The signs of that struggle are all about us and around us. You cannot pick up a newspaper without coming across them. Perhaps the most remarkable of them of late, spoken or written, have been the speech of Mr. Gladstone at Liverpool, quoted in my Tuesday's lecture, and a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette on Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.* Of the speech I need only say that I rejoice that it was made. The articles I must refer to a little more in detail. .

After a masterly examination of the utilitarian and positivist theories, the writer explains his own views: how he has come honestly and bravely to the conclusion, that believers in "the service of humanity" and "the religion of fraternity" have no solid ground beneath them why, for his part, he will resolutely continue to love his friend and hate his enemy, and will on no terms call all sorts of people, of whom he knows and for whom he cares nothing, his brothers and sisters-he proceeds: "The believer in the religion of fraternity cannot speak thus. He is bound to love all mankind. If he wants me to do so too, he must show me a reason why. Not only does he show me none, as a rule, but he generally denies either the truth or the relevancy of that which, if true, is a reason-the doctrine that God made all men and ordered them to love each other. Whether this is true is one question; how it is proposed to get people to love each other without such a belief I do not understand. It would want the clearest of all imaginable revelations to make me try to love a considerable number of people whom it is unnecessary to mention, or affect to care about masses of men with whom I have nothing to do." It is healthy and bracing to hear or read such plain speaking; for, when one comes upon a naked and transparently honest denial, not only of modern theories, but of teaching which one learnt at one's mother's knee, upon which Christendom and civilization, such as we have it, are supposed to have been built up, a man must be very careless or very dishonest who is not driven to ask himself plainly how far he agrees with it.

The writer in question goes on, coming specially to the subject of these lectures, and

Since published separately, with the name of Mr. Fitzjames Stephen to them.

supporting on one side the view which I was urging on Tuesday as to the effects of civilization:-"These are the grounds on which it appears to me that there is a great deal of self-deception as to the nature of fraternity, and that the mere feeling of eager, indefinite sympathy with mankind, in those cases in which it happens to exist, is not deserving of the admiration which is so often claimed for it. I will say, in conclusion, a very few words on the opinion that the progress of civilization, the growth of wealth and of physical science, and the general diffusion of comfort, will tend to excite or deepen such sympathy. I think it more probable that it will have exactly the opposite effect. The whole tendency of modern civilization is to enable each man to stand alone and take care of his own interests, and the growth of liberty and equality will, as I have already shown, intensify these feelings. They will minimize all restraints and reduce everyone to a dead level, offering no attractions to the imagination or to the affections. In this state of society you will have plenty of public meetings, Exeter Halls, and philanthropic associations, but there will be no occasion for patriotism or public spirit. France in 1870, with its ambulances and its representatives of the Geneva Convention, was, after all, a poor, washy, feeble place in comparison with Holland three centuries before. There are many commonplaces about the connection between the decay of patriotism and the growth of luxury. No doubt they have their weak side, but to me they appear far more like the truth than the commonplaces which are now so common about the connection between civilization and the love of mankind. Civilization no doubt makes people hate the very thought of pain or discomfort either in their own persons or in the case of others. It also disposes them to talk and to potter about each other's affairs in the way of mutual sympathy and compliment, and now and then to get into states of fierce excitement about them; but all this is not love, or anything like it. The real truth is, that the human race is so big, so various, so little known, that no one can really love it. You can at most fancy that you love some imaginary representation of bits of it, which, when examined, are only your own fancies personified. A progress which teaches. people to attach increased importance to phantoms is not a glorious thing, in my

eyes at all events. It is a progress towards a huge Social Science Association, embracing in itself all the Exeter Halls that ever were born or thought of. From such a religion of humanity I can only say in the deepest tones of alarm and horror, 'Good Lord, deliver us!'”

