Thackeray the ugliness of hypocrisy and the beauty of forgiveness, in George Eliot the supremacy of duty, in Dickens the divinity of kindness, and in Ruskin the dignity of service. Irving teaches me the lesson of simple-hearted cheerfulness; Hawthorne shows me the secret life of goodness surviving the dreadful power of evil in the soul of man; Longfellow gives me the soft music of tranquil hope and earnest endeavor; Lowell makes me feel that we must give ourselves to our fellow-men if we would bless them; and Whittier sings to me of human brotherhood and divine Fatherhood. Are not these Christian lessons?

I do not ask my novelist to define and discuss his doctrinal position or to tell me what religious denomination he belongs to. I ask him to tell me a story of life as it is, seen from the point of view of one who has caught from Christianity a conception of life as it ought to be. I do not ask him even to deal out poetic justice to all his characters and shut the prison doors on the bad people while he rings the wedding bells for the good. I ask him only to show me good as good and evil as evil; to quicken my love for those who do their best and deepen my scorn for those who do their worst; to give me a warmer sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men who are sincere and loyal and kind; to strengthen my faith that life is worth living even while he helps me to realize how hard it is to live well; to leave me my optimism, but not to leave it stone-blind; not to depress me with cheap cynicism, nor to lull me with spurious sentimentalism, but to nourish and confirm my heart with Sir Walter Scott's manly faith that "to every duty performed there is attached an inward satisfaction which deepens with the difficulty of the task and is its best reward."

The use of fiction either to defend or to attack some definite theological dogma seems to me illegitimate and absurd. I remember a devout and earnest brother who begged me to write a story to prove that Presbyterians never held the doctrine of infant damnation. I would as soon write a story to prove the binomial theorem. But that fiction may serve a noble purpose in renewing our attraction to virtue, in sharpening our abhorrence of selfishness and falsehood, in adding to the good report of the things that are pure and lovely, in showing that heroism is something better

than eccentricity tinged with vice, and, at its deepest, in making us feel anew our own need of a divine forgiveness for our faults and a divine Master to control our lives-this is true beyond a doubt; for precisely this is what our best fiction, from Waverly down to The Bonnie Brier Bush and Sentimental Tommy, has been doing. Name half a dozen of the great English novels at randomHenry Esmond, David Copperfield, The Cloister and the Hearth, Lorna Doone, Romola, The Scarlet Letter-and who shall dare to deny that there is in these books an atmosphere which breathes of the vital truths and the brightest ideals of Christianity?

It must be admitted that there is a great mass of printed books, fearfully current at present, of which this cannot be said. Some of them breathe of patchouli and musk, some of stale beer and cigarettes, some of the gutter and the pesthouse; many do not breathe at all. The presses of England and America are turning out for every day in the year about six new works of fictionmost of them works of affliction! It is a deplorable waste of time. and labor, to say nothing of brains. But I do not see in it any great or pressing danger. The chemists tell us that the paper on which these books are printed will not last twenty years. It will not need to last so long, for the vast majority of the books will be forgotten before their leaves disintegrate. Superficial, feeble, fatuous, inane, they pass into oblivion; and the literature which emerges and abides is that which recognizes the moral conflict as the supreme interest of life and the message of Christianity as the only real promise of victory.

There are three mischievous and perilous tendencies in our modern world against which the spirit of Christianity, embodied in a sane and virile and lovable literature, can do much to guard us: The first is the growing idolatry of military glory and conquest. It is one thing to admit that there are certain causes for which a Christian may lawfully take the sword. It is another thing to claim, as some do, that war in itself is better for a nation than peace, and to look chiefly to mighty armaments on land and sea as the great instruments for the spread of civilization and Christianity. The forerunner of Christ was not Samson, but John the Baptist. The kingdom of heaven cometh not with observa

