betrayed into such a remissness, as commanding with justice our admiration and reproaching our indolence, however much we may reprobate the grand schemer's designs. While he is adjusting an immense complexity of concerns, even in the time given by others to perhaps needless sleep, "how many men of talents, with some pretensions to virtue, and with a considerable scope for efficient activity before them, are absorbing their days in idle musings, or dissipating them in a trifling kind of social intercourse?" etc. A more recent essayist, after describing how the day of an English girl in town is apt to be made up,—of a little riding, namely, a little reading, a little dabbling with the paint-brush, a little strumming on the piano, a little visiting, a little shopping, a little dancing, and a general trivial chat scattered over the whole,-declares that Woman can always say with Titus, "I have wasted a day," but the confession wears an air of triumph rather than regret. "A world of trivial occupations, a whole system of social life, has been laboriously invented, that the day might be wasted gracefully and without boredom." If the idle, says Coleridge, are described as killing time, the man of methodical industry and honourable pursuits may be justly said to call it into life and moral being, while he makes it the distinct object not only of the consciousness but of the conscience: he organizes the hours, and gives them a soul; and that, the very essence of which is to fleet away, and evermore to have been (fuisse), he takes up into his own permanence, and communicates to it the imperishableness of a spiritual nature. "Of the 'good and faithful servant' whose energies, thus directed, are thus methodized, it is less truly affirmed that he lives in time than that time lives in him." For his days, months, and years, it is added, as the stops and punctual marks in the records of duties performed, will survive the wreck of worlds, and remain extant when time itself shall be no more.

There are some who account a day lost in which they have not done something silly or mischievous. There are those we read of in the Book of Proverbs who sleep not except they

have done mischief; and whose sleep is taken away unless they cause some to fall.

"Clara, with Titus, thinks she's lost a day,

Which some new source of scandal don't display.”

Cliton tells Dorante, in Corneille's one comedy that lives, Votre humeur sans emploi ne peut passer un jour. Montesquieu's Persian Letter-writer cites an "honest citizen" of his acquaintance, who cannot, in these troublesome times, betake himself to rest unless he can say, "I have ruined a whole family to-day; I'll ruin another to-morrow." Chamfort declares the most utterly lost of all days to be that which had gone by without a good laugh. This was in his prose maximes et pensées; he could essay the heroic style in his poésies, as where he sings the praises of those "mortels magnanimes" and "bienfaiteurs fameux," who have taken for their model

"Ce Titus, qu'à genoux tout un peuple environne,

Pleurant au pied du trône

Le jour qu'il a perdu sans faire des heureux."

Dr. Armstrong is said to have designed by Thomson been in his Castle of Indolence portrait of the splenetic solitary who would brook no company, and quite detested talk,

"Ne ever uttered word, save when first shone

The glittering star of eve― Thank heaven! the day is done!'" Done, and no good done it by him. Gone, and left no pleasant memory to him, whether of beneficence or even of benevolence. Shelley contrasts with the sting which retributive memory implants in the hard bosom of the selfish man, the

"ecstatic and exulting throb

Which virtue's votary feels when he sums up

The thoughts and actions of a well-spent day."

In one of Longfellow's narrative poems we have a sombre man who counted each day as lost on which his feet no sacred threshold crossed. In one of his lyrics we have a village blacksmith who goes through life toiling, rejoicing:

"Each morning sees some task begin,

Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earn'd a night's repose."

Fly idleness, is George Herbert's exhortation,

"which yet thou canst not fly

By dressing, mistressing, and compliment.
If these take up thy day, the sun will cry

Against thee; for his light was only lent."

And one verse of that, par excellence, Country Parson's "Even. song" runs thus:

"What have I brought Thee home

For this Thy love? have I discharged the debt
Which this day's favour did beget?"

Very solemn, to Archbishop Trench's thinking, as being far deeper than at first sight it might seem, is the Arabian proverb, "Every day in thy life is a leaf in thy history"-a leaf which shall once be turned back to again, that it may be seen what was written there; and that whatever was written may be read out in the hearing of all. To-day is the theme of a copy of verses by Mr. Carlyle, such as make one wish that even that master of quaint, rugged, picturesque, graphic, grotesque, and sometimes most eloquent and sonorous prose, had written more such, and many more:

So here hath been dawning another blue Day:
Think wilt thou let it slip useless away.

