perfection but of official greatness, when he assumes in his own name such a prerogative as the forgiveness of sins. Such assumption could not have been suggested by the disciples, slow of heart to believe. An ambitious motive is utterly at variance with the facts of his life. Neither could heated enthusiasm have carried away one whose words and actions were so eminently those of deliberate selfpossession. Was it a mistake—an overrating of the real compass of his mission? How is such error reconcilable with the great truth he has confessedly brought into the world? Was he who surpassed earth's wisest under most grave delusion all the while? Again, in his whole life there is a symmetry, a oneness, altogether free from the partiality which stamps with imperfection our most conspicuous human virtues. The humanity is complete; no one attribute is sacrificed to another. His life was a manifestation, not an effort.' If we look to his motive we find that obloquy cannot provoke, that applause cannot win forth, the slightest exhibition of self. His whole life is expended in blessing and originating blessing.

It is not difficult to imagine the reply which will be advanced by one desirous of avoiding the conclusion to which the author would reduce him. Such an objector will answer, I admit that ordinary principles, such as those which serve to explain other facts of history, experience, and observation, fail to explain these to account for the attainment of so much perfection under so much external disadvantage. But I call in an extraordinary principle. I am prepared to grant that Christ did receive for his great work extraordinary protection, illumination, power, spiritual culture, from the hand of the Supreme. Who shall set a bound to the divine bestowments to men ?'

Who indeed ?' we answer. If Jesus was merely man, how is it that there have been no others like him? If he, despite such hindrance, could be raised to such height—to absolute moral perfection -why have no others, under circumstances far more kindly, ever reached attainments to be compared with his ? It is a question, as Mr. Young properly reminds his readers, not of mere official adap

tation; it relates to personal excellence to the great cause of truth and virtue in the world.' What God did for that cause in this one instance, he might have done in others—in a succession of similar manifestations. The exclusive possession of such excellence in this one case points to a something which rendered that possible to Him which was not possible to any other, or else the goodness of God must be impugned. Incarnation at once involves such a separation-such a constitutional disparity, between him and all others. Mysterious as the doctrine is, it inflicts no gratuitous mystery upon men; it removes an importunate difficulty. It furnishes the only answer to questions which the thoughtful mind cannot fail to urge. Recognise in Christ a being who appears once for all time to save, in the great crisis of the world's history,-one possessing not merely a higher office, but a higher incommunicable nature, and his spiritual perfection is an anomaly no longer. It is then a postulate, not a problem. The miraculous circumstances of his appearance and of his disappearance from among men assume their due aspect of fitness. Miracle satisfies a natural demand.

Such, in its outline, is the argument fairly founded on the admitted facts of Christ's earthly life. Like the reasoning which sustains the proof for revelation as a whole, that which maintains this section of it is essentially cumulative in its character. With the reflecting it will possess the more weight on this account. Comprehensive as it is, it constitutes, moreover, but one line of proof in favour of the Divinity of Christ. But it takes that course which a large proportion of the unsettled or inquiring mind among us will be best disposed to follow. Whether such readers may choose to regard Mr. Young as a guide or as an antagonist, they will find him honest and trustworthy in the one capacity, and candid and courteous in

the other.

VOL. II.

I

LEWES'S LIFE AND WORKS OF GOETHE.*

THE

HE successful biographer of Goethe must possess no ordinary combination of qualities and accomplishments. He has to portray a literary career of twice the common duration, and of seven times the usual versatility. He has to penetrate and analyse a mind which found an equal interest in the serene creations of art and in the intricate details of science. He has to criticise the contents of a long row of volumes, claimed on the one side by the Theatre, on the other by the Museum. He has to estimate the workmanship of the faculty which combines, and of the faculty which dissects-productions about which the brush and the scalpel, the chisel and the microscope, have been employed by turns. For where is the admirer of Goethe who never dreamed that Götz appeared to him holding the 'typical plant' in his iron hand; that Mephistopheles exhibited, with a grin, the intermaxillary bone; and that the tears of Werther were a shower, on which a rainbow spread itself, to illustrate the Theory of Colours ? Once more-he who would give us a life of Goethe has to transport himself, body and soul, into the alien world of German society and German literature. He has to give us thence an accurate survey of the inflowing tendencies of the time which filled and stimulated the mind of Goethe during a period of intense excitement and prodigal production. He must show us next how the outflowing streams from that fertilizing genius ran among the hills, as rivulets from some lofty tarn, and

* The Life and Works of Goethe; with Sketches of his Age and Contemporaries. From published and unpublished sources. By G. H. LEWES. Two vols.

