truth to him. His special thought was, how does reason authenticate religion, and the divine idea in its totality rise into a valid element of human knowledge? He was in short from the beginning, and by right of mental birth, a Christian philosopher. Divinity presented itself to him in the shape of a science. Even if the answers given by him to the questions which he thus raised had been less satisfactory than they are, it was yet a definite advance in the thought of the seventeenth century to ask such questions-to conceive the idea of a philosophy of the Divine. Theology had been hitherto viewed as a product of the schools, or, at the best, as a series of deductions drawn from a supposed infallible oracle. It was tradition, or dogma, resting on a verbal basis. And Smith, no doubt, had been taught it as a system of inherited formulæ ready to hand for the solution of all questions. But whatever traditionary impressions had thus been made upon him, had sunk into the large depths of his spiritual nature, and become merely food for its richer nurture, rather than left any formal trace behind. The great ideas of Theology were taken up by him from the first as vital elements within the sphere of the soul itself. Whatever they are, he felt that they must have a real conformity to man's higher reason and life; and that the only valid science of them is to be sought in the ascertainment of this conformity. A science of the Divine may embrace many things-elements of communicated and derived, as well as of primary knowledge; but its basis must lie on the primary affirmations of the soul, and all its structure be traced back to the great question of man's essential character in the scale of being. What then is this? Is man essentially a spiritual being? And if so, what are the true contents of his spiritual reason or consciousness? These, the eternal problems of religious philosophy, were the problems to which Smith directly addressed himself with clear-sighted and admirable perspicacity.

And his answers, upon the whole, go as nearly to the heart of their solution as any that have been given. He vindicated the distinctive reality of the human soul with clear effect, if not with any special resources of argument. All arguments on such a subject, from those of the Phaedo downwards, are indeed more or less of the same nature; and it may be safely said that no man, not already convinced, is likely to be convinced by them. Smith's argumentative details are not more conclusive than others. But he unfolds all the spiritual qualities of humanity with such a rich depth of insight that we feel, as it were, the fact of the soul to realize itself before us. The sense of the Divine grows quick within us at the touch of his living analysis; and it witnesses itself, not as the result of any elaborate inference, but as the primary being which we are the original ground of all our life. And this is really

the most that any thinker can accomplish on the subject. For the question of spirit versus matter-of immortality versus epicureanism -comes in the end to a rational assumption on the one side or the other. We must start Spiritualist or Materialist-from within or from without. Or we may start from the meeting point of boththe eternal doubleness which seems to lie at the basis of being. The one cannot be logically deduced from the other; but the one may be found in the other; an essential antithesis-subject-object-with the subjective or spiritual side in front. And the thinker, who brings out most vividly, and helps us to understand most fully this spiritual side of human thought and life, does most, after all, to attest its reality.

The manner in which Smith attaches the belief in God to the belief in immortality, was also a special service rendered to the cause of religious philosophy. He saw clearly what has since his time been so often declared authoritatively by the highest thinkers, that the only basis for the recognition of the Divine in the world, was the recognition of the spiritual in man. Both the fact and the character of Deity must be primarily read in the human soul; and, without “this interpreter within,” all life and nature would be really void to us of divine meaning. If we do not find God within ourselves, "the whole fabric of the visible universe may whisper to us of Him," but the whisper will be unintelligible,

"For we receive but what we give,

And in our light alone does Nature live."

All questions concerning God and religion thus really cluster round one root-the root of an original divine principle in man. Revelation itself is nothing else than the historical illumination of this fontal source of the Divine; while practical religion is its growth or development on the volitional and moral side. Smith saw all this plainly and expounded it luminously. He saw also what perhaps Whichcote has not made so apparent, that the Divine, while thus linked to human reason, and finding its first and essential utterance in it, is yet as a living power something which human nature itself could never elaborate. No mere philosophy or moralism can ever transmute itself into evangelical righteousness. This has its rise within the heart no doubt, but not as a spontaneous product. It can only come from the original fount of Divinity-a new divine force within us springing up into eternal life.

