fect, not so much for the sake of what they teach us, as for the sake of showing us how to think and how to act. What Socrates taught, concerning man and the universe, has long since passed away; but what he taught of the method and process of pursuing truth -the inquiry, the cross-examination, the sifting of what we do know from what we do not know-this is the foundation of the good seed of European philosophy for all time. What St. Paul taught concerning circumcision and election or grace is among the things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the unstable may wrest to their own destruction, or, having served their generation, may be laid asleep; but what he taught of the mode and manner of arriving at divine truth, when he showed how "the letter killeth and the spirit maketh alive"; when he set forth how charity is the bond of all perfectness; when he showed how all men are acceptable to God by fulfilling, each in his vocation, whether Jew or Gentile, whether slave or free, the commandments of God-he laid the true foundation of Christian faith; he planted in the heart of man the seed, the good seed, of Christian liberty and Christian duty, to bear fruit again and again amidst the many relapses and eclipses of Christendom. When Luther dinned into the ears of his generation the formula of transubstantiation and of justification by faith only, this was doomed to perish and

"wax old as doth a garment"; but his acts, his utterances of indignant conscience and of far-sighted genius, became the seed of the Reformation, the hope of the world. When John Wesley rang the changes of the wellknown formula of assurance, it was the word of the ordinary preacher; but, in his whole career of fifty years of testifying for holiness and preaching against vice, this was the seed of more than Methodism-it was the seed of the revival of English religious zeal. Such seeds, such principles, such infusions, not of a mechanical system, but of a new light in the world, are not of every-day occurrence-they are the work of a few, of a gifted few, and, therefore, are so much the more to be observed when anyone, who has had it in his power to scatter such seeds right and left, passes away and leaves us to ask what we have gained, what we can assimilate, of the peculiar nourishment which his life and teachings may have left for our advantage. Few will doubt that such an one was he who yesterday was taken from us. It may be that he will not be laid, as might have been expected, among the poets and scholars and sages, whose dust rests within this Abbey; it may be that he was drawn by an irresistible longing toward the native hills of his own Dumfriesshire, and that there, beside the bones of his kindred, beside his father and his mother, and with the silent ministrations of the Church of Scotland, to

which he still clung amidst all the vicissitudes of his long existence, will repose all that is earthly of Thomas Carlyle. But he belonged to a wider sphere than Scotland; for, tho by nationality a Scotchman, he yet was loved and honored wherever the British language is spoken. Suffer me, then, to say a few words on the good seed which he has sown in our hearts.

In his teaching, as in all things human, there were, no doubt, tares, or what some would account tares, which must be left to after-times to adjust, as best they can, with the pure wheat which is gathered into the garner of God. There were imitators, parasites, exaggerators, of the genuine growth, which sometimes almost choked the original seed and disfigured its usefulness and its value; but of this we do not speak here. Gather them up into bundles and burn them. We speak only of him and of his best self. Nor would we now discourse at length on those brilliant gifts which gave such a charm to his writings, and such an unexampled splendor to his conversation. All the world knows how the words and the deeds of former times became, as Luther describes in the apostle's language, "not dead things, but living creatures with hands and feet. Every detail was presented before us, penetrated through and through with the fire of poetic imagination, which was the more powerful

because it derived its warmth from facts gathered together by the most untiring industry. Who can ever, from this time forward, picture the death of Louis XVI, or the flight of the king and queen, without remembering the thrill of emotion with which, through the "History of the French Revolution," they became acquainted with him for the first time? Who can wander among the ruins of St. Edmunds's at Bury without feeling that they are haunted in every corner by the lifelike figure of the Abbot Samson, as he is drawn from the musty chronicle of Jocelyn? Who can read the letters and the speeches of Cromwell, now made almost intelligible to modern years, without gratitude to the unwearied zeal which gathered together from every corner those relics of departed greatness? What German can fail to acknowledge that, not even in that much-enduring, all-exhausting, country of research and labor-not even there has there been raised such a monument to Frederick the Second, called the Great, as by the simple Scotchman who, for the sake of describing what he considered the last hero-king, almost made himself, for the time, a soldier and a statesman?

But, on these and many like topics, this is not the time or place to speak. It is for us to ask, as I have said, What was the good seed which he sowed in the field of our hearts, and in what respects we shall be, or ought to be,

the better for the sower having lived and died among us?

It was customary for those who honored him to speak of him as a prophet. And, if we take the word in its largest sense, he truly deserved the name. He was a prophet, in the midst of an untoward generation: his prophet's mantle was his rough Scotch dialect, and his own peculiar diction, and his own secluded manner of life. He was a prophet, most of all, in the emphatic utterance of truth which no one else, or hardly anyone else, ventured to deliver, and which, he felt, was a message of good to a world which sorely needed them. He stood almost alone, among the men of his time, in opposing a stern, inflexible resistance to the whole drift and pressure of modern days toward exalting popular opinion and popular movements as oracles to be valued above the judgment of the few, above the judgment of the wise, the strong, and the good. Statesmen, men of letters, preachers, have all bowed their heads under the yoke of this, as they believed, irresistible domination, under the impression that the first duty of the chiefest man is, not to lead, but to be led-the necessary conditions of success, to ascertain which way the current flows, and to swim with it as far as it will bear us. To his mind all this proved an insane delusion. That expression of his, which has become, like many of his expressions, almost