true, sought to reassure him by the reply, that he, the guide of the pilgrims' progress, had it in commission to comfort the feeble-minded, and to support the weak.

XXXIV.

THE UNTEMPTED THAT STAND, AND THE TEMPTED THAT FALL.

ST.

GALATIANS vi. I.

T. PAUL would have his brethren restore in the spirit of meekness a man overtaken in a fault, each of them, the while, considering himself, lest he also be tempted.

It is easy, said a heathen poet, to be virtuous when one is not exposed to temptation: Esse bonum facile est, ubi quod vetet esse remotum est. But no soul is absolutely impeccable; and, in Frederick Robertson's words, it seems as if all we can dare to ask even of the holiest is how much temptation he can bear without giving way.

""Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall;"

but the distinction comes with sorry grace from one who fell so low as Angelo. Who, asked Rogers, can say, "In such circumstances I should have done otherwise"? Who, did he but reflect by what slow gradations, often by how many strange concurrences, we are led astray; with how much reluctance, how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many selfaccusations, how many sighs, how many tears,-who, did he but reflect for a moment, would have the heart to cast a stone? Byron was the subject of his lines beginning,

Pleasure, while yet the down was on thy cheek,
Uplifting, pressing, and to lips like thine,
Her charmed cup-ah, who among us all

Could say he had not erred as much, and more?"

To Byron himself once turned Sheridan at a dinner-party, in tears, and said, "It is easy for my Lord G. or Earl G. or Marquis B. or Lord H., with thousands upon thousands a year, to boast of their patriotism and keep aloof from temptation; but they do not know from what tempation those have kept aloof who had equal pride, at least equal talents, and not unequal passions, and nevertheless knew not in the course of their lives what it was to have a shilling of their own." And Byron, could he ever have forced himself to quote Wordsworth, might for once have used lines of the derided Lake poet's, and have reassured his fellow-guest, so far as he was concerned, by the assurance,

"I am not of the world's presumptuous judges,

Who damn where they can neither see nor feel,
With a hard-hearted ignorance."

Said Johnson once, "You may not have committed such crimes as some men have done; but you do not know against what degree of light they have sinned." But the Judge who, as Thackeray puts it, sees not the outward acts merely, but their causes, and views not the wrong alone, but the temptations, struggles, ignorance of erring creatures, has, we know, a different code to ours-to ours, who fall upon the fallen, who fawn upon the prosperous so, who administer our praises and punishments so prematurely, who now strike so hard, and, anon, spare so shamelessly.

"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone decidedly can try us;

He knows each chord-its various tone, each spring-its various

bias:

Then at the balance let's be mute, we never can adjust it;

What's done we partly may compute, but know not what's

resisted."

Was Lord Nelson, it has been asked, a better or a worse man than a clerk in a London bank who passed his life in a sort

of moral torpor, without sufficient energy or temptation to do anything very right or very wrong? Et combien semblent purs qui ne furent qu'heureux! exclaims Victor Hugo. It is all very easy for a man to talk of conquering his appetites, when he has none to conquer, says Charles Kingsley's first hero. We owe all to Heaven, even our virtues, muses the Vicar in metaphysical William Smith's Gravenhurst; and he professes to have always felt a certain timidity in dealing out the requisite censures against men who have been led into error by hot impetuous temper, who probably thirsted after pleasures and excitements which to him and others were no temptations at all. The Countess Brunella of Dr. Moore's Zeluco". was chaste, without being virtuous; because in her it proceeded from constitution, not principle. Guarded by the breastplate of frigidity, which, like the ægis of Minerva, repels the shafts of love, she walked through life erect, and steady to the dictates of decorum and self-interest, without a slip or a false step.” In his Inquiry concerning Virtue, Shaftesbury accepts as the greatest proof imaginable, that a strong principle of virtue lies at the bottom, and has possessed itself of the natural temper, when ill passions or affections are evidently and firmly seated in one part of the temper, whilst in another part the affections towards moral good are such as absolutely to master those attempts of their antagonists: "Whereas, if there be no ill passions stirring, a person may be indeed more cheaply virtuous, without sharing so much of a virtuous principle as another." To apply a couplet of Corneille's Pauline,—

"Ce n'est qu'en ces assauts qu'éclate la vertu,

Et l'on doute d'un cœur qui n'a point combattu."

