they must know God in Christ. If they knew God, then with them, as with himself, they would have the key which would unlock all knowledge, ecclesiastical, eschatological, (religious, as it is commonly called,) historic, political, social. Nay, even, so he hoped, that knowledge of God would prove at last to be the key to the right understanding of that physical science of which he, unfortunately for the world, knew but too little, but which he accepted with a loyal trust in God, and in fact as the voice of God, which won him respect and love from men of science to whom his theology was a foreign world. If he could make men know God, and therefore if he could make men know that God was teaching them; that no man could see a thing unless God first showed it to him, then all would go well, and they might follow the Logos, with old Socrates, whithersoever he led. Therefore he tried not so much to alter men's convictions, as, like Socrates, to make them respect their own convictions, to be true to their own deepest instincts, true to the very words which they used so carelessly, ignorant alike of their meaning and their wealth. He wished all men, all churches, all nations, to be true to the light which they had already, to whatsoever was godlike, and therefore God-given, in their own thoughts; and so to rise from their partial apprehensions, their scattered gleams of light, toward that full knowledge and light which was contained so he said, even with his dying lips-in the orthodox Catholic faith. This was the ideal of the man and his work; and it left him neither courage nor time to found a school or promulgate a system. God had his own system: a system vaster than Augustine's, vaster than Dante's, vaster than all the thoughts of all thinkers, orthodox and heterodox, put together; for God was His own system, and by Him all things consisted, and in Him they lived and moved and had their being; and He was here, living and working, and we were living and working in Him, and had, instead of building systems of our own, to find out His eternal laws for men, for nations, for churches; for only in obedience to them is Life. Yes, a man who held this could found no system. "Other foundation," he used to say, "can no man lay, save that which is laid, even Jesus Christ." And as he said it, his voice

and eye told those who heard him that it was to him the most potent, the most inevitable, the most terrible, and yet the most hopeful, of all facts.

As for temptations to vanity, and love of power-he may have had to fight with them in the heyday of youth, and genius, and perhaps ambition. But the stories of his childhood are stories of the same generosity, courtesy unselfishness, which graced his later years. At least, if he had been tempted, he had conquered. In more than five-and-twenty years, I have known no being so utterly unselfish, so utterly humble, so utterly careless of power or influence, for the mere enjoymentand a terrible enjoyment it is-of using them. Staunch to his own opinion only when it seemed to involve some moral principle, he was almost too ready to yield it, in all practical matters, to any one whom he supposed to possess more practical knowledge than he. To distrust himself, to accuse himself, to confess his proneness to hard judgments, while, to the eye of those who knew him and the facts, he was exercising a splendid charity and magnanimity; to hold himself up as a warning of "wasted time," while he was, but too literally, working himself to death,-this was the childlike temper which made some lower spirits now and then glad to escape from their consciousness of his superiority by patronizing and pitying him; causing in him-for he was, as all such great men are like to be, instinct with genial humor -a certain quiet good-natured amusement, but nothing more.

But it was that very humility, that very self-distrust, combined so strangely with manful strength and sternness, which drew to him humble souls, self-distrustful souls, who, like him, were full of the "Divine discontent," who lived-as perhaps all men should live-angry with themselves, ashamed of themselves, and more and more angry and ashamed as their own ideal grew, and with it their consciousness of defection from that ideal. To him, as to David in the wilderness, gathered those who were spiritually discontented and spiritually in debt; and he was a captain over them, because, like David, he talked to them, not of his own genius or his own doctrines, but of the Living God, who had helped their forefathers, and would help them likewise. How great his influence was; what an amount of teaching, con

solation, reproof, instruction in righteousness, that man found time to pour into heart after heart, with a fit word for man and for woman; how wide his sympathies, how deep his understanding of the human heart; how many sorrows he has lightened; how many wandering feet set right, will never be known till the day when the secrets of all hearts are disclosed. His forthcoming biography, if, as is hoped, it contains a selection from his vast correspondence, will tell something of all this: but how little! The most valuable of his letters will be those which were meant for no eye but the recipient's, and which no recipient would give to the world-hardly to an ideal Church; and what he has done will have to be estimated by wise men

hereafter, when (as in the case of most great geniuses) a hundred indirect influences, subtle, various, often seemingly contradictory, will be found to have had their origin in Frederick Maurice.

