tent with not forbidding any that cast out devils," but in every such instance he says:

Acknowledge the finger of God. And not only acknowledge, but rejoice in his work, and praise his name with thanksgiving. Encourage whomsoever God is pleased to employ, to give himself wholly up thereto. Speak well of him wheresoever you are; defend his character and his mission. Enlarge, as far as you can, his sphere of action; show him all kindness in word and deed; and . . . if he forbid you, do not forbid him.

Surely Wesley was very close to the heart of the Master when he wrote these words. He caught the spirit of the catholicity of Christ. We must quote him once again from a sermon on "A Catholic Spirit." He said:

I dare not, therefore, presume to impose my mode of worship on any other. I believe it is truly primitive and apostolical; but my belief is no rule for another. I ask not, therefore, of him with whom I would unite in love, Are you of my Church? of my congregation? Do you receive the same form of Church government, and allow the same Church officers with me? Do you join in the same form of prayer, wherein I worship God? I inquire not, Do you receive the supper of the Lord in the same posture and manner that I do? Nor whether in the administration of baptism you agree with me in admitting sureties for the baptized, in the manner of administering it, or the age of those to whom it should be administered? Nay, I ask not of you (as clear as I am in my own mind) whether you allow baptism and the Lord's supper at all. Let all these things stand by; we will talk of them, if need be, at a more convenient season. My only question at present is this: "Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart?"

If this is catholicity this is what Methodism loves and cherishes. We say not that we are more catholic than all other denominations, we say not that we better interpret the mind of Christ; that would be bigotry, and we hate bigotry. We say not that we have "already attained," or "were already perfect;" but we strive to keep close to the Master, and learn to love as broadly, deeply, and tenderly as he loved. In the words of our beloved Bishop Simpson: "We live to make our own Church a power in the land, while we live to love every other Church which exalts our Christ."

H. K. Carroll.

ART. II.-THE GENTLEMAN IN LITERATURE.

HUMOR is half pathos and more. This sword has two edges. On the one, shining like burnished silver, you may see smiles reflected as from a mirror; on the other tears stand thick, like dews on flowers at early morning of the later spring. Humor is a dual faculty, as much misconceived by those who listen as by those who speak. We do not always have wit to know the scope of what we do. Thoughts of childhood, says the poet, are long, long thoughts; but who supposes childhood knows they are? Nor is this altogether a fault. To feel the sublime sequence of all we did would burden us as Atlas was burdened by holding up the sky. Life might easily come to be sober to somberness, which is a thing unwholesome and undesirable. Sunlight must have its way. Darkness must not trespass too far, and every morning says to every night," Thus far, but no farther."

To many readers Don Quixote seems fantastic, and Cervantes a laughter-monger. Cervantes had suffered much. His life reads like a novelist's tale. He belonged to the era of Spenser and Shakespeare, of Philip II and William the Silent, of Leicester and Don John of Austria, of the great Armada and the Spanish Inquisition, of Lope de Vega and Cervantes-for he was in the Hispanian peninsula his own greatest contemporary; and to this hour this battle-scarred soldier of fortune stands the tallest figure of Spanish literature. His was a lettered rearing, and a young manhood spent as a common soldier. At Lepanto he lost hand and arm. In five long, weary, and bitter years of slavery among Algerine pirates he held up his head, being a man, plotted escape in dreams and waking, fought for freedom as a pinioned eagle might, was at last rescued by the society for the redemption of slaves, sailed home from slavery to penury, came perilously near the age of threescore poverty-stricken and unknown, when, like a sun which leaps from sunrise to noon at a single bound, this maimed soldier sprang mid-sky, impossible to be ignored or forgotten, and disclosed himself the marked Spaniard of his era, and on the same day of 1616

Cervantes and Shakespeare stopped their writing in an unfinished line, and not a man since then has been able to fill out the broken meaning. This man had not wine but tears to drink. Yet he jests, and the world laughs with him, though we feel sure that while his age and after ages laugh and applaud Miguel Cervantes sits with laughter all faded from his face and the white look of pain settled about his lips, while tears "rise in the heart and gather to the eyes." Tears sometimes make laughter and jest the wilder. Men and women laugh to keep their hearts from breaking.

