Therefore he has been, in a certain sphere, edifying, and has inspired in many powerful minds an interest and an admiration such as no other philosopher has inspired since Plato. The lonely precursor of German philosophy, he still shines when the light of his successors is fading away; they had celebrity, Spinoza has fame. Not because his peculiar system of philosophy has had more adherents than theirs; on the contrary, it has had fewer. But schools of philosophy arise and fall; their bands of adherents 10 inevitably dwindle; no master can long persuade a large body of disciples that they give to themselves just the same account of the world as he does; it is only the very young and the very enthusiastic who can think themselves sure that they possess the whole mind of Plato, or Spinoza, or Hegel, at all. The very mature and the very sober can even hardly believe that these philosophers possessed it themselves enough to put it all into their works, and to let us know entirely how the world seemed to them. What a remarkable philosopher really does for human thought, 20 is to throw into circulation a certain number of new and striking ideas and expressions, and to stimulate with them the thought and imagination of his century or of aftertimes. So Spinoza has made his distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas a current notion for educated Europe. So Hegel seized a single pregnant sentence of Heracleitus, and cast it, with a thousand striking applications, into the world of modern thought. But to do this is only enough to make a philosopher noteworthy; it is not enough to make him great. To be great, he must have 30 something in him which can influence character, which is edifying; he must, in short, have a noble and lofty character himself, a character, to recur to that much-criticised expression of mine,-in the grand style. This is what Spinoza had; and because he had it, he stands out from the multitude of philosophers, and has been able to inspire in powerful minds a feeling which the most remarkable philosophers, without this grandiose character, could not inspire. There is no possible view of life but Spinoza's,' said Lessing. Goethe has told us how he was calmed and 40 edified by him in his youth, and how he again went to him for support in his maturity. Heine, the man (in spite of

his faults) of truest genius that Germany has produced since Goethe,-a man with faults, as I have said, immense faults, the greatest of them being that he could reverence so little, reverenced Spinoza. Hegel's influence ran off him like water: 'I have seen Hegel,' he cries, 'seated with his doleful air of a hatching hen upon his unhappy eggs, and I have heard his dismal clucking.-How easily one can cheat oneself into thinking that one understands everything, when one has learnt only how to construct dialectical formulas ! But of Spinoza, Heine said: 'His 10 life was a copy of the life of his divine kinsman, Jesus Christ.'

And therefore, when M. Van Vloten violently presses the parallel with the post-Hegelians, one feels that the parallel with St. Augustine is the far truer one. Compared with the soldier of irreligion M. Van Vloten would have him to be, Spinoza is religious. It is true,' one may say to the wise and devout Christian, 'Spinoza's conception of beatitude is not yours, and cannot satisfy you; but whose conception of beatitude would you accept as satis- 20 fying? Not even that of the devoutest of your fellowChristians. Fra Angelico, the sweetest and most inspired of devout souls, has given us, in his great picture of the Last Judgment, his conception of beatitude. The elect are going round in a ring on long grass under laden fruittrees; two of them, more restless than the others, are flying up a battlemented street,—a street blank with all the ennui of the Middle Ages. Across a gulf is visible, for the delectation of the saints, a blazing caldron in which Beelzebub is sousing the damned. This is hardly more 30 your conception of beatitude than Spinoza's is. But "in my Father's house are many mansions; only, to reach any one of these mansions, there are needed the wings of a genuine sacred transport, of an "immortal longing.' These wings Spinoza had; and, because he had them, his own language about himself, about his aspirations and his course, are true his foot is in the vera vita, his eye on the beatific vision.

