how it is to take charge of society, if society should be thrown upon its hands. I could not but observe how much there is of the believer in our modern sceptic, how much of the sceptic in some of our modern believers. (Page 249.)

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Sandford. If so various a country as England could put forward its model, or representative man," how would you describe him? He would certainly be a Christian, but a Christian who has a zeal for promoting all the temporal interests of society — whether it is a system of drainage or a system of education. And astonishing indeed it is to behold the number of charitable, municipal, national undertakings, in which our representative Christian takes the lead. We do honour to his piety, but we demand that it occupy itself with the good, healthy, happy life of this terraqueous globe. We have very little respect for the solitary raptures of saints, looking upward into the skies, if nothing comes of it for this lower world. Such solitary raptures we rather excuse than admire. Vague exultations followed by vague depressions we leave them undisturbed. But not to saintship of this description does England look for its salvation. By all means, let this or that gentle youth sit apart, with books of devotion on his knees sit there in ecstatic, hopeful, amazed condition of mind, if such to him be the best and most innocent mode of passing his existence. Innocent it is, and therefore let it be undisturbed. But England thinks it has other employment for its youth, and looks for help to another species of piety. (Page 289.)

Ada. There was a voice in the wilderness, and it cried, Repent! And there followed another voice, still more divine, and it said, Love! And the tempest arose, the tempest of wars, invasions, revolutions, and it carried these two voices round the world, and to this moment these divine words are everywhere reëchoed, Repent and Love. Repent that you may be pure, and capable of loving.

To grieve for our failings, and to love each other, this is a teaching worthy of being called divine. Heaven's authority for the preeminence of the sentiment of Love - I think much of this. Love is, indeed, the very passion of the reason; for reason, from its nature, can desire only good. Still there are daring moods, and there are daring reasoners, occasionally exalting Hate and

Revenge to an almost equal eminence. See how some sweet serviceable Christian soul takes upon itself to love all the afflicted all, even the guilty. Wherever there is sickness and distress, or crime, which is a sickness of the soul, the Christian comes if possible to heal, always to soothe and commiserate. You will say - no, not either of you, but some stern jurisprudential moralist will say that this universal charity tends to obliterate the distinctions between virtue and vice- - that it counteracts the moral opinion of society, which demands that love and kindly service be withdrawn from the criminal. But this universal love, remember, is love with tears in its eyes - love that will not cease to weep and protest till the guilty one has turned from his guilt -till he too can repent, and can love. Nay, the Christian is the true philosopher; for shining through all his inevitable censure of the criminal is his deep compassion that the man should be a criminal ― deep compassion, which he recognizes as a divine sentiment, which he hears in the last word God has uttered out of eternity to his suffering and bewildered creatures.

To love is the great glory, the last culture, the highest happiness; to be loved is little in comparison. Amongst our strangely complicated relationships of life, it often seems as if the loved one had all the advantage. To him the service, for him the sacrifice; from him, perhaps, no return. You pity some deluded mother, impoverishing herself for a reprobate son, who laughs as he spends her little hoard. Do not pity — admire rather; she is happier than a thousand reprobates. She loves. Oh, if One really existed, as I and others believe, who loved all the world, and in some inexplicable way suffered for its salvation, he was a God, at least, in his sublime happiness. Nor should I say that it was a "religion of sorrow" that such a love had inaugurated. (Pages 259, 260.)

Where, now, in briefest word, have our philosophizings brought us? How do we return from them to the view of the actual world and our own business therein?

I think it well to see that it is by overcoming evil, as well moral evil as natural evil, that we rise in the scale of creation. This very fact convinces us that evil was not brought here otherwise than beneficently — is, in fact, part of the scheme of a be

nevolent Creator. This may aid us, too, in supporting manfully the unavoidable, and in combating manfully all remediable evils. He who seeks truth and loves goodness has God upon his side.

I think it well to see that the higher needed the lower, that we may learn to respect the whole of our humanity. Even that which we have learnt to dispense with may have been a necessary help to our present elevation. I think it well to see that Human Society becomes the mould for the individual man born into it, and to see, also, how this mould itself becomes improved. by those stronger minds which can advance upon the education they have received. Such truths as these enlighten each man on the debt, and on the duty, he owes to society. They also show Humanity, as a whole, standing in the presence of a beneficent Creator, but one whose love exacts our effort, our endurance, under whom pain and terror ofttimes do the offices of love. (Page 324.)

All who battle for the good are, in the language of a natural piety, the children of God. They are ranged on the side of goodness, or the production of happiness, and they also receive into their hearts, as their indisputable reward, the highest sentiments of happiness. (Page 180.)

It is a noble life in which this contest is bravely and wisely sustained. Worlds there may be where there is only pleasure, and only goodness, but we can form no conception of such a state of things; or so far as we can form any conception, it is a languid pleasure and a torpid goodness that rises to our imagination. It is not our supreme wisdom to pass life dreaming of a world where there will be no evil; it is highest wisdom, individually and socially, to do battle for the good, so that this mingled existence which is alone intelligible to us may put on all the glory it is capable of. From this contest we win our felicity and our progress, and the contest itself is a great and enduring happiness, which runs through all the ages of mankind. All that is energetic and noble savours of this contest. Aye, even what is tenderest in human life comes out of some struggle between good and evil. Even our very piety springs from it. (Pages 139, 140.)

Do not ask for a world without evil. Seek rather to know and rightly appreciate this our own dark-bright existence, and

enter, heart and soul, into the old warfare for the Good! (Page 139.)

At the outset of William Smith's life its purpose seemed fitly. summed up in Charles Kingsley's phrase, "Given self, to find God." The deepest finding lay in that fidelity to moral good which he never forsook. But the intellectual quest was long and arduous. The barrier to intellectual peace lay in the seeming contradiction involved in the existence of evil in a divinely ordered world. In "Gravenhurst" we have at last an interpretation of evil as the servant of good. It is an interpretation that only became possible when the light of modern knowledge had been thrown on the procedure of the universe. Perplexities remain and doubtless always will remain. But great is the advance, glad as morning is the light! The seeker, "sublimely meek," who entered the clouds and darkness. of Sinai, comes back with a prophet's message.

CHAPTER XX.

SWITZERLAND.

(From the Memoir.)

IN the May of 1862 "Gravenhurst" was published, and we went to Switzerland for five months, dividing the time between Bex, Zermatt, Sixt, Chamounix, and Unterseen. It was our custom to settle down quietly at one place after another, to get its loveliness by heart, and to be free from that ruffling of equanimity bad weather may entail on the rapid tourist. Our fortnight at Zermatt stands out very prominently in my memory. The keep air and the kind of scenery exhilarated my husband to the utmost. In a manuscript book of his I find, very hastily jotted down: "Two short, long weeks and all my future, such is your share, Zermatt, of my life. Nowhere the torrents so grand, the snow-hills more beautifully set. I cannot describe the scene on the Görner Grat - but I recur to it and keep it alive. All pleasure-flowers- the English hare-bell looks up from my ankle, the white Pinguicula (as if dropt from the skies upon its stalk, on which it rests rather than grows), shy as the violet and more delicate. You look up from the flower and down into the ravine. I tremble as I look below, one false step and all the beauty is gone forever, gone for me! And see, the torrent-stream is so safe, just here is its low bed scooped in the solid rock; it is so distant as to seem quite silent. And then the village, and the cows, and the goats, and the church and the bells; a great deal of the praying here seems done by the bells, and not badly."