lie bare like the sea-shore when that mighty tide has flowed away back to its bed. We behold one of the keenest intellects of this or any century, and, on the human side, one of the tenderest and most capacious of hearts-a man whose moral sense (whatever were his theories of its nature) quivered with intensest life, and was true as needle to the pole of the loftiest justice to man, to woman and to brute, who yet, great philosopher as he was, when he comes to deal with a subject on which the rude tinker of Bedford has instructed the world, writes like a blind man discoursing of colours, or a deaf man criticising the contortions of a violinist wasted on the delusion of music. When he speaks of the Utility of Religion, he confounds, as if they were identical, those realms of human nature which public opinion or human authority may sway; and those which, in the solemn hours of visitation from the Divine Spirit, fall under the inner law of Conscience and of Love. And when he writes of the Consciousness of God, all he has to say of it, is to refer to the metaphysical subtleties of Cousin about the laws of perception, and to add contemptuously:

"It would be a waste of time to examine any of these theories in detail. While each has its particular logical fallacies, they labour under the common infirmity that

one man cannot, by proclaiming with ever so much confidence that he perceives an object, convince other people that they see it too.... When no claim is set up to any peculiar gift, but we are told that all of us are as capable as the prophet of seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels --nay, that we actually do so-and when the utmost effort of which we are capable fails to make us aware of what we are told we perceive, this supposed universality of intuition is but

'The dark lantern of the spirit

Which none see by but those who bear it ;'

and the bearers may be asked to consider whether it is not more likely that they are mistaken as to the origin of an impression on their minds, than that others are ignorant of the very existence of an impression on theirs."*

The friends who can have told Mr. Mill that he saw, or was capable of seeing, religious truth as a Tauler or a Fenelon saw it, or of feeling on the subject as even much less religious men are accustomed to feel, were bold indeed. It may have been a hard task to say that such was not the case. Nobody could have ventured upon it during his life or even after his death, had he not thrown down the challenge, and elaborately explained to us the way in which his religious instincts were destroyed by his ruthless father. But now the matter stands plain;

* P. 163.

and I confess I look with some confidence to the results of the act of the elder Mill in extirpating the organ of religion from his child's heart, as serving to reveal to us the place it naturally takes among human faculties. Even at the cost of all the desolation the book will spread around, it is perhaps well that this dreadful experiment should once for all have been tried, and not in any "vile body" of fool or egotist, but in the person of one of the ablest, and, in all things beside, one of the very noblest of men.

That lesson, then, is this: that, as we did not first gain our knowledge of God from the external world, so we shall never obtain our truest and most reliable idea of Him from the inductions which Science may help us to draw from it. Spiritual things must be spiritually discerned, or we

must be content never to

discern them truly at all. In man's soul alone, so far as we may yet discover, is the moral nature of his Maker revealed, as the sun is mirrored in a mountain. lake. While all the woods and moors and pastures are quivering in its heat, we only behold the great orb reflected in the breast of that deep, solitary pool. If (as we must needs hold for truth) there be a moral purpose running through all the physical creation, its scope is too enormous, its intricacy too deep, the cycle of its revolution, like that of some great

sidereal Period, too immense for our brief and blind observation. It must be enough for us to learn what God bids us to be of just and merciful and loving, and then judge what must be His justice, His mercy and His love. That Being whom the sinful soul meets in the hour of its penitence-and the grateful heart in its plenitude of thanksgiving—and every man who really prays in the moments of supreme communion-that God is One concerning whom the very attempt to prove that He is infinitely good seems almost sacrilege. It is as Goodness, as Holiness, Love and Pity ineffable, that He has revealed Himself. Shall we treat all that we have so learned on our knees as idle self-delusions, and barricade with iron shutters the windows of the soul which look out heavenward, and this in the name of sense and reason? Nay, but let us fling those windows wide open, and again and yet again seek to renew the celestial vision. These sacred faculties of our nature have a right to their exercise, as well as those which tell us of the properties of solids, fluids and gases, of light and electricity. Their reports may be false? So may be everything we call knowledge, every report of the senses, every conclusion of the logical intellect. A persistent and widely recognized fact of human consciousness may be illusory; but

there is no better proof to be had even of the existence of an external world.*

The great root passion of normally constituted humanity, the craving to find some One to whom to

* An excellent illustration of this subject, expressing very closely my own view of it, is to be found in the following letter, published in the Spectator, Sept. 5, 1874:

"Will you give me space for an illustration in support of that which, apart from revelation, is surely the best proof of all of the existence of God,-the existence, viz., of that religious instinct in man which, on Professor Tyndall's and Mr. H. Spencer's own scientific principles, should be the subjective response to some objective reality, the adaptation of the creature man to his environment.' The dog has a religion, and his deity is man. Previous to the introduction of man upon the scene, the dog must have been simply dog, minus this quasi-religious faculty. But man appears, and makes his appeal to the dog-nature; in response, a capacity for human fellowship is developed in the dog, and is inherited, so that a craving for such fellowship becomes, thenceforth, part of his

nature.

"Now if we imagine some being, some detached intelligence, with power to observe the dog in his development through the ages, but to whom the man, on his introduction, is invisible, what a strange problem would present itself for his solution! Would not the higher development of the dog, as now observed by him, be analogous to the calling forth of the religious instinct in the creature man? The observer would now see with wonder the frequent reference to a seemingly higher will, not always cheerfully yielded to. He would note the upward look, the overcoming of mere animal impulses, the occasional wilful outbreak of the lower nature, bringing with it a sense of guilt, to be followed by shame, penitence and meek submission to chastisement; strangest thing of all, he would see this chastise