And thus I end what little I have dared to say. There is much behind, even more worth saying, which must not be said. Perhaps some far wiser men than I will think that I have said too much already, and be inclined to answer me as Elisha of old answered the over-meddling sons of the prophets :

"Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head today?

"Yea, I know it: hold ye your peace." CHARLES KINGSLEY.

SHORTLY after the middle of the seventeenth century, (1666,) the great dramatic genius of the age brought upon the French theatre a rude, strange, and incomprehensible figure, which puzzled and offended contemporaries, which puzzles if it does not offend posterity, and of which the master himself always said that he hardly knew what he had meant by his creation. It was the sound in the midst of men and women playing a little artificial game of life, with compliments, ribands, sonnets, of a hoarse and strident voice recalling them to truth, manliness, self-sufficience, strength. The Misanthrope of Molière was only a poetic apparition. About a hundred years later, the poetic conception took flesh, and the cry of Rousseau shook the world. This vision, too, both puzzled and offended contemporaries: Rousseau's person was proscribed, and his books were burnt in the market-place; the Jesuit archbishop and the Jansenist Parliament of Paris, the Protestant Council of Geneva, and the patriarch of unbelief at Ferney, all joined for a moment of unique accord in a chorus of angry reprobation (1763.) Yet this was an apparition which another hundred years have not been able to lay. The literature of imagination and the literature of social philosophy are equally haunted by it; it still stands significantly beckoning between

* A discourse delivered before the Royal Institution, on Friday evening, April 12, 1872.

に

the hideous luxury and the sodden despair of cities; and it is not twelve months since we saw it armed with the sword and the brand, energetically transcribing into letters of blood and flame Rousseau's famous

paradoxes, that science and art do not purify manners, and that inequality among men is not authorized by the natural law. It was Rousseau who first called from the depths and launched upon the old European society that mysterious something which we know not whether to call a religion, or a philosophy, or a sentiment, or a dream; which assumes all forms from the vaguest and wildest humanitarian aspiration, up to the last brand-new system from Paris, which accurately maps out the future of the race, with each intellectual province and most diminutive moral township finally planted and decisively marked; which men hate or love under the fragmentary and partial designations of Democra cy, Socialism, Cosmopolitanism, and the rest; but of whose presence, whether we hate it or love it, whether we hope all things from it or fear all things, every one in Europe, from the Pope in the Vatican to the red soldier of despair in his garret at Belleville, is conscious, as a brooding and fermenting spirit of conviction that the old terms of right and duty and the old forms of humanity and justice are destined to be fitted with new definitions and to receive many unexpected applications.

Of the personality of Rousseau-which

is one of the most extraordinary and interesting if it is not by any means one of the most fascinating, in history-it is not necessary that I should now speak. It is hard to do so without putting on the mask of the prig. His biography is the record of a tenacious revolt against conventions, a revolt often praiseworthy and noble, often otherwise. He committed a multitude of offences against propriety, he committed many against common morality, and he repeated one cruel and shocking crime against humanity. But we need not here exercise ourselves in these matters. They did not much affect his influence. Men are wont to put aside and to let drop from their memories the foibles, the vices, the crimes even, of those whom they suppose to have brought them new light from the high heavens. Those whom the moralist justly condemns are constantly reprieved by a world which willingly forgets the multiplicity of circumstances surrounding conduct and character, and fixes with perfect admiration upon the extraordinary display of any one singular human quality -energy, tenacity, fortitude, devotion. As has been many a time said, to Rousseau much has been forgiven, because he loved much.

In proceeding from the personality of Rousseau to his work, and examining the ideas with which he so rapidly inundated France, we need not expect to come upon many that are peculiarly original, or intellectually of his own conception. There is scarcely a single definite idea among those which made him so great a power, which may not be found among some of the European writers within the range of whose influence he was brought. French writers to this day systematically attribute to the hardihood and originality of his genius much of what was really due to the circumstances of Geneva, where he was born, and to which in spite of many difficulties he always preserved a strong and lively attachment. He was born in a time of great public discontent, and in the midst of perpetual discussion of the first principles both of politics and theology; his youth was passed in the thick of preparation for a revolution. The sight of the austere government which Calvin established and the paternal stringency with which it was exercised and accepted, exerted the same influence upon Rousseau which the spectacle of Sparta exerted over the social

thinkers of Greece, by engendering that conviction of the artificiality of a social system and the omnipotence of the lawgiver, which is among the most shallow, deplorable, and ruinous of all the false ideas that infest modern Europe.

