fically is this mechanism contrived and applied, that it is for ever counteracting and neutralising the frustrative and hostile, whether arising in ourselves or from others. In short, it will be seen, that what is fitliest denominated a Special Providence, hems in and acts on every man from his birth, or earlier, on to his final exit ;-that this Providence is ever doing the best for every man, battering down the real hindrances that lie in his way, and beating off assailants. Put aside what man has done, and does in frustrating and traversing the divine plan, and not only would the constitution of the world be found in cunningest adaptation to the wants and requirements of the human race, but every man's position and social environment the best for him.

This much is clear then, Nature is not against man but for him. The constitution of the world is not chargeable with being in defect, or in antagonism towards him; or, in either, no farther than is necessary, and best adapted to make him MAN-to evoke, develope, strengthen, and mature all his distinctive powers and capabilities. This is not more shown in what is prepared for him, than in what is left to him, and required of him to do. The land is before him to go up and possess it; but he must have courage and energy, for there is jungle as well as prairie. If he would reap he must till and sow; if he would build he must quarry and hew; he must spin, and weave, and knit, and sew, if he would not revert to the primitive leaf and skin covering. But this MUST is not only beneficent; it opens up a limitless vista of progress and capability. Rightly understood and obeyed, it will carry him to all heights of achievement and realisation. It walls him off from wild Nature, and presses him onward to the possession of the whole realm of Civilization, with its so various and illimitable wealth.

And the law is not general merely, or is so general rather, that it embraces all particulars. The natural limitations are the best for the race; the specific (Providential) limitations, as well as facilities, are the best for every man. What God does for every man, is the very best that can be done for him, and His deep skill, and wondrous means and resources are in sleepless operation, controlling, neutralising, and transmuting even the hostile agency and influence of his fellow-men. The failure (where there is failure) is in the individual will; in declining the life-conflict which must be accepted by every man who would realise his true humanity, and not merely drift along on the moral level of the beast.

XI.-DUTY.

• Nevertheless, Evangelicalism had brought into palpable existence and operation in Milby Society, that idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for, beyond the mere satisfaction of self, which is to the moral life, what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life, No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or on an idea, without rising to a higher order of experience, a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses, and whatever might be the weaknesses of the ladies who pruned the luxuriance of their lace and ribbons, cut out garments for the poor, distributed tracts, quoted scripture, and defined the true gospel, they had learned this-that there was a divine work to be done in life, a rule of goodness higher than the opinion of their neighbours; and if a notion of a heaven in reserve for themselves was a little too prominent, yet the theory of fitness for that heaven consisted in purity of heart, in Christian-like compassion, in the subduing of selfish desires. They might give the name of piety to much that was only puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin; but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted; and colour-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of colour at all.Scenes of Clerical Life.

DID you ever reflect how almost all the evil there is in the world, comes of people preferring their own ease or pleasure to doing their duty! If you never did, cast the thing over in your mind now; it is more than worth the trouble. There is the family-and if things are not right in the family, they will never be right in the wider spheres of the parish, the town, or the commonwealth. Take a family then; what is the worst form of injury any one can suffer- that of parental neglectto be traced to? Clearly to a preference of personal ease or gratification to care for the well-being of the child. Were there such care-sustained by the industry, temperance, and frugality it implies---the children of the poorest would be in a very different state from that in which we now so often find them. They would have their trials and hardships, no doubt, but would these be morally more perilous than the temptations and dangers that beset the children of the rich? Few, capable of rightly estimating both, will be prepared to say that they would. As a matter of fact, all the worst-if not all the real evils--from which children suffer, are traceable to vice or indolence in the parents. Do they grow up ragged, dirty, wild; uneducated, untrained, uncared-for? Are they condemned to live in miserable hovels, to breathe impure air, to eat a scanty or unwholesome meal? Are they left to consort with vicious and corrupting companions, to acquire bad habits, to become a danger, a pest, a burden to society? In all such cases it will be found that the parents are either careless or vicious; that they have no adequate or constraining sense of duty; that self, in one form or other, predominates. Grant, that much parental incapacity is due to ignorance, what, in circumstances like ours, does ignorance imply? Clearly, this same fatal absence of a sense

of duty. Were that duly operative, parents would not allow themselves to remain ignorant. The means of knowledge, in this and all other relations, are ample, and brought, so to speak, to every one's door. But, perhaps, the very fact, that they sustain the parental relation, is due to an unlicensed indulgence of animal appetite. In such cases, now so numerous, the very foundation of the family institution is destroyed. And why? Because low gratification overbears the sense of duty; yea, the very sense of self-respect, which even a pure instinct of humanity inspires. Whatever most afflicts us, disgraces us, mars our civilization, neutralises and transmutes its blessings, is traceable to the want of a sense of duty ;— the social evil in all its forms, drunkenness, extravagance, bankruptcy. Wherever we find an evil from which society suffers, there, at its root, do we find gratification first-duty postponed, or nowhere.

Do we look at wider social relations, at the neglect or oppression of the poor by the rich, at the preference of splendid mansions, gay equipages, luxurious establishments to expenditure for improving the homes of the people, and, in general, for ameliorating their condition? Do we look at the dissipation by landlords-in luxury, in gambling, in the various fashionable forms of pleasure-of the revenues derived from the land, whilst no suitable house accommodation is provided for the labourers, and they are left to find it where they may or to consort as beasts? It is ever the same cause, the sense of duty is in abeyance, and the craving for gratification predominant.

