To rouse, to urge; and, with the will, confer Of order and of good. was a Many stanzas to the same effect, but with an infusion of passion and energy of protest, to which Wordsworth stranger, are to be found scattered through the works of Lord These verses may Tennyson-In Memoriam' especially. stand as specimens: No man in England has done more for literary culture, the habit of using words to add an imaginative intensity and colour to the embodiment of truths of nature, than the gifted Professor who would fain eliminate literary study from the course of education. It cannot be said that he and his friends are in this far-sightedly self-interested. The full appreciation of their writings depends upon literary culture, well supported by logic and mathematics. If it would not seem too much of a heresy to say so, the defect of the literary faculty proper, or of humanizing and imaginative energy in Mr. Darwin, has, pace Mr. Grant Allen, done not a little to limit the power of his books in certain directions. They are cold, and without atmosphere-a most masterly array of facts for future philosophers to work on, rather than great literary performances. They are encyclopædias of the matters of which they treat, rather than final words' on the subject. It is because of this defect in Mr. Darwin that Mr. Arnold can innocently afford to discharge on him one of his shafts of brilliant, highbred banter, such, however, as were more numerous and biting in former volumes than in this. One piece of natural knowledge is added to another, and others are added to that, and at last we come to propositions so interesting as Mr. Darwin's famous proposition that our ancestor was a hairy quadruped ... Interesting, indeed, these results of science are, important they are, and we should all of us be acquainted with them. But what I now wish you to mark is, that we are still, when they are propounded to us and we receive them, we are still in the sphere of intellect and knowledge. And for the generality of men there will be found, I say, to arise, when they have duly taken in the proposition that their ancestor was a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits,' there will be found to arise an invincible desire to relate this proposition to the sense in us for conduct, and to the sense in us for beauty. But this the men of science will not do for us, and will hardly even profess to do. They will give us other pieces of knowledge, other facts about other animals and their ancestors, or about plants, or about stones, or about stars; and they may finally bring to those great 'general conceptions of the universe, which are forced upon us all,' says Professor Huxley, by the progress of physical science.' But still it will be knowledge only which they give us; knowledge not put for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty, and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while, unsatisfying, wearying.. us If there is to be separation and option between humane letters on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other, the great majority of mankind, all who have not exceptional and overpowering aptitudes for the study of nature, would do well, I cannot but think, to choose to be educated in humane letters rather than in the natural sciences. Letters will call out their being at more points, will make them live more. ... And so we at last find, it seems we find, flowing in favour of the humanities the natural and necessary stream of things which seemed against them when we started. The hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits,' this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters. Nay, more; we seem finally to be even led to the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in his nature, also, a necessity for Greek. Mr. Arnold is therefore strong in his position when he grounds his claims for literary culture on the constitution of human nature itself. The error on his part in dealing with Professors Huxley and Tyndall is, in our opinion, that his love of sprightly Arnoldian banter has led him to ignore their practice, or better part, in condemnation of their theory, or worse part. Dr. Tyndall, in the acknowledgements of indebtedness to Emerson and Carlyle, which he has made in sufficiently forcible terms, himself indicates the point from which, as we think, the most effective serious rejoinder could be made. There is an oft-quoted remark of a great man to the effect that in his youth he had planned to write a satire on men, but that in his age he would favour an apology for them. The true morale of criticism of social and moral matters, lies here. Men are not to be driven even to their good, but are only to be led; and he is more an egotist than a philanthropist, however gifted as a writer, who does not perceive this more and more and act upon it. There must always remain a suspicion that a man who reproves the faults and the shortcomings of others in such a manner as only to draw attention to himself, unconsciously comes to have a vested interest in the continued existence of the very evils and vices he professes to deplore. Mr. Carlyle, with his grimly frank and plainly avowed conviction that mankind were mostly fools, and Mr. Matthew Arnold, with his playful banter and ineffably superior airs, meet together at certain points in far closer affinity