The Chautauquan, November 1883

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The Chautauquan.

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE PROMOTION OF TRUE CULTURE. ORGAN OF
THE CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC CIRCLE.

Vol. IV. JANUARY, 1884. No. 4.

Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

President—Lewis Miller, Akron, Ohio.

Superintendent of Instruction—Rev. J. H. Vincent, D.D., New Haven, Conn.

Counselors—Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D.; Rev. J. M. Gibson, D.D.; Bishop H. W. Warren, D.D.; Prof. W. C. Wilkinson, D.D.

Office Secretary—Miss Kate F. Kimball, Plainfield, N. J.

General Secretary—Albert M. Martin, Pittsburgh, Pa.

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Contents

[REQUIRED READING]
FOR THE
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle for 1883-4.
JANUARY.

[GERMAN HISTORY.]

By Rev. W. G. WILLIAMS, A.M.

IV.

The C. L. S. C. student is already aware that it is not pretended here to write the history of Germany, but properly these are entitled “Readings in German History.” To write with any degree of fulness or detail the history of a people which has played so large and important a part in the modern world, would require more volumes than are the pages allotted to us. It has been, and still remains the design to select those events and characters of greatest interest, and which have had the largest influence upon the current of subsequent history. The purpose, also constantly in view, has been to stimulate the reader to further study of the subject, by perusal of the best works accessible to the reader of English.

In this number no choice is left us but to pass, with only a glance or two, over the long period from the death of Charlemagne to that day-dawn of modern history, the Reformation. It is the period in which the historian traces, successively the beginning, vicissitudes, decay and extinction of the Carlovingian, Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstauffen houses. Following these is the great interregnum which precedes the Reformation. Included in this long stretch of time are what is known as the “dark ages.” Yet in Germany it was not all darkness, for now and then a ray of light was visible, prophetic of the rising sun, which heralded by Huss, appeared in the person and achievements of Martin Luther. It is about the work and character of the latter personage that we purpose to make the chief part of this chapter. Especially are we disposed so to do, now that protestant christendom is celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great reformer, and all civilized mankind has its attention called to his bold doctrines and brave career.

But, before we are prepared for Luther, we must note the change which has come in the claims and pretensions of the church. The different attitude which made possible a few centuries later, such a mission as Luther’s can not better be exhibited than during the reign of the Franconian Emperor, Henry the Fourth.

HENRY THE FOURTH—HIS SUPPLIANT VISIT TO CANOSSA.

The student of the history of the Romish church is aware that during the first five centuries after Christ the pope was vested with little, if any, other powers or dignities than those which pertained to him as Bishop of Rome. His subsequent claim to unlimited spiritual and political sway was then unthought of, much less anywhere advanced. Even for another five centuries he is only the nominal head of the church, who is subordinate to the political potentates and dependent upon them for protection and support in his office. But in the year 1073 succeeded one Gregory VII., to the tiara, who proposed to erect a spiritual empire which should be wholly absolved from dependency on kings and princes. His pontificate was one continuous struggle for the success of his undertaking. Of powerful will, great energy and shrewdness and with set purpose his administration wrought great change in the papal office and the relations of the church to European society. His chief measures by which he sought to compass his design were the celibacy of the priesthood and the suppression of the then prevalent custom of simony. The latter bore especially hard on the German Emperor, much of whose strength lay in the power to appoint the bishops and to levy assessments upon them when the royal exchequer was in need. In the year 1075 Gregory proclaimed his law against the custom, forbidding the sale of all offices of the church, and declaring that none but the pope might appoint bishops or confer the symbols of their authority. With an audacity unheard of, and a determination little anticipated, he sent word to Henry IV., of Germany, demanding the enforcement of the rule throughout his dominion under penalty of excommunication. The issue was a joint one, and a crisis inevitable. No pope had ever assumed such an attitude or used such language to a German Emperor. Henry was not disposed and resolved not to submit. So far as a formal disposition of the difficulty was concerned the case was an easy one. He called the bishops together in a synod which met at Worms. They proceeded with unanimity to declare Gregory deposed from his papal office and sent word of their action to Rome. The pope, who had used every artifice to gain popularity with the people, was prepared for the contest and answered back with the ban of excommunication. The emperor might have been able to carry on the struggle with some hope of success had he been in favor with his own subjects. But he had alienated the Saxons by his harsh treatment of them and the indignities heaped upon them; and others of his states looked upon him with suspicion. Pitted against the ablest foe in Europe, he found himself without the sympathy and aid of those to whom alone he could look for help. Meanwhile Gregory was sending his agents to all the courts of Europe and employing every intrigue to effect the emperor’s dethronement. In 1076 a convention of princes was called to meet near Mayence, Henry not being permitted to be present. So heavy had the papal excommunication fallen by this time that the emperor sent messengers to this convention offering to submit to their demands if they would only spare his crown. Gregory was inexorable, and they adjourned without any reconciliations being effected, to meet in a few months at Augsburg. Henry now realized the might of the hand that for centuries had been silently gathering the reins of spiritual power, only to grasp at last the political supremacy as well. With the burden of excommunication ready to crush out his imperial scepter he sued for pardon at any price. The pope had retired for a time to the castle of Canossa, not far from Parma. Thither went the Franconian Emperor of Germany to implore the papal forgiveness. He presented himself before the gate barefoot, clad in a shirt of sack-cloth, and prayed that he might be received and forgiven as a penitent sinner. But Gregory chose to prolong the satisfaction he had in witnessing his penitence. So throughout the whole day, without food, in snow and rain, he stood begging the pope to receive him. In the same condition and without avail, he stood the second and the third day. Not until the morning of the fourth day did the pope admit him, and then his pardon was granted on conditions which made his crown, for the time, a dependency of the Bishop of Rome.

But the struggle of the German rulers with popedom was not ended at Canossa. Henry himself renewed it a few years later with far better results to his side. The spirit of protestantism was ever alive in some form in Germany, and, as we have said, was prophetic of him who should rise in the fifteenth century and dare to protest against the claim of spiritual supremacy by the autocrat of Rome. From that time till now it has been a by-phrase with German princes in their conflicts with the church that they “will not go to Canossa.”

BEFORE THE REFORMATION.

At this time superstition and dense ignorance were widespread. Stories of magic were constantly told and believed, and the miracles with which the church offset them were hardly less absurd. Other terrors were added. Public justice was administered so imperfectly that private and arbitrary violence took its place; while the tribunals which formerly sat in the open sunlight before the people now covered themselves with night and secrecy. “The Holy Feme” sprang up in Westphalia. Originally a public tribunal of the city, such as is found in Brunswick, and in other places, it afterward spread far and wide, but in a changed form. Its members held their sessions in secret and by night. Unknown messengers of the tribunal summoned the accused. Disguised judges, volunteer officers, from among “the knowing ones,” gave judgment, often in wild, desolate places, and often in some ancient seat of justice, as at the Linden-tree at Dortmund. The sentence was executed, even if the criminal had not appeared or had made his escape. The dagger, with the mark of the Feme, found in the dead body, told how surely the avenging arm had struck in the darkness. It was a fearful time, when justice, like crime, must walk in disguise.

The habits of thought which made possible such beliefs and actions as these were part of the same movement to which the corruption of church doctrine and government must also be referred. The perverted Roman Christianity from which the Reformation was a revolt was not the Christianity of Charlemagne, nor even that of Hildebrand. Hasty readers sometimes imagine that the church, for many centuries before the Reformation, had firmly held the doctrines which Luther rejected. But, in fact, most of them were recent innovations. Peter the Lombard, Bishop of Paris in the twelfth century, was the first theologian to enumerate “the Seven Sacraments,” and Eugene IV., in 1431, was the first of the popes to proclaim them. The doctrine of transubstantiation was first embodied in the church confession by the Lateran Council of November, 1215, the same which first required auricular confession of all the laity. It was more than a century later before the celibacy of the clergy and the denial of the sacramental cup to all but priests became established law, and the idea that the pope is the vicar of Christ upon earth, and the bearer of divine honors, was accepted. All these corruptions of the earlier faith were the results of ambition in the hierarchy, and of gross and sensual modes of thought in the people; and the same causes led to the rapid development, in the fifteenth century especially, of the worship of the Virgin Mary, who was honored with ceremonies and prayers from which Christians of earlier ages would have shrunk as blasphemous. Nor can the church of the beginning of the sixteenth century be understood by studying the confession adopted by the Council of Trent a generation or more afterward. The teachings and practices which called forth Luther’s protest were far too gross, when once explained, to bear the examination of sincere friends of Romanism; who, without knowing it themselves, were greatly influenced, even in their formal statements of belief, by the controversies of the Reformation. The value of that great event to the world can not be comprehended without a knowledge of what it has done for the Catholic church within its own boundaries.[A]

PREPARING FOR THE REFORMATION.

Prior to the fourteenth century all learning was monopolized by the church. Its power was exercised to make every branch of knowledge harmonize itself with the teachings of Catholic Christianity. In revolt against these shackles arose a few independent spirits who sought to rest religious doctrine on the foundations of reason to some degree, at least. Nevertheless, superstitions still clung to and mingled with all these new studies, and the age did not witness their separation. The higher intelligence traveled gradually, but very slowly. The art of printing came to its assistance and proved to be its strongest auxiliary. To Germany belongs the glory of this invention, and she can boast no higher service rendered to mankind. The art of wood-engraving was the preliminary step which led to it. It was soon employed for pictures of sacred scenes and persons; so that the many who could neither read nor write had a sort of Bible in their picture collections. But the grand conception of making movable types, each bearing a single letter, and composing the words of them, was first formed by John Gutenberg, of the patrician family of Gänsefleisch, of Mayence. He was driven from his native city by a disturbance among the guilds, and went to Strasburg, where he invented the art of printing about the year 1450. Great trouble was experienced in discovering the proper material in which to cut the separate letters; neither wood nor lead answered well. Being short of resources, Gutenberg formed a partnership with John Faust, also of Mayence. Faust’s assistant, Peter Schöffer, afterward his son-in-law, a skillful copyist and draughtsman, discovered the proper alloy for type-metal, and invented printing-ink. In 1461 appeared the first large book printed in Germany, a handsome Bible, exhibiting the perfection that the art possessed at its very origin.