Out of Eternity this new Day is born;
Into Eternity, at night, will return.
Behold it aforetime no eye ever did :
So soon it for ever from all eyes is hid.
Here hath been dawning another blue Day:
Think wilt thou let it slip useless away."

G

XXXI.

GALLIO.

ACTS xviii. 12-17.

ALLIO was deputy of Achaia what time the Jews in Corinth made insurrection with one accord against Paul, and brought him to the judgment-seat, charging him with

persuading men to worship God contrary to their law. Without waiting to hear the defendant, Gallio dismissed the charge. It was altogether a matter outside of his function. He would have nothing to do with it. Had the matter been one of wrong, or wicked lewdness, he would of course have entertained it. But as it simply turned on verbal distinctions and Judaic doctrines, let them settle it among themselves; he would be no judge of such matters. And so saying, the proconsul summarily dismissed them (åreλaúvei need not indicate the violence implied in "he drave them ") from the judgment-seat.

Whereupon the Gentiles, perhaps instigated to the attack by a wish to please Gallio, as well as by their spite to the Jews, laid hands on Sosthenes, the chief ruler of the synagogue, and beat him before the judgment-seat. "And Gallio cared for none of these things." His allowing his tribunal to be abused to such an extent as this, even his apologists or admirers are scarcely able to defend. Contempt of court so flagrant, his own official self-respect might have forbidden or denounced. But with regard to the earlier procedure, the refusal to take cognisance of the case against Paul, the men of this generation are disposed to eye it with something at least of complacent interest and even approval, very different from the spirit in which it was common to stigmatize Gallio as the odious type of all that is coldly apathetic and systematically irreligious.

As the man who cared for none of these things, Gallio was practically bracketed and branded together with Pilate, who asked, What is truth? Bible-readers looked at him from a somewhat narrow point of view--their own standpoint of Christian creed and life-and condemned him accordingly as a heartless and professed worldling, representative of that cynical indifferentism which pooh-poohs not only all religions together, but religion itself. In which light the deputy of Achaia is marked out for emphatic and universal reprobation. From a thousand pulpits have fervid declaimers rolled the thunder of their rhetoric against him. From almost as many periodicals have the pens of ready writers discharged their blackest ink upon him. But the thoughts of man are widened with the

process of the suns.

And Broad Church is one of the issues

of this widening process; and with greater breadth of vision comes the perception that something is, from his own standpoint, to be said for Gallio after all.

An old Dissenting minister, simple, grave, sincere, whose good name for simple piety is still cherished in Wellingborough, made even his Independent congregation stare a little, when, at the commencement of his pastorate there, he prayed that " Our rulers may be like Gallio, caring for none of these things." The aspiration was that of a consistent adversary of the union of Church and State; but there was an "independent" originality about the manner of it that might naturally make lifelong “independents" and confirmed congregationalists wonder what might come next. But the day was not to be very far off when a Frederick Robertson at Brighton would commend from the pulpit as "exceedingly wise" the conduct of Gallio in caring for none of these things. "He took no notice. He would not see." The preacher admits that the affair of the beating of Sosthenes was doubtless illegal and tumultuous, “ a kind of contempt of court- -a great offence in Roman law." But what ensures his approval of Gallio is, that the proconsul preferred permitting a wholesome outburst of healthy indignation, to carrying out the law,-knowing, as the deputy did, that in that popular riot human nature was throwing off an incubus; it was a kind of irregular justice, excusable because of its provocation. "And so Gallio would not see. He covered the transaction in a wise and wilful blindness."

Coleridge was regarding him from the conventional, if also from a correct, point of view, when he observed incidentally, in the Aids to Reflection, " Many there be of Gallio's temper, who 'care for none of these things,' and who account all questions in religion, as he did, but matter of words and names." Renan remarks that the total absence of religious and philosophical proselytism among the Romans of this epoch made them regard devotion to truth as a chimæra: such discussions annoyed them, and appeared to them devoid of meaning; all their displeasure fell upon those who asked them to inflict punishment