selves, and it is no sign of freedom to ignore this fact. It is likeness in unlikeness which makes family quarrels the bitterest, the keener bite of "benefits forgot, friends remembered not.'' The way to avoid them is to acknowledge facts-not to attempt an artificial harmony, or behave as if no change of time or scene could alter the habitual state of feeling toward people whom you used to live with and now see once in five years; nor on the other hand to exaggerate differences of place and circumstance, or be unfaithful to the past. It is so with friendship also. We have given to others a right to part of ourselves, and we cannot honestly recall it. The free spirit does not wish it; for faithfulness is another character of freedom. No teaching of George Eliot cuts deeper than her scorn of unfaithfulness, the willingness to forget the inconvenient past. Tito Melema is the type of unfaithfulness, because he chooses to consider only what he is, without recognizing the persons and things which had made him such.

I have spoken hitherto of freedom as a quality depending partly at least on habit and practice as if it could be taught or learned. The use of freedom can be learned as cricket, riding, or Greek. Yet many will remain bunglers to the end; and to renounce a pursuit in which failure is certain is the only way to escape being ridiculous. And so to many the wisest use of the choice which is liberty, is to renounce liberty and take up obedience. And thus they were often wise who renounced liberty in the cloister. Others there are who have a natural power of it, for whom rules are not made. They may become libertines, or they may follow the law of liberty.

This capacity of liberty, as when it is perfect is a man's most glorious possession, so on a lower scale it does much to make life happy. The free giver, the ready laugh, the cheerful sharer in the pains and pleasures of others, the hearty comrade, the lover of children, for whom inferiors and even animals feel an instinct of service. There is a kind of largeness of nature often to be found in company with largeness of bodily frame. Size and strength are often found together with softness, but oftener they are combined with an absence of fear

But

and a sense of personal superiority which ought to be, and often is, good-natured superiority-a superiority of temper and generosity which becomes one who has natural advantages. Such a man may be gross and violent, but he is seldom waspish. This is the form in which freedom is most genial and not most rare; it is a grace of nature. The name of "frankness" is rightly given to this character, and it is one of the most delightful things in human nature. The feminine counterpart is nowhere better seen than in early womanhood, because young women are not pestered with thoughts of a livelihood or a careertheir business is to be happy and useful, and to be loved and admired. Mephistopheles maintains wives and unmarried sisters to be the best preachers of liberty, because they do not desire it for themselves. They are not troubled by ambition or the desire of recognition which makes so many a man's life bitter. ter. It is true that a peculiarly narrow form of worldliness, that of wishing to rise in society, especially belongs to women, and that the corresponding vice is less odious in men, who have to strive for their place in life. But a woman who is contented with her home and her place is the mirror of noble humanity. Thankfulness is one of the characters of freedom; and the method of contentment, whatever the spirit from which it springs, is to deal cheerfully with details. A man who quarrels with his bread and butter because it is not ambrosia will always be hungry. If he thinks his farm, his counting-house, his village school, his lecture-room, his quartersessions too small for him, he will never find a room large enough for the exercise of his virtues. I am not saying that to desire a wider field or a higher work is unworthy of the free spirit. Desire for recognition is too often found side by side with personal jealousy, which may ripen into malignity. Such personal and professional jealousies are hindrances to freedom. Your adversary takes the judgeship or the recordership which would have made you a rich man ; he gains the elections which you lose; his family connection, his vulgar good looks, his insincere rhetoric, his odious obsequiousness, his unscrupulous support of the winning cause, takes away

not only the praise from your ears but the bread from your mouth. And so the disappointed man becomes a slave, not merely to his own vanity but to his rival's success. There is more often than not a reason for his disappointment. It is well for him if he shows his control of circumstance by not ignoring it; otherwise disappointment ripens into envy. To be free from envy and jealousy is another note of liberty. Perhaps the meaning of what I have been saying may be best brought out by examples. They shall be examples of freedom by inheritance, and freedom by conquest or by purchase.

One of the most complete examples of the man whose freedom comes by nature is Montaigne. He is so superior to all personal pride and sensitiveness that he can contemplate impartially the workings of his own heart and mind.

