"Far and wide though all unknowing, pants for Thee each mortal breast;
"Human tears for Thee are flowing; human hearts in Thee would rest.

But elsewhere they tell us that those who go forth to bear the words of truth have to create the thirst which they come to satisfy here the thirst exists already, and if there be none to satisfy it, it is a shameful blot on our boasted Christianity.

And so, my friends, we have come amongst you; to set before you that truth which, whether rightly or wrongly, we do most earnestly believe, and which we show that we believe by being here. We have come not to stay a few years and be gone again, but to make our home with you, to be if you will let us, one with you; to learn your thoughts; to tread with you step by step over your difficulties; to respect your honest doubts; to meet if we can your real heart-felt objections: to set before you that which to ourselves we know has brought life and light and love, to set it before you not in one way only but in many, by our lives, by our prayers, by our words, by the unuttered evidence of heart speaking to heart in brotherly affection.

But on our side too there is an anxious question.

Are you really seeking the truth in earnest ?

It is an anxious question for us. Because once there went forth a great preacher of the truth, one the latchet of whose shoes we are not worthy to untie, to a great city such as this; and there gathered round him a crowd of listeners; but that crowd was led by a listless curiosity which had in it no element of moral purpose. "What will this babbler say was the spirit in which they approached him, and to them he was an idle babbler and nothing more, and to you we shall be idle babblers and nothing more, unless you bring the great conditions which are indispensable to the search after truth.

There are three conditions which are indispensable to the search after the truth, whatever that truth may be, for I do not want to prejudge the answer to that question. I say that no man can hope to discover the truth unless he start with an honest desire of obeying it, with the belief that there is a truth to discover, with the conviction that mankind has the means of discovering it.

It is the first of these conditions of which I desire to speak to-night. The honest desire of obeying the truth when found. The willingness to submit oneself to, to guide one's life by, the laws of right and wrong so far as they are known. The honest and good heart which desires the

truth not merely as an intellectual possession entailing no responsibility; but as a mastering force, to govern the life. It is said of a character in fiction: "She yearned towards the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her errant will." That is the temper which we must aim at cultivating.

But, you will say, Duty is a very good thing in its place, but what has it got to do with the enquiry after truth? Surely they are two distinct things. The one is a matter of the will and the emotions: the other a matter for the intellect alone: for one to intrude into the sphere of the other is to endanger both. Truth must be pursued for its own sake, be the consequences what they may. The more calmly, the more dispassionately, the more drily and unlovingly, so to speak, we can pursue the truth, the more certain shall we be of finding it.

This is a very common view, and at first sight a very tempting one: but as I hope to be able to prove to you an entirely false one.

I. The greatest treatise on Ethics that the world has ever seen bears stamped upon its forefront this principle. The end of our enquiry is not Knowledge but Practice. Ou gnosis alla praxis says Aristotle therein by one masterly stroke cutting himself free from the whole cloudy tangle of idle speculation in which all the Philosophy which preceded him had been involved, and giving such an impetus to the human mind in this region as it has never since lost. Not Knowledge merely, which is a function of only one portion of the man, but Practice, which is the energy of the whole, is man's highest goal, and knowledge is a means to it, says this prince of moral philosophers; and he gives us a great word, and in a masterly chapter developes its meaning: proairesis.-Moral Purpose-that faculty which gathers up all the gifts that knowledge can bring and casting them at the feet of the will, produces moral action, justice, Duty, than which "neither the evening nor the morning star is more divine." The philosopher, usually so calm and unimpassioned, seems to kindle into enthusiasm as he touches this great conception, and surely in it he does here reach the very highest level to which an uninspired mind could go. This moral purpose, this duty, what a god-like thing it is. The passionate man knows it not, the self-indulgent man has banished it from his breast. There is about it nothing impulsive, nothing paradoxical, nothing sudden, nothing selfish.* It is that "repeated choice of good or ill,

*Eth. Nic. iii. 2.

"Far and wide though all unknowing, pants for Thee each mortal breast; "Human tears for Thee are flowing; human hearts in Thee would rest.

But elsewhere they tell us that those who go forth to bear the words of truth have to create the thirst which they come to satisfy: here the thirst exists already, and if there be none to satisfy it, it is a shameful blot on our boasted Christianity.

And so, my friends, we have come amongst you; to set before you that truth which, whether rightly or wrongly, we do most earnestly believe, and which we show that we believe by being here. We have come not to stay a few years and be gone again, but to make our home with you, to be if you will let us, one with you; to learn your thoughts; to tread with you step by step over your difficulties; to respect your honest doubts; to meet if we can your real heart-felt objections: to set before you that which to ourselves we know has brought life and light and love, to set it before you not in one way only but in many, by our lives, by our prayers, by our words, by the unuttered evidence of heart Speaking to heart in brotherly affection.

