In subsequent deliverances has the reverend court returned to the maxims of its Founder, or is there still a conflict of decision?

Into these high matters, however, 'secular' criticism does not care to intrude. But there is one side or aspect of the question with which it may venture to deal. Jean Paul says, in his eccentric way, that you cannot always be engaged in the commission of sin. Most sins are occasional sermons and occasional poems, and must frequently be set aside, from the third to the tenth commandment inclusive. Marriage, the Sabbath, a man's word, cannot be broken at any given hour. One cannot bear false witness against himself, any more than he can play nine pins, or fight a duel with himself. Many considerable sins can only be committed on Easter fair or New-year's day, or in the Palais Royal, or in the Vatican. Many royal, margravely, princely crimes are possible only once in a whole life—many never at all; for instance, the sin against the Holy Ghost.' But if the ascetic theory be adopted, you will be enabled to sin by the day, by the hour, by the minute. It is a sin to dance. It is a sin to walk in the fields on the Sabbath day. It is a sin to read Alfred Tennyson's poems, or Anthony Trollope's novels. For all these things God will bring thee into judgment.' Now such teaching is, to say the least of it, excessively and dangerously imprudent. It is a huge mistake to look at the dark side of human nature through a magnifying glass. Great theologians have held that the standard of conduct which the Apostles describe, those counsels of

perfection' on which they so earnestly dwell, are incapable of being reduced to practice in a sinful world and by imperfect creatures. But if you go farther than the apostles, if you enormously exaggerate the number of ways in which God's law may be broken, what is the result? The moral balance is upset. You obliterate the distinction between right and wrong. It is impossible for merely mortal men and women to observe the whole body of your ecclesiastical legislation, to keep within the desperately narrow path in which you require them to walk. What then? The men and women who have been brought up at your feet, who have been taught that looking at the flowers on the Sabbath day, or dancing, or theatre-going, are deadly transgressions, feel, when they do these things, that they have become sinners, and have rendered themselves obnoxious to the punishments inflicted on sinners. But they are men and women, and these things they cannot help doing, not innocently, like the rest of the world, but with a guilty blush on their cheeks. The next step is inevitable. They have crossed the boundary line, once, twice, daily, hourly. They have danced: they have been at the theatre: they have read Les Misérables. Their pastor tells them that they are great offenders; that they have broken God's law; that they have incurred His righteous displeasure. They feel that this is true, but they have grown reckless,-repeated and continuous transgression has blunted the moral perceptions, and hardened the conscience. Even now they are sinners,-one sin more or less cannot turn the

balance.

And if these slight pleasant delinquencies earn eternal damnation, as they have been taught to believe, what heavier penalty can attach to dishonest deailng, or an unchaste life? Such scholars are ripe for CRIME.

There are times-times when we are pained by the meanness and baseness of our contemporaries—when it is a relief to turn to the great masters of our English,' who fought as they wrote for the liberty which they loved, -to the noble English of Milton, to the scarcely less noble English of Macaulay. Among the men who have maintained inviolate their fidelity to principles, which, though borne down at times by senseless clamour, are 'yet strong with the strength, and immortal with the immortality of truth,' Lord Macaulay has a right to a not undistinguished niche. His constancy to the cause of religious freedom was the heroic element in a life that at some points was not that of a hero. There is a passage in an early speech, which he has not reprinted, but which I think almost more admirable than any other passage in his speeches. He had been charged, because he loved liberty, with supporting an infidel policy; this was his reply :

'We hear it said that a policy which does not give a decided advantage to one sect over another, is an infidel policy. According to this authority, justice is infidelity—mercy is infidelity—and toleration is liberalism, and liberalism is only another name for infidelity. It is infidelity, it seems, to think worthily of God, and justly of His laws, and not to encircle with worldly

defences that religion of which the weapons are not carnal, and whose kingdom is not of this world. And it is infidelity to direct attacks rather against the evils of gross immorality than against altars which; though differing from ours in form, are not perhaps heaped with less acceptable incense, or kindled with less celestial fire. We must be content to bear this reproach, as it was borne by the great men of former days,—by Tillotson, Locke, and Sidney: and the only regret we ought to feel when we hear it, is, that men who profess, and perhaps sincerely feel a zeal for religion, should bring disgrace on those truths which are the last restraint on the powerful, and the last consolation of the unhappy.'

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VIII.

THE BREED OF HEROES.

E have had a long continuance of wet weather, and,

WE

in the absence of out-door employment, the hour in the cottage drawing-room before dinner has grown more popular than ever. And our readings have latterly lost a little of their desultoriness, and taken a more systematic shape. More than one cause has operated to produce the change.

Primo: The other day, after an eloquent speech from the Doctor against evil-doers and evil-doings, the Commodore struck in abruptly,-taking the bull by the horns as it were :-'You are always aggressive. You tell us what we ought not to do; I wonder if there be anything that we ought to do? Mere hostility is barren; negative teaching bears no fruit whatever; how can we fatten upon the empty husks of controversy? Show us the hero we are to imitate, if you please.'

Secundo: To which (the Doctor remaining silent) Horace, in his absolute way, replied:-'The breed of heroes is extinct.' Whereat we, remembering Indian mutinies, Scindian campaigns, Balaclava charges, sieges