ward? Because he is a martyr to truth, because he pursues his own ideas of truth fearlessly in spite of all difficulties. This standard gives a wide field of sympathy, and as if truth itself were nothing, and the search after it the only reality, that process of restlessness and difficulty which any inquirer, be he what he may, goes through, is made an ultimate virtue. Superseding all other considerations whatever, the simple exertion of the intellectual powers is beatified and glorified as such, and canonises the man.

We are unable to see, for our part, on what such a view as this, when pushed to its legitimate basis, can rest but the assertion of this principle, viz., that the intellectual part of human nature is no department of human probation. Every one allows that man is tempted, and is capable of sinning through the flesh; but it seems there are some who deny that he is capable of sinning through the intellect. The idea of human trial and sin admitted, it stops according to this view with the outer and does not go on into the inner sphere. This is a question, of course, of simple moral perception and conscience. There have been, and are, very rude savage nations who do not seem to have perceived the fact of a probation even in the department of the flesh, and sensual acts that would excite the horror of any informed conscience seem literally not to have been regarded as wrong by them; they really do not appear to have seen the evil there was in them. As God's law enlightens the human conscience, however, this gross darkness disappears; it is perceived that the flesh is capable of sin, and the awful distinction of good and evil comes to light, and is established at any rate in this lower and more palpable region. This is the first, and it is a mighty step in the progress of morality; but the moral perception wants still further enlightenment to meet the more profound and subtle departments of our being as they unroll, and a powerful intellectual nature residing underneath the solid body, conversing with abstractions, penetrating depths, and having a world and empire of its own, has still to be dealt with. Here also sin enters. The intellect appears in some ancient philosophies as a sort of metaphysical fluid, and its existence is realised by

materialising it. We may realise its full substantial liability to sin without any such supposition; no reason is to be alleged why a simple spiritual nature may not sin as really as a corporeal; the distinction is altogether irrelevant to the subject. As a further stage of enlightenment then comes on it is perceived that the intellect is capable of sin as really as the flesh is, and its spirituality no longer preserves it from suspicion; evil is seen in its operations-in neither, of course, it being the intellect itself or the flesh itself that sins, but the personality of man that sins, in the one case through the intellect, in the other through the flesh.

The Gospel dispensation has mainly introduced this deeper, larger, and more searching morality. It conducts man to a more ample development of his moral nature than he ever enjoyed before. The Church watches anxiously over the department of the human intellect, and cautions man against his dangers there. She tells him, You may not see so clearly sin here as you do in the bodily instance; it is not so palpable as ocular tangible sin is, but it is as real. Look into yourself; do you not feel an excitement, a stimulus, a pungency in pursuing an intellectual process? does not a particular movement, accompanied with pleasure, carry you along? Examine this, and see if it has not the same substantial liability to sin that an operation of animal nature has. Is not this movement, whatever it is, a something which may become sin, just as a movement of the sensual appetite may? Even the sensual movement is not itself sin, it only may become such; it has an inherent tendency to do so. Has not this intellectual movement the same? Reflect how you think, and how you are internally influenced while you are thinking and following out a speculation. As you go along do you not, independently of their bare truth, or supposed truth, acquire a partiality to your thoughts because you think them? And does not this partiality act very deeply? Will not this deep subtle pleasure in your own ideas tempt you to prefer them to truth if truth comes in their way, and so, denying truth, to adopt a falsehood? If so, everything has taken place that takes place in a sin of sense; there is a sinful tendency, and that tendency has

reached a climax and an act. The process of pure speculation is capable of sin. So speaks the Church. The intellect, in her view, exhibits on inspection all the circumstances and phenomena as a field of sin that the flesh does-pleasurable sensation, stimulus, excitement; only having them invisibly, and not visibly. The conscience perceives, as an absolute internal fact, a sinful tendency in this department.

the undisciplined bodily appetite rushes into grossness, so the undisciplined intellect abandons itself to a lie the former issues in carnal sin, the latter in the sin of heresy.

It is nothing to the purpose here to say that we are not agreed as to what is truth. This argument makes no assertions - about truth itself, but about that part of the mind that investigates truth. That part, the intellectual part of the mind, is capable of sin. A large number of persons absolutely do not see any sinful tendency at all in its operations; they do not connect their ideas of sin with that department. The intellect, with them, has no more to do with sin than physical law has; and it seems as absurd to talk of it sinning as to talk of any air, or gas, or chemical solution sinning. They see in all its movements pure rational influence at work, and moving with the same simple propriety and extra-moral innocence with which a tree grows out of the earth or a planet performs its orbit.