than the admirers of either would admit. Mr. Arnold's style has, at all events, greatly suffered by his habit of indirect allusion, of innuendo, and the trick of packing the most essential things into parentheses. This we could demonstrate by a succession of instances if time and space allowed-instances of solecism and even of error. In the present work, notwithstanding all the wistful care that has been devoted to bring each period up to the highest point of polish, and to gain harmony in the whole, plain and simple laws of style are violated-due, almost entirely, to the inversions and parentheses, which the habit of playful banter has encouraged and confirmed in him. On these, in view of such an advance in toleration and in sympathy, as we have pointed out, it would be ungracious in us to dwell at this time of day. We can only express the hope that Mr. Arnold may not fall back into his old habit; that he will remember, as he writes, the confession of failings due to youth and inexperience which he made to his American hearers, and that he will persevere in being at least as frank and honest to his own countrymen as to them. Above all, let him be charitable and considerate-ready to favour the best construction. Charity, even at this date, should begin at home. He has great influence in many directions; let him use it with kindly purpose and aim, remembering that- O! it is excellent To have a giant's power; but it is tyrannous And, finally, let him refresh himself by more frequent excursions into the realm of poetry, and delight and elevate us with poems and songs which will, perhaps, help us more effectively to relate knowledge to conduct and to beauty than all his critical strictures. Such a lord is Art, And Beauty such a mistress of the world.. ALEX. H. JAPP. ART. III.-Ignatius and Polycarp. The Apostolic Fathers. Part II. S. Ignatius-S. Polycarp. Revised Texts, with Introductions, Notes, Dissertations, and Translations. By J. B. LIGHTFOOT, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., Bishop of Durham. 1885. Three Vols. Macmillan and Co. It is impossible to lay too strong an emphasis on the intense significance of the new direction that was given to the investigation of ecclesiastical history about the middle of the present century, and which is being followed with increasing persistency in our own day. The sayings and doings of the later fathers formerly usurped an inordinate share of the field of vision; now those topics are thrust into the shade, while by tacit consent all eyes are fixed on the earliest age of Christianity with a wistful eagerness hitherto unfelt. less this change is due in part to the provocation of antagonists. No longer content to waste their energies in attacking the shifting outworks of traditional theology, the Doubt leaders of the anti-Christian crusades have brought up their engines for a grand assault on the citadel of the faith, with this happy result, that defenders of the truth of Christianity are thereby compelled to recall their forces from stray paths of theological knight-errantry in order to concentrate them on central positions. But the new turn is also to be largely attributed to the growth of a truer sense of proportion. For no obscure period of history can fascinate us with problems of deeper interest than those which cluster round the times immediately after the close of the New Testament era. The course of Christianity was then like that of a mountain torrent which, having displayed its upper reaches in clear sunlight, suddenly plunges into a chasm so profound that the very roar of its waters is hushed until, only after a considerable interval, it emerges in the plain A full-fed river winding slow. It is not as though the interval were one of torpor and stagnation which we could afford to pass over as easily as we might ignore whole centuries of Chinese legend without the least detriment to a complete picture of the Celestial Empire. The Church was in no way overwhelmed by the cataclysm which swept away the delusive hopes of the Jews. On the contrary, if she has left us no annals of the close of the first century and the opening of the second, it must be because she was then too busily engaged in laying the foundation for all the world's future history to care about recording her own present achievements. The half century which followed the destruction of Jerusalem was certainly a time of healthy activity, as the evidences both of external growth and of internal development, which appear as soon as Christianity comes out into the daylight again, plainly prove. Now, although our resources for understanding the sub-apostolic age are meagre and fragmentary at the best, they have decidedly improved of late, and that in two directions. In the first place, our stores of ancient manuscripts, &c., have been enriched by more than one priceless treasure; and, secondly, the critical apparatus for extracting from these stores the last grain of information has been developed into a scientific instrument of the finest delicacy. It is not too much to assert that no generation since the age of Jerome has been better equipped with materials for the study of the dawn of Christianity than the generation now living; and it is quite indisputable that, owing to the cultivation in our own day of an entirely new faculty-that of the historic sense-no generation |