different from the schemed picturesqueness of ordinary historical fiction. I want brief, severely conscientious reproductions, in their concrete incidents, of pregnant movements in the past.

VALUE IN
ORIGINAL-

ITY.

The supremacy given in European cultures to the literatures of Greece and Rome has had an effect almost equal to that of a common religion in binding the Western nations together. It is foolish to be for ever complaining of the consequent uniformity, as if there were an endless power of originality in the human mind. Great and precious origination must always be comparatively rare, and can only exist on condition of a wide massive uniformity. When a multitude of men have learned to use the same language in speech and writing, then and then only can the greatest masters of language arise. For in what does their mastery consist? They use words which are already a familiar medium of understanding and sympathy in such a way as greatly to enlarge the understanding and sympathy. Originality of this order changes the wild

grasses into world-feeding grain. Idiosyncrasies are pepper and spices of questionable aroma.

PROSAIC

THINGS
ARE PRO-

"Is the time we live in prosaic?" "That To THE depends it must certainly be prosaic to one ALL whose mind takes a prosaic stand in contemplating it." "But it is precisely the most SAIC. poetic minds that most groan over the vulgarity of the present, its degenerate sensibility to beauty, eagerness for materialistic explanation, noisy triviality." "Perhaps they would have had the same complaint to make about the age of Elizabeth, if, living then, they had fixed their attention on its more sordid elements, or had been subject to the grating influence of its everyday meannesses, and had sought refuge from them in the contemplation of whatever suited their taste in a former age."

We get our knowledge of perfect Love by "DEAR glimpses and in fragments chiefly-the rarest LOVE."

only among us knowing what it is to worship

RELIGIOUS

and caress, reverence and cherish, divide our bread and mingle our thoughts at one and the same time, under inspiration of the same object. Finest aromas will so often leave the fruits to which they are native and cling elsewhere, leaving the fruit empty of all but. its coarser structure!

WE MAKE

OUR OWN

PRECEDENTS.

In the times of national mixture when modern Europe was, as one may say, a-brewing, it was open to a man who did not like to be judged by the Roman law, to choose which of certain other codes he would be tried by. So, in our own times, they who openly adopt a higher rule than their neighbours, do thereby make act of choice as to the laws and precedents by which they shall be approved or condemned, and thus it may happen that we see a man morally pilloried for a very customary deed, and yet having no right to complain, inasmuch as in his foregoing deliberative course of life he had referred himself to the tribunal of those higher conceptions, before which such a deed is without question condemnable.

TOLERANCE.

Tolerance first comes through equality of BIRTH OF struggle, as in the case of Arianism and Catholicism in the early times-Valens, Eastern and Arian, Valentinian, Western and Catholic, alike publishing edicts of tolerance; or it comes from a common need of relief from an oppressive predominance, as when James II. published his Act of Tolerance towards nonAnglicans, being forced into liberality towards the Dissenters by the need to get it for the Catholics. Community of interest is the root of justice; community of suffering, the root of pity; community of joy, the root of love

Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.

Sympathetic people are often incommunicative about themselves: they give back reflected images which hide their own depths.

The pond said to the ocean, "Why do you rage so? The wind is not so very violentnay, it is already fallen. Look at me. I rose into no foaming waves, and am already smooth again."

FELIX QUI

NON
POTUIT.

Many feel themselves very confidently on safe ground when they say: It must be good for man to know the Truth. But it is clearly not good for a particular man to know some particular truth, as irremediable treachery in one whom he cherishes-better that he should die without knowing it.

Of scientific truth, is it not conceivable that some facts as to the tendency of things affecting the final destination of the race might be more hurtful when they had entered into the human consciousness than they would have been if they had remained purely external in their activity?

DIVINE

There is no such thing as an impotent or GRACE A neutral deity, if the deity be really believed in, and contemplated either in prayer or

REAL EM

ANATION.