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STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
STUDIES OF THE SOUL 
 
 BY 
 
 J. BRIERLEY, B.A. 
 
 ("J. B.") 
 
 Third Edition. 
 
 London : 
 JAME5 CLARKE & CO., 13 & M. FLEET STREET. 
 
 1901. 
 
Contents. 
 
 CHAPTER F10K 
 
 I. On Growing a Soul 1 
 
 II. The Soul's Eeceptiveness 10 
 
 III. Personality 18 
 
 IV. The Chemistry of Souls 27 
 
 V. Deposits from the Unseen 34 
 
 VI. The Soul's "I Will" 42 
 
 VIL Our Twofold Life 51 
 
 VIII. The Soul's Music 60 
 
 IX. The Greater Egoism 69 
 
 X. Life's Inevitableness 78 
 
 XL Our Unpublished Self 87 
 
 XII. Impedimenta ... ... ... ... ... 95 
 
 XIIL Of Well-Dressed Souls 104 
 
 XIV. The Soul's Colloquies 113 
 
 XV. In Search of One's Self 121 
 
 XVI. Our Possible Self 129 
 
 XVII. Negative Capability 137 
 
 XVIII. Imagination in Eeligion 146 
 
 XIX. Morality and the Clock 154 
 
 XX. The Religiously Ungif ted 161 
 
 XXL Fog in Theology 170 
 
 XXIL Temperament in Theology 177 
 
 XXIIL On Accepting Ourselves 187 
 
 XXIV. Life's Unknown Quantities 194 
 
 XX V. The Soul and Public Opinion . . 201 
 
 89 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAQK 
 
 XXVI. Our Best and Worst 208 
 
 XXVII. Survivals 216 
 
 XXVIII. The World's Silences 225 
 
 XXIX. The Soul's Pathfinders 234 
 
 XXX. The Soul and Heredity 243 
 
 XXXI. The Soul and Pleasure 249 
 
 XXX1L Spiritual Amalgams 257 
 
 XXXIII. On Being Two-Faced 266 
 
 XXXIV. The Soul in Preaching 274 
 
 XXXV. The Soul's Holidays 281 
 
 XXXVI. When the Soul Lets Go 288 
 
 XXXVn. The Soul and Death 295 
 
STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 xxv rv> 
 
 I. 
 
 On Growing a Soul. 
 
 IN the very first glimpses we get, in history's 
 earliest dawn, of articulate speaking man, we 
 find him pondering precisely the questions 
 which to-day agitate him in his central depth. 
 He asked then as he is asking now, What is 
 the soul, whence came it, what does it stand 
 for? And nothing is more remarkable than 
 the practical unanimity of the world's answer to 
 this world-question. Looked at historically, 
 modern materialism is a mere insignificant 
 eddy on the surface of an overwhelming 
 current of contrary opinion. India answers 
 back to ancient Egypt, and the deepest thought 
 of Europe to the teaching of Galilee, with a 
 result which may be summed up in one 
 formula the world is the expression of Spirit, 
 
STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 and exists for the further development of it. 
 In other words, the world exists in order to 
 grow souls. No other theory fits the facts or 
 satisfies the human conscience. Apart from 
 this outlook, life's sufferings and failures would 
 lead us to the feeling expressed in the picture 
 which Lowell saw in Belgium, where an angel 
 arrests the arm of the Almighty, put forth for 
 the creative act: "If about to make such a 
 world," the canvas seems to say, " stay Thine 
 hand ! " 
 
 But when we speak of growing a soul, we 
 must define with a little more closeness what 
 we mean. And to do so we pass by a multitude 
 of questions on this subject with which the 
 earlier philosophers busied themselves. Augus- 
 tine, be it said, in his "De Anima," is 
 admirable reading here, not only for his own 
 profound suggestions, but for the conspectus 
 he gives of the opinions of the early world. 
 Has the world itself a soul ; is the soul of man 
 a direct emanation from God, or does one soul 
 generate another; is the soul of the same 
 essence as the Deity, or something inferior; is 
 
ON GROWING A SOUL. 3 
 
 it, as the Platonists aver, placed in a body in 
 this world as a punishment for sins committed 
 in another sphere ? On these, and a multitude 
 of similar points, the old thinkers have said 
 about as much as there is to be said, and 
 after all leave the question very much where 
 it was. 
 
 But the expressions "the world-soul" and 
 " the human soul " open up some questions of a 
 different order from those propounded by the 
 Platonist, and which are worthy of all our 
 attention. We may, for instance, affirm and 
 in doing so we are linking modern science and 
 the historical consciousness with the very 
 earliest thinking that the world, in the sense 
 of collective humanity, is actually growing 
 a soul. Of the immense process of the ages 
 this is the chief and fore-ordained result. What 
 lies behind and explains that process is a ques- 
 tion on which the latest European idealism and 
 the oldest Hindu philosophy are significantly at 
 one. When Schelling declares that the external 
 world is an expression of the same life that is 
 writ in our consciousness, that the Universal 
 
STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 Spirit comes to the knowledge of itself in man ; 
 that the outer world is God's thought shown to 
 our eyes, while the inner world is God's thought 
 become conscious of itself ; he is simply echoing 
 what had been uttered thousands of years 
 before on the banks of the Ganges, where the 
 relation of man to nature, and of the Eternal 
 Spirit to both were put into the great formula, 
 thou art that. 39 
 
 We are on different ground when, from the 
 metaphysics of the world-soul we come to its 
 natural history. That history has been epito- 
 mised in the saying of another German thinker : 
 " God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, 
 and wakes in the man." The awakening has 
 been a slow process. To trace the movement 
 towards conscious thought through the ages of 
 geologic time, through the faint suggestions of 
 it in the vegetable and lowest animal life, 
 through the foreshadowings of reason and of 
 ethics in the prehuman races; to track its 
 upward way into the human form itself as it 
 showed on this planet through the dim, for- 
 gotten paleolithic and neolithic eras, is to pass 
 
ON GEOWING A SOUL. 
 
 through abysses of duration beyond the power 
 of arithmetic to compute. All we know is, and 
 truly this is a marvellous thing, that as soon as 
 we meet man in the earliest dawn of history we 
 find him in full possession of his soul. Says 
 Boseawen, speaking of the Egyptian Book of 
 the Dead and of the Chaldsean tablets : " Six 
 thousand years ago man, in Egypt and Chaldeea, 
 stands before us pure in his tastes, lofty in his 
 ideals, and, above all, keenly conscious of the 
 relationship which existed between himself and 
 his God. ... It is no dread, but the 
 grateful love of a child to his father, of friend 
 to friend, that meets us in the oldest books of 
 the world." The common world-consciousness, 
 which has reached this height when it is first 
 introduced to us, has been growing ever since. 
 Mighty revelations have been vouchsafed it ; 
 stupendous experiences of trial and suffering 
 have wrought upon it ; continuously have its 
 horizons widened ; and these processes are still 
 going on. To what height of evolution this 
 world-soul will reach; whether, as Drummond 
 held, life on this planet will go no higher than 
 
6 STUDIES o# THE SOUL. 
 
 its present human expression; or whether, as 
 Nietzsche taught, the present consciousness of 
 the actual man is only a preparation for that 
 of " the over man " yet to come, it is not for us 
 here to discuss. 
 
 For, after all, our main business in this planet 
 is to study, not so much the growing of the 
 world-soul, as the growing of our own. Socrates 
 was describing the greatest work a man could 
 give himself to when, in his Apology, he de- 
 clared: "For I do nothing but go about per- 
 suading you all, old and young alike, not to take 
 thought for your persons, or your properties, 
 but first and chiefly to care about the greatest 
 improvement of the soul." It needs to be as 
 seriously and as categorically taught to the 
 inhabitants of these islands to-day as it was to 
 the Athenians in the time of Socrates, that, 
 apart from any questions of Church dogma or 
 of future life, no human pursuit, no hunt after 
 wealth, fame, or pleasure is comparable in 
 interest or in value with the growing of a soul. 
 
 By the soul here we mean something deeper 
 than the machine that ticks in the brain, that 
 
ON GKOWINO A SOUL. 
 
 calculates and memorises, that learns the tricks 
 in trade or diplomacy, and cleverly practises 
 them. A developed man finds in him a streak 
 of something beneath that, a something that 
 relates him to the infinite, which feels and 
 suffers, which wills, and is the seat of moral 
 judgment. Everybody recognises this as part 
 of himself, but few indeed realise what may be 
 made of it. To a generation which does not 
 read the world's deepest books it is difficult to 
 give an idea of what the human soul has really 
 grown to in those who have given it a chance. 
 The literature of this subject is the lives of the 
 great saints, and amongst them perhaps espe- 
 cially the great mystics. Here we learn the 
 possibilities of a grown-up soul; the annihila- 
 tion in it of the lower desires, and the full set 
 of its determination upon the highest things; 
 its power of vision, by which it has an appre- 
 hension of God which nothing can shake, and a 
 sense of the spiritual world that makes it 
 grandly indifferent to the conditions of the 
 earthly lot; its power of influence, such that 
 through commonest words and acts thrill mys- 
 
8 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 terious forces that shake and inspire the hearts 
 of men; and its power of enjoyment, drawn 
 from sources which the world cannot dry up, 
 and which reaches at times an intensity that 
 transcends the limits of expression. Unless the 
 world's best men and women have been its 
 greatest liars, these experiences have, in differ- 
 ing degrees, been common to them all. 
 
 It is impossible for us here to particularise as 
 to the method by which these results have been 
 obtained. Our readers probably know the main 
 lines of it as well as we do. What we want to 
 emphasize is that the route is open to us all. 
 We can each grow a soul if we are willing to 
 pay the price. Assuredly it is worth it, for this 
 is really the one and the only victorious life. 
 Failure is, in the long run, written on every 
 other, and by whatever standard a man judges. 
 One could cite a thousand facts in proof, but 
 this one should be enough the growth of the 
 soul is the one pursuit which makes life, to its 
 very last day, full of interest. He who follows 
 it knows nothing of the despair of Anacreon in 
 his old age, or of the wail of Mimnermus over 
 
ON GROWING A SOUL. 
 
 his lost youth ; ' ' when once the appointed time 
 of youth is past it is better to die forthwith 
 than to live." It can survive strength, health, 
 fortune, friends, for by a Divine alchemy it can 
 turn the loss of them all into the aliment of its 
 ever-growing power. 
 
 The world is full to-day of the cry of the 
 educationist. It is well to remember that 
 nothing we can teach is comparable in its 
 importance to this. To show to our children 
 that they are on this planet to grow their own 
 soul and the world's soul ; that this is the solu- 
 tion of the world's riddle ; that the explanation 
 of what sorrow and loss may await them is all 
 found here ; and not only to teach this, but by 
 the conditions in which we rear them, to make 
 the learning of it both natural and universally 
 possible, will be to enrich the coming genera- 
 tions infinitely more than by aught else with 
 which our wealth or our love can endow them. 
 
II. 
 
 The Soul's Receptiveness. 
 
 A MAN who, from the standpoint of modern 
 research, tries to form for himself some 
 coherent idea of religion, is conscious of a 
 curious dissatisfaction when he turns to the 
 creeds and formularies which profess to give an 
 account of it. What they contain is, he finds, 
 in parts surprising enough, but his chief 
 surprise is at what they leave out. The first 
 thing which his mental habit teaches him to 
 ask for in such a study is a biology of the 
 spiritual life which shall give a scientific 
 account of its phenomena. He sees himself 
 surrounded by facts and forces belonging to this 
 realm, and he inquires for the laws of them. 
 But for knowledge of this sort he searches the 
 formularies in vain. The theologians have been 
 busy in an entirely different field. He must 
 make his own way here as best he can. An 
 illustration of his difficulty is suggested by the 
 
THE Soui/s ^ECEPTIVENESS. 11 
 
 title we have chosen for this chapter. Studying 
 religion at the beginning, as he finds it in him- 
 self and his neighbour, one of the first things 
 he runs up against is a great law of receptivity. 
 The doctrinal authorities have, it is true, in 
 their own way something to say on this subject, 
 but the topic is grievously in want of resetting. 
 Let us look here a little at how the facts stand. 
 Receptivity is a branch of the wider law of 
 relativity. What things are in themselves is 
 nothing. It is what they are in relation to us 
 that counts. We know nothing of substance 
 except in its relations. Hydrogen is a new 
 thing when it touches oxygen. Light as it falls 
 upon the hand or the forehead brings no revela- 
 tion of itself. It is when it touches the human 
 retina that its wide world of possibilities is 
 opened. A Paderewsld drops his fingers upon 
 a block of wood and there is no response. 
 The same touch on the keys of a piano thrills 
 the air with melody. In all these spheres the 
 same thing has happened. It is the wedding 
 of an outside impact to an inner power of 
 response. 
 
12 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 When we turn more definitely to human life 
 we realise how its development from stage to 
 stage is throughout a development of its power 
 of response. The universe knocks at our door 
 and enters in proportion as we open it. Light, 
 electricity, form, colour, sound have been here 
 from the beginning, waiting for recognition. 
 Through measureless ages and from lowliest 
 origins human life has been working up to a 
 perception of these things, until now the mind, 
 simply by its power to receive, has become as it 
 were a universe in itself. Man creates none of 
 these forces, invents none of these laws. They 
 were there before he came. But by appro- 
 priating the forces and conforming to the laws 
 he becomes mighty with their might, and 
 beautiful with their beauty. There appears 
 absolutely no limit to this process. So far as 
 one can see it will go on until the whole 
 stupendous total of cosmic force will be open 
 to our disposal. 
 
 This is the human receptivity and its pros- 
 pect on one side. The question now comes 
 whether similar affirmations may be made 
 
THE SOUL'S RECEPTIVENESS. 13 
 
 about the side of it which we term the spiritual. 
 When we say that the forces we know as light 
 or heat are constant and their law unchanging, 
 may we speak in similar terms of a light, 
 vibrating through a subtler ether, by which the 
 mind sees truth, and of an inner warmth which 
 kindles the soul to love ? Is there here also a 
 constant and limitless supply available ; are the 
 laws here ascertainable ; and may the soul 
 grow indefinitely by their appropriation ? 
 
 The moment we ask the question we find 
 ourselves thrown back upon what seems a 
 fundamental difference. The Cosmic forces 
 may be conceived of as impersonal. Spiritual 
 force, on the other hand, imperatively demands 
 a person. It only exists as an expression and 
 outflow of personality. We may use the warmth 
 of fire or the speed of electricity without con- 
 necting them in our minds with character or 
 will. But the soul's affections can only be 
 stirred by character. Magnetism cannot create 
 love. It takes a soul to touch a soul. To some 
 minds the direct sense of personality in the 
 spiritual world, as compared with what they 
 
14 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 think they find in the natural world, makes it 
 impossible to argue from one to the other. In 
 this we are dealing, they say, with matter and 
 force ; in that, with a personal God. The two 
 spheres cannot be treated as the same. But 
 science and philosophy in their latest forms are 
 both making it increasingly difficult to hold this 
 view. Both are asking whether Cosmic force, 
 in the final analysis, is not as clear an ex- 
 pression of will as is spiritual love. A coherent 
 view of the universe demands conscious spirit as 
 much behind gravitation as behind affection. 
 Natural laws are beginning to be realised as 
 God's habits in that sphere. Their permanence 
 means the permanence of His character. And 
 His law of love may be spoken of in the same 
 terms as His laws of light or heat, because they 
 are both the efflux of the same nature. 
 
 But if the law of receptivity in the spiritual 
 world is on all fours with what we see in the 
 natural world, some great consequences follow. 
 With this conception in our mind we are 
 delivered at once and for ever from the idea of 
 caprice or favouritism in religion. The same 
 
THE SOUL'S KECEPTIVENESS. 15 
 
 sun shines upon peasant and upon prince, and 
 each may enjoy the treasure as he may. Spiritual 
 power is simply the capacity to receive. Limit- 
 less force lies at each soul's threshold, waiting 
 to make it mighty. Religious genius is simply 
 a superior power of appropriation. The Incarna- 
 tion was the illustration on the sublimest scale 
 of the spiritual receptiveness of humanity. It 
 was "The Eternal Life in the life of Jesus." 
 And none so clearly as He has witnessed to 
 this truth. In His declaration that He could 
 " of His own self do nothing/' He spoke not 
 merely of Himself. He was affirming for all 
 time the law of spiritual power. 
 
 In studying the operation of this law 
 amongst men generally we find, in reference to 
 it, one broad line of distinction. There are the 
 many who receive their spiritual force mediately, 
 and the few who may be said to obtain it direct 
 from the Unseen. The mass follow leaders and 
 derive from the human. It is in the seeing 
 power of the prophet and teacher that they 
 behold truth, by his sense of the "world 
 to come" that they are brought under 
 
16 STUDIES OP THE SOTTL. 
 
 its power. Ever at their head are the elect 
 souls, dowered with the higher sensitiveness, 
 whose commerce with the Divine is direct 
 and immediate. By whatever name they are 
 called poet, prophet, philosopher, mystic 
 they lead men, knowing that they them- 
 selves are being led, and by a sure hand. 
 In every creed and by every race this law 
 has been recognised. The Eomans were not the 
 most gifted race spiritually, but Cicero's Nemo 
 vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit 
 was a good confession on this point. He realised 
 that the truly great man everywhere was so by 
 the Divine breath that was in him. 
 
 From all this emerges the question how we 
 may each develop our spiritual receptiveness. 
 There is none more important, for, so far as one 
 can see, it is for this end that humanity exists, 
 and by this road that it will travel to its highest 
 consummation. The rules are not for us to give. 
 They are already laid down. The Christ law of 
 love, purity, and humility is the way, and there 
 is no other plain, simple living, the conscien- 
 tious culture of every power in us, the daily 
 
THE SOUL'S RECEPTIVENESS. 17 
 
 commerce with the Invisible, association with 
 the nobler souls, the giving up ever of the 
 lower for the higher. Travelling along this 
 road we realise, as years go on, a sense of per- 
 petual enlargement of life. The surface is 
 broadening upon which the Divine breath plays. 
 The inner retina becomes more sensitive to the 
 light, from beyond the stars, that falls upon it. 
 And ever, as we progress, we know that all we 
 have is not a self -creation but rather a recep 
 tion. We say with Madame Guyon : 
 
 I love Thee, Lord, but all the love is Thine, 
 
 For by Thy life I live. 
 
 I am as nothing, and rejoice to be 
 
 Emptied, and lost, and swallowed up in Thee. 
 
m. 
 Personality. 
 
 THE more one thinks of it the more plainly it 
 appears that in all regions of thought 
 religious, scientific, artistic, literary the ques- 
 tion of questions, the pivot on which every- 
 thing turns, is that of personality. What we 
 mean by it, what importance we attach to it, 
 colours our every idea on every subject. And 
 yet, strange to say, there is no other topic in 
 modern thinking about which there seems to be 
 such dire confusion. It is not only that the 
 man in the street, whose philosophical educa- 
 tion may be supposed to be meagre, has the 
 vaguest notions on the matter, but the experts 
 and the authorities are at hopeless loggerheads 
 upon it. On the one hand, the school of 
 scientific materialism has persistently belittled 
 personality. It claims, for one thing, to have 
 cleared the universe of an enormous number of 
 its presupposed inhabitants. The fauns, satyrs, 
 
PERSONALITY. 19 
 
 sprites, fairies, guardian angels, and what not, 
 which in the earlier pagan, and, in a different 
 form, in later Christian times, peopled earth 
 and sky, have given place to its reign of 
 natural law. More than that, it has striven to 
 depersonalise, in a sense, humanity itself. It 
 dethrones the individual and puts the whole 
 emphasis of value on the race. Man's 
 immortality, it says, is only a racial 
 immortality. The future life of the individual 
 is simply the life he transmits to his children, 
 and the ideas, the influence and the example he 
 leaves behind him. As to his own separate 
 self, the body and mind stuff of which he is 
 composed is entirely disintegrated at death, to 
 reappear in a thousand different forms of 
 matter, force and sensibility in the endless 
 dance of the worlds. And it adds a finishing 
 touch to this world philosophy by denying that 
 the First Cause of the universe can be in any 
 sense considered as a Person. 
 
 It is a curious set-off to this view of things 
 to find another body of non-Christian thinkers 
 taking exactly the opposite attitude to per- 
 
20 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 sonality. The extreme Monistic school makes 
 the individual ego everything and the universe 
 outside nothing. The outer world has no other 
 reality than as the unknown cause of cerebral 
 sensation. The calculations of astronomers as 
 to the immensities of space as between star and 
 star are a mere delusion. The one fact at the 
 bottom of them is a series of minute alterations 
 in the grey matter of the astronomer's brain. 
 Each individual ego is its own kingdom, its own 
 law, its own God. 
 
 As compared with these extremes on both 
 sides it may be worth while to note the 
 tendency of what we may call the more sober 
 type of both religious and philosophical think- 
 ing during recent years. It is safe to say that 
 the greatest result of the newer studies in 
 history and in the phenomena of the human 
 spirit, is the rehabilitation of the doctrine of 
 personality. Those studies have placed it in 
 some new lights, and have deduced from it 
 some new consequences. 
 
 First of all, while observation of the material 
 world has led scientists in the direction of law 
 
PERSONALITY. 21 
 
 and necessity, the study of history and 
 psychology, that is of man himself, has 
 resulted in a more and more emphatic verdict 
 for free will, for personality, for the individual. 
 Carlyle's " Hero Worship " is one of the forms 
 of this verdict. Its doctrine of great men as 
 the real creators of history is one which no 
 number of Buckles, with their food and climate 
 theories of human life, will ever be able to 
 upset. There is, we venture to say, no 
 historical problem which, carefully looked at, 
 does not show the personal equation as its 
 Alpha and Omega. Take for instance the 
 question of Protestantism. How did the world 
 come by it ? It may be said that the Protestant 
 doctrines, so far as they were true, existed 
 independently of Luther. They were in the 
 Bible, and in the nature of things. But why, 
 then, did the world pay no heed to them till 
 Luther came ? What would have happened if 
 the study of the Bible and of the " nature of 
 things " had had the same effect upon him as, 
 say, upon Erasmus? Without fathoming the 
 question ap to what extent the doctrine made 
 
22 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 him, or he made the doctrine, it remains that 
 what, at a critical period, went on in the 
 depths of this single personality created 
 Protestantism as we know it. And every other 
 historical evolution in its final analysis tells 
 the same tale. 
 
 But the question of personality as related to 
 religious feliought takes us a long way further 
 back than Protestantism. It touches the root 
 of religion in its doctrine of God. Negative 
 philosophy has denied personality to the 
 Absolute as being a limitation of it, and 
 consequently a self-contradiction. As a matter 
 of fact there is no philosophy of the Absolute 
 which does not abound in what seem self- 
 contradictions. Sir William Hamilton's illus- 
 trations of some of them should be sufficient to 
 make logic, in this dim and awful realm, more 
 modestly distrustful of its powers. What we 
 can be sure about, if there is certainty 
 anywhere, is our own consciousness and its 
 affirmations. What are these ? For one thing, 
 consciousness finds in itself an intelligence, a 
 sense of beauty, of righteousness and of love, 
 
PERSONALITY. 
 
 of which it argues there must have been a 
 cause. The Cause or Creator of righteousness 
 and love must possess them. But we cannot 
 imagine a possessor of them as not being a 
 person. And so consciousness, fairly interro- 
 gated, recognises in the first cause what we 
 include in Personality, though there may be 
 infinitely more in it than that. Victor Hugo 
 puts all this into one happy phrase, " The All 
 would not be the All unless it contained a 
 Personality. That personality is God." 
 
 And as personality lies at the beginning of 
 the religious idea, so we meet it at every stage 
 of its evolution. It has been the fashion to 
 mock at the anthropomorphism of the Bible. 
 To say that God made man in His own image, 
 the critics aver, is the reversal of the true order. 
 The proper way of putting it is that it is man 
 that makes God after his image. It may turn 
 out that the latter proposition is true, because 
 of the prior truth of the former. The reproach 
 against revealed religion, that it is anthro- 
 pomorphic, we are beginning to find is no 
 reproach at all. We are discovering that 
 
24 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 neither religion nor philosophy can get on 
 without a doctrine of incarnation. Nature 
 through all her processes is seen labouring to 
 produce personality as her final end. And the 
 human personality which is her highest result 
 is found to be, in different stages, a Divine in- 
 carnation. Man thinks by means of an eternal 
 reason at the basis of his thought ; he approves 
 or coiidems himself by an eternal righteousness 
 mysteriously linked to and doubling his own 
 consciousness. And what, in sum, is New 
 Testament Christianity, but the affirmation 
 that this process has had, in the fulness of 
 time, a culmination in the emergence to the 
 light of a complete personality, in whom was 
 exhibited all of God that could be contained 
 and manifested in one human form ? 
 
 And as in its doctrine of G-od and of Christ, 
 so in its doctrine of spiritual life, primitive 
 Christianity recognises to the full the supremacy 
 of personality. Its teaching is that the life of 
 the soul is quickened and maintained, not so 
 much by doctrine or sacrament or ceremony, as 
 by the impartation of its Founder's own self. 
 
PERSONALITY. 25 
 
 Christianity is to be propagated by the Spirit 
 of Christ, mediated and handed on by those 
 who have felt its indwelling power. The law 
 is an ultimate one, and is proved by the history 
 of every section of the Church. Whether we 
 read of a Catholic Vianney, of a Presbyterian 
 Baxter, of a Baptist Bunyan, or a Methodist 
 Wesley, their power as persuaders and winners 
 of souls came, not from the particular " ism " 
 they preached, but from the personality, the 
 spirit that was in them, dominated as it was 
 by a higher Personality behind. 
 
 The same law is writ large all over literature. 
 The personal is the one thing that interests. 
 Doctrine and dogma, whether theologic, social, 
 or economic, left to its naked self, will moulder 
 on the back shelves of libraries. To be power- 
 ful it must be incarnated. Create a living cha- 
 racter who holds the doctrines and he will 
 preach them to millions. The Baptist creed 
 of ff Pilgrim's Progress " can hardly be called 
 attractive to the mass. As talked by Christian 
 and Hopeful it is the property of the world. 
 Scotch Presbyterianism " in the aibstract " is 
 
STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 held commonly by outsiders to be a dry subject. 
 Translated into the life of a Jeanie Deans, or 
 into the characters and opinions of the worthies 
 of Drumtochty, its flavour is appreciated by 
 every palate. Art tells the same story. The 
 pictures that live are those where the colours 
 have been mixed in the artists own life-blood. 
 
 Surely the lesson of all this is plain, and it 
 is dead against the materialists. Into whatever 
 region of thought we stray whether theology, 
 philosophy, history, literature, or art we find 
 the universe spelling out one word as its final 
 meaning. It exists for persons. The personal 
 life is the ultimate life, the personal interest 
 the ultimate interest. The law which is writ 
 everywhere on this side the grave we may well 
 believe is the law beyond it, and becomes thus 
 the charter of our personal existence after 
 death. 
 
IV. 
 The Chemistry of Souls. 
 
 HUMAN nature is an article in which, all the 
 world deals. Every husband and wife, every 
 father and mother of children, every trader, 
 every public instructor is daily handling this, 
 the subtlest, most powerful, and in some aspects 
 most dangerous bundle of forces known on the 
 planet, and taking the risks. What amazes one 
 is the light-heartedness with which people con- 
 duct their experiments. Most men before med- 
 dling with dynamite would take care to learn 
 something of its properties. They take human 
 nature much more easily. It is a whole maga- 
 zine of explosives, yet they deal with it often 
 upon the crudest off-hand observations, without 
 in many cases troubling to inquire whether 
 there are any ascertainable laws governing the 
 operation of its materials. Yet it is upon a 
 proper knowledge of them that the whole art 
 of happy and prosperous living depends. 
 
28 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 In attempting, as we do here, to turn a side- 
 light from science upon one of these laws of 
 character, we are, we know, upon debatable 
 ground. Professor Drummond has been sharply 
 taken to task in some quarters for venturing to 
 speak of natural law in the spiritual world, as 
 though the idea led straight to materialism. 
 He was here, however, in the line of a succes- 
 sion of thinkers from the earliest ages who have 
 traced a correspondency between the two realms 
 of the inner and the outer in the midst of which 
 we stand. And as man and nature are studied 
 more thoroughly the more does the impression 
 grow upon us that an essential Monism is the 
 law of the universe; in other words, that the 
 pulsations of the human spirit are an answer to 
 the pulse which throbs through the outer world. 
 The one illustration of this which we offer here 
 has some large speculative outlooks, as well as 
 practical suggestions for daily life. 
 
 Nothing, perhaps, in experimental science so 
 strikes the imagination as the chemical feat of 
 obtaining out of two separate elements a new 
 product which bears no resemblance., either in its 
 
THE CHEMISTRY OF SOULS. 29 
 
 appearance or its properties, to its progenitors. 
 When the combining equivalents of chlorine 
 and sodium are brought together, and we see 
 these two elements disappear, and a third some- 
 thing, what we know as common salt, take their 
 place, we seem to be brought to the very origin 
 of things, and to be watching an act of creation. 
 The outer world, organic and inorganic, is full 
 of this. Its history is that of perpetual trans- 
 formation, in which, under the action of chemi- 
 cal affinities, matter is ever changing its shape, 
 dropping old powers and qualities, and taking 
 on new. The question we now ask is, whether 
 a, precisely similar law is not discernible in the 
 inner life; whether, in short, there is not a 
 chemistry of the soul, with its law of combining 
 proportions, and consequent disappearances and 
 transformations. If so, it is of the last import- 
 ance to us all that we should know something 
 about it. 
 
 First, as to the fact. When we study men, 
 whether the celebrities we read of in biographies, 
 or the ordinary specimens we meet in the street, 
 we find the phenomena of their life resolving 
 
30 STUDIES OP THB SOUL. 
 
 themselves substantially into two things first, 
 the sum of their original qualities, and second, 
 the currents of external influence to which 
 those qualities have been successively subjected. 
 An Ignatius Loyola up to well on in his early 
 manhood shows the characteristics and leads 
 the career of a Spanish gallant of the period. 
 Then comes, first, a cannon-ball which breaks 
 his leg at the siege of Pampeluna, and next the 
 opening of a book of " Lives of the Saints," to 
 while away the period of his invalidism. The 
 play of the new influence upon the old qualities 
 produces, as result, the wondrous life of the 
 Father of Jesuitism. The Kingswood colliers, 
 to whom John Wesley preached, were origin- 
 ally, like their fathers before them, hard- 
 working and hard-drinking fellows, whose idea 
 of enjoyment lay largely in horseplay and coarse 
 brutalities. When upon these characters was 
 poured the magnetic stream of spiritual influence 
 which the Methodist leader had at command, 
 the resultant was in many cases a type of life 
 and feeling so new that the possessors of it 
 were scarcely recognisable, either to themselves 
 
THE CHEMISTRY OP SOULS. 31 
 
 or their neighbours. The Spanish knight of 
 the sixteenth century and the Kingswood 
 colliers of the eighteenth may be taken as 
 examples of what meets us everywhere in 
 history and contemporary life. A man's 
 original qualities, struck upon by some influ- 
 ence from without, unthought of and unsought 
 by himself, may combine with this new element 
 to produce a human result as different from 
 the first as water is different from either the 
 hydrogen or the oxygen out of whose union it 
 has been formed. 
 
 Viewed in this light a man's actual life 
 appears to be only one out of a thousand might- 
 have-beens. No human, and we surely may 
 also say no Divine judgment of it would be 
 adequate which did not take into account the 
 character of the forces which have played 
 upon the stock of inward quality with which it 
 began. The consideration will be enough in 
 a thoughtful mind to stay a too-confident 
 dogmatism as to human destiny, and to incline 
 to Madame de Stael's opinion that " if we knew 
 all we should forgive all," 
 
82 STUDIES or THE SOTJL. 
 
 The topic has, however, a bearing on things 
 nearer home than speculations of this kind. 
 The sum of domestic happiness would, for 
 instance, be enormously increased if men and 
 women would take the trouble to study the 
 subject of soul chemistry in its relation to home 
 life. Many a household is the scene of per- 
 petual storm because a wife has not yet learned, 
 by a thousand experiences, that to bring to bear 
 a given tone and temper on her husband is as 
 certain to produce an explosion as would be the 
 application of a match to a barrel of gunpowder. 
 That she has an influence at command which, 
 when turned upon his nature, will produce a 
 very different result is evident from the fact 
 that he once fell in love with her. To know the 
 characters we are in daily contact with, and the 
 influence which draws out their best and re- 
 presses their worst, is to have mastered the 
 chemistry of domestic bliss. This is a branch 
 of science in which all makers of homes ought 
 to be compelled to take their diploma. 
 
 Christianity in its history, its doctrines and 
 its daily spiritual work at once assumes and 
 
THE CHEMISTRY OF SOULS. 
 
 proves the operation of such a chemistry of 
 souls as we have been discussing. Its whole 
 appeal is based on the possibility of a new 
 human product being obtained from the com- 
 bination of original qualities with a special 
 influence. Man may become a new creature by 
 union with a spiritual power which waits to 
 combine with him. This is in essence the 
 Christian G-ospel^ and it is as scientific as it is 
 inspiring. Churches become centres of irre- 
 sistible power, and homes the scenes of sunny 
 brightness^ when the men and women com- 
 posing them recognise as a truth and realise as 
 an experience that they were made with a yiew 
 to an actual union with Grod 5 a combination of 
 His nature with their own, out of which a new 
 and higher form of life is to emerge. 
 
V. 
 Deposits from the Unseen. 
 
 THAT we stand in the midst of two worlds, the 
 visible and the invisible, is, with varying 
 degrees of intensity, recognised by every one. 
 What, however, is not so evident is the relation 
 between the two. To the mass of men the 
 material universe represents the solid, substan- 
 tial actuality of things, the invisible looming 
 behind it as a vague, shadowy something, 
 dimly appreciated, and almost unreal. But 
 this is the hugest of blunders, and one which 
 must be straightway got rid of if we would set 
 ourselves right with life. What, after a little 
 patient thinking, becomes clear up to the point 
 of certainty is that everywhere the seen is the 
 offspring of the unseen, that the visible is, so to 
 say, a secretion or deposit of the invisible, that 
 matter is the handmaid and plaything of 
 thought; that, in a word, the one primordial 
 
DEPOSITS FROM THE UNSEEN. 35 
 
 and universal reality is spirit. We propose 
 here, in a few scattered observations, first to try 
 and make this plain, and then to see what con- 
 sequences it seems to carry. 
 
 To begin with what is close at hand, it is 
 remarkable how, in the commonest things, we 
 have to recognise the reign of the invisible. 
 We walk through a city and observe its 
 buildings. What are they? So much stone 
 and lime, iron and timber ? If that were all 
 they would not be buildings, but rubbish heaps. 
 Their principal ingredient is not matter, but 
 thought. These structures are, in fact, 
 embodied ideas. The inner life of the capi- 
 talist, the architect, the contractor, the 
 artist who constructed and embellished them ; 
 their desire, their will, their education and 
 taste are here visualised. The wood and stone 
 are penetrated throughout with mind, and tell 
 the story of it to all who can see and hear. 
 But some of these buildings have more to say 
 than that. Here is a house which has been 
 lived in for years and generations. The owner 
 of it was born there, as were his fathers before 
 
36 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 him. The visible part of it might be scheduled 
 as so many tons of second-hand building 
 material. Is it this, though, which of itself 
 makes the place dear to him ; which, when he 
 returns to it from far pilgriming in the world, 
 causes his heart to throb and his eye to 
 moisten? The house is what it is to him 
 because it is rich with deposits of the unseen. 
 It is saturated with the inner life of those 
 whom he loved and are gone, of those whom he 
 loves and who remain. The dead matter has 
 become beautiful and sacred from its alliance 
 and interpenetration with soul. 
 