tion, nor with acquisition, nor with subjugation. If all the territory of the globe were subject to one conquering emperor to-day, no matter though the cross were blazoned on his banner and his throne, the kingdom of heaven would be no whit nearer. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord." That is the message of Christianity. A literature that is Christian must exalt love not only as the greatest, but as the strongest thing in the world. It must hold fast the truth bravely spoken by one of America's foremost soldiers, General Sherman, that "war is hell." It must check and reprove the lust of conquest and the confidence of brute force. It must repeat Wordsworth's fine message, "By the soul only the nation shall be great and free." It must firmly vindicate and commend righteousness and fair dealing and kindness and the simple proclamation of the truth as the means by which alone a better age can be brought nigh and all the tribes of earth taught to dwell together in peace. The second perilous tendency is the growing idolatry of wealth. Money is condensed power, but it is condensed in a form which renders it frightfully apt to canker and corrupt. A noble literature, truly in harmony with the spirit of Christ, will reiterate in a hundred forms of beauty and power his teaching that "a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." It will expose with splendid scorn and ridicule the falsehood of the standard by which the world and too often the Church measure what a man is worth-his wealth. It will praise and glorify simple manhood and womanhood, "plain living and high thinking." It will teach that true success is the triumph of character, and that true riches are of the heart. The third perilous tendency is the growing spirit of frivolity. A brilliant British essayist in his life of Robert Browning has just said that the nineteenth century has already become incomprehensible to us because it took life so seriously. This was probably not intended as a compliment, but if the nineteenth century could hear the criticism it would have good reason to feel flattered. An age that does not take life seriously will get little out of it.

One of the greatest

services that Christianity can render to current literature is to inspire it with a nobler ambition and lift it to a higher level. I

remember an old woodsman in the Adirondack forest who used to say that he wanted to go to the top of a certain mountain as often as his legs would carry him because it gave him such a feeling of "heaven-up-histedness." That is an uncouth, humble, eloquent phrase to describe the function of a great literature.

Unless above himself he can

Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!

I want the books that help me out of the vacancy and despair of a frivolous mind, out of the tangle and confusion of a society that is buried in bric-a-brac, out of the meanness of unfeeling mockery and the heaviness of incessant mirth, into a loftier and serener region, where through the clear air of serious thoughts I can learn to look soberly and bravely upon the mingled misery and splendor of human existence, and then go down with a cheerful courage to play a man's part in the life which Christ has forever ennobled by his divine presence.

Hemy randyke

57

ART. III.-THE SOUL OF HABAKKUK.

THE second quarter of the last thousand years before Christ brought to the staid Semitic peoples and the tribes of Asia Minor the experiences of the Roman empire during the last centuries of its own existence. Aryan peoples, pressed by the terrible Mongol hordes behind them, were steadily pressing southward into the mountainous regions east of the Tigris, some settling there and strengthening and unifying the somewhat decadent and enervated Mongol tribes that had dwelt there for centuries. Other Aryan bands swept westward into Asia Minor, while occasionally the Mongol raiders in the rear burst through the cordon of petty buffer states, and carried devastation and ruin into Asia Minor or into Palestine to the border of Egypt. The Assyrian, never far-sighted in his statecraft and not comprehending the value of buffer states, was exerting all his strength to check their development, not realizing that he was but opening the way for the irresistible flood behind. The inspired statesmen of Israel saw the rise of Urartu, Mannai, and Ashguz; they sounded the alarm at the approach of the Scythian hordes; and, some of them at least, believed that the final consummation was at hand, that the day of Yahweh was near and hastening greatly. All ancient empires were in the crucible; the whole ancient order was yielding place to new. The princes of Egypt were gone; Ethiopians, Libyans, or Assyrians alternately sat in their place; and though Assyria, roused to the energy of despair, won occasional victories, they were of the Pyrrhic type-ruinous to the victor. Her last mad act, the destruction of mighty Elam at tremendous cost to herself, sealed her fate. The way was opened for the hordes beyond.

Within Israel, during this period, the changes are hardly less marked than without. The earlier prophetic dream of an eternal nation and eternal city has vanished. The land has witnessed religious struggles--doctrinal disputes between two great schools of prophets. One believes that Yahweh will defend and preserve his city at all hazards, under all circumstances; the other asserts that it must be included in the sweeping away of all things that