it nourished his obedience as a servant of Christ. It rested not on an inquiry but on a revelation, and issued not in speculation but experience. "I know whom I have believed' was the force of his life. I believed, therefore have I spoken,' was the reason of his work. He was a decided and persistent Strict Communionist, and felt bound to this by his reason and conscience, yet, like many who hold these views, he was eminently large-hearted. He cherished warm sympathies, and held hearty co-operation with all good men. To say "Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ" never was with him, as it seems to many, a high attainment, but one of the most elementary acts of charity.

"His ethics were not those of Aristotle or Thackeray. They referred very little to the opinions of men, but all to the judgment of God. The supreme thing was not advantage, but conscience. In his view crime was not worse than sin. He could not waste his indignation on oddities and follies when there were so many vices to be condemned and deplored. He did not care to be hot against meanness, unless there was in it some element of badness. He had much of the old Hebrew feeling, that nothing is very foolish but that which is ungodly and wicked. On the other hand, drapery and perfume had but small charms for him; posture and glitter never inspired him with love or awe. Corruption bedizened was only the more loathsome; and cunning when cleverest was regarded only as most Satanic. For hypocrisy and falsehood he had scant compassion, but for weakness and sorrow none had a gentler hand or a softer heart. As a man he was inflexibly honest and true; as a co-worker he was prompt, constant, and thoughtful; as a friend, frank, genial, and generous; but as a Christian he was absorbed in consecration. His piety was eminently devout, and his devotion supremely reverent. Happy in Jesus, he enjoyed the spirit of adoption; but his filial heart always bowed before the 'Holy Lord God.' It has been well said, 'He was greatest in prayer, especially family prayer.' In his later years his character beautifully mellowed. His energy of will, often urgent, and sometimes a little peremptory, ripened into a patient and gentle waiting for Christ. His tenderness towards his grandchildren was something touching to witness. As his day declined the golden glories gathered round, and as he drew near to the better land he caught more of its spirit and tone."

EDITOR.

The Religious Influence of Carlyle.

HE famous" writer of books" who so recently passed from us has impressed a mark upon the age far deeper than that left by the mere essayist or historian. Carlyle is a religious teacher and preacher, though by no means of the common kind. He is styled by his disciples "the Seer," or "the Prophet." His books are full of God and the Soul, Duty and

Sin, Heaven and Hell. And since they are likely now to be more widely read than ever, it may be worth while to venture a few plain considerations on the character and value of their religious influence.

Let it be said, at the outset, that no one who has entered into the spirit of Carlyle's writings can fail to realise that he is in the presence of a true God-fearing man, earnestly faithful to his own sense of religious duty, and strongly bent on making others faithful too. His personal friends describe him as not only most sincere and noble-minded, but humble, guileless, and devout, with a fatherly "God bless you" for little children, and a generous heart toward the struggling and unfortunate. His "Reminiscences" reveal a tenderness of religious emotion, a strength of pious impulse, which might otherwise have been unsuspected. His "Letters," when more fully published, will no doubt show us still more of that gentle and gracious aspect of the man. We have at present, however, to do with his books. And in these Carlyle comes before us as a veritable iconoclast-stern and unsparing. He tears down the false stucco with so rough a hand that the honest brickwork behind is also threatened with demolition. Herein, indeed, as a religious teacher lies alike his weakness and his strength. "He cries out against cant, but never even hints a remedy," was the criticism made by Robertson of Brighton. He cuts our moorings and sends us far out to sea; but he tells us little of the land of rest. He wounds, but he scarcely tries to heal. He can sympathise deeply and warmly, but he fails to satisfy; he fails even to direct. On the other hand, this very onesidedness lends the greater vigour to his blows. They fall upon abuses and evils like strokes from the mighty hammer of his favourite Thunder-god. In this intense destructive energy, in so far as it is rightly directed, lies much of Carlyle's usefulness. The moral air is marvellously clearer for his thunderstorms. You can now see prospects that before were hidden. You can hear voices close at hand that before seemed a great way off. He is of the type of the Forerunner, who, with loud and stern appeals, " prepares the way of the Lord."

Who, for instance, can measure the debt which even we in the churches owe Carlyle for his lifelong denunciation of all shams and shows, dead formulas and hearsays, hypocrisies and untruths? It is true that he does us scant justice, and knows little of us

beyond our faults; but his pungent satire has more oil in it than vinegar. Never was heard a more ringing call to our true dignity and duty. The gulf between class and class, the lack of human sympathy, the disposition to hand everything over to institutions and societies, is nowhere more faithfully exposed. "Past and Present," with all its exaggerations, is a healthy book for a follower of Christ to read. And equally useful are those passages, so frequent in all these books, where the necessity for a personal religious faith is insisted on, as distinguished from the mere "old clothes" of tradition and custom. Strong is he who has a faith that is his own! "He stands thereby manlike toward God and man; the vague shoreless universe has become to him a firm city and dwelling which he knows. Such virtue lies in those words well spoken, I believe!"

