father with fear than love, were in reality
powers of evil; while above the Oriental
additions so often made to the pantheon
was to be superposed one ultimate divin-
ity, alone beneficent, and alone to be
adored.

see at least a reflection of his own virtue in the arch of heaven, and bathe his spirit in the mirage projected from the wellspring of its own love.

For such an instinct, for all the highest instincts of his heart, Marcus would no The hierarchy of an unseen universe doubt have found in Christianity a new must needs be a somewhat shadowy and and full satisfaction. The question, howarbitrary thing. And to those whose im-ever, whether he ought to have become a agination is already exercised on such matters a new scheme of the celestial powers may come with an acceptable sense of increasing insight into the deep things of God. But to one who, like Marcus, has learnt to believe that in such matters the truest wisdom is to recognize what we cannot know, in him a scheme like the Christian is apt to inspire incre dulity by its very promise of completeness, suspicion by the very nature of the evidence which is alleged in its support.

Christian is not worth serious discussion. In the then state of belief in the Roman world it would have been as impossible for a Roman emperor to become a Christian as it would be at the present day for a czar of Russia to become a Buddhist. Some Christian apologists complain that Marcus was not converted by the miracle of the "thundering legion.' They forget that though some obscure persons may have ascribed that happy occurrence to Christian prayers, the emperor was assured on much higher authority that he Neither the Stoic school in general, in- had performed the miracle himself. Mardeed, nor Marcus himself, were clear of cus, indeed, would assuredly not have all superstitious tendency. The early insisted on his own divinity. He would masters of the sect had pushed their doc- not have been deterred by any Stoic extrine of the solidarity of all things to the clusiveness from incorporating in his point of anticipating that the liver of a par- scheme of belief, already infiltrated with ticular bullock, itself selected from among Platonic thought, such elements as those its fellows by some mysterious fitness of apologists who start from St. Paul's things, might reasonably give an indica- speech at Athens would have urged him tion of the result of an impending battle. to introduce. But an acceptance of the When it was urged that on this principle new faith involved much more than this. everything might be expected to be indic- It involved tenets which might well seem ative of everything else, the Stoics an- to be a mere reversion to the world-old swered that so it was, but that only when superstitions and sorceries of barbarous such indications lay in the liver could we tribes. Such alleged phenomena as those understand them aright. When asked of possession, inspiration, healing by imhow we came to understand them when position of hands, luminous appearances, thus located, the Stoic doctors seem to modification and movement of material have made no sufficient reply. We need objects, formed, not, as some later apolonot suppose that Marcus participated in gists would have it, a mere accidental absurdities like these. He himself makes admixture, but an essential and loudly no assertion of this hazardous kind, ex- asserted element in the new religion. The cept only that remedies for his ailments apparition of its founder after death was "have been shown to him in dreams." its very raison d'être and triumphant And this is not insisted on in detail; it demonstration. The Christian advocate rather forms part of that habitual feeling may say, indeed, with reason that pheor impression which, if indeed it be super-nomena such as these, however suspicious stitious, is yet a superstition from which the associations which they might invoke, no devout mind, perhaps, was ever wholly however primitive the stratum of belief to free; namely, that he is the object of a special care and benevolence proceeding from some holy power. Such a feeling implies no belief either in merit or in privilege beyond that of other men; but just as the man who is strongly willing, though it be proved to him that his choice is determined by his antecedents, must yet feel assured that he can deflect its issue this way or that, even so a man, the habit of whose soul is worship, cannot but

which they might seem at first to degrade the disciple, should, nevertheless, have been examined afresh on their own evidence, and would have been found to be supported by a consensus of testimony which has since then overcome the world. Addressed to an age in which reason was supreme, such arguments might have carried convincing weight. But mankind had certainly not reached a point in the age of the Antonines, if, indeed, we

