universe. A God of this kind—a mere roi fainéant, a constitutional king, secured from our sight by responsible ministers in the shape of second causes-will hardly stir the vehement passions which burst spontaneously into verse. The psalms sung in his honour would be as languid as the feelings he inspires. A God who is not allowed even to make a fly or launch a thunderbolt will be worshipped in strains widely different from those which celebrated the Ruler who clothed the horse's neck with thunder, and whose voice shook the wilderness. The prevalent conceptions of the day will somehow permeate its poetry—if it has any-in spite of all that can be done to keep them out. Shakspeare and Bacon were not independent phenomena, brought together by an accidental coincidence. They were rooted in the same soil, and the impulse, though it led to different manifestations, was ultimately derived from the same

sources.

This, of course, is a commonplace; but we have a device in modern times for evading the apparent conclusion. We are, it is said, pre-eminently an historical age; our special function is the critical. We do not produce original thought, but live upon examining and dressing up the accumulated inheritance of our ancestors. We want the simplicity and the freshness which was necessary to produce new forms of art or faith. Indeed, when we come across regions in which such forms still linger, we are apt to spoil them by our touch. The native dress of India disappears in favour of Manchester prints, and perhaps native religions may be superseded in time by equally vulgar forms of European superstition. The remedy is to be found in that judicious spirit of revivalism which is now so popular. We must learn to cherish instead of destroying. Since Scott revealed to us the surprising fact that medi

æval knights and ladies were real human beings, instead of names in a book, and succeeded in impressing that fact upon the world at large, we have made surprising progress. We have been reviving all manner of things once supposed to be hopelessly dead. We have succeeded in building churches so carefully modelled after the old patterns, that William of Wykeham might rise from the dead and fancy that his old architects were at work. Nay, we have revived the men themselves. We have clergymen who succeed in accomplishing very fairly the surprising feat of living in two centuries at once; and the results are held to be infinitely refreshing and commendable. We have been just told, for example, that our new courts of law must be unimpeachable, because there is not a window or a tower in them which might not have been built just as well six hundred years ago. Poets can affect an infantile lisp, and tell us legends of old times as naturally as if human beings at the present day had still a lively interest in them. We have undoubtedly obtained some very pretty results, and have a beautiful new set of toys, which we may persuade ourselves are almost capable of living and moving. There is only one objection to our complete success. The more skilfully we imitate obsolete modes of art or religion the more palpably dead they become. One of our modern imitations of an ancient church resembles its original as minutely as the Chinese imitation of a steam-engine, the only fault of which is that it won't work. The old building was the natural production of men working freely, by all means in their power, to give expression to their feelings: the new building is the work of men fettered by the self-imposed law that they will use the forms invented in an epoch permeated by different creeds, aspirations, and emotions. A genuine revival could only be pro

duced by reproducing all the intellectual and social conditions under which the old art arose; and in that case it would have a spontaneous resurrection. Till then we shall only see what we see now-spasmodic attempts to be pretty and picturesque, with infinite antiquarian labour, and yet, with all our products marked by that feebleness of constitution characteristic of any natural or artificial object forcibly transplanted to an unnatural medium.

In art, indeed, there is room for such methods. There can be no reason why the poet or the painter should not help us to enter into the spirit of the past, and to contemplate with pleasure the picturesque and graceful forms from which all vitality has departed. Speaking frankly, indeed, art of this kind, whether it takes the shape of the careful historical romance or of the pictorial representation, is apt to be rather oppressive. At best, it is fitted chiefly for decorative purposes. The emotions to which it appeals are those with which we enter a museum, not those with which we enter a church. But at any rate, an art which has become entirely parasitical must fall into decay. The method is in fact inapplicable to the loftier forms amongst which, one would suppose, religion must be reckoned. The passionate and deep emotions, to which the highest art is owing, must burst forth in spontaneous and original expression. A great orator must use the language of his day; he cannot stop to pick and choose his words, and see that he has in every case the authority of Addison or Johnson's Dictionary. If preaching is bad at the present day, it is because it generally resembles an egg-dance, where the performer is afraid of coming into collision at every step with one of the Thirty-nine Articles. The growing interest in past ages, and the warm appreciation of what was good in them, which should have led

us to investigate the principles on which our ancestors acted, has too often led us to a servile mimicry of their results. Admiring the imposing aspect of a great spiritual power which reposed on the profoundest convictions of mankind, and provided harmonious expression for their strongest emotions, it is attempted to revive that happy state of things by obeying the same power when it is opposed to all our deepest convictions, and when it is impossible to use its forms without unnaturally cramping our understandings. What was once spontaneous tends to become a masquerade, where the actors are nervous and constrained by the fear of acting out of character. It is characteristic that the commonest bit of advice now administered to the French people is not that they should cultivate that virtue of veracity of which their late experience should have taught them the importance; but that they should cling to any fragments of belief which remain amongst them, as though dogma acted like a charm even when it rested not upon conviction, but upon a persuasion of its convenience.

Much contemporary teaching ap pears, in fact, to be the product of amiable sentimentalism and intellectual indolence. We shrink with effeminate dislike from all that is severe and melancholy in the old creeds. Our ears are too polite to be shocked by the mention of hell. We wrap ourselves in a complacent optimism, and the only form of faith which seems to have no chance of revival is that which endeavoured to look things boldly in the face, and refused to evade the more awful consequences of theology. Religion is to be an opiate instead of a stimulant. Christianity is to mean nothing but the Sermon on the Mount; and its historical basis and distinctive dogmas are to be withdrawn as much as possible from view. We are told in

substance, that if you take away from Christianity all the peculiarities by which it is distinguished from other religions, there will remain a very amiable system of morality; and this is put forward in perfectly good faith as a sufficient reason for accepting it. The residuum thus left is explained to be identical with the very estimable doctrine dispersed through popular novelists and the leaders of the Daily Telegraph. It will do very well for comfortable middle-class people, who have no particular reason to be discontented with the world, and are not apt to perplex themselves with speculative difficulties. The learned writer who has converted the Gospels into materials for a very pretty French romance is generally stigmatised as an infidel; but his method is substantially that of most popular preachers. Let us all be very amiable, turn away our eyes from the doubts which beset thinkers, and the evils which drive men to revo

lution, and we may manage to get along with a very comfortable, picturesque, and old-established belief. Such, we may fancy, was the attitude of mind of many of the spectators of the Ammergau play. They saw no irreverence in the play, though, perhaps, they might have found something irreverent in the more free-spoken products of the robust faith of older times.

