and I wonder that John Fiske's exposition of the Spencerian Philosophy never made him a convert by its wonderful lucidity. It was what seemed to him the necessarily utilitarian ethics of the experiential school that most offended him. He found no ground of obligation but the inborn sense of right. But his criticism seems to lack acquaintance with the later aspects of Utilitarian thought, which he vigorously flouts, while adopting much to which its modern statement has attained. A criticism of Bentham, or even of Mill, is not a valid criticism of Sidgwick's "Methods of Ethics," Leslie Stephen's "Science of Ethics," or Alexander's “Moral Order and Progress," in which Hegel and Spencer meet, like righteousness and peace, and kiss each other. As with the moral law, so with belief in God: it was given in consciousness, by intuition. Speculation can only reach a negative or incomplete result. It cannot prove God. It can only analyze the ineradicable belief.

Dr. Hedge loved the force of contrast. He would paint in a dark background, to bring out his darling thought against it the more clearly. He liked to give his hearers a veritable shock, as when he told the Cambridge theological alumni that Dr. Channing was "a good deal of a Philistine " (his humor and his frolic-temper had a part in this); but he liked still better to "pluck up drowning honor by the locks," to prepare for his hearers a happiness of glad resuscitation, when he had buried them under a torrent of superb negation. The best example of this that I recall is where he says of Dr. Channing, "And curious it was how this man — without learning, without research, not a scholar, not a critic, without imagination or fancy, not a poet, not a word-painter, without humor or wit, without profundity of thought, without grace of elocution—could, from the spiritual height on which he stood, by mere dint of gravity (coming from such a height), send his word into the soul with more searching force than all the orators of his time." Make positive the negatives of this daring characterization, and, with the least necessity for change, you have the qualities of Dr. Hedge's mind. But to

make negative the positive we have no call.

He had not the

ethical supremacy of Channing. His dominant quality was intellectual. But his ethical volume and momentum were not slight and small. We speak of him habitually as a scholar; but he was not pre-eminently that. Not merely that he was no Dryasdust, but also that in his wide reading there was much of touch and go and little of the patient digging in minutiæ which constitutes a talent like that of Ezra Abbot, for example, or Freeman, or Kuenen, or Toy. He was more of a thinker than of a scholar. To develop his own ideas was to him a business more proper to himself than the massing of facts, the tracing of causes. Others must write mémoires pour servir: he would make the memoirs serve his thought and art.

That last word, like a herald's trumpet, ushers in the long expected king, the governing idea of Dr. Hedge's intellectual life. As with the great Goethe of his boundless admiration, art was his joy and crown. He aimed to be, and nobly, grandly was, the literary artist, taking his rank not with Emerson as a seer, but with Burke and Gibbon and Arnold and Newman and Ruskin as a sayer; a seer in no mean degree, but pre-eminently a sayer, an artist in words, in thought, a master of style, of classic style, "the grand style," swelling, resonant, Miltonic,-first, last, and always this. He is full of thought, full of suggestion; but sometimes, I think, if he were not, or if he always irritated, never satisfied my mind, I should go on reading him for those majestic swells and falls, those words so full of color, warmth, and fire. But there is no separation of the thought and word, the sense and sound. I remember his quotation in Divinity School days: "Luther was the absolute man. In him soul and body were not divided." That was true of his own style.

"For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make."

It was not merely his love for beauteous form that made him strenuous for the balance and perfection of his style: it was

his passion for ideas that obliged him to demand for them the fairest temple he could build for them with words chosen and fitted with the great builder's mastery and patient care.

