Testament. It is most unfortunate that, over and above the selfishness which life itself infuses into individual men, the economic conditions of our huge modern societies and the wall of partition which they build up between the rich and the poor, render simply impossible the practice of the entire Gospel. Misery will never be eliminated until all men have become very good. I say all, and all as good as possible. But the phrase "as good as possible" implies the renunciation of almost everything; a life consecrated to others; a life, to all intents and purposes of sanctity. The admirable truth is, therefore, that humanity tends toward the extinction of misery exactly in proportion as it tends toward interior perfection; and our spiritual and economic safety will be found to coincide on the extreme limits of the ideal.

It is well to think of these things and the works of M. Brieux which compels us to think of them, sometimes very painfully, is worthy of all respect and approbation. Go and look upon this picture drawn by one who is often an excellent artist, and always a perfectly honest man. You will find it by turns amusing and in the best sense of the word "edifying" and you will occasionally have the added pleasure of gratifying some private antipathy by the method of applause. "The Benefactors" is played with consummate ease and skill by M. Coquelin, and with remarkable talent by his son and others of his supporters. Translated for THE LIVING AGE from Jule Lemaitre.

From The Speaker.

THE PURITAN IN HISTORY. Mr. S. R. Gardiner, in the first of the Ford lectures on Cromwell, with which he has been instructing and charming Oxford, spoke of Puritanism as "a sort of backwater" in the main

But

and life. It is easy to mistake the meaning of a lecturer who speaks out of his vast wealth of knowledge to an audience much less specially informed than himself, and mistake is still more easy when one whose strength lies in his mastery of detail falls for the nonce into generalities, which are certain to be interpreted in either too vague or too definite a sense. what puzzled at least one of his hearers were the illustrations or proofs he used. They were more curious than conclusive. He cited three names to show what a small place Puritanism filled in the mind of Elizabethan and early Jacobean England-those of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Hooker. Hooker's polity was indeed anti-Puritan, but his theology was not. Calvin was to him "incomparably the wisest man that ever the French Church had enjoyed, since the hour it enjoyed him;" and while he disagreed strenuously with the Genevan polity, yet with the theology which was its basis he was in all essentials at one. Bacon was, if anything, a latitudinarian and an Erastian, but nothing so little as a Laudian or a believer in any jure divino claim for any sacred or civil office, whether named priesthood or kingship. He is as clear as any Puritan as to the distinction between the "visible" and the "invisible" Church. His notes of the "visible" are the familiar Puritan notes; and he distinguishes the Church and the Scriptures in a manner that would have satisfied Any Puritan. The one was the tabernacle which had the custody and handing down of the Scriptures; the other was the testimony which was the very soul of the tabernacle. The affinities, too, of his thought, as far as it concerned the relation of God to nature and man, were Puritan rather than Anglican. As to Shakespeare, what Church or system can claim him? He was a son of Elizabethan England, but how much of its history could we reconstruct from his plays? What of the wonderful feats of the men who made the English name a terror on

as

the high seas and laid the foundation of our naval supremacy could we learn from him? And what of the conflict with Spain and the fate of the Grand Armada, and the sudden awakening of England from an insular to a really large and catholic life? As a simple matter of fact, we know from him as little of the civil, the naval, or the military exploits of England in his own day, and even of its social and political conditions, as we know of its religious. His mind may be a mirror of his world, but we can hardly describe his world as English save by the art of esoteric interpretation, which is likely to be the creation of the interpreter's dreams as the reflections of the author's mind. We have indeed in his historical dramas great events of English history described, but they were the events of a day which preceded his own, and their interest may well be said to be dramatic-i.e., human rather than historical. It is humanity that interests him, its passions, its disappointments, its loves and illusions, its infinite complexity of temper and state, its infinite variety of character and motive and end. Shakespeare speaks for no party. All may claim him, but none can own him. He has the variety of the universal and its impersonality as well. He is the child of no sect, the spokesman of no tendency. He is larger than even his own large age, for he is man, and all that is human is akin to him. And so he can be as little cited to illustrate the tendency personified in Hooker as the ideas impersonated in Cartwright.

It was strange indeed to hear the two men, who represent neither of the dominant theological and ecclesiastical tendencies of their time, cited to prove the ephemeral character of one of them, and that the very tendency which the only Englishman of the period who can claim to be named beside them distinctly embodied. Spenser, alike in the essence of his thought and his attitude to the clergy, was Puritan. We have but to recall his Algrind, Archbishop Grindal, and his censure of the shepherds who

Matched themselves with mighty potentates,

Lovers of lordship, and troublers of states.