 This secretion from the invisible is manifest, 
 moreover, not only on matter which has been 
 directly handled by man ; it is patent every- 
 where. Nature in her virgin wildernesses is 
 saturated with it. Our sense of scenery, for 
 instance, is almost entirely a spiritual creation. 
 It is because some beautiful mind has been laid 
 upon it that it has become beautiful for us. 
 Sometimes, indeed, the action is reversed, and 
 Nature appeals directly to us without an inter- 
 mediary. But the striking thing here is that 
 
DEPOSITS FEOM THE UNSEED. 37 
 
 the impression still is one of a soul con- 
 versing with our soul out of the heart of the 
 material. Have we not all felt at times what 
 William Watson in his lines on e Autumn ' so 
 finely expresses ! 
 
 And spectral seem thy winter-boding trees, 
 Their ruinous bowers and drifted foliage wet ; 
 O Past and Future in sad bridal met, 
 O Yoice of everything that perishes 
 And Soul of all regret. 
 
 The sentiment here is simply true to the fact. 
 In such a scene nature seems full of a thought 
 which answers to our own. 
 
 But we are as yet only on the threshold of 
 the topic. The next step brings a whole uni- 
 verse upon our hands. For what we have said 
 about a separate building or a separate scene in 
 nature applies with equal force when we con- 
 template the entire system of things. What, 
 after all, is the whole material universe but a 
 mass of petrified thoughts ! The mere fact 
 that we can give any rational account of the 
 world argues, when we think the matter out, a 
 reason immanent in it which answers to our 
 own. Every piece of its matter, related as it is 
 
38 STUDIES OF THE 
 
 to time and space, to cause and effect,, to simi- 
 larity and dissimilarity, to genera and species, 
 to statics and dynamics, to chemical, biological, 
 and infinite other affinities, is by these very 
 facts seen to be penetrated through and through 
 with logic, with reason, with will, in a word 
 with spirit. It does not require the facts 
 adduced and the line of argument followed 
 in that finely conceived work, "The Unseen 
 Universe," valuable as they are in themselves, 
 to convince us that the material world is a 
 deposit from the invisible. A true philosophy, 
 starting from any piece of chalk picked up on 
 the highway, and dealing thoroughly with the 
 categories contained in it, will arrive inevitably 
 at the same conclusion. It is not poetry, nor 
 sentiment, nor the religious instinct only which 
 declare the material world to be the vesture of 
 an Eternal Mind. The dry necessities of logic 
 leave no other conclusion open. 
 
 That every commonest thing we handle brings 
 us thus into the immediate presence of the 
 world's Q-overning Thought and Will should 
 be enough in itself to save our life from 
 
DEPOSITS FROM THE UNSEEN. 89 
 
 triviality. And closely related to this thought 
 is another which may well help that conclusion. 
 Every particle of matter,, we have urged, is full 
 of deposits from the unseen. But nowhere are 
 these deposits so manifest as in our own 
 personality. We know how the invisible things 
 of a man's character write themselves upon 
 his feature ; how out of a life devoted to high 
 purposes there come subtle beauties of form 
 and expression which advertise the nobleness 
 within ; and how, on the other hand, the 
 inward corruption of an ignoble soul puts 
 its disfiguring mark on eye and brow and 
 lip, and distorts every facial line. This is 
 one of nature's broad hints which only a fool 
 will neglect. Our inward experiences are 
 none of them simply gone through and then 
 done with. The joy or pain of this moment, 
 the mind's thought, the will's "yes" or 
 " no " leave, each, behind them a deposit of 
 effect which will work endlessly and in a 
 thousand forms. Eastern philosophy has a 
 doctrine on this subject which the German 
 Ulriei, in his theory of the spiritual body, has 
 
40 STUDIES OF THE Soul. 
 
 in some degree adopted. That character creates 
 environment ; that the spirit's clothing in a 
 future state will have been woven for it by 
 its thought and deed in this, seems, indeed, 
 the result to which all the facts of the case 
 lead us. 
 
 We have here, in fact, the doctrine of heaven 
 and hell, towards which the most earnest 
 thinkers of both East and West have instinc- 
 tively gravitated. The outward state repre- 
 sented by these terms, men of all creeds are 
 beginning to feel must be a creation of the in- 
 ward character; in other words, is a deposit 
 from the invisible. The place fits the state. 
 It is curious to see the practical agreement 
 between schools of thought the most widely 
 separated. Let us, for instance, put side by 
 side utterances on this subject by that most 
 sceptical of poets, Persian Omar Khayyam, and 
 that most fervent of Catholic believers, St. 
 Catherine of Genoa. Says the poet : 
 
 I sent my soul through the Invisible 
 
 Some letter of the after life to spell, 
 
 And after many days my soul returned 
 
 And said, " Behold myself am heaven and hell." 
 
DEPOSITS FEOM THE UNSEEN. 41 
 
 On her side the Catholic saint avers that " if a 
 soul dying in mortal sin did not find hell, which 
 is the proper place for her state, she would be 
 in greater suffering than she feels in that place, 
 and it is this which causes the soul's im- 
 petuosity to precipitate herself into it." Both 
 sides here, it must be said, express themselves 
 with sufficient crudeness, but a solid truth 
 gleams in each. Taken together, they give us 
 the kernel of what is to be known on this 
 theme. The future state, according to all the 
 analogies of the spiritual life, as we find them 
 in the Scriptures and in experience, will be a 
 projection, on a vaster scale, of the law which 
 works around us now and which we have been 
 trying here to illustrate, namely, that the inner 
 creates the outer, that, to repeat once more our 
 formula, environment is "a deposit of the 
 Unseen." 
 
VI. 
 The Soul's "I Will." 
 
 " I HAVE spent forty years," said Dr. Johnson, 
 in one of his bitter moments, " in making futile 
 resolutions." And for a man who, after again 
 and again solemnly vowing to himself to riee 
 at six in the morning, was more often than not 
 in bed at midday, the self-reproach does not 
 seem undeserved. But most of us who have 
 spent many years in the world are in a similar 
 plight. The new Eecord Office, large as it is, 
 would hardly provide house-room for the 
 number of our unfulfilled resolves. They form 
 part of that possible life which we have not 
 lived, the memory of which haunts us at times 
 so unpleasantly. 
 
 It is altogether a curious feature in human 
 life this business of saying " I will." The 
 gainsayer could easily argue against it as an 
 absurdity. It is, he might urge, the egotism 
 
THE SOUL'S "I WILL." 43 
 
 of the present moment which arrogates to itself 
 the function of legislating for all future 
 moments. It is man conspiring against his 
 own liberty. Why should one's future be 
 spent in obeying one's past ? Was that earlier 
 moment of resolving superior to this one 
 which I am now come to that this should be 
 bond-slave of that? 
 
 The wise man will take note of all this,, but 
 he will still go on making resolves. He has 
 to pay for them, but then he has to pay for 
 most things worth having. That the process 
 involves the mortgaging of his future is part 
 of the price for getting something done. If the 
 S I will " of yesterday had no authority over 
 to-day he might feel gloriously independent, but 
 he would make no headway. The chariot would 
 be without driving power. To protest in the 
 interests of freedom is, he knows, entirely 
 futile. The utmost freedom accorded him in 
 this world is a liberty to choose his masters and 
 his forms of obedience. He is obeying his 
 own volition or that of someone else all the 
 time. To refuse is to fall into subjection to 
 
44 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 that worse bondage of the whim of the 
 moment, with a resulting character sufficiently 
 suggested by the epitaph on Louis XV, 
 
 Ci-git Louis, ce pauvre roi ; 
 On dit qu'il fat bon, mais a' quoi ? 
 
 The history of man's "I will" is often, we 
 began by saying, one of failure. Looking over 
 its whole extent, however, what we are struck 
 by is not so much the failures in it as the 
 stupendous successes. The story of free volition 
 as exercised on this planet, from its beginnings 
 in the dim appetencies of the amoeba to the 
 self-conscious determinations of the hero and 
 the saint, is the magnificent epic of spiritual 
 evolution. The result is already amazing. A 
 great volition, judged by natural standards, is 
 a miracle. No known law of physics wil] 
 measure it. We have accurate instruments for 
 gauging the ordinary world forces. We can 
 estimate them in volts, or in surface pressures, 
 or in foot-tons. But where are our instruments 
 for expressing the impact on the world of 
 the "I will" of a Csesar, of a Columbus, 
 of a Paul ? In the viewless realm of a great 
 
THE SOUL'S "I WILL." 45 
 
 man's consciousness ; in the moment when he 
 says to himself " the die is cast," whether it be 
 to explore an unknown sea, or to found an 
 order, or to evangelise a continent, there is 
 evolved, we know not how, a force compared 
 with which Niagara is a toy. The wonder of 
 a volition of this kind is that it never ex- 
 hausts itself. The range and the results of 
 it grow constantly with the revolving years. 
 There is no motor known on this planet com- 
 parable for a moment in sheer power to the 
 one hidden away in the recesses of man's own 
 spirit. 
 
 The natural history of the great volitions 
 by which the world has been changed would 
 be infinitely interesting had we only the mate- 
 rials for it. We should find in most cases 
 a kind of Divine necessity closing in upon the 
 mind, and making it feel that the path entered 
 was the inevitable one. Something of the 
 instinct which sends the swallow 011 its voyage 
 through the air draws the hero to his task. 
 He feels with Haydn, when, in his German- 
 English, he spoke of the mighty chorus in his 
 
46 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 Creation, " Not from me, but from above it all 
 has come." Not that a man reaches a great 
 purpose at a bound, or has one thrust into him, 
 as it were, ready-made. " Nature does not 
 take leaps " inside a man's mind any more than 
 in the outside world. The final resolve is 
 attained through all manner of circuitous 
 routes and of preliminary essays. Often a man 
 turns into his fated road without knowing it. 
 Luther had not the faintest idea of breaking 
 with Rome when he opposed Tetzel. The 
 initial volition covers only the smallest of 
 curves from the beaten track. The rest comes 
 by continuing to follow it. 
 
 Most interesting, too, is it to note the way 
 in which Nature, when she has brought her 
 protege to the determination which marks a 
 new departure, works to keep him in it. The 
 new leader speedily finds himself surrounded 
 by comrades and followers. His solitary 
 volition finds an echo in other minds, and 
 the response heartens him. The fresh path, 
 by its novelty, even by its perils, fascinates. 
 The sense of being committed to a course 
 
THE SOUL'S "I WILL." 47 
 
 comes also as a grand determinant. The 
 pathfinder's whole manhood, his pride, his 
 fighting instinct, his staying power, are roused 
 and engaged in the task of seeing the thing 
 through. Nature seeins here, in fact, to be 
 straining every nerve to guard and develop the 
 fresh "variation," and so bring about the 
 furtherance of life. The new departure will, 
 if it occur in the theological or ecclesiastical 
 department, be banned probably as heresy or 
 schism. The higher biology has a different 
 way of looking at it. 
 
 A department of the subject which we can 
 only here glance at is the " I will " by which 
 a man governs not only himself but his fellows. 
 The man of strong volition rarely exercises it 
 on himself alone. " Follow my leader " is a 
 game as old as man, and almost the only one of 
 which the majority of the race are capable. 
 Human equality is a doctrine which Nature 
 scoffs at. To find his master is the average 
 man's greatest piece of good fortune. For the 
 leader who opens a road for his weaker brother 
 across the trackless waste, who stands as a 
 
48 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 shelter for him over against the naked, appall- 
 ing Infinite, is the greatest of benefactors, and 
 men gather swiftly where such an one is to be 
 found. He can make almost his own terms. 
 A Bernard may emigrate to the empty wilder- 
 ness of Clairvaux and knights and nobles press 
 on his steps ; a George Fox cuts convention to 
 its roots, but disciples throng to him ; a Wesley 
 draws up a severe and minute code of conduct, 
 and multitudes take it ready-made at his word. 
 If only the great leaders in religion had been 
 content with this power! It is the deepest 
 blot upon Augustine that he taught Christen- 
 dom to impose its "I will" by other than 
 spiritual means. Well had it been for him and 
 the after ages could he only have remembered 
 the great word of another African Father, and 
 have said with Tertullian, " Sed nee religionis 
 est cogere religionem, quse sponte suscipi debeat, 
 non vi : it is no part of religion to compel 
 religion, whose essential it is that it be accepted 
 freely and not through force." 
 
 In our day the detestable mediaeval applica- 
 tion of the text, "Compel them to come in," 
 
THE SOUL'S "I WILL." 
 
 49 
 
 has happily ceased. We no longer " compel " 
 to orthodoxy by fire and sword. The terrorism, 
 however, of those petty " scruples," of which 
 Dr. Johnson truly said " They made many 
 miserable, but never made any good," is not 
 yet over. The Sunday of Euskin's boyhood, 
 whose rigour, he tells us, cast its shadow over 
 him as early as Friday, has relaxed its gloom. 
 But there are still numbers of family circles 
 where the determination of the head to 
 enforce the narrowest ideas and practices by 
 the iron hand of authority is creating in young 
 hearts a sense of passionate rebellion and a 
 hatred of the very name of religion. Of all the 
 enemies in Christ's household none have been 
 so dangerous as the people who have sought to 
 drive instead of to draw, to worry instead of to 
 win. 
 
 A man may, as we here see, make terrible 
 mistakes in the exercise of his will power. 
 But the greatest mistake, after all, will be to 
 fail to cultivate it, or to pursue a course which 
 destroys its first strength. He who by animal 
 indulgence, by slavery to evil habit, has lost 
 
 < 
 
50 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 the inner impetus which makes his " I will " a 
 power upon himself and others, has sunk out 
 of the category of manhood. The last thing we 
 should venture to do is to break word with 
 ourselves. That is to open a leak in the 
 vessel which contains our inmost essence of 
 life. For when all is said, the power to form 
 a clear, strong, self-conscious determination, 
 and, against whatever strain of opposition, to 
 quietly abide in it, is the special sign of 
 man's royalty, the mark by which he is recog- 
 nised as akin with the Divine. 
 
vn. 
 Our Twofold Life. 
 
 THE average man is being hard pressed just 
 now on his spiritual side. The old arguments 
 with which he used to fight his inbred material- 
 ism seem breaking down. He is less easy than 
 he used to be about his footing in the invisible, 
 and more inclined despairingly to accept that 
 view of things which regards death as, in 
 Horace's words, the 
 
 Ultima liiiea rerum. 
 
 It is pathetic to witness the eagerness with 
 which, in quest of some light on his problem, 
 he turns to this quarter and to that to occult- 
 ism may be, or to the dicta of a self-styled 
 Infallible Church, or even to the expected literal 
 fulfilment of symbolic Apocalypses. As of old, 
 he seeketh a sign and no sign is given him. 
 And for a good reason. If he will only consider, 
 he will find that he himself is the sign. Why 
 
52 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 search for miracles when he is the miracle? 
 He has only to study the plain, obvious facts 
 of his own nature to see a clear way to the 
 invisible. That study will begin with the 
 natural. But it will assuredly land him in the 
 supernatural. We propose here to glance along 
 two lines of fact about our lives, very different 
 from each other, but both pointing one way, 
 and landing us at the same inevitable conclu- 
 sion. 
 
 Each of us is conscious of a twofold life, one 
 which we live in common with our neighbours, 
 and another which we live all alone to ourselves. 
 Let us, to begin with, see what is contained in 
 the first, the common life. An immense part 
 of us belongs to what may be called the general 
 consciousness. Our own feelings and thoughts 
 form a drop in an ocean of similar thought and 
 feeling which is heaving and surging through 
 the world around us. Language is only possible 
 on the supposition of a community of ideas, of 
 which its vocables are the signs. A Handel 
 chorus, a Beethoven sonata, are the souls of 
 music in one individuality calling to the same 
 
OUR TWOFOLD LIFE. 53 
 
 soul in a million others. A great orator or a 
 great musician, in perfect command of an 
 audience, brings this spiritual unity to perhaps 
 its most striking expression. Under the im- 
 passioned appeal or the moving, mighty 
 harmony, a thousand separate men and 
 women, gathered promiscuously and knowing 
 nothing of each other, have ceased to be 
 individuals. They are blended for the time 
 into a huge common consciousness, which 
 laughs and cries, exults or despairs, as one 
 single soul. It is in the exaltation of such a 
 moment that we realise the full force of 
 Goethe's saying, that " only mankind together 
 is the true man, and the individual can only be 
 joyous and happy when he feels himself in the 
 whole." 
 
 But this ( ' feeling oneself in the whole " 
 implies something further, which will come out 
 more clearly, perhaps, when we study it in 
 relation to a special department of the common 
 inner life that, namely, of intelligence, know- 
 ledge, the perception of truth. If a thoughtful 
 man asks himself why he believes that truth 
 
54 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 will certainly conquer error, he falls back for 
 an answer to his belief in the existence of a 
 verifying faculty, common to the race, which 
 slowly but irresistibly separates the true from 
 the false. "The human race," says Lamen- 
 nais, "advances towards the truth infallibly 
 by the evolution of its universal reason." This 
 "universal reason" may for the moment be 
 described as the common agreement of human- 
 ity about the universe in which it is placed. 
 It interrogates that universe, and obtains in the 
 end answers in which all minds agree. In 
 other words, it finds the universe intelligible. 
 Turn that proposition round, and it means that 
 the common mind in us, as it studies the world, 
 is really studying a mind outside us. If the 
 universe were not rational that is, the expres- 
 sion of a mind, and a mind, too, which works 
 on the lines of our own nothing is more certain 
 than that we could come to no possible agree- 
 ment about it. Man's growing perception of 
 truth is, then, in reality his growing perception 
 of one central, underlying, and eternal mind, in 
 whom all truth inheres. What he digs out of 
 
OUR TWOFOLD LlFtf. 
 
 the world with his investigator spade are really 
 the thoughts of a Thinker who was there before 
 him. The gaze outward of the common reason 
 is, as the higher philosophy everywhere is 
 recognising, a look upon God. 
 
 But this inference from the common mental 
 life comes not only as the result of the gaze 
 outward, but also of the gaze inward. We 
 have described the "Universal Season" of 
 humanity as its common agreement about the 
 universe. But no one who has studied the 
 growth of civilisation, what has been happily 
 termed "the education of the human race," 
 will regard that as a complete definition. The 
 slowly but steadily broadening light which that 
 marvellous movement shows, the unceasing 
 uplift it reveals in knowledge and morals, is 
 felt to be a work, not by man, but a work in 
 man. The separate jets of light, to which in 
 history we give human names, are fed from 
 one fountain. The common uplift is the effort 
 of one spiritual energy which is the ground- 
 work of every soul, and which for ever seeks 
 to realise itself in man as its organ. Amiel, 
 
STUDIES OF THE SOUL* 
 
 whose inind was a battle-ground on which 
 was fought out the whole conflict of modern 
 thought, could not, with all his waverings, 
 escape from this. " I realise," says he, " with 
 intensity, that man in all that he does that 
 is great and noble is only the organ of some- 
 thing or some one higher than himself." 
 Human reason in its look outward and its 
 look inward is alike face to face with God. 
 
 But the common consciousness, vast as is 
 the range of its significance, is after all only 
 a part of each soul's life. There is another 
 part which also carries its inference. The 
 mystery of our solidarity is not more wonder- 
 ful than the mystery of our loneliness. In 
 studying this part of the theme we seem to 
 have almost to unsay the other part. We 
 have spoken, for instance, of language as an 
 expression of the common consciousness. But 
 as a real interpreter of the soul how far does 
 it go? When a man tells me he is glad 
 or that he is in pain, what kind of an insight 
 has that given me as to his actual interior? 
 The words seem to lift for a moment the 
 
OUR TWOFOLD LIFE. 57 
 
 curtain at the window of his personality. But 
 they do not open the door. The new photo- 
 graphy may reveal our neighbour's skeleton. 
 It will give us no picture of his real self. We 
 are, indeed, to each other, even to our 
 intimates, a kind of Australia, with a few 
 settlements and points of contact and commerce 
 upon the coast, but having a vast interior 
 within, all unexplored and unknown. We talk 
 of the union between mother and child. But 
 when the child lies racked with pain and the 
 mother would give anything to lessen the 
 suffering by sharing it, not one pang of it 
 reaches her. Between her and it is a great 
 gulf fixed which she may not pass over. Truly 
 has it been said, " There are thoughts which 
 have no confidant, sorrows which are not 
 shared. We dream alone, suffer alone, die 
 alone." 
 
 Is this, we may well ask, a chance arrange- 
 ment? For what end has been reared the 
 impassable wall which bars off our inmost 
 life from the nearest and dearest of our kind ? 
 Is it meant as a prison, or as an insulator; 
 
STUDIES 6# THE SOUL. 
 
 to shut us off only from something, or to 
 preserve something to us ? Let the thoughtful 
 man again turn in upon himself and question 
 his consciousness for answer. He will find 
 that it is precisely his isolation from man that 
 has driven him upon the infinite; that the 
 sphere of things in which he has no commu- 
 nication with his fellow is that where he 
 constantly hears a voice, a ad feels an impact 
 which is not from man. His unreached self 
 is not a prison but a sanctuary. A speech is 
 heard there. It is the intercourse between 
 man and a Spirit that witnesses with his. 
 
 Along two plain roads then, trodden of us all, 
 we come out upon the same conclusion. The 
 facts of our life in common and of our life 
 alone, the one by an intellectual, the other by 
 a moral compulsion, alike force us upon God, 
 and make Him inevitable. And if this be so ; 
 if the logic of life compels us to admit it as 
 penetrated within and without by a mind, 
 " by whose thought we think, by whose 
 knowledge we know, and in whose light 
 we see," indwelt by One who is not only 
 
OUR TWOFOLD LIFE. 59 
 
 Thought but Love, whose heart in its outflow 
 upon us is the source of our noblest affection 
 our spiritual inheritance, spite of all 
 appearances to the contrary, stands secure. 
 The changes that may come over the form 
 and expression of our religious faith are but 
 the outworking of an evolution, whose guid- 
 ing thought and purpose have that Mind 
 and Heart for their source, and from whose 
 eternal power and eternal love none shall ever 
 separate us. 
 
VIII. 
 The Soul's Music. 
 
 A GREAT musician is an interpreter-in-chief 
 of the mind's inner world. There is nothing 
 which, properly considered, leads us deeper 
 than does music into the heart of things; 
 nothing which brings to us more convincing 
 evidence that man belongs to a spiritual 
 order and is related intimately and irrevocably 
 to a world unseen. When we think of what 
 music contains and what it suggests we do 
 not wonder that Plato, the great prophet of 
 the ideal, should have put it so high as an 
 element of education and as an inspirer of 
 virtue. If we want to know what God 
 is and what His relations are to the 
 human soul we have, in this great realm of 
 ordered harmony, what might be described 
 almost as a distinct revelation ready to our 
 hand. 
 
 We speak of instruments and of players 
 
THE SOUL'S Music. 61 
 
 upon them. But a study of the elementary 
 facts of music soon shows us that the primal 
 musical instrument is the human soul. Our 
 consciousness is a keyboard incessantly played 
 upon by an unseen performer. Let us see how 
 matters stand. The process of producing music 
 may be described as a process of disengaging 
 spirit from matter. On one side, metals, woods, 
 wires, strings are subdued from their rough- 
 ness and wrought to fineness. On the other 
 side, human hands, eyes, ears, breath are 
 trained to co-operate with these elements in a 
 certain way. The result is that sounds are 
 produced, notes higher and lower, united in a 
 combination which is called harmony, and 
 which creates a certain sensation in the mind. 
 Inquiring yet further, we discover that these 
 sounds are obtained by vibrations, whose 
 numbers and relations to each other are 
 strictly calculable, can be expressed, indeed, 
 in terms of logarithms. Music, then, is under 
 law. It is founded on abstruse calculations. 
 Man did not make these laws. He finxis them 
 there, ready-made and waiting for him. They 
 
62 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 have an unseen author who is evidently a cal- 
 culator, a mathematician. 
 
 But this is only the beginning. When we 
 study music we find that a mind full of ideas 
 has been there before us, laying out principles 
 which man's feebler intelligence spells out bit 
 by bit. What we next discover is that not 
 only has there been here a pre-existent intellect, 
 but an intense aesthetic feeling. In other 
 words, the revelation is not only of a Person 
 who is a mathematician, but of a Person who 
 has the soul of a musician. See what the facts 
 are. One of the first is that the soul finds in 
 musical sounds, arranged as we have seen by a 
 mathematical mind, a mysterious language 
 addressed to itself, which it intuitively under- 
 stands and to which it immediately responds. 
 What is that power of the soul which, when 
 some great organ thunders, takes the mighty 
 play of vibrations and turns it to range upon 
 range of sublime emotion ? What is there at 
 the back of a minor key that it makes the soul 
 feel as though it were losing paradise over 
 again, or behind the upward swell of a 
 
THE SOUL'S Music. 63 
 
 lujah Chorus that when we hear it we feel as 
 did Handel in composing it, as though we also 
 " did see heaven opened, and the holy angels 
 and the great God Himself"? How comes 
 this leap of inner feeling in recognition of 
 what, in terms of matter, is only a series of 
 aerial vibrations ? Why should men in common, 
 varying only in the degree of their culture, 
 realise within themselves laughter, weeping, 
 storm, calm, despair, rapture, heaven, hell as 
 the sounds smite the ear ? What mystery is 
 this that the mind greets music as an acquaint- 
 ance whom it has known of old, permitting it, 
 with the privilege of a familiar, to enter its 
 most secret recesses, to unlock all its doors, and 
 to move it as a spirit conversing with spirit ? 
 
 One does not wonder that brooding over such 
 problems men have listened to the Platonic 
 solution that the soul greets music as an old 
 acquaintance because it is an old acquaintance ; 
 that the human soul is old, ages old, coming 
 into this world from a higher sphere where it 
 knew these things, so that when it meets them 
 now it knows them again and can translate 
 
64 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 their speech. For ourselves we prefer a simpler 
 and a more Christian answer. It is that man, 
 as the Bible has it, is made in the image of 
 God. The human faculties are, in their way, 
 a replica of the Divine ones. Man is musical 
 because, in an infinite way, God is musical. 
 The emotion which is got out of music is an 
 emotion which He has put into it. The great 
 composers are not inventors or creators. They 
 are mediators, interpreters of the music in God. 
 What they do is to discover His laws of it, to 
 fill themselves with that side of His mind, and 
 then to come down and report what they have 
 seen and heard. It is thus that, as our capacity 
 expands, we get to know more and more of 
 what, on the aesthetic side, God thinks and 
 feels. 
 
 But there is more than this. We have before 
 observed how harmony, through its dependence 
 on mathematics, is related to the pure reason. 
 Perhaps after all the distinction we draw 
 between these spheres is a sharper one than 
 what really exists. God's music has probably a 
 far wider range than our conception of it, 
 
THE SOUL'S Music. 65 
 
 there may after all be something in what 
 lamblichus, the Neo-platonist, says about " the 
 sublime symphonies of the world, the universal 
 harmony and consonance of the spheres, and 
 the stars that are moved through them, and 
 which produce a fuller and more intense melody 
 than anything effected by mortal sounds." As 
 man goes on learning he will probably discover 
 how music is entwined into the very essences of 
 things. He may realise that beauty is actually 
 a form of harmony, and that Keats is speaking 
 the language of science as well as of poetry 
 when he sings : 
 
 Oh what a wild and harmonised tune 
 My spirit struck from aD the beautiful ! 
 
 Love, too, may prove to be such a co- 
 ordinated pulsation of kindred souls as trans- 
 lated into another form would be music. And 
 when we remember how musical harmony, in 
 its higher forms, is full of the spirit of 
 discipline and obedience ; how its perfection 
 depends absolutely on the proper relation of 
 weaker and dependent notes to the stronger and 
 
 dominant ones ; how one cannot do without the 
 
 5 
 
66 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 other, and that other in its proper place ; we 
 begin to realise the Divine idea of the world's 
 perfect music when all its conditions, its play 
 of interests, its animal passions, intellectual 
 conceptions, spiritual emotions shall work easily 
 into each other under recognised law, and unite 
 in harmony to one great end. Our age is not 
 the time for this concert. It is a time of 
 tuning the instruments and of learning the 
 notes. But the score is already written, and 
 the great Artist moves steadily, if slowly, to the 
 final result. 
 
 Closely related to this side of the theme is 
 the thought of that inner harmony which the 
 mind enjoys without the aid of instruments. 
 It is, with high-toned natures, a not uncommon 
 experience that when they have risen to a 
 spiritual height, by an act of self-sacrifice, by 
 an inner reaction from sorrow, by the brooding 
 over them of the Divine Spirit, it has seemed as 
 though unspeakable melodies swept over the 
 soul. They have bent like Saint Cecilia, 
 listening to more than mortal music. The 
 mind, too, has a rare faculty of treasuring up in 
 
THE SOUL'S Music. 67 
 
 its memory-rooms what it has heard from harp 
 and organ, and then of reproducing it sub- 
 tilised, doubly distilled down to its essence, 
 realising thus to itself a finer, more ethereal 
 note than has ever struck upon the tympanum. 
 Beethoven, when he became stone-deaf, was, 
 perhaps, not entirely to be pitied. His ear was 
 closed to the world's harsh discords, while his 
 mind continued the creator and the audience- 
 chamber of sublimest harmonies. 
 
 To fill a nation with music is assuredly one 
 of the highest means of developing its soul. 
 Its enjoyment is one of the highest forms of 
 consciousness, and the road it opens leads 
 straight to the spiritual and the eternal. Some 
 day we may reach Plato's ideal and make it ona 
 of the leading elements of education. We may 
 even come to Fourier's programme, and have 
 all the more irksome and monotonous tasks of 
 life made cheerful by noble strains. Music 
 should be made, too, a department of theology. 
 The more men work along this line and think 
 along it, the more apparent will it become that 
 the highest musical realisation requires that 
 
STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 the whole being be disciplined, attuned, and 
 brought into vibrant sympathy with the nature 
 of the Eternal Musician, who created Beauty 
 and Harmony that they might be the expression 
 and the adornment of Holiness. 
 
IX. 
 The Greater Egoism. 
 
 FEW subjects have caused more singular con- 
 fusions of thought than that of Egoism. The 
 term, as generally used, is in bad odour. Das 
 verdammte Ich, as Goethe puts it, is every- 
 where held up as something to be got rid of. 
 The egoist is, by the rough and ready judg- 
 ment of the man in the street, denounced 
 as a prig and a nuisance. In religion the 
 annihilation of self is declared to be the only 
 way to spiritual perfection. And in the field 
 of economics, an aggressive school of thinkers 
 regards the development of Collectivism and 
 the suppression of Individualism as the only 
 way of salvation for the State. 
 
 On the other hand, there are judgments, 
 representing at once popular feeling and the 
 verdicts of highest authority, which point 
 quite the other way. History, religion, art, 
 looked at in one way, appear to pronounce for 
 
70 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 Egoism as the latest and highest fruit of 
 time. It seems, for one thing, to be the cul- 
 mination of ethics. In primitive times man's 
 morality was not individual, but tribal. It 
 was the nation, the State, that was responsible, 
 not the individual. The idea of the separate 
 soul realising its own worth in the sight of 
 heaven, and working out a destiny which was 
 regarded as of infinite interest there, represents 
 a far later and far higher point in man's 
 spiritual evolution. "What shall it profit a 
 man if he gain the whole world and lose his 
 own soul," is a pronouncement of the most 
 absolute religious Egoism. 
 
 And the noblest art and literature affirm the 
 same principle. What we feel in a great picture 
 or a great book is the suffusion of the one and 
 the other by the soul the individuality, the 
 idiosyncrasy, we may even say, of their creator. 
 Tha/fc sense of life, of the universe, in painter or 
 poet, which separates him from everybody else 
 his Egoism, in fact is what makes him 
 interesting to us. Similarly in social develop- 
 ment. On the value of Egoism here the 
 
THE GREATER EGOISM. 71 
 
 following passage from M. Leon Bourgeois 5 
 " Solidarite " may be taken as representing the 
 best economic thought of the day: "In the 
 history of societies, as in that of species, the 
 struggle for individual development is the 
 first condition of all progress. The free 
 exercise of the personal faculties can alone give 
 the initial movement. Finally, the more the 
 liberty of each individual grows, the more the 
 social activity may, and ought, to grow in its 
 turn." 
 
 In presence of these seeming contradictions 
 it is time to seek, on this subject, for some 
 common principle which may reconcile them. 
 It is evident that there is a good and bad 
 Egoism, and what we want is to be able to 
 distinguish between the two. 
 
 To begin with, the highest teaching in all 
 spheres invites us to Egoism, in so far as it 
 means the attainment of a full self-realisation. 
 That we were not meant to be lost in the mass 
 is proved by the way we are made. It is not 
 for nothing that our separate self has been so 
 absolutely walled off from other existences, its 
 
72 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 secret kept impenetrable from the outside, 
 while within it mysteriously constructs its 
 universe from the thousand shadow images of 
 it which dance on the wall of its conscious- 
 ness. Individuality is writ large on the human 
 threshold. Of this wondrous inner world we 
 are put separately in possession, and told to 
 make of it what we can. The "self " is to 
 grow into as big, as powerful, as rich a self as 
 it is in it to become. 
 
 It is at this point that the lines between 
 the good and bad Egoism begin to diverge. 
 We reach the true through a great deal of 
 what is inferior. In our spiritual education it 
 is wonderful how tenderly, how at times almost 
 playfully, we are dealt with. A young man, for 
 instance, begins commonly with an Egoism 
 which consists in the belief in a ( e self " which 
 is little denned and scarcely understood. He 
 has not yet measured his own nature, or the 
 world with which by-and-by it will try a fall. 
 Older men, who have had their wrestle with 
 destiny and found their limits, smile at the 
 tyro's self-confidence; yet not unkindly, for 
 
THE GREATER EGOISM. 73 
 
 they know it is Nature's way of getting the 
 best out of him. Who, after all, will believe 
 in him if he does not believe a little in 
 himself ? 
 
 But sooner or later, if our neophyte be true 
 to all that is moving and speaking in him, the 
 problem of " self " will assume a new phase. 
 The word, he finds, spells something deeper 
 than he had dreamed of. The " I " he works 
 for and seeks to satisfy becomes more exacting. 
 His innermost self he discovers is not a stomach, 
 nor an animal passion. As he more narrowly 
 observes it he finds it expanding to the illimit- 
 able. His nature is, he sees, resting on Another 
 Nature, which forms its essential ground and 
 substance. It dawns on him that this deepest 
 " I " is a rill from an infinite ocean, a spark 
 from a sun. 
 
 It is here that, in religion, the reconciliation 
 comes of what seemed a contradiction. A man 
 becomes, in the Christian sense, spiritually alive 
 by finding, and at the same time losing, him- 
 self. A greater conception has absorbed the 
 less. What he seeks to please is an " I," which 
 
74 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 is, indeed, himself, but which also spells God. 
 He builds the structure of his individuality, but 
 according to a pattern shown him in the Mount. 
 Human nature draws towards its ideal height 
 in proportion as this process approaches com- 
 pleteness. "When we read of a Madame Guy on 
 with her earthly joys sapped by the persecutions 
 of a tyrannous husband and of an intolerable 
 mother-in-law, by the death of her children, 
 and by the loss of her early beauty through the 
 ravages of small-pox, and yet, from her anchor- 
 age in the Divine, triumphing over all, and 
 preserving the treasure of an unbreakable peace, 
 we get an inspiring insight into the possibilities 
 of human nature when it has found its base. 
 
 From this standpoint we can also see very 
 clearly how a bad egoism comes about and in 
 what it consists. By what, in some, seems a 
 kind of arrested development, and in others a 
 deliberate cutting of the line of communication, 
 a man's nature may be shut off from its natural 
 inflow from God and outflow towards its fellows, 
 and the self left as a purely animal and falsely 
 centred one. To such a nature everything 
 
THE GREATER EGOISM. 75 
 
 appears in wrong relation, and life's whole 
 business will, in consequence, be fatally 
 bungled. It exhibits at every point an egoism 
 which offends and disgusts. The desire to 
 excel becomes the wish to outshine one's neigh- 
 bour instead of the noble ambition to do one's 
 best in order to be most helpful to all. Power 
 will be used for a personal gratification which 
 reaches no one outside. 
 
 Gaunt famine never shall approach the throne, 
 Though Ireland starve great George weighs twenty 
 stone. 
 
 What egoists of this sort weigh in history is 
 another matter. We repeat, the only permis- 
 sible egoism is the one in which the ego to 
 which we appeal is at once our deepest self and 
 more than ourself . 
 
