estimate of true nobility of soul. Even in the most untoward circumstances-in those calamities which mar and mutilate the felicity of life by causing pains and hindrances to its various activities-nobility may shine out when a person bears the weight of accumulated misfortunes with calmness, not from insensibility but from innate dignity and greatness of soul.

In this attitude of Aristotle we are already very near the position of the Stoics. The problem of fortune, which Aristotle never completely solved, became the chief problem of his successors; and the Stoics and Epicureans found in part the same solution of it. The only salvation from the evil chances of life is to be found, they agree, in a self-contained life, which is independent of outward change and circumstance. The life of the wise man is a closed sphere, with its centre within the man himself; his mind to him a kingdom is, he is his own sufficient sphere. For the outward sphere has become manifestly inadequate; the splendid life of the Greek States has disappeared in a narrow provincialism. Fortune has played havoc with man's life, and shattered the fabric of his brave endeavours. The lesson is that man must find his good, if he is to find it at all, entirely within himself, and must place no confidence in the course of outward things. And has he not the secret of happiness in his own bosom ? Is it not for him to dictate the terms of his own true welfare? Can he not shield himself from fortune's darts in a complete armour of indifference and impassibility?

Yet this is not the final resting-place, either for Aristotle or for the Stoics. The problem of fortune, it is quite manifest, is not yet solved, nor can the attempt to solve it be abandoned. There is a very real kinship and community, it is felt, between man's nature and the nature of things. The latter is not the sphere of blind chance, after all; its essence is, like man's, rational. "Live according to nature" means, for the Stoic, “Live

according to the common reason, obey that rational order which embraces thy life and nature's too." Nothing happens by chance, everything befalls as is most fit; and man's true salvation is to discover the fitness of each thing that befalls him, and, in all things, to order his behaviour in accordance with the eternal fitness of the divine order. Fortune is in reality the providence of God; no evil can happen to a good man, his affairs are not indifferent to God. The universe is itself divine; it is the perfect expression of the divine reason, and therefore the home of the rational spirit of man. Nor is man, after all, alone, or his life a solitary and exclusive one, contained within the narrow bounds of his individual selfhood. Without ever straying beyond himself, he can become a citizen of a fairer and greater City than any Greek or earthly Statea civitas Dei, the goodly fellowship of humanity, yea, of the universe itself; for his life and the life of the universe are in their essence one. This splendid and spacious home it was that the Stoics built for themselves out of the wreck of worldly empire and the shattering of their earlier hopes; such sweet uses hath adversity for the human spirit. Aristotle's problem seems very near its solution.

Aristotle had himself suggested this Stoic solution, and had even, in his own bold metaphysic, transcended it. He could not stop short of a perfect unification of man's life with the life of nature, and of both with the divine universal Life. The universe has, for him, one end and one perfect fulfilment. The form of all things, and the form, if we may say so, of human life, are the same; the form of the universe is reason. And the apparent unreason, the matter' of the world and of morality, is only reason in the making or becoming. It is the promise and the potency of reason, and will in due time demonstrate its rationality by a perfect fulfilment and actualisation. The process of nature and the process of human life are really only stages in the one entirely rational

process of the divine life. To God all things turn, after his perfection they all aspire, in him they live and move and have their being.

ἐντελέχεια.

