dered into a far country. But now it is turning unsatisfied from empty husks, and casting doubtful but longing eyes up to Heaven and God. Never was there a time when the proud heart of man so yearned to throw itself upon the bosom of Religion and sob itself to rest. But for this there must first be ministry to the mind diseased. The trouble with the age is in the thinking faculty, and that is the organ that needs treatment. And not in the comparative study of Religions, nor in Mr. Arnold's odd fancies about the Bible, but only in a philosophic Christianity, will the cure be found. Here arises a question. Philosophy is a severe and abstruse science. Religious truths, being practical principles for all, must be made popularly apprehensible. Will not, then, a Christian teaching, which is the scientific thinking out and demonstration of fundamental Christian truths, be too lofty, remote, and abstract for its purpose? On a full understanding of all the points involved, this question would withdraw itself. Such answer as can be given here must be brief. Undoubtedly the way of life is so plain that the wayfarer, though a fool, need not err therein. But we are not now dealing with fools - that is, with simple piety and humble faith. We are considering the intellectual difficulties of intellectual men with regard to Christianity. Professor Seeley thus marks the different attitude of the two sorts of hearers: Present to an ordinary man the two sayings, "Love your enemies," and "The Word was made flesh." The first will give him difficulty; he will find it a hard saying. But the second will make no distinct impression upon his mind, and he will say he believes it which only means he has no wish to dispute it. Present the same two sayings to a thinker. He may find no great difficulty in the first. A retired life may have removed him from occasions of enmity, and thoughtful habits have calmed his passions. But the second will give him trouble. If he has regarded the logos as a technicality of extinct philosophies, he will be staggered at finding it made the center of a theology for all time. Here, then, a philosophic theology would address the thinker, and it would not matter if what it said to him were not popularly intelligible. Those who feel no phil osophic difficulties have no need of a philosophic resolution of them. It is enough that those whose minds are unsettled and perplexed should be led to the quieting of all doubtfulness. But it is not to be supposed that a philosophic christianity is all theology, or limited to addressing the "thinker" to the neglect of the "ordinary man." Philosophy does not make religion a thing too abstract or remote for any single practical end, but it would change somewhat the prevalent spirit of its practical teaching. It is sometimes said that religion is not a creed, but a life. It would be truer to say that it is both a creed and a life, and a life because it is a creed. Now, a speculative dealing with the creed, with the intellectual side of Christianity, keeps ever distinctly in mind that the truth is a truth for life, for action—not a mere intellectual scheme. It distinctly disavows any intention of cutting the thought of Christianity apart from the life of Christianity; for that is just the long error of the past which it is anxious to bring to an end. When the faith "once delivered" is regarded as a dry deposit of dogma, to be jealously guarded by the distinctions and definitions of systematic divinity-not as an ever-fresh wellspring of truth for men's daily use; when it is not safe for them to take it as a vital thing into their warm, living hearts and consciousness, but it must be handled gingerly by professors with the nice instruments of formal logic, lest they get some view about it that is not orthodox". then Christianity looks no longer like an actual growth, rooted in the nature of things, and their highest flower and fruit, but seems to be a mechanical, artificially-concocted scheme, whose wooden joints and sapless tissues are only a parody on life; then, indeed, Christian truth becomes too remote and abstract for any religious use. As to this common fling of "abstract," let me say, in a word, that speculative philosophy does away forever with abstractions. It is what it is because it deals solely, and it alone deals thoroughly, with the concrete. The fact is that the practical teaching of a speculative christianity. would be infinitely stronger, fuller, and more direct than is that of the dogmatic Christianity of the Protestant communions or of the Anglican Church. It would find its way 66 - out of the dust and confusion raised by the struggle with Rome of 300 years ago, and that without merely going back to a period anterior-an ante-Nicene golden age, when the complex questions of the Reformation had not as yet historically emerged. It would go back to the spirit of Apostolic times that is, it would talk to the men of this age. It would go to them, find out where to reach them, how to win them; adapt itself with tact to every disposition, "if by any means it might gain some;" not considering its own dignity, nor content with going through a perfunctory routine, careless of the growing indifference to it. There are men who don't care for sermons on the Atonement taken up with discussing the different theories of it; who don't care for sermons on the Incarnation from which Nestorius and Eutyches crowd out the Son of Man. They ask, What has your Christianity. to say to me, living here this life of darkness, and puzzle, and