Leonard Fairfield may admire as a definition wiser and simpler than any in the most elaborate sermon by Parson Dale, Helen's question and answer, What is the difference between being good and bad? The good do not yield to temptation, and the bad do. But it is too epigrammatic to be exhaustive. Dr. Boyd accounts it fearful to think what malleable material we are in the hands of circumstances: "the graceful vase that

stands in the drawing-room under a glass shade, and never goes to the well, has no great right to despise the rough pitcher that goes often and is broken at last." The image recalls one that follows Frederick Robertson's apostrophe to the proud Pharisee of a woman, who passes by an erring sister with a haughty look of conscious superiority, ignorant, it may be, of what temptation is, with strong feeling and mastering opportunity: "Shall the rich-cut crystal which stands on the table of the wealthy man, protected from dust and injury, boast that it has escaped the flaws, and the cracks, and the fractures which the earthen jar has sustained, exposed and subjected to rough and general uses?" Gibbon is sneering, as usual, when he remarks that the virtue of the primitive Christians, like that of the first Romans, was very frequently guarded by poverty and ignorance.

How is it, asks Crabbe, that men, when they in judgment sit

"On the same fault, now censure, now acquit ?

Is it not thus, that here we view the sin,
And there the powerful cause that drew us in?
'Tis not that men are to the evil blind,

But that a different object fills the mind.
In judging others we can see too well

Their grievous fall, but not how grieved they fell;
Judging ourselves, we to our minds recall,

Not how we fell, but how we grieved to fall."

Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall. There is something applicable in Ovid's line, Etsi non cecidit, potuit cecidisse videri. A commentator on the two Bacons, referring to the spotless descent to posterity of Roger's name, while that of Francis has come down to us darkened with more spots than time can efface, deems it hard to say how much difference of position had to do with this difference of moral purity. If Lord Bacon had lived in his study, we might have had nothing but praises for his name. In judging such an Edgar Poe-like German romancer as Ernst Hoffmann, if we are forced to condemn him, let it be without forgetting, pleads

66

Mr. Carlyle, that for a mind like his, the path of propriety was difficult to find, still more difficult to keep: moody, sensitive, and fantastic, he wandered through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which common natures have happily no glimpse." The American romancer, Charles Brockden Brown, modestly referred his abstinence from coarser indulgences to his constitutional infirmities, and consequent disinclination to excess: the benevolence of Nature, he used to say, set him free from many of the temptations which beset others in their hot youth. Had he been furnished with the nerves and muscles of his comrades, his career, he believed, might have been the reverse of temperate and intellectual. "Who has assayed no danger, gains no praise," is a sententious line of Prior's. How can the proud Pharisee, as Dr. South words it, that shall reprove a publican in terms of insultation and boasting, tell but what, in the same circumstances and opportunities of sin, he should have done the same "for which, with so much arrogance, he reproves or rather baits another? Was it not the mercy of Providence that cast the scene of his life out of the way of temptation? that placed the flax and the stubble out of the reach of the fire?" Prescott pleads for Pizarro that his lot was cast among the licentious inmates of a camp, the school of rapine; and argues that the amount of crime does not necessarily show the criminality of the agent; and though history is concerned with the former, to be recorded as a warning to mankind, it is He alone who knoweth the heart, the strength of temptation, and the means of resisting it, that can determine the measure of the guilt.

"The life of the man-can you tell where it lies?

In the effort to sink, or the power to rise?

Can you guess what the thirst is the man quenches thus?"

As Gordon says to Butler of their great leader, in Schiller's Wallensteinstod:

"We in our lucky mediocrity

Have ne'er experienced, cannot calculate,

What dangerous wishes such a height may breed
In the heart of such a man."