claims for the Papal See. And "this tendency to go back to the childhood and youth of the world has of course retarded the acquisition of that toleration which is the chief philosophical and religious lesson of modern days." But the lesson is being learned; "toleration is being united, not with indifference or worldliness, but with spiritual truth and religiousness of life." And as

"We doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns;" so says our author, that widening of thought shall be ever welcome; it will all be seen to group itself around, and to illustrate that study of the Bible which is the great work of our day, the true" maximus partus temporis ;" and it is all in its right time, for this is the age of knowledge and calm reflection; the discipline of childhood and the impulses of youth are alike past, and self-governing and enlightened conscience is the arbiter of the world.

This, then, the analogy of the spiritual life of the race to that of the individual, is the central idea of this essay, an idea in itself far from new, but which has here been illustrated with a minute copiousness of detail never before, as far as we know, expended on it. Reluctantly we must confess that it is the very elaboration with which the analogy is here worked out which seems to us the capital fault of the essay. In the rough, we admit, of course, that the collective life of the human race is analogous to the individual life of every member of it, that barbarism represents babyhood, early civilization youth, the highly developed and intellect-ordered civilization of our day middle life, if not age. But much more closely than this, we do not believe that it is possible truthfully to trace the analogy. For instance, how can you match, by any event in the individual life of man, that relapse into barbarism which was the main characteristic of the history of well nigh one thousand years in the life of Europe from the downfall of the Empire of the West? We maintain that if ever there were nations whose condition could be fitly compared to a state of infancy and boyhood (with all the happiness and the sorrows, the uncontrolled passions and the simple faith, the docility and the lawlessness of that age), the nations of medieval Europe must be classed among them. In fact, Dr. Temple admits as much incidentally (p. 42), and endeavours, by representing the Papal system as a species of revived Judaism, to make the religious history of these ages dovetail in with his educational theory. But he entirely omits to point out how so long an interval of "second childhood," in

tervening between what he terms the vigour of the world's youth, and the mature wisdom of its middle life, consists with his elaborate parallel, in particulars, between the life of mankind and the life of man.

This brings us to another point of more importance, on which we are even more directly at issue with the essayist. He says, and it is of vital consequence to his theory, that our Lord came to give to the world, while still in its plastic and impressionable youth, the well-timed teaching of his example. But it will be well to quote his own eloquent words. He says,

"The power of example which is born with our birth and dies with our death, attains its maximum at some point in the passage from one to the other. And this point is just the meeting point of the child and the man, the brief interval which separates restraint from liberty. Young men at this period are learning a peculiar lesson. They seem to those who talk to them to be imbibing from their associates and their studies principles both of faith and conduct. But the rapid fluctuations of their minds shew that their opinions have not really the nature of principles. They are really learning, not principles, but the materials out of which principles are made. They drink in the lessons of generous impulse, warm unselfishness, courage, self-devotion, romantic disregard of worldly calculations, without knowing what are the grounds of their own approbation, or caring to analyze the laws and ascertain the limits of such guides of conduct. They believe, without exact attention to the evidence of their belief; and their opinions have accordingly the richness and warmth that belong to sentiment, but not the clearness or firmness that can be given by reason. These affections, which are now kindled in their hearts by the contact of their fellows, will afterwards be the reservoir of life and light, with which their faith and their highest conceptions will be animated and coloured. The opinions now picked up, apparently not really, at random, must hereafter give reality to the clearer and more settled convictions of mature manhood. If it were not for these, the ideas and laws afterwards supplied by reason would be empty forms of thought, without body or substance; the faith would run a risk of being the form of godliness without the power thereof. And hence the lessons of this time have such an attractiveness in their warmth and life, that they are very reluctantly exchanged for the truer and profounder, but at first sight colder wisdom which is destined to follow them. To almost all men this period is a bright spot to which the memory ever afterwards loves to recur; and even those who can remember nothing but folly-folly, too, which they have repented and relinquished—yet find a nameless charm in recalling such folly as that. For, indeed, even folly itself at this age is sometimes the cup out of which men quaff the richest blessings of our nature-simplicity, generosity, affection. This is the seed time of the soul's harvest, and contains the promise of the year. It is the time for love and marriage, the time for forming life-long friendships. The after-life may be more contented, but can rarely be so glad and joyous. Two things we

need to crown its blessings-one is, that the friends whom we then learn to love, and the opinions which we then learn to cherish, may stand the test of time, and deserve the esteem and approval of calmer thoughts and wider experience; the other, that our hearts may have depth enough to drink largely of that which God is holding to our lips, and never again to lose the fire and spirit of the draught. There is nothing more beautiful than a manhood surrounded by the friends, upholding the principles, and filled with the energy of the spring-time of life. But even if these highest blessings be denied, if we have been compelled to change opinions, and to give up friends, and the cold experience of the world has extinguished the heat of youth, still the heart will instinctively recur to that happy time, to explain to itself what is meant by love and what by happiness.'