When Adolphus of Nassau captured Mayence in 1462, the workmen skilled in the art, which had been kept a secret, were scattered through the world; and by the end of the fifteenth century the principal nations of Europe, and especially Italy, France, and England, had become rivals of Germany in prosecuting it. Books had previously been transcribed, chiefly by monks, upon expensive parchment, and often beautifully ornamented with elaborate drawings and paintings. They had therefore been an article of luxury, and confined to the rich. But a book printed on paper was easily made accessible to all classes, for copies were so numerous that each could be sold at a low price. Beside books of devotion, the writings of the Greek and Latin poets, historians and philosophers, most of which had fallen into oblivion during the Middle Ages, now gradually obtained wide circulation. After the fall of Constantinople, and the subjugation of Greece by the Turks, fugitive Greeks brought the works of their forefathers’ genius to Italy, where enlightened men had already begun to study them. This branch of learning, called “the Humanities,” spread from Italy through Germany, France, England, and other countries, and contributed powerfully to produce a finer taste and more intelligent habits of thought, such as put to shame the rude ignorance of the monks. It was the art of printing that broke down the slavery in which the blind faith of the church held the human mind; and even the censorship which Rome set up to oppose it was not able to undo its work.

Just as the convents fell before the art of printing, so did the castles of the robber knights before the invention of gunpowder. Thus, at the coming of the Reformation, these degenerate remnants of the once noble institutions of knighthood were swept away. It is supposed by many that the knowledge of gunpowder was brought into Europe from China during the great Mongolian emigration of the thirteenth century, the Chinese having long possessed it. The Arabs, too, understood how to make explosive powder, by mixing saltpeter, charcoal, and sulphur. But all the Eastern makers produced only the fine powder, and the art of making it in grains seems to have been the device of Berthold Schwarz, a German monk of the Franciscan order, of Freiburg or Mayence, in 1354; and he is commonly called the inventor of gunpowder. He had a laboratory, in which he devoted himself to alchemy; and is said to have made his discovery by accident. But as early as 1346, a chronicle reports that there was at Aix “an iron barrel to shoot thunder;” and in 1356 the armory at Nuremberg contained guns of iron and copper, which threw missiles of stone and lead. One of the earliest instances in which cannon are known to have been effectively used in a great battle was at Agincourt in 1415. But gunpowder was long regarded with abhorrence by the people, and made its way into general use but slowly.[B]

MARTIN LUTHER.

Martin Luther was born at Eisleben on the 10th of November, 1483, on the eve of St. Martin’s day, in the same year as Raphael, nine years after Michael Angelo, and ten after Copernicus. His father was a miner and possessed forges in Mansfield, the profits of which enabled him to send his son to the Latin school of the place. There Martin distinguished himself so much that his father intended him for the study of law. In the meantime Martin had often to go about as one of the poor choristers singing and begging at the doors of charitable people at Magdeburg and at Eisenach, to the colleges of which towns he was successively sent. His remarkable appearance and serious demeanor, his fine tenor voice and musical talent procured him the attention and afterward the support and maternal care of a pious matron, into whose house he was taken. Already, in his eighteenth year, he surpassed all his fellow-students in knowledge of the Latin classics, and in power of composition and of eloquence. His mind took more and more a deeply religious turn; but it was not till he had been two years studying at Eisenach that he discovered an entire Bible, having until then only known the ecclesiastical extracts from the sacred volume and the history of Hannah and Samuel. A dangerous illness brought him within the near prospect of death; but he recovered and tried hard to obtain inward peace by a pious life and the greatest strictness in all external observances.[C] He then determined to renounce the world, and in spite of the strong opposition of his father, became a monk of the Augustine order of Erfurt. But in vain; he was tormented by doubt, and even by despair, until he turned again to the Bible. A zealous study of the exact language of the gospels gave him not only a firm faith, but a peace and cheerfulness which was never afterward disturbed by trials or dangers.[D]

In the year 1508 the elector of Saxony nominated him professor of philosophy in the university of Wittenberg; and in 1509 he began to give biblical lectures. These lectures were the awakening cause of new life in the university, and soon a great number of students from all parts of Germany gathered round Luther. Even professors came to attend his lectures and hear his preaching. The year 1511 brought an apparent interruption, but in fact only a new development of Luther’s character and knowledge of the world. He was sent by his order to Rome on account of some discrepancies of opinion as to its government. The tone of flippant impiety at the court and among the higher clergy of Rome shocked the devout German monk. He then discovered the real state of the world in the center of the Western church. He returned to the university and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity at the end of 1512. The solemn oath he had to pronounce on that occasion, “to devote his whole life to study, and faithfully expound and defend the Holy Scripture,” was to him the seal of his mission. He began his biblical teaching by attacking scholasticism, at that time called Aristotelianism. He showed that the Bible was a deeper philosophy. His contemporaries praised the clearness of his doctrine. Christ’s self-devoted life and death was its center; God’s eternal love to mankind, and the sure triumph of Faith, were his texts.[E]

SALE OF PAPAL INDULGENCES—LUTHER’S RESISTANCE.

In the year 1517, the pope, Leo X., famous both for his luxurious habits and his love of art, found that his income was not sufficient for his expenses, and determined to increase it by issuing a series of absolutions for all forms of crime, even perjury, bigamy and murder. The cost of pardon was graduated according to the nature of the sin. Albert, Archbishop of Mayence, bought the right of selling absolutions in Germany, and appointed as his agent a Dominican monk of the name of Tetzel. The latter began traveling through the country like a peddler, publicly offering for sale the pardon of the Roman church for all varieties of crime. In some places he did an excellent business, since many evil men also purchased pardons in advance for the crimes they intended to commit; in other districts Tetzel only stirred up the abhorrence of the people, and increased their burning desire to have such enormities suppressed.

Only one man, however, dared to come out openly and condemn the papal trade in sin and crime. This was Dr. Martin Luther, who, on the 31st of October, 1517, nailed upon the door of the church at Wittenberg a series of ninety-five theses, or theological declarations, the truth of which he offered to prove, against all adversaries. The substance of them was that the pardon of sins came only from God, and could only be purchased by true repentance; that to offer absolutions for sale, as Tetzel was doing, was an unchristian act, contrary to the genuine doctrines of the church; and that it could not, therefore, have been sanctioned by the pope. Luther’s object, at this time, was not to separate from the church of Rome, but to reform and purify it.

The ninety-five theses, which were written in Latin, were immediately translated, printed, and circulated throughout Germany. They were followed by replies, in which the action of the pope was defended; Luther was styled a heretic, and threatened with the fate of Huss. He defended himself in pamphlets, which were eagerly read by the people; and his followers increased so rapidly that Leo X., who had summoned him to Rome for trial, finally agreed that he should present himself before the Papal Legate, Cardinal Cajetanus, at Augsburg. The latter simply demanded that Luther should retract what he had preached and written, as being contrary to the papal bulls; whereupon Luther, for the first time, was compelled to declare that “the command of the pope can only be respected as the voice of God, when it is not in conflict with the Holy Scriptures.” The Cardinal afterward said: “I will have nothing more to do with that German beast, with the deep eyes and the whimsical speculations in his head!” and Luther said of him: “He knew no more about the Word than a donkey knows of harp-playing.”

The Vicar-General of the Augustines was still Luther’s friend, and, fearing that he was not safe in Augsburg, he had him let out of the city at daybreak, through a small door in the wall, and then supplied with a horse. Having reached Wittenberg, where he was surrounded with devoted followers, Frederick the Wise was next ordered to give him up. About the same time Leo X. declared that the practices assailed by Luther were doctrines of the church, and must be accepted as such. Frederick began to waver; but the young Philip Melanchthon, Justus Jonas, and other distinguished men connected with the university exerted their influence, and the elector finally refused the demand. The Emperor Maximilian, now near his end, sent a letter to the pope, begging him to arrange the difficulty, and Leo X. commissioned his Nuncio, a Saxon nobleman named Karl von Miltitz, to meet Luther. The meeting took place at Altenburg in 1519; the Nuncio, who afterward reported that he “would not undertake to remove Luther from Germany with the help of 10,000 soldiers, for he had found ten men for him where one was for the pope”—was a mild and conciliatory man. He prayed Luther to pause, for he was destroying the peace of the church, and succeeded, by his persuasions, in inducing him to promise to keep silence, provided his antagonists remained silent also.

This was merely a truce, and it was soon broken. Dr. Eck, one of the partisans of the church, challenged Luther’s friend and follower, Carlstadt, to a public discussion in Leipzig, and it was not long before Luther himself was compelled to take part in it. He declared his views with more clearness than ever, disregarding the outcry raised against him that he was in fellowship with the Bohemian heretics. The struggle, by this time, had affected all Germany, the middle class and smaller nobles being mostly on Luther’s side, while the priests and reigning princes, with a few exceptions, were against him. In order to defend himself from misrepresentation and justify his course, he published two pamphlets, one called “An Appeal to the Emperor and Christian Nobles of Germany,” and the other “Concerning the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.” These were read by tens of thousands, all over the country.

Pope Leo X. immediately issued a bull, ordering all Luther’s writings to be burned, excommunicating those who should believe in them, and summoning Luther to Rome. This only increased the popular excitement in Luther’s favor, and on the 10th of December, 1520, he took the step which made impossible any reconciliation between himself and the papal power. Accompanied by the professors and students of the university, he had a fire kindled outside of one of the gates of Wittenberg, placed therein the books of canonical law and various writings in defence of the pope, and then cast the papal bull into the flames, with the words: “As thou hast tormented the Lord and His saints, so may eternal flame torment and consume thee.” This was the boldest declaration of war ever hurled at such an overwhelming majority; but the courage of this one man soon communicated itself to the people. Frederick the Wise was now his steadfast friend, and, although the dangers which beset him increased every day, his own faith in the righteousness of his cause only became firmer and purer.[F]

LUTHER AT WORMS.

