afraid. He was not afraid of the face of the great, of the disapprobation of his fellows. It was then an age of much more plain speaking than ours, when intercourse between kings and other men was more free, when expression was more homely, and went with less ceremony to the point. But when Anselm dared to tell what he believed to be the truth in the king's court, it was more than the bluffness of a rude code of manners; he accepted a call which seemed divine, with its consequences; the call of undoubted truth and plain duty. That for which he contended was to him the cause of purity, honesty, justice; it involved the hopes of the weak and despised, in the everyday sufferings, as unceasing then as in the days of which the Psalms tell, of the poor and needy at the hands of the proud and mighty. There might be much to say against his course; the "usages" were but forms and trifles, or they were an important right of the crown, and to assail them was usurpation and disloyalty, or it was a mere dream to hope to abolish them, or they were not worth the disturbance which they caused, or there were worse things to be remedied; difficulties there were no doubt; still, for all this, he felt that this was the fight of the day, and he held on unmoved. Through what was romantic and what was unromantic in his fortunes-whether the contest showed in its high or low form—as a struggle in "heavenly places " against evil before saints and angels, with the unfading crown in view, or as a game against dastardly selfishness and the intrigue of courts; cheered by the sympathies of Christendom, by the love and reverence of the crowds which sought his blessing; or brought down from his height of feeling by commonplace disagreeables, the inconveniences of life—dust, heat, and wet, bad roads and imperialist robbers, debts and fevers, low insults and troublesome friends,— through it all his faith failed not; it was ever the same precious and ennobling cause, bringing consolation in trouble, giving dignity to what was vexatious and humiliating. It was her own fault if the Church gained little by the compromise, and by so rare a lesson. In one sense, indeed, what is gained by any great religious movement ? What are all reforms, restorations, victories of truth, but protests of a minority; efforts, clogged and incomplete, of the good and brave, just enough in their own day to stop instant ruin-the appointed means to save what is to be saved, but in themselves failures? Good men work and suffer, and bad men enjoy their labours and spoil them; a step is made

in advance_evil rolled back and kept in check for a while only to return, perhaps, the stronger. But thus, and thus only, is truth passed on, and the world preserved from utter corruption. Doubtless bad men still continued powerful in the English Church. Henry tyrannised, evil was done, and the bishops kept silence; low aims and corruption may have still polluted the very seats of justice; gold may have been as powerful with cardinals as with King Henry and his chancellors. Anselm may have over-rated his success. Yet success and victory it was-a vantage-ground for all true men who would follow him; and if his work was undone by others, he at least had done his work manfully. And he had left his Church another saintly name, and the memory of his good confession, enshrining as it were her cause, to await the day when some other champion should again take up the quarrel -thus from age to age to be maintained, till He shall come, to whom alone it is reserved "to still" for ever the enemy and the avenger, and to "root out all wicked doers from the city of the Lord." (From Anselm.)

CIVILISATION AND RELIGION

WE are in danger, even in the highest condition of civilisation, from the narrowing of man's horizon, and we need a protection against it which civilisation cannot give. I call a narrowing of man's horizon whatever tends to put or drop out of sight the supreme value of the spiritual part of man, to cloud the thought of God in relation to it, or to obscure the proportion between what is and what we look forward to, the temporary and provisional character of the utmost we see here. To have fought against and triumped over this tendency is the great achievement of Christianity. We hardly have the measure to estimate the greatness of it; of having kept alive, through such centuries as society has traversed, the faith, the pure and strong faith, in man's divine relationship; of having been able to withstand the constant enormous pressure of what was daily seen and felt; not only of the solemn unbroken order of the natural world, but of the clogs and fetters of custom, of the maxims taken for granted in the intercourse of life, of the wearing down, the levelling of high thought and purpose which is always going on in society; of the

perpetual recurrence, with the tides and weather, of the same story of promise and disappointment, of far-reaching attempts and poor success; of evil in high places; of the noble mingled with the vile; of good ever tending to extravagance or decay; of character in men or bodies of men insensibly deteriorating and falling away from its standard; of wisdom hardly won, and wasted; of great steps taken and thrown away; of the old faults obstinately repeated in the face of ever-accumulating experience; of the bewildering spectacle of vice beyond hope and without remedy; of the monotonous dead level of the masses of mankind. For a religion to have been proof against all this, still, through it all, to have preserved itself the same and unworn out, and still to be able to make men hold fast by faith and hope in the invisible, is among the wonders of human history, one of the greatest and most impressive.

