not a few, and of which Clough and William Smith are typical. In their most troubled periods, we see neither of them failing in moral fidelity. In each there was always recognized by his associates a rare quality of purity and of sweetness. There was forbidden to them such kinds of beneficent labor as are wrought by the reformer of society or the apostle of an ardent faith. They were withdrawn to lonelier tasks, tasks which even to their own hearts seemed often to promise no outcome of good to the world. But there is a virtue of silence and humility, which may be not less noble than the zeal of the reformer or the apostle. By the unquestioning believer, any religion which the speculative inquirer may possess is likely to be regarded as cold. Whatever excellence it may have, he thinks, it cannot know the tenderness, the ardor, which belong to the worshipper of Christ. We are told that a young niece of William Smith, with the self-assertion of early youth, once tried to force upon him some theological discussion, and by way of reply he put into her hand these verses: There is a sweetness in the world's despair, When, severed quite from earthly hope or care, The crown, the palm, of saints in Paradise, To weep as thou hast wept, I ask no more, Be mine the sorrows that were known to thee; But he that loseth his life shall save it; and in the truth-seeker's self-renunciation there is a prophecy of a sunrise beyond the darkness, not for himself alone, but for the world. Clough, in "The New Sinai," represents the resolute abandonment of a creed become incredible, as the Israelites left behind them the gods of Egypt: Though old Religion shake her head And say in bitter grief, "The day behold, at first foretold, Of atheist unbelief," Take better part, with manly heart, Thine adult spirit can; Receive it not, believe it not, Believe it not, O Man! Then follows the view of the world as a mechanism of blind force, a view as dark as the cloud and blackness which wrapped Sinai when Moses went upon the mount; the people going back to worship their old gods and the golden calf; the "prophet-soul sublimely meek" seeking Deity within the cloud, the heart of man bidden meanwhile neither to go back nor to despair. No God, it saith; oh, wait in faith Devout indeed, that priestly creed O Man, reject as sin; The clouded hill attend thou still He yet shall bring some worthy thing Some sacred word that he hath heard Some lofty part, than which the heart Adopt no nobler can, Thou shalt receive, thou shalt believe, And thou shalt do, O Man! 6 "In 1839," says the Memoir, "William Smith published A Discourse on Ethics of the School of Paley.' The late Professor Ferrier' (I quote from the obituary notice in the Scotsman') used to speak of this pamphlet in bulk it is nothing more as one of the best written and most ingeniously reasoned attacks upon Cudworth's doctrine that had ever appeared.' It is interesting to find that the favorite brother, Theyre, William's fellow-student at Glasgow, who had now for several years been a clergyman of the Church of England, and was Hulsean Lecturer in 1839-40, adopted the opposite standpoint, and in the notes to the second volume of his lectures vigorously contends against the theory put forth in the Discourse on Ethics,' while admitting, with evident satisfaction, that it had never met with a more ingenious as well as eloquent advocate.' Could this paragraph have been read by William Smith, one fancies that a quiet smile might have played about his lips. It justly describes what the "Discourse on Ethics" purports to be, — an argument upon one side of a long-debated and familiar question: namely, Whether the sense of moral obligation in man is an original and primary instinct, or a derived and compounded principle. It is an old theme of metaphysicians; Christians and churchmen are found on both sides of the debate; the author of this treatise ranks himself under the banner of the orthodox Paley, and professes only to develop more fully a theory whose substance is virtually implied in Paley's avowals. If the line of his advance seems sometimes to run along perilous ground, yet his flank is always carefully protected; he is writing, so he reminds us, only about what we know by the light of nature, and leaves untouched that inner stronghold of faith which is given by the revelations and sanctions of supernatural Christianity. The author's strong confidence in his own views is expressed always with perfect modesty, dignity, and composure. It is impossible in a brief epitome to reproduce even the main lines of the discussion. Its leading proposition is embodied in this paragraph: The feeling of responsibility appears to issue at once fullformed from the recesses of the individual mind. Be happy! Be virtuous! are described as two distinct commands of nature, two great dictates of our being, which in general are in perfect harmony, but of which the second is to take precedence whenever that harmony is disturbed. Now as an account of what is immediately felt by the moral man, this is not inaccurate. There are these two commands, Be happy! Be virtuous! and the second, from its nature, domineers over the first. But, nevertheless, the second, we say, is in fact a modification of the first; and this moral sentiment, however authoritative, is but a result of the play of our desires and the exercise of our reason, under a social condition of existence. Briefly stated: "Right and wrong are good and evil with the authoritative stamp of general approval." In fuller words: Whatever action makes for human happiness is intrinsically good; whatever makes for human misery is intrinsically bad. The mere perception that an action makes for happiness or misery carries with it a sort of command to seek or shun; "the knowledge of what is best must bind a rational being." But this original rational impulse toward the "best," that is, toward the action which tends to produce happiness, is immensely reinforced in the individual by the voice of the community praising or blaming him; it gets such new force and color that new terms are needful to describe it, and the choice of the better or the worse is invested with the name of "right" and "wrong," with all the tremendous associations which gather about those words. The sense of morality is thus a creation of public opinion: "This moral sentiment, however authoritative, is but a result of the play of our desires and the exercise of our reason, under a social condition of existence." But, having thus been developed by the social atmosphere, the moral sentiment acquires an independent authority, and the good man no longer governs himself by the opinions of his neighbors, but by his own conviction of right. The essential temper in which our essayist follows his quest is instanced in these words : There is mystery enough in and about our being, the world rolls on encompassed by it, and I am far from ranking myself with those who think there is no place and no recognition for it in a philosophic mind. But morality, which springs from and concerns the palpable business of men, ought not to be treated in a vein of mystery. Nothing is gained, even to our admiration, by endeavouring to invest our moral feelings at once in a sort of celestial panoply. The natural and true proportions of the human mind, as of the human form, contain, after all, the only beauty; it is of little use to deck the figure of humanity with painted wings that cannot fly, to the hindrance and disparagement of the natural limbs which Heaven has assigned to it. This is the keynote of the modern search into the nature of man as revealed in the history of man. The book is pervaded by the spirit of modern science, and much of its substance is an anticipation of what has been said, not with more force and eloquence, but with wider hearing, in later days. The force of its arguments of which not even the heads can be given here lies in the explanaations they offer of broad facts of human society. We have a theory generated in an imaginative brooding upon |