Meanwhile Charles of Spain had succeeded Maximilian and became Karl V. in the list of German emperors. Luther wrote to the new emperor asking that he might be heard before being condemned. The elector Frederick also interceded, and the diet of Worms was convened January 6, 1521. Luther was summoned to appear. “I must go; if I am too weak to go in good health, I shall have myself carried thither sick. They will not have my blood after which they thirst unless it is God’s will. Two things I can not do—shrink from the call, nor retract my opinions.” The emperor tardily granted him the safe conduct on which his friends insisted. In spite of all warnings he set out with the imperial herald on the 2nd of April. On the 16th he entered the city. On his approach to Worms the elector’s chancellor entreated him in the name of his master not to enter a town where his death was already decided. Luther returned the simple reply, “Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs, I would enter.” When surrounded by his friends on the morning of the 17th, on which day he was to appear before the august assembly, he said, “Christ is to me what the head of the gorgon was to Perseus; I must hold it up against the devil’s attack.” When the hour approached he fell on his knees and uttered in great agony a prayer such as can only be pronounced by a man filled with the spirit of him who prayed at Gethsemane. He rose from prayer, and followed the herald. Before the throne he was asked two questions, whether he acknowledged the works before him to have been written by himself, and whether he would retract what he had said in them. Luther’s address to the emperor has been preserved, and is a masterpiece of eloquence as well as of courage. The following is a part of his words: “I have laid open the almost incredible corruptions of popery, and given utterance to complaints almost universal. By retracting what I have said on this score, should I not fortify rank tyranny, and open a still wider door to enormous impieties? I can only say with Jesus Christ, ‘If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil.’” Addressing himself directly to the emperor, he said: “May this new reign not begin, and still less continue, under pernicious auspices. The Pharaohs of Egypt, the kings of Babylon and of Israel never worked more effectually for their own ruin than when they thought to strengthen their power. I speak thus boldly, not because I think such great princes want my advice, but because I will fulfill my duty toward Germany as she has a right to expect from her children.” The contemptible emperor, seeing his physical exhaustion, and thinking to confound him, ordered him to repeat what he had said in Latin. Luther did so. It was, however, when again urged to retract that we witness what seems the highest point of moral sublimity in Luther’s career. “I can not submit my faith either to the pope or to councils, for it is clear that they have often erred and contradicted themselves. I will retract nothing unless convicted by the very passages of the word of God which I have just quoted.” And he concluded by saying: “Here I take my stand. I can not do otherwise: so help me God. Amen.”[G]

From that day Luther’s life was in greatest and constant danger. The papal dogs had scented the blood of a heretic, and were on his track. Leaving Worms, he was seized by friends under the guise of enemies, as he was passing through the Thuringian forest, and carried away and hid in the castle of Wartburg. Here, secreted from his enemies for many months, he busied himself with translating the New Testament into German. His version proved to be among the most valuable of the services he rendered. In many respects it is superior to any other translations yet made. With all his scholarship, he ignored the theological style of writing, and sought to express the thoughts of the inspired writers in words comprehensible by the commonest people. To this end he frequented the marketplace, the house of sorrow, and of rejoicing, in order to note how the people expressed themselves in all the circumstances of life. “I can not use the words heard in castles and courts,” he said; “I have endeavored in translating to give clear, pure German.”

Luther lived twenty-five years after the diet of Worms—years of heroic battle, sometimes against foes inside of his movement of reform as well as against the church, which never gave up the struggle. He wrote many works, some controversial, others expository of the Bible. His “Battle Hymn” also revealed him the possessor of rare poetic genius.

He died at Eisleben, February 17, 1546. For some time, under the weight of his labors and anxieties, his constitution had been breaking down. The giant of the Reformation halted in his earthly course, but the gigantic spirit and work moved on. As the solemn procession which bore his body from Eisleben to Wittenberg passed, the bells of every village and town were tolled, and the people flocked together, crowding the highways. At Halle men and women came out with cries and lamentations, and so great was the throng that it was two hours before the coffin could be laid in the church. An eye-witness says: “Here we endeavored to raise the funeral psalm, ‘Out of the depths have I called unto thee,’ but so heavy was our grief that the words were wept rather than sung.” Mr. Carlyle closes his “Spiritual Portrait of Luther” with the following words of noble and beautiful tribute: “I call this Luther a true great man; great in intellect, in courage, affection and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk, but as an Alpine mountain—so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the heavens; yet in the clefts of it fountains, green, beautiful valleys with flowers! A right spiritual hero and prophet; once more, a true son of nature and fact, for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to heaven.”

[To be continued.]

[EXTRACTS FROM GERMAN LITERATURE.]

JOHANN JOACHIM WINCKELMANN.

No critic has displayed a keener feeling for the beauty and significance of such works as came within his knowledge, or a truer imagination in bridging over the gulfs at which direct knowledge failed him. And his style, warm with the glow of sustained enthusiasm, yet calm, dignified, and harmonious, was worthy of his splendid theme.—Sime.

More artistic and æsthetic views have prevailed in every direction since Winckelmann became a recognized authority.—Schlegel.

The Apollo of the Vatican.

Among all the works of antiquity which have escaped destruction the Apollo of the Vatican reaches the highest ideal of art. It surpasses all other statues as Homer’s Apollo does that of all succeeding poets. Its size lifts it above common humanity, and its altitude bespeaks its greatness. The proud form charming in the manliness of the prime of life seems clothed with endless youth.

Go with thy soul into the kingdom of celestial beauty and seek to create within thyself a divine nature, and to fill thy heart with forms which are above the material. For here there is nothing perishable, nothing that mortal imperfection demands. No veins heat, no sinews control this body; but a heavenly spirit spreading like a gentle stream fills the whole figure.

He has foiled the Python against which he has just drawn his bow, and the powerful dart has overtaken and killed it. Satisfied, he looks far beyond his victory into space; contempt is on his lip and the rage which possesses him expands his nostrils and mounts to his forehead. Still the peace which hovers in holy calm upon his forehead is undisturbed; his eye like the eyes of the muses is full of gentleness.

In all the statues of the father of gods which remain to us in none does he come so near to that grandeur in which he has revealed himself to the poets as he does here in the face of his son. The peculiar beauties of the remaining gods are united here in one: the forehead of Jupiter, pregnant with the goddess of wisdom, eyebrows which reveal his will in their arch, the full commanding eyes of the queen of the gods, and a mouth of the greatest loveliness. About this divine head the soft hair, as if moved by a gentle breeze, plays like the graceful tendrils of a vine. He seems like one anointed with the oil of the gods, and crowned with glory by the Graces.

Before this wonderful work of art I forget all else. My bosom throbs with adoration as his with the spirit of prophecy. I feel myself carried back to Delos and to the lyric halls, the places which Apollo honored with his presence; then the statue before me seems to receive life and motion like Pygmalion’s beauty; how is it possible to paint, to describe it? Art itself must direct me, must lead my hand, to carry out the first outlines which I attempt. I lay my effort at its feet as those who would crown the god-head, but can not attain the height, do their wreaths.

FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER.

He was a seer—a prophet. A century has passed since his birth, and we revere him as one of the first among the spiritual heroes of humanity.—Vischer. Speech at the Centenary Festival of Schiller’s birthday (1859).

That Schiller went away early is for us a gain. From his tomb there comes to us an impulse, strengthening us, as with the breath of his own might, and awakening a most earnest longing to fulfill, lovingly, and more and more, the work that he began. So, in all that he willed to do, and in all that he fulfilled, he shall live on, forever, for his own nation, and for mankind.—Goethe.

Goethe and Schiller greatly excelled in their department of literary labor, becoming oracles in all such matters. And since their names have gone into history, they share, perhaps not quite equally, the highest niche in the pantheon of German literature. Schiller was, at once, a fine thinker, and poet, able to weave his own subtle thoughts, and the philosophies of other transcendentalists into verse, as exquisite as their speculations were, at times, dreamy and incomprehensible. Carlyle, in a glowing tribute to Schiller, concedes to Goethe the honor of being the poet of Germany; and so perhaps he was, though it is difficult to compare men so widely different. They differed in this: Goethe, with his rich endowment of intellect, was born a poet—an inspired man; the everspringing fountain within him poured forth copiously; Schiller, with genius hardly surpassed, seems a more laborious thinker, ever seeking truth, while his finely wrought stanzas are a little more artificially melodious. He is the most beloved because his countrymen think he had more heart, and breathed out more ardent aspirations for political freedom. We commend what is excellent in his works; the facts and truths expressed with refreshing clearness, and usually of good moral tendency, but we can not ignore his philosophical skepticism, and warn the admiring reader against its pernicious influence. In the supreme matter of religious faith our captivating author was evidently much of his life adrift on stormy seas, “driven of the winds and tossed.” If the fatuity of the venture was not followed by dismal and utter shipwreck, he was near the fatal rocks, and suffered great loss. The beginning was in this respect most full of promise, and his environment favorable. The home training in a devout religious family, and the teachings of the sanctuary had made a deep impression on the mind of the thoughtful youth, and as solemn vows were made as ever passed from human lips. His was for a season really a life of prayer and consecration to Christian service. But all that passed away. And how the change was brought about it is not hard to discover. Though blameless in character, and full of noble aspirations while yet in his adolescence, quite too early, he became acquainted with infidel writings of Voltaire—a perilous adventure for any youth. The foundations on which he rested were shaken, and he fled to the positive philosophy of Kant and others, who interpreted away all that was distinctively true and life-giving in the Scriptures. Faith, whose mild radiance brightened the morning, suffered a fearful eclipse before it was noon: and thence, like a wanderer, he groped for the way; “daylight all gone.” The great man needed God, but turned from him—sought truth with worshipful anxiety, but, in his sad bewilderment, found it not. The difference between his states of faith and unfaith is strongly stated in his own words that we here give. The first extract was written on a Sabbath in 1777. The other tells, about as forcibly as words can, of the unrest and disappointment that were afterward felt.

Sabbath Morning.

