virtues, in another perhaps, an excess of the Christian. S. Paul's great hymn on Love will give him an opportunity of delineating the ideal Christian character.

I have insisted on the Bible as the legitimate basis of religious teaching, and the words of Christ Himself as the pearl and crown of the Bible from an ethical point of view. If He was Divine then His Divinity will be best displayed by the utterances of His Divine Heart, and among those who dispute His Divinity they are in the minority who gainsay the beauty and force of His teaching. The crimes and vices that are the reproach of Christianity arose from a neglect of that teaching. It is one of the most remarkable features in the history of Christianity that there should be so little reference to the ethical teaching of the Founder. Men were diverted from this teaching at first by the expectation of His return to reward His friends and punish His foes, then by disputes about His Person and struggles for ecclesiastical predominance. If we take up a history of Christianity with the object of correctly analysing the influence Christianity has had on the morals of the world we shall be met with an immense difficulty in arriving at facts. In ecclesiastical as in secular history the lives of the poor and struggling, on which we should expect Christianity to have most influence, are lost sight of amid the quarrels of emperors and popes and nice disputes on the Personality of the Founder. It was a noble saying of the far-sighted Erasmus, "Never was the Christian faith purer and more undefiled than when the world was content with one creed and that the shortest creed we have."

This unhappy neglect of the ethical teaching of Christ was due among other causes to the fact that the early Christians were engaged in defending themselves against the assaults physical and intellectual of the Pagans, and that subsequently Christianity was adopted by rude and anlettered barbarians whose religion was based not on the

recorded words of the Founder, but on the pageants they witnessed in the churches and the brief formulæ of the creeds. Christianity was hardly less leavened by barbarism than barbarism was leavened by Christianity, and Christianity has been reproached for results which were due to the Zeit Geist.

If there be any truth in these positions the influen Christian morality in the past is no gauge of its influ on the future if those who believe in the efficacy o example and teaching of its Founder resolve with prud and honesty to promote the knowledge of them.

If the character of Christ be the highest and most ning the world has seen, if it is best for the welfare of human race that conduct should be regulated in acc ance with His words, then the presentation of this chara and these words to the ardent and susceptible minds children must be regarded as one of the most salut measures for the future of mankind.

It is impossible in the limits of a paper to define all i good results that might be expected from such a presen tion in the class rooms of our schools. The chief charact istic of boyhood, perhaps, is selfishness tempered generous impulses. The life of Christ, by appealing to tl latter, will subdue the former. Withdraw that life from th pages of history and from the orbit of the boy's imagina tion, and where else will he so well learn to subdue hi selfish instincts? Again, men seek in these days rest from the distractions of life in the calm teachings of Nature, and Wordsworth is regarded as the priest of those mysteries. But Christ was the first who taught men to love Nature for her own sake and for her quiet teachings apart from her material uses. Christianity has been reproached, and not without cause, for the blood shed in her name by antagonistic sects. But the child whose mind has been imbued with the teaching of the parable of the good

Samaritan will find it naturally part of his religion to be tolerant and kindly to those who differ from him; and this spirit of tolerance will influence not only his conduct but his estimates of historical actions and literary characters. We wish our religious teaching to influence our future writers and statesmen as well as our ordinary citizens.

I will conclude by an adaptation of the noble words of the religious teacher in whose pages are combined the most profound devotion with the most cultivated reason.* *

The object of the Christian teacher will be to train a character that shall exhibit in just proportions a combination of the active and passive virtues-the life of devotion and the life of activity; that shall be able to stem moral wrong-doing without betraying pride in its own rectitude or a personal feeling against the wrong-doer; that shall seek truth by every method of investigation, and yet be unassuming and simple before the ignorant and unlearned; that shall be resolute in will, and yet tender-hearted in its affections; that shall love all beautiful things that are in the world, and yet be capable of showing sympathy with the unlovely and the deformed, and working if necessary amid squalor and misery; that shall combine heroism with refinement, and saintliness with manliness; that shall be the light of the society in which it lives, and yet be so little conscious that it is so as to create no jealousy in the minds of other

men.

And as regards the influence of his teaching on the intellects of his pupils, he will seek to prepare them for the doubts and difficulties he knows they will have to encounter, not by openly introducing these to them, but first by insisting strenuously on matters comparatively undisputed in the main outlines of the life and teaching of Christ, and secondly by giving indirectly such hints of solutions or of abandonments of attempts at solutions as have been helps

* James Martineau.

to himself; so that if in after life it should come about that any pupil is led by his studies to abandon some doctrine of traditional belief, he may feel that this is no adequate reason for detaching himself from his love and loyalty to Christ, the beauty of whose character has been indelibly imprinted on his boyish mind; nor will he, perhaps, be less stedfast if he is conscious that the knowledge of similar difficulties did not withdraw his master from his allegiance.

J. HUNTER SMITH.

THE LEADING IDEA OF THE DIVINE COMEDY.*

D

ANTE-a name derived from Durante, "the enduring one," ALIGHIERI, "the wing-bearer," and certainly no words could be more expressive of the man, seeing that his great poem has endured through nearly six centuries, increasing in favour as men became more and more capable of appreciating a work of the highest intellect, and seeing, also, that no poet ever attained to so lofty a flight as our Alighieri, the wing-bearer.

Dante did not bestow upon his poem the epithet Divine; he modestly named it "THE COMEDY," to distinguish it from what he deemed the grander poems of Homer and Virgil, each of which he distinguished as " THE TRAGEDY"; and he points out that while these two poems are written in the heroic style befitting the term, his poem was pitched in a lower key, in what he named "the middle style," as befitting comedy. It was the loving admiration of his countrymen that suggested the term Divine, and it first

* La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri. Text by Carlo Witte. Berlin, 1862.

La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri. Riveduta nel Testo e Commentata da G. A. Scartazzini. Leipzig, 1874-5-. In progress.

Critical, Historical, and Philosophical Contributions to the Study of the Divina Commedia. By Henry Clark Barlow, M.D. London and Edinburgh,

1864.

A Vision of Hell: the Inferno of Dante. Translated into English Tierce Rhyme, with an Introductory Essay on Dante and his Translators. By Charles Tomlinson, F.R.S. London, 1877.

The Barlow Lectureship on Dante. Introductory Lecture to the First Course of English Lectures on the Divine Comedy. By Charles Tomlinson, F.R.S. London, 1878.