do-will try to do their duty. And perhaps the very discipline through which we are passing, severe though it be, is clearing some films from the eye away. Who will bind the red cross upon his arm, in a nobler cause than any old crusade, and follow Christ through all the perils and swayings of the fight, strong in the conviction that the cause of righteousness must prevail, and that there are yet powers in the living Word of God, which, far from being exhausted, have as yet hardly been tried?

Preached St. Mary's, Oxford, February 9, 1879; Westminster Abbey, July 8, 1883.

XIV.

INFLUENCE OF CHARACTER ON INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS.

"Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible."-1 CORINTHIANS ix. 24, 25.

DISCIPLINE is an effort, as well as a result, of will. No one who watches the processes of his own inner life will accept the most recent philosophical and scientific theories, that he is a mere result of environment acting upon physical organisation—a mere piece of reflexacting mechanism. Even the mappings out of a sounder psychology are apt to mislead; they make us forget, by their separations and discriminations, the unity of the character of each individual. It may be convenient to parcel out the faculties; but after all, they start from, or converge in, a certain point; and that is the centre of the man.

According to Bishop Butler's theory, human nature is only rightly organised when all its parts-if an indivisible spiritual being can be truly said to have parts—

are duly co-ordinated and set a-working in harmonious adjustment, by conscience sitting on her sovereign throne. It is this that gives character to a man. Without it, there can be none. According to the Epistle to the Hebrews it is the formed habit―ëğış— that gives the perceiving faculties their discerning power (Heb. v. 14).

Aristotle, in a well-known passage in the Rhetoric, distinguishes between stable and highly-gifted natures. I am not sure that these differences are so much natural differences, as tendencies, whence derived I know not, which develop, under certain training and treatment, into what they ultimately become. Lord Bacon thought that one of the effects of his new method of philosophical generalisation would be to equalise intellects, and place the great scientific achievements of the future more plainly within the reach of all, or any, who would use the necessary industry, and observe the prescribed conditions of success.

Intellectual progress is a different thing from, and should not be confounded with, intellectual success. "Genius," said Buffon, "is patience "—and patience is a part of character. "Genius," said Carlyle, "is nothing but a transcendent faculty for taking pains" — and industry and perseverance are parts of character. "If we have done anything to advance knowledge," said Bacon, "it has only been by a true and legitimate humiliation of the intellect-crushing its pride, its precipitancy; teaching it to know and feel its limitations, where it is weak as well as where it is strong."

No one could have had a more instinctive sense of

the limitations imposed by the nature of the case, on even the most gigantic intellect, than Newton, when he said, I seem to have been no better than a child on the sea shore picking up a few stones here and there, with the great ocean of Truth lying all undiscovered before me."

To philosophise in this spirit implies not only that the philosopher has a character, but that that character has determined, or at least modified and even regulated, the spirit and the very methods of his philosophy. His intellect, so to speak, has been moralised. The man's conscience goes with him into the field of speculation. Devotion to truth, as such and for itself, is a moral quality; a part of character; that which perhaps more than anything else stamps the truly great, as well as the only good man.

The more a man is possessed with this ardour for truth, the less will he be ready to project upon the world, and demand immediate acceptance of, his crude, unformed hypotheses-bis quasi - scientific guesses, which, to minds of a certain temper, are all the more welcome if they come into startling collision with previously received beliefs.

Wise men recognise the responsibility of their utterances, and shrink, in spite of the supposed necessity for rounding off an hypothesis, from shocking beliefs which, with all their imperfections and inconsistencies, are still found to lend a support that cannot lightly be dispensed with, to the moral purpose of mankind.

I admit that if atheistic science, or scientific atheism, could be proved in the same way, or to the same extent,

as Newton's theory of gravitation, it would go hard with theology; but, at the same time, it would go hard with everything besides. The social life of the world would have to be reconstructed upon a new basis. If the materialistic hypothesis becomes the order of the day, it will have to be shown how society, as the word has hitherto been understood-the union of men under a sense of individual responsibility and with distinct relative duties could be compacted together, could exist at all.

Now this modesty, this hesitancy in the proclamation of opinions, this absence of presumption, vanity, selfseeking, are moral qualities; are a part of character, and certainly have a connection with intellectual progress. Let no one suppose that that Athenian temper, always in quest of the latest forms of truth, is necessarily indicative of a fair, impartial, advancing mind. It may be nothing more than the feverish restlessness of one who has become so volatile and inconstant that he cannot rest long upon any intellectual convictionhardly, perhaps, on any moral certainty. "He woke in the morning prepared to find everything an open question," may be a description of the condition of mind which recognises, and truly recognises, that upon no truth, other than mathematical, as it presents itself to a finite mind, can the last word ever have been really spoken; but it may also characterise a weak, foolish, purposeless mind, incapable of progress, because incapable of sustained application; not recognising the moral obligation of truth, and forgetting that light may perplex and dazzle, as well as guide and illuminate.