 That this conception is the true one is shown 
 by the way it works out. We have spoken of 
 art and literature. We demand individualism 
 here, but it must be that greater egoism which 
 is correctly related to the eternal truth and 
 beauty. Without this, what we get is not art 
 but eccentricity. " I am moved/' said Socrates, 
 
76 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 "by a certain divine and spiritual influence." 
 And so indeed is every man who has aught of 
 real value to offer to his fellows. The principle 
 works also with equal certainty in its applica- 
 tion to social development. Communal perfec- 
 tion can only be reached through individual 
 perfection, for we gain the one in the other. 
 The hero who sacrifices himself for his country 
 is impelled to this by the sense of what he owes 
 to his personal ideal of a citizen. When, at the 
 wreck of the Birlcenhead, the five hundred 
 officers and men on board, after saving the 
 women and children, themselves went down, 
 drawn up in line on deck, as calmly as if on 
 parade, the sublime act was the triumph of the 
 individual. Had the standard been lower of 
 what the British soldier felt that he owed to 
 himself it would have been impossible. 
 
 And this greater egoism will survive death. 
 It is an inextinguishable faith of the soul, when 
 self-realised and ennobled by contact with its 
 Source, that it will preserve its separate being 
 beyond the tomb. What has been developed 
 in it by its long struggle and travail is, it 
 
THE GREATER EGOISM. 77 
 
 feels, something worth keeping, and it will be 
 kept. 
 
 Dust to dust : but the pure spirit shall flow 
 Back to the burning fountain whence it came, 
 
 A portion of the Eternal, which must glow 
 Through time and change, unquenchably the sama 
 
Life's Inevitableness. 
 
 THERE is a marvellous life apologue in that 
 sentence recorded as having, on a memorable 
 occasion, been addressed to an apostle : " When 
 thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself and 
 walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when 
 thou shalt be old . . . another shall gird 
 thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest 
 not." It is always so. At the beginning we 
 walk by ourselves ; later, we have a sense of 
 being carried. In youth we are conscious of 
 our inward vitality, of the power of our self- 
 determination. We refuse to accept things as 
 we find them. We propose to reform the 
 world, to cut our mark deep in it. As the 
 years creep on, what we become aware of is not 
 so much our powers as our limitations. The 
 world is big, and we are little. Life reveals 
 itself as the valley of Rasselas, with freedom of 
 roaming up to a certain point, but where the 
 
LIFE'S INEVITABLENESS. 79 
 
 traveller comes always in the end upon moun- 
 tain barriers which he may not cross. With a 
 growing intensity we realise that 
 
 To tunes we did not call, onr being must keep chime. 
 
 Our later thought becomes oppressed with the 
 sense of life's inevitableness. What is true of 
 the individual here seems true of races. The 
 older civilisations become smitten with Fatal- 
 ism. It is the younger ones who exult in the 
 sense of liberty. Asia groans under existence 
 as though it were a burden. Europe, youthful 
 in comparison, throbs with energy and the 
 sense of what it can do. 
 
 Whether young or old, the study of our 
 limits is, however, well worth while. As we 
 pursue it our pride, if we have any, should get 
 some knock-down blows. In the order of our 
 coming Nature has treated us cavalierly, as 
 though we were of small account. Our spoon- 
 ful of existence has been served out to us, so 
 much and no more, and no questions asked as 
 to how we liked it. Such points as to whether 
 we should wake in the nineteenth century or in 
 
80 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 the Old Stone period, in Mars or this planet; 
 whether we should be man or woman, prince, 
 poet, or wood -cutter, and a thousand other 
 things deemed by us important, were deter- 
 mined without the smallest reference to the 
 opinions of the speck of vitality inside us which 
 we caU "I." 
 
 Think of the fatalism stamped on a man's 
 features, wrought into the fibre of his brain ! 
 What are the spiritual chances of a bull neck, 
 holding a narrow forehead, a sullen eye, and 
 sensual mouth, as compared with those 
 of a head every lina of which suggests 
 the artist or the saint? Made as they were 
 could a Beethoven help being a musician, or a 
 Beecher an orator? And could this wretch 
 with the criminally-built skull, as Dean Swift 
 said, "not born but damned into the world," 
 take any other road but the one that leads to 
 prison or the scaffold? Men worry at these 
 questions till their brains reel and they deny 
 morality and religion. They cry with the 
 Persian poet : 
 
 Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin 
 
LIFE'S INEVITABLENESS. 81 
 
 Beset the road I was to wander in, 
 
 Thou wilt not with predestined evil round 
 
 Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin. 
 
 There is another side to all this, to which we 
 shall return. 
 
 But more may yet be said first on this sense 
 of life's inevitable ness. Nowhere is it, to a 
 careful eye, more discernible than where, per- 
 haps, we should least expect to find it in the 
 inner workings of our own mind. When, dazed 
 and dwarfed by the immensity of the outer uni- 
 verse, we retreat to the refuge of our inner self, 
 we find even here a sharp rebuff to our import- 
 ance. We discover that we are not masters 
 even in our own house. The inward economy 
 of thinking and feeling which we call ourselves 
 is, we find, to a large extent strange to us and 
 independent of us. What power have we over 
 our own sensations ? We cannot create sensa- 
 tion. We can only experience it. That a given 
 set of circumstances should produce a given 
 result of pleasure or pain is an arrangement 
 entirely outside our own will. We accept it, 
 we perhaps wonder at it. What we cannot do 
 
 6 
 
82 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 is either to explain it or alter it. It gives 
 one an eerie, haunted feeling to realise that 
 within us, yet not of us, there is this unseen 
 agent who arranges for us all the phases of our 
 consciousness, leaving the taste of them simply 
 for our part in the business. This strange 
 registering apparatus, which we did not create 
 and do not regulate, is ready for every conceiv- 
 able event that may happen to us. If it were 
 announced to us that to-morrow we were to be 
 married or to be hanged, to be made a million- 
 aire or a pauper, a certain preordained sensation 
 would be the result. But what precisely it 
 would be, either in its flavour, its intensity, or 
 its duration, is beyond both our will and our 
 power of prediction. We are, indeed, the spec- 
 tator of the greater part of our inner life rather 
 than its agent or producer. 
 
 But where life's inevitableness strikes on us 
 with most effect is perhaps in its relation to 
 time. There is something fantastic in the 
 play of our feelings about a coming event as 
 compared with the onward movement of our 
 life towards it, The event inay be a consum- 
 
LIFE'S INEVITABLENESS. 83 
 
 mation we desire intensely, or a catastrophe we 
 dread unspeakably. We would give everything 
 to hasten or retard it. We can do neither the 
 one nor the other. The clock ticks. The days 
 come and the nights. We are swept on to the 
 great experience to realise it, in nine cases out 
 of ten, as neither so good as we had hoped nor 
 so bad as we had feared and wake to find it a 
 thing behind us, done with, dimming rapidly to 
 our sight as the current bears us forward. We 
 grasp some sweet delight, and say with Faust : 
 
 Verweile doch, du bist so schon. 
 
 But to linger is precisely what it will not do. 
 The millionaire may build palaces and command 
 the markets. Where he is powerless is to hold 
 a joy in his hand long enough to stamp it with 
 the seal of possession. His acres are solid 
 ground, but he who owns them is a shadow that 
 fleeth. 
 
 The One remains, the many change and pass, 
 Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows flee ; 
 
 Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
 Stains the white radiance of eternity, 
 
 Until death tramples it to fragments. Die 
 
 If thou would'st be with that which thou dost seel:. 
 
84 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 But this is, after all, a one-sided picture, and 
 to leave it so would be to tell one of those half 
 truths which are a whole falsehood. For the 
 whole truth is not fatalism. Life would be 
 robbed both of its interest and of its import- 
 ance if it were. What gives to it its infinite 
 zest is the delicate balance of humanity between 
 limitation and freedom. And what is of im- 
 mense significance here is that these two op- 
 posites are not fixed quantities. Man's history 
 discloses an ever-growing freedom with an ever- 
 lessening limitation. His story is that of the 
 evolution of free spirit, with a corresponding 
 increase of mastery over the outward. Palaeo- 
 lithic man had little enough freedom. For 
 ages he bent before powers he did not under- 
 stand. His will was not good enough to build 
 a canoe. That of his descendants can chain 
 the lightning and cut through mountains. The 
 Easselas valley has been steadily widening. 
 This constant increment of man's spiritual 
 faculty, of his self-determining power, as dis- 
 closed by history, is in itself the refutation of 
 the fatalist theory. With the waxing of his 
 
LIFE'S INEVITABLENESS. 85 
 
 personality man is less and less bound by the 
 chain of circumstance and more enabled to use 
 it instead as the instrument of his will. 
 
 But there is more. We spoke awhile ago 
 of the fatalism of feature and of brain fibre. 
 Closer investigation reveals that this has 
 its limits, and that it is controlled by some- 
 thing mightier. It is not true that a man's 
 features and his cerebral fibre determine 
 the quality of his soul. It would be nearer the 
 mark to say that the soul secretes the brain and 
 forms the features. There is a power dormant 
 behind the lowest brain which, once awakened, 
 will light up the intelligence and refine the 
 face. Nothing is more striking than the trans- 
 formations of this kind wrought on gutter 
 children when brought under higher influences. 
 The very physical texture is kneaded by an 
 inner force, and its shape and contents 
 changed. This power is strong enough to 
 break the iron chain of heredity. It will 
 make a champion of temperance out of a 
 drunkard's child. Until we hare gauged the 
 possibilities of spiritual influence, and of the 
 
86 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 soul's response to it, it is idle to talk of char- 
 acter as determined finally by the shape of the 
 skull. We had much better put the horse 
 before the cart, and ask what shapes the skull. 
 The discussion of our subject from these two 
 sides of will and circumstance shows, then, that 
 the one is gaining on the other, while both 
 are subject to a power greater than either. 
 Human life is limited at every point, but the 
 limitations are constantly falling back, while 
 freedom wins ever- widening areas. Yet it 
 remains that at his best and highest man is a 
 child, learning elementary lessons of the infinite 
 whole, led along a path marked out for him by 
 another mind than his own. For such a being, 
 in such a position, the only sane attitude is that 
 of awe, reverence, and submission. With this 
 may well be mingled a deep and solid joy that 
 he is permitted to take part, however humble, 
 in the elaboration of a scheme so immense, to 
 be a co-worker towards ends, so far beyond his 
 utmost powers to conceive. 
 
 Our wills are ours, we know not why, 
 Our wills are ours, to make them Thine. 
 
XI. 
 Our Unpublished Self. 
 
 ONE of the most difficult and oft-debated topics 
 in modern politics is the representation of 
 minorities. The generally accepted doctrine is 
 that while the majority is to rule, the minority 
 should have fullest liberty to make its voice 
 heard and its influence felt. Ingenious schemes 
 have been devised to secure the rights of the 
 minority at the ballot-box, and a modern Eoyal 
 Commission would hardly be complete without 
 its " minority report." There is, however, an 
 existing and deeply interesting system of 
 government in which the minority, while active 
 and powerful, may be said to be unrepresented. 
 It is that which is found in "the viewless realm" 
 of the soul. Plato's idea of human nature, 
 as representing in its varieties the differing 
 forms of a republic, has ever been a popular 
 one, and comes, perhaps, as near the truth as 
 can be expected from analogies of this kind. 
 
STUDIES OF THE &OUL. 
 
 Our inward life certainly resembles a 
 democracy in this that its vote is scarcely ever 
 a unanimous one. The decisions come to on 
 the myriad questions brought before it are ihe 
 result of a conflict of passions and of interests, 
 of moral and intellectual considerations, in 
 which always some part of our complex 
 consciousness has got the worst of it and has 
 gone under. The peculiarity of the position is 
 that the minority here, while often so formid- 
 able as to be within an ace of determining the 
 situation, is not allowed to issue any report. 
 The side which wins announces itself at once 
 in decision, speech, or act, and is taken by the 
 outside world as representing the man. The 
 fact is that only a portion of him has been here 
 published, and that often by no means the best 
 or most interesting portion. 
 
 It is true that in a healthy nature the best in 
 the long run does generally come to the top. 
 The life of what we call a good man, one who 
 in the main has been dominated and directed 
 by his noblest part, may be compared, as to its 
 inner and its outer features, with the crust of 
 
OUR UNPUBLISHED SELF. 
 
 the earth as related to its interior. The speech, 
 action, and general career which we know and 
 admire are the flowers, fruits, and fair scenery 
 of a surface beneath which beyond our ken 
 volcanic fires have raged. We know the 
 surface. The man himself knows the interior, 
 and is modest accordingly. 
 
 There is, however, another direction, less 
 immediately connected with a man's moral 
 evolution, where this rule does not so generally 
 obtain. In the sphere of opinion, and especially 
 of religious opinion, it would be one of the 
 most interesting things imaginable if we could 
 get at the " minority vote " as delivered in the 
 interior self of recognised leaders and 
 champions of the different sides. When, for 
 instance, in periods of transition, some doughty 
 fighter for the orthodoxy of the time 
 vehemently maintains its assailed positions, and 
 solemnly denounces the adversary, the multi- 
 tude who are carried away by his words would 
 be very differently affected if a certain part of 
 the orator could make itself heard by them as 
 well as it is by himself. Often has it been 
 
90 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 and life presents few more pitiful tragedies 
 that the man's reason, his verifying faculty, 
 when at its clearest, has pronounced inwardly 
 for the enemy. What finds its way to his lips 
 is the voice of his earlier thought-habits, of his 
 prejudices, his interests, and of his fears. 
 
 That was the plight of multitudes of 
 religious teachers at the time of the Reforma- 
 tion. The bold words of Mutiaiius Rufus went 
 home to many an uneasy conscience when 
 he told his fellow clerics of the sixteenth 
 century that " by faith we mean not the 
 conformity of what we say with fact, but an 
 opinion about Divine things founded on 
 credulity, and persuasion which seeks after 
 profit." A hard time indeed was it for honest 
 men who had not only to find their own way, 
 but who were looked to to lead others, and who 
 realised that 
 
 'Tis an awkward thing to play with souls, 
 And matter enough to save one's own. 
 
 The Protestant was better off than the Catholic, 
 as having at least opened a way out of conven- 
 tion towards the living fact. But there was a 
 
OUB UNPUBLISHED SELF. 01 
 
 minority vote inside him also which harassed 
 him terribly. We read now and are heartened 
 by the brave words of a Luthf3r and a 
 Melancthon. It is, perhaps, as well that we 
 have not had also to read all their thoughts. 
 One has a curious sensation in remembering 
 that as late as 1535, when the Eeformation 
 seemed immovably established, the German 
 Eeformers, bewildered and disheartened, were 
 entertaining overtures for a reconciliation with 
 Rome, the non-success of which appeared, so 
 far as one can see, to have resulted from 
 political rather than from religious causes. 
 
 Orthodoxy, in those days, tried to see its way 
 by the light of the fires in which it burned its 
 adversaries. But the burnings were, on its 
 side, often an affair not so much of belief as of 
 make-believe. 
 
 Who lights the fagot? 
 
 Not the full faith, but the lurking doubt. 
 
 The nineteenth century does not light fagots 
 by way of settling its religious difficulties. But 
 in the present crisis of faith, in which questions 
 even more fundamental than those which 
 
92 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 agitated the time of Luther are in men's minds, 
 the " lurking doubt " still plays its curious and 
 sinister part in the procedures of orthodoxy. 
 Furious denunciations of opponents come from 
 lips behind which lies a mind three-parts 
 convinced of the opponent's position. The 
 loud discharge of artillery is often not so much 
 a declaration of strength as the firing in despair 
 of the last round of ammunition before hoisting 
 the flag of surrender. 
 
 The study of man's (f unspoken half " would, 
 however, if only it could be accurately pursued, 
 bring singular results in other directions than 
 this. Closely allied to what has just been said, 
 but with its shade of difference, is, for instance, 
 the question of the " published selves " of the 
 moral preachers and teachers who have been 
 with mankind from the beginning as compared 
 with their unpublished everyday working senti- 
 ments. Carlyle has described Seneca as " the 
 father of all such as wear shovel hats." On 
 the one hand proclaiming the maxims of a high 
 philosophy of virtue and self-abnegation, and, 
 on the other, endeavouring to stand well with 
 
OUR UNPUBLISHED SELF. S3 
 
 Nero, and to get from him the goodliest 
 possible share of houses, lands, and suchlike 
 conveniences, the Roman philosopher seemed to 
 his later brother sage of Chelsea a beautiful 
 example of the well-placed professional ex- 
 horter whose theme is the salvation of the 
 soul, but whose inward self is bent upon 
 gaining the whole world. Lucian, a century 
 later, has drawn a vivid picture of the swarm of 
 adventurers who overspread the Empire, and 
 who gained large sums by orations in praise of 
 virtue which they spent in the practice of secret 
 debauchery. The picture is dolefully similar to 
 that presented by our own monkish orders at 
 the suppression of the monasteries. These men 
 stood outwardly for chastity, poverty, and self- 
 abnegation. Two-thirds of their whole number 
 were proved by irrefragable evidence to be 
 living habitually in the practice of unnarneable 
 vice. Our modern clerical and other exponents 
 of ideal moralities have travelled, happily, a 
 long way from such conditions, but the gap 
 between the "published self" of the average 
 mortal put in trust with transcendental life- 
 
9i STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 schemes and his inward work-a-day sentiments 
 will continue, we fear, still to furnish material 
 for the satirist and the cynic. 
 
 It is not always, however, that the un- 
 published is the worst of us. France was 
 defined by Madame de Stael as " a country 
 where the desire to produce an effect by one's 
 sentiments is stronger than the sentiments 
 themselves.' 5 In these islands, at least, the 
 reverse of this is quite as often the truth. The 
 misery of innumerable lives is that they will 
 not or cannot let the best in them come to 
 view. The pathetic lament of Carlyle over his 
 dead wife : " Ah ! if only I had five minutes 
 with her, if only to assure her that I loved her 
 through all that ! " represents a tragedy which 
 is continually being repeated. The way to 
 avoid it is to let our love for those around us, 
 to whom the expression of it will be as summer 
 sunshine, cease to be part of " our unpublished 
 self." 
 
XII. 
 Impedimenta. 
 
 THE Bomans, from whom we get the word 
 impedimenta, used it mainly of the baggage 
 train of an army. A campaign cannot be 
 waged without a commissariat. But the long 
 file of waggons, bearing victuals, tents and a 
 thousand odds and ends, which follows the 
 troops, is a hindrance as well as a help. It 
 enormously complicates the military position, 
 and its successful management is a sure test 
 of generalship. There are times when the 
 baggage has to be reduced to a minimum, and 
 pinches when it is dispensed with altogether. 
 Frederick the Great won Eossbach by his 
 miraculous marching, on the lightest possible 
 equipment. The useless luxury with which he 
 had encumbered his army helped, on the other 
 hand, to lose Vittoria to Joseph Buonaparte, as 
 it has lost many another battle and many 
 another general, 
 
96 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 What is true of armies and campaigns is 
 most suggestively true of human affairs. Life 
 is largely a question of impedimenta. The 
 circumstances, environments, qualities, defects 
 with which we are all daily in contact, form 
 material which is at once help and hindrance. 
 Wisdom consists to a large extent in knowing 
 how to use the baggage-waggons rumbling in 
 our rear, that hamper and yet feed us. 
 
 As we look back on the long road humanity 
 has travelled, what, perhaps, strikes us first is 
 the immense weight of encumbrances it has 
 carried. We wonder that, dragging such a load, 
 it has made any progress at all. If we consider 
 man as a spiritual being, and his end the attain- 
 ment of moral perfection, the long list of his 
 animal instincts, his rapacities, his inbred 
 savagery, seem only a baffling and hopeless 
 hindrance. But it is not so. What we now 
 call the lower qualities were, in man's pre- 
 moral stage, the motor power which carried 
 him along. He wanted them in his fight with 
 nature and with wild beasts would in fact 
 hardly have survived without them. And 
 
IMPEDIMENTA. 97 
 
 history shows how steadily he drops them when 
 he reaches the stage where they hamper only 
 and do not help. It has in its day been a 
 fashionable materialistic argument that 
 human morality is essentially stationary. 
 Nothing could be more ridiculously false. 
 The Eome of the Caesars had travelled a long 
 long way beyond the earliest primitive ideas of 
 justice and social duty, but what is the moral 
 distance between ourselves and that Eome 
 between us and a civilisation which could, as in 
 the Servile war, cause crosses to be erected 
 from the imperial city to Capua and crucify ten 
 thousand slaves together upon them? One 
 need not, indeed, to measure the moral move- 
 ment, take nearly so long a period as this. It 
 is only a century and a-half since Walpole's 
 time. But what chance would a man have to- 
 day of becoming Prime Minister, far less of 
 enjoying twenty years of uninterrupted power, 
 if, possessed though he might be of all the 
 Georgian Premier's splendid abilities and of 
 all his solid strength, he dared to practise 
 his public corruption and his private de 
 
 7 
 
98 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 baucheries? When we study what man has 
 come out of, the load he has carried, and 
 the milestones he has already passed, the 
 boundless moral optimism of the New Testa- 
 ment its Gospel of ultimate perfection 
 becomes strictly scientific. 
 
 Narrowing our point of view, we find a 
 striking illustration of the way in which 
 hindrances become helps in man's family life. 
 The best chapters in Professor Drummond's 
 "Ascent of Man" are those in which he 
 describes the evolution of the father and the 
 evolution of the mother. The human child, 
 helpless and dependent for a longer period than 
 any other earthly creature, entailed a heavy 
 burden of care and watchfulness on primitive 
 man and woman. It was that burden, as Dr. 
 Drummond so admirably shows, which proved 
 the moral making of them. Out of it came 
 altruism, devotion, sacrifice, father and mother, 
 love, the foundations, in fact of the higher 
 human life. The same story is, in another way, 
 reproduced in the domestic histories of to-day. 
 When a man marries he unquestionably in- 
 
IMPEDIMENTA. 99 
 
 creases his burdens. Harassed paterfamilias, 
 in pessimistic mood, is apt to ask himself 
 why he exchanged the simplicity and ease of 
 bachelorhood for this complex of cares and 
 of expenditures. He could have raced for 
 wealth or scholarship or distinction with so 
 much better chances without this handicap ! 
 May be. Some men and women are better 
 without marrying, just as some expeditions 
 are better without baggage. But the main 
 body will not make progress that way. The 
 majority of us grow to what there is in us of 
 genuine value to the world largely through the 
 difficulties at which we kick. A man will put 
 his back into the uplift when it is for wife and 
 bairns. To know them happy through his 
 exertions will be a healthier reward than 
 wealth or fame. His family life is Nature's 
 way of coaxing the best out of him. 
 
 Still further narrowing the view, we may see 
 every day, in the individual lives around us, 
 how a man's impedimenta help while hindering. 
 The seeming disadvantages are part of the 
 machinery of progress. It is notorious how 
 
100 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 often plain - featured women marry, while 
 better favoured ones are left in the lurch. Is 
 the secret that beauty is apt to be too self- 
 satisfied, while plainness seeks to offer an 
 equivalent for outward lack in inner quality? 
 It was said of Madame de Stael, who was the 
 reverse of a beauty, that she could bring any 
 man to her feet in a quarter of an hour by the 
 charm of her manner and of her converse. If 
 all women had from the beginning been beauties 
 man would probably have fared much worse 
 than he has. 
 
 As suggestive, too, as it is touching, is it to 
 see how the impedimenta of disease and pain 
 have played their part in the forward movement. 
 It does not, we know, adequately explain their 
 presence in the world to say they have helped 
 to humanise people, but that is the fact, never- 
 theless. The poor deformed child has made the 
 father's heart bigger. The loss of her baby 
 has dowered the stricken woman with a mother- 
 hood felt in a thousand homes. It may be that 
 in the end humanity, thanks to science and a 
 higher knowledge of the laws of life, will out- 
 
IMPEDIMENTA. 101 
 
 grow its diseases. We look for the state when 
 " there shall be no more pain." But man would 
 never have come to his full moral stature with- 
 out it. 
 
 In man's purely intellectual progress, too, it 
 is interesting to observe the part played by his 
 impedimenta. We enter the world of thought 
 dragging behind us a long train of inherited 
 preconceptions. They are very valuable in their 
 way, and to cut loose from them would be for 
 most of us a very perilous operation. Mr. 
 Balfour, in his " Foundations of Belief," has, 
 perhaps, exaggerated the role of authority in 
 mental affairs, but his striking picture has un- 
 doubted truth in it. The past has stained 
 every window through which light streams into 
 the mind, and we cannot, if we would, see 
 things apart from its colouring. A Descartes, 
 in his quest for truth, imagines he has thought 
 himself away from every possible prejudice and 
 prepossession, and that his Cogito ergo sum 
 represents an absolutely primal conception. 
 We know how much he was mistaken. We 
 cannot drop the past if we would, and no 
 
102 STUDIES 0* THE SouL. 
 
 healthy rnind will try. What we can do is to 
 clarify our view of it and of our relation to it. 
 In that way we shall rid our baggage-waggons 
 of some loads of shells and husks, carrying 
 their contents in smaller compass and in subli- 
 mated form. 
 
 The men who show us how to do this are the 
 prophets of their age. They generally go them- 
 selves in light marching order. They have an 
 easily solvable relation to the world's respecta- 
 bilities, conventions and worldly considerations. 
 When Chrysostom replied to the threat of the 
 Emperor, that he could not take from him his 
 goods because his treasure was in heaven, nor 
 exile him because his fatherland was above, he 
 showed the relation of a genuine prophet to his 
 impedimenta. Modern fashionable ecclesiastic- 
 ism has lost this powerful gift of detachment. 
 An Anglican Bishop carries too much baggage 
 for such campaigns. A seat in the Lords, a 
 palace and great revenues, a luxurious table, 
 and the smiles of duchesses, have proved for 
 centuries entirely effective against any episcopal 
 inclination for plunging. Since Attcrbury, no 
 
IMPEDIMENTA. 108 
 
 occupant of an English see has really risked his 
 place for principle. 
 
 Let us sum up. A man's baggage train 
 forms an indispensable part of his equipment 
 for this world, and on his management of it 
 depends much of his inner and outer success. 
 It is the part of wisdom to learn what amongst 
 this luggage is only a hindrance, and to dis- 
 pense with it. The leaders, in winning their 
 battles for humanity, have often, in heroic 
 faith, to cut themselves off from their base, and 
 dash on without visible supplies. And we all, 
 in that great race, disclosed to us in the Gospel, 
 for life's highest prize, must needs " lay aside 
 every weight," and that greatest and heaviest 
 of impediments " the sin that doth so easily 
 beset us," 
 
xm. 
 
 Of Well -Dressed Souls. 
 
 SINCE the day when. Adam and Eve discovered 
 their lamentable lack of clothing, the subject 
 of dress has been of perennial interest to the 
 human race. It has, as every student knows, 
 bulked enormously in literature. Carlyle in his 
 " Sartor Kesartus," while illuminating, has by 
 no means exhausted the topic. He was not 
 the first, as he will certainly not be the last, 
 Clothes Philosopher. His successors of the 
 present day even are legion. Woman is inquir- 
 ing whether man has any prescriptive right to 
 a monopoly of the bifurcated garment, while 
 the accomplished editor of Aglaia lectures 
 humanity in general on the lack of artistic 
 first principles displayed in the covering and 
 adornment of both sexes. What we have here 
 to say, however, concerns an aspect of the great 
 dress question somewhat outside the profes- 
 sional purview of the Parisian modiste or the 
 
OF WELL-DRESSED SOULS. 105 
 
 Bond Street tailor. The article of attire we 
 propose to discuss was worn by humanity before 
 it sewed fig-leaves together. Our bodies, 
 strictly speaking, are an underclothing. They 
 are the dress of the soul. To say this is, we 
 know, to repeat what has been a commonplace 
 from Socrates downwards, to go no farther 
 back; but the theme it suggests is not even 
 yet entirely exhausted of applications. It will, 
 indeed, we predict, draw more and more atten- 
 tion to itself, for it is crammed with science, 
 with ethic, and with religion. 
 
 When Kingsley says that the soul secretes 
 the body as a crustacean secretes its shell, 
 he is setting in the framework of a scientific 
 terminology the ancient mysticism which de- 
 clared the soul's priority over the body in 
 time, as well as its supremacy in quality 
 and function. Nowhere, however, has the 
 idea been better or more tersely expressed 
 than in our own Spenser where he says : 
 
 Of soul the bodie forme doth take 
 
 For soul is forme and doth the body make. 
 
 It is obvious, however, that this view, fascinat- 
 
106 STUDIES OF THE SouL. 
 
 ing to the poet and the spiritual thinker, of the 
 soul building the body, must be taken with 
 some large reservations. Life is a little too 
 complex to permit of being summed up in 
 epigrammatic definitions. To ignore the influ- 
 ence of external conditions, such as food, 
 climate, and outside circumstances generally, 
 not only upon bodily structure, but upon 
 feature and expression, would be to go to an 
 extreme as great in one direction as that of 
 Buckle in the opposite, when he declares it 
 would be enough for him to know the climatic 
 and food conditions of a people to predict its 
 character and history. What it is safe, and at 
 the same time sufficient, for our purpose to 
 allege here is, that the soul or interior spiritual 
 life of a man, working under the limitations of 
 his outer environment, is incessantly weaving 
 itself into the structure of his body, suffusing 
 it with its own subtle essence, until the glance 
 of the eye, the lines of the mouth, the set and 
 expression of the features, nay, the very 
 carriage and gait reveal to the experienced eye 
 the character of the inhabitant within. The 
 
OF WELL-DRESSED SOTTLS. 107 
 
 saintly soul clothes itself here in its robes of 
 white ; sensuous men, like Ulysses 5 companions 
 under the power of the sorceress, take on the 
 swinish likeness ; while Cain, in everj^ age and 
 nation, carries his brand. 
 
 It is this fact which, for one thing, makes 
 the study of faces and of portraits so fascinat- 
 ing. We feel that here we are looking at souls. 
 To Schiller's saying, Verwandte sind sich alle 
 starken Seelen, we may add that not only are all 
 great souls related, but that their physical 
 features reveal the family likeness. Who that 
 has looked at a portrait of St. Teresa, for 
 instance, could find any difficulty in fitting 
 those features to the "Treatise on Prayer"; 
 or in believing her when, speaking of herself as 
 persecuted, she says, "My soul is then so 
 mistress of itself that it seems that it is in its 
 kingdom, and has everything under its feet " ? 
 
 In this view a man's own face should be to 
 himself a book of judgment, in which the laws 
 of the universe are legibly writing down his 
 sentence. There is surely no work on the evi- 
 dences of religion more potent or more con- 
 
108 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 vincing than the book of the human counten- 
 ance. He that runs may read here of a moral 
 Lawgiver behind the scenes who says that the 
 way of the spirit is the way of life, while the 
 way of the flesh is the way of rottenness and 
 death. Man begins his inward career, to use a 
 sentence of Amiel, c ' as a tamer of wild beasts, 
 and these wild beasts are his passions. To cut 
 their claws, to muzzle them, to tame them, to 
 make of them domestic animals and servants, 
 foaming at times but submissive, that is per- 
 sonal education." A glance at his mirror in 
 mid or later life should reveal to a man whether 
 all this has been done or is doing, or whether, 
 on the contrary, the menagerie has overpowered 
 the keeper. 
 
 The looking-glass, the use of which has been 
 mainly under the ban of moralists as minister- 
 ing to vanity and self -consciousness, is indeed 
 in a way the sternest of monitors. When a 
 man finds reflected in it a wavering, uncertain 
 eye, and a face development, the accentuation 
 of which is all in the lower features, he will be 
 indeed blind and deaf if he cannot recognise 
 
OP WELL-DRESSED SOULS. 109 
 
 there his perishing soul's signal of distress. It 
 is time for him then to go on his knees, to 
 make vows, to choose anew his companions and 
 his haunts, to forswear his appetites, to 
 
 Clasp his teeth, 
 
 And not undo 'em 
 
 To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em. 
 
 There is a curious modern travesty of our 
 doctrine, eminently characteristic of the time, 
 which, in a discussion of this sort, ought not to pass 
 quite without notice. The fact that the thoughts 
 and emotions which constitute our inner life 
 influence in a most important way the features 
 and general appearance, is in this system fully 
 admitted. But the emphasis of its application 
 is laid not upon the culture of the soul, but 
 upon that of the body. With the people who 
 hold it the business of life is to look handsome, 
 blooming, and young for the longest possible 
 period. To this ideal anything in the way of 
 inward stress and strain, of mental wear and 
 tear, of soul wrestlings such as precede the 
 hero's deed or the prophet's utterance, would 
 be regarded as fatally inimical, and be accord- 
 
110 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 ingly eschewed. The art of life with such is to 
 avoid all violent emotions and the occasions of 
 them. Let the people who want it go after 
 
 The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too 
 
 hard, 
 The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the 
 
 sky, 
 
 and get scarred and dinted all over in the 
 struggle. The dilettanti followers of the newer 
 doctrine will be quite contented if, without any 
 experience of this sort, by a sedulous guarding 
 of themselves from, exhausting drains upon 
 their sympathy, or shocks to their equanimity, 
 they can achieve the success of being taken for 
 thirty when they have reached fifty. Verily 
 these have their reward. Their soul gets a 
 dress exactly suitable to its quality and 
 capacity. It is pretty and, one may see, 
 ornamental. When, however, one contrasts 
 its meaningless simper with the majesty 
 suggestive of infinite possibilities, which looks 
 from the eyes and suffuses the features of the 
 greater natures to whom the body has at best 
 been an instrument, and ofttimes been felt as a 
 
OF WELL-DKESSED SOULS. Ill 
 
 prison, one realises that the spiritual system of 
 the universe, while " it suffers fools gladly/' 
 permitting them even to thrive in their own 
 way, uses them nevertheless as pitifullest of 
 illustrations of its own eternal law. 
 
 There is one aspect of this theme which 
 we can here only hint at, but which has 
 produced some profound speculations among 
 both Eastern and Western thinkers. We mean 
 the relation of it to a future life. Ulrici's 
 doctrine that we are, during our earthly pro- 
 bation, by the action of our will, our moral 
 decisions, and the processes which go to the 
 making of character, building up within us a 
 spiritual body, whose presence reveals itself in 
 imperfect ways while we are yet in the flesh, 
 but which will be the fully-developed organ of 
 the soul after death, runs on lines very similar 
 to Oriental teachings on this subject, which 
 have been reproduced in modern Theosophy. 
 There is something to be said for it, and it 
 may be that revelations are yet in store for 
 humanity along this line of things as the result 
 of future investigations. 
 
112 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 Apart from speculation, however, and resting 
 on the basis of what we know, there is evidence 
 enough surely, even in this narrow by - path of 
 investigation, to satisfy discerning souls as to 
 what is life's true end. Man is essentially a 
 spirit. When that is realised, and the soul 
 within him is allowed to seek its proper goal, 
 it will develop into glorious beauty and propor- 
 tion, and, as it grows, weave for itself a 
 garment worthy its God-like origin and nature. 
 The true soul will be a well-dressed soul. The 
 body will reveal the mind, and be impregnated 
 with its Divine essence. 
 
 What is left for us save in the growth 
 Of soul to rise up far past both, 
 From the gift looking to the Giver 
 And from the cistern to the river, 
 And from the finite to infinity, 
 And from man's dust to God's Divinity I 
 
XIV. 
 The Soul's Colloquies. 
 
 A MAN'S chief occupation in this world might 
 be said to be that of conversing with himself. 
 During fifty or sixty years, if he has lived so 
 long, he has been carrying on this interminable 
 colloquy, to which he returns immediately after 
 every interruption from outside. His talk with 
 himself is entirely different in character from 
 any he has with his most intimate friend. If it 
 could be given to the world it would reveal him 
 in some new and unexpected phases. Those 
 who know him most would probably be startled 
 to find from it how much better and how much 
 worse he is than they thought him. 
 