Cervantes has ostensibly drawn a picture of a madman, and in fact has painted a gentleman. What his intent was who can be so bold as to say? What part of his purpose was we know. He would excoriate a false and flippant chivalry. Contemporaneous chivalry he knew well, for he had been common soldier, wounded and distressed. He had seen what a poor triviality that once noble thing had grown to be. Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the knight-errant; and now when law began to hold sword for itself the self-constituted legal force, knighterrantry, was no longer needed. But to know when an institution has served its purpose is little less than genius. Some things can be laughed down which cannot be argued down. A jest is not infrequently more potent than any syllogism. Some things must be laughed away, other things must be wept away; so that humor and pathos are to be ranked among the mighty agents for reform. And one purpose Cervantes had was to laugh a tawdry knight-errantry off the stage. In long years of soldiery we doubt not he had grown to hate this empty boast, and his nursed wrath now breaks out like a volcano. This was his apparent purpose; but who can say this was all his purpose? "King Lear" has a double action. Mayhap, Don Quixote has a double meaning. We are always attaching meanings to works of genius. But you cannot tie any writer's utterance down to some poor altitude. Great utterances have at least a half-infinite application. Tennyson felt this, saying-as we read in his son's biography of him-regarding explanations of his "Idyls of the King" "I hate to

be tied down to 'this means that,' because the thought within the image is much more than any one interpretation;” and, "Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colors. Every reader will find his own interpretation according to his ability and according to his sympathy with the poet." What is true of poetry is true of all imaginative literature. An author may not have analyzed his own motif in its entirety. In any case we may hold to this, Don Quixote was a gentleman, and is the first gentleman whose portrait is given us in literature. We have laughed at Don Quixote but have learned to loved him. The "knight of the rueful countenance," as we see him now, is not himself a jest, but one of literature's most noble figures; and we love him because we must. Was it mere chance that in drawing this don Cervantes clothed him with all nobilities and shows him-living and dying-good, courageous, pure, in short a man? This scarcely seems a happening. Seas have subtle undercurrents. We venture Don Quixote has the same, and marks the appearance of a gentleman in literature, since which day that person has been a recurring, ennobling presence on the pages of fiction and poetry.

A gentleman is a comparatively recent creation in life, as in letters. Christ was the foremost and first gentleman. After him all gentility patterns. With the law of the imagination we are familiar, which is this: Imagination deals only with materials supplied by the senses. Imagination, in other words, is not strictly originative, but rather appropriative, giving a varied placing to images on hand, just as the kaleidoscope makes all its multiform combinations with a given number of pieces. Imagination does not make materials, is no magician, but is an architect. Admitting this law, we can readily see how the creation of a gentleman does not lie in the province of imagination. Homer's heroes are the men Homer knew, with a poetic emphasis on strength, stature, prowess. His era grew warriors and nothing else, and so Homer paints nothing else. Human genius has limits. Man is originative in character; and poets-" of imagination all compact"-catch this new form of life, and we call the picture poetry. All civilization to the days of Jesus produced but one character, so far as we may read, worthy to be thought a gentleman, and this was

He is the most manly Classic scholarship can Greek soil grew no Plato was philosopher,

Joseph, the Jew, premier of Egypt. man of pre-Christian civilizations. show no gentleman Greece produced. such flowers beneath its radiant sky. not gentleman. Socrates was an iconoclast, but not a manly man and helpful spirit. Greek heroes were guilty of atrocious and unthinkable sins. Test them by this canon of Alfred Tennyson: "I would pluck my hand from a man, even if he were my greatest hero or dearest friend, if he wronged a woman or told her a lie;" and, so tested, where must Greek heroes be classified. Greece and Rome produced heroes but not gentlemen. Julius Cæsar was the flower of the Latin race. Nothing approximates him. Great qualities cluster in him like stars in the deep sky. But his ambition was like to that of Milton's Satan, and his lust was a bottomless pit. As a national heroic figure Julius Cæsar is dazzling as a sun at summer noon; but as gentleman he cuts poorer figure than Lancelot or Sir Tristram. The gentleman is not an evolution but a creation. Christ created the gentleman as certainly as he created the world.

Now literature is what Emerson says genius is, a superlative borrower. The state of a civilization at a given time will gauge the poet's concept. He cannot pass beyond the world's noblest notions to his hour. If Greece and Rome produced no man, settle to it that Greek and Roman literatures will produce no man. Sculptor as Phidias, statesman as Pericles, dramatist as Eschylus, general as Themistocles, stern justice as Aristides, Greece can show; and such characters the historians, dramatists, and epic poet will delineate and celebrate. Horace is a looking-glass, and holds his genius so as to catch the shadows of men passing by. This poets do, and can do no more. They are not strictly creative. We mistake their mission. God has somehow kept the creative power in his own possession. Man can appropriate; God can create. So what we find is that ancient literature never attempted depicting a gentleman. Those days had no such persons. But Christ came and set men a-dreaming. He filled men's souls to the brim with expectation and wonder akin to fear and anticipation of impossibilities; and what he was men fondly and greatly