(From Sermons.)

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

[Charlotte Brontë, descended from an Irish family that originally bore the name of Prunty, was born on the 21st of April 1816, at Thornton in Yorkshire, where her father held a living. Her experiences of the wild moors around Haworth, whither the family moved when she was three years old, of the school to which she was sent at Cowan's Bridge, of the pensionnat of Madam Héger at Brussels, where she passed the better part of two years, and of Yorkshire society, industrial and clerical, have all left their mark upon her novels. With her sisters Emily and Anne she published a joint volume of Poems in 1846. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, Shirley in 1849, and Villette in 1852. The Professor, her earliest novel, failed to find a publisher. She was married in 1854 to her father's curate Mr. Nicholls, and died on the 31st of March 1855.]

It is likely enough that in the three novels which preserve her fame Charlotte Brontë had exhausted her vein. She did her best work at high pressure with material glowing from the fires of memory. Such a method, depending as it does on the intensity of passion and reminiscence for its chief effect, can only be extended by a chill process of analogy to a variety of themes, and Shirley, which attempts a wider range and a more impartial treatment than the other two books, is the least admirable of the three. "A nice sense of means to an end," the only merit that she allowed to Miss Austen, was no part of Charlotte Brontë's talent; the consuming fervour of her feeling can communicate itself even by involved sentences or conventional expressions. At her best of observation and emotion she strikes out vivid and memorable phrases, but at all times the fire is there, smouldering when it does not blaze. The choice of those much derided little gray ladies, plain and frail, for her heroines, emphasises her own depth of wonder at the strange alliance of the soul with the body," Thy heart rends thee, and thy body endures." The art of which she was most conscious in her writings was the art of repression and restraint.

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There is not in literature a more genuine note of passion and longing than the muffled cry that echoes through her novels. The egregious Miss Martineau, in criticising Villette, remarked that "there are substantial, heart-felt interests for women of all ages, and under ordinary circumstances, quite apart from love; there is an absence of introspection, an unconsciousness, a repose in women's lives-unless under peculiarly unfortunate circumstances of which we find no admission in this book." The remark is a true one, and has been illustrated by some thousands of bad novels written since the time when it was made. The substantial interests and the unconsciousness of women's lives were, for once, in the works of Charlotte Brontë, lit by the lurid glare and outlined by the dark shadows cast from the eruption of a volcano. No woman among English novelists, before or since, has succeeded in throwing so uniform and so intense a glamour over the domain allotted to her imagination, none has displayed so superb a confidence in the intuitions of her own temperament. Critics and humorists there have been in plenty, of whom the unrivalled chief is Jane Austen; there have been plenty, too, of over-educated women, with George Eliot at their head, who submitted a generous faculty of observation and sympathy to borrowed schemes of thought, never thoroughly appropriated or vivified. But this great gift of apocalyptic romance, free from the tyranny of system, and mastering the vacant importunity of detail, was the dower of the inmates of the Yorkshire parsonage, and has proved as little heritable as the comic genius of the rector's daughter of Steventon herself.

For the creation of a rich variety of character, a more intellectual discursive humour than Charlotte Brontë ever possessed is imperatively necessary. Her laughter is sardonic, concealing pain and passion; the portraits of Mr. Naomi Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre and of the three curates in Shirley are delineated admirably but never playfully, the shadow of the Day of Judgment is projected on the canvas. Of all her creations the most wonder

ful, the figure of Edward Rochester, owes little to observation, from her own inmost nobility of temper and depth of suffering she moulded a man, reversing the marvels of God's creation. So he becomes a living spirit, and not all the vagaries of melodrama, nor the crowd of minor characters less perfectly inspired, can bring upon him the suspicion of unreality. The scenes at Thornfield, the agonised parting, and the last ultimate meeting at