 The talk, be it remembered, is not a mere 
 soliloquy, but a veritable conversation, in which 
 quite a number of different voices take part. 
 For the speakers under a man's waistcoat are 
 more numerous even than appear in that 
 notable description in the " Autocrat" of the 
 
114 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 multiple individuals that make up a man. By 
 turns we have, in this interior conclave, the 
 upper man haranguing the lower, the animal 
 man coaxing the spiritual, the calculating 
 faculty throwing cold water on the sensibilities. 
 At another time the talk is reminiscent; we 
 hear fifty chatting pleasantly with its former 
 self of twenty, comparing notes on the experi- 
 ences of thirty years ago. Even in sleep the 
 circle is not broken. In our dreams the " sub- 
 jective soul," if we may accept Mr. Hudson's 
 ingenious theory, has its innings, and gives to 
 us its own peculiar version of the universe. 
 Deepest element of all in this marvellous con- 
 verse is the ground tone, speaking through the 
 conscience and through the reason, at times 
 compelling with its sweetness, at times startling 
 with its thunders, of that " Over-soul " in which 
 all individual souls abide, and to which, as 
 Fichte says, " Every separate mind is related as 
 are the branches to the vine." 
 
 As a man has no chance throughout his life 
 of quitting his own society, it seems reasonable 
 tfcat he should endeavour, as one of his 
 
THE SOUL'S COLLOQUIES. 115 
 
 concerns, to make it agreeable. This single 
 consideration should be sufficient, one would 
 think, to create in everybody a thirst for 
 culture. The truly educated mind lives in a 
 different world from that of the vulgar. When 
 a man has made acquaintance with the best 
 thinking of ancient and modern times, of his 
 own and other literatures, he has something to 
 talk about with himself. Moltke was said to 
 be "silent in seven languages." He probably 
 found such excellent fellowship in his own brain 
 as to indispose him to seek an inferior article 
 outside. To the intellectually well-furnished 
 man there is indeed no such thing as solitude. 
 His inner world is thronged with life. He gets 
 away from the crowd that he may understand 
 it. This explains partly the love of solitude of 
 the great saints. A Cuthbert, scholar and 
 apostle, spends months at a time shut up on his 
 lonely Fame island and is happy there. One 
 wonders what some modern men would do alone 
 on an island! People rush to what they call 
 society because they have nothing and nobody 
 in themselves worth speaking to. 
 
J16 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 But to find oneself good society requires 
 something more than parts and culture. A 
 man cannot, for instance, be entirely at ease if 
 some authority within has unmistakably written 
 him down a rogue. That does happen some- 
 times, and a not inconsiderable part of some 
 men's speech with themselves consists of appeals 
 against this verdict and endeavours to get the 
 case retried at a more lenient court. It would 
 be a mistake, however, to imagine that wrong- 
 doers are always on bad terms with their moral 
 sense. As a matter of fact, that faculty is 
 often the least developed in them, and so the 
 easiest to be hoodwinked. It is curious to see 
 how clever men will address arguments to their 
 conscience which would be rejected in a moment 
 if addressed to their intellect. Eousseau, one of 
 the acutest thinkers in Europe, its censor 
 morum, the creator, in " Emile," of its ideal of 
 education, could content himself, as his personal 
 contribution to morals, with having children by a 
 woman to whom he was not married, with throw- 
 ing them, naked on the world, to be brought up 
 by public charity, and then calmly avowing the 
 
THE SOUL'S COLLOQTTIES. 117 
 
 fact in the language of a man on the best of 
 terms with himself, in his published Confes- 
 sions ! From Ireland, to cite an instance nearer 
 home, it is just over three centuries ago that 
 Lord Essex, a well-disposed and religiously- 
 minded English nobleman, sent an account to 
 his sovereign, Elizabeth, of a bit of work done 
 by his troops. At his orders they went to 
 Eathlin Island, off Giant's Causeway, where six 
 hundred Irish women and children had been 
 sent for refuge, and there slaughtered every one 
 of them, unarmed and defenceless as they were, 
 in cold blood. He did the deed, this good Pro- 
 testant Englishman, and then wrote about it, 
 in a quite calm and equable frame of mind. 
 All the atrocities, be it remembered, have not 
 been done by the Turks. Truly the records 
 of the forum conscientice contain some queer 
 verdicts. 
 
 There are, however, other than strictly 
 ethical questions involved in a man's talks 
 with himself. Some of the most interesting of 
 these conversations, if they could be reported, 
 would be those carried on by a creative mind 
 
118 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 while in the process of creation. We know 
 very little of what really goes on here, and the man 
 himself could not help us much. Genius is at 
 an entire loss to explain its own products. A 
 whole Philosophy of the Unconscious is needed 
 to understand what really happens . The painter, 
 the poet, the inventor, is haunted awhile by a 
 vague idea, and calls on his mind to elucidate 
 it. His mind, so far as it is conscious, makes 
 no response. But all the time the unconscious 
 part of it is, in some mysterious manner, at 
 work, until at last, and suddenly, there emerges 
 from the brain's unknown depths an idea, a 
 creation, as new and surprising to the thinker 
 himself as it will be by-and-by to the outside 
 world. The work which makes a man famous 
 is not the work he sets out to do. He stumbles 
 on that in a way he cannot explain. When 
 Gibbon took to history he had no idea of 
 writing the "Decline and Fall." It was the 
 history of Switzerland, then of Charles V., then 
 of Florence, that successively filled his mind. 
 Through what a debris of unfulfilled projects 
 did he finally argue his way to the Roman 
 
THE SOUL'S COLLOQUIES. 119 
 
 Empire and so to immortality! And that is 
 the story of all great creations. 
 
 It is curious to note the difference between 
 a man's talk with himself when young 
 and that of his riper years. The youth is 
 as yet nothing to the world, but he is every- 
 thing to himself. He has not yet tried a fall 
 with circumstance, and so puts no limit to his 
 possibilities. One should look kindly on this 
 self-conceit, for is it not, after all, Nature's 
 effort to get the best out of her children ? If 
 a man has not some belief in himself to begin 
 with he is indeed badly off. The lesson of his 
 limitations will be rubbed into him soon 
 enough, and with relentless thoroughness. 
 Meanwhile the rush of youth, in its eager 
 self-confidence to conquer the world, is a goodly 
 thing. It is like the initial velocity of a cannon- 
 ball, the force of which determines its range. 
 When Disraeli, failing in his first speech in 
 the House, says, " A day will come when you 
 will hear me"; when Cobden, early in his 
 public career, on being told that a given project 
 was impossible, replies, " Then if that is all we 
 
120 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 had better set about it at oiicc," we recognise in 
 this glorious optimism of the young one of 
 Nature's great conquering forces. The talks 
 of old age with itself have another signifi- 
 cance. They deal not so much with the future 
 as with the past. The possibility of their 
 being enjoyable and satisfying is one of the 
 high rewards of a true life. It argues a certain 
 ,ort of career behind it when one can say, with 
 Fontenelle, that " old age is the most agreeable 
 period of life, in which our passions are 
 calmed, our duties fulfilled, our ambitions 
 satisfied." On the other hand, we cannot 
 imagine a worse fate than to be shut up in 
 the later years, to the voices from a vicious and 
 futile past. The ghosts of a man's evil deeds 
 make sorry table companions. Their talk is 
 horrible, and he cannot get away from it. 
 
XV. 
 In Search of One's Self 
 
 IN the detective stories which have such vogue 
 in the present day the interest lies in the 
 hunt which one man is making after some 
 other man. There is, however, in human life 
 a chase frequently going on in which the 
 complications are vastly subtler, and the 
 psychological interest far deeper than any- 
 thing which the Sherlock Holmes order 
 of fiction presents. It is the hunt of man 
 after himself. And what we mean by this 
 has nothing to do with the metaphysical puzzle 
 so amusingly presented in "The Autocrat of 
 the Breakfast Table," in which every one 
 of us is proved to be half-a-dozen different 
 people ; nor yet with that simpler distinction 
 of the personality from the bodily life which 
 Socrates suggests when, in "The Phsedo," in 
 answer to Crito's question, "How shall we 
 bury you ? " he says, " in any way you like ; but 
 
122 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 you must first get hold of me, and take care 
 that I do not run away from you." The topic 
 to be dealt with here has a more immediate 
 and urgent bearing than these upon practical 
 life. Briefly stated, it is contained in the fact 
 that there are, in the lives of most men, periods 
 of consciousness in which they realise them- 
 selves as at their fullest and highest ; when the 
 possibilities in them of feeling and of faculty 
 are at their greatest expansion ; moments when 
 they can say, "this is my best and truest 
 self"; and in the further fact that this 
 consciousness is retained by few through any 
 lengthened period without interruption. With 
 multitudes there are wide intervening gaps of 
 life, through which the soul wearily trudges, 
 in search of its lost power, its lost feeling. The 
 spectacle they present is one than which the 
 world offers none more pathetic, none more 
 widely suggestive. 
 
 It is possible that some reading so far will 
 say, that in thus stating the theme we are 
 giving it a too restricted range. For, they 
 may urge, does not the deepest significance in 
 
IN SEARCH OF ONE'S SELF. 123 
 
 the search for one's self lie in the fact that 
 what we here seek we never really find? In 
 a sense that is true. When Goethe says that 
 in youth " our wishes are presentiments of the 
 capabilities which lie within us and the 
 harbingers of that which we shall be after- 
 wards in a condition to perform," he is only 
 giving half of the fact. The other half is that 
 a good part of the self which the youth dreams 
 of and seeks to realise will never be reached by 
 him, and for the reason that it forms part of 
 that human idea which is in the race, and 
 which it will take ages for it, as a race, to 
 grow up to. 
 
 Eestricting ourselves however, of purpose, 
 to that self which a man does actually realise 
 and is continually losing, let us see what the 
 theme in that aspect of it, has to offer in the 
 way of practical suggestion. On the side to 
 begin with, of his intellectual possibilities, a 
 man has at times the strangest lapses from his 
 true self. We are not speaking here of those 
 caused by the irremediable ravages of disease 
 and old age; such, for instance, as brought 
 
124 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 Newton into a condition in wh;^h he could not 
 understand his own " Principia." For men in 
 their prime are only occasionally themselves. 
 Whatever we mean by inspiration as related 
 to prophets and apostles, the poet, the orator 
 and the singer of to-day know what they mean 
 by it, and that its presence or absence, both 
 of which they are continually experiencing 1 , 
 makes all the difference to the quality of their 
 work. In the fc Buch der Lieder " Heine has 
 an exquisite lyric of an awkward, listless and 
 solitary wight, who suddenly becomes trans- 
 figured into nobleness and strength by the 
 approach of his lady love. When she dis- 
 appears he sinks back again to his old propor- 
 tions. It is an allegory of the poet's personality 
 before and after the visit of his muse. The 
 men who in every age have thrilled their 
 fellows, have always been conscions that in 
 their best efforts they were not so much the 
 originators, as the channels of a force flowing 
 through them, they knew not whence. 
 
 But whatever be the undiscovered mystery at 
 the back of prophetic, artistic or poetic creation, 
 
IN SEAECH OP ONE'S SELF. 125 
 
 what is certain is that, as a condition of it, a 
 man must cultivate as best he can both his 
 bodily and mental health. The preacher or 
 writer who finds his true vision gone and 
 morbid hypochondriasms taking its place had 
 better cease utterance and take to digging. 
 Old Tauler, the famous mediseval preacher, who 
 was silent for two years and then began again 
 with a new flow of power, is an excellent pre- 
 cedent for temporarily worn-out pulpits. Let the 
 exhausted prophet be silent, and resolutely dig, 
 until at length he once more disinters his buried 
 self. It is wonderful, after a season in which 
 we have endured this loss, in what odd corners 
 we find again our treasure. Many an Alpine 
 tourist, who, with shattered nerve and a 
 drained vitality, has wandered listlessly through 
 the noblest scenery, at length with unspeak- 
 able joy has caught a glimpse of something 
 compared with which the grandeurs of a Jung- 
 frau, or a Matterhorn, are as naught. It is the 
 view of his real self, dawning again upon his 
 Consciousness, with the old vigours and the old 
 enthusiasms. That is the finest prospect in 
 
126 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 the world, though not mentioned, we believe, 
 in either Murray or Baedeker. 
 
 In this search for one's self, on its in- 
 tellectual and creative side, there is another 
 point worth noting. In the formation of every 
 true artist, poet, writer or preacher a preliminary 
 process, of varying lengths, is commonly gone 
 through before the man is in a condition to 
 offer anything really serviceable to the world. 
 It is that of imitation. The neophyte in every 
 sphere delights in forming himself upon some 
 model or other. In its way, this is not a bad 
 sort of apprenticeship to begin with. But 
 mediocrities not only begin here, but here they 
 end. The man, however, who has a genuine 
 message for his fellows will arrive some day at 
 the consciousness that his mind is a medium 
 through which the light of the universe, as it 
 streams in, is refracted at a special angle of its 
 own, and that his work is to paint, sing, write, 
 or speak of things as they appear in that dis- 
 tinctive light. It is this personal equation, 
 this touch of individuality, whether it appear 
 in a sunset by Turoer, a movement by 
 
IN SEATJCH OP ONE'S SELF. 127 
 
 thoven, an essay by Charles Lamb, or a sermon 
 by Phillips Brooks, that gives the production 
 its charm. Each soul God creates has its own 
 flavour, and we want to taste that flavour. 
 When the young worker has learned precisely 
 what he is as distinguished from others, and 
 gives us that, in whatever limited quantity, or 
 sphere of operation, he becomes valuable. 
 When he has found himself, he will find his 
 world. 
 
 We can touch only in the briefest possible 
 way that part of the subject where the 
 soundings are deepest. On their moral and 
 spiritual side men go often in search of a 
 lost self, and it is here that the pursuit takes 
 on its strangest and most tragic forms. On 
 the best and most religious natures the march 
 of the years inflicts some sense of loss. The 
 rapture and ecstasy of the religious feeling 
 which in earlier years, at some sweet strain 
 or moving utterance, or untraced breath of 
 the Spirit, made highest heaven in the soul, 
 is, with many, a faculty which becomes in a 
 measure blunted by time. But when, as is the 
 
123 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 case with true hearts, this blossom and bloom 
 of the religious life have been succeeded by the 
 fruit of a strong endurance, of an unfailing 
 sense of duty, of a rooted faith, and an ever 
 widening sympathy, the gain is greater than 
 the loss. The tragedy is not here. It is when 
 men who, in their youth, have looked on God 
 and His world through the eyes of purity, who 
 have known what it was to feel the passion for 
 righteousness, and the supreme gladness of 
 being counted worthy to fight on the side of 
 whatsoever is good, and who in some fatal hour 
 have slipped away from all this, and then from 
 the bottom of the precipice where the best in 
 them went to wreck, gaze back to the far off 
 inaccessible heights of that paradise they lost 
 here it is we have what may truly be called the 
 tragedy of a soul. The man who has gazed 
 into the depths of that experience will never 
 scoff at the doctrine of a Redemption and a 
 Redeemer. 
 
XYI. 
 Our Possible Self. 
 
 IT was a favourite dictum of Schopenhauer 
 that man can never be happy from the simple 
 fact that, while he is of necessity some one 
 thing, he has in him the idea and the desire of 
 being a thousand other things. What a world, 
 in which poverty is haunted with the thought 
 of the riches it would so enjoy; where de- 
 crepitude muses on the youth and strength 
 that lie out of its reach ; where the linen- 
 draper's assistant, chained to his counter, is 
 tormented with the aspirations of a poet ; where 
 the dweller in the cold and misty North yearns 
 for those lands of the sun of which he reads, 
 but may never see ! Certainly when one holds 
 a brief for Pessimism there is no difficulty in 
 making out a case. Whether it is a good 
 one is another question. For ourselves we do 
 not believe in the conclusion to which facts of 
 this order are supposed to point. Of this 
 
130 STUDIES OP THE SOTJL. 
 
 more anon. Meanwhile, the study of that 
 part of us which belongs, so far, only to 
 the possible and the unrealised, has, apart 
 from theories, some peculiar interests of its 
 own. 
 
 It is, indeed, a strange and portentous 
 position this of ours in the world, with com- 
 monly one role in life to play, and a thousand 
 in our repertoire unused. Every individual of 
 us feels in him the germs of all that 
 humanity has done and been. Fortune has 
 made us a governess or a Custom House 
 clerk. We should be quite at home as a 
 duchess or a millionaire. The working facul- 
 ties which gain our bread-and-butter form 
 only a small part of our potential equipment. 
 We are the raw material of the artist, the 
 poet, the orator, the statesman, though we 
 shall probably never be known by those names. 
 Three parts of us seem to lie idle. We work 
 the surface ores, believing all the while that 
 rich lodes lie beneath that are never got at. 
 Modern tendencies, too, bind upon us our 
 limitations more closely than ever. It is an 
 
OUR POSSIBLE SELF. 181 
 
 age of specialisation, in which a man gains 
 his living by making, not a pin, but the head 
 of a pin. The feat of being absolutely first 
 in half-a-dozen different things, accomplished 
 by a Michael Angelo and a Da Vinci, become 
 less and less possible, not merely from the 
 rarity of faculties of this order, but from the 
 immensely increased range of the subjects 
 themselves. The hills of knowledge which 
 our fathers climbed in succession, have swollen 
 to great peaks, each of which takes a lifetime 
 to ascend. 
 
 It is, in this connection, curious, and in a way 
 pathetic, to note the efforts which people often 
 make to escape their one appropriate role. 
 Nothing is commoner than for men of dis- 
 tinction to think lightly of the faculty in 
 which their true strength lies, and to seek for 
 glory in parts where they are really weak. 
 Goethe was prouder of his botanical re- 
 searches and his theory of colours than of 
 "Faust." Sir Walter Scott thought little 
 of being the author of "Waverley," and 
 much of being a Scottish laird. The world 
 
132 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 was wiser than these wise men. It found out 
 speedily, what they never did all their lives, 
 that theories of colours and Scottish lairds 
 were dirt cheap, while a Faust and a Waverley 
 were jewels of price. 
 
 The reflection that might seem to follow 
 from this, that time spent in pursuits which do 
 not call out our highest faculty is, therefore, 
 time wasted, would, however, be far from cor- 
 rect. While the thing we can do best should 
 be our life business, we owe it to our weaker 
 self to work it for all it is worth if only to 
 make it stronger. Besides, our highest faculty 
 needs the repose it gets when we are using the 
 lower. And is it not true that much of the 
 enjoyment of life issues from pursuits in which 
 we have no chance of pre-eminence ? Professor 
 Max Muller has just been surprising the world 
 with his poetical and musical reminiscences. 
 How poor comparatively would life have been to 
 him without music and poetry ! Yet the world 
 will never remember him as musician or as poet. 
 Moreover, by luring us on to the pursuit of 
 hings in which we shall ourselves never excel, 
 
OUR POSSIBLE SELF. 133 
 
 nature often prepares for the son or grandson 
 who will shine in them. The obscure horn- 
 player of a strolling orchestra in this way gives 
 us a Eossini; an old organist of Eisenach, 
 mediocre himself, makes possible a Sebastian 
 Bach ; Margaret Ogilvie, nourishing in humble 
 fashion her love of literature, has for son a 
 J. M. Barrie, who adorns it. Sometimes, too, 
 it happens that the by-pursuits of a good man, 
 nine-tenths of which are of little importance 
 outside his own life, secure a great reward in 
 the fortune of the remaining tenth. Next to 
 the duties of his sacred vocation there was to 
 Bishop Ken nothing, perhaps, quite so absorb- 
 ing as poetry. One wonders how many hours 
 of that noble life were spent in the writing of 
 his "Edmund," his " Hymnotheo," his 
 " Da morel and Dorilla ? " Who nowadays 
 reads them? Was, then, the time wasted? 
 Before we say so we have to remember that this 
 sub-faculty of his, working so often to small 
 result, produced in a happy moment the Morn- 
 ing and the Evening Hymn, compositions which 
 have made his name immortal, and have become 
 
134 STUDIES o# THE SouL. 
 
 an integral part of the worship of the English- 
 speaking race. 
 
 It is time now, perhaps, to come back to the 
 consideration of our possible, or, perhaps, rather 
 our conceivable life as related to our actual, in 
 its bearing on happiness and well-being. Are 
 we, after all, shut up to Schopenhauer's conclu- 
 sion that the power of imagining himself a 
 thousand other things than what he is makes 
 not for a man's weal, but for his woe ? Let the 
 man who professes to believe this ask himself 
 whether he would really prefer to do without an 
 imagination ? Aspiration and desire bring un- 
 doubtedly their pains, but then they are 
 growing pains, and entirely healthy. The 
 yearning after the unattained is the motor 
 power of humanity, forcing it onward to the 
 fulfilment of its high destiny. The unrealised 
 in human thought is a sure prophecy of what is 
 yet to be. The word of Goethe, which seems, 
 perhaps, too sanguine for the individual, at 
 least in this life, is not too much for humanity 
 as a whole. " Our wishes are presentiments of 
 the capabilities that lie within us, and harbin- 
 
OUR PossifcLU SELF. 135 
 
 gers of that which we shall be in a condition to 
 perform." 
 
 Apart from this, the dream side of life,, the 
 side of its unrealised imaginings, has, with 
 healthy natures, an enormous balance of 
 pleasure over pain. That a weaver can 
 conceive of himself as a duke, without any 
 chance of being one, is assuredly the reverse of 
 a hardship. The hardship would come in if he 
 were condemned to be a weaver all over, with 
 no power of looking beyond his loom. There 
 are men, indeed, who do little else but dream, 
 and they enjoy life as well as most. They get 
 often more out of their imaginary roles than the 
 people who really play them. Mr. Casaubon 
 never wrote his great book, but the thought of 
 it was his daily meat and drink. The barber 
 who dreamed every night that he was a king 
 had very likely a better time of it than his 
 majesty. 
 
 This power of enjoying life possibilities 
 which we are never likely to realise, whether it 
 come to us by gift of temperament or by 
 spiritual grace, is assuredly a great possession. 
 
136 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 Not less is the faculty of contemplating without 
 bitterness the departure into dreamland of what 
 once was actual. To gain that is the problem 
 of old age. History records on this point some 
 of its most melancholy failures. What a wail 
 is that of the old Greek Mimnermus : " When 
 once the appointed time of youth is past it is 
 better to die forthwith than to live ! " How 
 wholesome compared with such a whine is the 
 word of Marcus Aurelius : " Your way is, there- 
 fore, to manage this minute [of life] wisely, to 
 part with it cheerfully; and like a ripe nut, 
 when you drop out of the husk, be sure to 
 speak well of the season and make your 
 acknowledgments to the tree that bore you ! " 
 That is good, but Christianity gives us some* 
 thing better. For it deepens in us, as time 
 streams on, the feeling, not only that the life 
 we have had here has been essentially good, a 
 boon for which to be thankful, but that its 
 unrealised possibilities are prophecies of a 
 higher condition beyond, where they shall have 
 undreamed-of fulfilment3. 
 
XVII. 
 Negative Capability. 
 
 WE borrow the phrase from Keats, who used it 
 to express what seemed to him an important 
 condition of literary achievement. He was, 
 perhaps, himself the most striking example of 
 what he meant. He produced his wonderful 
 results by an extraordinary feat of detachment. 
 In a period of depression and disillusionment, 
 when the miserable outcome of the French 
 Revolution had destroyed, in some of the finest 
 spirits, almost all hope for humanity, Keats 
 found a way of escape by quietly turning his 
 back on all the problems which confounded 
 his contemporaries, and satisfying himself 
 with an ideal world, summoned from the past, 
 and filled with images of immortal beauty. 
 He eluded the hard facts which weighed on 
 other thinkers by the " negative capability " 
 of ignoring them. He did his work by shut- 
 ting his eyes to a reality that looked so hope- 
 
138 STUDIES OF THE SouL. 
 
 loss, and creating in its place a sunnier realm 
 of his own. 
 
 It would not do, in literature or in any other 
 pursuit, for every one to exercise the same 
 capacity in the same degree. Since Keats's 
 time the real has indeed asserted itself again 
 with a vengeance. Nevertheless, it remains 
 that in all spheres his "negative capability," 
 the faculty of not seeing and not feeling on 
 occasion, forms an indispensable feature of a 
 life equipment. The cultivation of it is, to an 
 extent which we perhaps have scarcely been 
 accustomed to recognise, necessary both to high 
 achievement and to real enjoyment. Illustra- 
 tions of this may be found in some widely 
 differing directions. 
 
 It is to be observed at the outset that there 
 is a negative capability produced by training, 
 and another which is native and inborn. The 
 latter may seem at first sight a pure limitation, 
 but it plays a role of the highest importance in 
 the field of affairs. Nature gets an immense 
 deal out of men by their sheer ignorance and 
 want of perception. There are some things 
 
KEGATIVE CAPABILITY. 189 
 
 they do blindfold, or they would never do them 
 at all. Eudyard Kipling gives a good example 
 of what we mean in that wonderful achievement 
 of Thomas Atkins, " The Taking of Lungtung- 
 pen." Mulvaney, commenting on the exploit, 
 says : " 'Tis the bhoys the raw bhoys that 
 don't know fwhat a bullut manes, an' wud'nt 
 care av they did that dhu the work. . . . Wud 
 fifty seasoned sodgers have taken Lungtungpen 
 in the dhark that way ? No ! They'd know 
 the risk av fever and chill. Let alone the 
 shootin'. . . . But the three - year - olds 
 know little an' care less ; an' where there's no 
 fear, there's no danger." Precisely. The 
 world is full of Lungtungpens, which Nature 
 sets her recruits to capture. Older birds would 
 not do here. They see too much. Their culti- 
 vated appreciation of consequences forms a real 
 incapacity for some things which have to be 
 done if the world is to be kept moving. 
 
 In regions of things sufficiently remote from 
 the British soldier and his doings we may see 
 precisely the same principle at work. There 
 %re, for instance, in the moral and religious 
 
140 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 sphere examples of tho way in which a sheer 
 ignorance of what we now regard as eminently 
 well worth knowing, has helped in realising 
 wonderful spiritual results. Take the case of 
 the asceticism, the monkish austerities of the 
 medieval Church. When we read of Bernard, 
 in his novitiate and afterwards, carrying through 
 a process of starving, of vigil, of flagellation, 
 which absolutely ruined his health and reduced 
 him do all his after work under the conditions 
 of a deplorable invalidism, we wonder at his 
 folly. The pity of it ! That a man, longing to 
 serve his God and his fellows, should begin by 
 crippling in this way all his powers of serving ! 
 But there is another side to the matter. The 
 man who, to the immeasurable benefit of Christ- 
 endom, wielded over it for a whole generation 
 an almost absolute authority, to whom kings, 
 popes, and emperors turned as to an oracle, 
 gained this authority by virtue of a saintship 
 which, with the ideas of that age, would cer- 
 tainly not have been ascribed to him apart from 
 his self-imposed rigours. What a picture of 
 power, in its most divine and beneficent form, 
 
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY. 141 
 
 is that which one of his biographers draws for 
 us in this sentence: "The man on whom the 
 eyes of the Church had long been fixed, on 
 whose forehead beamed the halo of sanctity, 
 and who at Rome as well as in France, was 
 venerated as the oracle of God and the tutelary 
 spirit of the age; the presence of that man 
 could not be dispensed with." With our 
 modern ideas of the cult of the body he would 
 certainly not have wrecked his constitution for 
 a religious idea. No. And he would not have 
 been the Bernard who made popes, preached a 
 crusade, ruled the spirit of princes, and inspired 
 the world. 
 
 While in the region of Church history one is 
 tempted to clench the principle we are illus- 
 trating by citing an exactly opposite instance. 
 Again it is a Frenchman. If it was one-sided 
 ness which, in the twelfth century, made 
 Bernard, it was the lack of it which, in the 
 nineteenth, ruined Lamennais. Was there 
 ever a greater inward and outward tragedy 
 than that represented by the simple successive 
 publication, on the part of the same man, of 
 
142 STUDIES OF THE SOTJL. 
 
 two books ? In the " Essai sur PIndifference " 
 Lamennais offered an argument for Catholicism 
 and Infallibility, which was felt to have re- 
 habilitated the Eoman system, and which 
 brought Pope and Cardinals to the feet of its 
 splendidly gifted author. The highest ecclesi- 
 astical honours were within his reach if only 
 he could keep steadily looking one way. But 
 that was exactly what he was incapable of 
 doing. The other side would assert itself, 
 looming ever bigger and bigger, fascinating his 
 gaze until it had mastered him, and we get 
 finally in the " Paroles " the utterances of the 
 religious revolutionary who has shaken from 
 him the system of which he had been counted 
 the invincible defender. His ecclesiastical 
 career was ruined because he had not the 
 power, the " negative capability," of shutting 
 one eye. 
 
 "We have left ourselves only a short 
 space for the discussion of what is, 
 perhaps, the most important side of this 
 topic, the negative capability which is the 
 result of practice and discipline. Some of the 
 
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY. 143 
 
 best results of life come from the cultivated 
 power of not seeing and of not feeling. In 
 mental matters, for instance, every student 
 knows that half the battle of successful 
 thinking lies in his faculty of abstraction. He 
 must become blind and deaf to a hundred 
 things that assail his attention before he can 
 make headway with the one thing he would 
 investigate. 
 
 Important in the intellectual, this faculty 
 becomes absolutely indispensable in the social 
 and domestic spheres. Where husbands and 
 wives remain lovers through life, their conjugal 
 good fortune owes much to a cultivated and 
 happy blindness on both sides. There are 
 faults in plenty for the seeing, but they look 
 the other way. Peace between mistress and 
 servants depends also largely on the faculty 
 the former possesses of shutting her eyes, or, 
 at least, of winking hard on occasion. Worthy 
 to be praised, to be compared indeed with 
 the wise woman of the Proverbs, is she who, 
 loving cleanliness, does nevertheless not upset 
 the peace of a houseful of people because a 
 
144 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 speck of dust, yea, peradventure six specks, 
 have been found in the wrong place. 
 
 A like negative capability is invaluable in 
 our general social intercourse. There is 
 amongst English people a curious shyness and 
 reserve in regard to strangers the feeling that 
 led an acute foreign observer to remark that 
 not only is England an island but every 
 Englishman is an island and this, if not taken 
 at its true estimate, leads to the strangest mis- 
 understandings. The man who makes headway 
 socially amongst us is he who ignores the 
 surface frost and makes straight for the warmth 
 that lies below. The outstanding illustration 
 of this is Boswell. We do not propose him as 
 an example, but it is certain we owe the 
 immortal biography to the happy insensibility 
 of its author to the mental kicks and cuffs with 
 which his acquaintance with Johnson com- 
 menced. He had faith, the strange little man, 
 that the great heart under the bear's skin could 
 be won if he only tried long enough, and faith 
 had its full reward. If we win friendship by 
 being a little blind we keep it, too, on the same 
 
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY. 145 
 
 terms. The secret of happiness in human 
 relations is the steady cult of the good points in 
 our loved ones and the systematised atrophy, in 
 relation to them, of our critical powers. It is 
 only in our Divine relationships that we can 
 turn the fullest gaze upon the Object of our 
 love and be content. 
 
Imagination in Religion. 
 
 WE shall have got rid of a good many of our 
 inward confusions when we have settled two 
 questions first, the part which imagination 
 has played in the building up of our religious 
 ideas, and secondly, the part which it ought to 
 play. That imagination, the power of imaging, 
 what the Germans call Einbildungsfcraft, or the 
 picturing faculty, has been and is an enor- 
 mously potent factor in religion goes without 
 saying. Our religious vocabulary, to begin 
 with, consists almost entirely of images. It is 
 a set of concepts borrowed from the region of 
 the material and the visible to set forth the 
 invisible and the spiritual. These at the best 
 are but rough instruments for getting at truth. 
 It does not require the arguments of a Kant 
 or a Ritschl to make us realise the shakiness of 
 the ground we are on. wtyen we take tjiese 
 
IMAGINATION IN KELIGION. 147 
 
 images as at all adequately or accurately 
 representing the real and innermost fact of 
 things. But our difficulties are enormously 
 increased when we come to the actual content 
 of religion as it has been handed down to us, 
 and are confronted with the question, What of 
 this represents history and reality, and what of 
 it is picture and dream? 
 
 In this matter the East and the West have 
 a very heavy and complicated account to settle 
 with each other. Our religion has come to 
 us from the East, and we are now slowly 
 beginning to understand that the Eastern 
 religious imagination has been very much like 
 the Eastern jungle in the prodigal fecundity 
 and wildly fantastic character of its growths 
 and has to be dealt with by us accordingly. 
 
 Before going further, however, let us guard 
 against being misunderstood. It must not for 
 a moment be supposed that we are running a 
 tilt against imagination in religion, as though 
 it were an element that needed to be 
 eliminated, or indeed that could be dispensed 
 with. The most cursory glance round is sufE- 
 
148 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 cient to show how essential it is, and must ever 
 be, to man's spiritual developement. In China 
 Confucius endeavoured to do without it, and 
 leaving the unseen world out of account, to 
 build up a religious system from plain, worka- 
 day moral maxims. But even amongst that 
 most matter-of-fact people the imagination 
 demanded its rights, and to-day the average 
 Chinaman is at once Confucianist, Taouist and 
 Buddhist, the first system giving him his 
 morals, and the two last his views of the 
 unseen powers. 
 
 Amongst ourselves, with the cultured as 
 well as the uncultured, the imagination is 
 amongst the most hard-worked of the religious 
 faculties. No one can successfully teach chil- 
 dren without a constant appeal to it. Adults 
 are in this matter but children of a larger 
 growth. The most powerful preachers are 
 the men of high imagination who can at 
 the same time play most effectively on this 
 faculty in their hearers. Massillon, making the 
 courtiers of Louis XIV. leap to their feet under 
 the idea that the judgment day was actually 
 
IMAGINATION IN RELIGION. 149 
 
 upon them; and William Dawson, the Method- 
 ist preacher, turning the eyes of his audience 
 to the door, where they expected to see the 
 prodigal son whom he had pictured, coming in 
 on his way from the far country, are types of 
 the men who have been most successful in 
 winning their fellows to the religious life. We 
 all of us know that the "Pilgrim's Progress" 
 is not history; that Doubting Castle and the 
 Delectable Mountains are nowhere on the map ; 
 that Mr. Greatheart and Old Honest are 
 children of a dreamer's brain. But learned and 
 ignorant alike have recognised here religious 
 teaching of the first order, a teaching which, 
 under the forms of the imagination, offers 
 truths which feed the inmost life of the soul. 
 
 It is not, then, in the use of the imagination 
 in religion taken by itself, that the West of 
 to-day has found its difficulty in settling its 
 account with the East. Where the crux comes 
 in has been in the boundless luxuriance of the 
 Oriental fancy, coupled with, to us, an exas- 
 perating neglect to discriminate between its 
 own dompiu and that of historical and scientific 
 
150 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 fact. We have no difficulty with " Pilgrim's 
 Progress," because we know where to look for 
 the truth that is in it, and what to put down to 
 imagination. It has not been so with the Bible 
 and Christianity. 
 
 The West has suffered, and is still suffering, 
 incredible mental confusions and miseries from 
 having made the mistake of taking the Oriental 
 Bunyans and Miltons literally. It is, for in- 
 stance, only just dawning upon us that the 
 Bible story of Creation is not history, but, as 
 Professor Ryle puts it, the Hebrew version of 
 one of the primitive legends common to the 
 Semitic race. When people hear the Com- 
 mandments recited in church numbers of them 
 believe that the preamble, " And God spake all 
 these words saying," represents an actual 
 articulate utterance made to Moses from the 
 Unseen. It is hard for them to understand 
 that man, including, of course, woman, has had 
 all the talking on this planet, and that the 
 universe, which does everything, says nothing. 
 And where historical fact is dealt with in the 
 Bible it is extremely difficult for the popular 
 
IN RELIGION. 
 
 mind, educated as it has been, to comprehend 
 that in the majority of instances what is offered 
 us is fact plus the Oriental imagination. The 
 problem of the Christian origins is, for instance, 
 to those who have really faced it, enormously 
 complicated by the remembrance that for thirty 
 years after Christ's death, so far as we can 
 trace, no written record of His life or teachings 
 existed. When the great Life did get at last 
 into ink and upon paper it was under the influ- 
 ence of ideas and thought-forms which the 
 unfortunate Western mind, with its canons of 
 historical composition, has to do what it can 
 with. 
 
