itable poems, pictures, etc., should be pro- | it has revived the Hebrew awe of God and duced this is a very secondary matter- conviction of the mistake of imagining but that the largest possible number should him under the form of man, it has at the take those elevated views of life and have same time acquired an immense and perthat keen enjoyment of nature which are petually increasing knowledge of the laws ends in themselves, and which may at the through which he manifests himself in the same time encourage the artist, admonish universe. him to aim high, and insure his success. When one religion is set up against anIn other words, it is not so much culture other controversies begin and embarrassas religion that is wanted, not so much ments. But when the principle of all that the artist should be taken out of the religion is compared with the opposite community and trained, as that the percep- principle, when the life inspired by admitions and sensibilities of the community ration and devotion is compared with the itself should be quickened. And here life that begins and ends in mere acquisiculture, so far from being equivalent to tion, then there is no controversy at all religion, becomes too frequently antago- among those whose opinions are valuable. nistic to it. The differentiation of the Looked at so, religion is seen to be enartist class may prove unfavorable to the tirely beyond dispute and to be only anspirit of art. It may make art a thing of other name for the higher life, the life of schools and cliques, the affair of a profes- the soul. Again when on the scene of sion now become rich enough to judge history religion appears in some partial, itself and applaud itself, and tyrannizing one-sided form, it is easy to find fault with over a public of whose suffrages it has its workings, and, as it is a principle of become independent. Just so in the enormous vigor, it has been in such cases Christian Church in its first inspired and the instigator of more tremendous deeds victorious moment, the maxim was that and the cause of more wide-working ruin every Christian was a priest; it was not than any other principle. It has been easy till somewhat later that a sacerdotal order for philosophers preaching on the text was differentiated. The differentiation tantum religio potuit, etc., to make out was probably necessary, but who does not religion itself a mischievous principle and see the danger of this increase of machin- that it ought to be a main object to moderery? Who does not see now that the ate, if we cannot hope to kill, this unforonly hope for the Christian religion lies in tunate propensity in human nature. And moderating this professional influence? yet almost everything else that is highest Clericalism is well-nigh fatal to Christian-in man might be looked at in the same ity. Precisely the same law holds in the lower religion of art.. Goethe asks himself, "What drives poetry out of the world?" And he answers," The poets!" Such then, it seems to me, looked at in outline, is religion in its modern aspect. It is not forward to assume the name of religion, because of the ecclesiastical associations that have gathered round that name, but for the most part prefers the somewhat less appropriate name of culture. It is a natural religion, rejecting for the present everything called miraculous as inconsistent with the notion it has formed of the laws of nature; and it has suffered so much from the abuse of priestly power in former days that it dislikes and avoids, certainly more than is reasonable, everything that reminds it of Church organization. On the other hand it is larger and richer than the religion of past times. It is richer by the Renaissance in art and by science. From the buried ruins of the pagan world it has dug up a precious treasure, the worth of which early Christianity had not been able to perceive, and under the influence of science, while way. In the individual, for instance, what a dangerous, mischievous thing is genius or originality! What sleepless nights does it cause, what weariness of spirit! How it disconcerts society, interrupts the tranquil course of its vegetation, perplexes the methodical logomachy of parties! Or philanthropy again! What hindrances to trade has this restless principle caused, now putting down slavery, now passing factory-laws; and what flagrant mistakes has it made at times! And then there is the spirit of liberty. Why, it may safely be said that if only this spirit did not exist the art of government would be a comparatively simple matter, whereas it is an almost impossible problem to govern tolerably nations in which it has been allowed to become strong. Of all these intractable forces the greatest by far is religion. If only it could be destroyed! In that case we might picture the human family entering upon that happiness which has no history, beginning a career chequered by nothing that could be called incident, and varied only by the gradations of progress, a career the annals of which would con sist only of the ever-improving statistics | only to have acquired what comes latest, of production and enjoyment; in short, "feeding like horses when you hear them feed!" But indeed such a consummation would be only a kind of euthanasia of human nature. It is precisely these