and the successful merchant begins in untimely age to moderate the passion for accumulation, it is too late to cultivate himself; every instinct of rational life, if not already destroyed outright, has been paralysed; and he comes to the end of life having entirely missed life's true purpose, which is simply to live.

What wonder if all such marks and movements of the present age should create in thoughtful minds the direst misgivings, and suggest the reflection that the life of modern days is a life far below the level fitted to an intelligent human society? What wonder that men and women, clear-sighted enough to distinguish truth from deception, are more and more urgently asking, What do we then get of worth and true dignity from our vaunted civilisation on the existing lines? Does civilisation really come as an emancipator, or as a tyrant? Are the defects of civilisation as we know it inherent, or may they be cast off? In the quiet moments when the mind, emerging from the mists of sophistry and the glamour of illusion, sees things as they really are, clear, undistorted, and in their true proportions, such inquirers ask themselves, with right, if indeed the old world was really so bad and treated us so ill that we must needs despise it; if the old-fashioned ideals had indeed become so impossible and passés that they must needs be rejected-in a word, whether the progress we are making is progress for good or for ill.

And who, impressed by considerations like these,

can doubt that the great needs of to-day are, on the one hand, self-cultivation, and on the other hand, and no less, self-suppression a cultivation which gives fuller content, greater harmony and completeness to life, a suppression which curbs egoism and restrains. eccentricity, which emphasises private judgment less and respect for authority more, which discourages the assertion of our precious individualities, most of which, after all, are poor things, far better hidden than seen, and so brings into prominence the collective view and the collective interest?

Here, then, Arnold comes with suggestive reasoning and fruitful thought. His advice alike to the private and the public man is: Get culture, and it will not only edify by the very possession of it, setting you on the path to perfection, but it will offer you a principle and rule of action applicable and operative in all the circumstances and situations of life. So that culture, after all, instead of being something selfish and uselessly recondite, is in reality the most social and the most humane thing in the world. It is, as we have seen, the true friend of equality, for where culture is most absent society is most hopelessly divided into classes. It is the foe of excess and immoderation of every kind. It causes the individual, of his own will and motion, to subordinate himself to the totality, and this is not the least of its benefits. Finally, it offers to the world of action a way of welcome release from its besetting difficulties. It is not over-eager to be adjust

ing abuses and remoulding society according to the nostrum and shibboleth of this party or that. It seeks rather to defer action until it can be more clearly seen whether the reform proposed will really have the result

pected, or will create a new order of conditions even more perplexing than that which now exists. Most mistakes in the past have been the result of want of thought, or of thought by the wrong people on the wrong lines.

THAN

preached the duty of opening the mind to the free play of ideas as the first step to clear and independent thought, and no man justified the precept more completely in himself. You may differ from him upon many points of detail, and often upon fundamental principles, when he discusses either theology or politics, the drama or education, but it will always be with gratitude for his fresh, critical spirit, his unconventional handling of topics in themselves as old as the hills, his ⚫ wealth of suggestion, his novel points of view. Always he illuminates even when he fails to exhaust a subject, or to carry you to his own conclusions. If he has a habit of riding a theory too hard, it is generally because the theory has so much strength and spirit in it as to tempt the rider to overdo his horsemanship; and, moreover, he carries himself so gallantly that, pity the steed as you may, you forget to blame the adept who is able to get so much out of him. His treatment of that favourite theme of his, Hellenism and Hebraism,

is an excellent illustration of this disposition unduly to force an argument in itself perfectly legitimate. Yet, after making all necessary reservations on points of application, his statement of the place which these spiritual disciplines have historically occupied in European civilisation is as precise as his plea for their harmonious union is irresistible.

Having convicted the middle classes of lack of culture, it was necessary to discover a reason why their habits had taken an unintellectual tendency, and the reason which satisfies him is that conscience has been cultivated at the expense of the intellect, conduct at the expense of thought. The discipline of thought he calls Hellenism, the discipline of conduct he calls Hebraism: to the latter discipline the middle classes, thanks to the stimulus derived from Puritanism, have exclusively devoted themselves, with the result that in all that affects the nurture and life of the intellect they have lamentably failed. Its immediate bearing apart, his study of these two rival tendencies, which have alternately dominated Western civilisation, is perhaps one of the solidest parts of his dissertation upon culture. The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness. It lays stress upon reason, intelligence, and the æsthetic faculties. The cultivation of these is the end of life, and life reaches its truest balance and harmony when all are cultivated equally, none to the neglect of the rest. To the Greek the life of wisdom was the life of happiness, for the secret of virtue and happiness was to think