Now we deny that this picture, which might have not inaptly represented the Athens of Cimon, or the Rome of Scipio Africanus, or the crusading Europe of Joinville and St. Louis, would ever naturally recall to us the weary world into which Christ was born. We deny that the nations were in their boyhood at the time of the Christian era. We say that it was to an old, and decrepit, and tottering civilization, wrinkled and unlovely, with no generous enthusiasms, with none of boyhood's quickly-kindled admiration for the noble and the self-denying, to a world blasé, materialist, and cynical in the highest degree-that Jesus Christ came. We cannot prove our assertion: it is a question not of syllogisms, but of appropriate metaphor. But let any one recall the leading features of that age the instinct of civilized nationality all but dead, one all-mastering race dominating amid so many corpses of states once free and glorious—that race itself nearly lost to all its old generous instincts, more moved by avarice than ambition even in its love of empire, and prostrating itself with Oriental sycophancy before an idiot or a buffoon-its capital, the brain of the world, but not its heart, the scene of all these unutterable meannesses, and sins, and pollutions which made the soul of Juvenal sick within him-art cankered, literature a parasite, philosophy despairing of all spiritual truth, the one pure religion in the world sinking daily deeper into hypocritical formalism, becoming daily more offensive to God and man-let these and the unnumbered symptoms of a like kind be glanced at by memory, and then let him say whether there is any meaning in the analogy of history and human life at all, if this period is compared to "the rich promise of a boyhood's prime."

But, in truth, we are again arguing for a point which the essayist himself, when out of the groove of his theory, has instinctively conceded. It will be admitted that the state of civilization at the time of our Lord's coming was substantially the same as that at the time of the barbarian invasions. The

intervening four hundred years had developed some processes of decay which were then working, but at most they had not turned vigorous youth into decrepitude. But in the same passage which we have before alluded to (p. 42), Dr. Temple says,"A flood of new and undisciplined races poured into Europe, on the one hand supplying the Church with the vigour of fresh life to replace the effete materials of the old Roman Empire, and, on the other, carrying her back to the childish stage, and necessitating a return to the dominion of outer laws."

So much for the historical fitness of the parallel quoted above. We have the further objection that the comparison of the example of our Lord's life to the romantic friendships of boyhood-in which, as he himself hints, there is often so large an element of impulsive error mingled-seems, to us, at least, inadequate and degrading. We are persuaded that Dr. Temple had no intention to speak with anything but the utmost reverence of this central event in the world's history, but we think that whoever, free from the compulsion of an all-exacting analogy, ponders the comparison implied in this passage, will feel that the theory here fails signally, that the two figures are dissimilar as well as unequal, and that the thing which is set over against the divine life of Christ among men is, even on the reduced scale of individual humanity, not worthy of its antitype.

It is a noble task-that which the essayist has imposed upon himself to "justify the ways of God to men," but it is one beset with difficulties arising not solely from our dim vision of the Creator, but partly also from our extremely partial and fragmentary knowledge of his creature-of mankind itself. We can only feebly guess at the conditions of the mighty problem which the all-wise One has been for these thousands of years slowly solving, much less can we hope to reproduce accurately the successive steps of that solution. An instance occurs in page 24, in which we think that the author has been not so much unbelieving towards God as slow of heart to believe the good which really exists among his fellow men. He says

"But the one Example of all examples came in the 'fulness of time,’ just when the world was fitted to feel the power of his presence. Had his revelation been delayed till now, assuredly it would have been hard for us to recognize his divinity; for the faculty of faith has turned inwards, and cannot now accept any outer manifestations of the truth of God. Our vision of the son of God is now aided by the eyes of the apostles, and by that aid we can recognize the express image of the Father. But in this we are like men who are led through unknown woods by Indian guides. We recognize the indications by which the path was known, as soon as those indications are pointed out; but we feel that it would have been quite vain

for us to look for them unaided. We, of course, have, in our turn, counterbalancing advantages. If we have lost that freshness of faith which would be the first to say to a poor carpenter, Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God-yet we possess, in the greater cultivation of our religious understanding, that which, perhaps, we ought not to be willing to give in exchange."

This is to our minds a dreary and disheartening passage, and would be yet more so if we believed it to be true. It is a kind of language we have been accustomed to hear from men of a very different stamp, from men whose theories of Positivism and histories of the march of human thought strive with no doubtful purpose to eliminate God from his own creation. Had these words been written by one of these men, we should have had no difficulty in recognizing in them the voice of a diseased world, glorying in its own decline, and saying, "Look at me; I have outgrown health and vigour, and all those foolish illusions of my youth. True, my limbs were strong to labour in my father's service, my heart once beat vigorously and well, and my face glowed with the warmth of happy toil; but I have outlived all that now, and have developed into a pale and flaccid invalid. My muscles all wasted and shrunk, my pulse feeble and fitful, I lie here all the day idle, and laugh at that foolish activity of old, and my old zeal for a father whom strangely enough I have never even seen since I attained this new and higher development, disease, and withdrew myself from his unprofitable service."

Such, we think, is the true translation of the boastings of Positivism. We are sure Dr. Temple has no desire to blend their theory with his. We know that he would say as we should, that the Creator abides unchangeably for ever, and wills to be sought after and communed with by generation after generation of his creatures, εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. But these few sentences look in a different direction from that truth, and we cannot but regret that they are so written. Besides, as we before hinted, we do not believe that they are true. We are convinced that there are countless multitudes at the present day who, if Christ were to appear now to them, under the same circumstances under which he shewed himself to his disciples, would hail him as they did. Only it must be remembered that to make these circumstances equal, we must on the one hand pre-suppose for ourselves clear prophetic indications, such as they had, of the approaching close of an aiwv, and of the near advent of a long-expected deliverer; on the other, we must take away from ourselves his own most solemn warnings against false Christs arising in his name, and his own plain predictions, that his second coming shall be in majesty and in power to judge the