which he has added new lustre to an Oxford chair, adorned within living memory by Milman and Keble, has lately renewed his advocacy of Culture as a meliorating power in society. This lecture, like all that Mr. Arnold writes, is instinct with ideas, not indeed formalized into system, and with no parade of philosophy, but more living, more provocative of thought, than much of what passes for philosophy amongst us. From the light banter and playful humour with which he conducts his assaults, there is a danger that minds of the heavy-pounding sort may not recognise his real earnestness. Anew in this lecture he reiterates his assertion that the great enemy to all that is high, pure, and spiritual, is British Philistinism. By Philistinism, he elsewhere explains, is meant, on the side of beauty and taste, vulgarity; on the side of morals, hardness and coarseness; on the side of mind and spirit, unintelligence. Mr. Arnold, who, from a more intimate knowledge of Continental life and manners, is better able than many to estimate British society, thinks that it is rank with this Philistinism. And of the British people he seems to give the great middle class, and the upper part of the lower class, credit for the larger share of it. That the thing he speaks of is no chimera, but a really existing evil, that stands in the way of all moral elevation, no one with an eye to observe what is going on around him, and some things it may be in his own heart, can for a moment doubt. Only it may be doubted whether, when we trace the thing to its root, any class of society can be justly credited with a monopoly of it. Mr. Arnold of course speaks chiefly of English society, with which he is best acquainted. But we in Scotland cannot claim any exemption from the plague of Philistinism. Our Scottish Philistine, however, has not so much of the third element-non-intelligence. Indeed, he has a large fund of intelligence of a sort, but that so raw and harsh a sort, as only to bring into more offensive prominence the other two elements. So little can knowledge alone really educate a man, that sometimes even the very highest scientific attainments may be found combined with the true Philistian character. Mere knowledge, without those influences that make a man generous, gentle, humane, is to the man within the man a very doubtful gain. But besides raw brusquerie of intellect, triumphant industrialism and rapidly gained wealth tend this same way. For Philistinism is a plant that springs up rapidly under the sun of material prosperity. But the truth is, it belongs to no one soil, or set of circumstances. Wherever there is a man pre-occupied with thoughts about himself, and, as a consequence, without thought for others, there is the germ of Philistinism, whether in a coarser form, or a more refined.

Where there is a heart at leisure from itself, however rustic and unlettered, there Philistinism cannot be.

For the antidote to this evil, the solvent to break up the horny crust that hardens round the hearts of men, Mr. Arnold looks to Culture; and by culture he means much more than has usually been meant by that word. Not only æsthetic and intellectual elements he makes it include, but moral also, and even religious. It has generally been desired as rendering an intelligent being more intelligent;' but besides this, Mr. Arnold regards it in another aspect, as the means 'to make reason and the will of God prevail.' To the former aspect, which regards rather the improvement of each man's self, this view of Mr. Arnold's would add a social and a moral side, which includes, as a main element of culture, the love of our neighbour, and the desire in a man to leave the world better than he found it. What is new in Mr. Arnold's view is the emphasis with which he insists that culture is not only the endeavour to see things as they are-to know the order of the world as it exists-but to know it as the Will of God, and to make this will prevail.

With great power and fine irony, Mr. Arnold shows how in Great Britain, at this hour, men everywhere, absorbed in the pursuit of the means of life, worshipping the machinery, lose sight of the ends-those ends which alone give to the machinery any value. Immersed in love of coal, steam, wealth, population, bodily health and strength, they fail to find true wellbeing. They find instead the character of Philistines in all its hideousness, as the result of this worship of machinery, this neglecting of the spiritual ends which machinery ought to serve. In rebuke of all this, he reiterates with Epictetus, and how many more, that the formation of the spirit and character is our one real concern. This is familiar teaching-often taught, ever forgotten,' What will it profit a man . . . The spiritual ends, however, to which he exhorts, the ideal which he holds up, contains in it fully as much of the Greek as of the Hebrew element. A complete and harmonious inward perfection, a character combining sweetness and light, the two noblest things we knowsweetness, or the love of beauty, harmony, goodness-light, or the large and high intelligence open to all truth, these are the ends that make men's real welfare; these he urges them to seek, and to make all their other seekings subserve.

In much of this teaching Mr. Arnold does real service to moral progress. In preaching once more the doctrine of moral ends and means, he is following in the path of all the sages, only with a language which the present hour will understand. But it is because we so entirely side with him as against his

