have the thoughts of men widened, but also their moral consciousness, we will not say their heart, has deepened. Modern literature, as compared with that of last century, has nothing more distinctive in it than this,—that it has broken into deeper ground of sentiment and reflection, ground which had hitherto lain fallow, non-existent or unperceived. About the deeper soul-secrets, literary men of last century either did not greatly trouble themselves, or they practised a very strict reserve. But our own and the preceding age has seen an unveiling of the most inward-often of the most sacred feelings-which has sometimes gone beyond the limits of manliness and self-respect. This bringing to light of layers of consciousness hitherto concealed, though sometimes carried too far, has certainly enriched our literature with new wealth of moral content. In the best modern poetry it has shown itself by greater intensity and spirituality; in the highest modern novels, by delicacy of analysis, discrimination of the finer tints of feeling, variety and fine shading of character hitherto unknown; in the modern essay, by a subtleness and penetrative force which make the most perfect papers of Addison seem slight and trivial. It farther manifests itself in the growing love and keener appreciation of the few great world-poets, who are after all the finest embodiments of moral wisdom. It may be that so much ethical thought has been turned off into these channels that it has left less to be expended in the more systematic form of ethical science. It may be too, that, as the field of moral experience ^ widens, and the meaning of life deepens, and its problems become more complex, it demands proportionably stronger and rarer powers to gather up all this wealth, and shape it into systematic form. Certain it is that the modern time produces no such masters of moral wisdom for our day, as Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius were to the old world, or even as Bishop Butler was to his generation. Wide, many-sided, sensitive, deep, complex, as is the moral life in which we now move, if we would seek any philosophic guidance through its intricacies, any thinking which is at once solid, clear, practical, and instinct with life, we must turn, not to any modern treatise, but to the pages of these bygone worthies. What help ardent spirits, looking for guidance in our day, have found, has been not from the philosophers, but from some living poet, some giant of literature with no pretension to philosophy, or some inspired preacher. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Newman, Frederick Robertson, these, not the regular philosophers, have been the moral teachers of our generation, and to these young men have turned, to get from them what help they might. And now it seems that in these last days many, wearied out with straining after their high but

impalpable spiritualities, have betaken themselves to a style of teaching which, if it promises less, offers, as they think, something more systematic and more certain. In despair of spiritual truth, they are fain to fill their hunger with the husks of a philosophy which would confine all men's thoughts within the phenomenal world, and deny all knowledge that goes beyond the co-existences and successions of phenomena.

From aberrations like this perhaps no moral philosophy would have delivered men. But it would be well if, warned by such signs, it were to return closer to life and fact, deal more with things which men really feel; if, leaving general sentiments and s moral theories, it would attempt some true diagnosis of the very complex facts of human nature, of the moral maladies from which men suffer, the burdens they need removed, the aspirations which they can practically live by. Instead of this,instead of dealing with the actual and the ideal, which co-exist in man, and out of which, if at all, a harmony of life is to be woven, philosophers have been content to repeat a meagre and conventional psychology, taken mostly from books, not fresh from living hearts; or they have lost themselves in the metaphysical problems which no doubt everywhere underlie moral life, but which, pursued too far, distract attention from the vital realities. These two causes have exhausted the strength and the interest of moral study-either a cut-and-dried conventional psychology, or absorbing metaphysical discussion. The former, in which moral truths appeared shrivelled up, like plants in a botanist's herbarium, is the style of things you find in the most approved text-books of the last generation.

'Never before,' as one has smartly said, 'had human nature been so neatly dissected, so handily sorted, or so ornamentally packed up. The virtues and vices, the appetites, emotions, affections, and sentiments, stood each in their appointed corner, and with their appropriate label, to wait in neat expectation for the season of the professorial lectures, and the literary world only delayed their acquiesence in a uniform creed of moral philosophy till they should have arranged to their satisfaction whether the appetites should be secreted in the cupboard or paraded on the chimney-piece; or whether certain of the less creditable packets ought in law and prudence, or ought not in charity, to be ticketed "Poison." Everything was as it should be, or was soon to be so-differences were not too different, nor unanimity too unanimous -opinion did not degenerate into certainty, nor interest into earnestness, moral philosophy stood apart, like a literary gentleman of easy circumstances, from religion and politics, and truth itself was grateful for patronage, instead of being clamorous for allegiance. Types were delicate, margins were large, publishers were attentive, the intellectual world said it was intellectual, and the public acquiesced in the assertion. What more could scientific heart desire?'

This description may contain something of caricature, and yet there are books enough on moral science which justify it--books which no doubt have been successful in disgusting many with the subject of which they treat. Nor has moral philosophy suffered less from those deeper and more abstract discussions which have often in modern times been substituted for itself. Men of a profounder turn have so busied themselves with investigations of the nature of right, the law of duty, freedom and necessity, and suchlike hard matters, that these have absorbed all their interest and energy, and left none for the treatment of those concrete realities which make up the moral life of man. Not that such discussions can be dispensed with. They are alway necessary, never more so than now, when the spiritual ground of man's moral being is so often denied by materialistic or by merely phenomenal systems. It were well perhaps that they should be made a department by themselves, under the title of Metaphysic of Ethics, to be entered on by those who have special gifts for such inquiries. For when substituted for the whole or chief part of moral inquiry, they become 'unpractical discussions of a practical subject,' and as such alienate many from a study which, if rightly treated, would deepen their thought and elevate their character.