thou wilt love them if when they err thou bethink thee that they are to thee near akin." "Men exist for the sake of one another; teach them then, or bear with them." "When men blame thee, or hate thee, or revile thee, pass inward to their souls; see what they are. Thou wilt see that thou needst not trouble thyself as to what such men think of thee. And thou must be kindly affectioned to them; for by nature they are friends; and the gods too help and answer them in many ways." "Love men, and love them from the heart." "Earth loves the shower,' and 'sacred æther

have reached it yet, at which the recol- | upper and lower teeth." "It is peculiar to lections of barbarism were cast into so man to love even those who do wrong: and remote a background that the leaders of civilized thought could lightly reopen questions, the closing of which might seem to have marked a clear advance along the path of enlightenment. It is true, indeed, that the path of enlightenment is not a royal road, but a labyrinth; and that those who have marched too unhesitatingly in one direction have generally been obliged to retrace their steps, to unravel some forgotten clue, to explore some turning which they had already passed by. But the practical rulers of men must not take the paths which seem to point backwards until they hear in front of them the call of those who have chosen that less inviting way.

An emperor who had "learned from Diognetus not to give credit to what is said by miracle-workers and jugglers about incantations and the driving away of demons, and such things," might well feel that even to inquire into the Gospel stories would be a blasphemy against his philosophic creed. Even the heroism of Christian martyrdom left him cold. In words which have become proverbial as a wise man's mistake, he stigmatizes their Christian contempt of death as "sheer party spirit." And yet it is an old thought, but it is impossible not to recur to it once more- what might he not have learned from these despised sectaries! the melancholy emperor from Blandus and Potheina, smiling on the rack.

Of the Christian virtues, it was not faith which was lacking to him. His faith indeed was not that bastard faith of theologians, which is nothing more than a willingness to assent to historical propositions on insufficient evidence. But it was faith such as Christ demanded of his disciples, the steadfastness of the soul in clinging, spite of doubts, of difficulties, even of despair, to whatever she has known of best; the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest hypothesis. To Marcus the alternative of "gods or atoms of a universe ruled either by blind chance or by an intelligent Providence ever present and ever unsolved; but in action he ignored that dark possibility, and lived as a member of a sacred cosmos, and co-operator of ordering gods.

was

Again, it might seem unjust to say that he was wanting in love. No one has expressed with more conviction the interdependence and kinship of men.

"We are made to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the

loves; and the whole universe loves the mak-
universe: Even I, too, love as thou."
ing of that which is to be. I say then to the

And yet about the love of a John, a Paul, a Peter, there is the ring of a note which is missing here. Stoic love is but an injunction of reason and a means to virtue; Christian love is the open secret of the universe, and in itself the end of all. In all that wisdom can teach herein, Stoic and Christian are at one. They both know that if a man would save his life he must lose it; that the disappear. ance of all selfish aims or pleasures in the universal life is the only pathway to peace. All religions that are worth the name have felt the need of this inward change; the difference lies rather in the light under which they regard it. To the Stoic in the West, as to the Buddhist in the East, it presented itself as a renunciation which became a deliverance, a tranquillity which passed into an annihilation. The Christian, too, recognized in the renunciation of the world a deliverance from its evil. But his spirit in those early days was occupied less with what he was resigning than with what he gained; the love of Christ constrained him; he died to self to find, even here on earth, that he had passed not into nothingness, but into heaven. In his eyes the Stoic doctrine was not false, but partly rudimentary and partly needless. His only objection, if objection it could be called, to the Stoic manner of facing the reality of the universe was that the reality of the universe was so infinitely better than the Stoic supposed.

If then the Stoic love beside the Christian was "as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine," it was not only be cause the Stoic philosophy prescribed the curbing and checking of those natural emotions which Christianity at once guided and intensified by her new ideal. It was because the love of Christ which the Christian felt was not a laborious

duty, but a self-renewing, self-intensifying of spiritual progress? Or may we not
force; a feeling offered as to one who for- find that the conditions of the experiment
ever responded to it, as to one whose vary, as it were, as virtue passes through
triumphant immortality had brought his different temperatures; that our formula
disciples' immortality to light.
gives a positive result at one point, a neg-
ative at another, and becomes altogether
un meaning at a third?