A very startling, suggestive, and in many respects, I believe, truthful, diagnosis of our condition, and forecast of what is coming upon us. I should think most persons when they put it down must have asked themselves, What then! Freedom, equality, brotherhood, a mockery and delusion the passionate struggle of three generations to realize them ending in a huge Exeter Hall millennium! The writer exclaims scornfully, "Good Lord, deliver us!" and passes on in his strength-but we cannot. For us, then, what outlook! what escape! Who shall deliver us from the body of this death!. I have not come here, 400 miles from home, my friends, to speak to you on the problems of civilization and to shirk the most difficult and the most interesting of them all-the one, in fact, which underlies and overshadows all others-I mean, of course, this religious problem. Do not start in alarm, or suppose for a moment that I am about to trespass on or lead you into the tangled paths of religious polemics. The party wresting matches and janglings of the various Churches and sects which go by the common name of Christian, are to me only not wholly indifferent because they seem so eminenly futile and mischievous. But the religious" problem of civilization" lies outside of all this. For I think very few persons interested in these questions can have failed to remark the uneasy and mournful tone which runs through much of the serious scepticism in our current literature. Of flippancy and shallowness we have no doubt enough and to spare, but not amongst the writers and thinkers I refer to, and from one of the ablest of whom I have been quoting. Their feeling would seem to be rather one of sorrow that Christianity has been unable to hold its own. They recognize the noble work it has done-admit that its history has been the history of civilization-while they entirely abandon it as a living power, capable of delivering us from the moral and religious anarchy which seems to them to brood over the nineteenth century in as dense a cloud as overshadowed the Roman world in the time

of Augustus. They are too English and too masculine to put up with the "Universum" of Strauss, or the organized religion of humanity of the Positivists. Blank Atheism has no attraction whatever for them. Rather in a gloomy and despondent way, while refusing belief to anything which cannot be tested by the methods of their science and measured by their plumb-line, with a sort of half hope which they will scarcely admit to themselves, they seem to recognize the travail of their own time with thoughts too big for utterance hitherto, and to look, with a dull, dim kind of hope, for the gradual rise out of the chaos of a new faith, which shall fuse again and give expression to the scattered thoughts and aspirations of mankind, and stand out as a revelation of God suited to these new times, which have been driven in sheer despair to abandon the old revelation.

A curious echo-if that can be called an echo which is set in an entirely different key-comes back to these broodings from the New World. There, too, the foremost thinkers recognize the prevailing anarchy, and many look for a new revelation, but in a cheerful and hopeful spirit, such as befits a new country, and rather as a supplement to, than a substitution for, the Christianity which they too believe to have spent its force, and to be inadequate to the new time. Let Mr. Emerson, their ablest and wisest voice, speak for them. "And now," he says, in an address-singularly typical of the best current thought of New England-to the Senior Divinity Class at Harvard University, "let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nighquenched fire on the altar. The evils of the Church that now is are manifest. The question returns, What shall we do? I confess all attempts to project and establish a Cultus, with new rites and new forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a new system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the Goddess of Reason-to-day pasteboard and filagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For if once you are alive, you shall find that they become plastic and new. . . . I look for the hour when that supreme beauty which ravished the souls of those Eastern men, and chiefly of those

Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, which have been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical integrity-are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new teacher, who shall follow so far these shining laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding, complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one with science, with beauty, and with joy."

Surely, my friends, there is something singularly inspiring in this Transatlantic voice. Its first ring is like that of a bugle in front of a forming battalion. The call to the best heart and head in young America to throw to the winds all attempts to establish a new cult, new rites, new forms; to rekindle the smouldering fire on the altar by themselves breathing new life into the forms already existing, till they become plastic and ready to fit the new times, and express the new thoughts-is to my mind full of hope, for the Old World as well as for the New. But look again, listen again, and the jubilant voice falters; the sound of the bugle grows wandering, uncertain, and passes away in a few wild notes, to me at least as empty of hope as that wail of the Old World. The voice that spoke to those old Hebrews has not then, as yet, spoken in the West: a new Teacher is needed there too, who shall bring with him some further good news for Without such, the shining laws cannot come full circle-the pure of heart cannot see God.

men.

Great is the controversy-full of the most absorbing interest for every human soul, and great the issues which the civilization of our day is forcing on a world bent on enjoyment of all kinds-sensual, artistic, intellectual-and on shutting its ears to all voices from the height and from the depth. And more and more clearly it seems to me, at least, is the voice, calmer than silence, sounding from the height and from the depth; and more and more vain grows the world's effort to enjoy any of its good things, until it hears and answers. As Carlyle said scornfully thirty years ago,

the wealth is enchanted, the art is enchanted, the science is enchanted; let those who feel that they are really the better for them, give us their names.