Scott is another instance. A man of many weaknesses, prejudiced and unjust in politics-of the world, if Mr. Ruskin will have it so; but if Sir Walter Scott is of the world, humbler citizens of it need not despair,-unduly and not altogether nobly deferent to birth and rank, so not superior to personal antipathies nor to the common code of honor of his time; a careless spender of money easily got; a reckless speculator; no saint, either in his judgment or his personal habits of mind. Yet how free he was from anything which degrades. How delightful the description of his life at Abbotsford; how exalted his ideal, never with him removed from practice, of chivalry, industry, soundness in every relation of life. Nothing base or mean was in him. His stoical endurance of poverty and ill-health was not put on as a philosopher's cloak; it was genuine, and he took no credit for it. His kindliness, his chivalrous respect for the poor, the unfortunate, and the dull, are all his own. If the Scots are above all things a free people, the Memorial of Scott stands fittingly in Edinburgh as the monument in its noblest embodiment of their distinguishing national virtue. How well he contrasts with Byron, to whom he yielded at once as his superior in the field of poetry-not that he thought meanly of his own genius; he accepted as his right homage willingly

given, but never grudged others their share of praise.

And his freedom of soul was based upon obedience. His code of morals may have been unenlightened, but it was genuine, and he obeyed it. Though Scott was not a Puritan, there was something of Puritan sincerity in him as in his Puritan heroes; he had the "mere dignity of mind and rectitude of principle" of Jeannie Deans. He lived in the fear of God, and never believed in happiness or goodness which was not disciplined. Scott's life is full of acts of kindness shown to less successful writers-acts which involved the spending of time, pains, and money. If he was enslaved by the passion for speculation, and if this part of his life is not wholly pardonable, he expiated much by the example which he set of sacrificing everything to the payment of his debts. It is not just to say that he received great payment for bad work. His work was always unequal; but the years which produced "Woodstock' and the

Chronicles of the Canongate" are not unworthy to be compared with the best part of his literary career.

Or to take an instance from history. Henry the Fourth of France with all his libertinism was worthy to be a leader to freedom by reason of the freedom in him. He was capable of self-repression and of painful sacrifice. The very saying by which he is best known is rather the expression of tolerance than of irreligion. He may well be compared with his kinsmen, the Constable of Bourbon, and Condé, falsely termed the Great, whose vanity and egotism drove them into rebellion against their country and alliance with the Empire and Spain. William of Orange is one of these who conquered freedom. He deliberately chose to live laborious days, and freedom gave him not a crown, but toil and privation. I would not put his grandson in the same scale, for great as he was, there was more of personal ambition and pride in his life. It was his pride to thwart Lewis the Fourteenth, a personal contest no less than a natural hostility to the chief enemy of liberty.

Johnson conquered his freedom from the grasp of ill-health, hypochondria, and indolence. His will to be free prevailed over everything by virtue of cour

age, judgment, and warmth of heart. His whole life was a battle for freedom, and a victory over devils as real as those which vexed St. Antony. And how many St. Antonys have there been who defended an empty fastness; whose strength spent itself in fighting chimeras and fashioning a character which had no usefulness left in it? The Thebaid and the monasteries of the West were full of men whose earnest and unrelenting efforts made them no more pious and less useful than if they had bought and sold, planted and builded, and had the substance of freedom, leaving its form to the monks. But we are not to reckon with these unintelligent votaries such an anchorite as George Herbert, who knew the value both of what he purchased and what he gave for it; or as Erasmus, when he refused the cardinal's hat offered as the price of discreet silence.

Of intellectual freedom I have nothing to say which has not been said a hundred times. Locke's warnings against "local truth," prejudice, authority, are well known and are always true. We have not outgrown Plato and Bacon, but the tendency of the present age is to discredit old authority and to set up new; it is the story of the New Presbyter and the Old Priest over again; but the dogmatist in this case is the negative not the positive authority. The negative arm of argument, of which Grote in his "Plato" wrote so wisely, threatens the other with an atrophy. The dicta of natural philosophers are superseding those of the ancients; but it is a mistake to suppose that the moderns are free from the old error of submitting inquiry to authority; and it is perhaps a more pernicious error to believe what is new than what is old for that reason merely. Even in Cicero's time, natural philosophers could be spoken of as a most arrogant sort of men," and our modern physicists are not inferior in arrogance to their prede cessors. It is not too often that modesty is combined with knowledge as it was in Darwin and Faraday. The danger of the present time is to think that all knowledge is scientific, and that the only popes are the wise men of to-day. In intellectual matters, humility is one of the characters of liberty. He who would know anything must in the first

place confess ignorance: he must neither take things for granted, nor yet accept anything beyond his own conclusions. He must keep his mind free both from dogmatism and from despair of knowing, and above all from the self-deception of conceit. Good sense is an ingredient of free thought.

