level of the banalities of discourse!" 66 Subjects which the wise take care only to discuss with the wise were here everyday topics for all comers." Now, Mr. Morley says, "all this was an outrage to the serious side of Rousseau." He was disgusted by the materialism and the atheisin around him. Besides, his tastes were simple, and the glare, the ostentation, the artificiality, and the moral hollowness of the society in which he moved wearied him." He said himself, "I was so tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so worn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs, great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odor of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of rouge and furbelows."

Thus wearied, and disgusted, and out of humor with all about him, he takes his famous walk from Paris to Vincennes on that hot summer afternoon, when he is roused by the theme proposed by the Dijon Academy to ask himself, What is this civilization worth? Surely, Rousseau could answer the question in but one way-in the way in which he actually did answer it; first, in the Discourses, and then in the New Heloïsa, the Emilius, and the Social Contract. In the excitement of his attack on the evils of the existing order of things he doubtless went further sometimes than he meant to go, as when he declares that "if he were the chief of an African tribe, he would erect on his frontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the first European who should venture to pass into his territory, and the first native who should dare to pass out of it;" but what Mr. Morley claims, is that he had a definite purpose; that he wrote in all sincerity; and that his whole doctrine hangs compactly and consistently together. He says that "that ecstatic vision under the oak tree was the opening of a life of thought and production which lasted, to be sure, only a dozen years, but which in that brief space gave to Europe a new Gospel."

Here we are brought back to the point from which we started. It is claimed that the Gospel of Jesus is superannuated. It

accomplished some good in its day, but it has now done its work. It has lost its hold on the masses. They are no longer found in Christian temples. Christianity has ceased to be aggressive. It is passing away; and the new Gospel of Rousseau is to take its place. It teaches that men are to labor for the good of their fellow men, so that each may enjoy his full proportion of the good things of life. Much has been already accomplished since the day of Rousseau. Immense changes have been made in the direction pointed out by him. But the goal is not yet reached. There are still multitudes everywhere who are mere pariahs, and mighty influences are at work to keep them in degradation. For examples of the distribution among the few of the privileges and delights which have been procured by the labors of the many, it is not necessary to turn to such Asiatic potentates as the Shah of Persia, surrounded by all the splendor of Oriental luxury, spending millions in an ostentatious visit to a distant land, who yet did not lift a finger or make one small contribution from his abundant treasury to save his subjects from literally dying by thousands of starvation. Even in England there are great landed proprietors who may ride for hours through their broad acres by rail, while the peasantry around are deprived of almost everything which can make life pleasant. Here, also, in the New World, which has been so long known as the paradise of the laborer, the tendency now is to roll up great estates as in older countries, and separate the rich and the poor by a wide chasm. Now Mr. Morley asks: "Is it possible that the last word of civilization has been heard in our existing arrangements?" He answers that generations will come to whom our present system "will seem just as wasteful, as morally hideous, and as scientifically indefensible, as that older system which impoverished and depopulated empires, that a despot or a caste might have no least wish ungratified, for which the lives or the treasure of others could suffice."

Here, then, say the disciples of the Brotherhood of Humanity, is abundant field for effort. They inscribe on their banners "the good causes of enlightenment and justice in all lands." Mr. Morley says "men are to be made to feel that they are not mere atoms floating independent and apart, to suck up as much

more than their share of nourishment as they can seize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than to keep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer of bland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whose boundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church, the handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idle mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death." Men are to be made to feel that "they owe a share of their energies to the great struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endless variety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love of self or class and solicitous passion for justice, between the obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mental activity of the few." "This is the church militant in which they should enrol themselves; this the true state to which they should be taught that they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship; these the struggles with which they should associate those virtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy, readiness to assert themselves, and readiness to efface themselves, willingness to suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men of old knew how to show for their sovereign or their God.”

66

ARTICLE IX.-NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S LITERATURE AND DOGMA.*-Mr. Matthew Arnold is undeniably a clever writer, and a man of high cultivation, if we adopt his own definition of culture, “an acquaintance with the best things that have been thought and said." He has an unfailing vivacity, caught, perhaps, in some degree, from the best French writers of our day, who, whatever other delinquencies may be chargeable to them, are never heavy. But it is no disparagement to Mr. Matthew Arnold's fine powers to say that he has attempted a task which infinitely surpasses them. It is nothing short of an endeavor, made, we must believe, with entire seriousness, to eliminate personality from the conception of the God of the Bible, the Jehovah whom the Hebrews worshipped, whom Christ taught us to call our Father in Heaven. We have here not a professedly new religion, but a new interpretation of that old religion which constitutes the faith of Christendom; an essay toward a better apprehension" of the Scriptures. The prime secret of this new and original exegesis is contained in the discovery that the gist of the Bible representation of God,-the inmost sense and intent of the sacred writers,-is alone grasped when we drop out of our notion of the Deity the idea that he knows and perceives, loves and hates, and chooses,-in a word, that He is a Person. We must confess to a feeling of amazement that one who claims to be the apostle of a deeper and more genial style of interpretation than that by which the long array of theologians have darkened counsel by words without intelligible meaning; that one who professes to read the Book with the clarified vision derived from an expanded literary culture, should think it possible to interpret out of the old Scriptures or the New Testa ment the living personality of God. As far as we remember, this is the first effort to resolve, through mere interpretation, the Hebrew religion into a Pantheistic creed!

* Literature and Dogmn.-An essay toward a better apprehension of the Bible. By MATTHEW ARNOLD, D.C.L., formerly Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1873.

Mr. Arnold has an abhorrence of abstract statements, and of everything that resembles metaphysics, which borders on fanaticism, and should least of all appear in one who takes care not to let the breadth and catholicity of his culture become a light hid under a bushel. This singular fanaticism betrays him into strange inconsistencies. He cannot tolerate the term 66 Cause," or "First Cause," as applied to God. But what is his own phraseology? God, in his view, is the enduring power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. Here we have a "Power," and a power that "makes for " something, that is, originates, produces something. Moreover, he very frequently uses terms-as "depend," "productive," and so forth—which are synonymous with “Cause,” or imply the principle of causation. In truth, the principle of causation is present, though not in an abstract form, to the mind of every child, and comes out in his habitual language. This horror of a word, of a very good and a very familiar word, is hardly to be expected on that lofty plane of culture to which Mr. Arnold would elevate his readers.

But Mr. Arnold tells us that the personality of God is not "verifiable." We answer that it is just as verifiable as is the conception of God which he offers us. It is a part of the intuition of the soul, in the light of its own sense of dependence and sense of the obligation of righteousness. We go further and say that the denial of freedom and personality to God, and the reduction of that Being to a blind power that "makes for righteousness," must end in the denial of righteousness itself, in the true and earnest meaning of the term, and in the establishment of fatalism. Pantheism and fatalism are Siamese twins. They live and die together. To affirm the reality of a power that makes for righteousness, but without having any preference of righteousness to its opposite, is preposterous as a piece of interpretation, and is in violation of the moral intuitions of a righteous soul. What is religion? It is communion with a personal being. The relation of person to person is essentially involved in religion. Pantheism is, therefore, the annihilation of religion.

Under the head of "aberglaube," or surplus beliefs, Mr. Arnold includes important parts of biblical teaching. The doctrine of judgment and immortality is placed under this rubric. Of course, to those who accept the authority of the Scriptures on such a subject, the truth of this doctrine is fully verified. But the presentiment of conscience is itself a revelation, which is met and corro