its aspect, we should agree with Mr Hutton in most he says, except in regarding it as indicative of superhuman knowledge. In his firm impression of the exceptional grandeur of his mission, and of his nature (or at least characteristic features) being apart and different from those of ordinary men, and of the significance of that impression, we think with Mr Hutton that no reasonable doubt can be entertained. And that Jesus had one of those gifted natures, rarely met with, and never in equal perfection, the purity and absolute harmony of whose mental and moral elements confer a clearness of vision wherein insight readily ripens into foresight, and almost rises to the quality of prophecy, is an opinion I am little disposed to controvert. And that this should have stamped itself so deeply on the popular mind as to have become, in some sense, to the world "an evidence of Christianity," is not surprising; and the inference should be signalized perhaps as rather untenable than essentially unsound.

XIL

MR FREDERIC HARRISON ON THE FUTURE LIFE.

[Contributed to a Discussion in the Nineteenth Century, in October 1877, commenced by Mr Frederic Harrison.]

It would seem impossible for Mr Harrison to write anything that is not stamped with a vigour and racy eloquence peculiarly his own; and the paper which has opened the present discussion is probably far the finest he has given to the world. There is a lofty tone in its imaginative passages which strikes us as unique among Negationists, and a vein of what is almost tenderness pervading them, which was not observed in his previous writings. The two combined render the second portion one of the most touching and impressive speculations we have read. Unfortunately, however, Mr Harrison's innate energy is apt to boil over into a vehemence approaching the intemperate; and the antagonistic atmosphere is so native to his spirit that he can scarcely enter the lists of controversy without an irresistible tendency to become aggressive and unjust; and he is too inclined to forget the first duty of the chivalric militant logician, namely, to select the adversary you assail from the nobler and

not the lower form and rank of the doctrine in dispute. The inconsistencies and weaknesses into which this neglect has betrayed him in the instance before us have, however, been so severely dealt with by others, that I wish rather to direct attention to two or three points of his argument that might otherwise be in danger of escaping the appreciation and gratitude they may fairly claim.

We owe him something, it appears to me, for having inaugurated a discussion which has stirred so many minds to give us on such a question so much interesting and profound, and more especially so much suggestive, thought. We owe him much, too, because in dealing with a thesis which it is specially the temptation and the practice to handle as a theme for declamation, he has so written as to force his antagonists to treat it argumentatively and searchingly as well. Some gratitude, moreover, is due to the man who had the moral courage boldly to avow his adhesion to the negative view, when that view is not only in the highest degree unpopular, but is regarded for the most part as condemnable into the bargain, and when, besides, it can scarcely fail to be painful to every man of vivid imagination and of strong affections. It is to his credit, also, I venture to think, that, holding this view, he has put it forward, not as an opinion or speculation, but as a settled and deliberate conviction, maintainable by distinct and reputable reasonings, and to be controverted only by pleas analogous in character. For if there be a topic within

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the wide range of human questioning in reference to which tampering with mental integrity might seem at first sight pardonable, it is that of a future and continued existence. If belief be ever permissible-perhaps I ought to say, if belief be ever possible—on the ground that "there is peace and joy in believing," it is here, where the issues are so vast, where the conception in its highest form is so ennobling, where the practical influences of the Creed are, in appearance at least, so beneficent. But faith thus arrived at has ever clinging to it the curse belonging to all illegitimate possessions. It is precarious, because the flaw in its title-deeds, barely suspected perhaps and never acknowledged, may any moment be discovered; misgivings crop up most surely in those hard and gloomy crises of our lives when unflinching confidence is most essential to our peace; and the fairy fabric, built up not on grounded conviction but on craving need, crumbles into dust, and leaves the spirit with no solid sustenance to rest upon.

Unconsciously and by implication Mr Harrison bears a testimony he little intended, not indeed to the future existence he denies, but to the irresistible longing and necessity for the very belief he labours to destroy. Perhaps no writer has more undesignedly betrayed his conviction that men will not and cannot be expected. to surrender their faith and hope without at least something like a compensation; certainly no one has ever toiled with more noble rhetoric to gild and illuminate the substitute with which he would fain per

suade us to rest satisfied. The nearly universal craving for posthumous existence and enduring consciousness, which he depreciates with so harsh a scorn, and which he will not accept as offering even the shadow or simulacrum of an argument for the Creed, he yet respects enough to recognise that it has its foundation deep in the framework of our being, that it cannot be silenced and may not be ignored. Having no precious metal to pay it with, he issues paper money instead, skilfully engraved and gorgeously gilded to look as like the real coin as may be. It is in vain to deny that there is something touching and elevating in the glowing eloquence with which he paints the picture of lives devoted to efforts in the service of the race, spent in labouring, each of us in his own sphere, to bring about the grand ideal he fancies for humanity, and drawing strength and reward for long years of toil in the anticipation of what man will be when those noble dreams shall have been realised at last—even though we shall never see what we have wrought so hard to win. It is vain to deny, moreover, that these dreams appear more solid and less wild or vague when we remember how close an analogy we may detect in the labours of thousands around us who spend their whole career on earth in building up, by sacrifice and painful struggles, wealth, station, fame, and character for their children, whose enjoyment of these possessions they will never live to witness, without their passionate zeal in the pursuit being in any way cooled by the discouraging reflection.