We need no deep research-no process of abstruse reasoning to conduct us to this conclusion. The fact is so simple, direct, and obvious, that, but for its striking relation to modern social theories, it would not be worth while formally to set it forth. But, in view of Buckleanism, which makes knowledge the grand regenerator of Society-in view of Utilitarianism, which makes pleasure the one end of life-this great pervasive principle has a deep and telling significance. That our social evils are clearly traceable to the absence of a proper sense of duty-are every day becoming more and more so-is surely a fact adapted to reveal pretty clearly what those theories are worth.

Is Knowledge the appropriate and sure corrector of those evils? Then they should now be disappearing at a rapid rate indeed. The increase and diffusion of knowledge are altogether unprecedented, yet our social evils, instead of yielding to this power have rather grown along with its growth. This coincidence nowise warrants the conclusion that they are caused by knowledge, but it does show that knowledge is not alone necessary in order to their cure. In order to that, we need something adequate to induce right action. People require, not merely to know truth-not merely to know what is right, they must feel it obligatory to do what is right. The sense of duty must be paramount. It must regulate the pursuit of gratification. The love of ease and pleasure must be combated, and nothing less than a sense of duty will nerve to the combat.

E

The idea of a life of warfare, of struggle, of self-denial is not, prima facie, welcome to any one, yet that such is the normal type of this actual human life of ours, is true notwithstanding. In no age or country has man been allowed practically to forget that it is so. Conflict may have been degraded; have been transferred from the soul to the intellect and from the spirit to the body. In times of civilization and culture we have it in the form of party and polemical warfare. In barbaric times, in literal, deadly, fighting, carried on as the great business, if not the highest end of life. Still in this inextinguishable spirit of combativeness-through all its phases, down even to its most brutalized debasements--we have a great testimony. A testimony to the deepest moral fact and requirement of our nature-a testimony to the fact that conflict is a necessity of this present mortal life of man. Not a necessity alone. Conflict is noble, when of the right kind; and through it only can a title to true nobility be earned. In the light of this, much is cleared up, else difficult to account for. We can see how war has been deemed noble through all ages of the world's history; how the Homeric combats-little above the level of those of wild beasts-could be invested in such a noble vehicle of poetry. In all this there is the great, deep, inextinguishable testimony, that man's life has a higher object than mere pleasure or enjoyment. To find man's feelings and his imagination so much higher than his deeds—to find that, unless where sunk to the most debased condition, never have those come down to the level of these-is not this a decisive testimony to the grandeur of his destiny? Even when arraying bloody war in all the glories of imagination, what does this hiding the horror of its ghastly details, suggest -what, but that a higher warfare is proper to man. If there had not been a "good fight" to be fought, the bad could never have been made to stir such a sense of the grand and noble in any human soul.

A great moral warfare is legitimate, is urgent, therefore is it possible to present warfare with the sword as noble ? That warfare is first of all inward-with our natural love of ease, and self-gratification. Only through the spiritual conflict-conflict of the spirit with the evil tendencies of selfcan there be the right training for waging war with the evil that has to be combated and beat down in the world. Clearly no otherwise; for it is with the injustice and the cruelty which spring from human indolence and selfishness, that the "good" warfare has to be waged. But we will never combat these, either in the right spirit or with the right weapons, until the causes whence they spring are dried up in our own bosoms. Then we are prepared to war, not with the persons of our fellow-men-not primarily, with their opinions-but with the sin that is in them, and the evil that they do. For this, Christianity, and it alone, trains, equips, and arms. And, in a subordination of our love of ease and pleasure, to the demands of Duty, this training must begin. A practical sense of duty is its primary, indispensible requirement.

Yes; in the dawn-in the ascendancy of the sense of duty, as the ruling

force in the mind, is found the beginning of the TRUE AND PROPER LIFE OF A MAN. Failure here, is failure in the very end and purpose of our being. A sense of duty is the first mark that differentiates the ELECT from the REPROBATE. The stones of the spiritual edifice are LIVING STONES, and all who fail to be so alive, must

"Be cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete."

A sense of duty, duly obeyed and honoured, will make service a delight, will conduct at length to that mount of beatitude, where—

"Serene will be our days, and bright,

And happy will our nature be;
With love as an unerring light,

And joy its own security."

XII.-IS THE NEW TESTAMENT MORALITY PRACTICABLE.

By many lines of inquiry we have been conducted to the conclusion-that, granting to all other agencies and influences their due value, it is only by the acceptance and observance of the Christian Morality in our individual and social life, that our social evils can be cured, and a state of permanent and all-pervasive social health established. But we have here to confront a difficulty-to meet an objection-with which we have not had hitherto to grapple.

A theory is zealously propagated by some, who, in these days, claim to be our advanced thinkers, to the effect, that the standard of life, as laid down in the New Testament, is a lofty ideal, but only an ideal, not fit to be put in practice.* That the renunciation by the Apostles of "worldly ambitions and interests, and the indifference they inculcated, to human needs, etc., arose from the impression which had become deeply fixed in their minds— that the end of the world was at hand." That, grounding thus on a misapprehension and mistake, it is inapplicable to ordinary human life, and incompatible with the requirements of society, in a world which abides and anticipates an indefinite futurity. The notion that to act on Christian motives, and live up to the Christian standard, is obligatory, lies, we are told, at the root of that oscillating, indeterminate, and morally disastrous life of compromise which so many professed Christians lead,—“ living confusedly in two worlds-fluctuating distractedly between Cæsar and God -their body and limbs, business and pleasures under the same law of a * Ethics of Christendom, Westminster Review, January, 1852. Kingsley's Novels and Poems, National Review, January, 1855.