endeavored to awaken his energies and to concentrate his studies. They were in a measure successful. In 1859 he gained a First Class. In 1860 he was employed as a lecturer on ancient and modern history, and in 1860 he was elected Fellow. To Professor Jowett he felt himself the most indebted and from 1860 to 1866 the two were most closely united. With Conington he was usually associated in the summer reading parties in which he rejoiced in the freshness of nature's beauty and luxuriousness and still more in the rough simplicity of the thoughtful country people with whom the two were brought into contact. Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Maurice are named as authors in English literature with whom, at that time, Green especially sympathized. Politics in the noble ethical sense of the term might be said to have been very early the engrossing theme of his speculative meditations, and the Family, the State, and the Church to have been recognized by him as divine institutions-veritable revelations from God and requiring on the part of man ethical and religious homage and affection-by a theory in which seemed to be blended the poetry of Chivalry, the prose of Radicalism, and the consecration of Religion. This theory he was always ready to expound and defend, but as might be expected it was stupid prose or empty declamation in the judgment of the most of the declaimers and listeners at the debates of the Oxford Union. His political sympathies and antipathies were by no means ideal only. Louis Napoleon he stigmatizes as "a successful brigand," and Palmerston, as the most mischievous man in England, while John Bright he glorifies as one of the noblest. In short, his political creed was, at that time, transfigured into a religion, or as his biographer expresses it: "The strongest elements in Green's nature seem to have been the sense of public duty and the sense of religious dependence, and in the creeds of modern toleration and modern evangelicalism he found a congenial language which he had no difficulty in translating when he wished into that of German metaphysics," and adds: "The passages quoted above indicate the position at which he had arrived at the age of four and twenty and which he never really abandoned. The idea of a free personality exercising its freedom under conditions which it has itself created formed the meeting point for his political and religious aspirations."

After obtaining his fellowship, his future occupation for life naturally began to occupy his thoughts. Under the natural drift of circumstances and the persuasive influence of Mr. Jowett, he by degrees became more and more firmly nested in Balliol and here he remained till his death, with more variety and enlargement of his sphere of instruction and influence, with more and more of definite purpose in his studies and labors, and an immense augmentation of his capacity to influence young men in the way of personal intercourse. Perhaps no portion of the inner life of the University of Oxford has been of late more critical than during his residence as an instructor. That in many respects his influence was most salutary, cannot be questioned. As a philosopher and philosophical critic he was strikingly able. His critical examinations of Locke and Berkeley and Hume, of Stuart Mill and Spencer and Lewes and Kant, are acknowledged to be masterly and will be regarded as essential to the library of every thorough student of the present phases of philosophical thought. Though needlessly elaborate and diffuse they will be read till they are superseded by simpler and more condensed presentations of the many fundamental truths which they assert and defend-many of which these criticisms were the first to set in a light so strong and so convincing that hereafter they will not be easily overlooked or denied. What they were and how they were defended we do not propose to explain. We choose to limit ourselves to a brief exposition of Green's ethical system and the application which he made of it to the Christian evidences and Christian theology. In a form somewhat condensed this ethical theory may be stated as follows:

"The central conception of the universe of being is a single eternal activity of which it is the essence to be self-conscious, i. e., to be itself and not itself in one. Of this activity every particular existence is a limited manifestation and among other such existences those which we call ourselves. In so far as there is a we at all and a world which we call ours, it is because the self which is the unity of the world is 'communicated' under the conditions of our physical organization. It is this fact, the fact of a self-conditioned or free energy acting under limiting conditions, which makes our experiences a continual

self-contradiction between what we are and what we have it in us to be."

"The conception of self-consciousness as the ultimate reality, is one to which we are led by reflection upon our own experiences, or in other words, by asking ourselves what we mean by a fact. It makes no difference whether fact be taken in the minimum or the maximum of its meaning, whether as the simplest possible fact, as 'something' or as the highly complex facts covered by such words as 'science, art, morality, or as the all-inclusive fact which we call the world.' At whatever

point it is considered, it is found to consist in relationship and relationships. It is through these relationships that God makes himself known to us more and more distinctly. It is by conforming ourselves more and more completely to them that we are ethically united to God."

This brief statement of the underlying metaphysics of Green's system, abridged from the words of his biographer, may prepare us to understand how it was possible for him to hold that in ethics we must assume a self-conscious being acting through each free being and manifesting himself more and more distinctly through the relationships which connect man with man and man with God, as man proceeds towards that complete harmony which ensues when knowledge is complete and love is perfect, or, as we take the liberty to add in the opposite direction, when dissonance and alienation prevail. This statement of Green's theory may seem dry and unfruitful as the seared and withered leaves of autumn, but held as a living faith by himself it was germinant with ever-springing life, wide-reaching enough to meet every exigency, a formula of duty sufficiently inspiring to breathe life beneath the ribs of death.