What he has added to our intellectual life is not any definite system of ideas, no philosophic scheme, no theological finalities, but something much better than any one of these things or than all of them together. He might have said with the apostle, "Not that we would have dominion over your faith, but that we would be helpers of your joy." A helper of our joy he certainly has been in many a session of sweet, silent thought, when the splendor of his diction has so married with the freshness of his idea that there has been born for us a pleasure bright and beautiful as that Euphorion of Goethe's mystic song. But he has been much more than this. We have been baffled by the seeming contradictions of his thought. We have been irritated and provoked by his cherubic scorn of doctrines and ideas that were precious in our eyes. But he has made us think. Impossible to follow, he has driven us back with his Ithuriel spear upon our individual strength, compelling us to think out our own intellectual salvation, albeit with trembling and with fear. This is the highest service that one man can render to another in the intellectual life.

"He is gone who seemed so great,—
Gone, but nothing can bereave him
Of the force he made his own,
Being here; and we believe him
Something far advanced in state,
And that he wears a truer crown

Than any wreath that man can weave him."

PUBLIC WORSHIP.*

In our liberal churches, the range of thought concerning public worship is extremely wide. On the one hand, we have those to whom "the enrichment of our public worship," as they phrase it, is a prominent ideal. On the other hand, we have those who would like to come in after what they call "the introductory services," which, to their thinking, merely lead up to the sermon, with which they have no worshipful associations, often naturally enough. The latter class again divides itself into two parts, widely distinguished from each other, one part finding no reality or appropriateness in any prayer or worship, the other holding that true prayer is an aspiration from the alone to the Alone,—a soliloquy which cannot be overheard without impiety.

It follows that the first consideration to which we are called in the discussion of public worship is the legitimacy of private worship, of private prayer. For, if there be no legitimacy here, it would hardly be conceived by any one that a place for public worship can be found. But, if there be legitimacy here, then, whether there is any for public worship is the next step, from which we may go on to ask what manner of public worship is best suited to men's spiritual wants and aspirations.

* A paper read at the meeting of the New York State Conference in New York City, Nov. 20, 1889, and reprinted from the Unitarian Review of February, 1890, as a contribution to the debate now going on in Unitarian circles as to the advisability of a liturgical service and the publication of such a service by the American Unitarian Association. Having examined with some care the five sample services that have been sent out, I should greatly regret their publication by the A. U. A.,- they have in them so much of mere survival with much admirable matter,- but hardly less the publication by the A. U. A. of any such service. It would seem a sanction of it that it has no right to give. I wish that those who are of this opinion would make it known to Secretary Reynolds or the Liturgical Committee.

I cannot think of anything more simple, natural, inevitable, than private prayer. It is as simple, natural, inevitable, as awe and wonder, reverence and adoration, as thankfulness for benefits received, as aspiration for the good and true, as yearning for communion with our own who have been received up out of our sight, and all those who have been "friends and aiders of such as would live in the spirit." The prayer of awe and wonder, reverence and adoration, is as much the normal attitude of the healthy soul as an erect posture is of the healthy body. The world might be just as wonderful, just as beautiful as it is; and, if man's mind were different, it might stir in him no sense of mystery, it might awaken in him no delight, no transport of enthusiasm, no rapture of thanksgiving. But, so long as the world and man remain as they are,- made for each other, the mind of man the complement of the material universe,— so long there will be that response of the human spirit to the divine which is worship, which is prayer, whatever it is called, or however strenuously it refuses to be named.

And just as natural as the private prayer of adoration, quickened by all the infinite wonder of the world, its infinite beauty and magnificence, is the private prayer of thankfulness. I cannot think that this to live and thrive-demands a sense of the peculiar and exclusive care of the omnipotent power. What we are thankful for is that we are sharers of the universal joy and sorrow of the world. What we are thankful for is that, for all our sorrow and our burden, others may be glad and free. What we are thankful for is that, however stricken and bereft we may be now, we have been blessed in ways we never can forget, and that the recollection helps to make us patient, sweet, and brave. What we are thankful for is the great inheritance which has come down to us from the toilers and thinkers of the past and the high privilege of living in such good man-fashion that it shall not be impaired by any fault of ours.

But adoration and thanksgiving do not exhaust the possibilities of private prayer. There is much more than these.