Nutt.

widely watered all the plains of Germany. And this our biographer must do without losing his hold upon the interest of English readers, to most of whom the names of the second-rate German literati are names, and nothing more.

In the case of Mr. Lewes, the tastes and the acquirements thus requisite are assembled together with a felicity somewhat rare in the annals of biography. He is himself a man of letters. An acute critic, he possesses, at the same time, no mean power of original production. His literary knowledge is extensive; his taste catholic. The masterpieces of the modern literature of Europe are familiar to him in their original languages. His mind is clear-sighted and singularly agile. Such characteristics fit him readily to enter into the cosmopolitan manysidedness of Goethe. Stoicism is odious to

him: enthusiasm is apt to awaken his quick sense of the ludicrous : speculation he will analyse for you to a nicety, and fling away the shreds as worthless. Here again is an advantage for the biographer of Goethe. The artist and the sage of Weimar-so little speculative, so active, and yet so calm-is a man after his own heart. Mr. Lewes will be sure to erect no austere ideal to the disadvantage of his hero. He need never take a step out of his way to admire, to sympathize with, or to defend him. What many have blamed as Epicurean indifference in Goethe, would have been praised by Mr. Lewes as good sense, had he never contributed a single stone to his monument. In Goethe's preference of natural science to metaphysics our author shared, long before the design of the present work had entered his mind. Mr. Lewes lays before his readers an adequate supply of facts, and with sufficient fairness, to enable them to judge for themselves concerning the true character of the poet. So long as a biographer will do this, it is better for his biography that he should err by temperament, rather in the same direction as his hero than in the opposite. We have all an instinctive feeling that the estimate of kindred minds concerning us is most likely to be the true one. For love gives insight; and the labour of love is,

for the most part, a successful labour.

One excellent feature in this book will render it no small service -the care which has been taken not to demand too much from the reader. No pains have been spared to render into English, in a manner, not German words merely,-but German life. The story is told in such a way that we are insensibly placed in the position necessary to its full enjoyment. The survey of German literature, the descriptions of Weimar scenery and Weimar society, are only the most conspicuous among many similar helps and illustrations, welcome to every reader. The style is clear and sparkling; the interest never flags; the book cannot be laid aside unfinished. This Life and Works of Goethe will live among the best biographies in our language. Let the reader consider, too, what this work might have been. With many writers, the two volumes must have swollen to six. Let any one consult the list, in the Appendix, of works called forth from the German press by Werther alone. Let the correspondence, the controversies, the commentaries, be called to mind, that have shot forth, taken root, and propagated about that gigantic banyan trunk, the Sämmtliche Werke. We shudder as we think of what we have escaped, and we style thrice-blessed Mr. Lewes's power of shelving the uninteresting. Suppose we had been lost in a forest of filed letters;—the Germans of those days wrote such letters-interminable, after-æsthetic-tea-in-select-circles-to-be-read lucubrations, of inscrutable profundity. Suppose we had been blinded and swallowed up in such a sand-whirlwind of minute and unintelligible facts as some writers delight to send flying about men's ears. How miserable the reader's fate, had he been swept away among the icebergs of allegory to those frigid and misty realms where move symbolic forms, bright only with the prismatic hues of an idle rhetoric! Under the guidance of Mr. Lewes we travel swiftly, always on terra firma, in sober daylight, in clear sunshine, seeing afar the mountains of German erudition, and hearing untroubled (as an occasional rumble underground) some reverberation from its deepest utterance.

The Germans themselves are emphatically acknowledging their