In the remarks which follow, it will be understood that our object is not so much to show how he held and applied his theory, as it is to show how his theory explains the man.

One remark seems to be here in place and indeed to be required for the full and fair understanding of his fundamental philosophy, and that is, that it is not the same with Hegelianism as it is often interpreted, as a system which substitutes thought and thought relations for persons and things, and which resolves the universe of fact into a self-developed structure

of logical entities. No better explanation of the differences between the two systems can be found than is furnished in the few brief and pointed strictures made by our author in a short criticism of Principal J. Caird's Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion.

"To assume, because all reality requires thought to conceive it, that therefore thought is the condition of its existence, is, indeed, unwarrantable. But it is another matter if, when we come to examine the constituents of that which we account real-the determinations of things-we find that they all imply some synthetic action which we only know as exercised by our own spirit."

"But when we have satisfied ourselves that the world in its truth or full reality is spiritual, because on no other supposition is its unity explicable, we may still have to confess that a knowledge of it in its spiritual reality-such a knowledge of it as would be a knowledge of God-is impossible to us. To know God we must be God. The unifying principle of the world is indeed in us; it is our self. But, as in us, it is so conditioned by a particular animal nature that, while it yields that idea of the world as one which regulates all our knowledge, our actual knowledge remains a piecemeal process. We spell out the relations of things one by one; we pass from condition to condition, from effect to effect; but, as one fragment of truth is grasped, another has escaped us, and we never reach that totality of apprehension through which alone we could know the world as it is and God in it. This is the infirmity of our discursive understanding. If in one sense it reveals God, in another it hides him. Language which seems to imply its identification with God, or with the world in its spiritual reality, can lead to nothing but confusion.” p. 145.

We are far from asserting that Professor Green was always clear or self-consistent in the exposition of his own system. We would rather say that the personal and practical sympathies of the man had quite as much to do with his convictions and his practical principles as had his metaphysical theories. While on the one hand he delighted in thinking and was entirely at home in the intellectual activities of patient analysis and adventurous synthesis, he was equally interested, on the other, in the practical conclusions to which his daring and adventurous logic would conduct him. A reverent conservatism and a reckless radicalism seem to have been the impulses which conspired to lift him to the heights of bold speculation and of patient and persevering action. Hence he was often unpopular or rather he was always prepared, we had almost said he was

uniformly impelled, to espouse an unpopular cause. And as it never fails to be true that what is conceived to be radicalism in politics, philosophy, and religion attracts more or less attention. by reason of the simple oddity of its antagonism, a temper like Green's could not fail to attach himself to an ample number of singular if not unpopular parties. We have already noticed that when at Rugby he was alone among four hundred boys as a water drinker, and also that somewhat early in his university life he dared to idolize John Bright, the man of all others who would least of all expect to find a following in the walks and halls which are so redolent of Toryism. What is more remarkable was the early and ardent interest which he took in our own civil war and the bold and sturdy patience with which, from the beginning to the end, he defended the cause of freedom and the Union against a host of natural and factitious opponents. What is, perhaps, still more remarkable, is the interest which he felt in that other "Great Rebellion," the civil war in which so many of England's noblest sons were engaged, and in which so many of her choicest spirits sealed their faith on the field or the scaffold.

The editor scarcely needed to apologize for the publication of the lectures on "The English Revolution," or "The English Commonwealth," as the running title has it. If those lectures render no other service, they are a fervent and outspoken confession of the author's political ideals and his political faith and furnish the key to much of his public conduct. The reader of them finds no difficulty in tracing the influences of his relationship to Cromwell and Cromwell's Colonel Sanders, or in finding in his ardent idealism a kinship with Sir Harry Vane, that noblest idealist whom Milton commemorates, and England and America each claims as its own. The concluding sentences of this course are fraught with suggestive meaning.

"Two palpable benefits the short triumph of puritanism did win for England. It saved it from the catholic reaction, and it created the "dissenting bodies." If it seems but a poor change from the fanatic sacerdotalism of Laud to the genteel and interested sacerdotalism of modern English churchmanship, yet the fifteen years of vigorous growth which Cromwell's sword secured for the church of the sectaries, gave it a permanent force which no reaction could suppress, and which has since been the great spring of political life in