But the philosopher of Concord (Emerson) has touched the very centre of the matter. A new Teacher, he tells us, is needed; a new Gospel will make the progress of civilization wholly beneficent. The great West (at least, all that is noblest in it) is looking for such a man, for such a message. Vain outlook! the "shining laws" would come full circle fast enough, have been ready to do so any time these eighteen hundred years, if men would only let them. The Teacher who has spoken the last and highest word to mankind, is asking of our age, as He asked of the men of His own day, as He has asked of the sixty generations of our fathers who have come and gone since His day, the question which goes to the root of all "problems of civilization"-of all problems of human life

-"What think ye of Christ ?" The time is upon us when that question must be answered by this nation, and can no longer be thrust aside, while we go, one to his farm, and another to his merchandise. Is this life the model of what human life must become-is He the Son of God, dwelling with men now and always, and inspiring hem with power to live that life-not at small section of them here and there, but the whole race, big, various, and disagreeable as it is to most of us? Upon the answer England gives to that question depends our future-whether we shall flounder on under the weight of increasing riches, till our vaunted civilization has brought us to utter anarchy, and so to the loss of courage, trustfulness, simplicity, manliness -of everything that makes life endurable for men or nations; or whether we shall rise up in new strength, casting out the spirit of Mammon in the Name which broke in pieces the Roman Empire, subdued the wild tribes which flooded that empire in her decay, and founded a Christendom on the ruins-which in our own land has destroyed feudalism, abolished slavery, and given us an inheritance such as has been given to no people on this earth before us; and so build up a stronger, gentler, nobler national life, in which all problems of civilization shall find their true solution.-Macmillan's Magazine.

NORTHUMBERLAND

WHEN Hotspur treads the stage with passionate grace, the spectator hardly dreams of the fact that the princely original lived, paid taxes, and was an active man of his parish, in Aldersgate Street. There, however, stood the first Northumberland House. By the ill-fortune of Percy it fell to the conquering side in the serious conflict in which Hotspur was engaged; and Henry the Fourth made a present of it to his queen, Jane. Thence it got the name of the Queen's Wardrobe. Subsequently it was converted into a printing office; and, in the course of time, the first Northumberland House disappeared altogether.

In Fenchurch Street, not now a place wherein to look for nobles, the great Earls of Northumberland were grandly housed in the time of Henry the Sixth; but vulgar citizenship elbowed the earls too closely, and they ultimately withdrew from the City. The deserted mansion and grounds were taken possession of by the roysterers. Dice were for ever rattling in the stately saloons. Winners shouted for joy, and blasphemy was considered a virtue by the losers. As for the once exquisite gardens, they were converted into bowling-greens, titanic billiards, at which sport the gayer City sparks breathed themselves for hours in the summer time. There was no place of entertainment so fashionably frequented as this second Northumberland House; but dice and bowls were at length to be enjoyed in more vulgar places, and "the old seat of the Percys was deserted by fashion." On the site of mansion and gardens, houses and cottages were erected, and the place knew its old glory no more. So ended the second Northumberland House.

While the above mansions or palaces were the pride of all Londoners and the envy of many, there stood on the strand of the Thames, at the bend of the river, near Charing Cross, a hospital and chapel, whose founder, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, had dedicated it to St. Mary, and made it an appanage to the Priory of Roncesvalle, in Navarre. Hence the hospital on our river strand was known by the name of "St. Mary Rouncivall." The estate went the way of such property at the dissolution of the monasteries; and

the first lay proprietor of the forfeited property was a Sir Thomas Cawarden. It was soon after acquired by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, son of the first Earl of Surrey. Howard, early in the reign of James the First, erected on the site of St. Mary's Hospital a brick mansion which, under various names, has developed into that third and present Northumberland House which is about to fall under pressure of circumstances, the great need of London, and the argument of half a million of money.

Thus the last nobleman who has clung to the Strand, which, on its south side, was once a line of palaces, is about to leave it for ever. The bishops were the first to reside on that river-bank outside the City walls. Nine episcopal palaces were once mirrored in the then clear waters of the Thames. The lay nobles followed, when they felt themselves as safe in that fresh and healthy air as the prelates. The chapel of the Savoy is still a royal chapel, and the memories of time-honored Lancaster and of John, the honest King of France, still dignify the place. But the last nobleman who resided so far from the now recognised quarters of fashion is about to leave what has been the seat of the Howards and Percys for nearly three centuries, and the Strand will be able no longer to boast of a duke. It will still, however, possess an English earl; but he is only a modest lodger in Norfolk Street.

