XIII. RIGHTEOUSNESS. "For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost."-Roм. xiv. 17. A MAN need not be a pessimist or a cynic who says that he is not cheered by the present aspects, and that he feels a kind of uncomfortable shudder at the dark and threatening future, of modern society. I admit that it is easy, perhaps natural, to some minds to exaggerate this. Our impression and our generalisation are so much modified by temperament, by association, by limitation of view, by accidental grouping or contrast of the objects which present themselves to the eye at the same moment; by defect, sometimes of imagination and sometimes of reasoning; by inability to "look before and after," to discern causes and trace consequences; and not seldom by a loss of stability in the moral centre, and an enfeebled, if not a shaken, faith in God, that our inferences are apt to go further than we are justified, upon the evidence, in carrying them; and a more sanguine, as well as a more philosophic and religious, mind would bid us see elements of hope and light in what had filled our hearts with gloom and despondency. I remember well on my last visit to Oxford, walking with a thoughtful friend, and his remarking, in a tone that struck and surprised me, that he had given up all hope of the birth or revival of great ideas in England for this generation. What the twentieth century might have in store he could not tell; but the nineteenth had "left off bearing." Something like this, you will remember, was the fancy of Aristotle in regard to races. "There is a cropping-time," he says, "in the races of men, as in the fruits of the field; and sometimes, if the stock be good, there springs up for a time a succession of splendid men (avdρes TeρITTO); and then comes a period of barrenness." I am not saying whether such views are true or false, nor denying that there may not be a dangerous trace of fatalism in them which would paralyse effort, and help the prophecy to fulfil itself; but they are natural; and at crises like the present, when there are very few objects, either in the political, or the social, or the religious field of view, on which a reflecting mind can rest with satisfaction, they are apt perhaps unduly to depress the spirit, and almost make us lose our heads in the appalling thought that the deluge is upon us, and that we are too weak, too disorganised, and, above all, too late, to do anything to arrest its devastating and fatal career. I was strengthened myself recently by a passage which fell under my eye in the preface of Mr. Thomas Hughes's touching Memoir of a Brother, a brother whom I remember when I first became a fellow of Oriel, thirty-nine years ago, as an undergraduate of the highest type there; a memoir, which you, young men, who would fight the good fight, and pass safely through the world's trials and temptations, and win its highest and purest rewards, would do well to read. Deprecating dark and gloomy forebodings of the future of England, as though we were unable to do what our fathers had done, Mr. Hughes bids his reader look round upon and number up the various groups of families scattered up and down the land, in which we know that homely, simple, modest, pure lives are yet being led, and which vice and luxury and selfishness have not yet contrived to spoil, and he says we shall be surprised at the number of such homes within the circle of our own acquaintance; and there, he adds, lie the hopes and the future of England. And I acquiesced in the truth of the statement, and thanked God and took courage. Of course, there is always a ground of hope in what I may call the inherent moral resources of human nature. Even the darkest and most hideous pictures of the condition of man-"far enough gone," indeed, as every one's conscience must witness, "from original righteousness," yet not so far gone as some theological systems, which exercised perhaps too great a spell over the imagination of our reformers, have loved to paint him-have happily never been able to suppress the faith of the human heart in its capacities-in what Bishop Butler would probably call its "natural tendencies." Sane men—of course one does not notice the wailings of morbid minds like poor Cowper's— who, when under the necessity of acting, have broken through the conventional phraseology of their schools, have felt that they had, and that they could exert, a moral power; and that even when, through the failing resistance of the will, they allowed themselves "to be brought into captivity to the law of sin that was in their members," there was yet within them that consent of the conscience unto the law that it is good, and those visitings of compunction for the evil that has been done or the good that has been left undone, which are at least evidence of a nature not wholly corrupt, and guarantees that the divine image in which we were made, however much disfigured, is not absolutely marred. Indeed, when our Divine Lord bids His disciples have faith in God, it almost follows as a necessary implicit inference that they should have faith in man, who, as St. James reminds us, "is made after the similitude of God." To despair of humanity-to bemoan its sad estate to picture it as, since the great mystery of the Incarnation, still lying "fast bound in misery and iron" -to so misread the lesson of the prophet's vision as to say or think that nothing can be done in the way of preparation, and of necessary preparation, which may be the very condition of full success, till the breath of God comes forth and shakes the bones and breathes upon and quickens those slain-this supine and enervating "waiting upon Providence" or upon grace-by whichever name it may be excused or disguised—is as irrational as it is unscriptural; as false in theory as it is fatal in practice. Of course, results are not ours; and we often form mistaken and too eager estimates of them; and like the half-hearted King of Israel, we smite but thrice upon the ground with our arrows, and stay; or ask in a murmur, which savours of mistrust, "Lord, wilt not Thou stretch forth Thy hand and destroy the enemy that hath done such dishonour in Thy sanctuary?" and forget the need and the discipline of that "long patience" (as the Apostle calls it) with which the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, until it receives the early and the latter rain, he having done, and doing still, his own part the while; but still there is evidence, and evidence enough, of a general law, and the blessing for the most part comes quick and ample and rewarding, where there has been effort, and the effort has been wisely calculated and adequately sustained. Quite wonderful at times has been the vivifying power of great principles and noble ideas, even upon masses of men who before seemed steeped in inertness and lethargy. It needs but that he whom Carlyle calls the hero should give utterance to the voice; and if it is a true and inspiring one, every tongue catches it up as it were instinctively, and repeats it to its fellows. There is a harmony between the inner sensibilities of the soul and the moral order and beauty of the universe, if we only have the skill to touch the note which wakens it. It was this harmony to which Paul so unhesitatingly appealed, in spite of all the subtleties of a sophistical philosophy, which so often made evil seem good, and wrong right, when he trusted that the Philippians could still discern for themselves, and love and |