Again, it has been always thought a sign of Rousseau's marvelous prescience of the coming revolution that he should have insisted upon the sons of the rich and noble being taught some craft or trade by means of which they might support themselves in case they should ever be driven into exile. But this most manly and laudable prescription suggests no marvelous prescience of revolution-though Rousseau did foresee change-when we remember that banishment was a traditional practice in Geneva, as it always has been in very small republics. When the civil troubles of Geneva came to a height in 1734, many of the oligarchs voluntarily emigrated, just as the French nobles did half a cen tury later. It is the same with that other most unmanly and far from laudable prescription which gave such scandal to his free-thinking contemporaries, namely, that all atheists should be banished from a wellgoverned country. This was a usage of Rousseau's native city, made wider and more liberal, but still unmistakably a Genevese survival. Again, that notion of the sovereignty of peoples which Rousseau's eloquence transformed so swiftly into so gigantic a force, though as yet only in a weak and speculative form, can still be shown to have been quite as familiar in Geneva as it was in England, Scotland, and Holland. Finally, the historian of opinion is able to trace in the theology of Geneva during the first half of the eighteenth century a strong movement towards that substitution of natural religion and pure deism which Rousseau expounded with such attractive eloquence in the Savoyard Vicar's memorable Profession of Faith. general connection, which needs more ample treatment than has hitherto been thought of, between the spirit of Rousseau's work and the spirit of his birthplace ought never to be overlooked. History might remind us of it. The most strenuous and powerful disciple of Rousseau's teaching ever gained was Robespierre; and Robespierre was emphatically a sort of Calvin who overshot the mark.

This

Besides his obligation to Geneva, Rousseau abounds in ideas which may be de

finitely traced one by one to the writers whose works he is known to have read. He is steeped in Montaigne; Plutarch, Hobbes, Charron, gave him much; but above all in every page that he wrote, both upon education and government, we see how much is directly assimilated from that English philosopher, who was at once the strength and the weakness, the evil genius and the good genius, of French speculation in the eighteenth century,-our sage, firm, and sober Locke. Books have been written to prove that Rousseau was a plagiarist. If the name belongs to one who borrows the thoughts or decorations of other writers merely for a passing literary purpose of his own, it was never more entirely misapplied. Rousseau was by temperament eminently passive and receptive. It was his supreme conception of pleasure to lie profoundly still in the heat of the sun, listening to the hum of the summer air or to the light whisper on the waters of the lake, and passively inhaling the sweet fragrance of flowers and grass and the earth. He read the books that pleased him in the same mental attitude and mood. Their ideas were absorbed, assimilated, and became a part of himself, and in the process they were mixed and transformed into a new and strange force. He was original much as Voltaire was; he contributed a new temper and a new sentiment. He combined old ideas in a fresh pattern; he filled them with color, and warmed them with the glow of ardent passion; with magical skill he wove around them a vesture of tender sentiment, of sympathetic association, and fervid, inextinguishable hope, which brought men rapturous into an unrecognized presence.

No doubt the times were ripe, and the minds of men were already. turned in the direction in which Rousseau led them with such over-mastering vehemence. Had it not been so, it would have been impossible that within a short period of thirty years after the first publication of his two most important works, and almost within a dozen years of his death, the men who avowed themselves for his disciples, who kept his books ever open on their tables like some sacred fire perpetually burning, who never spoke without quotation of the master's sentences and justification of their actions from his principles-that these Jacobins should without resistance have si

lenced the old religion, should have silenced Voltairism, and sent the Girondins who were its professors and representatives to the guillotine, and not only made themselves masters of their country, but should have charged France with a fiery current of social and patriotic and religious energy, and kindled a great flame of heroic purpose, for which we have to seek a parallel in the noble enthusiasm of the first crusades or the stormful fanaticism of the first followers of Mahomet. Once more, then, the harvest was ripe; once more, no man scientifically or intellectually in the first rank of creative originality ever leads masses of men. He can only be original in form, and in the manner of the presentation of ideas of which the various conditions of the time have made men expectant. The theory of the great leader as a miraculously illuminated pillar of fire which flames into light we know not how; or as a colossal monolith silently reared in the darkness of night by unseen hands, and towering like a portent in the level wilderness of humanity-is one of the thoughts which fade away at the same time and by the same process as that conception of history which makes it a long series of inscrutable conjuring tricks.