So completely had the appearance of Jesus to the faithful after his apparent death altered in their eyes the aspect of the world. So decisive was the settlement of the old alternative, "Either Providence or atoms," which was effected by the firm conviction of a single spirit's beneficent return along that silent and shadowy way. So powerful a reinforcement to faith and love was afforded by the third of the Christian trinity of virtues - by the grace of hope.

But we are treading here on controverted ground. It is not only that this great prospect has not yet taken its place among admitted certainties; that the hope and resurrection of the dead are still called in question. Much more than this; the most advanced school of modern moralists tends rather to deny that "a sure and certain hope" in this matter is to be desired at all. Virtue, it is alleged, must needs lose her disinterestedness if the solution of the great problem were opened to her gaze.

Pour nous [says M. Renan, who draws this moral especially from the noble disinterestedness of Marcus himself], pour nous, on nous annoncerait un argument péremptoire en ce genre, que nous ferions comme Saint Louis, quand on lui parla de l'hostie miraculeuse; nous refuserions d'aller voir. Qu'avons nous besoin de ces preuves brutales, qui n'ont d'application que dans l'ordre grossier des faits, et qui gêneraient notre liberté ?

It will be allowed, in the first place, that for an indefinite time to come, and until the mass of mankind has advanced much higher above the savage level than is as yet the case, it will be premature to be too fastidious as to the beliefs which prompt them to virtue. The first object is to give them habits of self-restraint and well-doing, and we may be well content if their crude notions of an unseen power are such as to reinforce the somewhat obscure indications which life on earth at present affords that honesty and truth and mercy bring a real reward to men. But let us pass on to the extreme hypothesis, on which the repudiation of any spiritual help for man outside himself must ultimately rest. Let us suppose that man's impulses have become harmonized with his environment; that his tendency to anger has been minimized by long-standing gentleness; his tendency to covetousness by diffused well-being; his tendency to sensuality by the increased preponderance of his intellectual nature. How will the test of his disinterestedness operate then? Why, it will be no more possible then for a sane man to be delib erately wicked than it is possible now for a civilized man to be deliberately filthy in his personal habits. We do not wish

now that it were uncertain whether filth were unhealthy in order that we might be This seems a strong argument; and if the more meritorious in preferring to be it be accepted it is practically decisive of clean. And whether our remote descendthe question at issue, I do not say only ants have become convinced of the reality between Stoicism and Christianity, but of a future life or no, it will assuredly between all those systems which do not never occur to them that, without it, there seek, and those which do seek, a spiritual might be a question whether virtue was a communion for man external to his own remunerative object of pursuit. Lapses soul, a spiritual continuance external to from virtue there may still be in plenty; his own body. If a proof of a beneficent but inherited instinct will have made it Providence or of a future life be a thing inconceivable that a man should voluntato be deprecated, it will be indiscreet, or rily be what Marcus calls a "boil or imeven immoral, to inquire whether such a posthume upon the universe," an island proof has been, or can be, obtained. The of selfishness in the mid-sea of sympaworld must stand with Marcus; and therethetic joy. will be no extravagance in M. Renan's It is true indeed that in the present age, estimate of the Stoic morality as a sounder and more permanent system than that of Jesus himself.

But generalizations like this demand a close examination. Is the antithesis between interested and disinterested virtue a clear and fundamental one for all stages |

and for certain individuals, that choice of which M. Renan speaks has a terrible, a priceless reality. Many a living memory records some crisis when one who had rejected as unproved the traditional sanctions was forced to face the question whether his virtue had any sanction which

still could stand; some night when the | her as eternally rewarded in any other foundations of the soul's deep were broken up, and she asked herself why she still should cleave to the law of other men rather than to some kindlier monition of her own:

To be the conqueror in such a contest is the characteristic privilege of a time of transition like our own. But it is not the only, nor even the highest conceivable, form of virtue. It is an incident in the moral life of the individual; its possibility may be but an incident in the moral life of the race. It is but driving the either of the banquet-ball or of the cloisenemy off the ground on which we wish ter? There would be no need to test to build our temple; there may be far men by throwing an artificial uncertainty greater trials of strength, endurance, cour-round the operation of such laws as these; age, before we have raised its dome in it would be enough if they could desire what was offered to them; the ideal would become the probation.

