every mood, but claiming to work as in his great Taskmaster's eye, and with Him to leave the issue: "I work my work. All its results are Thine. I know the loyal deed becomes a fact Thou carest for Thy creatures, and the end There was the pride that apes humility, or rather, perhaps, the conceit that is apish after another fashion, in Rousseau's rêveries on his life as mostly a failure; by no fault of his, he reckons, with a degree of complacency that he thought nearer to the sublime than to the ridiculous (but then the two are so near!): "Au moins, ce n'a pas été ma faute, et je porterai à l'auteur de mon être, sinon l'offrande des bonnes œuvres qu'on ne m'a pas laissé faire, du moins un tribut de bonnes intentions frustrées, de sentiments sains, mais rendus sans effet." JeanJacques acquits himself of the burthen of responsibility almost as comfortably as the conscious dullard whose suddenly acquired consciousness of being dull, after long persuasion to the contrary, is affirmed by a latter-day philosopher to be one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter a mortal's mind. For all our failures, he argues, all our shortcomings, our strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts, are then lifted from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian's pack, at the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gift of high intelligence. When we are veritably humble, says a masterly foreign divine, we look for nothing of ourselves, but for all of God. We are simple instruments; but it is of His glory. Let Him break us and cast us into a corner as a tool for which the artisan has no further need; so be it, so that His kingdom come. So be it, if only so His will be done. Whatever we ought to do, we can do; or there is no meaning in ought. His command to us being to go forward, our part is to go forward, without calculation, or hesitation, or looking back. Luther's words at the Diet of Worms,-"Here am I; I can WITH GOD THE ISSUE. 291 do no otherwise," are admired as a typical text of intrinsic humility. The Imperial might would very quickly have crushed the wretched Wittemburg monk, who would tremulously have stammered forth a retractation, had he been there in his own name, and had he been thinking of his own many failings. But Brother Martin knew himself to be too frail for the present question to turn on his personality, with its good points or its bad. He was nothing; and that qualified him to be the chargé d'affaires of the King of Kings. To Kestner, warning him of the perils that awaited him at Augsburg, from the subtlety and skill of the Italian doctors he would have to confront, and try to confute, there, Luther simply answered by a profession of faith in his Lord God: "If he maintain His cause, mine is maintained; but if He will not, assuredly it is not I who shall maintain it, and it is He who will bear the disgrace." Bold words, as Luther's so often were. To apply others in a poem by Mr. Browning, 66 Did not he throw on God (He loves the burthen)— God's task to make the heavenly period Every reflecting worker together with God (in apostolic phrase) is well said to feel more and more, the longer he lives and works and reflects, that the world is going God's way, and not his, or any man's; and that if he has been allowed to do good work on earth, that work is probably as different from what he fancies it as the tree is from the seed whence it springs. Such a man will grow content, therefore, not to see the real fruit of his labours; because, if he saw it, he might likely enough be frightened at it, and what is very good in the eyes of God would not be very good in his: and content, also, to receive his discharge, and work and fight no more, sure that God is carrying on the work and the fight, whether his servant be in hospital or in the field. I thought, All labour, yet no less This present of theirs with the hopeful past!" Quite early in life Sir Samuel Romilly tutored himself well in "a very useful lesson of practical philosophy,” not to suffer his happiness to depend upon his success. Late in life he had frequent occasion to jot down in his diary such parliamentary experiences and inferences as this: "There seems now to be no prospect that the time will ever come when I or my friends shall be in power; and the only task that is likely ever to be allotted me is, to propose useful measures with little hope of being able to carry them. Some good, however, may be done by such unsuccessful attempts, and I shall therefore persevere in them." As Owen Feltham says for himself of fame, he means, if he can, to tread the path which leads to it, and if he finds it, he shall think it a blessing; if not, his endeavour will be enough for discharging himself within, though he miss it. "God is not bound to reward me, any way: if He accepts me, I may count it a mercy." Feltham avows a liking for the man who does things which deserve fame, without either seeking or caring for it. Felix Holt declares himself proof against that word, failure. He has seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear, he says, is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best. As to just the amount of result a man may see from his particular work—that is a tremendous uncertainty : "the universe has not been arranged for the gratification of his feelings." As long as, in Felix Holt's philosophy, a man sees and believes in some great good, he will prefer working towards that in the way he is best fit for, come what may. How strongly the late Arthur Hugh Clough could feel all the nobleness and romance attached to the then falling cause of Italy, remains on record in that little poem of his, often quoted, which assures the men of Brescia that not in vain, although in vain, on the day of loss past hope he heard them bid their "welcome to the noble pain." THE CONSEQUENCE GOD'S. "You said, 'Since so it is,-good bye "And though the stranger stand, 'tis true, And strength, which yet shall spring in you. Peschiera, when thy bridge I crost, Than never to have fought at all."" 293 In the battle 'twixt Evil and Good, writes a bard of later date, who has seen what that earlier one longed to see, and which to have seen would have made him glad, — "Heed not what may be gain'd or be lost In that battle. Whatever the odds, Fight it out, never counting the cost, NOT razor. MALIGNANT MISCHIEF-MAKERS. Psalm lii. 3-5. OT peculiar to the Psalmist's time is the embodied type of malignant slander, whom he stigmatizes with such scathing words of abhorrent reproach: "Thy tongue imagineth wickedness, and with lies thou cuttest like a sharp Thou hast loved to speak all words that may do hurt, O thou false tongue!" Like the ungodly man in the Book of Proverbs, who diggeth up evil, and in his lips there is as a burning fire; like the froward man, that soweth strife, and the whisperer, that separateth chief friends. Among the six things denounced as an abomination to the Most High, are the heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, as coupled with feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies; and he that soweth discord among brethren. There is a mischief-making malignity so fertile in its inventions, so remorseless in its efforts to do harm, so ingenious in its devisings to give pain, that the adept in it may almost say of himself and of his victims, in apostolic words, wrenched and wrested utterly from the apostolic meaning, "If I make you sorry, who is he that maketh me glad, but the same which is made sorry by me?" For he loves to speak all words that may do hurt, that may breed mischief, that may engender strife, that may cut like a sharp razor, does this false tongue. "Peut-il être des cœurs assez noirs pour se plaire A faire ainsi du mal pour le plaisir d'en faire ?" Le Méchant of Gresset is a systematic answer in the affirmative. Lisette paints him to the life :— "Je parle de ce goût de troubler, de détruire, Du talent de brouiller et du plaisir de nuire : Dr. Thomas Brown is assured that were it within the power of the calumniator to rob his victims of the one thing which happily is not within his power,—the consciousness of their innocence and virtue, he would all too gladly exercise it; so impossible is it to doubt that he who defames, at the risk of detection, would, if the virtues of others were submitted to his will, prevent all peril of this kind, by tearing from the heart every virtue of which he must now be content with denying the existence, and thus at once consign his victim to ignominy and rob him of its only consolation. So hateful, indeed, to the wicked,-affirms our moral philosopher, — is the very thought of moral excellence, that, if even one of the many slanderers with whom society is filled had this tremendous power, there might not be a single virtue remaining on the earth. A pretty picture is that preserved in the Maloniana, of Bishop Percy's painting, after Samuel Dyer, of no less noteworthy a person than Sir John Hawkins. The blackest colours |