Sunday epigrams against the rich just because they are rich. He should not treat social subjects invidiously, representing the rich as always getting richer, the poor as always getting poorer, and a great gulf fixed between them. The mud splashed by the aristocrat's carriage wheels upon the workman's coat is an effective enough picture. But if such an orator as he to whom we refer had lived in the day of the Picts, he would probably have declaimed against the rich man's shoes. He should fairly reflect upon the whole tendency of luxury in pagan as compared with Christian societies. That of the former was entirely extravagant, sensual, ostentatious, self-centred, anti-social, in the bad sense aristocratic. That of the latter may have—and has-certain abnormal and most reprehensible manifestations; but it is mitigated-in some considerable measure redeemed-by the tendency of luxury to find a thousand unselfish egresses, to diffuse itself into humble homes, to equalize in some degree the fortunes of humanity. The kitchen of the club or mansion pays its tribute to the dinner of the outcast; the garden has its exquisite tithe for the adornment of the altar of God, for affording delicate associations and refreshing thoughts to the inmates of the hospital. It is not wise or well to flaunt out of the pulpit in the audience of the poor the prices paid for certain refinements. At all events the fact should be recognized that luxury is a relative term; that it has a good side as well as one that is evil. An instructor should make himself prepared to take into account that sweetness and beauty in life and its surroundings are being increased, year after year, by social advancement, and in course of time may approach to being equalized; that homes are being made a little better, labour a little less tyrannical, rest a little softer, sickness a little less distressing. The true remedy against the unquestionable evils of luxury is not an angry-and sometimes a little insincere-declamation against luxury. The good which a preacher can really effect in this matter lies in another direction. Let him show that while the spirit of the age may improve, the spirit of the world is ever hostile to Christ. The four great evils which engender luxury, and which in their turn are pampered and bloated by it, are selfishness, ostentation, sensualism, and materialism. Now the preacher can do little against these by inflammatory harangues against the refinements, the elegancies, the embellishments of life. But he may destroy or mitigate selfishness by bringing home to hearts the law of a new life, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves.'1

1 2 Cor. v. 15.

He may shame pride out of its poor ostentation by inducing the favourites of fortune to visit those homes of suffering where our poor shivering humanity is seen in its original misery without the trappings by which it is hidden. Sensuality may be wisely treated in a school like the Church; people may be reminded again and again of the frequent abstinence of which one instance is advised every Friday in every week by the English Church—that starting from this humble but necessary point, 'the flesh may be subdued to the spirit.' Materialism may be removed by appealing to affections which have God for their object, and to desires which have heaven for their home. In all ages and countries sumptuary laws have failed to win one inch of ground from luxury. Sumptuary declamations will be equally impotent. To alter the framework of society is impossible; if possible, it would be tremendously mischievous. The appeal, therefore, must be made to the responsibility of the individual conscience. He who would effectively strive with Christian people against evil luxury must do more than scold and point to bills for dress, dinners, furniture. Three ideas must fill his soul, which may be expressed by three words, loved by the mystics, yet instinct with a practical power beyond every other-detachment, attachment, elevation. He must persuade his flock that earth is not all, and point them to the Cross and to Heaven -to the symbol of sacrifice and to the home of souls.

Let us sum up our meaning in the words of a religious and most thoughtful, but forgotten writer, of the last century: 'It is neither superfluities, nor their number, which constitute luxury. It is the attachment which a man has to these superfluities. It is the influence which they exercise upon his happiness.'1

1 Traité philosophique et politique sur le Luxe, par l'Abbé Pluquet (Paris, 1786). To judge by M. Baudrillart's extracts, Ferguson's Essay upon the History of Civil Society seems to evince a masterly grasp of the philosophy of the subject.

ART. II.-MYSTICISM IN THEOLOGY.

The Divine Unity and Trinity: Essays on God and on His Relation to the Universe and to Man. By HERBERT H. JEAFFRESON, M.A. (London, 1888.)

THE supreme mystery of the Catholic Faith-the doctrine of the Holy Trinity-has always presented irresistible attractions to speculative minds. The very fact that it transcends the capacities of the human intellect to formulate and to explain has only made theologians of a certain type more anxious to grapple with it, more resolute in the attempt to ascertain at least the lines of demarcation within which the reason can still feel at home in discussing it. We do not wish to maintain that this is an unfortunate direction for thought to take. The Catholic Faith is more than a creed to be blindly accepted; it is also a philosophy. In it the various questions which have tried the philosophic intellect find, or we believe will find, their ultimate solution. Man's own life here, its origin, its laws, its ultimate destiny, and its relation with God, are perpetually in discussion. Theories of various kinds are constantly being suggested to bring into connexion with the facts which we do know those remoter facts and events of which we have no immediate experience. We know life always in the midst of its course, never see it begin, can only conjecture, by hints and suggestions derived from our observation of it, what its end will be. And the problem of philosophy is constantly to develop these hints and suggestions into such a system that the life may be seen as a whole, explicable in its origin, intelligible in its end. This we say is the object of Philosophy strictly so called: to eliminate chance and surprise and suddenness, and show the whole life and experience of man as governed by order and law and reason. It is obvious that such a problem must be seriously affected by the limits of our knowledge. The fact that we have no direct experience, nor even a capacity to conceive of an absolute beginning, cannot but make a conjectural origin of things difficult and unsatisfactory. We analyse things as they are into what seem to us their simpler elements, but too often only to find that our analysis of the present is not the same as a history of the past, and that the theory which we have put forth does not, after all, explain the facts from which it was derived.

