6 6 before us, as in the old Hebrew pages which Maurice restored again. to reality and being. Wordsworth, though perchance he was unconscious of it, was a Christian Platonist, as was Maurice. They are both of them poets in the highest sense, for they are both of them seers. They are raised above the slime of earth, into the life of the ideal. We are taught by a new philosophy, whose note seems to me to ring with a somewhat vulgar and false tone, that this is a shallow optimism; and we are referred to other poets and novelists who, we are told, are 'courageous thinkers, and face the ghosts of the mind.' The business of intellect is to master, not to shun, the disturbing elements of life.' This we shall all admit; but how can those poets be said to master such elements who pander to mankind in its lowest. and vilest forms? He is not a regenerator who resigns all hope and effort towards the pure and the spiritual, and contents himself with describing, in forcible rhythm, the debased and distracted life of a reckless humanity, which he lives as well as they. An optimist, however shallow,' who believes, and acts as a believer, in a regenerating energy, which is permeating the race, is a truer friend to his kind than such as these. The living God' of Frederick Maurice. solves many questions that have perplexed the wise. His teaching solves that great perplexity which has haunted the students of Spinoza from before the time of Lessing, for it explains that belief of Spinoza in a God who exists within human consciousness alone, a belief which Dr. James Martineau says is atheism, and Mr. Frederick Pollock says is not. The God of Frederick Maurice, infinite and incomprehensible as He doubtless is, enters into human consciousness by virtue of His gracious will, and may be known in consciousness by whosoever seek Him. There is no dogma of Christianity, however grotesque it may appear in its popular form, but what has its germ in the profoundest scientific truth, and none can be more certainly traced to such truth than the 'living God' of Platonism and of the Christian Church, whom Frederick Maurice was sent into the world to proclaim, who enters into consciousness by the Divine Humanity, and continues His energising power by the living Spirit, which enlightens the world. It is not necessary to dispute of the unknowable,' or of the range of consciousness of all. Within consciousness, and as a man sees his friend, Frederick Maurice knew God. His portrait might tell us this, where Promise and presage of sublime emprise On the 15th of June, 1856, in the chapel of Lincoln's Inn, the sermon was drawing to a close. The somewhat strained attention became relaxed, for the well-known change in the preacher's face, the slight alteration of the voice, showed that the appeal to the reasoning faculty was over, and that the veil was rent for a moment, and VOL. XV.-No. 87. 3 L that the High Priest had entered into the Holy of Holies, the 'Cyte of Sarras in the Spyrituel Place':— Towards this resurrection all creation is groaning and travailing, and that groan which burst from Christ at the grave of Lazarus was the expression of His sympathy in that groan of His creatures. . . . Do we not feel sometimes as if all power of believing in anything that is great and noble were departing from us? Do we not feel as if to believe in Him who is goodness and truth were the hardest effort of all? Does it not appear as if a second death were coming upon us, a death of all energy, of all trust, of all power to look beyond ourselves? Oh, if This numbness and coldness have overtaken us, or should overtake us—if we should be tempted to sit down in it and sink to sleep-let the cry which awakened Lazarus awake us. Let us be sure that He who is the Resurrection and the Life is saying to each of us, however deep the cave in which he is buried, 'Come forth!' -however stifling the grave-clothes with which he is bound, 'Loose him, and let him go!' 3 Yes. Emboldened by the gracious utterance of the divinest mercy, which permits us to believe that the servant may be even as his master, and the disciple as his lord, I do not hesitate to apply these words to him of whom we speak. For these two great cries, spoken centuries ago before an open grave, have re-echoed in men's hearts before all graves, whether of the flesh or of the spirit, ever since; and have formed the note of all prophetic utterance, and of none more so than of his. Come forth! Loose him, and let him go!' Come forth out of the lower life: out of the life, lovely in its kind-the life of self, of fleshly beauty, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life-and at his call the soul came forth. But this was not enough. The soul, thus aroused from death, and stirred into a strange activity, is still crippled and wrapped in the grave-clothes of the imperfect dispensation in which we live-the grave-clothes of superstition, of formalism, of systems, and of burdens laid by human imposition upon the righteous whom the Lord has not made sad. 'Loose him, and let him go!' This was the distinctive proclamation which it was the mission of Frederick Maurice to announce. How true he proved to this mission I shall not ask. I leave it for those to testify from whose stiffened limbs the grave-clothes fell at his word. Much has happened since his voice was still, but, across the lapse of time, the words are still ringing in their ears, Loose him, and let him go!' 6 J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE. • Gospel of St. John, p. 319. AUSTRALIA AND THE IMPERIAL CONNECTION. WHEN any proposal is made to change the established and longrecognised order of things, even in the customs of a village community or in the daily routine of a household, if the persons interested are sufficiently numerous, two or three classes of objectors are sure to present themselves. But when the proposal affects the time-honoured constitution and the officially-hallowed forms of procedure of a great nation, there is so much of the colour of audacity about it, that the objections, naturally enough, assume a corresponding intensity of positiveness. The first class of objectors consists of those who, being perfectly content or unconcerned in respect to what is, have never thought, and do not like the trouble of thinking, about a change, and cannot understand why others should think about it. The second class consists of those who find a pleasure in the mental excitement of raising objections, including the casuistic critic, whose nature it is to discover grounds of objection, and the captious disputant, who is generally prepared to condemn what does not emanate from himself. There are other objectors: those who are personally interested in things remaining as they are, those who honestly seek to obtain information on points that to their minds are involved in doubt, and those who are dissatisfied with the present