God of truth, Father of light, I look to thee with the first rays of the morning sun, and I bow before thee. Thou seest me, O God! Thou seest from afar every pulsation of my praying heart. Thou knowest well my earnest desire for truth. Heavy doubt often veils my soul in night; but thou knowest how anxious my heart is within me, and how it goes out for heavenly light. Oh yes! A friendly ray has often fallen from thee upon my shadowed soul. I saw the awful abyss on whose brink I was trembling, and I have thanked the kind hand that drew me back in safety. Still be with me, my God and Father, for there are days when fools stalk about and say, “there is no God.” Thou hast given me my birth, O my Creator, in these days when superstition rages at my right hand, and skepticism scoffs at my left. So I often stand and quake in the storm; and oh, how often would the bending reed break if thou didst not prevent it; thou, the mighty Preserver of all thy creatures and Father of all who seek thee. What am I without truth, without her leadership through life’s labyrinth? A wanderer through the wilderness overtaken by the night, with no friendly hand to lead me, and no guiding star to show me the path. Doubt, uncertainty, skepticism! You begin with anguish, and you end with despair. But Truth, thou leadest us safely through life, bearest the torch before us in the dark vale of death, and bringest us home to heaven, where thou wast born. O my God, keep my heart in peace, in that holy rest during which Truth loves best to visit us. If I have truth then I have Christ; If I have Christ then have I God; and if I have God, then I have everything. And could I ever permit myself to be robbed of this precious gem, this heaven-reaching blessing by the wisdom of this world, which is foolishness in thy sight? No. He who hates truth will I call my enemy, but he who seeks it with simple heart I will embrace as my brother and my friend.

Later in life his anguish is openly expressed in his philosophical letters. “I felt, and I was happy. Raphael has taught me to think, and I am now ready to lament my own creation. You have stolen my faith that gave me peace. You have taught me to despise what I once reverenced. A thousand things were very venerable to me before your sorry wisdom stripped me of them. I saw a multitude of people going to church; I heard their earnest worship as they united in fraternal prayer; I cried aloud, ‘That truth must be divine which the best of men profess, which conquers so triumphantly and consoles so sweetly.’ Your cold reason has quenched my enthusiasm. ‘Believe no one,’ you said, ‘but your reason; there is nothing more holy than truth.’ I listened, and offered up all my opinions. My reason is now become everything to me; it is my only guarantee for divinity, virtue, and immortality. Woe unto me henceforth, if I come in conflict with this sole security!”

The following lines are given as a specimen of his verse. They are taken from Carlyle’s translation of the “Song of the Alps:”

By the edge of the chasm is a slippery track,

The torrent beneath, and the mist hanging o’er thee;

The cliffs of the mountains, huge, rugged, and black,

Are frowning like giants before thee;

And, would’st thou not waken the sleeping Lawine,

Walk silent and soft through the deadly ravine.

That bridge with its dizzying, perilous span,

Aloft o’er the gulf and its flood suspended,

Think’st thou it was built by the art of man,

By his hand that grim old arch was bended?

Far down in the jaws of the gloomy abyss

The water is boiling and hissing—forever will hiss.

Duty—Fame of.

What shall I do to be forever known?

Thy duty ever.

This did full many who yet slept unknown—

Oh! never, never!

Thinkest thou, perchance, that they remain unknown

Whom thou knowest not?

By angel trumps in heaven their praise is blown,

Divine their lot.

What shall I do to gain eternal life?

Discharge aright

The simple dues with which each day is rife?

Yea, with thy might.

Ere perfect scheme of action thou devise,

Life will be fled,

While he who ever acts as conscience cries

Shall live, though dead.

The following verse is from the oft-recited “Song of the Bell,” and is exquisite:

Ah! seeds how dearer far than they

We bury in the dismal tomb,

When hope and sorrow bend to pray,

That suns beyond the realm of day

May warm them into bloom.

JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE.

Goethe differs from all other great writers, except perhaps Milton, in this respect, that his works can not be understood without a knowledge of his life, and that his life is in itself a work of art, greater than any work which it created.... He is not only the greatest poet of Germany; he is one of the greatest poets of any age.... He was the apostle of self-culture.—Sime.

A Criticism on the Poems of J. H. Voss.

Every author, in some degree, portrays himself in his works even be it against his will. In this case he is present to us, and designedly; nay, with a friendly alacrity, sets before us his inward and outward modes of thinking and feeling; and disdains not to give us confidential explanations of circumstances, thoughts, views, and expressions, by means of appended notes.

And now, encouraged by so friendly an invitation, we draw nearer to him; we seek him by himself; we attach ourselves to him, and promise ourselves rich enjoyment, and manifold instruction and improvement.

In a level northern landscape we find him, rejoicing in his existence, in a latitude in which the ancients hardly expected to find a living thing.

And truly, winter there manifests his whole might and sovereignty. Storm-borne from the pole, he covers the woods with hoar frost, the streams with ice—a drifting whirlwind eddies around the high gables, while the poet rejoices in the shelter and comfort of his home, and cheerily bids defiance to the raging elements. Furred and frost-covered friends arrive, and are heartily welcomed under the protecting roof; and soon they form a cordial confiding circle, enliven the household meal by the clang of glasses, the joyous song, and thus create for themselves a moral summer.

And when spring herself advances, no more is heard of roof and hearth; the poet is always abroad, wandering on the soft pathways around his peaceful lake. Every bush unfolds itself with an individual character, every blossom bursts with an individual life, in his presence. As in a fully worked-out picture, we see, in the sun-light around him, grass and herb, as distinctly as oak and beech-tree; and on the margin of the still waters there is wanting neither the reed nor any succulent plant.

Around him, like a dweller in Eden, sport, harmless, fearless creatures—the lamb on the meadows, the roe in the forest. Around him assemble the whole choir of birds, and drown the busy hum of day with their varied accents.

The summer has come again; a genial warmth breathes through the poet’s song. Thunders roll; clouds drop showers; rainbows appear; lightnings gleam, and a blessed coolness overspreads the plain. Everything ripens; the poet overlooks none of the varied harvests; he hallows all by his presence.

And here is the place to remark what an influence our poets might exercise on the civilization of our German people—in some places, perhaps, have exercised.

His poems on the various incidents of rural life, indeed, do represent rather the reflections of a refined intellect than the feelings of the common people: but if we could picture to ourselves that a harper were present at the hay, corn, and potato harvests—if we recollected how he might make the men whom he gathered around him observant of that which recurs to them as ordinary and familiar; if, by his manner of regarding it, by his poetical expression, he elevated the common, and heightened the enjoyment of every gift of God and nature by his dignified representation of it, we may truly say he would be a real benefactor to his country. For the first stage of a true enlightenment is, that man should reflect upon his condition and circumstances, and be brought to regard them in the most agreeable light.

But scarcely are all these bounties brought under man’s notice, when autumn glides in, and our poet takes an affecting leave of nature, decaying, at least in outward appearance. Yet he abandons not his beloved vegetation wholly to the unkind winter. The elegant vase receives many a plant, many a bulb, wherewith to create a mimic summer in the home seclusion of winter, and, even at that season, to leave no festival without its flowers and wreaths. Care is taken that even the household birds belonging to the family should not want a green fresh roof to their bowery cage.

Now is the loveliest time for short rambles—for friendly converse in the chilly evening. Every domestic feeling becomes active; longings for social pleasures increase; the want of music is more sensibly felt; and now, even the sick man willingly joins the friendly circle, and a departing friend seems to clothe himself in the colors of the departing year.

For as certainly as spring will return after the lapse of winter, so certainly will friends, lovers, kindred meet again; they will meet again in the presence of the all-loving Father; and then first will they form a whole with each other, and with everything good, after which they sought and strove in vain in this piece-meal world. And thus does the felicity of the poet, even here, rest on the persuasion that all have to rejoice in the care of a wise God, whose power extends unto all, and whose light lightens upon all. Thus does the adoration of such a being create in the poet the highest clearness and reasonableness; and, at the same time, an assurance that the thoughts, the words, with which he comprehends and describes infinite qualities, are not empty dreams and sounds, and thence arises a rapturous feeling of his own and others’ happiness, in which everything conflicting, peculiar, discordant, is resolved and dissipated.

Faustus.

Faustus. Oh, he, indeed, is happy, who still feels,

And cherishes within himself, the hope

To lift himself above this sea of errors!

Of things we know not, each day do we find

The want of knowledge—all we know is useless:

But ’tis not wise to sadden with such thoughts

This hour of beauty and benignity:

Look yonder, with delighted heart and eye,

On those low cottages that shine so bright

(Each with its garden plot of smiling green),

Robed in the glory of the setting sun!

But he is parting—fading—day is over—

Yonder he hastens to diffuse new life.

Oh, for a wing to raise me up from earth,

Nearer, and yet more near, to the bright orb,

That unrestrained I still might follow him!

Then should I see, in one unvarying glow

Of deathless evening, the reposing world

Beneath me—the hills kindling—the sweet vales,

Beyond the hills, asleep in the soft beams

The silver streamlet, at the silent touch

Of heavenly light, transfigured into gold,

Flowing in brightness inexpressible!

Nothing to stop or stay my godlike motion!

The rugged hill, with its wild cliffs, in vain

Would rise to hide the sun; in vain would strive

To check my glorious course; the sea already,

With its illumined bays, that burn beneath

The lord of day, before the astonished eyes

Opens its bosom—and he seems at last

Just sinking—no—a power unfelt before—

An impulse indescribable succeeds!

Onward, entranced, I haste to drink the beams

Of the unfading light—before me day—

And night left still behind—and overhead

Wide heaven—and under me the spreading sea!—

A glorious vision, while the setting sun

Is lingering! Oh, to the spirit’s flight,

How faint and feeble are material wings!

Yet such our nature is, that when the lark,

High over us, unseen in the blue sky

Thrills his heart-piercing song, we feel ourselves

Press up from earth, as ’twere in rivalry;—

And when above the savage hill of pines,

The eagle sweeps with outspread wings—and when

The crane pursues, high off, his homeward path,

Flying o’er watery moors and wide lakes lonely!

Flying o’er watery moors and wide lakes lonely!

Wagner. I, too, have had my hours of reverie;

But impulse such as this I never felt.

Of wood and fields the eye will soon grow weary;

I’d never envy the wild birds their wings.

How different are the pleasures of the mind;

Leading from book to book, from leaf to leaf,

They make the nights of winter bright and cheerful;

They spread a sense of pleasure through the frame,

And when you see some old and treasured parchments,

All heaven descends to your delighted senses!

FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL.

His most important work is his “History of Ancient and Modern Literature.” Throughout his exposition he is a propagandist of his special ideas; but the book is of lasting importance as the earliest attempt to present a systematic view of literary development as a whole.—Sime.

Extracts from History of Literature.