But intellectual freedom is not entirely dependent on logic. It requires freedom of will, courage, and other virtues to take one's own views and think consistently, and therefore rightly. Authority may be accepted from servility or laziness, or because we wish its conclusions to be true. The fault is in our will, and it obscures our vision; we cozen our soul into byways of error" by slipping into the error of a partisan. One need only take up to-day's newspaper and read an electioneering speech or a parliamentary debate to see how miserable is the logic of party. In nine cases out of ten, we are inclined to say that the speaker is either deliberately misstating the case, or that looking at one side of it has prevented him from seeing the other; in either case his intellectual freedom is ruined. It is strange that it should be so; for honest speech always makes itself felt, and you cannot convince without conviction. Politicians seem to forget that their business is to help to solve questions of practical philosophy, not to defend a thesis; and hence it is that there is so much of bad politics in the world.

It is a pity that there should be such a term as "independent" politician. All public men ought to be independent, if they have honesty and courage. Unwise and intemperate candor is often a mark of a weak head, and makes a man shifty and untrustworthy; real candor, which is never found apart from courage, may sometimes spoil the game of party, but it has its reward in the long run. For the rank and file, however, obedience is better than captious independence. It is a safe rule to follow your party if you cannot lead it, and not inconsistent with an honorable independence. A man who says he belongs to no party has for the most part no heart in the matter.

There is no greater obligation incumbent on the free than to help others to be free. No one can love liberty for

himself without cherishing it in others. He knows what it has cost him, and he would not keep it to himself. The tyrant, in great or in little, is not free; his rule is his own caprice, or obstinacy; to regulate, to domineer, to apply his own standard to others, to be intolerant of opinions, tastes, sentiments which do not fall in with his own, and to carry out his own will without regard to the wills of others. This is not liberty. He who loves freedom delights to see the free working of nature in others. He likes to see his children grow up to be themselves, not reflections of their parents. He is tolerant even of what he does not like, for he knows that no true taste or judgment can be formed except by native growth or free acceptance. He would not have all even think as he does, for he has humility enough to know that he is often mistaken, and he honestly respects difference of judgment, because it is the only road to truth, and because every tree must bear its own fruit, and he would not wish to hang apples on a barren stock. And because he respects the opinions and feelings of others, he is respected in return; because, as he is not forever imposing his own views, regulating and hindering the action of others, so when he speaks his mind or asserts his will, it is felt that he acts from honest conviction, not from wilfulness or caprice. I do not deny that a domineering temper, like other forms of selfishness, may effect its object; but it is effected at the cost of peace and the wiser control which comes of itself to superior wisdom..

On the stage of history the domineering temper creates Napoleons and Lewis the Elevenths. It is a matter of everyday experience in the dealings of masters and workmen, teachers and pupils, parents and children, and disfigures characters which in other respects are admirable. Read" Emile and Levana, teachers and parents, and learn that there is nothing more precious than the liberty of a child.

