INDIVIDUALITY.

A VERY high authority is reported to have recently stated, that "when a lecturer is invited to choose his own topic, there is a great temptation to show off himself more than his subject." Whether we are to receive this statement as the confession of experience, or the mere expression of opinion, does not clearly appear. Such statement has, however, supplied me with a curious and complimentary solution of your Committee's conduct towards myself. Believing, I suppose, with the individual referred to, that "a lecturer is under great temptation" to obtrusive egotism, when left to select his own topic, they have spared me this risk by bespeaking my subject as well as myself.

That subject is Individuality. I will not complain of my brief. Some "ideas" have their day; their influence may be brilliant, but, of necessity, brief. Others, however, may be said to possess all time and place. "Individuality belongs to mankind; and a topic so vital and germinant is never out of date. Nevertheless, I will hope for it an especial worth and welcome amongst the young men of this Christian brotherhood. Your studies and occupations differ -your posts of action are wide apart,—but you are, I trust, one in chivalrous desire and effort to qualify yourselves for the duties that may best befit your Christian manhood. Such desire is the very pivot on which your

Association vibrates-the orbit in which your activities revolve.

Moreover, our topic harmonizes with the spirit of modern thought and the tendency of those wide-sweeping and majestic events which give marvel and momentousness to our times. The age, as we read it, is intensely practical. Raglan wrote home from the Crimea-" War demands men—not lads." Our age wants men-not speculative and visionary triflers, but good, earnest, transparent men,practical in bent, pure in purpose, with principles wisely selected, and gifted with courage to maintain them. Such and such only can help to a successful settlement of the social and religious problems that now press for solution. It scarcely admits of argument, that one real fact transpiring now-a-days is of more living and practical import than the entire of mythical and fabulous history. Modern poetry has grown no fairer or more fragrant flower than the "Idylls of the King;" but we could not read it without thinking, that more happiness or misery hinge upon one bour of the social and religious struggle that chafes and surges within the sound of Bow-bells, than depend upon the existence and deeds of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. We value the past, but common sense demands that we train and address ourselves to those substantial realities that touch and encircle us. The ratio of practical purpose which a man discovers is his real value to God and his generation; by how much he diverges hence, by so much is his existence proved to be a grim anachronism, and a reflection upon the Providence who has cast him on these days.

It is idle for Churches, Dynasties, Corporations, or individuals, to take their stand upon the traditions and glories of a famous past. The foremost facts of our times illustrate this. Some short years ago Louis Philippe wrote sage counsels to

Ferdinand II. of Naples, advising more constitutional policy than Bourbon traditions could inspire. The infamous Bomba replied in these words: "Liberty is fatal to the Bourbons. We are not of this century. For us to adopt modern fashions were ridiculous. We will imitate the Hapsburghs." The miserable monarch wrote the death-warrant of his own dynasty when he penned that note. The disavowed century has now made reply:-" Liberty is fatal to the Bourbons. You are not of this century! You belong not to us! Agreed.Pack up your ducats and begone' The nineteenth century can do without the Bourbons, but not without Liberty!" And so the Hapsburgh at Villafranca, and the Naples Bourbon, shut up at Gaeta, but illustrate the sentiment, that the age "proves all things, and holds fast that which is good." His Grace of Canterbury rebuked the sticklers for professional etiquette, and devotees of rubrical proprieties, when, in the Upper House, he justified the use of this hall on Sabbath evenings for the religious instruction of the working classes, in these memorable words"The Church could pronounce no fitter reason for her own extinction than to declare herself incapable of adapting herself to the altered circumstances of our age." True, your Grace-true of all Churches, and true of the men who go to make them. The order of Nature is secured by making atom and planet obey one common law; and the progress of humanity is maintained by a rigid subjection of men and systems to one ordeal,-the test of practical usefulness. "The true wealth of a man," says a modern writer, "is the number of things which he loves and blesses." If a name was submitted to Napoleon for promotion, the inevitable query of this practical man was, "What has he done?" "Tis the test of our times, and the age is thus insured from petrifying into fossil or withering into mummy.

If the age be so practical, no wonder that, thinking no less of organizations, we begin to think more of men; that Individuality has made its way to the forefront of modern thought. A fire burns brightest where the circle is enlarging: so, where men cease to be dealt with as sheep to be fleeced, or cattle to be driven-as in Italy, for example -this thought is held close to men's hearts. At home, if we mistake not, it is an ever-augmenting idea. The standpoints may be antipodal, but most earnest thinkers converge to this centre. Poetry pleads for it in the pages of Tennyson. Philosophy has couched lance for it in the muscular prose of Stuart Mill. The plucky idea has audaciously carried the Horse Guards; recruits are no longer drilled into machines, but educated, armed, and built up into intelligent men. Our modern education has espoused it. Formerly children were brought together en masse, like a promiscuous gathering of empty bottles. Buckets full of very doubtful liquor were poured upon them. If drops of information dribbled into the boy-mind, it was more "good luck than good management." But 'tis the aim and, in no small degree, success of modern teaching, that the individual pupil-mind shall come into contact with that of the master; and in our model day-school all who will may get knowledge, and so get it as to keep it.

With

Again, we may observe a silent revolution in the workings of our philanthropic and religious organizations. clearer vision men show more practical faith in the axiom, that your whole is but the aggregate of its parts-that, improve your machinery as you may, you cannot make "silk purses out of sows' ears," and therefore must attend to the quality of your raw material. Houses built never so correctly in size, shape, and arrangement, are not rain-proof nor wind-tight if you have failed to get good bricks. Gun-boats made never so quickly and expensively, must rot, if built of green timber

and with villanously short bolts. Make your Association omnipotent-on paper: its real strength is the individual worth of those who form it.

Modern legislation does homage to Individuality. Men of all parties, with that political novelty, "a man of no party," tell us now, that the true end of government is not, as the Genoese say, "to straighten the legs of the grasshoppers"-not in mistaken sympathy to interfere with individuals, but to secure the utmost possible self-culture, selfhelp, self-action, compatible with the welfare of the whole. The State has too much approached the subject as did Alexander Diogenes, "What can I do for you?" and 'tis a hopeful omen that the self-reliance of modern Englishmen replies, "Nothing, save that you stand out of my way." Civilization herself is now rated more or less imperfect according to the power, freedom, knowledge, and goodness which lodge in the single individual. Whatever insulates the man encircles him with barriers of just and honourable respect, gives him his world, confesses sovereignty in it: so that man shall commerce with man in that sense of independence and self-respect with which king holds intercourse with king, is, in these days, held to be the citizen's right and the commonwealth's defence.

The worth of the Individual gains, also, in the sphere of modern religionism. Man has gone for too little-not seldom for cypher-in the teachings of some of our modern pulpits. The distinction between moral inability and natural inability has been overlooked, till moral helplessness has sounded very much like absolute worthlessness. Truth sent to humble has thus been travestied into aimless humiliation of human nature; as if man, fallen, had ceased to be man. "God in Christ," and the Spirit through Christ, are always and absolutely necessary to real soul-help; but Saviour-help accrues only where there is individual determined self-help.