The absence of profanity is indeed less a proof of the vitality of the performance than an indication that it has passed into the academical and unreal stage, and is properly superintended by modern professors of æsthetics. It would be as impossible now to introduce any ribaldry on such an occasion as to allow Cato to appear on the stage in a full-bottomed wig. We have become extremely exacting as to the harmony and keeping, and terribly afraid of an anachronism. That is just because the whole affair is to

us, whatever it may be to the performers, a mere artistic performance, and is entirely divorced from any reference to fact. A modern religious painting is very certain not to offend against the accepted canons of good taste, for the very reason that it appeals to no strong sentiments. Costumes have become more perfect, and the proprieties of time and place are more carefully observed in proportion as the old animating influence has been withdrawn. And the same progress in propriety and the same decay in intensity is visible in our other religious observances. Nobody, except some vulgar Dissenter, dares now to make a joke in a sermon any more than he cares to start a new heresy. Those are symptoms of a period of superabundant energy and vitality; not of a time when we are eminently respectable, dull, and decorous. And yet we have become so much accustomed to this mode of regarding religions, that it has passed into a kind of axiom, that our creeds cannot be beautiful unless they are in some degree false. We have seen it lately asserted, that the modern view of Christianity is that it is the depository of the profoundest truths although the history is an entire delusion. That is to say, in plain language, that you must tell a certain number of lies in order to secure the acceptance of a certain quantity of truth. Pure unmixed truth is too dazzling for the vulgar mind. It must be judiciously adulterated, combined with a judicious alloy of myths and legendary legends, in order to impress the popular imagination. It is difficult to put into words a more complete expression of utter scepticism; and we may safely assume that no enduring superstructure can be raised upon so unsafe a foundation. One may deed manufacture a dilettante religion; something which to professors of æsthetics will appear to be exceedingly graceful and pretty, but

in

which will fail really to touch the hearts and consciences of mankind. Even its own advocates admit that a doctrine of this kind is intended as a mere stop-gap; it is intended to patch up a difficulty, and to make a secure paving across which we may pass to revolutionary conclusions. But surely it is better, here as elsewhere, to look our perplexities in the face; to give up this feeble attempt at vamping up old dogmas to look as good as new. We must be content to abandon much that is beautiful and that once was excellent. But the more we really believe that religion is founded upon enduring instincts which will find an expression in one form or another the less anxious we should be to retain the old formulæ, and the more confident that by saying what we think, in the plainest possible language, we shall be really taking

the shortest road to discovering the new doctrines which will satisfy at once our reason and our imagination. The reluctance to part company with beliefs which have been so valuable in their day is in every way amiable and respectable; but, however slow we may be to acknowledge the truth, it is in fact the worst compliment we can pay them, when we endeavour to make the mere empty shams do the work of realities, and try to play at believing when we can no longer believe in earnest. Certainly the first results of an endeavour to be perfectly sincere may be the destruction of many beautiful fancies with which we cannot part without a pang; but the plunge must be made, and the sooner it is made, the more quickly we shall arrive at a really satisfactory result.

L. S.

IT

CHAPTER I.

THE JOURNEY HOME.

T was a fine day in June, and the eleven o'clock train from Amsterdam, heavily laden with passengers and luggage, only waited for the last whistle to start from the station.

The peculiar bustle of the moment of departure prevailed on the platform. Trucks with trunks and packages were wheeled in all haste out of the luggage office to the goods-vans; relations and friends who were to remain behind waved their adieux to the travellers, and here and there a last shake of the hand was exchanged.

'Farewell, Miss Emmy! God bless you! Think now and then of old Henry!'

It was a little meagre old man who pronounced these words, as he stood, with his cap in his hand, at the door of a first-class carriage. A fair-haired young lady leant out of the window with a friendly smile. She did not answer these adieux, but reached out her hand once more to the old man, and, indeed, had she spoken, he could hardly have heard her, for the whistle screamed and the train was off.

The young lady sat in a corner of the carriage and gazed out of the window, whilst one by one the objects familiar to her vanished out of

her sight. The tears rolled down her cheeks, but yet it was rather a melancholy sensation incidental to leave-taking than any more painful feeling which caused them to flow; for Emmy Welters was still at that happy age when every change has its charms, and the future looks rosecoloured in the horizon. Thus her natural good spirits soon overcame any momentary regret.

Emmy Welters was eighteen years of age. Where was she going? She was going to her native place and parental home. As to both, owing to a long absence, she had become almost a stranger.

For in her twelfth year she had had the misfortune to lose her mother, and her unmarried aunt at Amsterdam had taken possession of Emmy with the ready consent of her father, who felt himself little fitted to superintend the completion of her education.

The aunt who took charge of her was one of those women to be found in most families; a woman who in ordinary times is too little considered, but as soon as sorrow, sickness, or death enters the house, enters it also as a guardian angel. In such a case it is to her always that the letter is written with a trembling hand. Be it Aunt Anna, Sister Wim, or Cousin Kate, she is always an old maid, and for this reason people