utterly undesirable. It was his profound sense of the misery and worthlessness of life which drove Gautama Búdha from his throne into the jungle, which underlies all the meaning of the religion which he founded, and which finds forcible expression in the Búdhist hymn"All is transitory, all is misery, all is void, all is without substance." And the cardinal doctrine of Christianity has the same meaning, though it is often verbally accepted without being realised. Accepting it, in substance, I cannot conceal from myself its true signification. That awful meaning plainly is, that the only way in which the Creator of the human race could redeem it, or perhaps only a portion of it, from utter perdition, was by identifying Himself with it, and bearing an infinite burden of sin and agony. Shirk the thought as we may, it cannot be denied that this is the real meaning of the Christian religion, and it finds innumerable corroborations from every side of our knowledge. The burden is shifted, but has to be borne. Human existence is redeemed and rendered tolerable, not from any efforts made out of its own great misery and despair, but from its Creator taking upon Himself the punishment and the agony which pursues His creation. Far be it from me to complain of the Providence which enabled me to pass through those tremendous scenes in safety, or to arraign the wisdom of the arrangements of the universe. I only suggest, that existence in itself implies effort, pain, and sorrow; and that the more perfect it is, the more does it suffer. This may be a Búdhistic idea; but, as pointed out above, it is certainly a Christian doctrine, though the true meaning of it seems scarcely to have been understood. Of His own will, Deity is involved in the suffering of His creation, so that we cannot say where the agony ends. Our notions on this subject are confused by starting from the supposition that there is an effortless existence of pure unshadowed enjoyment for which no price has been paid; and the more we realise the actual state of the case, though doing so may have a saddening effect, yet it will not necessarily lead us to doubt that existence vindicates itself, much less to arraign Eternal Providence, or the ways of God towards man. Thoughts of this character, however true they might be in themselves, were not fitted to give a cheerful aspect to that midnight scene on the Schinkal Pass. The Zartusht Namah' says that when Zoroaster lay one cold night under the stars, "understanding was the companion of his soul." I hope he found understanding to be a more agreeable companion than I did; for there are moments of depression when we seem to feel still in need of some explanation why organic life should exist at all. "A life With large results so little rife, Our civilisations reach a certain point, and then die corruptly, leaving half-savage races, inspired by coarse illusions, to reoccupy the ground and react the same terrible drama. Wordsworth put the usual answer admirably when he said,— "O life! without thy checkered scene But the difficulty of this argument, so far as our knowledge goes, appears to be the enormous waste, and useless, endless cruelty of Nature, as also in the purely fanciful ground of the suppositions which are usually brought to explain that cruelty, and which, even if admitted, do not really solve the mystery. Nor is there much consolation to be found in the views of the monadic school, which have been so forcibly expressed by Goethe in his poem Das Göttliche, which I may here translate, as it was in my mind on the Schinkal Pass: Noble be Man, Helpful and good; For this alone separateth him We do know of. Hail to the unfathomed Highest Being Whom we follow ! May He, too, teach us Ever Nature Is unfeeling: She lighteth the sun Storms and rivers, Pursue their path, Ever hasting, Downward breaking On the sons of men. This is well in its way; but when we consider what humanity has been able to accomplish in imaging the divine, it would seem as if a voice had said to us, as to the Prometheus of Eschylus, "Evermore shall the burden of the agony of the present evil wear thee down; for he that shall deliver thee exists not in nature." Indeed life sometimes seems as if it were composed. very much of the torturers and the tortured, the devourers and the devoured. There is some refuge, however, for the spirit in the order and beauty of this unfeeling inorganic nature. The Yliastron, or materia prima, has strange attractions of its own. So orthodox a thinker as John Foster could write-" There is through all nature some mysterious element like soul which comes with a deep significance to mingle itself with our own conscious being, conveying into the mind trains and masses of ideas of an order not to be gained in the schools." Speaking of a departed friend and brilliant poet, Goethe said: "I should not be surprised if, thousands of years hence, I were to meet Wieland as the monad of a world-as a star of the first magnitude. We can admit of no other destination for monads than as blessed co-operating powers sharing eternally in the immortal joys of gods." In like manner, when the most purely poetical genius of England foresaw his own passage from this troubled life, it was as a star that the soul of Adonais beaconed from the abodes of the Eternal; and in describing the gain of his brother-poet, he could only break forth "It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long These may be something more than poets' dreams, |