themselves off from the benefits which they might derive from other Christian teachers, whereas the Christian should make all sources of help his own; all are his right. Then the idea of the Christian's possession takes hold upon his mind, and his thought suddenly expands: Yes, all things are yours; not only Paul, Apollos, and Cephas, but the world and life and death, things present and things to come, all are yours, if ye are Christ's, for Christ is God's (1 Cor. iii. 21-23). The vivacity and power of Paul's letters are well described by Weiss in the following just and forcible language: "It is certain that we never find the cold objectivity of the author, because the living warmth of the letter-writer throbs in all his epistles. Hence the frequent addresses, the ever-recurring questions with which he draws out his details. Paul is able powerfully to move, but also to lift up and comfort; high moral earnestness is always associated in him with depth of religious feeling, which often finds vent in inspired utterance. He is not without passion, he lashes the weaknesses and errors of his readers without pity, he is able mortally to wound his opponents, and does not even despise the weapons of irony and satire. But the softest tones of the mind are likewise at his disposal, the ebullition of righteous anger softens down to the most touching expression of heartfelt love; he can speak the language of deeply wounded love as well as of most ardent longing, of exulting gratitude as well as of suppressed pain." 1 YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW HAVEN. George B. Stevens. "THE STORY OF WILLIAM AND LUCY SMITH." 2 THE two lives, whose delightful memorials have been gathered in Mr. Merriam's charming volume, possessed the originality of genius as well as that originality which accompanies the highest culture. In both there was the vision of the poet, to which in one was added the insight of the philosopher, and in the other an affection the depth and purity of whose devotion offer us a 1 Int. to N. T., i. 212. 2 The Story of William and Lucy Smith. Edited by George S. Merriam. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1889. [The writer of this article was for many years a friend and correspondent of William and Lucy Smith. - Editors.] new measure of the capacity of human hearts, and the beauty and dramatic intensity of whose adoring sorrow should give to this record of their lives a permanent place in the literature of the affections as a veritable idyl of the heart. It is now a full generation ago that a warmly appreciative review of " Thorndale," by President Porter, in the "New Englander," gave a considerable circle of American readers their first introduction to William Smith. There were probably few who read the review who did not end by reading also the book and by finding themselves drawn into sympathetic acquaintance not only with the thinker, but with the man. For unique as was the book in many other respects, it was especially so in that singular contradiction by which this shyest of mortals writing out of a seclusion and a loneliness in which he deemed himself unapproachable could scarcely take pen in hand without a self-revelation whose most charming feature is the naìveté of its utter unconsciousness. But the book was remarkable not only in a personal quality which made all who were taken into its confidences friends, but yet more in the fact that with a profound and sympathetic acquaintance with the leading directions of English thought there was united the most complete individual independence in his relations to all the schools and coteries which they represent. The volume is mainly in the form of a dialogue. On its pages the Catholic churchman defends with a dexterous skill and a keenness of insight hardly surpassed by a Newman the positions of the Roman communion, while the philosophical skeptic, the materialist, and the poetic enthusiast of humanity give the most fearless and the most radical exposition of their own thought united with the frankest and most complete recognition of that of their opponents. Indeed, if we were to select any single trait as the especial characteristic of the author of "Thorndale," it would be a sympathetic appreciation so thorough and a candor and sincerity so absolute as to enable him to present sentiments and opinions most opposed to his own in language so truthful as to commend it for adoption by those very opponents themselves. The object sought at times seems to be that of showing that only by the successive development of those antagonisms of thought which lie of necessity in differences of temperament, in the limitations of human faculties and the gradual growth of human knowledge, and in their approximate resolution in higher forms of expression, can man approach his ever unattainable goal of absolute truth. The book lacks symmetry and any close organic connection between its different parts, but in avoiding the compactness of a treatise the author has made room for that profusion in which he has poured into it the accumulations of his note-books upon the profoundest themes of human thought and human destiny. A hundred detached thoughts, similes, and suggestions precede the somewhat random and miscellaneous discussion which constitutes the bulk of the volume at whose close we find developed in a more detailed and connected scheme an exposition of the laws of human progress and glimpses of a finally perfected human society. If a certain degree of aimlessness be charged against the main discussion in the failure to attain to positive results and the apparent inconsequence in which we are left at its close, it is a charge which the author can very well afford to share with another theological discussion the most notable in all literature-in which we are left also at its termination in a like inconsequence, and in which both Job and his friends are silenced without being answered. But "Thorndale" had a larger significance than is contained in its delicate appreciation of the diverse directions of thought and of sentiment through which the great problem of human life is seeking its solution. It gave a fresh statement to the problem itself. It lifted the ideal of a perfected human society into a prominence it had seldom received. It put individual life into its legitimate relation to the life of the whole, and it considered both in their necessary connection with the past history and the future