state of things but can never agree upon the form of remedy. In a previous paper in this Review I have endeavoured to show that a change in the relations between England and Australia must come and cannot be long in coming, and I have suggested in very faint outline what that change should be. We have first to be satisfied that the present system or absence of system cannot long last; that it is unsuited and insufficient for the daily altering condition, the rapidly expanding life, of the Colonies under parliamentary government. These Colonies possess the absolute power of legislation on all internal matters, subject only, as in the case of the Imperial Parliament, to the assent of the Crown; and their affairs are administered by Governments which can only exist by the support of the local legislature. The principal link-the only link,' as it is frequently called-connecting them with England is the appointment 6 of Governor. I once heard a gentleman, who now occupies an eminent place among living English statesmen, publicly describe a Colonial Governor as 'the appointee of a clerk in Downing Street.' That is not my estimate; but it must be admitted that the estimate of a Colonial Governor formed by Englishmen in general, from any point. of view outside the colony where he is stationed, is not a very viceregal one. Abstaining now from all comment on the class of persons who receive these appointments, let us consider the office itself in relation to the system of parliamentary government. The Sovereign cannot be present in person in a distant part of the Empire, and therefore a representative of the Crown must necessarily be appointed. As such he carries out with him a code of official law, known as the Royal Instructions, which is presented, with his commission, when he assumes office in the colony, and which is duly published for generał information. All this is simple and clear enough; something similar must be done, whatever change may in the future be made in the appointment of Governor. But he is something more, or something less, than the representative of the Crown, and has functions beneath and unknown to the Sovereign; he is an officer of the Imperial Government under secret instructions, and enjoined to furnish secret reports to his masters. As such, he is the only recognised medium of political communication between the Colonies and Englandbetween the outlying parts of the Empire and the central part of the Empire where all the subjects of Her Majesty are supposed to occupy a common ground of political equality. Now, it can be no disparagement of the gentlemen who serve as governors to say that they are not all equal in mental organisation and attributes of character, not all alike in political insight, critical analysis, range of observation and method of reasoning, in training, acquaintance with men, and means of information. One is a retired soldier, another a civilian with a purely English experience; one has sat in the House of Commons, another has seldom lived in England. But the political well-being of the Englishmen in a self-governed colony, so far as in any of its phases it needs representation to the Imperial Government, must be set in a kind of framework of the idiosyncrasies of the Governor for the time being, whoever he may be. He may be perfectly unbiassed, or he may be openly or unconsciously prejudiced, on the matter; he may take a broad view or an extremely narrow view; he may fully understand the situation, or he may fail to comprehend it at all; but he is the only appointed channel through which all wants must be made known, all purposes explained, all difficulties solved. 6 Let it be recollected that I look to the future of the Colonies in only all I say; and, looking to the future, I maintain that this • I link' of the Imperial connection is not strong enough to last. assume that it will be admitted on all hands that parliamentary government in the Colonies ought to be fashioned on the grand example of the Imperial Parliament. In justice to the Colonial Parliaments it must be asserted that they strive in form and practice to imitate the Imperial example. In holding the Executive to its responsibilities they certainly are not less exacting than the House of Commons; and in the maintenance of their rights and privileges they constantly seek to be guided by the precedents of Westminster. The teaching of the parent Legislature does not end with the record of the famous contentions and vindicatory triumphs of the past from which it is derived; the thousand illustrations by which that teaching is illuminated and enforced abundantly show the spirit that would arise to meet any now unforeseen assault or indignity in the future. I have sufficiently shown how a governor stands in relation to the parliamentary system of self-government in a colony. If it could for a moment be imagined that a power existed which should appoint an officer to stand in a similar relation to the Imperial Parliament and the Executive Government it sustains, the imaginary picture would forcibly bring home to the mind the difference between self-government in England and self-government in the Colonies. We cannot say that the Imperial Parliament would not submit for a single day to the mockery of such tutelage, because the occurrence of the thing is simply impossible. But you cannot expect to be like England,--you are only a colony. Just so; that is exactly what I contend is now the case, and that is what I ventured to predict cannot continue to be the case for any long period of time. As the Colonies year by year increase in numbers, in enterprise, in prosperity, and in sense of power, the want of a more congenial bond of union will be more and more strongly felt. Federation alone will not meet this want. It has not met it in the Canadian Dominion. It is less likely to satisfy it in Australia, at the opposite side of the globe. It may be, indeed, that Australian federation if left to itself will engender a feeling which some of its advocates in England do not now take into account. It would be the federation of the limbs almost severed from the body of the Empire. What is wanted is a bond, or a network of bonds, woven of the same material as that of the central constitution-enduring but elastic, adequate in strength to resist all irrational pressure, but yielding to the recurrent forces of reason and justice, to bind the body and the limbs together in one great selfsustaining, consanguineous political organism. Taking the case of Australasia, I have ventured to suggest that, concurrently with federation, in which England herself should take the lead, a Council of Australia should be created, to sit in London, whose functions should embrace the transaction of all political business between the English Administrations on the other side of the globe and the Imperial Government in England. This Council |