Literary Influence of the Bible.—On attentively considering the influence exercised by the Bible over mediæval as well as more modern literature and poetry, and the effects of the Scriptures, viewed as a mere literary composition on language, art, and representation, two important elements engage our observation. The first of these is complete simplicity of expression or the absence of all artifice. Almost exclusively treating of God and the moral nature of man, the language of the Scriptures is throughout living and forcible, devoid of metaphysical subtleties and of those dead ideas and empty abstractions which mark the philosophy of all nations—from the Indians and Greeks down to modern Europeans—whenever they undertake to represent those exalted objects of contemplation, God and man, by the light of unassisted reason.... Corresponding simplicity or absence of affectation also mark the poetical portions of Holy Writ, notwithstanding the copiousness of noble and sublime passages with which they abound.... The second distinctive quality of the Bible, in reference to external form and mode of representation, exerting an immense influence over modern diction and poesy, is the all pervading typical and symbolic element—not only of its poetical but of the didactic and historical books. In the case of the Hebrews this peculiarity may be partially regarded as a national peculiarity, in which the Arabs, their nearest of kin, participated. It is not impossible that the prohibition concerning graven images of the Divinity contributed to cherish this propensity; the imagination restricted on one side sought an outlet in another. The same results flowed from similar causes among the followers of Mahomet. In those portions of Holy Writ in which oriental imagery is less dominant, as for instance in the books of the New Testament, symbolism nevertheless prevails. This spirit has, to a great extent, influenced the intellectual development of all Christian races.

Mediæval Gothic Architecture.—The real mediæval is nowhere so thoroughly expressed as in the memorials of the architectural style erroneously called gothic, the origin of which, as also its progressive features, may, to this day, be said to be lost in obscurity and doubt. The misnomer is now generally admitted, and it is commonly understood that this mediæval style did not originate with the Goths, but sprung up at a later date, and speedily attained its full maturity without exhibiting various gradations of formation. I allude to that style of Christian art which is distinguished by its lofty vaults and arches, its pillars which resemble bundles of reeds, and general profusion of ornament modeled after leaf and flower.... Whoever the originators, it is evident that their intention was not merely to pile up huge stone edifices, but to embody certain ideas. How excellent soever the style of a building may be, if it convey no meaning, express no sentiment, it can not strictly be considered a creation of art; for it must be remembered that this, at once the most ancient and sublime of creative arts, can not directly stimulate the feelings by means of actual appeal or faculty of representation. Hence architecture generally bears a symbolical hidden meaning, whilst the Christian architecture of mediæval Germany does so in an eminent and especial degree. First and foremost there is the expression of devotional thought towering boldly aloft from this lowly earth toward the azure skies and an omnipotent God.... The whole plan is replete with symbols of deep significance, traced and illustrated in a remarkable manner in the records of the period. The altar pointed eastward; the three principal entrances expressed the conflux of worshipers gathered together from all quarters of the globe. The three steeples corresponded to the Christian Trinity. The quire arose like a temple within a temple on an increased scale of elevation. The form of the cross had been of early establishment in the Christian church, not accidentally, as has been conjectured by some, but with a view to completeness, a constituent part of the whole. The rose will be found to constitute the radical element of all decoration in this architectural style; from it the peculiar shape of window, door and steeple is mainly derived in their manifold variety of foliated tracery. The cross and the rose are, then, the chief symbols of this mystic art. On the whole, what is sought to be conveyed is the stupendous idea of eternity, the earnest thought of death, the death of this world, wreathed in the lovely fullness of an endless blooming life in the world that is to come.

READINGS IN PHYSICAL SCIENCE.[H]

IV.—THE SEA.

It has been ascertained that water covers about three times more of the earth’s surface than the land does. We could not tell that merely by what we can see from any part of this country, or indeed of any country. It is because men have sailed round the world, and have crossed it in many directions, that the proportion of land and water has come to be known.

Take a school-globe and turn it slowly round on its axis. You see at a glance how much larger the surface of water is than the surface of land. But you may notice several other interesting things about the distribution of land and water.

In the first place you will find that the water is all connected together into one great mass, which we call the sea. The land, on the other hand, is much broken up by the way the sea runs into it; and some parts are cut off from the main mass of land, so as to form islands in the sea. Britain is one of the pieces of land so cut off.

In the second place, you cannot fail to notice how much more land lies on the north than on the south of the equator. If you turn the globe so that your eye shall look straight down on the site of London, you will find that most of the land on the globe comes into sight; whereas, if you turn the globe exactly round, and look straight down on the area of New Zealand, you will see most of the sea. London thus stands about the centre of the land-hemisphere, midway among the countries of the earth. And no doubt this central position has not been without its influence in fostering the progress of British commerce.

In the third place, you will notice that by the way in which the masses of land are placed, parts of the sea are to some extent separated from each other. These masses of land are called continents, and the wide sheets of water between are termed oceans. Picture to yourselves that the surface of the solid part of the earth is uneven, some portions rising into broad swellings and ridges, others sinking into wide hollows and basins. Now, into these hollows the sea has been gathered, and only those upstanding parts which rise above the level of the sea form the land.

When you come to examine the water of the sea, you find that it differs from the water with which you are familiar on the land, inasmuch as it is salt. It contains something which you do not notice in ordinary spring or river water. If you take a drop of clear spring water, and allow it to evaporate from a piece of glass, you will find no trace left behind. Take, however, a drop of sea water and allow it to evaporate. You find a little white point or film left behind, and on placing that film under a microscope you see it to consist of delicate crystals of common or sea salt. It would not matter from what ocean you took the drop of water, it would still show the crystals of salt on being evaporated.

There are some other things beside common salt in sea water. But the salt is the most abundant, and we need not trouble about the rest at present. Now, where did all this mineral matter in the sea come from? The salt of the sea is all derived from the waste of the rocks.

It has already been pointed out how, both underground and on the surface of the land, water is always dissolving out of the rocks various mineral substances, of which salt is one. Hence the water of springs and rivers contains salt, and this is borne away into the sea. So that all over the world there must be a vast quantity of salt carried into the ocean every year.

The sea gives off again by evaporation as much water as it receives from rain and from the rivers of the land. But the salt carried into it remains behind. If you take some salt water and evaporate it the pure water disappears, and the salt is left. So it is with the sea. Streams are every day carrying fresh supplies of salt into the sea. Every day, too, millions of tons of water are passing from the ocean into vapor in the atmosphere. The waters of the sea must consequently be getting salter by degrees. The process, however, is an extremely slow one.

Although sea water has probably been gradually growing in saltness ever since rivers first flowed into the great sea, it is even now by no means as salt as it might be. In the Atlantic Ocean, for example, the total quantity of the different salts amounts only to about three and a half parts in every hundred parts of water. But in the Dead Sea, which is extremely salt, the proportion is as much as twenty-four parts in the hundred of water.

Standing by the shore and watching for a little the surface of the sea, you notice how restless it is. Even on the calmest summer day, a slight ripple or a gentle heaving motion will be seen.

Again, if you watch a little longer, you will find that whether the sea is calm or rough, it does not remain always at the same limit upon the beach. At one part of the day the edge of the water reaches to the upper part of the sloping beach; some six hours afterward it has retired to the lower part. You may watch it falling and rising day by day, and year by year, with so much regularity that its motion can be predicted long beforehand. This ebb and flow of the sea forms what are called tides.

If you cork up an empty bottle and throw it into the sea, it will of course float. But it will not remain long where it fell. It will begin to move away, and may travel for a long distance until thrown upon some shore again. Bottles cast upon mid-ocean have been known to be carried in this way for many hundreds of miles. This surface-drift of the sea water corresponds generally with the direction in which the prevalent winds blow.

But it is not merely the surface water which moves. You have learnt a little about icebergs; and one fact about them which you must remember is that, large as they may seem, there is about seven times more of their mass below water than above it. Now, it sometimes happens that an iceberg is seen sailing on, even right in the face of a strong wind. This shows that it is moving, not with the wind, but with a strong under-current in the sea. In short, the sea is found to be traversed by many currents, some flowing from cold to warm regions, and others from warm to cold.

Here, then, are four facts about the sea:—1st, it has a restless surface, disturbed by ripples and waves; 2ndly, it is constantly heaving with the ebb and flow of the tides; 3dly, its surface waters drift with the wind; and 4thly, it possesses currents like the atmosphere.

For the present it will be enough if we learn something regarding the first of these facts—the waves of the sea.

Here again you may profitably illustrate by familiar objects what goes on upon so vast a scale in nature. Take a basin, or a long trough of water, and blow upon the water at one edge. You throw its surface into ripples, which, as you will observe, start from the place where your breath first hits the water, and roll onward until they break in little wavelets upon the opposite margin of the basin.

What you do in a small way is the same action by which the waves of the sea are formed. All these disturbances of the smoothness of the sea are due to disturbances of the air. Wind acts upon the water of the sea as your breath does on that of the basin. Striking the surface it throws the water into ripples or undulations, and in continuing to blow along the surface it gives these additional force, until driven on by a furious gale they grow into huge billows.

When waves roll in on the land, they break one after another upon the shore, as your ripples break upon the side of the basin. And they continue to roll in after the wind has fallen, in the same way that the ripples in the basin will go on curling for a little after you have ceased to blow. The surface of the sea, like that of water generally, is very sensitive. If it is thrown into undulations, it does not become motionless the moment the cause of disturbance has passed away, but continues moving in the same way, but in a gradually lessening degree, until it comes to rest.

The restlessness of the surface of the sea becomes in this way a reflection of the restlessness of the air. It is the constant moving to and fro of currents of air, either gentle or violent, which roughens the sea with waves. When the air for a time is calm above, the sea sleeps peacefully below; when the sky darkens, and a tempest bursts forth, the sea is lashed into waves, which roll in and break with enormous force upon the land.

You have heard, perhaps you have even seen, something of the destruction which is worked by the waves of the sea. Every year piers and sea walls are broken down, pieces of the coast are washed away, and the shores are strewn with the wreck of ships. So that, beside all the waste which the surface of the land undergoes from rain, and frost, and streams, there is another form of destruction going on along the coast-line.

On some parts of the coast-line of the east of England, where the rock is easily worn away, the sea advances on the land at a rate of two or three feet every year. Towns and villages which existed a few centuries ago, have one by one disappeared, and their sites are now a long way out under the restless waters of the North Sea. On the west coast of Ireland and Scotland, however, where the rocks are usually hard and resisting, the rate of waste has been comparatively small.