struggle, and sorrow, and trial, and failure? What is your message to enlighten, strengthen, cheer? And we would answer, not merely, Come to church; not merely, Come to Jesus, in the technical sense; but, Come home-home to your Father God, and the Son of God, your Brother. God is your Father! That is an old saying; yes, but you are to take it in a new sense, in a real sense. This is not a doctrine you are to accept; it is a fact you are to know, to live in, to live by. Get out of the lazy lap of conventional ecclesiasticism; get out of conventional notions and phrases that have stiffened and dried up, and face the spiritual facts of your being on your own feet as a man. Take them into the depth of your soul. These are the realities; these are your nearest, dearest, deepest interests; nay, in these only stands your human life. Your self-consciousness is only complete in your religious consciousness. Is it not a proverb, like father, like son? You, too, are essentially divine. Live, then, as an infinite spirit. for there is no such thing as finite spirit. Make your ideal unity with God an actual communion, and you shall come fully to yourself; the universe shall be transfigured to your eyes, and your place and path in it bathed in celestial light. There can be no attempt here to give the full volume of utterance, but some what in such a tone we may conceive that such a speculative christianity would practically speak. And if it must look alone to Hegel as its great master in theology, it might well choose for its practical teacher the great English churchman of our time, the large-hearted, noble-minded Maurice. SCHILLER'S ETHICAL STUDIES. BY JOSIAH ROYCE. The history of literature is full of philosophic problems; no period in it more so than that of the German classical literature. The philosophic problems concerned are, indeed, not those of the most purely theoretical interest; they are, on the contrary, the great practical problems of life. But their general interest is none the less for that reason, as one is easily convinced by a very superficial consideration. It is with the philosophic problems that engaged the attention of a great literary man, the second of the great leaders of the classical literature, the popular and much-loved Schiller, that the following essay treats. Not a contribution to philosophy, but only an attempt to aid in the understanding of the poet, shall form the substance of our task. It is from an age full of outer and inner conflicts that our subject is taken. We shall seek to describe only one of the heroes, and him only in respect to one of his great adventures. Schiller is profoundly an ethical poet. Not that he began life as a great ethical theorist. On the contrary, his early philosophic education was neglected, and until he was full thirty years old he knew of the great movements of thought of his day only superficially and by hearsay. But still, from the "Ode to Rousseau" down to " William Tell," you always find Schiller grappling with some problem as to the conduct of life. If he cannot speak the language of the school, he speaks his own language, and that is commonly much better. If he cannot give a final solution for his difficulties, as the schools always do for theirs, that only makes his expression more poetic, his development freer, and his ideas more life-like. And when at last he is brought to spend three or four years on abstract, ethical, and æsthetic studies, the consequence is a return with greater vigor than before to the work of poetic production, and a daring effort to put all the results of his thinking into poetic form, and so to make them of worth for real life. From first to last his motto seems to be that nothing is too earnest for the earnestness of life, and nothing relating to life too barren for the transforming hand of poetry. Popular instinct has long since recognized this fact of the ethical tendency of Schiller. To his own nation he appears as the poet of freedom, of ideal aspiration, of active striving for the better. The history of literature contrasts him with Goethe by making him the representative of the element of restless progressive effort in the classical period, as Goethe is the representative of the element of repose, of trust in nature, of self-surrender to life as a process, instead of self-affirmation in life as a free construction. No reader can mistake this tendency in Schiller. It is the merit, as it is the weakness, of all his best work, that it is throughout determined by ideas that have relation to action. Whatsoever things are in his eyes pure, lovely, of good report these, and no others, he seeks to realize in his poetry. And so, as his ethical conceptions develop, his poems develop with them. In short, when you study the principles that governed Schiller's thought on practical questions, you enter at once into the laboratory where his genius worked, and witness at least a part of the process, in so far as that can be made visible, by which his productions reached maturity. And this is the ground of the importance of Schiller's ethical studies in the history of his life and works. These studies were, as we have indicated, not for the first the fruit of an intimate and systematic acquaintance with philosophy, or with the special branch of it concerned. It is much rather true that Schiller finally came to busy himself quite systematically with philosophy because he had first long been an independent student of ethical problems, and had been unable to solve them satisfactorily. |