 One of the ways in which the East has most 
 effectually puzzled the West has been in its 
 symbolism. No more singular fate has ever 
 overtaken imaginative compositions than that 
 which has caused such works as the Book of 
 Daniel and the Apocalypse to be regarded by 
 multitudes as authoritative statements of a 
 world-history which is yet to be made. The 
 remedy we should prescribe for notions of this 
 kind is to read the whole of the literature of 
 
152 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 which these books are specimens. No one is in 
 a position to arrive at a sane appreciation of 
 Daniel and Revelation who does not know such 
 works as the Apocalypse of Baruch, the Assump- 
 tion of Moses, the Book of Enoch, and the 
 other examples of this school. Here we may 
 match vials, trumpets, seals, and many-headed 
 beasts with the vine of a thousand branches, 
 the twelve floods, and the eagle with twelve 
 wings and three heads. After reading them all 
 we shall probably realise that a symbolism 
 which suited the mental methods of a period 
 that has passed away is only of minor signifi- 
 cance to us, and that it is elsewhere than in 
 their numbers and in their imagery that Daniel 
 and the Apocalypse contain a message for our 
 time. 
 
 But if the creative and visualising faculty by 
 its reckless and unguarded use in former times 
 has brought so much of confusion into religion, 
 it is to the same faculty, disciplined and scien- 
 tifically directed, that we shall have to look 
 largely for the remedy. It is the untrained 
 imagination which, in the childhood of the 
 
IMAGINATION IN EKLIGION. 153 
 
 race, has mingled fact and truth with myth 
 and legend. It will be the modern historic imag- 
 ination that, realising to itself the exact mental 
 conditions under which this early work was done, 
 will know how to disengage the essence from 
 the form, and the substratum of fact from the 
 fancies that have been made to overlie it. 
 
 Eaised by culture to its proper power and 
 true function, the imagination will, then, still 
 stand as one of the essential elements and 
 prime forces of the inner life. Having purified 
 the history of religion and rectified its attitude 
 towards the universe, it will have in the new 
 conditions freer play than ever for its sublime 
 and spiritualising energy. History it will still 
 find to be full of inspiration and of revelation, 
 and the universe full of God. It will, with 
 clarified vision, behold the kingdom of heaven 
 coming amongst men ; will see that the earth is 
 saturated with spirit ; and will give its assured 
 affirmative to Milton's prophetic surmise : 
 
 What if earth 
 
 : hut the shadow of heaven, and things therein 
 Each to the other like ? 
 
XIX. 
 Morality and the Clock. 
 
 THE man who invented the first timekeeper 
 has never been canonised, and most likely his 
 life was not saintly. For all that he was a 
 great ethical authority. His influence upon 
 morals has been immense. His advent marked 
 the rise of a whole department of " virtues 
 and their contrary ^vices." The people who 
 lived before his day had an easy-going relation 
 to the hours which would be regarded as 
 scandalous now. We have been caught and 
 tamed, and our master is the clock. This 
 pontiff of bronze has reduced us, body, soul 
 and spirit, to a subjection which is almost abject. 
 Modern religious life, for instance, is under its 
 absolute control. The reach of its finger to a 
 point on the dial tells the Church when its 
 worship is to begin. As peremptory is its 
 intimation to officiating clergy when to end. 
 
MORALITY AND THE CLOCK. 155 
 
 Christendom, divided on a thousand points, is 
 united on this, that its ministry shall obey the 
 clock. That they are too high, or too low, or 
 too broad is as dust in the balance compared 
 with the offence of being too long. 
 
 This religious domination of the timepiece 
 is not confined either to Sundays and church 
 service. It is the central element of not a few 
 notable schemes for the religious conduct of 
 life. Monasticism is expressly modelled upon 
 it. The High Church William Law, in his 
 " Serious Call to a Devout Life," tells his 
 readers what to do when the clock strikes nine 
 and eleven, and three and six. Wesley, a some- 
 time follower of Law, earned for himself and 
 his little circle at Oxford the name Methodists 
 for a similar scheme, the title flung at them in 
 derision being originally that of a Eoman 
 philosophical sect who lived by rule and line. 
 Every religious body, in fact, has had ita 
 devout men and women whose endeavour to 
 make the best of life, in the spiritual sense, has 
 taken the form of a daily programme which 
 assigns its occupation to each hour. 
 
156 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 The commercial world, whose ethical code, 
 generally speaking, is not too strictly modelled 
 on that of the Church, is one with it in the 
 recognition of the clock. As the Decalogue in 
 the New Testament is summed up in two 
 comprehensive principles, so, in the opinion of 
 many, the code of commerce lies in the two 
 aphorisms " time is money " and { e punctuality 
 is the soul of business." The modern employe 
 has his whole life ruled by a mechanical deity, 
 placed high in front of warehouse or factory, 
 whose brazen finger dividing the minutes, and 
 deep tongue tolling the hours, tell him when 
 he shall work and rest, when he shall eat and 
 drink, when he shall sleep and wake. 
 
 The rule of the clock is undoubtedly absolute 
 in modern life. Is it beneficent as well ? If 
 we give an affirmative reply, it has to be at 
 least with some reserves. That the noting of 
 the hours, in awakening a sense of their value, 
 has been an enormous factor in human progress 
 can hardly be denied. The clock awoke 
 humanity to realise that time was pace 
 philosopher Kant an objective fact, and that 
 
MORALITY AND THE CLOCK. 157 
 
 at the same time it was a gold-mine. Since the 
 discovery, the human output from it has been, 
 it must be admitted, by no means contemptible. 
 From counting the hours men have come to 
 squeeze them, and to make their palpitating 
 minutes yield, as they fly, ever more varied 
 forms of activity, ever more complex phases of 
 consciousness. The West, in learning this 
 lesson, has outstripped the drowsy East, and 
 made (( better fifty years of Europe than a 
 cycle of Cathay." 
 
 The system, however, has its drawbacks. It 
 has not been proved yet that the final end of 
 the soul was that it may keep time to the swing 
 of the pendulum. The moralist, watching the 
 operation, in different departments of life, of 
 the clock system of morals finds himself inclined 
 to ask whether it will not result in turning men 
 into machines, and in extinguishing their role 
 as creators. It seems, for one thing, to leave 
 no place for the dreamer. Schiller, when he 
 wrote his poem on the partition of the earth, 
 in which he complains that the priest, the 
 soldier an<} the trader bad taken their shares 
 
158 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 and left nothing for the poet, was feeling the 
 stress of this system. All the dreamers, in 
 fact, have felt it. It was under this duress 
 that Thoreau wrote: "I cannot easily buy a 
 blank book to write thoughts in; they are 
 commonly ruled for dollars and cents." And 
 his further sentiment, " If I sell both my fore- 
 noons and my afternoons to society, as most 
 appear to do, I am sure that for me there 
 would be nothing left worth living for," was 
 regarded by his punctual timekeeping fellow- 
 citizens as the utterance of an impracticable 
 idler. Yet some of us think that one Thoreau 
 was worth fifty punctual makers of dollars and 
 cents. 
 
 The clock morality is, in fact, dangerous in so 
 far as it makes men think that activity and 
 regularity are enough of themselves to save 
 their souls alive. There are models of both 
 these virtues who, by the time they are half 
 through, may be said to have no souls left to 
 save. The busy bourgeoisie of Athens got rid of 
 Socrates because they felt there was no room 
 amongst them for a man whose boast was " fpr 
 
MOEALITY AND THE CLOCK. 150 
 
 I do nothing but go about persuading you all, 
 old and young alike, not to take thought for 
 your persons and properties, but first and chiefly 
 to care about the greatest improvement of the 
 soul." Such a sentiment was altogether in- 
 tolerable to the clock morality. 
 
 The rule of thumb system is excellent for 
 supplying the world with its calico and its book- 
 keeping. But its great spiritual inheritance did 
 not come to it that way. The clock regime could 
 never produce a Midsummer Night's Dream. It 
 could never have founded the Christian Church. 
 The greatest enrichments of humanity have 
 reached it by methods entirely independent of 
 the method of " so much output per hour." 
 The name cut deepest in human history is that 
 f One who lived some thirty years in absolute 
 obscurity, whose public life was compressed into 
 a number of months, and whose published 
 utterances can be read in an hour or so. 
 Neither that life, nor the death in which it 
 culminated, can by any ingenuity be used as an 
 illustration of the clock method of to-day. Yet 
 in that life and deatli tjie worJ(J finds still the 
 
160 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 fount of energy which keeps its spiritual self 
 alive. 
 
 The sum of all this is that the timepiece, 
 though an excellent helper in morals, is hardly 
 fitted to be their sole arbiter. Over a large 
 area of life it rules with a really beneficent 
 sway. There could be no greater blunder than 
 to attempt to bring under it the remainder. 
 In business and in religion activity and regu- 
 larity are excellent things, but they are not the 
 whole, nor even the highest. There is some- 
 thing better than performance, and that is 
 character. There is something more impor- 
 tant than quantity of output, and that is 
 quality. It may indeed be well worth con- 
 sidering whether the rule of the clock might 
 not be with profit relaxed in many directions 
 where it now reigns, and whether the cease- 
 less rush to capture the minutes and the 
 hours, which is the note to-day of our 
 Western world, is after all the surest way of 
 realising that " Licht, Liebe, Leben," which 
 Herder had placed on his tomb as the ex- 
 pression of the highest human ideal, 
 
XX. 
 The Religiously Unsifted. 
 
 THE phrase "religious disabilities " is to 
 English ears one of familiar and somewhat 
 ugly import. Its ordinary associations are with 
 bygone Test and Corporation Acts, with exclu- 
 sion of non-Anglicans from the Universities, 
 and other sordid features of our sectarian 
 strife. There is, however, a class of religious 
 disabilities of quite a different order, and which 
 merit more attention than they have hitherto 
 had. These relate not to the strife of parties 
 so much as to men's own nature and environ- 
 ment. They are disabilities not of law but of 
 brain and heart. Types of men are around us 
 who, as compared with their fellows, can perhaps 
 best be described as the religiously ungifted. 
 They lack a sense of things in this direction 
 just as others lack the feeling for music or 
 art. This fact has been strangely misinter- 
 
 H 
 
162 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 preted, and has led to the gravest mistakes 
 about human nature. It has been seized on 
 by sectarians as the mark between elect and 
 non-elect, as showing the dividing line between 
 nature and grace. The blunder was, perhaps, 
 excusable in earlier times, but we can now take 
 a saner estimate of matters. The wider survey 
 of to-day shows us that the distinction in this 
 respect between man and man, instead of mark- 
 ing a gulf between them, is a proof of their 
 essential solidarity. Its proper lesson lies in 
 a deepening of sympathy arising from a sense 
 of mutual dependence. 
 
 Before coming to this, however, it may here 
 be noted that there is a wide sense in which 
 our whole race is, as compared with what the 
 future may have in store, at present religiously 
 ungifted. The difference between the high 
 prophetic natures of the world and the dullards 
 who live by their lowest instincts may not be 
 greater than that between what man spiritually 
 is now and what lie will hereafter become. Our 
 present senses and perceptions are so many 
 windows through which we look out upon and 
 
THE RELIGIOUSLY UNGIPTED. 163 
 
 interpret the universe. Who knows that hu- 
 manity as it develops will not open out new 
 ones, affording entirely fresh views? The 
 world's history so far has been that of the 
 steady inflow of spirit, lifting the organisms 
 through which it works to ever higher levels, 
 and attuning them to finer perceptions. There 
 is no evidence that this process has ceased or 
 will cease. If evolution has brought us from 
 " the ape and tiger " stage to where we are, 
 why may it not bring us to a position where 
 our footing in the spiritual world shall be as 
 sure, and our outlook as wide, as now the one 
 is uncertain and the other limited ? 
 
 A conviction of this sort seems specially 
 appropriate to a time like our own. Our age, 
 as compared with some others, may be itself 
 described as a religiously ungifted one. The 
 cultivated man of to-day is 
 
 Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born. 
 
 Multitudes of earnest thinkers are in 
 the state described by dough's melancholy 
 lines : 
 
164 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 Eat, drink and die, for we are souls bereaved : 
 Of all the creatures under heaven's wide cope 
 We are most hopeless, who had once most hope, 
 
 And most beliefless that had most believed. 
 
 If, indeed, one were to take the current 
 literatures of France, Germany, Italy and 
 Scandinavia as indicating the opinion on this 
 subject of the most educated classes of the 
 modern world, one would say that religion, in 
 the old sense, had almost died out of cultivated 
 Europe. The condition is, however, we are 
 firmly convinced, one of temporary eclipse only, 
 and not of extinction. Religion is not dead, 
 but hibernating as preparatory to a new meta- 
 morphosis. Our race is on the way, through 
 a somewhat bleak transition stage, to a higher 
 altitude and a more advanced spiritual develop- 
 ment, where the secret yearnings of the soul, 
 at present so feebly supported by reason, shall 
 find as clear a scientific sanction as they will 
 a full inward realisation. 
 
 Coming now to the more individual aspects 
 of the topic, we note first that men are gifted 
 in the most varying degrees with the faculty of 
 religious perception. There are people born 
 
THE BELKHOITSLY UNGIFTED. 165 
 
 with the . prophetic instinct. From childhood 
 they dream dreams and see visions. They 
 have a sense for the unseen as distinct and 
 special as had Newton for mathematics and 
 Mozart for music. Their nature inwardly 
 and instinctively thrills to everything relating 
 to the ideal, the mystic, the suprasensuous. 
 Connected with this faculty of perception there 
 is usually an exquisite susceptibility to re- 
 ligious feeling. A strain of music, a function 
 of worship, an eloquent appeal, a view from a 
 mountain height, will produce in such a mind 
 an inner rapture which cannot be expressed in 
 words. It seems natural to think of characters 
 of this kind as specially the beloved of heaven. 
 Let us make no mistake. As a matter of fact 
 our seer is usually a very defective personage, 
 and if the world were peopled exclusively with 
 his type it would be very much poorer than it 
 is. The seer's neighbour, who is nothing if not 
 practical, who is designing bridges or inventing 
 locomotives, while the other is questioning his 
 soul, is the prophet's necessary counterpoise 
 and makeweight. 
 
166 STUDIES 0* THE SOUL. 
 
 To put one of these up and the other down 
 on the scale of moral worth ; to declare that 
 the ideality of the one is religion, and the 
 homely practicality of the other a kind of 
 worldliness, is a blunder which the world has 
 in past times made often enough, but which. 
 is hardly now excusable. Who has not known 
 the man of extreme devotional susceptibility, 
 of fluent and impressive religious utterance, who 
 has been as weak in other important points of 
 character as he is strong in these ! Such are 
 as a rule kept going in the world, and helped 
 to bear a useful part in it, by the presence at 
 their side of men who cannot put two words 
 together, whose minds are bare of religious 
 imagination, but who cordially appreciate in 
 others what they do not themselves possess, and 
 who make up the lack in the idealist temperament 
 by solid qualities of another kind. It is by this 
 distribution of the common spiritual heritage 
 over different individualities, each possessing 
 a part of the whole, and finding in his 
 neighbour that which is necessary to his own 
 completeness, that men realise their essential 
 
THE RELIGIOUSLY UXGIFTED. 167 
 
 oneness, as belonging each ttf the other, and 
 all to God. 
 
 It must not be overlooked that a man's 
 spiritual gifts lie in his environment as well as 
 in himself. We become, as Kant has taught 
 us, only properly aware of ourselves by the 
 impact upon us of the outside world. And one 
 may well deplore here the case of those 
 religiously ungifted, who never in their history- 
 have had the inspiration of contact with a 
 great spiritual personality, or whose career 
 has led them away from the accustomed 
 sources of religious life. Our Anglo-Saxon race, 
 wandering from its home to every corner of the 
 world, has fared strangely in this matter. 
 Ruling in the East over subject races, and 
 struggling in the far West and in the Southern 
 seas against primitive nature, it has on these 
 missions, with a singular spiritual recklessness, 
 begun by shutting itself off from its old moral 
 conditions. The nabob of a century ago was 
 commonly reported as dropping his religion at 
 the Cape, to pick it up again on his return 
 journey. The early Calif ornian and Australian 
 
168 STUDIES or THE SOUL. 
 
 mining camps observed Sunday by orgies of 
 whisky and cards. But in the Anglo-Saxon the 
 spiritual, however at times it may seem to go 
 under, invariably re-asserts itself. The Anglo- 
 Indian of to-day is a reputable and church- 
 going character, and San Francisco is now one 
 of the best steepled, of cities. The story, 
 indeed, of what has been done, amid the wildest 
 communities, to re-awaken in men a feeling 
 after their lost spiritual inheritance, makes it 
 practically certain that well-directed effort will 
 have results equally successful with the most 
 neglected classes at home or abroad. As the 
 ^Eolian harp vibrates to the wind, so does the 
 heart of man everywhere to the true message 
 of God. 
 
 A word, perhaps, in closing is needed to 
 secure that some of the foregoing is not mis- 
 understood. What has been said of the differ- 
 ences in men's natural religious capacity must 
 not be taken as implying that, in our view, such 
 differences are matters purely of temperament, 
 lying apart from a man's own will and moral 
 striving. As a matter of fact they are, at every 
 
THE KELIGIOTJSLY UNGIFTED. 169 
 
 point^ allied to character. On the one hand, a 
 man of rich inner faculty may, by indifference, 
 by moral obliquity, by breaking with the con- 
 ditions of its health and growth, starve or destroy 
 it. On the other hand, a nature which for years 
 has shown no religious aptitude will, by the 
 simple process of placing itself in the spiritual 
 current, and by yielding to the central demands 
 of the Divine life, discover in itself new and ever- 
 growing potencies of emotion and delight. It 
 is for each man, in fact, to sedulously cultivate 
 his own weak side. Let the idealist take 
 constant lessons in the practical, and reverence 
 the masters in that sphere. And let him whose 
 faculty is mainly in the region of the seen 
 and the solid understand that above all this 
 stretches a realm impalpable but most real, 
 the kingdom of the Spirit, man's true home, 
 whence come to him his highest glory, and 
 his purest joy. 
 
XXI. 
 Fog in Theology. 
 
 DESPITE the broadening light, heavy mist still 
 hangs over portions of the theological field. 
 In no corner of it is the fog denser than that 
 where lie the questions relating to knowledge 
 and revelation. Examples are continually 
 occurring of experienced theologians entering 
 this region to flounder hopelessly in its opaque 
 atmosphere, involving themselves and their 
 followers in dire confusions and contradictions. 
 The time has surely arrived when it is proper 
 to ask whether this fog is natural and inevi- 
 table, or whether it may not be an artificial 
 production, capable of being dissipated, to the 
 great advantage of all concerned. 
 
 Dropping metaphor, and coming to the plain 
 facts of the case, what we find is that religious 
 thinkers of various sects and schools agree 
 to regard the doctrines of the Bible as having 
 
FOG IN THEOLOGY. 171 
 
 reached man "by a special route, a fact which 
 is supposed to invest them with a peculiar 
 authority. We have, accordingly, < ' the truths 
 of revelation " spoken of as something distinct 
 from so-called secular knowledge, and as 
 occupying consequently a higher plane. These 
 specially-revealed truths are, we are told, found 
 only in the Bible, and they constitute it the 
 "Word of God, to which the reason must bow. 
 
 At this point comes in, for Protestants at 
 least, contradiction number one. For while on 
 this theory the reason is subordinated to the 
 Scriptures, it is by reason alone that the all- 
 important question as to what is and what is 
 not the Bible has, for them, been decided. The 
 Catholic evades the difficulty by asserting the 
 inspiration and infallibility of the Church 
 Councils which determined the Scripture canon. 
 But this resource is not open to the Protestant. 
 If he speaks of a providential guidance of the 
 mind of the fourth century in this matter, he 
 must accept what follows. For the Divine 
 guidance here accorded to the fourth century 
 cannot with any consistency be refused to the 
 
172 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 intellectual movement of the nineteenth. But 
 this admission knocks the first great hole into 
 the theory of a special source for Biblical truth. 
 For it means that we cannot admit Divine 
 inspiration as belonging to one period of 
 human history, without admitting it for all 
 periods. 
 
 But we may approach the subject from 
 another standpoint. It is constantly argued 
 that, if the doctrine of a special inspiration of 
 the Scriptures be abandoned, their authority 
 will be lowered. This is another way of saying 
 that a theory of special inspiration is a real 
 buttress to truth. Fortunately, we are able to 
 put this to a simple test. The secular sciences 
 have attained to their present position without 
 any support whatever of this kind. The doc- 
 trines on astronomy, geology, biology, and the 
 multitude of other subjects which have entered 
 into the consciousness of the civilised world of 
 to-day have no theory of inspiration to back 
 them. Have they suffered from the want of it ? 
 On the contrary, the singular fact is, that 
 while theology, with its inspiration theory, has 
 
FOG IN THEOLOGY. 173 
 
 suffered a prodigious decline in influence in 
 modern times, the authority of the sciences is 
 at its maximum, and is regarded everywhere 
 as resting on unshakeable foundations. The 
 " Special Source" theory of Scriptural truth 
 certainly does not appear to come out well from 
 the point of view of utility. 
 
 The same test will also, happily, avail in 
 another direction. The cry is constantly heard 
 that if, in the study of the Scriptures and of 
 spiritual truth generally, we make the reason 
 our guide and criterion we expose ourselves to 
 endless confusions. What refuge have we from 
 the endless vagaries of the human mind, from 
 the dreams of visionaries, and the rash asser- 
 tions of the ignorant ? If the Bible is a mixture 
 of truth and error, who shall finally show us 
 what to accept and what to reject ? How may 
 we decide amid the claims of warring teachers 
 and systems? Surely it is enough to say in 
 answer that precisely the same difficulties lie 
 against the authority of the reason in the 
 sciences to which we have alluded. They, as 
 well as religion, have had to struggle against 
 
174 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 every form of ignorance, of delusion, of contra- 
 dictory opinion. What has, in face of this, 
 secured their advance toward truth and 
 authority? Nothing but the ever-broadening, 
 ever-clarifying consciousness of the race; 
 nothing but the constant action of the common 
 verifying faculty, by which error is in the long 
 run discovered to be error, and is quietly 
 relegated to its place. 
 
 But we are told the special source of Scrip- 
 tural truth, as distinguished from other know- 
 ledge, is shown by the testimony of the prophets 
 and apostles, who were its organs. They speak 
 of a Divine action upon their mind, of the truth 
 they uttered coming to them as a " Word of the 
 Lord." In this we believe they spoke truly. 
 Only, they were not alone. When there flashed 
 upon the minds of a Copernicus, of a Kepler, 
 of a Newton, the truths concerning the 
 universe of which they were made the organs 
 to mankind, the conviction was not less clear 
 that what they had seen was, too, a part of 
 the Divine Order, an unveiling of the Divine 
 mind. 
 
FOG IN THEOLOGY. 175 
 
 It is time, indeed, that our religious vision 
 took a wider survey. What we plead for is not 
 a levelling down but a levelling up of faith. 
 We need to grasp the all-unifying, all-clarify- 
 ing idea that knowledge of every kind is 
 nothing less than an impartation to the human 
 consciousness of a portion of that Eternal 
 Reason which is the ground and source of all 
 being. What is the guarantee that any opinion 
 we may hold is true ? The answer is in its 
 agreement with facts, as witnessed to by the 
 highest consciousness of the race. The fact that 
 this common consciousness tends in its findings 
 evermore to unity is one of the surest proofs we 
 have that the individual mind derives from, and 
 rests upon, One Universal Mind, in which all 
 truth inheres, and that human progress and 
 enlightenment mean simply the inflowing upon 
 man to an ever-increasing degree of its radi- 
 ance. The reception of this light is revelation, 
 of which the truth in the Scriptures is one 
 part as the truth of science is another. There 
 is no room for specialising here, #nd there is 
 no need for it. When theology understands 
 
176 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 this, there will be no more building on the 
 boggy acre of Dualism, on which so many 
 rickety structures have hitherto been reared; 
 and religious truth, resting on the same basis 
 as that of science, will receive the same 
 universal acceptance. 
 
XXII. 
 Temperament in Theology. 
 
 THE death of Francis W. Newman will to a 
 multitude of minds inevitably recall the vivid 
 contrast between two closely-related careers. 
 The possibilities of divergence in modern 
 theological thinking could hardly be more 
 strikingly illustrated than in the life of the 
 brilliant Theist who has just passed away, as 
 compared with that of his greater brother who 
 died a Eoman Cardinal. Born of the same 
 parents, brought up under, and profoundly 
 responsive to, the same Evangelical faith, alike 
 equipped with the highest intellectual powers, 
 unworldly both to the degree of asceticism, 
 these two earnest spirits in their quest for truth 
 arrive, one at the negation of all the distinc- 
 tively Christian creeds, and the other at the 
 conviction that "the creed is the ingrafted 
 
 word which is able to save our souls," and that 
 
 13 
 
178 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 " a publisher of heresy should be treated as if 
 he were embodied evil." 
 
 This tremendous and, one might say, almost 
 tragic theological antithesis of the two 
 Newmans sets the mind in motion along a good 
 many trails. One of them especially seems 
 worth following for the results it may yield in 
 the inter esting, if somewhat obscure, province 
 of thought through which it leads. It is 
 evident that positions so different, arrived at 
 by two men so nearly related, and each so pure 
 and so hiprh-minded, could not be the result of 
 the working of pure rationality. On mathe- 
 matical subjects they were at one. That they 
 were so at variance in theology shows that in 
 this region another element than reasoning had 
 come into play. What happened in these two 
 instances has been happening over the whole 
 field. The positions arrived at by theologians, 
 the systems they create or support, will never 
 be understood by us until we have gone behind 
 them, and have investigated their actual pro- 
 ducing causes. And we shall not be long at 
 work before discovering that pure reasoning 
 
TEMPERAMENT IN THEOLOGY. 179 
 
 has had only a minor part to play in them. 
 We are specially dealing with theology here; 
 but the fact is that over vast regions of human 
 thought the really controlling power is not 
 evidence, or any logical process relating to it ; 
 it is temperament. 
 
 In developing their systems men act as trees 
 act in building up their structure. The oak, 
 by its "oak instinct/' seeks the outside 
 elements in air, soil and sunlight, which are 
 appropriate to it, and then turns them into its 
 own likeness. The thousand things repugnant 
 to it, or which its assimilatory power does not 
 reach, it leaves alone. In like manner a 
 leading mind, according to its secret affinities, 
 selects out of the infinite array of outside 
 phenomena the things which most strike it and 
 best suit it. It arranges and co-ordinates these 
 materials very much as we see the tree doing. 
 What in the one becomes trunk and branches, 
 becomes in the other an articulated intellectual 
 system. It is full of reasonings, but the 
 reasonings did not make it. They were the 
 retinue and camp followers of the primal 
 
180 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 instinct. Schleiermachers pectus est quod 
 theologum facit is true in a wider sense than he 
 intended it. Deep down in the inmost feeling, 
 in that " philosophy of the unconscious," which 
 waits yet to be explored, lies buried the real 
 secret of our theologies. 
 
 And this secret of temperament, which 
 compels our reasonings, which creates for each 
 of us in a way a separate universe, and which 
 has really made the creeds, differs so widely in 
 different men. Of few, indeed, can it be said, 
 as Tennyson sang of himself and his friend : 
 
 But thou and I are one in kind 
 As moulded like in Nature's mint ; 
 And hill and wood and field did print 
 
 The same sweet forms in either mind. 
 
 What men see depends on the instrument 
 within as much as on the object without, and 
 at present we have no means of bringing the 
 mental object-glasses to a common focus. 
 What is patent to the mystical faculty is 
 invisible to the critical, and vice versa. You 
 cannot yoke a Swedenborg with a Voltaire. 
 
 As if to give an object-lesson for all time in 
 
IN THEOLOGY. l8l 
 
 this subjective character of all theologies, we 
 have its most vivid illustration in the very 
 foundation documents of Christianity. A Paul, 
 a John, a James, standing alike in the centre 
 of the Christian movement, in vital and first- 
 hand relation with its transcendent facts and 
 forces, give us each their system of it, and each 
 is an absolutely different one. Christianity is 
 one thing to Paul, another to John, and yet 
 another to James. It is life and power and 
 infinite uplift to each of them, but their 
 separate conception of it as a system introduces 
 us to three distinct thought-worlds. 
 
 The same phenomenon has been repeating 
 itself throughout the history of Christianity. 
 Augustine had the same Christian material 
 to go upon as Origen. Very different was 
 the affair they made of it. There seems to. 
 be no common denominator between the order 
 of minds, such as that of a Scotus of Erigina 
 and a Zwingli, who both saw nothing in 
 the Eucharist but a commemoration, and that 
 of a Radbertus or a Manning, who found 
 transubstantiation writ large in the New 
 
182 STUDIES OF *HE 
 
 Testament. How are we to relatively estimate 
 the mental workings of a Calvin and a 
 Rabelais ? Both are Frenchmen ; they are 
 contemporary ecclesiastics, furnished with all 
 the learning of their time. The same religious 
 facts are within the purview of each. But 
 one emerges with the ee Institutes " as his 
 rendering of the account, the other with Panta- 
 gruel and the Thelema motto of ' e Fais ce que 
 voudras." 
 
 To suppose that the Church has escaped as 
 to its conclusions from this temperamental 
 factor by its device of General Councils is to 
 any one who has studied their history a vain 
 imagination. The Great Councils have in 
 every instance been examples, not of a com- 
 munity of minds, but of the predominant 
 influence of some one. Nicsea was the reflec- 
 tion of Athanasius ; to understand the Triden- 
 tine conclusions we need to study the mental 
 history of the Jesuit Lainez, who swayed the 
 assembly irresistibly by his oratory; the last 
 Vatican Council was the triumph of our own 
 Manning. Equally vain is it to expect that 
 
TEMPERAMENT IN THEOLOGY. 183 
 
 the development of the scientific spirit is going 
 all at once to eliminate the variations in 
 theology arising from the personal factor. A 
 sufficient evidence that this is not the case is 
 furnished by the later developments of the 
 Eitschlian school. That school is now begin- 
 ing to discover that KitschTs quarrel with 
 German Pietism was the result of a primal 
 repugnance, instinctive rather than rational, 
 and that this subjective feeling has seriously 
 limited his view in some important directions. 
 One of the most distinguished of his followers, 
 Harnack, has, in a recent German review, 
 expressed this feeling with much plainness. 
 
 But it is time to ask what all this amounts 
 to. In the first place, let it be remembered 
 that while human reason, in the strict sense, 
 has played a comparatively subordinate part 
 in the world's doctrinal movement, this does 
 not imply that the movement has been an 
 irrational one. Because those who thought 
 themselves architects turn out to be only 
 day labourers, it does not follow there has 
 been no architect. The signs are becoming 
 
184 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 more apparent that the different systems, 
 the result of the varying mentalities that 
 forged them, while not the truth, as their 
 authors fondly imagined, are all being made 
 to serve as means for getting at it. The 
 mystic and the rationalist, the minds in- 
 ductive and the minds deductive, have been 
 tunnelling through the same mountain, and 
 the work of each will count in the final 
 result. 
 
 And despite the difficulties in the way of 
 it, the prospect lies open of an ultimate agree- 
 ment, in the domain even of the human reason, 
 on the great questions of the spiritual life. 
 There is already an area, small yet growing, 
 of ascertained fact and scientific inference in 
 this region in which the best minds are prac- 
 tically agreed. There is no reason to suppose 
 that this area will not continue to extend. 
 Such a unanimity will be indeed the last 
 result of time ; but it is coming, and is worth 
 waiting and working for. 
 
 Meantime the wise man will use the systems 
 as his helpers while never allowing them to 
 
TEMPERAMENT IN THEOLOGY. 185 
 
 become his masteis. They have all in them 
 valuable material, which he will appropriate 
 for his own building purposes. He will realise 
 that he lives spiritually, not by them, but by 
 what is behind and beneath them. Life is 
 one thing, the theory of it another. A man 
 may be perfectly healthy with a hopelessly 
 wrong doctrine of nutrition, or without any 
 doctrine at all. New Testament Christianity, 
 offering him on the part of its most prominent 
 leaders three or four separate theories, and 
 showing the Christ living in and ennobling 
 them all, gives him an all sufficing lesson as 
 to the relative value of theory and fact. He 
 will strive ever for a coherent system, but will 
 realise that the root of the matter lies not 
 there, but in the Eternal Life in him which 
 the theory seeks to express. 
 
 Our little systems have their day, 
 The have their day and cease to bo ; 
 They are but broken lights from TLco, 
 
 And Thou, Lord, art more than thcv. 
 
XXIII. 
 On Accepting Ourselves. 
 
 THE end of the year is, in our modern civilisa- 
 tion, a season of general stocktaking. While 
 the counting-house overhauls its goods and 
 strikes balances, the pulpit, following the 
 fashion, invites men to reckon with their inner 
 selves. The spiritual exercise to which people 
 are thus exhorted is apt, with some natures, 
 to lead to results other than those contem- 
 plated by the preacher. Men have nowadays a 
 new fashion of dealing with their shortcom- 
 ings. Instead of taking them as a reason for 
 contrition and amendment, they make them a 
 ground of expostulation with Providence. 
 Heredity and the nature of things are the 
 sinners, and not they. The tables are turned, 
 and people at least, some of them are much 
 more occupied in criticising heaven than in 
 accepting its verdict upon themselves. This 
 
ON ACCEPTING OURSELVES. 187 
 
 modern discontent shows itself in two direc- 
 tions. With some it is a refusal to accept the 
 common human lot. With others it is a revolt 
 against their individual share in it. 
 
 Of course the general impeachment of human 
 life, as in itself an evil and not a good, now 
 fashionable in certain circles is not a special 
 birth of this age. We find it scattered over all 
 the ages. The Greeks, whose view of life is 
 strangely considered by some writers as 
 having been so much sunnier than the Chris- 
 tian, summed it up in that cheerful line of 
 Sophocles, which declares that " the best of all 
 lots is never ip be born at all." Omar Khay- 
 yam, too, in the eleventh century, could nutter 
 it with the most cynical of our modern pessi- 
 mists, with his idea of existence as 
 
 One moment in annihilation's waste, 
 One moment, of the well of life to taste. 
 
 In our own day this wail over life in general 
 has been largely the outcome of scientific 
 materialism. But not entirely. A gloomy 
 theology has had not inconsiderably to do with 
 it. It was this which, grafted on to a morbid 
 
188 STUDIES OP THE Soul. 
 
 temperament,, led John Foster to say that he 
 could never view the growth of population with 
 any other feeling than regret, and which wrung 
 from Professor Henry Rogers the avowal: 
 " For my part, I should not grieve if the 
 whole race of manhood died in its fourth year. 
 As far as I can see I do not know it would be a 
 thing much to be lamented." A pretty system 
 of the universe, surely, which could lead up to 
 such a conclusion ! We suspect, however, that 
 talk of this kind, whether it come from philo- 
 sophers, poets, or theologians, is generally the 
 outcome, not so much of arguments or systems 
 as of a mood. It is humanity in a bilious fit, 
 where the patient needs to be dealt with, not 
 so much by controversy as by a return to 
 primitive laws of health. 
 
 YvHiat we have specially in view in this 
 chapter, however, is not so much the state of 
 mind which rails at the common lot, as that 
 which refuses to be reconciled to its own. 
 There are, it has been said, two kinds of pride 
 one which lives by an exaggerated estimate 
 of oneself, and the other which refuses to let a 
 
ON ACCEPTING OURSELVES. 189 
 
 man contentedly accept himself. The last is 
 infinitely the more interesting. The study of 
 its working brings us so close to the pathos and 
 the tragedy of life. Men let slip their own 
 birthright while they are staring enviously at 
 their neighbour's. By a perverse ingenuity 
 they persist in placing their ideal outside their 
 own possibilities. Here is a man physically 
 weak, but compensated by a strain of rare 
 inner faculty which multitudes envy. He 
 despises it and himself in his yearning after 
 the to him unreachable. He would pitch 
 away his scholarship and creative power to- 
 morrow for the power of climbing an Alp, or of 
 winning the Diamond Sculls, and moans 
 because he has not the chance. In another 
 man this self -disgust is born of comparison. 
 The good in him is killed by the better in the 
 next man. He hears Eubenstein, and vows he 
 will never touch a piano again. He sees 
 "Little Billee" do that sketch of Trilby's 
 foot on the wall, and in despair drives his fist 
 through his own canvas. The men who have 
 the greatest difficulty in accepting themselves 
 
190 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 are not the dunces and the dead failures. 
 They are the clever people who by a hair's 
 breadth have missed being first. To know 
 they are gifted beyond the common, and that 
 yet, for want of some omitted pinch of salt in 
 their composition a lack it may be of physical 
 staying power, or from a bar sinister in their 
 connections, or an unlucky circumstance in 
 their history the other man has gained what 
 they once felt sure of ; this it is which makes 
 their martyrdom. 
 
