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lawe of an admittedly divine justice; and on the vivid conception of the presence of spiritual beings. The mere admiration of physical beauty in the body, and the arts which sought its expression, not only conduced greatly to the fall of Greece, but were the cause of errors and crimes in her greatest time, which must for ever sadden our happiest thoughts of her, and have rendered her example almost useless to the future.

168. I have named four causes of her power: discipline of senses; romantic ideal of heroic honour; respect for justice; and belief in God. There was a fifth-the most precious of all-the belief in the purity and force of life in man; and that true reverence for domestic affection, which, in the strangest way, being the essential strength of every nation under the sun, has yet been lost sight of as the chief element of Greek virtue, though the Iliad itself is nothing but the story of the punishment of the rape of Helen; and though every Greek hero called himself chiefly by his parental name,-Tydides, rather than Diomed;-Pelides, rather than Achilles.

Among the new knowledges which the modern sirens tempt you to pursue, the basest and darkest is the endeavour to trace the origin of life, otherwise than in Love. Pardon me, therefore, if I give you a piece of theology to-day it is a science much closer to your art than anatomy.

169. All of you who have ever read your Gospels carefully must have wondered, sometimes, what could be the

meaning of those words,-" If any speak against the Soz of Man it shall be forgiven; but if against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the next."

The passage may have many meanings which I do not know; but one meaning I know positively, and I tell you so just as frankly as I would that I knew the meaning of a verse in Homer.

Those of you who still go to chapel say every day your creed; and, I suppose, too often, less and less every day believing it. Now, you may cease to believe two articles of it, and,-admitting Christianity to be true,-still be forgiven. But I can tell you-you must not cease to believe the third!

You begin by saying that you believe in an Almighty Father. Well, you may entirely lose the sense of that Fatherhood, and yet be forgiven.

You go on to say that you believe in a Saviour Son. You may entirely lose the sense of that Sonship, and yet be forgiven.

But the third article-disbelieve if you dare!

“I believe in the Holy Ghost, The Lord and Giver of Life."

Disbelieve that! and your own being is degraded into the state of dust driven by the wind; and the elements of dissol ion have entered your very heart and soul.

All Nature, with one voice-with one glory, is set to '' you reverence for the life communicated to you

from the Father of Spirits. The song of birds, and their plumage; the scent of flowers, their colour, their very existence, are in direct connection with the mystery of that communicated life: and all the strength, and all the arts of men, are measured by, and founded upon, their reverence for the passion, and their guardianship of the purity, of Love.

170. Gentlemen,-the word by which I at this moment address you-by which it is the first of all your duties through life, to permit all men to address you with truththat epithet of 'gentle,' as you well know, indicates the intense respect for race and fatherhood,―for family dig nity aud chastity,-which was visibly the strength of Rome, as it had been, more disguisedly, the strength of Greece. But have you enough noticed that your Saxon word kindness' has exactly the same relation to 'kin,' and to the Chaucerian 'kinde,' that gentle' has to 'gentilis'?

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Think out that matter a little, and you will find thatmuch as it looks like it-neither chemistry, nor anatomy, nor republicanism, are going to have it all their own way -in the making of either beasts, or gentlemen. They look sometimes, indeed, as if they had got as far as two of the Mosaic plagues, and manufactured frogs in the ditches, and Ece on the land; but their highest boasters will not claim, yet, so much even as that poor victory.

171. My friends, let me very strongly recommend you to give up that hope of finding the principle of life in dead bodies; but to take all pains to keep the life pure and

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holy in the living bodies you have got; and, farther, not t seek your national amusement in the destruction of animals, nor your national safety in the destruction of men; but to look for all your joy to kindness, and for all your strength to domestic faith, and law of ancestral honour. Perhaps you will not now any more think it strange that in beginning your natural history studies in this place, I mean to teach you heraldry, but not anatomy. For, as you learn to read the shields, and remember the stories, of the great houses of England, and find how all the arts that glorified them were founded on the passions that inspired, you will learn assuredly, that the utmost secret of national power is in living with honour, and the utmost secrets of human art are in gentleness and truth.

LECTURE IX.

THE STORY OF THE HALCYON.

March 7th, 1872.

172. I MUST to-day briefly recapitulate the purport of the preceding lectures, as we are about now to enter on a new branch of our subject.

I stated, in the first two, that the wisdom of art and the wisdom of science consisted in their being each devoted unselfishly to the service of men: in the third, that art was only the shadow of our knowl edge of facts; and that the reality was always to be acknowledged as more beautiful than the shadow. In the fourth lecture I endeavoured to show that the wise mod esty of art and science lay in attaching due value to the power and knowledge of other people, when greater than our own; and in the fifth, that the wise self-sufficiency of art and science lay in a proper enjoyment of our own knowledge and power, after it was thus modestly esteemed. The sixth lecture stated that sight was a distinetly spiritual power, and that its kindness or tenderness was proportioned to its clearness. Lastly, in the seventh and eighth lectures, I asserted that this spiritual sight, concerned with external aspects of things, was the source

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