impulses and emotions that are so hard to control which give dignity and worth to life. It is for their sakes that we produce and consume. And so it is a more hopeful course to consider whether those sinister workings of the higher life may not be as happily prevented by giving it a full and harmonious development as by vainly trying to extinguish it. but also to retain and not to lose what came earlier. Humanity must constantly renew its childhood and its youth as well as advance in experience. At the same time that it observes and reasons with scientific rigor, it must learn to hope with Christian enthusiasm, and also to enjoy with pagan freshness. How different does paganism look when we contemplate it in the age of Pericles, or that of Scipio, when it began to be qui etly left behind, and, again, in the days of the final triumph of Christianity when it was aggressively destroyed. In the one case we see with contempt its childish absurdity; in the other we mark with some regret its freshness and brightness. In the great Athenian age a few artists still with studied conservatism cling to it; and we may indeed observe that when this is no longer possible the great imaginative poets come no more; but to the majority of intelligent men it has become a mass of absurdity no more credible than Brahminism to the young Bengal of to-day. With still more decisive contempt do the strong prosaic intellects of Rome put aside and utterly forget their old Italian religion. All this seems to us, when we read of it, neither to be avoided nor to be regretted; what was absurd could not but Such harmony, I think, is to be found, and is gradually being found, by the religion or culture of the age in the coalition of three forms of religion, which in past history have generally regarded each other as enemies. A form of religion which, when it appears by itself, does mischief, works ill, and so is justly attacked as false, may, when it finds its right place and proper subordination, turn out to be true and fruitful of good. Paganism was very justly attacked by the Christians as a false religion, but its falseness did not consist in the honor it paid to sensuous beauty, but in its paying honor to nothing higher (as well as to many things lower), and the very same worship of visible things, when it is revived in proper moderation by mod-appear to be so sooner or later. But ern culture, may be not merely harmless, but most right and valuable, most indispensable to the harmony of religion. The same may be said of ecclesiastical Christianity, and of that new religion of modern science, viz., that each by itself may be attacked as false, but that each, taken in conjunction with the other, is true and indispensable. These three forms of religion have a sort of correspondence to the three stages of human life. Paganism may be called the childhood of the higher life, and so when continued too long, and not duly subordinated, it is the childishness and frivolity of it. Christianity (in the narrow sense) is its youth, its phase of enthusiasm and unbounded faith both in man and the universe; this, too, if it stands too much alone, becomes degraded into sentimentalism. Science is the later phase, when reality is firmly faced, when the sombre greatness of the law under which we live, and at the same time the limitations it imposes on us, and the patience it requires from us, are manfully confessed; but this also taken alone is no more than the cynical old age of the higher life. For it is essential to its complete manhood not when, after many centuries, the revolution has gone much further; when the Church has rooted out of the minds of the common people what then only dropped quietly out of the belief of philosophers; when the temples of the gods are thrown down and their names held abominable; when a completely new page of history begins, and all such ways of thinking are decisively left behind, some sort of revulsion takes place in our feelings. The new world appears too monastic, too much tormented with conscience, not spontaneous or natural enough. We delight to see the old pagan fire break out sometimes in Caedmon, and are inclined to wish it had free way, and that there were no Christianity near to smother it. How much we prize what glimpses we can get of those old beliefs; how much it disappoints us when the writings of those times are silent about them, and give us instead only Christianity and monotonous lives of saints! In some cases we are disposed to complain even that the native genius of a nation has been killed by the foreign faith when we find a literature, after perhaps a promising commencement, paralyzed for long ages by ecclesiastical influence. Then it is that we see the other side of paganism, and what before appeared childish we are now disposed rather to describe as childlike. We are struck now by the free zest and relish of the world that went to the making of those frivolous creeds; here and there perhaps we see in them the rudiments of a true philosophy. We are angry that this vigorous play of mind should be brought to an end, and that not by a truer philosophy of nature, but by a timid morality which looks only within, and is afraid to philosophize on nature at all. In fact, we have just the same feelings as when in an individual we see