 There is, so far as we know, only one thing 
 that, amid these temptations to the other view, 
 can reconcile ourselves to ourselves. This is 
 the primitive faith that our lot is an ordained 
 lot, given us to make the best of. Say, if we 
 will, after the modern fashion, that our life in- 
 heritance in its elements of body, mind, and 
 circumstance is just what our ancestors have 
 made it ; that its limitations, its thinness of 
 soil, its heavy encumbrances are due to their 
 mismanagement. If we are healthy-minded we 
 shall see in all this simply a reason for more 
 careful farming on our own part. If we can 
 
ON ACCEPTING OURSELVES. 191 
 
 thereby pay off some of the liabilities and hand 
 down the estate to our successors in better con- 
 dition than we found it, that will be something. 
 But there is more than this. The faith that 
 accepts our lot, whatever it be, as ordained, will 
 also see in it the battle-ground on which is to 
 be fought out the great fight for our own 
 personality, for our enduring spiritual self. On 
 this point we could not do better for modern 
 Pessimism, be it scientific, philosophic, or 
 religious, than to recommend to it the steady 
 reading of a thinker too little known in 
 England, the German Eothe. To get well into 
 the mind his conception of the universe, as 
 having for its one end the development of 
 spiritual personality by the conflict in all worlds 
 of free will with circumstance, a view in which 
 difficulties, sorrows, pains are regarded as 
 factors in the process, and heaven and the 
 angelic hierarchy as some of its achieved 
 results, is to sweep as with a keen north wind 
 the fogs out of our brain, and to set us cheer- 
 fully to work. 
 
 It is, too, a faith of this kind which enables 
 
192 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 \ 
 
 us, not only to accept ourselves, but also the 
 man who has beaten us in the race. We learn 
 to rejoice in his greater gifts and success as 
 enriching that common life of which we are 
 privileged to partake. Here comes in that deep 
 saying of Goethe : " If during our life-time we 
 see that performed by others to which we our- 
 selves felt an earlier call, but had been obliged 
 to give up, with much besides, then the beauti- 
 ful f eeling enters the mind, that only mankind 
 together is the true man, and that the 
 individual can only be joyous and happy when 
 he has the courage to feel himself in the 
 whole." 
 
 The doctrine, then, is, that we are to accept 
 ourselves as being, after all, something which 
 God meant, a possibility or a bundle of possibili- 
 ties out of which, with His help, we may 
 create a result which will enrich the sum total 
 of existence. Into the process our weakness 
 and pain, as well as our strength and joy, our 
 disappointment and defeat, as well as our 
 rapture and victory, come as needful elements. 
 But the self which we thus accept will never be 
 
Os ACCEPTING OUKSELVES. 193 
 
 a finality. It will be always a "becoming." 
 While planting our ideal in the region of 
 the possible we shall continually see 
 " Amplius " written across the attempts we 
 make to realise it. We may not reach the 
 goal we seek, but it will at least have drawn us 
 a long way upward, besides giving us a habit of 
 climbing which will very likely serve in the 
 next world as well as this. 
 
 That low man seeks a little thing to do, 
 
 Sees it and does it ; 
 This nigh man, with a great thing to pursue, 
 
 Dies ere he knows it. 
 
 That has the world here ; should lie need the next P 
 
 Let the world mind him. 
 This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed, 
 
 Seeking, shall find Him. 
 
XXIV. 
 Life's Unknown Quantities. 
 
 has, in one of his essays, a striking 
 passage in which he speaks of the way in 
 which the machinery of society adapts itself 
 almost automatically to the varying fortunes 
 of the individual. A man in the heat of 
 passion commits some crime which, in his 
 earlier years, would have seemed to him 
 impossible. When he comes to himself it 
 appears incredible that he should have done 
 such a thing. He finds, however, society, with 
 its police, its magistrates, its dock, its criminal 
 procedure, calmly and methodically dealing 
 with this phase of his career as though it had 
 been waiting for it through all his years. It is 
 a somewhat gruesome reflection, but there is an 
 idea underlying it which may be carried 
 further. The varied apparatus of civilisation, 
 and its startling relation to us under certain 
 
LIFE'S UNKNOWN QUANTITIES. 195 
 
 contingencies, suggests an even more complex 
 structure and its relations that, namely, of 
 our own organism and inner consciousness. It 
 would be a bewildering calculation to endeavour 
 to total up the sum of all the phases and 
 shades of thought and feeling passed through 
 by a fully-developed modern man in the course 
 of a lifetime. But the calculation would, after 
 all, be simple when compared with another 
 that of the experiences which, through that life- 
 time, have been possible to such a nature, but 
 into which it has never entered. There is some- 
 thing eerie in the thought of the pictures which 
 our inner machinery is prepared to throw at any 
 moment upon the screen of our consciousness, 
 but which will never come there. The precise 
 sensation realised by a person when threatened 
 by a terrible catastrophe, such as death by 
 burning or by murder; or that, on the other 
 hand, felt on the news of the coming to us of a 
 great fortune, is what few among us will ever 
 know. None the less the registering apparatus 
 for the production of that sensation is all ready 
 within us, and would, on occasion, produce it 
 
196 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 there with infallible accuracy. Poets have 
 often chosen psychological themes as the sub- 
 ject of their muse. They have written on 
 Hope, on Memory, on Imagination. There is 
 clearly a field open for another great poem 
 the Unrealised Possibilities of Consciousness. 
 
 But the subject of life's unknown quantities 
 is not exhausted by this class of consideration. 
 Another side of it emerges when we come to 
 study, not simply the existing capabilities 
 which are never called into action, but the 
 possible further development of the capacities 
 themselves. We are ridiculously ignorant, 
 most of us, about our own powers. There are 
 stops in our organ which we have never tried, 
 and which perhaps contain our finest tones. 
 Sir William Hamilton's story of the servant- 
 girl who, in the delirium of fever, repeated the 
 Psalms of David in Hebrew, from having over- 
 heard her clerical master daily read them 
 aloud a feat quite impossible while in health 
 and in her ordinary mental condition shows 
 the latent capacities of an untrained memory 
 when raised a little above its normal state. 
 
LIFE'S UNKNOWN QUANTITIES. 197 
 
 What is true of the memory is, we may sup- 
 pose, equally true of all our powers. E volu- 
 tion suggests that every faculty we possess is as 
 yet in a rudimentary condition. Some of those 
 destined in the future to play the most 
 important roles in the human drama are 
 hardly as yet above the horizon. The faculty 
 of second sight, for instance, so abundantly 
 testified to as existing amongst the Celtic 
 races ; and the mysterious powers, baffling com- 
 pletely our Western science, shown by Eastern 
 yogi, we may well believe are part of our 
 common heritage, if we knew only where to 
 find and how to train them. It is curious to 
 reflect what a revolution might come in our 
 view of the universe by the development in us 
 of a new organ of perception. A fresh window 
 let in to the wall of our consciousness might 
 make our knowledge of the spiritual world as 
 certain as that of the planetary system, and 
 cause Agnosticism, Pessimism, and Materialism 
 to be tenable only in Bedlam. And no sound 
 Evolutionist will say that such an organic 
 development is impossible. The outside uni- 
 
198 STUDIES or THE SOUL. 
 
 verse contains innumerable unknown quantities ; 
 and that man has, in his microcosm, the 
 elements which answer to them all, may be far 
 more than a poetic conceit. What Goethe 
 said of the Divine immanence has its meaning 
 also for man 
 
 Dim ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen 
 Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen. 
 
 The unknown about ourselves presents itself 
 also very vividly when we consider our daily 
 changing relation to environment. We do not 
 need to have read Kant to discover that our 
 consciousness from moment to moment is a 
 compound of the action of our internal percep- 
 tive organs and of the play upon them of the 
 external world. How far the variations in the 
 second of the conditions is capable of influenc- 
 ing our subjective states is what none of us is 
 sure about. Glycerine by itself seems the most 
 innocent of substances, but one of its combina- 
 tions forms the must terrific of explosives. In 
 like manner natures that for years have seemed 
 to themselves and to their neighbours born to 
 simplicity and to quietness have, by combination 
 
LIFE'S UNKNOWN QUANTITIES. 199 
 
 with new circumstances or new personalities, 
 developed into tremendous forces of revolution 
 or of crime. The devout gentleman-farmer of 
 Huntingdon never in his earlier years imagined 
 that he would one day make the name of Crom- 
 well so feared, hated, and admired. Had not 
 his uncle, the reigning Pontiff, insisted on his 
 joining as a young man, and against his own 
 will, the Papal Court at Borne, Alexander VI. 
 would probably have led a peaceful and unnoted 
 career, instead of making the name of Borgia 
 the symbol for everything execrable in cruelty, 
 hypocrisy, and vice. Of humbler men the same 
 is true. As Ruskin says : ' ( The virtues of the 
 inhabitants of many country districts are 
 apparent, not real ; it is only the monotony of 
 circumstances and the absence of temptation 
 which prevent the exhibition of passions not 
 less real because often dormant." Considera- 
 tions of this kind may well bring charity into 
 our judgments of others, and destroy overween- 
 ing confidence in our estimate of ourselves. 
 The result of the study of the unknown quanti- 
 ties in our own character, and in the environ- 
 
200 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 mentis to which it has yet to relate itself, should 
 make us realise, as each new day begins, our 
 absolute dependence for spiritual upholding and 
 progress on Him whose knowledge is perfect, 
 and whose promised grace is adequate to our 
 utmost need. 
 
XXV, 
 The Soul and Public Opinion. 
 
 IT is a singular fact, of which history is, 
 nevertheless, fertile in illustrations, that 
 prisons are apt to get as their occupants two 
 classes of people, the best and the worst. 
 The reason for this, namely, that these have 
 alike set themselves against the recognised 
 public opinion of their country, is very sugges- 
 tive as to the nature of this said public opinion, 
 its power, its limitations, and the true relation 
 of right-minded persons towards it as a rule 
 of conduct. 
 
 When a thoughtful man asks himself what 
 is the standard by which his daily life is regu- 
 lated he finds himself at every turn of his 
 investigations confronted by this seemingly 
 omnipresent and almost omnipotent force. The 
 laws of the land and its established institutions, 
 which limit his action in so many directions, are 
 
202 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 what may be called crystallised public opinion. 
 They are walls built of thoughts, the intellectual 
 and moral life of past generations which have 
 passed from the fluid into the solid state. The 
 religious forces that operate upon him are 
 another form of public opinion,, showing itself 
 again in its solid and fluid varieties. The 
 written Scriptures, the Church organisations, 
 customs, and usages are the religious thought 
 and feeling of former ages, at their origin flow- 
 ing and spontaneous, now preserved by the 
 fact of their having become congealed. 
 
 But the solidified public opinion of the past, 
 both in the religious and the secular life, 
 whether regarded as laws and codes or as 
 Scripture and Church, are, we are daily 
 conscious, supplemented in the control of 
 human action by a force which is even mightier, 
 the thought and feeling, namely, of the living 
 present, which is not fixed but fluid, and which 
 is welling up ever fresh from the hiddeir 
 fountains that feed the common human con- 
 sciousness. That this fluid form of publifc 
 opinion is stronger than the fixed is shown bj 
 
THE SOUL AND PCTBLIC OPINION. 203 
 
 the fact that in the region of laws and public 
 institutions it is incessantly modifying, destroy- 
 ing, and renewing ; while in religion it gives 
 quite new interpretations of its written authori- 
 ties, revises its opinion of their value, and 
 obtains outlooks independent of their direct 
 sugggestion. 
 
 Erom this it would seem to follow that fluid 
 public opinion, in the sense, that is, of the 
 existing common consciousness of an age, were 
 the ultimate standard both for the determination 
 of truth and the judgment of character. Look- 
 ing further, however, we are confronted by 
 some disturbing considerations which seems to 
 prevent our settling down in this conclusion. 
 We find, for instance, that public opinion in 
 the past has been full of errors in ideas and 
 of defects in morals. We shudder at the 
 views and practices sanctioned by the public 
 opinion of Carthage as depicted by Flaubert in 
 "Salammbo." In our own day, we of the 
 West are equally far from the conclusions of 
 the public opinion of those Indian hill tribes 
 described by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his 
 
204 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 Ethics, who regard murder and stealing as a 
 necessary element in the education and out- 
 fit of a virtuous character. Are, then, morals 
 an affair of latitude and of date, settled by rote 
 and voice of the majority in a given place and 
 time ? We know to the contrary. Not more 
 certain are we that Galileo was right in his 
 contention about the earth and the sun, though 
 in a minority of one, than we are certain that 
 the ethical ideas of the Carthaginians and of 
 the Indian hill tribes aforesaid represent moral 
 inferiority and falsity. 
 
 What, then, is the ultimate standard of truth 
 and conduct, and what is the relation to it of 
 public opinion? The line of thought we have 
 been following leads, we think, straight to the 
 answer. The standard is an Eternal Truth and 
 an Eternal Righteousness existent and inherent 
 in the universe, towards which the evolution of 
 the human mind and human character is a 
 constant approximation. In other terms, man 
 is in the presence of a slow but continuous pro- 
 cess of unveiling or revelation of this truth and 
 right. That he has continually blundered both 
 
THE SOUL AND PUBLIC OPINION. 205 
 
 in his mental and moral appreciations means 
 that he nearly always begins by misconstruing 
 the lesson set before him. But he ends by 
 mastering it, and by knowing he has done so. 
 
 The current opinion of an age, both in 
 science, ethics, and religion, represents then, 
 not the standard itself, but the degree to which 
 the ultimate truth, as it lies in the Divine mind, 
 has been apprehended, and acquiesced in by it. 
 And here lies the explanation of the anomaly 
 we mentioned at the beginning, of the ranks of 
 those condemned by existent public opinion, 
 numbering in them representatives at once of the 
 worst and of the best of mankind. The man who 
 defies public opinion may do so because he is 
 a rogue or because he is a prophet. The three 
 crosses at Jerusalem, on which hung two 
 thieves, and in their midst a Christ, is of this 
 antithesis the eternal illustration. The male- 
 factors were punished because they were be- 
 hind the ethical level of the public consciousness, 
 the Christ because He was beyond it. 
 
 The history of the onward movement of 
 society continually offers the same spectacle. 
 
206 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 When Pastor Hopkins, of Newport, U.S., 
 rose one morning in his pulpit and to his 
 congregation, made up largely of men whose 
 pecuniary interests were in the slave trade, 
 delivered a testimony, the first of its kind in 
 America, which, he said, had been laid on his 
 conscience to proclaim, to the effect that slavery 
 was un-Christian and iniquitous, he was exhibit- 
 ing the whole rationale of the Divine educa- 
 tion of humanity. For years he had kept step 
 with the rank and file of his people. He had 
 shared the public opinion of his time and place. 
 He saw what his countrymen saw. Then there 
 fell upon him the ray of a new dawn, and, like 
 Abraham of old, the sharer in a like experience, 
 he must go forth, following it, not knowing 
 whither he went. 
 
 We get here our answer to the question as 
 to the true relation of the individual to the 
 public opinion of his day. It is well for him 
 to keep up with it, for it is, on a multitude of 
 points, the product of successive revelations of 
 unspeakable value. The average maa will not 
 get beyond it will, in fact, need its esprit de 
 
THE SOUL AND PUBLIC OPINION. 207 
 
 corps to maintain himself at the height it has 
 reached. But the deeper spirits whom God 
 has chosen as prophets and leaders must ever 
 hold themselves open to the further unfolding 
 of His unceasing revelation, and in obedience 
 thereto to break rank and move on, as fore- 
 runners of the new and higher order. 
 
XXVI. 
 Our Best and Worst. 
 
 THE study of mankind is, under any circum- 
 stances, a sufficiently confusing business. But 
 it becomes doubly so when we take into ac- 
 count not only what people have actually done 
 in lif e, but what they might have done. For it 
 is very seldom, we imagine, that the best or the 
 worst in us gets either revealed or struck into 
 action. The man of exceptional moral solidity, 
 who has passed through his career without any 
 apparent catastrophe, has to admit to himself that 
 if certain moods and inclinations that have pos- 
 sessed him at times had coincided with an easily 
 possible set of external circumstances, the con- 
 junction might, for all he can see, have made 
 him a lecher or a thief. Happily, and he 
 may add providentially, the subjective con- 
 dition and the outer opportunity did not get 
 linked together, and he escaped. 
 
OUR BEST AND WORST. 209 
 
 But exactly the same may be said of the 
 possible good in him. When we read of men 
 in a colliery accident flinging themselves away 
 in an heroic attempt at rescue ; or of the five 
 hundred English infantry who, with their 
 officers, stood on the deck of the doomed 
 BirJcenhead, while the women and children 
 were rescued, and then calmly, as if they 
 were on parade, and without a man breaking 
 the rank, went down with the foundering 
 ship, our heart leaps at the moral grandeur 
 of it. Yet there are thousands of men about 
 who, if they had been at that pit mouth or 
 at that sliipwreck, would have done exactly 
 as these did, but whose present record is of 
 getting drunk with considerable persistency, 
 and of occasionally beating their wives. 
 Dickens's hero in " The Tale of Two Cities," 
 who after being long considered by himself 
 and his friends as a ne'er do weel, laid down 
 his life at the guillotine to save his friend, 
 is a man you may pick up in the next street. 
 There is a Divine act in him also if it only 
 
 got its chance, 
 
 U 
 
210 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 It is, indeed, the gradual dawn upon the 
 modern mind of the truth that a man is not 
 so much a fact as a possibility, "an eternal 
 becoming/' that is altering our whole way of 
 judging him, both religiously and for prac- 
 tical ends. When, for instance, we remember 
 out of what moral origins Sydney, Melbourne, 
 and San Francisco have reached their pre- 
 sent height of civilisation, we cannot in 
 our national appraisements set down our least 
 hopeful classes as a mere bad debt. They 
 are rather so much locked-up capital which 
 it is for society to discover how profitably 
 to employ ; a store of energy at present mis- 
 directed, which we have to find out how to 
 turn on to the social and iiidus trial mill- 
 wheels. 
 
 Looking at the subject in its personal aspect, 
 we are struck by the difference in the way men 
 take both the best and the worst in themselves. 
 The mass of people offer only their average for 
 outside consumption. Their self-revelations 
 have a limit, both in the upper and the lower 
 ranges. The chief significance of most auto< 
 
OUH BEST AND WORST. 21 1 
 
 biographies lies in what is left unsaid. The 
 exceptions to this and there have been some 
 extraordinary ones serve to prove the rule. 
 The candour of the man who tells us every- 
 thing seems unnatural, and even revolting. 
 When Rousseau calmly informs us in the 
 " Confessions " that he, the man who wrote 
 "Emile," with its lofty precepts on child 
 training, handed over his own children, all 
 of them illegitimate, to the fate of enfants 
 trouves, the fate, that is, of paupers deserted 
 of their parents, we feel that a man of his pre- 
 tensions in showing himself capable, first of 
 such a deed as this, and then of declaring it 
 to the world, was only excusable and even 
 explainable on the supposition of his latest 
 continental biographer that he was mad. We 
 have a like sensation in reading the memoirs 
 of that most astonishing of mortals, Benvenuto 
 Cellini. To find him on one page, as in his 
 description of his imprisonment in the Castle 
 of St. Angelo, setting forth his pious aspira- 
 tions, his unswerving faith in God, his delight 
 in the study of tjie Scriptures, and his visions 
 
212 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 of heaven, and on another, with equal minute- 
 ness and apparently equal satisfaction, telling 
 the story of his murders, and of his astounding 
 debaucheries, is to confound all our notions of 
 sane humanity. 
 
 These men, without reserves and without 
 remorse, were monstrosities. The average 
 mortal, at least among the Western races, 
 has a curious reticence about both the good 
 and the bad in him; the reticence being, on 
 the whole, perhaps greater about the former 
 than the latter. An English schoolboy would 
 rather be caught stealing apples than saying 
 his prayers; while his father would sooner 
 face a battery than imitate the Mussulman 
 who, at midday, dropped on his knees in Hyde 
 Park with his face to the East. The plain- 
 looking City man, who for twenty years has 
 talked politics and the news of the day with 
 his fellow-passenger on the way to town, has 
 never during that period given him a hint that 
 he is a mystic, a spiritual wrestler who has 
 discovered, with Omar Khayyam, that 
 Myself am heaven and hell. 
 
Gun BEST AND WORST. 213 
 
 Another of the singularities of this subject is 
 the apparently incommensurable difference be- 
 tween the quality of the best and worst in differ- 
 ent men. What common measure, for instance, 
 is there which will enable us to scientifically 
 determine the relative demerit of the worst in 
 a Carlyle and the worst in a Newman ? What 
 ratio is there between the bearishness of the 
 philosopher which made him, to his mother's 
 and his wife's cost, " gey ill to live wi'," and 
 the narrowness of sympathy in the theologian 
 which permitted him to declare that " a pub- 
 lisher of heresy should be treated as if he were 
 embodied evil," and to speak of the sudden 
 death of Arius as a declaration of Divine Pro- 
 vidence against his system? Here are two 
 great men at their worst, and yet, after 
 thousands of years devoted to the study of 
 morals, the world has absolutely no means of 
 appraising the relative quality of their bad- 
 ness. Our planet has plainly a good deal of 
 schooling to go through yet before it can call 
 itself educated. 
 
 As to the ultimate prospects of our best and 
 
214 STUDIES o# THE SOUL. 
 
 worst, the Christian evolutionist has no doubt. 
 It may be that in the past man's history has 
 been mainly zoological, a history that is of his 
 animal appetites and instincts, and that it is 
 only beginning to be a human history. But 
 the process of humanising and spiritualising 
 is going on and will go on. 
 
 The feeling of each one of us that we have a 
 Cain and Abel within, and that our business 
 here is to reverse the Scripture story and to 
 make our Abel kill our Cain, is in itself a kind 
 of revelation and an element of immense hope 
 about the future. There are, it has been 
 said, two kinds of pride one which makes us 
 approve ourselves, and another which makes 
 it impossible to accept ourselves. This last, 
 indeed, might be better named. It is a Divine 
 instinct, a grace, which arms us for the work 
 of self-reclamation. Every man needs to be 
 an Evangelisation Society whose operations 
 begin with himself. He will find there plenty 
 of scope. That some men have a vastly 
 harder fight here than others is unquestion- 
 able. When Newman, to mention him again, 
 
OUR BEST AND WOK ST. 215 
 
 says he was never troubled with the impulses 
 of sexual passion after twenty-five, what a 
 mighty simplification was this of a man's 
 moral problem ! To read, on the other hand, 
 of Chateaubriand, that the brilliant author of 
 the " Genie du Christianisme " had, as his inti- 
 mates knew, " an obscene Chateaubriand within 
 him," which at times broke out, is to find our- 
 selves nearer the condition of a good many 
 other men of genius who have been the world's 
 spiritual teacher?. 
 
 The problem here is puzzling and painful; 
 but all the light which converges on the 
 modern consciousness from science, history, 
 philosophy, and revelation makes it ever 
 clearer that in this great fight, waged in the 
 individual and the race, between flesh and 
 spirit, between good and evil, it is spirit and 
 good that will triumph. The human move- 
 ment is toward the kingdom of God. 
 
 And as I saw the sin and death, even so 
 See I the need yet transiency of Loth ; 
 The good and glory consummated thence. 
 
XSVIL 
 Survivals. 
 
 LIFE possesses few things more interesting or 
 mere revealing than its survivals. They have 
 such a story to tell. The skilled eye can 
 read in them a whole history of the past as 
 well as a prophecy of the future. In his 
 evolution upward man carries with him all 
 kinds of quaint material belonging to life's 
 lower stages. Each one of us, in the con- 
 tents both of body and mind, is a museum 
 of prehistoric time. We not only date from 
 an immemorial past, but we have brought it 
 with us. Drummond, in his " Ascent of Man," 
 has made the unscientific reader familiar with 
 the startling revelations of our physical frame ; 
 of tell-tale marks on limb and organ and 
 feature which show the way we have worked 
 upwards from the level of the 
 
 Dragons of the prime 
 "Who tare each other in their slime. 
 
SURVIVALS. 217 
 
 to where we now are. And the way in which 
 embryology confirms this story is, we suppose, 
 known more or less to most of us. 
 
 It is, however, in the region of the inner 
 man, of his thought and feeling, that we 
 come upon the most significant of life's sur- 
 vivals. Take, to begin with, those of race 
 and heredity. One hardly wonders at the 
 grip the doctrine of metempsychosis has 
 had upon men when we remember how, as 
 a race, we are haunted by the ghosts of 
 earlier times. We can never get rid of our 
 ancestors, and they have a habit of cropping 
 up in the most unexpected and sometimes 
 most disagreeable ways. Into a family full 
 of pieties and respectabilities will be born a 
 son of primitive and barbarous instincts, in 
 whom the bewildered parents can trace no 
 resemblance to themselves. The resemblance 
 is indeed not to them, but to a disreputa- 
 ble ancestor of five generations ago, whose 
 qualities have slumbered in the blood of 
 their line from then till now. Our fight 
 to-day is not only with the difficulties of 
 
STUDIES OF THE SouL. 
 
 the present, but with these spirits of the 
 past. 
 
 Man's religious history is full of the element 
 of survival. All the great world faiths are 
 rich in relics of earlier forms. The Jewish 
 accounts of the Creation, the Flood and the 
 Fall are, as every Sunday scholar now knows, 
 directly related to Assyrian and Babylonian 
 legends. In like manner Christianity has 
 taken over all manner of relics of ruder faiths. 
 Christmas was a pagan festival of the winter 
 solstice, and has become Christian by adop- 
 tion. The advice given by Pope Gregory to 
 Augustine in his dealing with the heathen 
 English, not to abolish their festivals or their 
 temples, but to turn them to Catholic uses, 
 has been followed to such an extent through- 
 out Christendom that the archaeologist finds 
 everywhere in local religious usages a kind 
 of baptized paganism. Mohammedanism ex- 
 hibits the same law. It is full of remains 
 of the earlier Arabic cult which Mohammed 
 superseded. The most singular illustration 
 of this is perhaps the worship paid to the 
 
SURVIVALS. 219 
 
 Kaaba, or black stone of Mecca, held to 
 have fallen from heaven. The religious ob- 
 servance paid to it is in strange contradic- 
 tion to the Mohammedan prohibition of idols. 
 As a matter of fact, the prophet found 
 the cult of the stone too ancient and 
 too deeply rooted to permit of its being 
 ignored or destroyed. Like a good business 
 man, therefore, he appropriated its religious 
 vogue as part of the assets of the new 
 faith. 
 
 So far we have been dealing with the sub- 
 ject on its purely matter-of-fact and historical 
 side. There is an aspect of it, however, which 
 permits of another kind of treatment. It is 
 the survivals in our personal life which come 
 closest home to us. And out of the infinite 
 variety of them there are some specially 
 worthy of selection for the light they filled 
 on character and destiny. 
 
 The most obvious of our personal survivals 
 is the one contained in memory the mar- 
 vellous faculty which makes our past a 
 present, and permits UE to repeat our life 
 
220 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 to ourselves a thousand times over. Nothing 
 perhaps so vividly exhibits our earthly career 
 as a progress from the natural to the spiritual 
 as the operation of memory. For in its pro- 
 cesses we see the raw material of experience, 
 the rough products of the consciousness in 
 its contact with the world, subtilised, 
 etherealised, made into possessions of pure 
 spirit which are held by it for ever. The 
 value of this form of our life lies in the 
 fact that it is, to so unique an extent, under 
 the mind's own control. Our daily contact 
 with the world is an encounter forced upon 
 us whether we will or no. Its incidents and 
 experiences are our fate, which we cannot 
 avoid and must make the best of. But in 
 the survival life of memory we can pick 
 I and choose. And we wonder that people do 
 not value higher than they seem to, this 
 glorious boon permitted to mortals of being 
 able, in the midst of monotonous tasks, to 
 call back at will their days of joy, to repro- 
 duce the merry jest, the glorious mountain 
 climb, the moment of unexpected success. 
 
SURVIVALS. 221 
 
 the feast of kindred minds, the supremo 
 heights of feeling which have made up life's 
 best hours. 
 
 Another of the great personal survivals is 
 that which belongs to the region of feeling, 
 and which is illustrated specially in religion 
 and love. In religion that which counts is 
 not so much what we start with as what 
 survives. A man of fifty who has thought 
 his way through the problems of an age 
 like our own, lives in a mental region 
 startlingly different from that of his youth. 
 A whole world of ideas has dropped away. 
 He looks over a new heaven and a new 
 earth. Yet, if his life has been pure and 
 his intent honest, his religious feeling will 
 have come out of the hurly-burly no whit 
 damaged and in its essence scarcely changed. 
 If difference there be it is that his faith is 
 more essentially childlike. All the motives 
 to trust, to sacrifice, to service, and to love 
 have strengthened with the wider horizon 
 and the deepened experience. From what 
 he has learned of fatherhood he understands, 
 
222 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 as he never could in the earlier years, what 
 it is to be a child. 
 
 The same principle holds in love. The test 
 of it is its survivals; The earlier period, 
 with its passional attraction and its tumult 
 of the senses, offers a judgment more or 
 less confused. It is when, with husband 
 and wife, this phase of the relationship has 
 been passed through and discounted, that 
 one can discern whether or no the root of 
 the matter is in them. For a true union 
 is another illustration of the divinely ordered 
 progress of life from the natural to the 
 spiritual. And it is in its later stages that 
 we discern whether the flower has produced 
 the fruit. A relationship such as that be- 
 tween Mr. Holt Hutton and the wife whose 
 shattered frame he through long years tended 
 with such devotion is one in which through 
 the veil of the flesh we see shining the 
 divinest things. 
 
 We said a moment ago that it takes 
 maturity to understand what it is to be 
 8. child. The remark is suggestive of onp 
 
SURVIVALS. 223 
 
 of the happiest of life survivals, that of 
 the boy in the man. Where it exists we 
 have the miracle of perpetual youth. The 
 boyhood of the old fellows who under- 
 stand this secret, who can at sixty "laugh 
 the heart's laugh," to whom a country walk, 
 a schoolboy's face and talk, a game of 
 cricket (played by deputy), stir all the by- 
 gone enthusiasms, has a distinct advantage 
 over the boyhood that is only in its teens. 
 The grown-up boys have the youthful feel- 
 ing and, what the other youngsters are not 
 so conscious of, a proper sense of its delight- 
 fulness. Here, again, we discern the upward, 
 the etherealising movement of the truly 
 human life. What was given it at the 
 beginning in the rough experimental form 
 it retains later as a spiritual essence. The 
 boyhood of the boy is animal. That of the 
 man has a touch from another sphere. 
 j The whole of this topic hangs together, 
 and its evidence points one way. In man's 
 physical frame, in his religious faiths, in 
 fyis social relationships, in his innermost 
 
224 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 feelings we discover marks of lowliest origin, 
 but of an ever upward movement. And 
 the depth of the beginning is in startling 
 contrast to the height of the consummation. 
 The progress of humanity is from nothing 
 to the infinite. Out of the material it 
 fabricates the spiritual. And the perman- 
 ence of this last is of all life's survivals 
 the greatest. Said his friends to Socrates 
 before he drank the hemlock, "How shall 
 we bury you?" "As you please/' was the 
 reply, "but first be sure that you have me." 
 To the old Greek thinker was it clear, as 
 on higher evidence it has become yet more 
 clear to us, that the inner wealth of the 
 soul, the spoil of its struggle in this world 
 of sense, will be life's great survival after 
 its last grim fight with death. 
 
xxvm. 
 
 The World's Silences. 
 
 THERE is a whole psychology of silence. The 
 gamut of emotions drawn up by Fontenelle, the 
 thirty-seven states of mind described by the 
 Buddhists, might be stated in terms of silence 
 almost as well as in those of speech. Every 
 human relationship, from that of entirest 
 harmony down to the last extremities of 
 estrangement, can be expressed by silence. It 
 may mean the highest bliss or the direst 
 wretchedness, life's comedy or its tragedy. And 
 man encounters not only the human silences. 
 Stamping themselves at times even more 
 vividly on the soul, forming by turns its conso- 
 lation, its terror, its baffling mystery, are those 
 of nature and the Infinite, The topic alto- 
 gether offers to the analyst far more material 
 than we can here deal with. Suffice it to 
 
 touch one or two of its salient points. 
 
 If 
 
b'i< 'lifES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 Nothing appeals more powerfully to the 
 imagination than the great silences of nature. 
 This overcrowded planet has some lonely 
 places still. Our own thought in this connec- 
 tion goes back to an unfrequented pass in the 
 Orisons, climbed alone in the depth of winter, 
 where, high above all trace of life, shut in on 
 every side by walls of snow and rock, the blue 
 sky above seeming, to the eye turned to it from 
 the dazzling white beneath, an awful ebon 
 black, the beating of the heart was the one 
 thing audible, and the sensation that of being 
 at the bottom of a crater in the moon. Such 
 experiences help us to picture what the 
 silence must be in places like the far depths of 
 the Antarctic circle, where for countless 
 centuries there has been no voice, no human 
 footfall, no movement of life, nothing but 
 
 A wind that shrills all night 
 
 In a waste land where no man comes, 
 
 Or hath come since the making of the world. 
 
 We need not, however, go so far afield for 
 the world's possibilities of silence. Who of us 
 has not, in lonely watches of the night, come, 
 
THE WORLD'S SILENCES. 227 
 
 by our own homestead, upon a hush of things, 
 intense, mysterious, as though Nature were 
 listening for some whisper to her from the 
 Infinite ! 
 
 Creation sleeps : 'tis as tlie general pulse 
 Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause, 
 An aTvful pause prophetic of her doom. 
 
 Nowhere, so far as our reading goes, has the 
 awe of such a time and the soul's response to it 
 been more vividly portrayed than in Isaac 
 Taylor's essay on " A Country Hide in a Dark 
 Night." Whoso wants a masterpiece of 
 observant imagination, and to be led to the 
 very centre of the secret of stillness, cannot do 
 better than open the works of this acute thinker 
 and prose-poet too little read in these days 
 at that page of them. 
 
 Meantime we may come here from nature's 
 to some of the human silences. These are, as 
 we have said, of all kinds and orders of signifi- 
 cance. There is one observation, however, of 
 which they are alike susceptible. Extreme 
 emotions of all kinds are silent. Joy, terror, 
 astonishment, rage, when carried to an extrein- 
 
228 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 ity, are without voice. Just as the external 
 vibrations which produce sound when carried 
 beyond a certain velocity go beyond the recog- 
 nition of the ear, so the soul's internal vibra- 
 tion, however caused, may reach extremes 
 which transcend speech. These, however, are 
 abnormal, and for the most part momentary 
 conditions. More fruitful is the study of the 
 silences which obtain in ordinary life. 
 
