it. For if we may judge from the past, it will be long ere another character of the same rare and saintly beauty shall again concur with a poetic gift and power of poetic expression, which, if not of the highest, are still of a very high order. Broader and bolder imagination, greater artistic faculty, many poets who were his contemporaries possessed. But in none of them did there burn a spiritual light so pure and heavenly, to transfigure these gifts from within. It is because "The Christian Year" has succeeded in conveying to the outer world some effluence of that character which his intimate friends loved and revered in Keble, that, as I believe, it will not cease to hold a quite peculiar place in the affections of posterity.

THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER.

WHY is Ethical Science, as pursued in this country, of late years, even to reflecting men, so little attractive and so little edifying? The cognate study of metaphysics has, after long neglect, recently, in a wonderful way, renewed its youth, but to moral science no such revival has as yet come. And yet human character, the subject it deals with, is one, it would seem, of no inconsiderable interest. Physical science has no doubt drained off the current of men's thoughts, and left many subjects which once engaged them high and dry. But man, his spiritual being, and the light which is to enlighten it, his possibilities here, his destiny hereafter, these still remain, amid all the absorption of external things, the one highest marvel, the permanent centre of interest to men. It cannot be said that modern literature the great exponent of what men are thinking circles less than of old round the great human problems. Rather with the circuit of the suns, not only have the thoughts of men widened, but also their moral consciousness, I will not say their heart, has deepened. Modern literature, as compared with that of last century, has nothing more distinctive in it than this, that it has broken into deeper ground of sentiment and reflection, ground which had hitherto lain fallow, non-existent, or unperceived. About the deeper soul secrets, literary men of last century either did not

greatly trouble themselves, or they practiced a very strict reserve. But our own and the preceding age has seen an unveiling of the most inward often of the most sacred feelings which has sometimes gone beyond the limits of manliness and self-respect. This bringing to light of layers of consciousness hitherto concealed, if at times carried too far, has certainly enriched our literature with new wealth of moral content. In the best modern poetry it has shown itself by greater intensity and spirituality; in the highest modern novels, by delicacy of analysis, discrimination of the finer tints of feeling, variety and fine shading of character hitherto unknown; in the modern essay, by a subtleness and penetrative force which make the most perfect papers of Addison seem almost trivial. It further manifests itself in the growing love and keener appreciation of the few great world poets, who are after all the finest embodiments of moral wisdom. It may be that so much ethical thought has been turned off into these channels that it has left less to be expended in the more systematic form of ethical science. It may be too, that, as the field of moral experience widens, and the meaning of life deepens, and its problems become more complex, it demands proportionably stronger and rarer powers to gather up all this wealth, and illumine it with the light of reason. Certain it is that the modern time produces no such masters of moral wisdom for our day, as Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius were to the old world, or even as Bishop Butler was to his generation. Wide, many-sided, sensitive, deep, complex, as is the moral life in which we now move, if we would seek any philosophic guidance through its intricacies, any thinking which is at once solid, clear, practical, and instinct with life, we must turn, not to any modern treatise, but to the pages of these by-gone worthies. What

help ardent spirits, looking for guidance in our day, have found, has been won not from the philosophers, but from some living poet, some giant of literature with no pretension to philosophy, or some inspired preacher. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Newman, Frederick Robertson, these, not the regular philosophers, have been the moral teachers of our generation, and to these young men have turned, to get from them what help they might. And now it seems that in these last days many, wearied out with straining after their impalpable. spiritualities, and baffled for lack of a consistent spiritual theory, have betaken themselves to a style of thinking which, if it promises less, offers, as they think, something more systematic and more certain. In despair of spiritual truth, they are fain to fill their hunger with the husks of a philosophy which would confine all men's thoughts within the phenomenal world, and deny all knowledge that goes beyond the co-existences and successions of phenomena.

From aberrations like this perhaps no moral philosophy would have delivered men. But it would be well if, warned by such signs, it were to return closer to life and fact, deal more with things which men really feel, if, leaving general sentiments and moral. theories, it would attempt some true diagnosis of the very complex facts of human nature, of the moral maladies from which men suffer, the burdens they need to have removed, the aspirations which they can practically live by. Instead of this, instead of dealing with the actual and the ideal, which co-exist in man, and out of which, if at all, a harmony of life is to be woven, philosophers have been content to repeat a meagre and conventional psychology, taken mostly from books, not fresh from living hearts; or they have lost themselves in the metaphysical problems which

no doubt everywhere underlie moral life, but which, pursued too exclusively, distract attention from the vital realities. These two causes have exhausted the strength and the interest of moral study either a cut-and-dried conventional psychology, or absorbing metaphysical discussion. The former, in which moral truths appeared shriveled up, like plants in a botanist's herbarium, is the style of thing you find in the most approved text-books of the last generation.

"Never before," as one has smartly said, "had human nature been so neatly dissected, so handily sorted, or so ornamentally packed up. The virtues and vices, the appetites, emotions, affections, and sentiments stood each in their appointed corner, and with their appropriate label, to wait in neat expectation for the season of the professorial lectures, and the literary world only delayed their acquiescence in a uniform creed of moral philosophy till they should have arranged to their satisfaction whether the appetites should be secreted in the cupboard or paraded on the chimney-piece; or whether certain of the less creditable packets ought in law and prudence, or ought not in charity, to be ticketed 'Poison.' Everything was as it should be, or was soon to be so differences were not too different, nor unanimity too unanimous opinion did not degenerate into certainty, nor interest into earnestness, moral philosophy stood apart, like a literary gentleman of easy circumstances, from religion and politics, and truth itself was grateful for patronage, instead of being clamorous for allegiance. Types were delicate, margins were large, publishers were attentive, the intellectual world said it was intellectual, and the public acquiesced in the assertion. What more could