the most intellectual people of the ancient world, lost their brilliant place through festering corruption; when the Romans, the strongest and most law-loving, found their empire cave in for want of inward moral tension in its matchless material and military organization; when, amid the decay of that vast civilization, a fresh creative life burst forth and spread, not from the courts and schools and libraries and observatories, but from the illiterate synagogue and the fanatical Jew; when, again and again, the law has been made clear that social degeneration descends from the ornamental ranks, while social regeneration ascends from the despised; it does seem a strange illusion to seek redemption from our ills on the side of mental culture. No; it is in the spiritual capacities of man that the true counterpoise is to be found to the stormy forces of his impulses and passions. The voice which can speak to these can alone carry him out of himself, and invest him with diviner powers; introducing him to a new life of reverence, which calms the eagerness of selfinterest and desire, and gives an unknown meaning and depth to every pure affection and generous duty. And not only has the religious new-birth this feature, of commanding the total nature of the individual in all its dimensions at once: it is further the great equalizing and uniting power which overleaps all secondary distinctions, and blends innumerable souls into one choral symphony; lifting all to the level of one impartial

standard of inward goodness, and casting all down in trustful worship of one Living and Infinite Perfection. They who "bring in hither,"-to this sublime homage, -"the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind," shall not only have place, for us, among the lights of the moral firmament, but, as "turning many to righteousness," shall "shine as the stars for ever and ever."

XIX.

The Rock that is higher.

PSALM Ixi. 2.

"Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I."

It was perhaps some outward calamity that wrung this prayer from the Psalmist. Be it what it may,-loss, sorrow, even remorse,—it brought him redemption from a more grievous ill,-the burden of himself. By the very tone of his strain you may know, without seeing him, that his face is turned upward. He has found that there is a "higher than he "; a too high for him; a rock he cannot climb of himself; yet whither he must be led, if ever he is to have peace again. These are great discoveries; very simple indeed, but very deep; short, no doubt, of the full insight of the Christian mind; yet beyond the temper of many a professed disciple. Those who feel nothing higher than themselves, who live upon the level and see the world upon the same, who have prudence in their own affairs, humanity for others, but reverence for none, are hardly in place, you would say, on the pavement where Chris

tians kneel. Yet who can doubt that the class is far from being small? Not that any one would deliberately maintain, or consciously think, himself to be above the attitude of dependence and aspiration. But how few there are in these days whose life seems to set into that attitude,-whose eyes seem to carry a look beyond, whose features tell you that they watch and wait,— in whose moral deportment there is a leaning upon strength other than their own. How many, in whom the bold face, the glib tongue, the empty self-content, the tone of light banter or perpetual criticism, show that they feel themselves in the presence of no Higher! Nor is it only in careless hours, when the free play of nature is disengaged, that these signs appear of a spirit drawn to no deep worship. Duty itself, though in its very essence the service of a Law above us, is too often rendered, if not with the pride, at least with the isolated strength, of personal resolve; as though, lapsing, we should indeed fall into the hands of another; but, achieving, effect a work that is all our own. Nay, even in their religion, in the very act of renouncing themselves and passing into the Divine hand, men contrive to flatter their own complacency and mock with a counterfeit the altar of their God; not yielding themselves, but claiming him; not laying down their nothingness and sin before his almighty holiness, but using his infinitude to swell their littleness, and his redemption to cancel the shame of sin; proud, if they

be orthodox, of knowing him so well; perhaps not less proud, if they be sceptics, of knowing him so little. So subtle is this clinging self-adhesion, that in order to divert attention and keep office, it will even denounce itself and call upon the world to aspire and mount. The cry of "excelsior" is corrupted into a cant; and if you watch the upturned look of those who use it, it has often nothing to do with the eternal heavens, but is only wandering after the glittering bubbles of their own vanity.

Inveterate however as may be this chronic sin of our humanity, the grace of God has not assailed it quite in vain. Christendom is broadly distinguished from the Greek and Roman world by its spirit of intenser aspiration,—its inability to repose upon the present and finite, as if that were all,-its constant search, behind the veil, for the perfection only hinted by the tracings thrown upon the eye. Its art, its piety, its moral life, hardly less than its worship, have betrayed the sense of a world transcending experience, an archetypal excellence that leaves all our achievements deep in shade. A heathen Raffaelle, or Beethoven, or Tennyson, are on no terms presentable to the imagination. York Minster would lose its meaning in Athens. And of all the great ancients whom one could place in fancy among the hearers of Tauler or Leighton or Pascal or Hare, Plato is the only one in whom the light would find entrance, and the marvellous tones would re