It would be worth your while the first time you happen to be at the coast, to ascertain what means the sea takes to waste the land. This you can easily do by watching what happens on a rocky beach. Get to some sandy or gravelly part of the beach, over which the waves are breaking, and keep your eye on the water when it runs back after a wave has burst. You see all the grains of gravel and sand hurrying down the slope with the water; and if the gravel happens to be coarse, it makes a harsh grating noise as its stones rub against each other—a noise sometimes loud enough to be heard miles away. As the next wave comes curling along, you will mark that the sand and gravel, after slackening their downward pace, are caught up by the bottom of the advancing wave and dragged up the beach again, only to be hurried down once more as the water retires to allow another wave to do the same work.

By this continual up and down movement of the water, the sand and stones on the beach are kept grinding against each other, as in a mill. Consequently they are worn away. The stones become smaller, until they pass into mere sand, and the sand, growing finer, is swept away out to sea and laid down at the bottom.

But not only the loose materials on the shore suffer in this way an incessant wear and tear, the solid rocks underneath, wherever they come to the surface, are ground down in the same process. When the waves dash against a cliff they hurl the loose stones forward, and batter the rocks with them. Here and there in some softer part, as in some crevice of the cliff, these stones gather together, and when the sea runs high they are kept whirling and grinding at the base of the cliff till, in the end, a cave is actually bored by the sea in the solid rock, very much in the same way as holes are bored by a river in the bed of its channel. The stones of course are ground to sand in the process, but their place is supplied by others swept up by the waves. If you enter one of these sea-caves when the water is low, you will see how smoothed and polished its sides and roof are, and how well rounded and worn are the stones lying on its floor.

So far as we know, the bottom of the sea is very much like the surface of the land. It has heights and hollows, lines of valleys and ranges of hills. We can not see down to the bottom where the water is very deep, but we can let down a long line with a weight tied to the end of it, and find out both how deep the water is, and what is the nature of the bottom, whether rock or gravel, sand, mud, or shells. This measuring of the depths of the water is called sounding, and the weight at the end of the line goes by the name of the sounding-lead.

Soundings have been made over many parts of the sea, and something is now known about its bottom, though much still remains to be discovered. The Atlantic Ocean is the best known. In sounding it, before laying down the telegraphic cable which stretches across under the sea from this country to America, a depth of 14,500 feet, or two miles and three-quarters, was reached. But between the Azores and the Bermudas a sounding has been obtained of seven miles and a half. If you could lift up the Himalaya mountains, which are the highest on the globe, reaching a height of 29,000 feet above the sea, and set them down in the deepest part of the Atlantic, they would not only sink out of sight, but their tops would actually be about two miles below the surface.

A great part of the wide sea must be one or two miles deep. But it is not all so deep as that, for even in mid-ocean some parts of its bottom rise up to the surface and form islands. As a rule it deepens in tracts furthest from land, and shallows toward the land. Hence those parts of the sea which run in among islands and promontories are, for the most part, comparatively shallow.

You may readily enough understand how it is that soundings are made, though you can see how difficult it must be to work a sounding line several miles long. Yet men are able not only to measure the depth of the water, but by means of the instrument called a dredge, to bring up bucketfuls of whatever may be lying on the sea floor, from even the deepest parts of the ocean. In this way during the last few years a great deal of additional knowledge has been gathered as to the nature of the sea floor, and the kind of plants and animals which live there. We now know that even in some of the deepest places which have yet been dredged there is plenty of animal life, such as shells, corals, star-fishes, and still more humble creatures.

We can not, indeed, examine the sea bottom with anything like the same minuteness as the surface of the land. Yet a great deal may be learnt regarding it.

If you put together some of the facts with which we have been dealing in the foregoing lessons, you may for yourselves make out some of the most important changes which are in progress on the floor of the sea. For example, try to think what must become of all the wasted rock which is every year removed from the surface of the land. It is carried into the sea by streams, as you have now learnt. But what happens to it when it gets there? From the time when it was loosened from the sides of the mountains, hills, or valleys, this decomposed material has been seeking, like water, to reach a lower level. On reaching the hollows of the sea bottom it can not descend any further, but must necessarily accumulate there.

It is evident, then, that between the floor of the sea and the surface of the land, there must be this great difference: that whereas the land is undergoing a continual destruction of its surface, from mountain crest to sea shore, the sea bottom, on the other hand, is constantly receiving fresh materials on its surface. The one is increased in proportion as the other is diminished. So that even without knowing anything regarding what men have found out by means of deep soundings, you could confidently assert that every year there must be vast quantities of gravel, sand and mud laid down upon the floor of the sea, because you know that these materials are worn away from the land.

Again, you have learnt that the restless agitation of the sea is due to movements of the air, and that the destruction which the sea can effect on the land is due chiefly to the action of the waves caused by wind. But this action must be merely a surface one. The influence of the waves can not reach to the bottom of the deep sea. Consequently that bottom lies beyond the reach of the various kinds of destruction which so alter the face of the land. The materials which are derived from the waste of the land can lie on the sea floor without further disturbance than they may suffer from the quiet flow of such ocean currents as touch the bottom.

In what way, then, are the gravel, sand and mud disposed of when they reach the sea?

As these materials are all brought from the land, they accumulate on those parts of the sea floor which border the land, rather than at a distance. We may expect to find banks of sand and gravel in shallow seas and near land, but not in the middle of the ocean.

You may form some notion, on a small scale, as to how the materials are arranged on the sea bottom by examining the channel of a river in a season of drought. At one place, where the current has been strong, there may be a bank of gravel; at another place, where the currents of the river have met, you will find, perhaps, a ridge of sand which they have heaped up; while in those places where the flow of the stream has been more gentle, the channel may be covered with a layer of fine silt or mud. You remember that a muddy river may be made to deposit its mud if it overflows its banks so far as to spread over flat land which checks its flow.

The more powerful a current of water, the larger will be the stones it can move along. Hence coarse gravel is not likely to be found over the bottom of the sea, except near the land, where the waves can sweep it out into the path of strong sea currents. Sand will be carried further out, and laid down in great sheets, or in banks. The finer mud and silt may be borne by currents for hundreds of miles before at last settling down upon the sea bottom.

In this way, according to the nearness of the land, and the strength of the ocean currents, the sand, mud, and gravel worn from the land are spread out in vast sheets and banks over the bottom of the sea.

[SUNDAY READINGS.]

SELECTED BY THE REV. J. H. VINCENT, D.D.

[January 6.]
ON SPIRITUAL CHRISTIANITY.

By ISAAC TAYLOR.

Read the Gospels, simply as historical memoirs; and by such aids as they alone supply, make yourself acquainted with him who is the subject of these narrations. Bring the individual conception as distinctly as possible before the mind; allow the moral sense to confer, in its own manner, and at leisure, with this unusual form of humanity. “Behold the man”—even the Savior of the world, and say whether it be not historic truth that is before the eye. The more peculiar is this form, yet withal symmetrical, the more infallible is the impression of reality we thence receive. What we have to do with in this instance, is not an undefined ideal of wisdom and goodness, conveyed in round affirmations, or in eulogies; but with a self-developed individuality, in conveying which the writers of the narrative do not appear. In this instance, if in any, the medium is transparent: nothing intervenes between the reader and the personage of the history, in whose presence we stand, as if not separated by time and space.

It may be questioned whether the entire range of ancient history presents any one character in colors of reality so fresh as those which distinguish the personage of the evangelic memoirs. The sages and heroes of antiquity—less and less nearly related, as they must be, to any living interests, are fading amid the mists of an obsolete world; but he who “is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever,” is offered to the view of mankind, in the eyes of immortality, fitting a history, which, instead of losing the intensity of its import, is gathering weight by the lapse of time.

The Evangelists, by the translucency of their style, have given a lesson in biographical composition, showing how perfectly individual character may be expressed in a method which disdains every rule but that of fidelity. It is personal humanity, in the presence of which we stand, while perusing the Gospels, and to each reader apart, if serious and ingenuous, and yet incredulous, the Savior of the world addresses a mild reproof—“It is I. Behold my hands and my feet; reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side, and be not faithless but believing.” And can we do otherwise than grant all that is now demanded, namely, that the Evangelists record the actions and discourses of a real person?

It is well to consider the extraordinary contrasts that are yet perfectly harmonized in the personal character of Christ. At a first glance, he always appears in his own garb of humility—lowliness of demeanor is his very characteristic. But we must not forget that this lowliness was combined with nothing less than a solemnly proclaimed and peremptory challenge of rightful headship over the human race! Nevertheless, the oneness of the character, the fair perfection of the surface, suffers no rent by this blending of elements so strangely diverse. Let us then bring before the mind, with all the distinctness we can, the conception of the Teacher, more meek than any who has ever assumed to rule the opinions of mankind, and who yet, in the tones proper to tranquil modesty, and as conscious at once of power and right, anticipates that day of wonder, when “the king shall sit on the throne of his glory,” with his angels attendant; and when “all nations shall be gathered before him,” from his lips to receive their doom! The more these elements of personal character are disproportionate, the more convincing is the proof of reality which arises from their harmony.

We may read the Evangelists listlessly, and not perceive this evidence; but we can never read them intelligently without yielding to it our convictions.

If the character of Christ be, as indeed it is, altogether unmatched in the circle of history, it is even less so by the singularity of the intellectual and moral elements which it combines, than by the sweetness and perfection which result from their union. This will appear the more, if we consider those instances in which the combination was altogether of an unprecedented kind.

Nothing has been more constant in the history of the human mind, whenever the religious emotions have gained a supremacy over the sensual and sordid passions, than the breaking out of the ascetic temper in some of its forms; and most often in that which disguises virtue, now as a specter, now as a maniac, now as a mendicant, now as a slave, but never as the bright daughter of heaven. Of the three Jewish sects extant in our Lord’s time, two of them—that is to say, the two that made pretensions to any sort of piety, had assumed the ascetic garb, in its two customary species—the philosophic (the Essenes) and the fanatical (the Pharisees); and so strong and uniform is this crabbed inclination, that Christianity itself, in violent contrariety to its spirit and its precepts, went off into the ascetic temper, within a century after the close of the apostolic age, or even earlier.