While Smith therefore broadened, and in a sense humanized the conception of religion, he, at the same time, with admirable balance of mind, vindicated it as a distinctive divine power revealed in man -a righteousness not self-evolved, but divinely given "through the

faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith."* He was one of those rare thinkers in whom largeness of view, and depth, and wealth of poetic and speculative insight, only served to evoke more fully the religious spirit; and while he drew the mould of his thought from Plotinus, he vivified the substance of it from St. Paul.

JOHN TULLOCH.

* Phil. iii. 9.

ROSSEL.

Papiers Posthumes, Recueillis et Annotés. Par JULES AMIGUES.
Paris Lachaud.

THE

HE individuality of Rossel, with that of a very few others, stands out in strong relief from the crowd of professional demagogues, and rebels actuated by jealousy or rage, by whom the Parisian movement was perverted and doomed beforehand to destruction.

Prone to new ideas, he yet knew that they could only be realized in a country uncontaminated by cowardice or crime, and powerful enough to lend them safe sanctuary and force. Loving France from the depths of his heart and soul, the idea of any violation of her soil by foreign foes was to him intolerable. The word capitulation sounded infamous in his ears; and while, on the one hand, men incapable of executing their mandate of defence, after declaring pas un pouce de notre terre, pas une pierre de nos forteresses, added the cession of two provinces to the shame of capitulation; while, on the other hand, the leaders of the insurrection, for the sake of certain ameliorations of the condition of working men, forgot the honour and independence of their country, and remembered only that a Prussian victory would bring new disgrace upon the bourgeoisie,-Rossel thought only of discovering and organizing new elements wherewith to carry on the national war.

He had endeavoured by every means in his power to kindle the enthusiasm of the army; he had sought to arouse the worthiest to revolt against Bazaine and the generals who prepared the capitula

'tion of Metz; he had striven to awaken the old pride of the French soldier in the veteran Changarnier, and to turn to good account the honest ambition, good intentions, and natural instinct of the Tribune, manifested by Gambetta-in vain. Some lacked intellect, others heart; they all of them—and it was the most fatal symptom-lacked faith in their country's destiny and power.

Rossel was himself possessed of intellect, heart, and faith; and when the news of the cowardly concessions made to the enemy and of the movement in Paris reached him, he at once sent in his resignation to the Minister of War at Versailles, in the following letter, written from the camp of Nevers, March 19, 1871

"GENERAL,-I have the honour to inform you that it is my intention to go to Paris and place myself at the disposal of the governing power to be constituted there. Having learned by the publication of the despatch from Versailles this day, that our country is divided into two distinct parties, I do not hesitate to side with that party which has signed no treaty of peace, and numbers in its ranks no generals guilty of capitulation."

On the 20th of March he was already in Paris, at the head of the 17th legion. We next find him imprisoned on I know not what charge, brought against him by officers whose capacity he had severely tested; then chief of the staff of the Minister of War (Cluseret), and president of a Court Martial which only pronounced one sentence of death, afterwards commuted; then, after the imprisonment of Cluseret, acting as Minister of War himself, and next compelled, by the anarchy of the elements by which he was surrounded, and the consequent impossibility of reducing his plans to action, to resign; and afterwards accused-as the habit was-of treason, and shamefully calumniated by the journals of Vallés and Pyat.

During the whole of this period Rossel laboured unceasingly to introduce such a system of organization as might have secured the triumph of the insurgents, and provided them with the arms and matériel for the recommencement of the war against their foreign invaders; but his every effort was rendered unavailing by the utter incapacity and irremediable lack of discipline around him-vices inherent in the government of the Commune. As a military man, he was, unquestionably, singularly gifted. Like our own Pisacane, he possessed not only revolutionary genius, but a synthetic grasp of mind, enabling him to comprehend the true value of every novelty or innovation, combined with a remarkable capacity for organization and the true instinct of discipline, qualities which had been developed and improved by long and serious study.

The great French Revolution and Napoleon would have perceived in him the stuff of a Hoche, Marceau, or Desaix. Gambetta saw him,