MARCUS AURELIUS

MR. MILL says, in his book on Liberty, that 'Christian morality is in great part merely a protest against paganism; its ideal is negative rather than positive, passive, rather than active.' He says, that, in certain most important respects, it falls far below the best morality of the ancients.' Now, the object of systems of morality is to take possession of human life, to save it from being abandoned to passion or allowed to drift at hazard, to give it happiness by establishing it in the practice of virtue; and 10 this object they seek to attain by prescribing to human life fixed principles of action, fixed rules of conduct. In its uninspired as well as in its inspired moments, in its days of languor and gloom as well as in its days of sunshine and energy, human life has thus always a clue to follow, and may always be making way towards its goal. Christian morality has not failed to supply to human life aids of this sort. It has supplied them far more abundantly than many of its critics imagine. The most exquisite document, after those of the New Testament, of all the 20 documents the Christian spirit has ever inspired, the Imitation,-by no means contains the whole of Christian morality; nay, the disparagers of this morality would think themselves sure of triumphing if one agreed to look for it in the Imitation only. But even the Imitation is full of passages like these: 'Vita sine proposito languida et vaga est; '-' Omni die renovare debemus propositum nostrum, dicentes: nunc hodie perfecte incipiamus, quia nihil est quod hactenus fecimus; Secundum propositum nostrum est cursus profectus nostri ; Raro etiam unum 30 vitium perfecte vincimus, et ad quotidianum profectum non accendimur; ' Semper aliquid certi proponendum est ;' -Tibi ipsi violentiam frequenter fac: (A life without a purpose is a languid, drifting thing;-Every day we ought to renew our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let us

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make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is nought;-Our improvement is in proportion to our purpose-We hardly ever manage to get completely rid even of one fault, and do not set our hearts on daily improvement ;— Always place a definite purpose before thee;-Get the habit of mastering thine inclination.) These are moral precepts, and moral precepts of the best kind. As rules to hold possession of our conduct, and to keep us in the right course through outward troubles and inward perplexity, they are equal to the best ever furnished by the great 10 masters of morals,-Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius.

But moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously followed as laws, are, and must be, for the sage only. The mass of mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is impossible 20 to rise from reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of restraint and melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear. Honour to the sages who have felt this, and yet have borne it! Yet, even for the sage, this sense of labour and sorrow in his march towards the goal constitutes a relative inferiority; the noblest souls of whatever creed, the pagan Empedocles as well as the Christian Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a joyful emotion, to make moral action perfect; an obscure indication of 30 this necessity is the one drop of truth in the ocean of verbiage with which the controversy on justification by faith has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary man, this sense of labour and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification; it paralyses him; under the weight of it, he cannot make way towards the goal at all. The paramount virtue of religion is, that it has lighted up morality; that it has supplied the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all. Even the 40 religions with most dross in them have had something of

this virtue; but the Christian religion manifests it with unexampled splendour. Lead me, Zeus and Destiny!" says the prayer of Epictetus, 'whithersoever I am appointed to go; I will follow without wavering; even though I turn coward and shrink, I shall have to follow all the same.' The fortitude of that is for the strong, for the few; even for them the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and grey. But, 'Let thy loving spirit lead me forth into the land of righteousness; ''The Lord 10 shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory; '—' Unto you that fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings,' says the Old Testament; 'Born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God; '—' Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God; ' -'Whatsoever is born of God, overcometh the world,' says the New. The ray of sunshine is there, the glow of a divine warmth ;-the austerity of the sage melts away under it, the paralysis of the weak is healed: he who is 20 vivified by it renews his strength; all things are possible to him; 'he is a new creature.'

Epictetus says: Every matter has two handles, one of which will bear taking hold of, the other not. If thy brother sin against thee, lay not hold of the matter by this, that he sins against thee; for by this handle the matter will not bear taking hold of. But rather lay hold of it by this, that he is thy brother, thy born mate; and thou wilt take hold of it by what will bear handling.' Jesus, asked whether a man is bound to forgive his brother 30 as often as seven times, answers: 'I say not unto thee, until seven times, but until seventy times seven.' Epictetus here suggests to the reason grounds for forgiveness of injuries which Jesus does not; but it is vain to say that Epictetus is on that account a better moralist than Jesus, if the warmth, the emotion, of Jesus's answer fires his hearer to the practice of forgiveness of injuries, while the thought in Epictetus's leaves him cold. So with Christian morality in general: its distinction is not that it propounds the maxim, Thou shalt love God and thy 40 neighbour,' with more development, closer reasoning, truer sincerity, than other moral systems; it is that it propounds