From the moral point of view that choice, in which freedom consists, must be exercised within limits, or liberty becomes license. "Only the Law çan give us Liberty." The law must be a schoolmaster, not only to Jews and Gentiles, but for every person individually.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;" it is also the beginning of liberty. Liberty needs the safeguard of the sense of right and wrong. The true Puritan thinks nothing indifferent; he exaggerates the truth, that right and wrong have a place in every part of life. The biblical narrowness of England still contains some of its wholesomeness. How long it will continue to do so, is a question for the next generation to solve. We are perhaps growing to be too tolerant of evil. Our grandfathers and grandmothers drew a sharp line at certain opinions and actions, and refused to countenance them. Nowadays bishops hobnob with atheists, and hope for their salvation without attempting to convert them; and all degrees of immorality are winked at if the sinner is a sufficiently eminent artist, actor or author, or a foreigner. If everything is not an open question, politeness demands that we should behave as if it were so. I would not wish to return to the manners and beliefs of the seventeenth century; but there is something to be learned from such a book as the " Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson," or the simple rectitude of "Robinson Crusoe." The crude idea of Providence which prevailed then, however unscientific, worked well, and our new epicureanism does not altogether take its place as a guide of conduct. We take a personal standard, not a moral standard. We follow our virtuous impulses, but forget that it is by rule and not by sentiment that our vicious impulses must be curbed, till after the struggle of many years they are tamed. We think perhaps that a delicate taste, or a generous spirit, or a theory that life is to be led as a fine art, will save us, and we ignore the fact that the beast within each of us must be chained and kennelled before the godlike nature can range safely and enjoy its native liberty. When we have subdued the seven deadly sins, it will be time to think of uncontrolled liberty. If life is a matter of taste, the mind must be purified by discipline, in order to see things in their true colors, and to choose and reject in accordance with a right sentiment. If a generous spirit is to solve the problem, we want discipline to drive out whatever there is mean and ungenerous in our character. If life is an art, the truest

artist knows best that it is only through obedience, humility, self-repression, unceasing labor within the limits of rule, that the certainty of hand, eye, and judgment is gained, in which consists the liberty of the great painter. We

have discredited the idea of duty, without strengthening love; we talk about human nature as if it were already perfect, and had nothing to do but to follow its impulses, or else we drop into the opposite error and represent it as a prey to contending emotions, a helpless hulk on a sea of calamities and passions.* The end of George Sand's philosophy is to destroy liberty by subjecting all to passion.

George Eliot's teaching, whatever its defects may be, rests upon the sovereignty of duty. She looks upon life as a service which love renders willingly, but not without the guidance of duty, and her "cynicism" goes no further than to show that the elements are often 'unkindly mixed,'' and that such is the irony of life that "to die in vain" is often the " noblest death.' That life is a service, is a more wholesome view than any other. That God's service is the only liberty, is the sublime paradox of St. Paul, which is as true now as in the reign of Nero-a truth which will survive theology.

It is quite right that many things should now appear indifferent which were once matters of life and death, but "Zeal and keen-eyed Sanctity" ought to find other objects as sacred and as difficult. Life is not easier because it is more comfortable, nor duty less imperious because it comes in a questionable shape, and states its problems more obscurely than in the days when "do this or die' was no allegory but a dreadful certainty. If this century is to help the solution of the contrast between love and duty, it must be by inflaming love, not by discrediting duty.

* The philosophy of Rousseau and his modern followers (which has more influence on English thought than is generally supposed) is to substitute the idea of misfortune for that of sin.

Of

As in the choice of life, so in the renunciation of life which Christianity seems to command, true freedom takes counsel of humility. It is the voice of arrogance to say "I will be a saint." Too many saints are like those Puritans of whom their enemies said, "We at least have the vices of men, whereas the Roundheads have the vices of devils, arrogance and pride." Devotion, as a pursuit, may be as misleading as Mr. Casaubon's" Key to all Mythologies." Such splendid examples as those supplied by the "Lives of the Saints" are not meant for the imitation of common folks. them and their imitation it is written, Who hath ears to hear let him hear. The call is never mistaken; but beware of hearing what is meant for another, not for thee. for thee. In secular things, too, the armor of the hero must not be rashly assumed. The French Revolution furnishes many examples of would-be heroes as every week uncovers the nakedness of would-be poets. But in Nelson's dedication to the life of a hero there was no rhodomontade. Ulysses' bow is always there for him who can shoot with it. But beware, ye suitors; stand aloof, ye profane. The frog in the fable followed an ideal, and burst. Do not imagine that you are following an ideal when you are only straining your strength. Standing on tiptoe will not enable you to look over a ten-foot wall. You can no more be St. Francis by shaving your head and wearing a frock and girdle, than Xanthias can become Hercules by taking his club and lion's skin. He will have to pick up his master's baggage after all. By the side of "Know thyself" should be written, "Be thyself." To thine own self be true.

The first condition of freedom is sincerity, and the second forgetfulness of self; and the end of the whole matter is the paradox that, as the best way to individuality is not to think about self, so the best and perhaps the only path of freedom is to be a willing slave. There is no maxim which transcends this from the old Service Books: Quem nosse vivere, Cui servire regnare est.Macmillan's Magazine.