 Pleasant to think of, for instance, is the 
 silence of perfect sympathy. This is the test 
 of intimacy. A fellowship is only complete 
 when the partners in it find themselves entirely 
 at ease without the necessity of a word. We 
 are a long way from this condition when, as 
 often happens, we talk and talk simply because 
 we realise that a pause would be awkward on 
 both sides. The picture of Carlyle and his 
 mother sitting at opposite sides of the fireplace, 
 each smoking a long churchwarden, in absolute 
 content, but without a word passing, illustrates 
 precisely what we mean. We get here, perhaps, 
 a foretaste of a stage of being when souls will 
 communicate without the cucabrous apparatus 
 
THE WORLD'S SILENCES. 229 
 
 of language. Under present conditions even 
 the degree is marvellous to which sympathetic 
 natures can influence each other without words. 
 There are souls which, in silence, seem to give 
 off of their very essence and to interpenetrate 
 others with it. It is as though the harmony 
 within communicated a rhythmic pulsation 
 which played on responsive natures like spirit 
 music. A volume lies in the sentence in the 
 life of Lord Lawrence which says that he felt 
 uneasy if his wife left the room. Happy man ! 
 To possess as one's own this benediction of a 
 presence that can bless without a word is to be 
 rich indeed. If the sympathetic natures could 
 all find each other what high bridals would 
 there be ! 
 
 But as there is a silence from perfect sym- 
 pathy, so is there one, equally interesting, 
 though not so pleasant to contemplate, from 
 imperfect sympathy. Of this species, indeed, 
 there are all varieties and shades. There is 
 that, for instance, which falls at times upon 
 the advanced thinker when in certain circles. 
 He is, perhaps, brusquely asked for his position 
 
230 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 on some question in religion or theology, and 
 he finds himself unable to state it. He cannot 
 properly interpret himself. His interlocutor, 
 he feels, is not in a position to judge the 
 evidence. He has not passed through the 
 experiences, the studies, the thought processes 
 which have led to his own standpoint. He is 
 entirely clear about the matter himself, but his 
 words, which mean one thing to him, but 
 would mean something else to this less prepared 
 mind, would certainly introduce confusion 
 there. He is compelled to a policy of reserve. 
 If he speaks at all it will be, as with a 
 greater Teacher before him, in parables, keep- 
 ing his fullest thought for those who can 
 receive it. 
 
 What an inward history lies behind these 
 silences, if one could only get at it ! One 
 wonders what passed through the mind of 
 Tauler when for the space of two years he, the 
 great preacher and spiritual leader, found him- 
 self dumb in the midst of his people. What a 
 deeper tragedy, too, that of a Eoger Bacon, 
 endowed with one of the greatest intellects that 
 
THE WORLD'S SILENCES. 231 
 
 Europe has ever produced, yet, perforce, keep- 
 ing his lips sealed because his message to the 
 monkish horde around him spelled only heresy, 
 blasphemy and insanity ! On a smaller scale 
 crucifixions of this kind are going on all around 
 us. Into a family, every other member of 
 which is rudely materialistic, is born a high 
 sensitive nature, unworldly, filled with ideals, 
 throbbing with intense response to the spiritual. 
 That nature can never speak of its deepest 
 where it is. And the pitifullest thing of all is 
 when one sees such spirits, despairing of being 
 understood, saying with Amiel, "I cannot be 
 in the right all alone," and so trying to rid 
 themselves of the shame of their singularity 
 by a move downward to the common level. 
 It is the worst of treasons. Less heinous 
 were it to deliver one's country to the 
 enemy than to repudiate the best that is in 
 ourselves. 
 
 We can only hint in closing at what is the 
 deepest side of our theme. We mean the 
 awful to some natures almost maddening 
 silence of the universe toward our human 
 
232 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 questioning. The picture in " Tancred " of 
 the hero, a nineteenth century Englishman, 
 journeying to Mount Sinai and prostrating 
 himself on its bald summit, crying for a new 
 revelation, is a pathetic if overdrawn illustra- 
 tion of the soul's ceaseless desire for some 
 authentic utterance to it from Heaven. That 
 desire has built churches, created legends, 
 formed religions. Man has endless stories of 
 heavenly communications, yet when we our- 
 selves look up and listen, how complete and 
 baffling is the silence ! Science explodes the 
 legends and declares that no articulate voice, 
 except that of man himself, has been ever heard 
 on this planet. The worlds revolve around us, 
 the stars glitter in their abysmal depths, but 110 
 word comes to us from them. What then? 
 Has faith lost its foothold ? In no wise. What 
 all this amounts to is simply the reaffirmation, 
 in other terms, of our deepest doctrine, that of 
 Incarnation. The voice that speaks to man 
 comes ever through man. The entrance of the 
 Divine into our life is always via our own 
 thought and intuition. That the great truths 
 
THE WORLD'S SILENCES. 233 
 
 on which we build rose first and shaped them- 
 selves in the human consciousness detracts no 
 whit from their divinity. It points to their 
 source while indicating the way they have 
 travelled. 
 
XXIX. 
 The Soul's Pathfinders. 
 
 A CHARMING book, written a generation ago by 
 a well-known American divine, entitled, " The 
 Rifle, Axe, and Saddlebags," depicts in vivid 
 fashion the life of the backwoods preacher of 
 an earlier time. He had to be an expert as 
 much in handling a rifle as a text, to know not 
 only how to preach sermons but to swim rivers, 
 and to be as thoroughly at home in dealing 
 with a grizzly as with a convert. It was a 
 great race of religious frontiermen, this gener- 
 ation of simple-minded, sinewy-bodied, devout- 
 souled, singing, praying, rejoicing evangelists 
 of prairie and of backwood, worthy of the 
 Church's lasting and loving remembrance. But 
 they, and such as they, form only a portion of 
 the heroic band who, as ive review the story of 
 the world's religious progress, occupy the 
 position which our title designates. For the 
 
THE SOUL'S PATHFINDERS. 225 
 
 pathfinder is of many types and of varying 
 tasks. He has immense diversities, combined 
 with elements that are common. The charac- 
 teristic that unites him to the rest of his 
 special genius is that he is, in his own line, 
 always a frontierman, a border fighter, a 
 spiritual Uhlan, ever in advance of the slower 
 moving main body. 
 
 The presence throughout history of the path- 
 finder is, indeed, when we think of it, an 
 impressive lesson on the destiny at once of 
 religion and of the human race. Every gener- 
 ation tells the same story. It is of a constantly 
 widening territory, both of action and of 
 thought; of the mass of men, wearied in the 
 struggle by which the new region has been 
 secured, anxious to settle down in it, and to 
 rest awhile that they may enjoy it ; and then 
 of the call from the elect spirits, ever in 
 advance, to strike tents and move on again to 
 the further realms which they have descried. 
 The drowsy mass, waked thus untimely from 
 their slumbers, badger and bully their 
 disturbers, cull them bad names and otherwise 
 
236 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 ill-treat them. But they end by getting up 
 and staggering on in their wake. Wonderful 
 pilgrimage of humanity, which is never 
 permitted to cease, and which is carrying it on 
 towards a knowledge, a power and a perfectness 
 which seem without end ! 
 
 The lonely pathfinder who marks out the 
 track is, as we have said, of various kinds. In 
 the directly religious sphere of which we are 
 now treating we see him by turns as evangelist, 
 as administrator, as mystic, as pure thinker. 
 As thus named these seem very different men. 
 But there is a strong family likeness among 
 them. For one thing, they alike realise that 
 in the deepest sense they are " alone, yet not 
 alone." They have appeared in the world to 
 express or put into action a new thought. Yet 
 they know that this thought is in no sense 
 peculiar to their individuality. It is a birth of 
 the age, inevitable, necessary. It existed 
 before as an electricity diffused. In them it 
 has come to a spark, and men recognise the 
 spark as a flash from heaven. . They here 
 illustrate what Lamonnais has so finely said : 
 
THE SOUL'S PATHFINDERS. 237 
 
 that "thought, in its rise and progress, is a 
 necessary thing. It comes from God. Not the 
 thought of each individual, but the universal 
 thought which goes on from stage to stage, 
 and which is a kind of progressive revelation." 
 The function* of the frontierinan here is to 
 mediate that revelation. 
 
 When men have once grasped the new 
 thought, it appears so simple that after 
 generations wonder there could have been any 
 fuss about accepting it. The people who 
 wonder should reflect on the difference be- 
 tween making a road and travelling along it. 
 The idea which dawned upon John Wesley, 
 and which made him the religious pathfinder of 
 the eighteenth century, that as people did not 
 come to the Church, the Church must come to 
 the people, appears a very obvious one to us. 
 But so great a man as Bishop Butler could not 
 see it, and denounced Wesley as a bad Church- 
 man for putting it into practice. 
 
 This gift, indeed, of seeing first the necessary 
 thing, in the domain either of thought or 
 action, is one which the possessor has to pay 
 
238 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 dearly enough for. For one thing his lot is to 
 be lonely, and that as much when he has 
 followers as when he is without them. For the 
 follower is not a companion. By the very fact 
 of following he shows the difference between 
 himself and the leader. The worthy Metho- 
 dist who scrupulously observes the ecclesiastical 
 routine of his Church is doing exactly the 
 opposite of what Wesley did himself. Wesley 
 was an originator, while this man is an imi- 
 tator. The leader broke Church rules to gain 
 higher ends. The follower is encased within 
 his rule as an end in itself. The rank and file 
 can march gaily enough, for there are foot- 
 prints on the road they take. The pathfinder, 
 meanwhile, on whom, their gaze is trustingly 
 fixed, moves solitarily on his untrod road, 
 devoid himself of all such help, with his eye 
 searching the awful night for the guidance of 
 its far-off stars. It was a dim consciousness of 
 what this business meant, which, when that 
 prime frontierman of these later ages, Martin 
 Luther, walked up the imperial audience hall at 
 Worms, made the doughty warrior, George of 
 
THE SOUL'S PATHFINDERS. 239 
 
 Frondsberg, say, as he touched him on the 
 shoulder with his gauntlet: "Little monk, 
 little monk, thou hast a fight before thee which 
 we whose trade is war never faced the like of." 
 The hardy swordsman was right. The peers of 
 "the little monk " in that hour were not such 
 as he. They were George Fox, cutting out his 
 suit of leather, and announcing the kingdom of 
 the Spirit; Benedict, sending out his first 
 colony from Monte Casino; Abraham, going 
 out " not knowing whither he went." 
 
 But the pathfinders, if they have their 
 special sorrows, have at the same time their 
 special consolations. One of these is the clear 
 sense of their call to speak or act as they do. 
 " Ich Jcann nicht anders " is not Luther's word 
 only, but that of all his class. To the voice of 
 contemporary opinion which condemns them 
 they find opposed a more imperious opinion 
 within them, which they dare not disobey 
 because they know it is higher. Opposition, 
 indeed, only heartens them. It is the clash of 
 the tournament which is to prove them true 
 knights. They ,feel about it, as did St. 
 
240 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 Teresa, one of their number, who, speaking of 
 her persecutions, said, "My soul is then so 
 mistress of itself that it seems that it is in its 
 kingdom and has everything under its feet." 
 And the voice within which compels them 
 has a wondrous way of compelling others. 
 That "demonstration of the Spirit" of which 
 an illustrious member of this company spoke 
 as accompanying his words is characteristic of 
 their utterance. For their speech lays bare that 
 Universal Reason which is the basis of their 
 soul's life, and which men know to be Divine. 
 One thinks here of Francis of Assisi when 
 before the College of Cardinals, forgetting the 
 address which, under the advice of a friend, 
 he had prepared for the occasion, and instead, 
 as an old biographer chronicles, " falling 
 back on his inspiration," with the result that 
 the august audience was overwhelmed with the 
 feeling that here before them was a man of 
 God with a message from God. 
 
 A topic like this branches in all directions 
 if one had space to follow the trails. There is, 
 for instance, the curious way in which men, 
 
THE SOUL'S PATHFINDERS. 241 
 
 who gave little attention to religion as 
 generally conceived, have proved to be never- 
 theless eminent religious pathfinders. George 
 Stephenson had as little to do as most men 
 with theology. But his railway locomotive, in 
 making the evangelist free, on easy terms, of 
 the whole world, and bringing into the range 
 of possibility such a gathering as the Chicago 
 Parliament of Eeligions, has enlarged the 
 religious frontier more than the united labours 
 of shiploads of D.D.s. Darwin, too, has not 
 been known as a constructive theologian. But 
 there is no theological system of to-day which 
 is not full of his thought. The two kingdoms, 
 indeed, of matter and spirit intersect at every 
 point, and a man cannot do good honest work 
 in the one without making important contribu- 
 tions to the other. 
 
 A study like this should be sufficient to show 
 how the idea of standing still in any depart- 
 ment of the Church's life has, by the very 
 nature of things, been rendered impossible. To 
 enter into its good land of truth and privilege, 
 to possess and enjoy it, to cultivate it, and 
 
 16 
 
242 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 gather its richest harvests is that to which 
 we are plainly invited. What is forbidden is 
 to build a wall round it with the inscription, 
 "Thus far, and no farther." Which is only 
 another way of saying that the soul is placed 
 in an infinite universe, and that its destiny 
 there is to expand to infinity. 
 
XX K. 
 The Soul and Heredity. 
 
 THE extent to which the religious thinking of 
 the day is being influenced by science is shown, 
 amongst other things, by the attention bestowed 
 by religious as well as by scientific teachers on 
 the subject of heredity as related to character. 
 The age-long controversies between fatalism 
 and free-will have in our day reappeared under 
 new aspects. The predestination of an Augus- 
 tine and an Edwards, founded upon metaphysi- 
 cal and theological grounds, has been trans- 
 formed into the doctrine of a Galton, a 
 Lombroso, and a Weismann, which fixes the 
 destiny of the human subject by the inherited 
 character of the germ-cell from which he has 
 sprung. It is true that on crucial points of the 
 problem the experts are still at open war. Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer and Professor Weismann are 
 at loggerheads as to whether acquired niodinca- 
 
244 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 tions are or are not transmissible by inheritance. 
 Biologists are divided into those who declare 
 life in all its developments to be merely a form 
 of motion and of chemical affinities, and the 
 large number represented by such masters of 
 research as the physiologist Bunge, who hold 
 that in vitality there inhere a force and a 
 mystery which nothing discoverable in the 
 inorganic world can explain. 
 
 Spite of these differences, however, it is 
 undeniable that the trend of a large volume 
 of modern scientific thought has been in the 
 direction of determinism. A man's character, 
 it is held, is the outcome of his past ancestry, 
 as inevitably as the Alpine torrent is a resul- 
 tant of the glacier above. In the words of Mr. 
 Galton, in his work on "Hereditary Genius/' 
 "a man's natural abilities (and, he would add, 
 character) are derived by inheritance under 
 exactly tne same limitations as are the form and 
 physical features of the whole organic world." 
 
 The results of this widely prevalent view of 
 things crop out in various directions, and with 
 curious effect. One of them is the return of 
 
THE SOUL AND HEREDITY. 245 
 
 many speculative thinkers to the notion of 
 Plato in his " Kepublic," that the true way of 
 improving the human race is by a scientifically- 
 directed system of breeding. We apply this 
 method, it is argued, with immediate and strik- 
 ing results in dealing with dogs, cattle and 
 horses. In the direction where the results 
 would be the most imposing, namely, with man 
 himself, we neglect it entirely. Society will 
 only put itself on the pathway leading to the 
 highest physical, mental and ethical excellence 
 when it recognises the necessity of regulations 
 in the interests of the whole organism, by 
 which bad, weak, diseased and socially deficient 
 members are weeded out, or at least prevented 
 from reproducing their kind, and the race con- 
 tinued by the proper mixture of the essentially 
 fit. Another indication of the present mental 
 temper on this subject is the manner in which 
 fatalism as to character is practically taken for 
 granted in much current literature and current 
 life. Ibsen is most frequently quoted as the 
 dramatic exponent of this view. But he is not 
 alone. When Dodo, in Mr. Benson's popular 
 
246 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 book, justifies all her procedures on the ground 
 that she is what she was made, and that she was 
 not consulted in the making,, she speaks as a 
 type, figuring largely, not only in the creations 
 of novelists, but in the living world of to-day. 
 Adam shifted his responsibility on to the 
 shoulders of his wife. His descendants are 
 shifting it back on their progenitors, himself 
 included. It is an easy-going theory, and to 
 many people simplifies things a good deal. 
 
 At this point we may ask what religion has 
 to say on these subjects. To begin with, it is 
 to be noted that the Bible is full of the doctrine 
 of heredity. Whatever view we may take of the 
 Fall, it holds as a declaration of the unbroken 
 sequence in cause and effect between the latest 
 generations and the earliest. The Old Testa- 
 ment doctrine, that the sins of the fathers are 
 visited upoi> the children to the third and 
 fourth generation, is to the same effect. But 
 the Bible, while admitting and affirming the 
 solidarity of the race and the large extent to 
 which a man's destiny is shaped for him before 
 his birth, is at direct issue with the materialistic 
 
THE SOUL AND HEREDITY. 247 
 
 fatalism which would rid the individual of moral 
 responsibility. In its story of Jacob and Esau, 
 where two children, bom of the same parents 
 and brought up in the same tent, exhibit in 
 their lives the widest divergencies of character, 
 it reduces to its proper proportions the notion 
 that we are going to perfect the race and remove 
 all ethical difficulties by a scientifically selected 
 parentage. The weight of that story lies in the 
 fact that it is absolutely true to human experi- 
 ence. Children differ from their parents con- 
 tinually in a manner that baffles the mechanical 
 theory of transmission. 
 
 What religion, in fact, contends for is that 
 the human ego, within a certain limited area 
 an area conditioned by the facts of heredity 
 and the existing environment is a fount of 
 creative power. Surrounded by competing and 
 often opposing currents of influence, which beat 
 upon it from both the material and the spiritual 
 world, it has the faculty of choosing which of 
 these it shall yield itself to. The immense 
 changes that come over men as the result of 
 the differing influences under which from time 
 
248 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 to time they place themselves, show that our 
 characters are not ready-made and irreversible, 
 but are every day in the making. The view of 
 life, in fact, which accords most closely with 
 Scripture, with the facts of experience, and 
 with our deepest moral intuitions, is that with 
 regards it as an inheritance which we are to 
 deal with as we will. We have not made the 
 inheritance. It comes down to us from the far 
 past, carrying with it all manner of burdens, 
 limitations, mortgages and what not, the result 
 of the good or bad stewardship of those who 
 held it before us. For these limitations we are 
 not answerable. What we are responsible for 
 is, when once in possession, to do the best with 
 what there is. That the estate may have been 
 impoverished by a spendthrift ancestor does not 
 absolve us from the obligation of personal 
 thrift. The more does that lie upon us, in 
 order to improve what is left and hand it on 
 in improved conditions to the next heir. 
 And the man who seeks to do this will find in 
 Christ's Gospel a store of vital energy which 
 will make him master of his fate. 
 
XXXI. 
 The Soul and Pleasure. 
 
 ON a theme which has furnished matter for 
 the published moralisings of 3,000 years it 
 would be the height of impertinence to attempt 
 to say anything new. We hasten, indeed, at 
 the outset, to disclaim any such intention. 
 There is, however, an excuse for discussing 
 pleasure, arising out of one curious circum- 
 stance. That is, that while the human race 
 appears to have been in conference about it 
 ever since it attained the status, to use Homer's 
 phrase, of articulate speaking men, nothing, as 
 yet, seems to have been settled. We cannot 
 to-day define pleasure, or describe it, or state 
 its relation to philosophy, or to ethics, or to 
 theology, without finding ourselves, whatever 
 our theory may be, in every sentence flatly 
 contradicted by considerable thinkers of our 
 own or other times. 
 
250 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 But the topic, though we can promise 
 nothing towards its settlement, remains an 
 excellent one to play round and to explore. 
 Skirting even the smallest portion of its coast 
 line, we find ourselves at every moment light- 
 ing upon something fresh. Anon our skiff is 
 caught in the whirlpool, where two conflicting 
 intellectual seas meet, while again our eye is 
 following the receding lines of inlets which run 
 up into and lose themselves amid the central 
 mysteries of existence. 
 
 Taking one or two of these stray glimpses, 
 let us look for a moment, to begin with, at the 
 relation of pleasure to pain. The idea that 
 pleasure, as we know it, is necessarily connec- 
 ted with pain, pain being, if not a producing 
 cause, at any rate a necessary condition of it, 
 is as old as the earlier Greek philosophy, but 
 it has been worked a good deal by some modern 
 thinkers. It serves, for one thing, as an illus- 
 tration of the Hegelian theory of opposites, 
 pain being necessary to the idea of pleasure as 
 that of inner is to outer and upper to under. 
 It is certain when we examine into our own 
 
THE Soui AND PLEASURE. 251 
 
 consciousness that the two are found to be 
 very close, if not inseparable companions. Tho 
 pleasure of drinking is hardly realisable apart 
 from thirst. The joy of victory, whether over 
 material obstacles or living opponents, seems 
 strictly proportioned to the difficulties pre- 
 viously encountered. The enjoyment of a 
 hungry and belated party on finding themselves 
 at some hospitable refuge in possession of food, 
 warmth, and rest, has the previous hardship and 
 fatigue as one of its most distinctly tasted 
 ingredients. Wherever the investigation is 
 carried the results will be similar. The theory 
 seems to make havoc of some conventional 
 notions about heaven. On the other hand it 
 should certainly put us more in love with our 
 difficulties upon earth. 
 
 In the " Philebus " of Plato there is a hint 
 worth following as to the relation of pleasure 
 to the intellect and the moral nature. Taking 
 an illustration from material substances, it is 
 pointed out how, in mixtures and compounds of 
 liquids and other things, everything depends on 
 the proportion with which we combine the in- 
 
252 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 gradients. We spoil our sauce or salad by 
 adding too much or too little of this or that 
 element. Modern chemistry, with its law of 
 combining proportions, could make the illus- 
 tration much more exact and telling. What 
 the idea suggests is whether, in order to a 
 perfectly pleasurable realisation, there may not 
 be required as scientifically correct a combina- 
 tion of the elements of intellect, conscience, will, 
 and passional force as, say, in chemistry, there is 
 needed the combining of so much oxygen and 
 so much hydrogen in order to produce water. 
 The hint might perhaps have been most appro- 
 priately dealt with by the author of " Natural 
 Law in the Spiritual World." 
 
 The relation of pleasure to intellect raises a 
 question within the four corners of which the 
 youthful orators of debating societies might 
 find ample room to expatiate namely, whether 
 intellectual development can be at all depended 
 on as a restraint upon passional excess. Most 
 people would be inclined to say "yes," but 
 the holder of the opposite theory would find 
 abundant material to support his contention. 
 
THE SOUL AND PLEASURE. 258 
 
 Commencing with natural history, he might 
 first of all affirm that man, the most intellec- 
 tual of the animal kingdom, is the one member 
 of it who physically indulges himself beyond 
 and contrary to nature's dictates. Coming to 
 history proper, he could point to scenes and 
 periods of the world's highest mental activity, 
 such as that of Athens under Pericles, Italy 
 in the Renaissance, and the France of the 
 Encyclopaedists, as exhibiting the most un- 
 measured profligacy. Passing from fact to 
 reason, it would be easy for him to show a score 
 of ways in which intellectual force may act as 
 a reinforcement, instead of a restraint to the 
 passions. Is it libertinism, the mere animal 
 sensations themselves, that constitutes the 
 chief force of the temptation? Is it not rather 
 the play upon them of the intellectual powers, 
 the memory of past scenes idealised by the 
 imagination, the suggestions in the vast litera- 
 ture of the subject of all ages and languages 
 which scholarship puts within the reach of the 
 intellectual man ? The intellect may, of course, 
 be made the most powerful ally of the moral 
 
254 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 principle, but the connection does not by any 
 means appear to be a necessary one. The 
 Socratic doctrine which identified them was 
 assuredly in this instance quite wide of the 
 mark. Like the mercenary troops of the 
 Middle Ages, the intellect seems capable of 
 fighting on either side for a consideration. 
 There is, indeed, no more impressive argument 
 for the Christian doctrine of grace than the 
 one which comes from a consideration of this 
 kind. 
 
 There remains on the subject of pleasure, 
 however, a question which some perhaps will 
 think should have come at the beginning of 
 the discussion, but which, whether standing 
 at the beginning or end of it, will remain, we 
 fear, an unsolved problem. What, after all, 
 is pleasure, and wherein does it consist ? We 
 study half-a-dozen persons seeking it in 
 different ways. One is reading a novel, a 
 second is journeying through noble scenery, 
 a third is engaged on a problem in chess or 
 mathematics, a fourth is eating or drinking, 
 or satisfying some other animal appetite. If 
 
THE SOUL AND PLEASURE. 255 
 
 we examine the consciousness of the actual 
 moment in the case of any one of these, we 
 shall find that in each case the mind is not 
 resting in that moment, as though satisfied in 
 it, but pressing out of it towards something 
 beyond. What is more, the something beyond 
 is never reached. The novel reader hurries 
 on from page to page, as though expecting, 
 when the plot is fully unravelled and the 
 story told, that some desirable end will have 
 been gained. But the end gained is vacuity 
 a sense of being flung back by the last 
 sentence upon one's own empty self. In like 
 manner men rush through the differing phases 
 of a form of animal sensation, as though the 
 consummation could furnish the prize. What 
 they find there is, again, a dead wall, against 
 which the baffled consciousness helplessly dashes 
 itself; and so through every other pursuit. 
 In this view of it life, even at its highest 
 moments, seems one vast and perpetual 
 anticipation. It may be none the worse for 
 that. May we not take this wonderful law 
 a.s the surest and most plainly written of the 
 
256 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 prophecies concerning man's relation to a 
 future and higher state of being ? It is when 
 contemplating this side of things that we feel 
 the weight of Plato's argument that what the 
 human soul, shut up in its mortal prison house, 
 deals with in the present life is only the 
 outward show of the actual, and that for the 
 Reality which will satisfy it we must wait. In 
 that pathetic struggle of Greek philosophy 
 with the problem of life and its result we 
 may surely recognise a preparatio evangelica 
 a Divinely-ordered introduction to the kingdom 
 and teaching of Jesus. 
 
xxxn. 
 Spiritual Amalgams. 
 
 IT is a hopeful feature in modern religious 
 thought that, on so many of the problems 
 which puzzled and hopelessly confused former 
 generations, we are at last beginning fairly to 
 see our way. It is quite possible, indeed, that 
 our generation, decried so often as sceptical 
 and decadent, may turn out to be, in the view 
 of posterity, an era of spiritual revelation. 
 Some new clues are certainly in our hands, and 
 they promise to act on old world difficulties as 
 effectively as did Kepler's laws on the puzzle of 
 planetary motion. It is with one of these clues 
 that we propose here to deal. 
 
 The scientific study of religious history, 
 characteristic of our time, has revealed what 
 may be termed a primary law of spiritual 
 evolution. We here come at last to understand 
 
 that the Divine Life, which is the essence of 
 
 17 
 
258 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 religion, is never in its human manifestation 
 found in a pure and absolute form, but ever 
 in combination with something outside of and 
 inferior to itself. And this by a kind of 
 necessity. God as the Absolute can, in the 
 nature of things, only come into contact with 
 man by a self limitation. It is the failure to 
 recognise the character and range of this 
 limitation that has hitherto covered the region 
 of theology with pitfalls. The history of 
 revelation is the history always of an amalgam 
 of heaven and earth. When viewed in the 
 light of this generalisation, a hundred of the 
 difficulties concerning it which before oppressed 
 the critical intellect fall away. 
 
 Let us see how our law works in relation to 
 Christianity. The Gospel is given us, first, 
 in the history of Christ, and second, in that 
 of His Church. In our ideas of both we get 
 hopelessly astray if we forget our principle of 
 spiritual amalgam. In Christ, to begin with, 
 we have a revelation of the Absolute in the 
 limited. In Him, as the Church all along has 
 joyfully confessed, we see God, In that life 
 
SPIRITUAL AMALGAMS. 25'J 
 
 is the clearest revelation of the Divine 
 vouchsafed to man. As Fichte has said, 
 "Jesus of Nazareth is in a wholly peculiar 
 manner, attributable to no one but Him, the 
 only begotten and first-born Son of God." 
 
 But in its anxiety to affirm this side of the 
 truth about Christ, theology in the past has 
 been perpetually overlooking another. Not 
 content with the facts as it found them, it has 
 clumsily endeavoured to divinise Christ by a 
 process of dehumanising Him. It has put Him 
 out of historical relation, and clothed Him with 
 a pseudo omnipotence and omniscience. A 
 good specimen of its method here is the com- 
 mentary of Ephrem Syrus on Christ's expressed 
 ignorance of the future : " Christ, though He 
 knew the moment of His second advent, yet, 
 that they might not ask Him any more about 
 it, said, ' I know it not.' ' And even with pro- 
 minent modern teachers it has been quite a 
 favourite point to argue Christ's absolute and 
 miraculous independence of the prepossessions 
 and ideas of His generation. All this rests 
 both on false history and false philosophy. As 
 
260 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 to the history, any candid reader cannot help 
 seeing that Jesus, so far from being indepen- 
 dent of His time and people, was full of the 
 spirit of both. His whole thought and language 
 were coloured by the Messianic and apocalyptic 
 Judaism in which He had been brought up. 
 And a true philosophy shows us that unless a 
 complete departure was to be made from the 
 whole Divine education of humanity, this was 
 the only thing that could happen. All God's 
 revelations to man are through the human. If 
 God was to come to man in a man, it must be 
 at some one time and through some one race. 
 The Divine Life must amalgamate itself with 
 the conditions of that time and race. It must 
 think through its thought, and drop its seed of 
 eternity into the soil of its specific racial aspira- 
 tions. And that is exactly what we have in 
 the Christ of the New Testament. Completely 
 a child of His time, He teaches in its thought 
 forms, and reveals in its human conditions, a 
 Truth and a Life that are beyond time. 
 
 This principle of spiritual amalgam has an 
 equally signal illustration in the history of the 
 
SPIRITUAL AMALGAMS. 261 
 
 Church, and half the blunders of theology have 
 come from the failure to recognise it. The 
 Catholic idea that the Church in its creeds is in 
 possession of a Divinely revealed, and therefore 
 absolute, authoritative, and unchangeable pre- 
 sentation of Christian truths, could never have 
 gained vogue had the law we are discussing 
 been earlier understood. What we see in 
 Church history is the Divine element of Chris- 
 tianity continually allying itself, as by a pro- 
 cess of chemical attraction, with the different 
 intellectual ideas of the varying races and ages 
 through which its stream flowed. Thus in the 
 first age Christian belief was Judaic and 
 Messianic. The early believers had in them 
 the same soul of the Gospel that we have, but 
 the body which clothed it was a congeries of 
 apocalyptic ideas which we could not enter into 
 if we tried our hardest. Later we have this 
 same essence encountering, on its intellectual 
 side, the world of Greek philosophy, and form- 
 in^ a new amalgam, the result of which appears 
 in the so-called Catholic creeds. It is one of 
 the strangest things to find people looking to 
 
STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 these creeds as the very palladium of Chris- 
 tianity when, as a matter of fact, their form 
 .and a good deal of their substance is not 
 Christian at all, but pagan. The terms used in 
 them, their vocabulary of essence, substance, 
 hypostasis, and so on have nothing to do with 
 Galilee. They were forged in Greek workshops, 
 They had Plato and Aristotle to their father 
 and not Christ. 
 
 It would be easy to multiply 'Jiese examples 
 and to show how, from the beginning of the 
 Gospel until now, the same process has been 
 going on. In every successive age its Divine 
 principle has been humbling itself to, and 
 making what it could of, the human tenement 
 prepared for it. And always, we may observe, 
 the movement is towards a better body, to- 
 wards a more adequate expression of itself. 
 When one form has worn itself out it is cast 
 off or remodelled. The sixteenth century saw 
 the process on a great scale, but the Protest- 
 antism then created was far from a finality. 
 The Bibliolatry on which, in its struggle with 
 Roman Church authority, it fell back, and 
 
SPIRITUAL AMALGAMS. 2G'J 
 
 which in the seventeenth century culmin- 
 ated in the monstrous doctrine of Quenstedt 
 that every line, word, and syllable of the 
 Scriptures was directly dictated by the Spirit, 
 the writers being passive instruments, a 
 doctrine which, it has been wittily said, 
 makes Balaam's ass the fittest of all the 
 chosen media of revelation, was a bodily 
 form which the ever-growing spirit has 
 already burst through and laid aside. Essen- 
 tial Christianity, which may be denned as 
 the revelation of the true relation between 
 man and God and man and man, with the 
 power to create it, is again seeking new gar- 
 ments of thought, speech, and action. It is 
 combining to-day with political economy and 
 social science. Are we told that these are 
 foreign to the Gospel? They are assuredly 
 not more foreign than the philosophies which 
 an Athanasius and an Augustine brought into 
 the Church. And the amalgam they will 
 produce will, we predict, be a good deal 
 more Christian than the Athanasian Creed. 
 But this is only one side of the topic. \Vlmt 
 
264 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 we set out mainly to deal with, and which must 
 ROW be left to a few concluding sentences, 
 is its personal and individual aspect. The 
 spiritual amalgams which take place in our 
 own nature are as interesting as those seen 
 on the broader scale of history. The first 
 result of these processes is that there are as 
 many Christianities as there are Christians. 
 For with each man the seed drops into the 
 special soil of his education, his temperament, 
 capacity, and primitive instincts, and the result 
 is always something unique and separate. 
 There is in every one a twofold reaction of 
 Christianity upon his original character, and 
 of his original character upon Christianity. In 
 the endlessly varying thought- worlds thus pro- 
 duced Nature provides against the hide-bound 
 stupidity which seeks, in the name of religion, 
 to hammer all skulls into one shape. She 
 allows men to repeat the same formularies, but 
 takes care they none of them mean the same 
 things. 
 
 So far we have spoken of spiritual amalgams 
 entirely from one point of view. We ha,va 
 
SPIRITUAL AMALGAMS. 265 
 
 studied the subject from above downwards. 
 The thought throughout has been that of the 
 Divine combining with what is inferior and 
 human. But there is another and beautiful 
 side of the topic which, in closing, we would 
 fain leave in the minds of our readers. The 
 action of the Christian spirit upon a nature 
 that honestly receives it will work out in the 
 endeavour, on its side, to link every function 
 of the lower life with the higher and heavenly. 
 The animal part of him will, under this influ- 
 ence, never be left to act alone. Eating and 
 drinking are brought under spiritual law, made 
 occasions for gracious courtesies, at times be- 
 come lifted to the height of a sacrament. 
 Sexual desire, which, left to itself, turns men 
 into swine like Ulysses* companions, in this 
 higher union is the source of endless chivalries. 
 
 o 
 
 In a word, a man keeps to the height of his 
 true self only by virtue of that spiritual amal- 
 gam which we term the soul's union with God. 
 
XXXIII. 
 On Being Two- Faced. 
 
 THE term two-faced is heard not infrequently 
 at tea-tables and other resorts where reputa- 
 tions are discussed. As ordinarily understood, 
 it represents the reverse of a compliment. The 
 verdict it carries, though not exactly in the 
 same category with that of being a drunkard or 
 a thief, is nevertheless one of the last which a 
 self-respecting person would care to have pro- 
 nounced against himself. The offence implied 
 does not land a man in prison, but, if proved, it 
 sends him often to the immediate neighbour- 
 hood of Coventry. And the general feeling is 
 that the punishment is just. But what is it to 
 be two-faced ? The severity of the condemna- 
 tion attached to the charge renders it the more 
 important that it should never be brought un- 
 justly. As a matter of fact there are few terms 
 of social reprobation used more ignorantly or 
 
ON BEING TWO-FACED. 267 
 
 more recklessly. The man who flings it at his 
 neighbour does so, in many cases, simply be- 
 cause he has failed to understand a nature of 
 wider compass than his own, or the exigency of 
 circumstances of which he has no experience. 
 Nowhere perhaps in that great region of the 
 unwritten social code, whose judgments make so 
 much of our happiness and our misery, is the 
 need of discrimination greater or the average 
 supply of it less. 
 