destiny of humanity. It contained, however, no anticipation of a Darwinian evolution of society. The forces are ever those of intelligence acting under conscience and in freedom, toward a definitely conceived ideal object. It would be difficult to find anywhere a more thoughtful analysis of the elements of human progress, or a more cautious and rational estimate of its probable results. The view possessed little which could be termed original. Its most striking characteristic was the constant and reverential recognition of the divine Providence as the immanent principle of what from another point of view may be regarded as a natural process. That conception of human history which from time immemorial had been fostered by the church was one in which catastrophes of divine judgment alternated with miraculous upheavals of divine redemption, and was appropriately closed by a vision of miraculous millennial transformation. Such a final consummation stood in no relation of effect to any intelligent forces of human causation. It was, indeed, in the more prevalent thought of those by whom its coming was most ardently anticipated, to be immediately preceded by general convulsion and disaster. To this view of the process of history that of the individual corresponded. Here, too, there was no orderly, natural, or rational development, but a series of more or less arbitrary crises. A crisis of miraculous transformation at any period of his earthly life assured to the favored individual, even in articulo mortis, a farther crisis of miraculous and blessed translation at its close, to whatever low level of commonplace or of ignominious and cowardly failure it might have sunk in the mean time. It would not be too much to affirm that the light thrown by science upon the early history of the planet, and upon the first life on its surface, has not done more to change and to turn into new channels the growing religious thought of the world, than have more rational conceptions of the future of humanity to change the whole attitude of man toward the race of which he is a part. It all seems commonplace enough now in the review, but to some of us even thirty years ago it lifted the whole horizon. Life under the stars could never again be the same with life under the conditions and limitations of miraculous convulsions whether of disaster or retrieval. Not only did the brotherhood of men and the fraternity of the race assume new significance and the responsibility they involve a new meaning, but even more profound was the transformation it wrought in the conception of a personal character in which individual life does not reach its consummation in the assurance of personal safety or even in the passive graces of resignation and trust, but has for its goal an ever-increasing reflection of all the attributes of wisdom, power, and beauty which the Creator has manifested in the universe. It is true that revulsion of feeling against the harsher features of the Calvinistic creed taught him in his boyhood threw William Smith into life-long revolt against the Christian revelation with which, in his mind, that creed was identified; true, that in consequence of that rejection the shadow of a great doubt continued to the last to becloud for him even the hope of personal immortality. But it is not from the side of yet lingering doubt in view of the suffering of the world, or of revulsion of sentiment from a Redeemer apparently failing to redeem and leaving the majority to a hopeless retribution, nor yet from the exclusion of the magical from his view of an intelligible universe, that we can best understand the contribution of William Smith to the progressive thought of our times. It is rather in the clearness of his perception and the strength of his conviction, which grew with every year of his prolonged contemplation, that the suffering of the world is immeasurably overborne by its happiness, that good is the ever-increasing outcome of the conquest of evil, that only through that consciousness which is developed by the struggle with sin can the soul take on its noblest attributes of character, and, finally, that a world in which character is the supreme design and the supreme result must be the creation of a God not only inspiring awe and reverence, but deserving also our highest allegiance and deepest affection, that we find the strength of those profound convictions which rise so often into eloquent expression in his pages. In "Gravenhurst," published five years later, appear in riper development and fuller illustration, thoughts and positions already contained, at least in suggestion, in the earlier volume. The book, though again in the form of a dialogue, presents the fullest and most sustained argument to be found in Mr. Smith's writings. Scarcely anywhere has ethical development, as a natural process, received more elaborate or more convincing exposition. Little time is spent in the overthrow of opposing theories. In such clearness and simplicity does the whole field lie before him, so little is he influenced by the complicated mysteries in which the real issue has so often been concealed and the logomachy which has so largely overlaid it, that we wonder how men can so long have lost their way. That the animal must of necessity precede the intellectual, and the intellectual the moral, in the order of their development, is to him too self-evident for argument. The instincts and propensities necessary to sustain existence he assumes to be elements as essential in the human being as are irritability or contractibility in the simplest cells of the infusoria. Without them life is inconceivable. But the activities to which they give rise are already habits before they can become objects of perception, still more before they can become subjects of consciousness and have established themselves as the practically controlling forces of the man; before they can be accompanied by any ideas of their wider and higher relations to his own life as a whole, or to that of his fellows. But of these ideas of relation also it must in turn be said that they are quantitative long before they can become qualitative.. The child sees with regret that it has secured for itself but one apple when two lay equally near its hands long before it feels remorse in the perception that in grasp ing a second it has left none for its playmate. Still later does it become conscious of guilt in its disobedience to parental author |