Under this aspect, then, let us for a moment consider the absolutely novel phenomenon of the Teacher of a far purer morality than the world had heretofore ever listened to; yet himself affecting no singularities in his modes of living. The superiority of the soul to the body was the very purport of his doctrine; and yet he did not waste the body by any austerities! The duty of self-denial he perpetually enforced; and yet he practiced no factitious mortifications! This Teacher, not of abstinence, but of virtue; this Reprover, not of enjoyment, but of vice, himself went in and out among the social amenities of ordinary life with so unsolicitous a freedom as to give color to the malice of hypocrisy, in pointing the finger at him, saying, “Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber; a friend (companion) of publicans and sinners!” Should we not then note this singular apposition and harmony of qualities, that he who was familiar with the festivities of heaven did not any more disdain the poor solaces of mortality, than disregard its transient pains and woes? Follow this same Jesus from the banquets of the opulent, where he showed no scruples in diet, to the highways and wildernesses of Judea, where, never indifferent to human sufferings, he healed—“as many as came unto him.”

These remarkable features in the personal character of Christ have often, and very properly, been adduced as instances of the unrivaled wisdom and elevation which mark him as preëminent among the wise and good.

It is not, however, for this purpose that we now refer to them, but rather as harmonies, altogether inimitable, and which put beyond doubt the historic reality of the person. Thus considered, they must be admitted by calm minds as carrying the truth of Christianity itself.

[January 13.]

There are, however, those who will readily grant us what, indeed, they can not with any appearance of candor deny—the historic reality of the person of Christ, and the more than human excellence which his behavior and discourses embody; but at this point they declare that they must stop. Let such persons see to it—they can not stop at this point; for just at this point there is no ground on which foot may stand.

What are the facts?

The inimitable characteristics of nature attach to what we may call the common incidents of the evangelic history, and in which Jesus of Nazareth is seen mingling himself with the ordinary course of social life.

But is it true that these characteristics suddenly, and in each instance, disappear when this same person is presented to us walking on another, and a high path, namely, that of supernatural power? It is not so, and, on the contrary, very many of the most peculiar and infallible of those touches of tenderness and pathos which so generally mark the evangelic narrative, belong precisely to the supernatural portions of it, and are inseparably connected with acts of miraculous beneficence. We ask that the Gospels be read with the utmost severity of criticism, and with this especial object in view, namely, to inquire whether those indications of reality which have already been yielded to as irresistible evidences of truth, do not belong as fully to the supernatural, as they do to the ordinary incidents of the Gospel? or in other words, whether, unless we resolve to overrule the question by a previous determination, any ground of simply historic distinction presents itself, marking off the supernatural from the ordinary events of the evangelic narratives?

If we feel ourselves to be conversing with historic truth, as well as with heavenly wisdom, when Jesus is before us, seated on the mountain-brow, and delivering the Beatitudes to his disciples; is it so that the colors become confused, and the contour of the figures unreal, when the same personage, in the midst of thousands, seated by fifties on the grassy slope, supplies the hunger of the multitude by the word of his power? Is it historic truth that is presented when the fearless Teacher of a just morality convicts the rabbis of folly and perversity; and less so when, turning from his envious opponents, he says to the paralytic, “Take up thy bed and walk?” Nature herself is before us when the repentant woman, after washing the Lord’s feet with her tears, and wiping them with her hair, sits contrasted with the obdurate and uncourteous Pharisee; but the very same bright forms of reality mark the scene when Jesus, filled with compassion at the sight of a mother’s woe, stays the bier and renders her son alive to her bosom.

Or, if we turn to those portions of the Gospels in which the incidents are narrated more in detail, and where a greater variety of persons is introduced, and where, therefore, the supposition of fabrication is the more peremptorily excluded, it is found that the supernatural and the ordinary elements are in no way to be distinguished in respect of the simple vivacity with which both present themselves to the eye. The evangelic narrative offers the same bright translucency, the same serenity, and the same precision, in reporting the most astounding as the most familiar occurrences. It is like a smooth-surfaced river, which, in holding its course through a varied country reflects from its bosom at one moment the amenities of a homely border, and at the next the summits of the Alps, and both with the same unruffled fidelity.

As the subject of a rigorous historic criticism, and all hypothetical opinions being excluded, no pretext whatever presents itself for drawing a line around the supernatural portions of the Gospels, as if they were of suspicious aspect, and differed from the context in historic verisimilitude. Without violence done to the rules of criticism, we can not detach the miraculous portions of the history, and then put together the mutilated portions, so as to consist with the undoubted reality or the part which is retained.

Or take the narrative of the raising of Lazarus of Bethany. A brilliant vividness, as when a sunbeam breaks from between clouds, illumines this unmatched history; and it rests with equal intensity upon the stupendous miracle, and upon the beauty and grace of the scene of domestic sorrow. If we follow Martha and Mary from the house to the spot where they meet their friend, and give a half-utterance to their confidence in his power, at what step—let us distinctly determine—at what step, as the group proceeds toward the sepulchre, shall we halt and refuse to accompany it? Where is the break in the story, or the point of transition, and where does history finish, and the spurious portion commence? Is it when we approach the cave’s mouth that the gestures of the persons become unreal, and the language untrue to nature? Where is it that the indications of tenderness and majesty disappear—at the moment when Jesus weeps, or when he invokes his Father, or when, with a voice which echoes in hades, he challenges the dead to come forth; or is it when “he who was dead” obeys this bidding?

We affirm that, on no principles which a sound mind can approve, is it possible either to deny the reality of the natural portions of this narrative, or to sever these from the supernatural. But this is not enough; for it might be in fact more easy to offer some intelligible solution of the difficulty attaching to the supposition that the gospels are not true, in respect of the ordinary, than of the extraordinary portion of their materials. If we were to allow it to be possible (which it is not) that writers showing so little inventive or plastic powers as do Matthew the Publican, and John of Galilee, should, with the harmony of truth, have carried their imaginary Master through the common acts and incidents of his course; never could they, no, nor writers the most accomplished, have brought him, in modest simplicity, through the miraculous acts of that course. Desperate must be the endeavor to show that, while the ordinary events of the gospel must be admitted as true, the extraordinary are incredible. On the contrary, it would be to the former, if to any, that a suspicion might attach; for, as to the latter, they can not but be true: if not true, whence are they?

The skepticism, equally condemned as it is by historical logic and by the moral sense, which allows the natural and disallows the supernatural portion of the history of Christ, is absolutely excluded when we compare, in the four Gospels separately, the narrative of what precedes the resurrection, with the closing portions, which bring the crucified Jesus again among his disciples.

[January 20.]

If those portions of the evangelic history which reach to the moment of the death of Christ are, in a critical sense, of the same historic quality as those which run on to the moment of his ascension, and if the former absolutely command our assent—if they carry it as by force, then, by a most direct inference, “is Christ risen indeed,” and become the first fruits of immortality to the human race. Then it is true that, “as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” No narrative is anywhere extant comparable to that of the days and hours immediately preceding the crucifixion; and the several accounts of the hurried events of those days present the minute discrepancies which are always found to belong to genuine memoirs, compiled by eye-witnesses.

The last supper and its sublime discourses; the agony in the garden, the behavior of the traitor, the scenes in the hall of the chief priest, and before the judgment-seat of the Roman procurator, and in the palace of Herod, and in the place called the Pavement, and on the way from the city, and in the scene on Calvary, are true—if anything in the compass of history be true.

But now, if our moral perceptions are in this way to be listened to, not less incontestably real are the closing chapters of the four Gospels, in which we find the same sobriety and the same vivacity; the same distinctness and the same freshness; the same pathos and the same wisdom, and the same majesty; and yet all chastened by the recollected sorrows of a terrible conflict just passed, and mellowed with the glow of a triumph at hand.

Let it be imagined that writers such as the Evangelists might have led their Master as far as to Calvary; but could they, unless truth had been before them, have reproduced him from the sepulchre? What abruptness, harshness, extravagance, what want of harmony, would have been presented in the closing chapters of the Gospels, if the same Jesus had not supplied the writers with their materials by going in and out among them after his resurrection.

On the supposition that Christ did not rise from the dead, let any one whose moral tastes are not entirely blunted, read the narrative of his encounter with Mary in the garden, and with his disciples in the inner chamber, and again on the shore of the lake; let him study the perfect simplicity and yet the warmth of the interview with the two disciples on their way to Emmaus. The better taste of modern times, and the just sense of what is true in sentiment and pure in composition, give us an advantage in an analysis of this sort. Guided, then, by the instincts of the most severe taste, let us spread before us the final portion of the Gospel of Luke, namely, the twenty-fourth chapter, which reports a selection of the events occurring between the early morning of the first day of the week, and that moment of wonder when, starting from the world he had ransomed, the Savior returned whence he had come. Will any one acquainted with antiquity affirm that any writer, Greek, Roman, or barbarian, has come down to us, whom we can believe capable of conceiving at all of such a style of incident or discourse; or who, had he conceived it, could have conveyed his conception in a style so chaste, natural, calm, lucid, pure? Nothing like this narrative is contained in all the circle of fiction, and nothing equal to it in all the circle of history; and yet nothing is more perfectly consonant with the harmonies of nature. We may listlessly peruse this page, each line of which wakens a sympathy in every bosom which itself responds to truth. But if we ponder it, if we allow the mind to grasp the several objects, we are vanquished by the conviction that all is real. But if real, and if Christ be risen indeed, then is Christianity indeed a religion of facts; and then we are fully entitled to a bold affirmation and urgent use of whatever inferences may thence be fairly deduced.

Acute minds will not be slow to discern, as in perspective before them, the train of those inferences which we shall feel ourselves at liberty to deduce from the admission that Christianity is historically true. This admission can not, we are sure, be withheld; and yet let it not be made with a reserved intention to evade the consequences. What are they? They are such as embrace the personal well-being of every one; for, if Christianity be a history, it is a history still in full progress; it is a history running on, far beyond the dim horizon of human hopes and fears.

[January 27.]

But it is said, all this, at the best, is moral evidence only; and those who are conversant with mathematical demonstrations, and with the rigorous methods of physical science, must not be required to yield their convictions easily to mere moral evidence.

We ask, have those who are accustomed thus to speak, actually considered the import of their objection; or inquired what are the consequences it involves, if valid? We believe not; and we think so, because the very terms are destitute of logical meaning; or imply, if a meaning be assigned to them, a palpable absurdity.