And if we ask, What, then, of man's place in nature? we have Aristotle's answer in his doctrine of the human uxh. It is the form of the body, its perfect actualisation or EvreλExea. Nay, the true soul of man, the soul of his soul, is that same active and creative reason, that pure activity of thought, which is the alpha and the omega of being. In fulfilling the end of his own nature, therefore, man is a co-worker with God in the fulfilment of the universal end. For the end of the universe is the same as the end of human life. Man, in virtue of his higher endowment of reason, can accomplish with intelligence and insight that which the lower creation accomplishes in its own blind but unerring way. So that ultimately man cannot fail of his end, any more than nature can fail of hers; let him link his fortunes with those of the universe itself, and he cannot fail. The cosmic process is not indifferent to man, who is its product and fulfilment, and also, in a sense, its master and its end. Aristotle, it is true, never brings together his ethical doctrine of fortune as an external and indifferent power which may as readily check as forward. the fulfilment of man's moral nature and his attainment of his true end, and his metaphysical doctrine of the unity of the divine or universal end with the end of human life a unity which would imply that there cannot be, in man any more than in nature, such a thing as permanently unfulfilled capacity, or potentiality that is not perfectly actualised. But the profound meaning of his total thought about the universe would seem to be that man must share in the fruition of the great consummation, that without his participation it would be no consummation at all, and that into that diviner order the lower order (or disorder) of outward accident, in which his life had seemed to be confined and thwarted

of its fulfilment, must ultimately disappear. Thus interpreted, the thought of Aristotle would at once anticipate and transcend the Stoic philosophy of man and nature, in the measure that the Aristotelian theology anticipates and transcends the theology of the Porch.

7. The Christian solution. Christianity offers its own bold solution of the problem we are considering. It knows no ultimate distinction between the course of the world and the course of the moral life, but sees all things working together for good, and discerns in each event of human history a manifestation of the divine Providence. The natural order is incorporated in the moral; and even where, to the Greek mind, and to the pagan mind in general, nature seemed to thwart and retard morality, it is felt most surely to advance moral interests. Misfortune and calamity, instead of being obstacles to the development of goodness, are the very soil of its best life-the atmosphere it needs to bring it to perfection. Not the wealthy, but the poor; not the prosperous, but the persecuted; not the highminded, but the lowly, the weary, and the heavy-laden, are called blessed. A new office is found for suffering and calamity in the life of goodness; man is made perfect through suffering. While Aristotle thought that length of days was needed for a complete life, Christianity has taught us that

"In short measures life may perfect be."

Nor is salvation found any longer in a mere Stoical indifference or apathy to misfortune; such a bearing is no real bearing of calamity, but rather a cowardly retreat from it. It is in the actual suffering of evil that Christianity finds the 'soul of good' in it. Its office is disciplinary and purifying; and though "no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous but grievous, nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteous

ness unto them which are exercised thereby." Instead of negating, or at best limiting, the exercise of virtue (as Aristotle thought), calamity provides the very opportunity of its best and highest exercise, and therefore must be regarded as the most perfect instrument in the development of goodness.1

8. The ideal and the real. If philosophy finds itself precluded from going the whole length of the Christian doctrine of divine Providence, yet it seems to me that Christianity puts into the hands of philosophy a clue which it would do well to follow up, especially since the conception is not altogether strange, but is the complement and development of the Aristotelian and Stoic theology which has just been sketched. All that we are concerned at this point to maintain is the speculative legitimacy and necessity of the demand for a moral order, somehow pervading and using (in however strange and unexpected wise) the order of nature, and thus making possible for the moral being the fulfilment of his moral task, the perfect realisation of all his moral capacities. That the universe is not foreign. to the ethical spirit of man, or indifferent to it, but its sphere and atmosphere, the soil of its life, the breath of its being; that "the soul of the world is just," that might is ultimately right, and the divine and universal Power a Power that makes for righteousness; that so far from the nature of things being antagonistic to morality, "morality is the nature of things,"-this at least, it seems to me, is the metaphysical implication of morality

1 Addison has given quaint expression to this Christian estimate of socalled misfortune in his fine allegory of The Golden Scales: "I observed one particular weight lettered on both sides, and upon applying myself to the reading of it, I found on one side written, 'In the dialect of men,' and underneath it, 'CALAMITIES': on the other side was written, 'In the language of the gods,' and underneath, 'BLESSINGS.' I found the intrinsic value of this weight to be much greater than I imagined, for it overpowered health, wealth, good fortune, and many other weights, which were much more ponderous in my hand than the other."