From Fraser's Magazine.
CHARLES LAMB AND HIS FRIENDS.

not nerve himself to bear his awful charge for a month or for a year; he endured his cross through life, conscious that there was no escape from its burden and from its pains. There were premonitory symptoms, but both knew that Mary's insanity might return any day. When they trav elled she carried. a strait-waistcoat in her trunk, and a friend of the Lambs has related how on one occasion he met the brother and sister weeping bitterly and walking hand-in-hand across the fields to the old asylum. This was the lot Charles had to face, and once only did his courage fail at the prospect.

My heart is quite sunk [he writes to Colerelief. Mary will get better again, but her ridge] and I don't know where to look for constantly being liable to such relapses is dreadful; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner marked. I am completely shipwrecked. My head is quite bad. I almost wish that Mary were dead. Five years later Mary writes:

It has been sad and heavy times with us lately. When I am pretty well, his low spirits throw me back again; and when he begins to get a little cheerful, then I do the same kind office for him.

And again she says:

THERE are few authors of the present century whose names are dearer to the lover of literature than that of Charles Lamb. And our affection for his books extends to the writer. There are men who publish invaluable works which we esteem for their wisdom, their learning, their logic, or their accuracy, but while appreciating the books we care nothing for the authors. This indifference has its advantage, for it makes a reader impartial; it has its disadvantage also, for it prevents the sympathy of mind with mind, which makes a writer and reader friends for life. Lamb asks, in the first place, for this sympathy. We must know the man before we can appreciate his genius. Shy though he was in company, he is communicative as an essayist, and like Montaigne, though in a different way, takes the reader into his confidence. His life must be read in his letters and essays, and on these his literary reputation rests. Lamb failed as a dramatist, had but small success as a poet, and less as a story-teller. His genius, resembling in this respect his taste for literature, was confined within a narrow range. In that, however, he was supreme. He put his heart into " Elia," and it is no exaggeration to say that its pulsation may be felt there still. The tragedy of Charles Lamb's life is universally known. It exceeds in pathos even that of Cowper. At the age of twenty-two the young clerk in the India House, who had himself been temporarily insane, undertook the charge of an imbecile father, who happily did not long survive, and of a mad sister ten years older than himself. Mary Lamb, whom Hazlitt considered the most sensible woman he knew, was liable all her life long to fits of frenzy. After the fatal plored, that this terribly shy" and calamity of 1796 the elder brother John, sorely tried man should have sometimes who kept apart from the family troubles, sought to forget his sorrow by drinking. desired that Mary should be confined for It brought him companionship and temlife in an asylum. Charles, however, ob-porary oblivion. tained permission to be her guardian, and the two lived together in what Words-I have been laughing, I have been carousing, Drinking late, sitting late with my bosom worth finely calls dual loneliness, until cronies, death divided them thirty-five years afterwards. His sister, as John Forster ob- was a confession Lamb had to make in serves, was but another portion of himself. sober prose many a morning, and to make The noble constancy and unselfish affec with profound sadness. Procter says he tion of Charles Lamb, and the constant never knew him drink immoderately; but love he received from Mary in return, he was speedily affected, and wine, by supply a lesson as beautiful and touching removing his nervousness, gave for the as any contained in the history of heroic moment freedom to his genius. It is deeds. Charles, be it remembered, did stated, on the authority of Mr. Crossley, VOL. XXXVIII. 1966

LIVING AGE.

Do not say anything when you write of our low spirits—it will vex Charles. You would laugh or you would cry, perhaps both, to see us sit, together, looking at each other with long and rueful faces, and saying, How do you do? and How do you do? and then we fall a cry. He says we are like toothache and his friend ing and say we will be better on the morrow. gumboil, which, though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort.

It is less to be wondered at than de