years ago, we are warranted in saying that many would have accepted it and been converted,' who, in the form in which it came to them, did not accept it and were not converted. "If the mighty

works had been done in Tyre and Sidon which were done in you, they would have repented long ago." It is no less reasonable to suppose that, if the more mature Christianity of A. D. 3000 could be presented to men to-day, some would accept it who do not accept it as it is now presented. 5. As a process in history, the proclamation of redemption and much of the application of it have been committed to men. In part by the fault of men, multitudes in previous generations have been without the clear knowledge of redemption and the redeemer. In some forms of conversion, and in their condition, they could not be converted. 6. Two problems are thus presented. One is that of the final destiny of those who have been ignorant of the gospel by no fault of their own, and of those who would have accepted it had it been more adequately presented, with its true nature more fully manifest. With the question of final destiny, or of anything beyond historic processes in the present life, this paper has nothing whatever to do. "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" The other problem is that of the slow development of historic Christianity into its ideal strength and beauty, leaving final destiny out of the question. The development is not only among men; in nature it is precisely the development of humanity itself in its higher capacities. Of course.that presupposes the hearty reception of redemption by men, and their continuous, unhesitating, and unreserved response to it. That is, it presupposes an altogether right use of liberty, which, under the laws of history, cannot be constrained. If it were constrained, redemption by constraint would no longer be true and genuine. It would no longer be a love of righteousness, a willing perfectness. As already said, it cannot be shown that greater pressure could have been put on the will, and a more rapid development of Christianity thus secured, without violating the conditions of liberty and endangering the ultimate permanence of Christianity. 7. After these statements the question asked comes to this form. Have all been converted who under their conditions of opportunity and influence would be? That question may surely be answered in the affirmative.

The facts stated under the third division go to prove the reality of a divine life-impartation to men in Christianity. It has been germinal rather than complete, for the generations pass from earth before anything more than the incipient stage can be reached. VOL. VIII. -NO. 44.

9

But if germinal it has been real. Under the influence of Christianity as nowhere else in history the human faculties given in creation are quickened into increasing activity, harmonized in action, and made effective in accomplishing their purpose. Beyond question human minds increasingly think God's thoughts after Him; human sensibilities increasingly thrill responsive to God's feeling; a larger number of human hearts and lives have some quality of his goodness; human personality attains a veritable consciousness of fellowship with the divine personality which increases unto more and more. These are the manifestations of a life renewed from above. Redemption seems to be effected slowly; in part because it is necessarily subjected to the laws of history, in part because it is so great a transformation, in part because we here see it only in its incipient stages. We are reminded of the slow process by which the primeval chaos was transformed into the earth fitted to be the theatre of human history.

In its performance, properly understood, Christianity does not fall short of its claims. There have been many failures of men; but they have been confessedly needless failures of liberty to receive revelation, respond to grace, walk in the spirit; or they have been the temporary and inevitable infirmities of a depravity undergoing removal. As commonly made, the complaint of failure is itself an illustration of redemption. It is product of Christianity, of a better spiritual apprehension, of rising ideals and increased expectation; and therefore it is prophecy of a larger redemption to come. Facts show failure only when compared with growing ideals; when compared with other facts of an earlier time they show the reality of a progressive redemption.

FALL RIVER, MASS.

William W. Adams.

ROBERT BROWNING.

THE best minds still hold the old conception of poetry as a revelation; as containing something more and something greater than the individual poet intended or even comprehended when the creative impulse and energy possessed him. The story he told, the song he sang, convey more than the definite truth, the striking incident, the inspiring vision; they disclose the deeper mind of the singer in his conscious and unconscious relations to his time and to universal life. It is quite conceivable that in one sense the critics

have found more in "Faust" than Goethe consciously embodied in that marvelous drama of human experience. Clearly as the great German had thought his way through all knowledge, and thoroughly as he had rationalized his life, there were forces in his nature whose momentum and tendency he never understood; there were depths in his habitual meditation which he never sounded. His relation to his own time and the character and movement of that time were matters of frequent and searching thought to him; and yet in the age and in his part in it there was much that was invisible or obscure to him. There is in "Faust" a revelation of the time through its most sensitive personality, of which, in the nature of things, the poet was for the most part unconscious. This fact does not diminish the greatness of such an achievement as the writing of a classic drama; it simply recalls the supplementary fact that as every work of art discloses relations to universal principles and to an historical development, so every artist discovers certain far-reaching and highly significant spiritual and intellectual affinities, which are so completely a part of himself that he never separates them in consciousness.