It is this perpetual breakdown of philosophic method which causes, in a large degree, the peculiar phenomena of the history of philosophy-the constant assertions of progress made, and the equally constant returns upon a point of view supposed to be long since discredited. Everyone is familiar with the complaints of the inoperative and unproductive character of metaphysical speculation, and everyone knows how hard they are to meet. Perhaps the best way of meeting them is to admit them, and trace them to their cause in the nature of the case. Metaphysical speculation must of necessity be constantly failing and as constantly renewing its efforts, because the problem to be solved is ever present and appealing to the mind, and the facts which are required to solve it satisfactorily are no less invariably absent.

The Catholic Faith is, on one side at any rate, a solution of these questions which does not labour under the same difficulties. Its utterances as to man and his place in the world are not vitiated at their source by ignorance of the real state of the case. The Creed does not present us with a conclusion wrung by mere human reason out of the facts of nature and life. It starts from a position of actual knowledge. This, surely, is the very least that is meant by saying that it is a revelation. But, though it is a revelation, it does not fall altogether out of relation to human knowledge and speculation. It is not so separated from the limited knowledge of man that it cannot be described, at any rate in some degree, in human language. It must have definiteness, sufficient to make it capable of guiding man's thought and life. Everyone is familiar with the Divine economy by which God's revelation keeps pace with the progress of the human kind; by which it restricted itself within narrower limits while man's range was narrower, and in the fulness of time came forth with a body of truth about God and man which eighteen centuries have not sufficed fully to grasp. And naturally so, for in this revelation, as we believe, all truth will be found to be contained.

But it may be asked, If all truth is to be found in this revelation, as it is called, why investigate further? Why spend time and valuable effort in doing again what has been done already? The answer is simply this: each age has its own views of life, each makes its own contribution to knowledge, each has its own difficulties; and the problem for the religious philosopher is to show how the body of truth contained in the revelation bears on the questions of the day. He has to realize what the difficulties are, and bring the Faith

into connexion with them. If the difficulty be as to the nature of Truth, he has to show how the Christian Faith provides a way out of difficulties, how it marks where man's knowledge must be limited and fail, and how the solution of the problems which Christianity suggests is a real one. The Christian philosopher does not, we think, if he is wise, attempt to deduce or induce the truths of Christianity, as if they were so many natural laws; he places them in relation to life and thought.

This function of the religious philosopher-to trace the connexion between the particular stage of intellectual development reached at any time and the changeless body of dogmatic truth-is an important but also a dangerous one. It is important, because, if only it were well done, it might save much of the bitter feeling which constantly arises between science and religion; but it is dangerous, because it is extremely difficult for a man who has once embarked upon a quest of this kind to restrain himself within its proper limits. The philosophic instinct is strong and overmastering. It is hard not to try and push just one step further, as it seems, and leave a completely rounded system in which religion should be fully included. It is hard for the philosophic impulse to acknowledge its own limits. But it must be done; for philosophy, however lofty its attainments, is always earth-born. However remote from the coarseness of everyday life its phrases and ideas may seem, it is from reflection upon this ordinary experience that it is derived. And it never loses the taint of its earthy origin. We no longer attempt, as in the old days of anthropomorphism, to apply the rough facts of human life straight to the Divine; but we weave out of the categories of our philosophy theories as to the Divine Nature which are just as mythical as the wildest tale which the savage intellect ever devised. There is a truth in this, no doubt, as there was a truth in anthropomorphism. Such knowledge as we can attain of God must be expressed in human language, or it will be unintelligible to us. But we must not make our philosophic terms and methods the absolute rulers of our theology, or we shall inevitably degrade our belief in God to the level of a mere philosophic theory.

The book named at the head of this article seems to have fallen into this peril. The motive with which the author set out upon his work is exactly that which should influence the religious philosopher. It is to mark 'the coherence and reasonableness of the Catholic religion.' He starts from the point of the general indifference to dogmatic truth among people who are professedly Christian, and