If, for a moment, we grant an intelligible meaning to the objection as stated, and consent to understand the terms in which it is conveyed, as they are often used, then we affirm that some portion of even the abstract sciences is less certain than are very many things established by what is called moral evidence—that a large amount of what is accredited as probably true within the circle of the physical and mixed sciences is immeasurably inferior in certainty to much which rests upon moral evidence; and further, that so far from its being reasonable to reject this species of evidence, the mere circumstance of a man’s being known to distrust it in the conduct of his daily affairs, would be held to justify, in his case, a commission of lunacy.

No supposition can be more inaccurate than that which assumes the three kinds of proof, mathematical, physical, and moral, to range, one beneath the other, in a regular gradation of certainty; as if the mathematical were in all cases absolute; the physical a degree lower, or, as to its results, in some degree, and always, less certain than those of the first; and, by consequence, the third being inferior to the second, necessarily far inferior to the first; and therefore, always much less certain than that which alone deserves to be spoken of as certain, and in fact barely trustworthy in any case.

Any such distribution of the kinds of proof is mere confusion, illogical abstractedly, and involving consequences, which, if acted upon, would appear ridiculously absurd.

It is indeed true that the three great classes of facts—the universal, or absolute (mathematical and metaphysical)—the general, or physical, and the individual (forensic and historical) are pursued and ascertained by three corresponding methods, or, as they might be called, three logics. But it is far from being true that the three species of reasoning hold an exclusive authority or sole jurisdiction over the three classes of facts above mentioned. Throughout the physical sciences the mathematical logic is perpetually resorted to, while even within the range of the mathematical the physical is, once and again, brought in as an aid. But if we turn to the historical and forensic department of facts, the three methods are so blended in the establishment of them, that to separate them altogether is impracticable; and as to moral evidence, if we use the phrase in any intelligible sense, it does but give its aid, at times, on this ground; and even then the conclusions to which it leads rest upon inductions which are physical, rather than moral.

The conduct of a complicated historical or forensic argument concerning individual facts, resembles the manipulations of an adroit workman, who, having some nice operation in progress, lays down one tool and snatches up another, and then another, according to the momentary exigencies of his task.

That sort of evidence may properly be called moral, which appeals to the moral sense, and in assenting to which, as we often do with an irresistible conviction, we are unable, with any precision, to convey to another mind the grounds of our firm belief. It is thus often that we estimate the veracity of a witness or judge of the reality or spuriousness of a written narrative. But then even this sort of evidence, when nicely analyzed, resolves itself into physical principles.

What are these convictions which we find it impossible to clothe in words, but the results in our minds, of slow, involuntary inductions concerning moral qualities, and which, inasmuch as they are peculiarly exact, are not to be transfused into a medium so vague and faulty as is language, at the best?

As to the mass of history, by far the larger portion of it rests, in no proper sense, upon moral evidence. To a portion the mathematical doctrine of probabilities applies—for it may be as a million to one—that an alleged fact, under all the circumstances, is true. But the proof of the larger portion resolves itself into our knowledge of the laws of the material world, and of those of the world of mind. A portion also is conclusively established by a minute scrutiny of its agreement with that intricate combination of small events which makes up the course of human affairs.

Every real transaction, especially those which flow on through a course of time, touches this web-work of small events at many points, and is woven into its very substance. Fiction may indeed paint its personages so as for a moment to deceive the eye, but it has never succeeded in the attempt to foist its factitious embroideries upon the tapestry of truth.

We might take as an instance that irresistible book in which Paley has established the truth of the personal history of St. Paul (“The Horæ Paulinæ”). It is throughout a tracing of the thousand fibres by which a long series of events connects itself with the warp and woof of human affairs. To apply to evidence of this sort, the besom of skepticism, and sweepingly to remove it as consisting only in moral evidence, is an amazing instance of confusion of mind.

It is often loosely affirmed that history rests mainly upon moral evidence. Is then a Roman camp moral evidence? Or is a Roman road moral evidence? Or are these and many other facts, when appealed to as proof of the assertion that, in a remote age, the Romans held military occupation of Britain, moral evidence? If they be, then we affirm that, when complete in its kind, it falls not a whit behind mathematical demonstration, as to its certainty.

Although it is not true that Christianity rests mainly upon moral evidence, yet it is true that it might rest on that ground with perfect security.

It is to this species of evidence that we have now appealed; not as establishing the heavenly origin of Christianity, which it does establish, but simply as it attests the historic reality of the person of Christ, and here we must ask an ingenuous confession from whoever may be bound in foro conscientiæ to give it, that the notion of Christianity, and the habitual feelings toward it of many in this Christian country, are such as if brought to the test of severe reasoning could by no ingenuity be made to consist either with the supposition that Christianity is historically false, or that it is historically true! This ambiguous faith of the cultured, less reasonable than the superstitions of the vulgar (for they are consistent, which this is not,) could never hold a place in a disciplined mind but by an act, repeated from day to day, and similar to that of a man who should refuse to have the shutters removed from the windows on that side of his house whence he might descry the residence of his enemy.

If Christianity be historically true it must be granted to demand more than a respectful acknowledgment that its system of ethics is pure; or were it historically false, we ought to think ourselves to be outraging at once virtue and reason in allowing its name to pass our lips. While bowing to Christianity as good and useful, and yet not invested with authority toward ourselves, we are entangled in a web of inconsistencies, of which we are not conscious, only because we choose to make no effort to break through it. If Christianity be true, then it is true that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ,” and must, “every one of us, give an account of himself to God.” What meaning do such words convey to the minds of those who, with an equal alarm, would see Christianity overthrown as a controlling power in the social system; or find it brought home to themselves, as an authority, they must personally bow to? Christians! How many amongst us are Christians, as men might be called philosophers, who, while naming Newton always with admiration, should yet reserve their interior assent for the very paganism of astronomy.

A religion of facts, we need hardly observe, is the only sort of religion adapted powerfully to affect the hearts of the mass of mankind; for ordinary or uncultured minds can neither grasp, nor will care for, abstractions of any kind. But then that which makes Christianity proper for the many, and indeed proper for all, if motives are to be effectively swayed, renders it a rock of offense to the few who will admit nothing that may not be reduced within the circle of their favored generalizations. Such minds, therefore, reject Christianity, or hold it in abeyance, not because they can disprove it, but because it will not be generalized, because it will not be sublimated, because it will not be touched by the tool of reason; because it must remain what it is—an insoluble mass of facts. In attempting to urge consistency upon such persons, the advocate of Christianity makes no progress, and has to return, ever and again, to his document, and to ask: Is this true, or false? If true, your metaphysics may be true also; but yet must not give law to your opinions; much less, govern your conduct.

Resolute as may be the determination of some to yield to no such control, nevertheless if the evangelic history be true, “one is our Master, even Christ.” He is our Master in abstract speculation—our Master in religious belief, our Master in morals, and in the ordering of every day’s affairs.

It will be readily admitted that this our first position, if it be firm, sweeps away, at a stroke, a hundred systems of religion, ancient and modern, which either have not professed to rest upon historic truth, or which have notoriously failed in making good any such pretension. These various schemes need not be named; they barely merit an enumeration; they are susceptible of no distinct refutation, for they are baseless, powerless, obsolete.

Say you that Christianity is intolerant in thus excluding all other systems? A religion which excludes that which is false is not therefore intolerant. If it be true, it must exclude all that is untrue. Let us have a religion willing to walk abreast with other religions—religions affirming what it denies, and denying what it affirms—but indulgent toward all. An intolerant religion is the religion of a sect, and of a sect in fear.

[POLITICAL ECONOMY.]

By G. M. STEELE, D.D.

IV.
DISTRIBUTION.

I. Distribution in economics embraces those principles on which the proceeds of industry are divided among the parties employed in their production.

If each man owned all the capital concerned in his business, and performed all the labor involved in each product, this question would be a very simple one. But when, as in the manufacture of chairs, of hardware and watches, and in the building of houses, there are many laborers of widely diverse capabilities, and especially when we remember that there are innumerable subsidiary occupations, as in the preparing of materials, the making of tools and machines, the protection of the workmen, the superintendence of the business, and in many other ways, the problem becomes a most complicated one.

The subject may be divided as follows:

1. Wages, or the compensation of labor.

2. Profits, or the compensation of the proprietor or employer.

3. Interest, or compensation for capital reckoned as money.

4. Rent, or compensation for the use of land.

5. Taxes, or compensation for protection by the government.

II. On the subject of wages diverse and contradictory opinions prevail. A large proportion of the British economists hold the theory that a low rate of wages is all that can be maintained, or is, on the whole, desirable among ordinary unskilled laborers. That a man should have compensation sufficient to furnish him with such food, raiment and shelter as are essential to keep him in good working condition; also, in addition, enough to enable him to support a wife (with what she can herself earn), and to rear at least two children, themselves prepared to become laborers; and to make some additional allowances for probable periods of sickness and inability to labor. So much is deemed absolutely essential even to the capitalist and employer, in order that their interests may not suffer. The school of writers referred to profess to find in the human constitution a law which prevents wages from going much beyond this limit. It is said that if they do go much beyond this, the population will multiply so rapidly, and the number of laborers will so greatly increase, that wages will not only fall back to their limit, but that great suffering will ensue.

Most American writers reject this view, though some of them appear to hold opinions logically implying it. Henry C. Carey takes the ground that there is not only no such law, but that there is one of a diametrically opposite character, which as thoroughly coincides with, as this antagonizes, the general provisions of an all-wise and beneficent creator. This law, as developed by Mr. Carey, is substantially that in any community where violence is not done to natural principles in the relations between capitalists and laborers, the share of the latter in the joint product to which both are contributors, is constantly increasing. While at first the capitalist receives much more than half, as time and the development of society go on his proportion is steadily diminishing till it becomes a small fraction of the whole, while that of the laborer is steadily increasing. At the same time, though the proportion of the capitalist is always smaller, the amount is always larger, owing to the always increasing productiveness; and for the same reason both the proportion and the amount received by the labor is enhanced. Evidence of this might be made obvious by comparing the compensation received by laborers in the earlier ages of almost any civilized race as compared with that received in its most advanced stage; and this, too, notwithstanding the vast imperfections under which society has labored and the unnatural conditions to which the laboring classes in all the earlier periods of history have been subjected. In the opinion of some writers this law is one of the grandest and most important of the recent discoveries in political economy.