His elaborate and involved allegories, each lying within and running through the other in rich profusion, disguise rather than express his meaning; but the ethical ideas that possessed him and that were the motive of all his poetry show him to have been thoroughly penetrated with the Puritan spirit. In the next generation, when its creative power can be measured, we see it embodied not only in statesmen like Eliot and Pym, Hampden and Cromwell, but in the man who of all the poets of our English tongue has most clearly the note of intellectual distinction. For Milton is not only in the severity of his spirit and in his political associations, but in the whole attitude of his mind, in the texture of his character, in the convictions that he held with such impassioned strength. the Puritan par excellence. And he is by no means the exceptional product he is often taken to be. In scholarship the foremost English classic was Thomas Gataker, and Gataker was a Presbyterian-even a member of the famous Westminster Assembly. Another member of the same famous assembly was possibly the greatest of all English Hebraists, John Lightfoot. And we may say that the Cambridge Platonists were the true children of Cambridge Puritanism. What Gataker was on the side of classical literature, they were on the side of classical thought. They were, all of them, formed in Puritan colleges by Puritan teachers out of Puritan men, and from the side of its thought they were legitimate developments. Indeed, it would hardly be either a paradox or an extravagance were we to say we owe to Puritanism all that is most picturesque in the English thought and life of the seventeenth century. George Fox, indeed, as Mr. Gardiner suggested, represented a strong reaction against the harsher Calvinistic theology and the dry and formal worship which had then become too common; but in the

basis of his belief, in his doctrine of internal illumination, the light of the Divine Spirit in man, in his aversion to priests, in his conviction that the illuminated people were the vehicle through which God spoke and worked, Fox was essentially the child of Puritan tradition. His failure to see this essential affinity is one of the most serious defects in Dr. Hodgkin's otherwise admirable book. John Bunyan is a representative man if ever there was one in the England of his day, and he, like Fox, shows the degree in which Puritanism had penetrated the common nature of the English people, transfigured it, and possessed it with an idealism and an imagination which had before seemed alien to all its temper and all its works. And in a field where it gets all too little credit for its achievements it contributed to form a distinctive English trait; it made and realized our idea of congregational worship. Our popular psalmody was largely its creation-the hymn it loved and inspired, and taught the congregation to feel that praise was not a matter for the choir and the highest act of worship no affair of the priest, but both alike the equal concern of the collective people. And from this has come all the highest poetry of our English common life.

It would be possible to illustrate ad infinitum the right of Puritanism to be described as the central current of the great stream of English life, but it were too large a task to be here attempted. In a matter of this kind, of course, much depends on definitions. The distinctive element in Puritanism may be described as either a theology or a polity. It would be more correct to say that it was a polity built upon a theology. The theology was by no means peculiar to it. The Lambeth Articles, or for that matter even the authoritative XXXIX, were more extreme in their Calvinism than the Scotch Confession of 1560. Then Whitgift was as much a Calvinist as Cartwright, Hooker as Travers. Where they differed was as regards the political doctrines which this the

ology involved. Two political ideas came logically from what is known as Calvinism. The first was that God was no respecter of persons, or, in other words, the equality of man before him, and so the doctrine that offfice as office made no difference in his eyes to the value of the man. It was alien to the very notion of Calvinism that sanctity should belong as by divine right to certain persons because of the office they filled. The second idea was that it was through his elect that God lived in the world and governed it; that therefore the religious society took precedence of the secular and could not by it be controlled. Out of the first principle came the idea that kings, courts, and magistrates held their office from God but through the people and for the people's good. Out of the second principle came the idea that the State could not control the Church; that the Church was under the authority of its own Head, and that were the king as head of the State to interfere with the Church, he would intrude into a sphere where he was no sovereign but only a subject. The combination of these two principles gave the Puritan movement its specially political character, though, of course, they did not both at once or all at once emerge into explicit and regulative potency. In Scotland they formed the basis at once of George Buchanan's theory of monarchy and of Andrew Melville's resistance to James VI., and in England they are the underlying assumptions, though not always as consciously perceived and explicated principles, in the whole Puritan literature, from Cartwright's "Admonition to Parliament" to Milton's polemic against Salmasius. Of course another and qualifying idea came in which may be expressed thus viz., that there was a literature which exhibited the truth as to these things and a society which was their most perfect embodiment-the literature and the Church of the New Testament.

Now it was this that became the basis of the entire civil struggle of the Puritans in England, and we may say

that they have been governing ideas in the mind of the English people from then till now. And from this point of view it would be true to say that the Jacobean and Laudian movements were the "backwater" and the Puritan the main stream. For what was the fate of both the Stuart theory and practice in England. The first and immediate result was the civil war and the Puritan revolution. When the revolution had spent itself and the Stuart returned, he returned to exercise power for a single generation. He entered in 1660; he was finally dismissed in 1688; and that dismissal was the ultimate result, for it signified the final breakdown of the theory, so far as the English people were concerned, alike in Church and State. I do not say, of course, that the Whig was a duplicate of the Puritan revolution, but I do not only say that the one made the other possible, but also that the Whig was the victory of principles, though in a very imperfect form, which the Puritan had affirmed and made good. Where the Whig revolution failed most completely was where the Puritan was most in earnest-in the matter of the Church. From that failure we all suffer to-day. It is the source of the perplexity which confounds us in our present politics. The revolution of 1688 recognized that the monarchy must be broad-based upon the people's will; that the institutions which expressed the collective life of the State must be in harmony with the minds it organized. But in its ecclesiastical policy it made a double mistake; made the Church subordinate to the State and attempted to maintain an ecclesiastical system which identity with the State would have justified. For while England is monarchical, it is not in the same sense or degree episcopal, and the attempt to maintain an ecclesiastical polity which exacts uniformity in a State where ecclesiastical uniformity has long been recognized to be impossible, involves a multitude of injustices which those who have suffered from them would be less and worse than human were