When the Duke of Northumberland goes from the Strand, there goes with him a shield with very nearly nine hundred quarterings; and among them are the arms of Henry the Seventh, of the sovereign houses of France, Castile, Leon, and Scotland, and of the ducal houses of Normandy and Brittany! Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus, might be a fitting motto for a nobleman who, when he stands before a glass, may see therein, not only the Duke, but also the Earl of Northumberland, Earl Percy, Earl of Beverley, Baron Lovaine of Alnwick, Sir Algernon Percy, Bart., two doctors (LL.D. and D.C.L.), a colonel, several presidents, and the patron of two-and-twenty livings.

As a man who deals with the merits of a book is little or nothing concerned with the binding thereof, with the water-marks,

or with the printing, but is altogether concerned with the life that is within, that is, with the author, his thoughts, and his expression of them, so, in treating of Northumberland House, we care much less for notices of the building than of its inhabitants-less for the outward aspect than for what has been said or done beneath its roof. If we look with interest at a mere wall which screens from sight the stage of some glorious or some terrible act, it is not for the sake of the wall or its builders: our interest is in the drama and its actors. Who cares, in speaking of Shakespeare and Hamlet, to know the name of the stage carpenter at the Globe or the Blackfriars? Suffice it to say, that Lord Howard, who was an amateur architect of some merit, is supposed to have had a hand in designing the old house in the Strand, and that Gerard Christmas and Bernard Jansen are said to have been his "builders." Between that brick house and the present there is as much sameness as in the legendary knife which, after having had a new handle, subsequently received in addition a new blade. The old house occupied three sides of a square. The fourth side, towards the river, was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century. The portal retains something of the old work, but so little as to be scarcely recognisable, except to professional eyes.

From the date of its erection till 1614 it bore the name of Northampton House. In that year it passed by will from Henry Howard, Lord Northampton, to his nephew, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, from whom it was called Suffolk House. In 1642, Elizabeth, daughter of Theophilus, second Earl of Suffolk, married Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, and the new master gave his name to the old mansion. The above-named Lord Northampton was the man who has been described as foolish when young, infamous when old, an encourager, at threescore years and ten, of his niece, the infamous Countess of Essex; and who, had he lived a few months longer, would probably have been hanged for his share, with that niece and others, in the mysterious murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Thus, the founder of the house was noble only in name; his successor and nephew has not left a much more brilliant reputation. He was connected, with his wife, in frauds upon the King, and was fined heavily. The heiress

of Northumberland, who married his son, came of a noble but ill-fated race, especially after the thirteenth Baron Percy was created Earl of Northumberland in 1377. Indeed, the latter title had been borne by eleven persons before it was given to a Percy, and by far the greater proportion of the whole of them came to grief. Of one of them it is stated that he (Alberic) was appointed Earl in 1080, but that, proving unfit for the dignity, he was displaced, and a Norman bishop named in his stead! The idea of turning out from high estate those who were unworthy or incapable is one that might suggest many reflections, if it were not scandalum magnatum to make them.

In the chapel at Alnwick Castle there is displayed a genealogical tree. At the root of the Percy branches is "Charlemagne"; and there is a sermon in the whole, much more likely to scourge pride than to stimulate it, if the thing be rightly considered. However this may be, the Percys find their root in Karloman, the Emperor, through Joscelin of Louvain, in this way: Agnes de Percy was, in the twelfth century, the sole heiress of her house. Immensely rich, she had many suitors. Among these was Joscelin, brother of Godfrey, sovereign Duke of Brabant, and of Adelicia, Queen Consort of Henry the First of England. Joscelin held that estate at Petworth which has not since gone out of the hands of his descendants. This princely suitor of the heiress Agnes was only accepted by her as husband on condition of his assuming the Percy name. Joscelin consented; but he added the arms of Brabant and Louvain to the Percy shield, in order that, if succession to those titles and possessions should ever be stopped for want of an heir, his claim might be kept in remembrance. Now, this Joscelin was lineally descended from "Charlemagne," and, therefore, that greater name lies at the root of the Percy pedigree, which glitters in gold on the walls of the ducal chapel in the castle at Alnwick.

Very rarely indeed did the Percys, who were the earlier Earls of Northumberland, die in their beds. The first of them, Henry, was slain (1407) in the fight on Bramham Moor. The second, another Henry (whose father, Hotspur, was killed in the hot affair near Shrewsbury), lies within St. Alban's Abbey Church, having poured out his lifeblood in another Battle of the