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opponents, the many enemies of culture, because we see the existence of the evil he warns of, the Philistinism already at our throats, and love the excellence he loves, that we are desirous that no mistake should be made about the right grounds and true method of eradicating the one and of attaining the other. Mr. Arnold makes religion an ingredient in culture, a means, perhaps the highest means, toward culture, yet a means. He thinks that culture, in its ideal of a 'har monious expansion of all the human powers,' goes beyond religion, as it is generally conceived among us. Again, he says that culture adding to itself the religious idea of a devout energy, is destined to transform and govern' religion. Culture the end, religion the means. But there are things which, because they are ultimate ends in themselves, refuse to be employed as means, and if attempted to be so employed, lose their essential character. Religion is one, and the foremost of these things. Obedience, conformity of the finite and imperfect will of man to the infinite and perfect will of God, this, which is the essence of religion, is an end in itself, the highest end which we can think of; and it cannot be sought as a means to an ulterior end without being at once destroyed. This is an end, or rather the end in itself, to which culture and all other ends are only means. And here in culture, as we saw in pleasure, the great ethic law will be found to hold, that the abandoning of it as an end, in obedience to a higher, more supreme end, will be made the very condition of securing it. Stretch the idea of culture and of the perfection it aims at wide as you will-and Mr. Arnold has widened and deepened it to the utmost-you cannot, while you make it your last end, rise clear of the original self-reference that lies at its root; this you cannot get rid of, unless you go out of culture, and beyond it, abandoning it as the end, and sinking it into what it really is--a means, though perhaps the highest means, towards full and perfect duty. No one ever really became beautiful by aiming at beauty. Beauty comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from deeper sources than itself. If culture, or rather the ends of culture sweetness and light-are to be healthy natural growths, they must come unconsciously, as results of conformity to the will of God, sought not for any end but itself. On the other hand, culture, making its own idea of perfection the end and religion the means, would degenerate into an unhealthy artificial plant, open to the charges urged against it by its enemies.

But it will be said, Have not religious agencies of all kinds been busily at work for the last three centuries, and behold the result! In the warmest advocates of religion, bitterness and division; in the great mass of the thriving classes, rawness,

narrowness, vulgarity; in the lowest portion, barbarism and profanity. Has not the religious idea been tried to the uttermost, and found wanting? Intensify to the uttermost 'the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion,' will this cure the inherent Philistinism of our people, achieve the ends which culture longs for? No one can pretend that the religious organizations, as they now are, have done this, or are on the way to do it. So much is their spiritual strength spent in enforcing sectarian and divisive ideas. Sectarianism, whatever else it may have done, has certainly not promoted the harmonious expansion of human nature which Mr. Arnold aims at. But there are signs enough that its day is waning. On all sides we see the new wine—a purer Christian spirit, new and strong as ever, ready to burst the old bottles, if only new ones were at hand to preserve it. Amid all our narrowness, and limitations, and contradictions, is not the horizon visibly widening around us? And as it widens, and as social philosophies one after another try to keep pace with it, and fail, the adaptation of Christ to fill the hearts of all men individually, and the necessity of Him to become the cementing bond of renewed humanity, will become more than ever apparent. In subservience to Him is the right place for culture. Large service lies ready for it to do, if it only understand its true calling, to be the minister of a faith higher than itself. As an instrumentality of this kind, culture may become a most beneficent power, probably the power most needed in this age. But it must be as means, not as end; as servant, not as master.

We have attempted to show, as far as our space allowed, how a new and more vital force is imported into morality, if we can regard the abstract moral law of ethical science as absorbed into the All-righteous, All-loving Personal Will which Christianity reveals. In doing so we have touched, and that very imperfectly, we are well aware, but one side of a manysided, indeed of an exhaustless, problem. When man's natural moral sentiments are confronted with the Christian revelation, many other questions arise, some of them more fundamental, though none perhaps more practical, than the one here discussed. Of these fundamental inquiries one of the foremost is, how far man naturally possesses within himself certain moral sentiments which serve as criteria by which the truth of a revelation may be judged. On this grave question we cannot even enter at the close of this long discussion. Only we would remark, that the moral nature in man must be that to which any objective religion, which claims to be universal, must mainly make its appeal. Else man has no internal standard at all by which

to try any religion which claims to be received; and on purely external grounds, it is conceivable that a religion, teaching immorality, might have much to say for itself. Christianity, at first, though it came with other evidence besides the moral, yet rested its claim mainly on the moral ground, and must do so more and more, as man's moral perceptions, through its agency, along with other agencies at work, become, age by age, deeper and purer.

The appeal to a power of judging in man is made in many different forms by our Lord Himself:- Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?' St. Paul, too, says that he strove in all he taught to commend himself to every man's conscience. And the more either individuals or the race advance in spiritual intelligence, the more readily will they respond to this appeal in preference to all others. Morality and Christianity have, for eighteen centuries, acted and reacted on each other, the outward teaching quickening the inward perceptions, and these, when quickened, purifying men's apprehensions of the outward truth. And these two have become so interwoven that we believe it to be now impossible to separate them in the moral consciousness of mankind, and to say, this was drawn from the one source, and that from the other. Christianity, from the first, appealing partly to men's natural desire to escape from the dreaded consequences of sin, partly to the moral longing for righteousness, never wholly dead in the race, has, through this mingling of prudential and moral motives, elevated the best of mankind, and made their moral perceptions what they now are. And these moral perceptions, thus refined, react on the objective religion, and require ever more stringently that the truths presented by it shall be not only moral, that is, conformable to all that is purest and best in man, but that they shall complement this, strengthen, elevate it. They require not only that nothing which is un-moral shall be taught as true of God and His dealings with man, but that all which is taught concerning Him shall be in the highest conceivable degree righteous, shall be such as to lay hold of and to cherish whatever susceptibility of righteousness there is in man, and carry it on to perfection. This is so obvious that it seems a truism. It is so readily assented to that no one would think of denying it when stated in this general way. Yet it is painful to think how much and how persistently it has often been lost sight of in popular religious teaching, and with how disastrous consequences. We are quite aware of the difficulties which this principle has to meet when turned on certain points in the elder and more rudimentary forms of revelation. To solve these fairly would require a combination of moral and historical insight, with various kinds of