Every one is tolerably familiar with the issue of the great battle in France between the old and the new up to the time when Rousseau effected his memorable diversion. The combatants were the Church on one side and the Philosophers, Voltaireans, or Encyclopædists on the other. Each party had its inner factions and subdivisions, but as against one another the two great armies closed their ranks and fought without concession, compromise, or quarter. The aim of the Church is a very old story. Bad churchmen were animated by the same selfish and sinister motives which actuate bad men of all kinds in all times; love of wealth, power, ease, and that lazy darkness of the understanding in which the ignoble take comfort. Good churchmen, on the contrary, believed themselves to be defending the sacred cause of divinely transmitted truth and a divinely willed social order against the scatterers of spiritual pestilence and eternal death. The aims of the Philosophers are less easily described, but they may be best understood when we remember that these extraordinary men were consumed by the thirst of intellectual curiosity; that

the acquisition of knowledge was to them what the attainment of holiness was to the canonized persons of the rival church; and, each new piece of knowledge thus acquired was eagerly transformed by them into an instrument for the humiliation and extinction of what they styled prejudices, that is of the ideas and uses which for so many centuries had been the far-shining beacon of western Europe. Their prime motive was not so much sympathy as curiosity: their field of action was not within their own thoughts, feelings and aspirations, but without, in the esteem of friends and the prostration of foes; their spirit, in a word, was not apostolic but gladiatorial. The Philosophers had unquestionably many fine qualities; they had a sincere passion for knowledge; they had a passion for truth, though it was too often disturbed by the factious emotions of the partisan; they had a passion for intellectual freedom, though it was too often blotted by intolerant disrespect for antagonistic opinion; finally, they had the courage of bold thinking and straightforward speech, though they too often lacked that more singular courage of frank suspense and patient doubtfulness. The mark of the school was their enthusiastic belief in external progress, in the gradual perfecting of the material conditions of life by augmented knowledge and enlarged freedom. Their ideal was rationalistic, critical, argumentative, confiding the future of society rather to increased strength of intelligence than to a happier expansion of the affections; to brighter light from reason, rather than to a spread of new warmth and moral energy from the feelings. The leaders of this great party, Voltaire, D'Alembert, and above all Diderot-whose individuality demands a separate appreciation-had many sage reserves and just reticences, but some of their subalterns carried the movement importunately forward, until they had landed the most polished and intellectual part of French society in a creed of some three articles, of which the first was the denial of a God, the second the assertion of the origin of the difference between right and wrong in convention, and the third, the reduction of all motives to deliberate self-interest.

Rousseau appeared in the very thick of the conflict of these two great bodies of partisans. He speedily found that he could side as little with one as the other.

Reli

gious dogma was a stumbling-block to him, and the mere acquisition of intellectual treasure foolishness. There was no pleasure to him, but only desolation and waste, in all the triumphs of controversy. He cared little to prove falsity in opinions which he did not hold; he cared extremely that the opinions which he did hold should be a solid and undisturbed part of himself not an element of fever, agitation, aggression, but the integral substance and all-pervading essence of a collected character and an even life. His central difference from the critical school did not lie in his demanding a system; on the contrary, it was exactly because they imposed a system from without that he found both the great branches of Christian monotheism with which he was brought into contact so deeply repugnant to him. He sought unity of character in the development of the spontaneous qualities of human nature; he leaned with all his weight upon what he counted the innate sensibility, truthfulness, benevolence, singleness of the heart of man; he insisted that these were the forces with which the lover of mankind should seek to deal, that only by warming, stimulating, and fostering these, and not by a teasing and incessant alternation of argument and objection, of replication and rejoinder and rebutter, can we effect in the world the only reform which good men can care for or bad men be made better by.

It is obvious from this how it was that Rousseau's writings enlarged the attack. which the Philosophers had limited to theology and the Church, so as to comprehend in its criticism the whole social order. As soon as ever the point of view was shifted, as Rousseau shifted it, from knowledge to character, from the acquisition of truth to the possession of moral harmony, then it was no longer a question of a special set of dogmas or a special kind of spiritual authority, but of the whole range of those external circumstances and relations by which character and the inner harmony are affected and regulated. To one whose ideal of conduct is not triumphant disputation, but a simple life in accord with surrounding circumstance, clearly the main object is not the truth of propositions, but the fitness of institutions. It is easy to see what a vast and deep-reaching revolution this extension of the field of battle made both in the thought of the