For what is the real object with which moral science deals? Every science has some concrete entity, some congeries of facts, which is called in a general way its subject-matter. Botany, we say, deals with plants or herbs, geology with the strata which form the earth's crust, astronomy with the stars and their motions, psychology with all the states of human consciousness. What, then, is the concrete entity with which moral science deals? It is not the active powers of man, nor the emotions, nor the moral faculty-not these, each or all. It is simply human character. This is the one great subject it has ever before it. About this it asks what is character, its nature, its elements, what influences make.it, what mar it, in what consists its perfection, what is its destiny? This may seem a very elementary statement, but it is quite needful to recur to it, and even to reiterate it, so much has it been lost sight of in the pursuit of side questions branching out of it. At the outset, before any analysis is begun, the student cannot too deeply receive the impression of character as a great and substantive reality. Some vague perception of character all men, of course, have. They are aware, whether they dwell on it or not, that men differ not only in face and form and outward circumstances, but in something more inward, they cannot exactly tell what. But farther than this confused notion most persons do not go. Others there are who see much more than this, who have a keen penetrating glance into every man they meet, apprehend his

bias, know what manner of man he is, and deal with him accordingly. This gift, so useful in practice, we call an eye to character; those who possess it, good judges of character. It is the same gift of discerning the quality of men which some persons have of judging of horses and other cattle. Hence Eschylus spoke of a good judge of character as προβατογνώμων. But this practical insight, so useful in business, and it may be to a certain extent in speculation, is something distinct from a fine and deep | perception of the higher moralities of character. Shrewd observers of human nature are often keen to discern the weaknesses and foibles of men, and even to exaggerate them, but slow to perceive those finer traits of heart which lie deeper. The apprehension of character with which the student should begin, and which his moral studies ought to deepen, is something very different from this. It is an eye open to see, a heart sensitive to feel the higher excellences of human nature, as they have existed, and still exist in the best of the race. It is a spirit the very opposite of that of the cynic, one which, while it looks steadily at the moral maladies and even basenesses into which men fall, yet, without being sentimental, loves more to contemplate the nobler than the baser side,—which, behind the commonplaces and trivialities, can seize life's deeper import, and look up, and aspire towards, the heights which have been attained, and are still attainable by man. To call out and strengthen in young minds such perceptions is one main end of moral teaching. No doubt there are influences which can do this more powerfully than any teaching. To have seen and known lives. which have embodied these fair qualities, to have felt the touch of their human goodness, to have companioned with those

'Whose soul the holy forms

Of young imagination hath kept pure ;'

to have fed on high thoughts, and been familiar with the examples of the heroes, the sages, the saints of all time, so as to believe that such lives were once on earth, and are not impossible even now, these are, beyond all teaching, the 'virtue-making' powers. But moral philosophy, though subordinate to these, is useless, if it does not supplement them; if it does not at once justify the heart's aspirations on grounds of reason, and strengthen while it enlightens the will to pursue them. Character, then, in the concrete, truthful, solid, pure, high, as better than gold, yea than fine gold, its revenue than choice silver,'-as the best thing we know of in all our experience, the one thing needful for a man, which to have got is to have got all, to have missed is to miss all, this cannot be too fully set before the learner at the outset, as the goal to which all his inquiries must tend, which alone gives his inquiries any value.

If this is not seen and grasped broadly and deeply at first, and its presence felt throughout all our reasoning, the discussion and analysis that follow become mere words-hair-splitting and logomachy.

To observe moral facts, and retain them steadily, requires a moral perception innate or trained, or both. Every one will remember Aristotle's saying that he should have been well trained in his habits who is to study aright things beautiful and just, and in short all moral subjects. For facts are the starting-point.' Quickness and tenacity of moral perception is not so much an intellectual as a moral gift. Nay, it is easy to overdo the intellectual part of the process. Too rigid logic, too exact defining and subdividing of that which often can be but inadequately defined, kills it. It is like trying to hold a sunbeam in an iron vice. The faculty that will best catch the many aspects and finer traits of character must be a nice combination, an even balance between mental keenness and moral emotion. It is the heart within the head which makes up that form of philosophic imagination most needed by the moralist. If moral character, in its higher aspects, were set thus truly and strongly before young minds, it would require little else to 1 counteract materialism. Such elevating views might be left, almost without reasonings, to work their natural effect on all who were susceptible of them.

Character has been defined as a completely fashioned will.' This, as has been said, is to be kept continually before us in all moral inquiry as its practical end,—that which gives it solidity. But, when once we have looked at it steadily, whether as it has existed actually in the best men, or in the ideal, the question at once arises, How is this right character to be attained? How is the good that is within to be made ascendant,-the less good to be subordinated, the evil to be cast out? Of the numerous questions which this practically suggests, as to the standard by which character is to be tested, the foundation of moral goodness, and many more, the simplest and most obvious is to ask, What is in man? What are the various elements of man's nature? Thus we are at once landed in psychology. And so it has happened, that almost all great ethical thinkers, whatever their method, even when it depends mainly on certain great a priori conceptions, have attempted some enumeration of the various parts or elements which make up human life. Begun by Plato and Aristotle, carried on by the Stoics, revived in modern times by Hobbes, not neglected even by demonstrative Spinoza, this way of proceeding by observation of living men, and of our own minds, formed the whole staple of Bishop Butler's method. It is strange as we read the first fetches into human nature of those early thinkers, with how much more living power they