The poet, by a law of his nature, is compelled to open his heart to us; when he plans to conceal himself most securely, he is making the thing he would hide most clear to us. Shakespeare is the most impersonal of poets, and yet no poet has made us understand more clearly the conditions under which, in his view, this human life of ours is lived; while of Byron, who

"bore

With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart,
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart,"

and of many another of his temperament, we possess the fullest and most trustworthy knowledge. But the poet tells our secret as frankly as he tells his own. We are irresistibly drawn to him not only because he gives us his view of things, the substance of his personal life, but because he makes ourselves clear and comprehensible to us. It is our thought in his words which has such power to bring back the vision which has faded off the horizon of life and left it bare and empty; to restore the vigor of faith and the clearness of insight which have failed us because we have not trusted them. It is this restoration of our truest selves to us which gives the great poets such power over us, and makes their great works at once so remote and so familiar. In its most characteristic singers, each age finds itself searched to the very bottom

of its consciousness. The scientists tell us something of our time, the philosophers, the critics, and the writers of discursive mind more, but the poet alone knows the secret of its joys or its sorrows, its activity or its repose, its progress or its retrogression. All these things enter vitally into his life, and in giving expression to his own thought he gives them form and substance. We learn more of the heart of Medievalism from Dante than from all the historians; more of the England of Elizabeth from Shakespeare than from all the chroniclers; and the future will find the essential character of the America of the last half century more clearly revealed in Emerson and Lowell and Whitman than in all the industrious recorders who were their less penetrating contemporaries.

Robert Browning offers us a double revelation: he discloses the range and the affinities of his own nature, and the large and significant thought of his time concerning those matters which form the very substance of its life. Burns drove his plowshare through his own native soil, singing as he went, and the daisy blossomed in the furrow and the lark sang overhead; but Browning takes the whole world as his field, and harvests every sort of product which goes to the sustenance of men. A poet of such wide range and such wellnigh universal insight demands much of his readers, and must wait patiently for their acceptance of his claims. He offers that which necessitates a peculiar training before it can be received. The Greeks held it dangerous to accept gifts from the gods; even at the altar, men must give as well as receive if their relations with the Invisible and the Eternal are to be moral and self-respecting. They only truly worship in whom something responds to the Divine and comprehends it. In the same way the great thinkers and artists compel a certain preparation in those to whom they would communicate that which is incommunicable save to kindred insight and sympathy. The flower by the wayside discovers its superficial loveliness to every eye, but they are few to whom it discloses its identity with the universal beauty which makes it akin with the flight of birds and the splendor of stars. It is only by degrees that the most sympathetic minds enter into the fundamental conceptions of life and the universe which another has reached as the result of long and eager thinking and living. The more fundamental and vital these conceptions are, the more tardy will be their complete recognition by others. A swift, alert, acute mind like Voltaire's makes all its processes clear, and the result of its activity, varied as it may be, is soon measured and

ascertained. But a profound, vital intellect like Herder's, entering into the living processes of nature and of history, finds little sympathy and less comprehension until, by the slow and painful education of a general movement of mind, the range and value of its contribution to human thought are understood. We have already exhausted Voltaire, but the most intelligent and open-minded student of modern life and thought still finds in Herder hints of movements which are yet to touch our intellectual lives with fresh impulse; thoughts which are unlighted torches waiting for the hand strong enough to ignite and bear them forward.

If Browning's genius has remained long unrecognized and unhonored among his contemporaries, the frequent harshness and obscurity of his expression must not bear the whole responsibility. His thought holds so much that is novel, so much that is as yet unadjusted to knowledge, art, and actual living, that its complete apprehension even by the most open-minded must be slow and long delayed. No English poet ever demanded more of his readers, and none has ever had more to give them. Since Shakespeare no maker of English verse has seen life on so many sides, entered into it with such intensity of sympathy and imagination, and pierced it to so many centres of its energy and motivity. No other has so completely mastered the larger movement of modern thought on the constructive side, or so deeply felt and so adequately interpreted the modern spirit. It is significant of his insight into the profounder relations of things that Browning has also entered with such characteristic thoroughness of intellectual and spiritual kinship into Greek and Italian thought; has rendered the serene and noble beauty of the one into forms as obviously true and sincere as "Cleon," and the subtle and passionate genius of the other into forms as characteristic as "The Ring and the Book."

A mind capable of dealing at first hand with themes so diverse evidently possesses the key to that universal movement of life in which all race activities and histories are included, not by violent and arbitrary adjustment of differences, but by insight into those deep and vital relations which give history its continuity of revela tion and its unity of truth. It is a long road which stretches from the Edipus of Sophocles to "Pippa Passes," but if Browning's conception of life is true, it is a highway worn by the feet of marching generations, and not a series of alien and antagonistic territories, each unrelated to the other. The continuity of civilization and of the life of the human spirit, widening by an inevitable and healthful process of growth and expansion, evidently