only

This has a very

they slow to feel. present moral-viz., If the policy Parliament pursues in education proceeded on the principle that there were as valid and as real religious societies outside as inside the Established Church, that the English Church in the only sense in which it is compatible with our civil constitution must be coextensive with the English people, and that they, as a people, are quite adequate custodians, of their own religious traditions and beliefs, well qualified and well disposed to vindicate and maintain the same by the ordinary methods and agencies of their public life-we should have fewer bitter controversies, sweeter ecclesiastical relations, and an early and reasonable settlement of the many questions touching the management of the schools for the people. But the Puritan revolution will not be finally accomplished till the independence of the Church from the State in all that concerns the Church's real and inner life be affirmed and recognized within the realm of England.

A. M. FAIRBAIRN.

From The Saturday Review. RECOLLECTIONS OF COVENTRY PATMORE. Coventry Patmore's work as an author is conspicuous and permanent; but as a man he was less widely known than most of his literary rank, and from his changes of residence, environment, and opinion, he was beheld under very different lights by those who at various periods enjoyed his acquaintance. My acquaintance with him extended over what was, perhaps, the most interesting part of his life, and for a long time almost amounted to intimacy; it may not, therefore, be few reminiscences amiss to offer a while the feelings aroused by his loss are fresh and vivid.

When I came, a mere lad, to work in the Library of the British Museum, I was introduced to all my colleagues

I

with one, doubtless accidental, exception. I was some time before finding out who the tall, spare, silent man was who, alone of the assistants, sat in the King's Library; who, though perfectly urbane when he did converse, seemed, rather among than of the rest of the staff, and who appeared to be usually entrusted with some exceptional task, now cataloguing a mighty collection of sermons from the King's Library gallery, now the pamphlets of the French Revolution. His diligence was certainly exemplary, though he was not considered a particularly able assistant from the librarian's point of view, and made no pretensions to extensive linguistic attainments or bibliographic lore. I came in time to know that he was a poet, but hardly recognized as such by his colleagues, and I was as unable as they to make anything of his poems of 1844, then only accessible in the first crude version. "Tamerton Church Tower," or rather its appendages, conveyed more to me; and my acquaintance with him, till then of the slightest, became intimate when ventured to express to him my appreciation of "The Betrothal" (1854). I presumed, however, to find some fault with what appeared to me the unevenness of some of the verses, and the imperfection of some of the rhymes. I well remember the seriousness with which he took my boyish criticism, and the earnestness with which he adjured me to declare, did I think him careless or negligent? No? then I might think as I pleased about the verses; but an imputation of poetical slovenliness he would never submit to. This was the prelude to a long series of conversations, in which I learned lessons invaluable for prose as well as verse. All the faults to which a young writer is most prone found in him a severe censor and an unanswerable antagonist. The subordination of parts to the whole, the necessity of every part of a composition being in keeping with all the others, the equal importance of form with matter, absolute truth to nature, sobriety in simile and metaphor, the wisdom of main

He

taining a reserve of power-these and kindred maxims were enforced with an emphasis most salutary to a young hearer just beginning to write in the heyday of the "spasmodic school." I discovered after a while that my teacher did not always exemplify his own precepts; that his one principal work was an assemblage of detached beauties without true vital unity; but I saw, too, that this was from no infidelity to his own creed, but from lack of faculty to exemplify it as he would have wished; that, although a poet, he was not an artist. I found the same inability to combine separate excellences into a whole to pervade his criticism; his strictures on single passages were almost infallible, but he seemed unable to obtain a just view of an author as a whole. If there be truth in phrenology, his head must have wanted the organ of Sublimity. seemed comparatively insensible to the grandeur of even the greatest poets, but no one possessed a more exquisite discernment of their more subtle and recondite beauties. Goethe's "Faust," for instance, did not appeal to him; but he was enthusiastic, as well as discriminating, in his praise of the same poet's "Alexis and Dora." His attitude towards contemporary poetry was negative-far too much so. He would not unfairly run down the works of others, but I never could believe that he took much pleasure in them. He reproved me seriously for overpraising the first poems of William Morris in a journal to which we both contributed. I had, he said, screwed the pitch of the paper a note too high, and he should be obliged to give all subsequent poets more praise than they deserved to put them into their true relative position towards the young pre-Raphaelite. At the same time, his judgment in these things as well as in political matters was liable to gusts of paradox and caprice. I have known him extravagantly extol a very middling poet on the strength of a single line that had taken his fancy. I should not do justice to his endowments either as critic or poet