Still more impressive is Carlyle's prolonged protest against Materialism. To him, life is not a mere "relation," but a solemn, mysterious, spiritual reality. The modern gospel of social development meets with little mercy at his hands. The universe through which we pursue our little round is to him full of wonders and terrors. Through every star, through every grass-blade, the glory of a present God still burns." And the mystery is not only about us; it is within us. It is written in ineffaceable characters on our very nature. "The true Shekinah is Man," Carlyle quotes from Chrysostom, with much approval and amplification. "That Invisible, that Infinite, did it not at any moment disclose itself to thee? Came it never, like the voice of old Eternities, sounding through thy heart of hearts? The Infinite is more sure than any other fact." And, therefore, to forget God, whether for the nation or the individual, is spiritual death.

The theories of Utilitarianism are equally obnoxious to Carlyle. Our conduct must rest, not on the shifting sand of expediency, but on the granite rock of right. The question is not, how far can I safely go in sin, how near to the precipice without falling over? I must not sin at all, on peril of my soul. "No! it is not better to do the right than the wrong. The wrong must in no wise be done; the right must in no wise be left undone. The one is eternal life; the other is eternal death." Right and wrong are eternal distinctions. They are causes rigidly followed by their consequences both here and hereafter. Heaven and hell are thus "not a fable, or a semi-fable, but an everlasting highest fact." It was being argued once in Carlyle's presence

that we really cannot tell who are wicked, and that there is no very strict line of demarcation between the evil and the good. He burst in vehemently-"None of your Heaven-and-Hell-AmalgamationCompanies for me! We do know what is wickedness. I know wicked men; men whom I would not live with; men whom under certain circumstances I should kill, or they should kill me! Our old German fathers dragged such a man to a peat bog, and thrust him in there, and said,' Go in there! That is the place for all such as thee!'"* It was roughly, almost savagely, expressed; yet how much more true and wholesome than the shallow Universalism which obliterates the moral law, and idly sings

"That there are fifty roads to town,

And rather more to heaven!"

With convictions of this kind it will be foreseen that Carlyle's sympathy in the religious struggles of all earnest souls is deep and distinct. His own peculiar experience, as it appears to be described in "Sartor Resartus," assumed the character of a death-wrestle with universal unbelief, or "the Everlasting No," such as few, it is to be hoped, are called to wage, such as for the most it is neither easy nor essential to follow. Still less edifying is the "Life of John Sterling," a melancholy and disheartening book, in which the sunshine is scarcely allowed to glimmer through the encompassing cloud of doubt. But the "Cromwell," apart from its historical interest, is fitted to do the reader thorough spiritual good. The best side of the biographer's nature seems to be drawn out by the deep, stern, realistic Puritan piety of our glorious Protector. There is true inspiration for Christian men in the description of Cromwell-"one of those singular enthusiasts who believe they have a soul to be saved, and even take some trouble about it;" in the allusions to his conversion-" certainly a grand epoch for a man, properly the one epoch, the turning-point of him and his activity for evermore ;" and, finally, in the story of the last sad days at Whitehall-" a great sacred scene, immortal light-beams struggling amid the black vapours of Death," and Oliver, "the wearied one," staying himself, and the nation he was about to leave, on the eternal covenant of God. The same salutary and stimulating spirit breathes in many other of the pages of Carlyle. Here is manifestly a man who has himself shared in the great struggle after light and love,

"struggle often baffled, sore baffled, but struggle never ended, ever with true unconquerable purpose begun anew!" Nor is there wanting the assurance of Divine support in the conflict. All Heaven is on the side of the humble, strenuous seeker. Courage, and ever forward," is the constant watchword. Only learn to renounce thyself, and the end is sure! "Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him." Cheering is it to compare with such words of abstract teaching one sentence from the "Reminiscences." Carlyle is speaking there of the father who lived and died in the old simple Scottish faith, untroubled by the doubts that exercised his distinguished son. "Mercifully has he been spared till I am abler to bear his loss; till by manifold struggles I too, as he did, feel my feet on the everlasting rock, and through time with its death can in some degree see into eternity with its life."

Thus far, then, we have cause to hail Carlyle as a most valiant and able witness to the truth. In an age when too many of our wisest are resolutely ignorant upon the highest themes, it is refreshing to meet with one who takes his stand so firmly on " the Everlasting Yea." We may be thankful to see our children interested in his vivid portraitures of character, and inspired by his urgent calls to duty. He may do them, as he has done us, a world of good. But we should be wanting in that very honesty which Carlyle himself has been at pains to teach us if we concealed from them what appear to us defects and even dangers in his religious thought. He may do them harm as well as good. He requires to be read with the eyes well open, and the judgment actively at work. Our reverence for him must not hinder the frank expression, where we think it called for, of our disappointment and even of our distrust.

We do not care to dwell on the satire, far too free to be discriminating, which Carlyle pours on the churches of the day, established and non-established, on our recognised modes of operation, our theories. of doctrine, and our forms of worship. All this we can take with equanimity. What there is antiquated or unreal in our organisations, let it go; what is of the essence can be trusted to endure. The case is more serious when the Christian Scriptures are discredited. The tone adopted in speaking of the Bible is usually respectful; sometimes it is of an even warmer kind; but its authority, as a revelation, is reduced to a minimum. Hebrew psalms