Upon a view then, we say, that first extra-moralises the whole of intellectual nature, and then elevates and enthrones it, it may be quite logical to canonise the fearless speculator as such, but on no other supposition is it so. We say it in no spirit of caricature,-that state of misery, doubt, and inquietude which a certain intellectual course brings on, does not in itself prove any more moral a martyrdom than the martyrdom of emaciation and disease that accompanies a licentious life. If the intellect can sin, its excesses must produce mental misery, as the natural consequence of a violated nature, and the use of a morbid internal stimulus. Infidelity points to a ghastly and sepulchral crown, to a career of doubt, hollowness, and restlessness, as an heroic life, as so much pain gone through in the great cause of truth. It compares such a course with the calm

course of faith, as if it were comparing activity with torpor and sensibility with indifference. This may be quite true if the intellect is sinless. If it is not, then let such thinkers take care that they are not comparing disease with health, and attenuation with vigour; then let them be sure that they are not exposing themselves to another view of the case. True, the sceptical intellect has its crown, and has its martyrdom; it is the enemy of strength and health; it emaciates, it unnerves, it unstrings; it destroys the soul's balance; its serpentine stimulus, like the fiery liquors, becomes the more necessary the more it is taken, and it leaves the soul dry and anatomised. This is a martyrdom in a sense, and who would pray for it?

Amongst the ideas that have been abused, and that have been distorted, this one of the search after truth stands foremost. A splendid and majestic phrase has covered a process. that will not bear inspection. The notion of seeking after truth carries a front of austere impartiality, serene candour, and enlarged vision. The mind wants truth, and nothing else; not what it likes, or has fancied, or has conjectured, or pictured; but what is true; what is, as distinct from what is not. On that account, and on that account only, not as being amiable, or fair, or bright, but as being truth, she seeks it. The pure, colourless appetency of the philosophical mind simply reaches towards its object-the essential intelligence proceeds towards its goal. Truth, simple, glorious, denuded, attracts by the one fact of itself; and the devotion of candid inquiry addresses itself to that one fact.

Such is the simply intellectual passion for truth. The cold, unlovely material, however, throws the whole interest and charm connected with it into the search rather than into the discovery. "If God offered me with one hand truth, and in the other search after truth, I would choose the latter," says a German philosopher. The sentiment is bold and complete, and is just what many unconsciously feel. It cannot but be so. This whole philosophy of search does tend essentially to make truth nothing, the search everything. Truth is a tenuity, an exsiccation, a misty vacuum in the distance, while the human engine is working with all its powers, and mind occuM.E.-II.]

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pies the universal field, and is truth's investigator-truth and all Nothing appears but mind. The world of truth ceases to be objective, and is brought within the mind itself, and subjected to it.

Here is the point. The fact is that the love of truth in fallen man is a corrupted affection, just as natural love is. It betrays the selfish element. His mind annexes truth to itself, and not itself to truth. It considers truth as a kind of property; it wants the pride of making it its own; it treats it as an article of mental success; it does not reverence truth as an object, but appropriates it as a thing; it loves it as its own creation, and as the reflection of itself and its labours. The merchant sees himself in his capital, the parent in his child; every one has the image of himself in the shape of some issue from himself; and there is a philosophy which sees such an issue in truth, and makes it, in its sphere, the very embodiment of that of which truth divine is the extinction, the principle of self.

Not as the function of his own activities, the triumph of his own penetration, the offspring of his mind, not in the subterranean regions, where nature's fallen machinery and emulous exertion is at work, and the begrimed intellect labours in its own smoke and exults in its difficulties, does the disciple of Christ search for truth. He searches and he penetrates, but not in this way. Truth penetrates into him, rather than he into Truth; Truth finds him out, and not he It. He looks out for Its approach, waits for It, prepares himself for Its reception. He knows the signs of Its approach, and can tell Its features through the distance; he is alive to the slightest stir of the air, to a whisper, to a breath. But he looks on It all the while as something without himself, as something to advance and act upon him. The tender wax expects its impress, the air its motion. Upon all his activities sits an awful passiveness, and the mind adores with pure devotion an Object above itself. From the invisible realm above us a Form comes, too vast for our eyes' comprehension, majestically slow the heavenly clouded weight descends, and bears an impress with it. The soul awaits in stillness the awful contact and embrace; and