childhood come to an end, and the merry, boisterous boy turned into the awkward, perhaps self-conscious and sickly youth. having gained something unknown both to Nothing can be more mistaken than the Hence the reaction which steadily and more or less secretly has for so many centuries gone on under the name of Renaissance. It is analogous to the growth in cheerfulness and healthy worldliness which comes to the youth as he grows accus-ity (in the narrow sense) and youth. tomed to manhood. The hobbledehoyhood of humanity was long and trying. Its pagan childhood was artificially prolonged till it was more like dotage than childhood, and when the new feelings of self-sacrifice, duty, enthusiasm came, instead of quietly controlling and modifying the old, they began a violent war against them. One extreme was substituted for another - for the pagan view of life, not properly the Christian, but the monastic. The renunciation of selfishness was violent in proportion to the intensity with which it had been indulged; the world was hated as much as it had been loved; the extremes of self-devotion were explored with the eagerness natural to a first discovery. These excesses are outlived in time, and youth ripens into manhood by recovering something of the child. And thus the Renaissance is not merely the revival of ancient arts, the adoption of ancient models, it is the revival in proper degree and subordination of the ancient religion. It is the restoration of the worship of the forms of nature. This worship returns, purified, of course, from all mixture of delusion, purified from superstition, and, what is still more important, subordinated duly to other worships infinitely higher and more solemn, but none the less a worship, an admiration which may become unbounded in degree and rise to ecstasy, and which is essential to the healthy vigor of the higher life. But manhood differs from youth, not merely in having recovered something which youth had parted with, but also in VOL. XV. 731 LIVING AGE. 'The opposite maxim has to be learned in time, that some things are impossible, and to master this is to enter upon the manhood of the higher life. But it ought not to be mastered as a mere depressing negation, but rather as a new religion. The law that is independent of us and that conditions all our actions is not to be reluctantly acknowledged, but studied with absorbing delight and awe. At the moment when our own self-consciousness is liveliest, when our own beliefs, hopes, and purposes are most precious to us, we are to acknowledge that the universe is greater than ourselves, and that our wills are weak compared with the law that governs it, and our purposes futile except so far as they are in agreement with that law. This assuredly is the transition which the world is now making. It is throwing off at once the melancholy and the unmeasured imaginations of youth; it is recovering, as manhood does, something of the glee of childhood, and adding to that a new sense of reality. Its return to childhood is called Renaissance, its acquisition of the sense of reality is called science. We may be glad of both; science will save us from those heroic mistakes of which the Catholic centuries were so fruitful, from unworldliness ending on the one hand in squalor and pestilence, on the other in greedy mendicancy, from pity creating pauperism, and chastity by reaction promoting vice. Renaissance will redeem the lower levels of life from the bald barrenness of money-getting, and give humanity the fond gaillard that may carry her through the trials in store for her. We may take sides firmly with the modern world against the Syllabus, against all unfortunate attempts to preserve a justly cherished ideal by denying and repudiating reality, to protect against all subsequent modification the first sublime exaggerations of the new-born spirit of self-sacrifice, to banish criticism because it is cold, and philosophy because it is calm, and to try and give the feelings of youth the one thing precisely which is most foreign to them-infallibility and unchanging permanence. ties cease to seem admirable, and the man begins to be praised for the opposite qualities, for ardor, for enthusiasm, in short for being still capable of that of which youth is only too capable. But in the individual we regard this persistent vitality as only possible for a time. Old age sets in at last, when, if enthusiasm still survive, it is not so much a merit as a kind of prodigy. Is humanity to verify the analogy in this respect also? When we have learnt to recognize the limitations imposed on us, that we cannot have everything as our enthusiasm would make it, and that if our ideals are to be realized in any considerable measure it must be by taking honest account of the conditions of possibility; when we have gone so far, are we to advance another step and confess that the conditions of possibility are so rigorous that most of our ideals must be given up, and that in fact humanity has little to hope or to wish for? It need not be so if, as was said above, the service of necessity may become freedom instead of bondage, if the power above us which so often checks our impatience and pours contempt on our enthusiasms can be conceived as not necessarily giving less than we hope for because it does