in abeyance. It is strong as censor of the conduct of others and as an ally of self-love, but barren of selfdenying motive. Prudence is concerned about the advantage of its subject, not about that of the race. What should the prudence of Tom, Dick, or Harry reply to a challenge to incur life-long pain for the sake of a possible resulting happiness to the race, to ensue in two or three thousand years if the race last so long? For aught that experience and inference make known, there may be an impassable gulf between man and wisdom; for aught they make known, resources in the womb of nature of which she has never yet given a hint might impart to the next or any future generation native conditions of a perfect wisdom needing for its development no more experience than that of childhood; but, limiting our view to probability discernible by legitimate induction, human nature affords no means for the acquisition of wisdom, if those of which Christ availed be inefficient.

ent.

3. The idea of goodness for God's sake is inconsistBad men who are godly may behave for God's sake as though they were good, but the behaviour evinces godliness, not goodness. One who conducts himself perfectly for God's sake resembles a beautiful statue in clay. But it is probable that the good behaviour for God's sake possesses a transmuting virtue capable of converting the atoms of the clay into atoms

of Parian marble. a transmutation will be accomplished in man;—the tissue of godliness, by a kind of Talicotian transfer, will be converted into the tissue of Wisdom.

If Christ's enterprise succeed, such

4. If the reader have experienced the Christian spirit it should be obvious to him that, apart from the worship and the mysticism, Wisdom and the Christian Spirit are identical. Wisdom is the Christian Spirit self-apprehended as a plain, homely, sober part of Nature,―a type disappointing to hearts accustomed to the exaltations and intensities of supernaturalism. Can it survive godliness? Science is washing away from its roots the soil of godliness: can it survive? Experience warrants hope and faith that it can. But is there any soil in which the seed of Wisdom could have germinated save that in which Christ planted it—the soil of godliness? Sanctity-the quality in virtue of which sacredness is a paramount power-is essential to Wisdom. Could the other conditions of sanctity have found their complement in a sacredness that does not depend on actual moral worth-the sacredness of mere humanity, if Reverence had not first climbed toward Heaven upon a symbol of the sacredness of a Creator and Providence? Surely not. People of interior life know that companionable sympathy with those who grovel in the common spontaneity is incompatible with growth in Wisdom. I never go amongst men," says the author of the Imitation, "but I return less a man.” Unactuated by the devotion of godliness, who could incur the dreariness of the needful detachment? If conduct conformable to a dominant love of the neighbour, including painful abstinence from the satisfaction of what Nature gives as being righteous indignation,