But on our side too there is an anxious question.

Are you really seeking the truth in earnest ?

It is an anxious question for us. Because once there went forth a great preacher of the truth, one the latchet of whose shoes we are not worthy to untie, to a great city such as this; and there gathered round him a crowd of listeners; but that crowd was led by a listless curiosity which had in it no element of moral purpose. "What will this babbler say" was the spirit in which they approached him, and to them he was an idle babbler and nothing more, and to you we shall be idle babblers and nothing more, unless you bring the great conditions which are indispensable to the search after truth.

There are three conditions which are indispensable to the search after the truth, whatever that truth may be, for I do not want to prejudge the answer to that question. I say that no man can hope to discover the truth unless he start with an honest desire of obeying it, with the belief that there is a truth to discover, with the conviction that mankind has the means of discovering it.

It is the first of these conditions of which I desire to speak to-night The honest desire of obeying the truth when found. The willingness to submit oneself to, to guide one's life by, the laws of right and wrong so far as they are known. The honest and good heart which desires the

truth not merely as an intellectual possession entailing no responsibility; but as a mastering force, to govern the life. It is said of a character in fiction : "She yearned towards the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her errant will." That is the temper which we must aim at cultivating.

But, you will say, Duty is a very good thing in its place, but what has it got to do with the enquiry after truth? Surely they are two distinct things. The one is a matter of the will and the emotions: the other a matter for the intellect alone: for one to intrude into the sphere of the other is to endanger both. Truth must be pursued for its own sake, be the consequences what they may. The more calmly, the more dispassionately, the more drily and unlovingly, so to speak, we can pursue the truth, the more certain shall we be of finding it.

This is a very common view, and at first sight a very tempting one: but as I hope to be able to prove to you an entirely false one.

and

I. The greatest treatise on Ethics that the world has ever seen bears stamped upon its forefront this principle. The end of our enquiry is not Knowledge but Practice. Ou gnosis alla praxis says Aristotle therein by one masterly stroke cutting himself free from the whole cloudy tangle of idle speculation in which all the Philosophy which preceded him had been involved, and giving such an impetus to the human mind in this region as it has never since lost. Not Knowledge merely, which is a function of only one portion of the man, but Practice, which is the energy of the whole, is man's highest goal, and knowledge is a means to it, says this prince of moral philosophers; he gives us a great word, and in a masterly chapter developes its meaning: proairesis.-Moral Purpose-that faculty which gathers up all the gifts that knowledge can bring and casting them at the feet of the will, produces moral action, justice, Duty, than which "neither the evening nor the morning star is more divine." The philosopher, usually so calm and unimpassioned, seems to kindle into enthusiasm as he touches this great conception, and surely in it he does here reach the very highest level to which an uninspired mind could go. This moral purpose, this duty, what a god-like thing it is. The passionate man knows it not, the self-indulgent man has banished it from his breast. There is about it nothing impulsive, nothing paradoxical, nothing sudden, nothing selfish.* It is that "repeated choice of good or ill,

*Eth. Nic. iii, 2.

་

·

which determines character." It is the sober, stately, and deliberate
preference of what our souls know to be good. The very name, he says,
proairesis, moral preference-shows that it is to be preferred before
all other things. With hardly more enthusiasm his words are taken up
and echoed by a modern poet. Wordsworth in his ode to Duty says:
"Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear

The Godhead's most benignant grace.
Nor know we anything so fair

As is the smile upon thy face.

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds

And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,

And the most ancient heavens thro' thee are fresh and strong."*

It would almost seem superfluous to dwell upon what seems such an obvious fact, that the end of moral enquiry is moral practice-that the search should not rest satisfied with itself-but that this age amongst the many strange tendencies to which it has given birth, has actually thrown up one which denies this most sound and wholesome first principle laid down by Aristotle, and followed by every great moralist from his day to ours. A German philosopher has actually said: "If God offered me with one hand truth, and with the other search after truth, I would choose the latter." So that it is denied that this earth is a place where we are meant to live responsible lives, which is only possible when we are under the dominion of some more or less degree of moral truth; but it is a place where we are to spend our lives in pursuit of something, which if found would take away our reason for living. If the very object of our lives is search, then finding takes away that object. We may see the truth and die. And menw ho more or less consciously accept this theory talk grand words about pursuing the truth for its own sake, by which they really mean that they have ceased to fear error as a danger to their moral being. No, the fact is that human nature cannot in practice, though it can in thought, be parcelled out into its logical divisions of mind, and affection, and will; they must necessarily act and react upon each other-a man who strives to be cold bare intellect alone is exactly analogous to a man who allows himself to be governed only by his affections. But the developement of the whole man, is a nobler end than the developement of any single part; and moral freedom for the man is the end to which knowledge, grand as it is, is only one of the means.

* Wordsworth. Ode to Duty.