son of Abraham off eternally from the Gentile, but supplying him with an easy, handy law of right and wrong. Greek polytheism had become delirious, and no man attended to its ravings, and yet it spoke words of truth when it declared that man to love God must love one like to himself. Greek philosophy had spent its energy, and it rested, listening for a new word of truth.

When the Gloria in excelsis smote on the classic ear, life and activity returned to exhausted thought. But only little by little did the full significance of that strain impress itself on the minds of men.

"In terris pax;" how? By the establishment of right on a foundation firmer than the eternal mountains; by making the emancipation of man from the law of violence obligatory; by making authority a prolongation of right only, to be used for the preservation to each man of the liberty to expand and ripen, physically, intellectually, and morally. There will be an end to strife and heartburnings when the rights of each are recognized by all, and authority is reduced to the protection of these rights.

When Constantine and his successors extended their hands to the Church to unite moral authority with sovereignty, a fatal error was committed; for sovereignty reposes on force, and is the faculty of doing wrong with impunity, that is of constraining men to surrender their rights, of curtailing their liberties, of dwarfing their growth.

The moral authority of the Church faded before the authority of force. The Crown placed its sword at the service of the mitre, and it was employed to cut off the tallest poppies in the garden of the Church, to suppress originality and level individuality. Activity was permitted in two channels only, mysticism and Christian art. To this therefore we owe the Divina Commedia, the Imitatio Christi

Chartres Cathedral, Raphael's Madonna del Sisto, and the strains of Palestrina. So that even that cloud had its silver lining.

Mediæval temporal autocracy was a mighty wrong. The governed were the chattels of their sovereign, to be imprisoned, driven to war, impoverished, sold, made to believe or disbelieve at the caprice of a monarch. It was a sacrilege on the divine rights of man. Its existence, linked as it was to the Church, forced into life another wrong,-the Papacy set up as a counterpoise to the temporal power.

Then indeed the bondage of men was complete, the State violated the right of man to personal independence, and the Church turned the key on his right to intellectual freedom.

The work obligatory on every man sent into the world. could not be done; he was not free in body, in mind, and in soul, to accomplish his destiny,-to make that liberty which is his potentially become his own effectually. "The initiation of all wise and noble things comes, and must come, from the individual," says Mr. Mill. The secret of wellbeing to the human race is the recognition of unity and individuality, in other words, of authority and of right. Unity without due scope for the man to stretch and grow dies into uniformity; and individuality, without recognition of solidarity, dashes itself to pieces in anarchy. The problem for States and Churches to work out is the preservation of unity and the particularization of the individual, the holding of authority and liberty in equilibrium.

Mediævalism did not attempt to solve this problem, it flung itself headlong into the negation of liberty and the falsification of authority. It adopted the principle of centralization, which is ruinous to the vitality of a State or of a Church. By concentration of power at the head the members were left impotent. The general activity

of the body gathered up at one point languished at the extremities.

The Reformation was the explosion of individuality. It had a double aspect, it was the assertion of the rights of man to think freely and to act independently. The second phase, constitutionalism, scarcely shewed above the surface in the sixteenth century, but it has been slowly emerging since; it is not as yet apprehended everywhere, it is acted upon as yet scarce anywhere.

The Church had been ramming dogmas down men's throats, as at Strasbourg they fatten geese, and they could bear it no longer. "We will eat," they said, "as suits our digestions and the capacity of our stomachs."

The Reformation was the proclamation of a grand truth, a truth necessary to flare into prominence, for Europe was rapidly becoming Chinese in thought and belief, and settling into a uniform grey, without strong shadows and without clear light. Had the Reformers rested in the establishment of the authority of private judgment to determine for each man the measure of truth adapted to his own capacity, they would have earned the lasting gratitude of all men. But unfortunately they mixed their grain of truth with a grain of error. They erected individual judgment, which the Church had practically denied, into an authority excluding all other truths, and especially that one which is paramount, the correlation of truths. They authorized each man to apply his own judgment to the judgments of every one else, and to hack and hew away at all appreciations in excess of his own scant measure, in the same spirit as that in which the papacy had pulled at every single faith to stretch it to embrace that measure of excess it authorized and enforced. They constituted every man an autotheist, the master of truth, and therefore sovereign over God.

They placed him on the slip which must inevitably launch him into blank atheism, and wrote up for him as his motto the maxim of Olden-Barneveld, "Nil scire tutissima fides."

It is not therefore matter of surprise if Protestantism should have been the fertile mother of doubt, discord, and division; for the proclamation of half a truth as a whole truth is the enunciation of error, and the admission of error is the introduction of discord.

Protestantism has thrust asunder, to their mutual exclusion, those three aspects of absolute truth which God has joined together-Religion, Morality, and Art, in other words the True, the Good, and the Beautiful; and yet, as Longfellow sings,—

"These are the three great chords of might,

And he whose ear is tuned aright

Will hear no discord in the three,

But the most perfect harmony."

As a power emancipating Individuality it is dead. The explosion of the Reformation has buried it under a bed of scoria, and has produced an atmosphere stifling to originality. This may seem paradoxical, for the Reformation opened a vent to individualism. Nevertheless the results of the eruption have proved fatal to its development; for this reason, private judgment, instead of being given its true function, has been turned into a weapon wherewith every man was authorized to kill all originality except his own.

Public opinion, which is the consensus of the judgments of the multitude, has been erected into the sovereign standard of all that is true, good, and beautiful. And as the most inferior and uncultivated estimate is necessarily the most common, the lowest and rudest ideas on truth, virtue and beauty have become the dominant judgment.

The opinion of the many being opposed to that of the original genius, it resists it and tramples it under foot; and, as a matter of practical experience, we know that public opinion has proved a far more powerful engine than spiritual or temporal autocracy for grinding all men into one dead, drear level. Art must be vulgar, goodness must be common-place, truth must be Tupperish-allow me the word, -or public opinion will not tolerate it. A thousand hands are lifted against the man who would raise art out of the gutter, teach a goodness higher than respectability, and declare that the horizon of the eagle is not that of the badger. "Already," says Mr. Mill, "energetic characters on any large scale are becoming merely traditional." For that we must thank Protestant civilization. He who has the audacity to think for himself, and to have larger sympathies, or a deeper heart than Jack, Tom, and Harry, is given a nickname and is hissed off the stage. Literary and art criticism have fallen into the hands of the clique. Conventionality is the rigid norm to which every truth, right action, and work of art must be fitted; and minds and hearts must be bound with more cruel fetters than those forged by the slave-masters of imperial Rome; whilst ridicule--a torture more brutal than the rack-is applied by every clown to enforce the sentence of modern vulgarism against whatever is too noble for its pettiness, too true for its hollowness, and too beautiful for its bestiality.

To the lowest and grossest is committed the function to roar down the voice that rises in witness of better things, to drag down the hand stretched out to higher things, to put out the eyes that look up to purer things. Has not each coarse, foul-minded man, each mean-spirited man, become an Esau whose hand may be against every one who differs from himself? What is the vulgar laughter