 It is, for instance, a by no means uncommon 
 occurrence for a man to be called two-faced 
 when, as a matter of fact, he has simply 
 endeavoured to be polite. Is it our duty always 
 to tell people exactly what we think of them ? 
 There are, it is true, some distinguished ex- 
 amples of doing so. Archbishop Bancroft, on a 
 certain occasion, described his opponents as 
 
 "d d liars." Perhaps this interpretation of 
 
 the line which his fellow nonjuring prelate Kt-n 
 had just been writing in the morning hymn, 
 
 In all thy converse be sincere, 
 compelled him to this, no doubt, rigidly accurate 
 
268 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 transcript of his feeling. But it certainly 
 sounds odd from an Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 There are abundant precedents, too, for roundly 
 calling a man a fool when you think him one, 
 Robert Hall, on being taxed by a young 
 preacher with using the obnoxious expression 
 about him, replied, "Did I say that? Well, 
 sir, I thought it." And Swift, after a sojourn 
 in Leicester, is reported as taking occasion, 
 shortly after, to publicly express his opinion of 
 the inhabitants as " a parcel of wretched fools." 
 It is not given to everybody, however, to think 
 aloud in this fashion, and it is quite as well for 
 the peace of society that the general rule is the 
 i other way. But the man who would be ashamed 
 ! to hurt the feelings of an intellectual or moral 
 inferior by a wounding word has no business to 
 be charged with insincerity if, afterwards, and 
 when an occasion requires it, he gives his actual 
 \ opinion. The charge will nevertheless very 
 often be made. Where, in a case of this sort, 
 it \7ould really lie is when we offer compliments 
 and profess attachments which we know are not 
 real. There is an enormous amount of social 
 
ON BEING TWO-FACED. 269 
 
 sinning of this kind which it behoves decent 
 people to repent of and renounce. Our good 
 opinion, if it is to be of value to others, should 
 never be paid over till it has been earned. 
 Uttered lavishly, and from the mere desire to 
 please, it becomes of no worth to others, while 
 it leaves the stain of untruth upon ourselves. 
 
 Men not infrequently come under the charge 
 of being two-faced as the result simply of the 
 richness and variety of their endowments. 
 They are possessed of faculties which people 
 of narrower range are unable to recognise as 
 compatible with what they call "a consistent 
 character." A man like the late Bishop 
 Wilberforce, prodigally opulent of nature, 
 having contact with life at a thousand points, 
 and who would be discussing on the same day, 
 with different individuals, and with a seemingly 
 equal enthusiasm, sport, or art, or politics, or 
 experimental religion, was certain in some 
 circles to come under a charge of this sort. It 
 was absurdly unjust. A man may be myriad- 
 sided, yet perfectly sincere. With such, while 
 the internal economy has a multitude of 
 
270 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 departments, unity is preserved by a Head 
 Office whose word is law in them. all. 
 
 History furnishes us with characters, how- 
 ever, which, in this matter of singlenes'* of 
 mind or its reverse, are not quite so easy of 
 decipherment. What, for instance, are we to 
 say of a Beiivenuto Cellini, .expressing himself 
 on one page of his journal in terms of religious 
 esctasy, and in another detailing with gusto the 
 murder of an enemy, or the enjoyment of dis- 
 gusting orgies? What of our own Sir John 
 Hawkins, stealing slaves from Africa to carry 
 for sale to the Spanish plantations, and 
 saying of his escape from a storm while on this 
 precious business, " but God did not suffer his 
 elect to perish " ? It would be wrong to call 
 this insincerity in either the Catholic or the 
 Puritan. Cellini is as whole-hearted in his 
 -eligion as in his murders. The examples are 
 not of two-facedness so much as of a condition 
 of society in which the proper relation of ethics 
 to religion was not recognised. Far removed 
 as is such conduct from our own moral ideals 
 it is, in relation to the point we are discuss- 
 
ON BEING TWO-FACED. 271 
 
 ing, not in the same category with that of the 
 French priests who, at the time of the Revolu- 
 tion, came forward and declared they had all 
 along been professing a belief which they 
 inwardly derided. Our Benvenuto was at worst 
 
 an honest sort of scoundrel, and that is more 
 
 I 
 than could be said of these Gallican renegades. 
 
 The mention of belief brings us to a side of 
 our topic which we can do no more here than 
 barely hint at its relation to religious teach- 
 ing and teachers. The man in the street is 
 often in these days heard to object to the 
 pulpit, that it does not say all it thinks. The 
 parson, he avers, in matters of orthodoxy and 
 heterodoxy, holds one language to the people 
 and another to his intimates over a cigar after 
 dinner. This, he says, is being two-faced. It 
 may, or may not be. The Catholic doctrine cf 
 reserve in religious teaching appeals, up to a 
 certain point, to common sense. No respon- 
 sible teacher thinks it his duty to tell his pupils 
 all he knows. Parents do not with their cliil- 
 dren. Christ held one language to the populace 
 and another to the disciples. And these, too, 
 
272 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 were told that He had many things to say 
 which they could not at present bear. The 
 religious teacher of to-day has to work by the 
 same law. His function is not simply to pro- 
 claim facts but to help, as far as he can, a num- 
 ber of moral natures in various circumstances 
 and stages of growth. His position makes him, in 
 an important sense, a mediator between the old 
 and the new. A large part of his work is to 
 regulate and soften the impact of new and un- 
 accustomed truths upon untrained minds ; to 
 canalise, as it were, the rush of fresh ideas and 
 prevent them from becoming a destroying flood. 
 The man who fails to recognise all this, who 
 cannot see the proportion of things, who takes 
 no pains to secure that the weaker members of 
 the flock have always solid footing under their 
 feet, is no true spiritual guide. 
 
 It has to be remembered, however, that this 
 doctrine of reserve has its limits. The true 
 teacher will rightly discuss the " how " and the 
 " when " for stating what to some are new or 
 unwelcome truths. But, when he has himself 
 found these truths, he is bound to be loyal to 
 
Oar BEINQ TWO-FACED. 273 
 
 them. To declare a doctrine which he believes 
 to be false, or to permanently hide the one he 
 holds to be true, is no business for an honest 
 man. We may disagree entirely with the 
 grounds which led Kenan to renounce orthodox 
 Christianity. But when he had reached per- 
 sonal conviction on this point he did the only 
 thing possible to honour in giving up the 
 priesthood. Luther's " Ich kann nicht anders " 
 is the cry of every true soul at such crises. The 
 impulse which comes upon such to declare, as 
 by a Divine necessity, and in scorn of conse- 
 quence, the things they see and feel to be true 
 are the world's guarantee of progress from 
 darkness to light. 
 
 is 
 
xxxrv. 
 The Soul in Preaching. 
 
 IN the outside world the progress of civilisa- 
 tion has been largely a process of discovering 
 sources of power which previously had lain 
 concealed from human attention. Coiled one 
 within another lie Nature's subtle forces, by 
 successively tapping which man indefinitely 
 extends his empire. He has supplemented 
 muscular force by steam, and steam by elec- 
 tricity, and may be on the way to harnessing 
 yet mightier energies to his car. The question 
 arises whether there may not be anything 
 analogous to this order of things in the life 
 sphere of the Church; whether the Christian 
 worker of every order, but the Christian 
 preacher especially, may not find in the inner 
 world of his* own nature a similar series of 
 powers, some nearer the surface others deeper 
 down, the discovery and right use of which may 
 
THE SOUL IN PREACHING. 275 
 
 augment enormously the general output of his 
 influence. 
 
 In such a study the outermost circle of 
 energy is, of course, the physical, the intimate 
 relation of which to spiritual result is even yet 
 far from being fully appreciated. It is worth 
 remembering that the most soul-moving utter- 
 ance of a Whitefield or a Fenelon would have 
 had its effects immediately annihilated by the 
 introduction of a little carbonic acid gas to the 
 room where they were speaking. Nature will, 
 in fact, never permit us to overlook the connec- 
 tion of the physical with the psychical. Physi- 
 cal energy is not spiritual energy, any more 
 than grass is beef ; but there will not be one 
 without the other. The point is vital both for 
 those preparing for the pulpit and for those 
 actually engaged in its work. The college 
 authorities who do not secure a bodily as well 
 as a mental training for their students, and the 
 preachers who in their daily habits as to \vuii: . 
 rest, exercise and sleep, deliberately break the 
 laws of health, are openly sinning against the 
 Church by putting in their own and in its waj 
 
276 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 a direct obstacle to the evolution of spiritual 
 power. 
 
 Immediately beneath the physical comes the 
 sphere of purely intellectual force, the import- 
 ance of which as a pulpit equipment is now so 
 universally recognised that it would be super- 
 fluous to dwell largely upon it. Suffice it to 
 say that a very cursory examination of history 
 reveals the fact that the men who have written 
 their names most broadly on its page as religi- 
 ous powers whether an Augustine in one age, 
 a Luther in another, or a Wesley in a third 
 have been characters in whom a profound 
 mystic apprehension of the spiritual world has 
 been united with a disciplined brain, absorbent 
 of the best learning of the time. St. Paul, the 
 most intellectual of the Apostles, is the one 
 whose influence survives. The people who 
 quote his saying, "that the wisdom of this 
 world is foolishness with G-od," as an argument 
 for unlearned enthusiasm in the pulpit, forget 
 that the expression by one of the greatest 
 minds of his own or any age of his own 
 intellectual humility is one thing, and the easy 
 
THE SOUL IN PREACHING. 277 
 
 self-confidence which elevates mental vacuity 
 into a transcendental grace another and very 
 different thing. In the Church as much as out- 
 side it knowledge is power, and, other things 
 being equal, leadership will inevitably go to 
 the pulpit which knows most and sees 
 furthest. 
 
 Of these " other things " there remain, how- 
 ever, to be noted two of such vital importance 
 that their absence makes even the most 
 brilliant mental capacity of little avail. Of the 
 concentric circles of force which we are describ- 
 ing these two stand still nearer to the centre. 
 The first of them is the thing so difficult to 
 define, but of potency so immense, which we 
 call character. A good illustration of what we 
 mean is afforded by Froude's remark about the 
 relative influence of Whately and of John 
 Henry Newman when they were contemporaries 
 in the Oriel Common Eoom. Whately, he 
 says, required to bring to their minds the 
 clearest intellectual demonstration before he 
 could lead them, whereas they were moved by 
 anything Newman said from the mere fact that 
 
278 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 it was lie who said it. It is the possession of 
 this precise power of producing a distinct 
 moral and spiritual effect by the saying of 
 things which, in the lips of another, would be 
 without point or significance, that makes a true 
 pulpit a force so entirely unique. The Abbe 
 Vianney producing an indescribable emotion 
 amongst a cultured audience by the simple 
 words, " I want you, my dear children, to love 
 God. He is so good," represents a problem in 
 the sphere of influence which every preacher 
 may well study. Power of this kind gathers 
 about the utterances of men who are known to 
 be of blameless character, of absolute honesty 
 of speech and act,, who dwell in the region of 
 realities, who would sacrifice their dearest 
 interests for the cause of truth, and who spare 
 not themselves in the service of their God and 
 of their fellow. A Church rich in such men 
 might try a fall with any power on earth, and 
 not be anxious about the result. 
 
 This last species of influence fades by an 
 almost unrecognisable gradation into another, 
 still more difficult to speak of, but which may 
 
THE SOUL IN PREACIMV:. 27'.' 
 
 fairly claim to be the most central of all. We 
 mean that arising from the Christian preacher's 
 direct relation to the spiritual world. The 
 apostolic terminology furnishes us with its pre- 
 cise description when it speaks of a preaching 
 " in demonstration of the spirit and of power." 
 There has been an enormous amount of mys- 
 tical writing and speaking on the question of 
 how to secure this suggested reinforcement of 
 one's own faculty by a power coming to it from 
 without. Men have worked themselves into a 
 frenzy of excitement to obtain what they call 
 "a baptism of the spirit." There is surely 
 room for some clearer thinking on this subject. 
 In the scientific world men do not talk of 
 getting by a merely emotional process such a 
 thing as, say, "a baptism of electricity." If 
 they want to clothe themselves with any force 
 outside themselves, they do so by first studying 
 the laws of that force, obeying them, and 
 organically relating themselves to them. And 
 in this way and in no other will men, in the 
 sphere of religious work and testimony., secure 
 that mighty augmentation of power which the 
 
STUDIES otf THE SOUL. 
 
 New Testament speaks of as coming directly 
 from the spiritual sphere. It will simply be by 
 studying and obeying the laws of that spiritual 
 realm, and by organically relating oneself to 
 them. Men live and work at present largely in 
 the outer circles of power, obtaining results 
 which accord with this position. In proportion 
 as by purer living and higher thinking, and by 
 a more exact obedience to what of truth and 
 right they know they come into closer relation 
 with the innermost spheres will their power 
 upon both Church and world augment by leaps 
 and bounds. 
 
XXXV. 
 The Soul's Holidays. 
 
 THE annual summer holiday may be said to 
 have definitely established itself as an integral 
 part of modern life. To leave one's ordinary 
 pursuits and one's ordinary haunts for a certain 
 number of weeks in August or September has, 
 with a vast mass of the toiling community, 
 become as fixed a habit as that of breakfasting 
 or of wearing clothes. With these classes the 
 year has two great divisions : the eleven months 
 more or less of "the daily grind," and the 
 much-cherished remaining fraction devoted to 
 seaside, moor, or mountain. The arrangement, 
 on the whole, works fairly well, and answers in 
 a rough and ready fashion to a felt physical and 
 mental need. We are most of us in harness. 
 It may be all very well for a Thoreau to recom- 
 mend us to "as long as possible live uncom- 
 mitted ; it makes little difference whether you 
 
282 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 are committed to a farm or a county gaol." 
 Unfortunately, we are not all Concord philoso- 
 phers, and the mass of us find the being " com- 
 mitted to a farm," or its equivalent, the only 
 apparent means of escaping the other, and to 
 most of us distinctly less desirable, alternative. 
 But the annual break from the harness finds us 
 quite ready for it when it comes, and the year's 
 total output of activity is, in the vast majority 
 of cases, the better, in respect both of quantity 
 and quality, for that brief release. 
 
 It is, however, worth while to point out that 
 holidays may very easily be overrated in their 
 relation either to the enjoyment or the general 
 furtherance of life. It would indeed be a pes- 
 simistic view which should regard the main 
 body of the year's experiences as a dull, un- 
 relieved mass, through which the thin streak of 
 vacation time shone as the only line of light. 
 Nature, happily, has taken care that we shall 
 not fall into that mistake. In her constitution, 
 both of the human mind and of external cir- 
 cumstance, she has provided a holiday system 
 of her own, which, while it takes the conven- 
 
THE SOTTI/S HOLIDAYS. 283 
 
 tional one into account, is by no means depen- 
 dent on it. The soul has its holidays, and the 
 times of them have no necessary relation to 
 August or September. 
 
 The foremost association of a holiday is that 
 of pleasure. But what, in the final analysis, 
 is pleasure ? Plato saw in pleasure an escape 
 from pain, the satisfaction of a want, the want 
 itself being pain. Aristotle regards pleasure as 
 the concomitant or expression of perfect 
 energy, and Kant comes very near to this in 
 defining it as the feeling of the furtherance of 
 life. Whatever view of the matter we may 
 take, one result of the analysis will be the dis- 
 covery that the moments of our soul's keenest 
 satisfaction, its highest sense of " la joie de 
 vivre" belong to its periods of toil, its times 
 of stress and strain, rather than to those of 
 careless ease. It is in the putting forth 
 of its whole self that consciousness satisfies 
 its own deepest want. "VVe feel most free 
 when we are most alive, and we are most alive 
 in the positions which call our every faculty 
 into play. Every healthy nature knows this, 
 
284 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 and consents to rest only that it may toil the 
 more. 
 
 When we come from principles to the actual 
 experience of life, it is an exhilarating study to 
 note the gloriously free way in which the soul 
 takes its holidays. It scorns conventions and 
 attires itself for highest festivities under cir- 
 cumstances which set the calculations of 
 Humdrum at defiance. One of the last places 
 in the world to be regarded as a holiday resort 
 was surely the noisome den at Bedford in which 
 Bunyan was confined. But there was rarest 
 holiday-making within. Not in king's palace, 
 nor amid the noblest scenery of our isles, was 
 there such exaltation of soul, such vision of 
 beauty, such sense of life and freedom as filled 
 the soul of the lonely prisoner as there rose 
 before him in his dungeon the successive scenes 
 of that great conception which was to make 
 him immortal. To stand on the Delectable 
 Mountains was better than to climb the 
 Jungfrau. Greatheart, Christian and Faithful 
 formed finer society than the wits of the coffee- 
 houses. To have looked through the gates of 
 
THE SOUL'S HOLIDAYS. 285 
 
 the New Jerusalem made cheap the splendours 
 of Paris or Borne. 
 
 It is doubtful whether in the present day we 
 have anybody who could take holiday in prison 
 in such a fashion as that. The vision faculty 
 is being crushed out under the pressure of 
 materialism. We feel the bitter earnest of 
 Hazlitt's jest : " In the days of Jacob there was 
 a ladder between heaven and earth, but now 
 the heavens have gone further off and are 
 become astronomical." Spite, however, of 
 changed conceptions of the universe and their 
 reaction on theology, it remains that for the 
 soul the surest way to freedom and to holiday 
 exultance is through religion. We have become 
 doubtful of many things, but it is not a matter 
 of doubt that faith and love can create a para- 
 dise. It is not legend, but sober history, which 
 Lecky is giving us when he says : " There has 
 probably never existed upon earth a community 
 whose members were bound to one another by a 
 deeper or purer affection than the Christians 
 in the days of the persecution." Persecution 
 was no more intrinsically pleasant in those days 
 
28(5 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 fclian now, but amid that circle of hunted people 
 there was, we may depend upon it, more 
 pleasure than is found in grouse shooting. 
 They had found the secret of loving, and where 
 love is, the soul ever makes holiday. To this 
 even the sceptical and sad-hearted Amiel bears 
 witness when he says : " Celui qui ne demande 
 a la vie que 1'amelioration de son etre, que le 
 perfectionnement moral dans le sens du con- 
 tentement interieur et de la soumission 
 religieuse, est moins expose que personne a 
 manquer la vie." 
 
 It would be easy to multiply examples of the 
 way in which Nature gives holiday times to the 
 soul under the strangest outward conditions. 
 Thackeray is exactly true to life when, in 
 "Esmond," he sketches a poor merchant 
 trembling on the edge of bankruptcy who has 
 sleepless nights, in which he thinks of suicide, 
 but who, when the crash has come and he has 
 lost all, finds he can now sleep comfortably, 
 After desperate strivings to keep his foothold, 
 he has finally slipped and rolled to the bottom, 
 to find that it is not such a bad place after all. 
 
THE SOUL'S HOLIDAYS. 287 
 
 The experience is typical and should be en- 
 couraging. When we come back from vacation 
 time to resume the familiar task awaiting us, it 
 is refreshing to think that in the midst of the 
 most pressing urgencies and of circumstances 
 the least promising to which it may introduce 
 us, there are reserved for us there holiday 
 seasons which the soul will register as the 
 of ail. 
 
XXXVI. 
 When the Soul Lets Go. 
 
 THE process of letting-go is sometimes a 
 hazardous one, calling for all the nerve and 
 judgment there may be on hand. To com- 
 mit oneself to a glissade in the High Alps 
 without being quite sure what is at the 
 farther end, or to drop from the end of 
 a rope slung over a vessel's side to a 
 boat riding below on a high-running sea, 
 with the consciousness that if you miss 
 the elect moment the said boat will be 
 yards away, and you amongst the fishes, 
 are experiences in this line which, when 
 gone through for the first time, leave a 
 mark in the memory. People who have 
 lived, in any wide sense of the word, are 
 sure sooner or later to come upon dead 
 drops of faith of this kind. Moments arrive 
 when we have to leave the known for tha 
 
WHEN THE SOUL LETS Go. 289 
 
 unknown, to commit ourselves to an untried 
 principle, to make our fate depend upon the 
 action of a law which we have hitherto taken 
 on hearsay. 
 
 Letting-go is a business both of the ex- 
 terior and the interior of life, and in both 
 forms an essential feature of human progress. 
 History is made by the men who accomplish 
 it successfully. When the world is ready 
 for a fresh departure, its struggling con- 
 sciousness becomes incarnate in some one 
 individual, who drops away from the old 
 moorings, carrying its fortunes in his hands. 
 The act, whenever and on whatever scale 
 accomplished, offers a psychological moment 
 which one would like to know more about. 
 It is a pity the men who perform it have 
 been, many of them, so reticent. The pioneer 
 who first trusted himself to the sea and the 
 man who swallowed the first oyster would 
 have made splendid " copy " if only they 
 had thought of getting themselves inter- 
 viewed. M. Andre*e, if he comes back in his 
 balloon from the Pole, will, no doubt, bo 
 
 19 
 
200 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 sufficiently talked about, but the man who 
 really " let-go " in that region of things is 
 forgotten. Not one in a thousand remembers 
 the name of Pilatre des Rosiers. Yet when 
 this man seated himself in the newly-invented 
 Montgolfier and, first of mortals to make the 
 venture, rose from the solid earth to the 
 immeasurable spaces of the upper air, he 
 opened a fresh chapter in the history of 
 he race. In him, man was taking posses- 
 sion of a new kingdom, destined some 
 day to be as familiar to him as to the 
 birds. 
 
 Letting-go is a process which people under- 
 go quite apart, often, from their own choice 
 It is one to which, for their good, Nature is 
 perpetually compelling her unwilling children. 
 We have known a youth take his first header 
 under a threat, on refusal, of being pitched 
 neck and crop into the stream by his com- 
 panions. The experience could hardly be 
 called agreeable, but it made him a swimmer. 
 On the broader scale this is continually hap- 
 pening. The Unseen Power behind history 
 
WHEN THE SOUL LETS Go. 291 
 
 forces man time and again to the edge of the 
 solid ground, compelling him to the leap 
 which threatens destruction, and which he 
 takes cursing his fate. He is astonished 
 afterwards to find how he has fallen on his 
 feet. Wholly harsh and unrelenting seemed 
 the pressure of circumstance which, in 1620, 
 pushed the Pilgrims of the Mayflower into 
 that uncomfortable bark and to that most 
 -bodeful voyage. Could they have seen the 
 issues their hearts had been lighter. 
 
 To let-go successfully requires some condi- 
 tions. The time must be ripe, and the prin- 
 ciple to which we commit ourselves trust- 
 worthy. Birds fly, but a young one who 
 struggles out of the nest too soon will fall 
 and get killed. A man may let-go only to 
 be smashed into bits at the precipice bottom. 
 When we are not sure of our parachute it is 
 much better to stop in the balloon. In the 
 region of social and spiritual, as well as of 
 material experiments, the way is marked by 
 lettings-go which were catastrophes, as well 
 .as by those which were successes. The gains 
 
292 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 come when men strike upon some new law 
 the defeats when they try to ignore or to get 
 rid of an old one. Thoreau's attempt to 
 desocialise himself was brave, and the record 
 of his experiences makes delightful reading. 
 But in the name of being natural it was 
 really an attack on nature, and we know 
 the result. The rebel who had rhapsodised 
 on independence ended by quietly coming back 
 to his fellows. Founder's phalanstery system,, 
 built on the opposite theory, that one could 
 so combine the play of the unrestricted human 
 passions as to produce a happy and progres- 
 sive society, was equally a kicking against some 
 ascertained moral and spiritual laws, and paid 
 the penalty of all such recalcitrance. 
 
 It is in the sphere of the inner and spiritual 
 life that the principle of letting-go receives 
 some of its most momentous applications. As 
 in other departments, so here we find the 
 human story one first of crawling on all 
 fours, then of endeavours after the upright 
 position, assisted by clutches at whatever 
 offers itself as a support, until at last the 
 
WHEN THE SOUL LETS Go. 293 
 
 pupil stands and walks alone. In no other 
 direction, however, is there such a tendency 
 to reversion. Nowhere so much as here do 
 men, after learning the use of their feet, so 
 easily get frightened back into the crawling 
 posture. Centuries before the Christian era 
 it was given to an inspired Jew to tell hia 
 contemporaries what Matthew Arnold retold 
 to our ears, that true religion is essentially 
 conduct. But Micah's magnificent deliverance, 
 " What doth the Lord require of thee but to 
 do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
 humbly with thy God," represented a stage 
 in the use, in religion, of one's own limbs, 
 which his countrymen at large were long 
 ieagues away from. Christ found the Jewish 
 nation in His day still going on crutches, and 
 the habit, spite of His own life and teaching, 
 in the religious world yet remains the fashion. 
 A Paul may, with his doctrine of faith, knock 
 away the loved implements from under Gala- 
 tian armpits, but as soon as his back is turned 
 the old hobbling recommences. 
 
 To-day, over three-fourths of Christendom, 
 
294 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 the religion which saves is held to consist 
 primarily in submission to Church authority 
 and the acceptance of old-world creeds. The 
 crutch ecclesiastical is still de rigueur. To* 
 walk without it is considered as socially 
 indecent. The nullius addictus jurare in verba 
 magistri habit is shocking impertinence. Spite,. 
 however, of clerical reactions and all other 
 appearances to the contrary, men will in the 
 end get to their feet in these matters, and the 
 crutch be finally relegated to the museum 
 of antiquities. The religion which consists 
 simply in heart-whole loyalty to truth and 
 to the highest standard of living is already 
 in sight. The time will come when it is in 
 full possession. 
 
xxxvii. 
 The Soul and Death. 
 
 DEATH is at once the most familiar and the 
 most unfamiliar of human facts. We are all 
 agreed that we must die, but the world has 
 been quarrelling from the very beginning as 
 to what dying really means. Whole races 
 who have lived and passed away in the belief 
 that death meant extinction have had for 
 next-door neighbours peoples entirely filled 
 with the thought of an existence beyond. 
 Warburton's "Divine Legation" was based 
 on the supposition that the Israelites under 
 Moses had no idea of a future life. But long 
 before the Exodus, some six thousand years 
 ago in fact, their neighbours the Egyptians, 
 as their "Book of the Dead" testifies, were 
 basing their whole theory of life on the con- 
 ception of a world to come. In the near East 
 we listen to an Omar Khayyam expressing in 
 
296 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 exquisite but infinitely mournful strains his 
 creed that the destiny of a man is to taste one 
 draught of life's waters on the way to annihila- 
 tion, and that 
 
 One thing is certain and the rest is lies, 
 The flower that once is blown for ever dies ; 
 
 while further East and furthur back in time 
 the Indian Bhagavad Gita is replying thus to 
 the doctrine of extinction : 
 
 These bodies that enclose the everlasting soul 
 inscrutable 
 
 Immortal, have an end; but he who thinks the soul 
 can be destroyed, 
 
 And he who deems it a destroyer, are alike mis- 
 taken; it 
 
 Kills not and is not killed ; it is not born nor doth 
 it ever die. 
 
 Interesting, however, and, in a way, impor- 
 tant as are these past ideas, our chief concern 
 here is with the opinion of to-day, and, above 
 all, with the grounds of it. The views on this 
 subject of a not inconsiderable portion of 
 modern society are, it must be said, frankly 
 negative. Numbers of cultivated men in both 
 
THE SOUL AND DEATH. 297 
 
 hemispheres hold, in their secret mind, that 
 this life is all, or at least that the odds are 
 enormously against there being any other. It 
 is easy to see how this has come about. The 
 decline in authority of the traditional theology 
 has left the mind open to the tremendous 
 assault of the senses, and the average man 
 sees nothing to rebut it. The evidence of 
 appearances looks so entirely unanswerable. 
 The mind, we see, grows with the growth of 
 the body, matures as the body matures, decays 
 as the body decays ; why should we not, then, 
 say it dies when the body dies ? Life gives ue 
 overwhelming evidence of the dependence of 
 each of the two partners on the other. An 
 injury to the brain will produce an entire 
 change in the mental and moral life of the 
 subject of it. What, then, more reasonable 
 than to suppose that if the brain is not merely 
 injured, but destroyed, the inner consciousness 
 will be destroyed also? The extent to which 
 men have succumbed to this argument is patent 
 in the whole literature of modern Europe. A 
 typical illustration of the tone it has produced, 
 
298 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 more, perhaps, on the Continent than here, is 
 in the finish of one of Pierre Loti's stories, in 
 which he describes the end of his hero, a 
 French soldier in Algeria. Cut off from his 
 comrades, he is surrounded by Arabs, who 
 thrust their spears into him, and leave him 
 to die alone. With a minute and terrible 
 realism we have described for us the soldier's 
 every successive sensation on his way to death. 
 There come to him pictures of home, memories 
 of old friends, frenzies of thirst and fever, a 
 roaring in the ears, flashings and whirlings in 
 the eyes of light and colour, and then for end 
 a body left to be gnawed by vultures, and a 
 naked skull rolled over and over by the winds 
 of the desert. 
 
 There are, with most of us, moods when a 
 presentation of this kind, taken with our own 
 observations in the spheres of disease and of 
 mortality, have an almost overwhelming effect. 
 This particular mood has, indeed, lain heavily 
 upon Europe during more than a generation. 
 But there are signs that it is passing away. 
 And the curious thing is that the cure is 
 
THE SOUL AND DEATH. 299 
 
 coming from the very quarter out of which 
 came the disease. For it is the science, the 
 material observation, which appeared at first 
 to rivet on man the chains of death, that is 
 now forging the instruments of his deliverance. 
 First of all, it has shown us the fallacy of 
 appearances. The premises on which the 
 old materialistic arguments were based are 
 being shattered by more extended observation. 
 Matter, the partner of spirit, is showing in 
 such entirely new lights as to make us recast 
 all our conceptions about it. Whatever death 
 does to spirit it does not destroy matter. It 
 changes it, that is all. And if all death can 
 do to one, and the inferior partner in the 
 human compact, is to alter its form, what 
 natural or logical ground, men are beginning 
 to ask, is there for supposing that it can do 
 more with its associate, the spirit ? As to the 
 argument arising from the deterioration of 
 mental powers consequent on physical decay, 
 that need frighten us no more than it fright- 
 ened Socrates. It amounts only to this, that 
 the mind as player is hampered by a worn-out 
 
300 STUDIES OF THE SOUL. 
 
 instrument. To say that a Beethoven cannot 
 extract perfect music from a used-up piano ia 
 surely not to prove that our Beethoven will never 
 get another piano. On this whole side of the 
 question it is certainly not going too far to 
 say that modern science, in demonstrating the 
 continuity of force, has made it more difficult 
 than ever to believe that the highest kind of 
 force as yet manifested on this planet, namely, 
 that of the human spirit, should be the one 
 exception to the law. If we can turn heat into 
 motion, and motion into electricity, and elec- 
 tricity into light, but can by no process reduce 
 them to nothingness, what is there in the 
 nature of things, or in human experience, to 
 lead us to the conclusion that character or 
 soul-force will meet with a worse fate? The 
 broad hint of science here is that, like its mate 
 the body, the spirit may be transmuted but will 
 not be destroyed. 
 
 It is at first startling, but afterwards in- 
 finitely reassuring, to learn that in the scheme 
 of evolution death is not a necessity, but simply 
 one of Nature's devices for the furtherance of 
 
THE SOUL AND DEATH. 30) 
 
 life. The investigations of a Maupas and a 
 Weismann yield as a result that the lowest 
 organisms are practically immortal. It was 
 in the endeavour after a higher and more 
 complicated structure that death entered. 
 What is more, in his study of the germ- 
 plasm, which, as distinguished from the cells 
 which are perishable, persists and is potentially 
 immortal, Weismann maintains that under 
 favourable conditions it seems capable of 
 surrounding itself with a new body. We- 
 are only at the beginning of these studies, 
 but the perspective they open is immense. 
 They show us life, instead of being lorded 
 over by death, pressing it into its service to 
 help build up its structures and complete its 
 developments. Instead of being the dread 
 tyrant before which all must bow, death is- 
 shown to be life's day labourer, whose entrance 
 on the scene can be discerned, and whose 
 departure, when his work is done, may be 
 predicted. 
 
 It may be said that what science here offers 
 does not, after all, amount to much. It would 
 
-302 STUDIES OP THE SOUL. 
 
 not if it stood alone. But it comes as reinforce- 
 ment to an immense and growing body of con- 
 siderations arising from another source. Man's 
 strongest hope for immortality rests, after all, 
 upon his moral and spiritual intuitions, and 
 upon his moral and spiritual history. He dwells 
 in a visible universe which he can prove has 
 come out of an unseen one, to which it will 
 eventually return. He has already multiform 
 relations with that Unseen, and is continually 
 enlarging them. The highest thinkers every- 
 where recognise the spirit world as the most real 
 and the most mighty. Spirit everywhere per- 
 vades matter and everywhere rules it. And 
 this permanent force, amid a world of change, 
 man realises as abiding not only in the 
 Universe on which he looks, but in his own 
 deepest self. The Eternal within him claims 
 kinship with the Eternal without him. His de- 
 sires here are facts in the making. His yearn- 
 ing for immortality is the unborn in him groping 
 lor the light to which it is destined : it is the 
 inland stream calling, as it runs, to the ocean 
 whence it came and towards which it hastes. 
 
THE SOUL AND DEATH. 803 
 
 It may be that man, this side death, will 
 never reach its ultimate secret, or gain physical 
 demonstration of what is beyond. In this very 
 lack, this withholding, of what he thirsts for 
 may, however, lie the very demonstration itself, 
 though its appeal be to another sense. For 
 the message of the New Testament, which, 
 when all is said, remains the highest authority 
 on this subject, is that man's preparation for 
 his spiritual inheritance is to be, right through, 
 by the education of faith. That the landscape 
 is darkened around him, his prospect barred by 
 impenetrable veils, his straining ear met by the 
 appalling silence, may have this for the reason 
 that in no other way than by " believing 
 where we cannot prove" could the soul gain 
 that special development which is needed for 
 its highest energy and for its full preparation 
 for the realm beyond. 
 
LONDOHt 
 W. EPEAIOHT AND SONS, 
 
PRESS OPINIONS. 
 
 The Outlook." To the theological reviewer, weary of 
 ponderous tomes containing so many, many pages, and so 
 very little original thought, this small volume is a pure 
 delight. This book reaches us in a second edition, it 
 deserves to go to a twentieth." 
 
 The Spectator. " Well-written essays.'* 
 
 North British Daily Mai!. "It is one of the freshest 
 books we have read for a long time." 
 
 Cambridge Independent Press. "' J. B. f is the most 
 thoughtful, the most suggestive, and the most helpful of 
 modern essayists." 
 
 Literary World. " Mr. Brierley is a prophet of to-day, 
 and, as we hold, of the to-morrow that comes next." 
 
 The Freeman. "Mr. Brierley is a psychological 
 theologian." 
 
 The Independent. "Mr. Brierley's qualifications are 
 an insight of extraordinary range and freshness, a breadth 
 of sympathy that enables him to lead us with willing 
 minds into some humiliating discoveries of ourselves; a 
 humour that has a glistening of tears in it, and a spiritual 
 grasp that breeds ever-increasing confidence in his leader- 
 ship." 
 
 The Examiner. "A better book for the modern man 
 does not exist." 
 
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 written books I have lighted on for a year past." 
 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward." There is a delicate truth 
 and fragrance, a note of real experience in the essays, that 
 make them delightful reading." 
 
 21 
 
PRESS OPINIONS. 
 
 Liverpool Mercury. "Thoughtful essays on man's 
 complex nature." 
 
 Expository Times. "It is the ' commonplace phil- 
 osopher ' at his best and most thoughtful. Nothing is over- 
 drawn or overdriven." 
 
 The Inquirer. "This is a book to be enjoyed. The 
 style, in places, is as clear spring water, and thoughts rise 
 there that chase happily over the rocks like a mountain 
 brook." 
 
 Evangelical Magazine. "Working largely, as the 
 author does, through intuition, he arrives at results which 
 often surprise and delight us." 
 
 Huddersfield Examiner. "His thought, though 
 subtle, is pellucid. His mysticism and transcendentalism 
 remind one now of Thoreau, uow of Emerson, and now of 
 the more modern Maurice Maeterlinck." 
 
 Professor Shuttleworth in "The Critic." 
 
 " Preachers in search of inspiration, and readers who want 
 a spiritual book which is not ' pious piffle/ will find their 
 need fully supplied in ' Studies of the Soul.' " 
 
 Baptist Times. " Mr. Brierley is at once a seer and a 
 mystic. There is a fine spiritual aroma about his essays ; 
 the atmosphere he creates is stimulating and bracing. 
 . . . Such a work as this will live." 
 
 Baptist Magazine. "There are, indeed, few writers 
 who can so unveil to us ourselves. . . This cheaper 
 edition of an invaluable book is a great boon." 
 
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