not give precisely what we hope for, but perhaps even as giving infinitely more. On this hypothesis humanity may preserve the vigor of its manhood. Otherwise, if reality, when we acquire the power of distinguishing it, turns out not merely different from what we expect but much below what we expect; if this universe, so vast and glorious in itself, proves in relation to the satisfaction of our desires narrow and ill-furnished, if it disappoints not only our particular wishes but the very faculty of wishing by furnishing no sufficient food, then humanity also Nevertheless, the analogy that we have has its necessary old age. And if its old been pursuing will suggest to us that the age, then surely that which lies beyond victory of the modern spirit would be fatal old age. We must not merely give up the if pressed too far, as indeed it is essential- immortality of the individual soul—which ly a melancholy triumph, and that the some have persuaded themselves they can youth of humanity, crushed out too ruth-afford to give up-but we must learn to lessly, would have a Renaissance still more think of humanity itself as mortal. irresistible than its childhood. The sense From The Cornhill Magazine. of reality gives new force when it comes THE BERESFORDS. had nearly attained the age of twelve at the necessary for her little girl, and sighed to time when this history begins. They had think how much less was possible when both got footing on that plateau of middle there were six or seven little girls to think age which, if it comes to something like of. The child, however, was not so overlevel ground at thirty, need not think of educated and overcared for as might have a descending step for twenty years the been fancied; for the parents were young, time of the greatest enjoyments and most as I have said, very fond of each other, solid progress of life. He was at one end and fond of their own way; which attachand she at the other of the first decade; ments did not consist with the burden of the one approaching the forties, the other dragging a small child with them wherscarcely well out of the twenties; both ever they went. The Beresfords liked to ready to laugh at the advance of years go about "honeymooning," as their which was as yet but a joke to them, and friends called it, and as they themselves neither having thought of bidding any grave were not displeased to call it, by themfarewell to youth. She was impulsive, en- selves, over the world. They would start thusiastic, and nervous; he philosophical sometimes quite suddenly, to the Riviera and speculative, a man ready to discuss in the middle of winter to escape London. any theory in earth or heaven, and with- fogs and wintry chills; to Paris at Easter; out any prejudices such as might make to Scotland in the autumn; even to Norone subject of discussion appear less way sometimes, or such difficult places : legitimate than another. They were not and it stood to reason that they could not very rich, but neither were they poor in take the child with them when they startany sense of the word. He had been ed quite suddenly on these delightful called to the Bar, but had never gone any journeys. For these journeys were defurther in that career. They had enough lightful. They were well enough off not between them to live on without show, to require to count the cost; they went but without pinching, as so many people of quietly social, semi-literary tastes do in London. They knew a number of people. They saw all the pictures, read all the books, and heard all the music that was going; not absorbed in any art, but with just enough devotion to all to make their life full and pleasant. And there could scarcely be a pleasanter life. The fantasies of youth, but not the sentiments of youth, had ended for both. Mr. Beresford had some mildly scientific pursuits, was a member of some learned societies, and of one or two new and advanced clubs where clever men were supposed to abound. Occasionally in his comfortable library he wrote an article for a review or magazine, which was very much talked about, by his friends, to the great_edification and amusement of people who live by writing articles and say nothing about them. This gave him an agreeable sense of duty to add seriousness to his life; and he was never without occupation-meetings of committees, scraps of And they were wonderfully free of semi-public business, educational and other relations who might have hampered other projects, which, for the moment at them. Mrs. Beresford had been an orphan least, seemed full of interest to the world, from her childhood, brought up by her made him feel himself a not unimpor- grandmother, who in the course of nature tant, certainly not a useless, man. Mrs. was dead too; and Mr. Beresford's only Beresford, on her side, had the natural two relations were a wealthy aunt, Charity occupation of her housekeeping, and her child, whose education gave her much thought so much thought that many people with full nurseries listened with a certain awe to her ideas of all that was lightly, with little luggage and no servants; Beresford, who lived in a pretty house in the country, within driving-distance of London, and with whom lived his eldest sister, Cherry Beresford, named after her aunt, and living in considerable subjuga |