forever. It was inevitable that the impression on the minds of those who afterwards learned to appreciate the infinite contradiction between the worth of the august sufferer and the doom he bore, between the spirit he showed and the treatment he took, should express itself in stories of preternatural portents, the veiling sun, the shuddering earth, opening graves, and rending temple.

There are doctrines connected with theoretical Christianity which may never command universal assent. There are speculative disputes on points relating to the person and biography of its founder which may never be satisfactorily settled. But, practically considered, in the authoritative beauty of his character and example, which carried the high-water mark of human nature so far above all rival instances, no purer expression of the divine in humanity is to be expected. And good men can cherish no worthier ambition than to make the whole world a Christopolis, whose central dome shall lift the lowly form of Jesus in solitary pre-eminence to draw all men unto the discipleship of his spirit, while, with everprogressing intelligence and liberty, they co-operate in the mazy industries of the sciences and arts of human life below.

SUMMARY OF THE SUBJECT.

THE foregoing pages have furnished abundant proof that persons of extraordinary sensibility are likely to experience the loneliness and unhappiness of human life in an extraordinary degree. Probably no previous age was so rife as the present in interior discords, baffled longings, vast and vague sentiments whose indeterminateness is a generating source of misery. Probably there were never before so many restless and weary aspirants, out of tune with their neighbors, dissatisfied with their lot, unsettled in their faith, morbidly sensitive, sad, and solitary. To make a true estimate of what the trouble is with these victims of self-love and the social struggle, to give them

sound sanitary directions, explaining the causes of their wounds, and the best curative treatment, we cannot but think will be a service of especial timeliness. To these innumerable sufferers, writhing under distressful relations with themselves and others, would it not be an invaluable boon to be guided to a tranquil oblivion of their injuries and resentments, their uneasy desires and woes, in remote retreats of thought, in cool and sweet sanctuaries of sentiment, in undisturbed temples and glens of faith and love? If the studies of the preceding chapters, and the personal experience which first led to those studies, furnish any qualification for this office, it may be in some degree discharged by summarizing for the reader the practical results of the whole investigation. He to whom a hundred veiled wounds of his own have given an accurate knowledge of the wounds of other people should know how to impart therapeutical instructions, and also how to soothe the unhappy souls about him with soft magnetic strokes of sympathy. Blessed art, why do so few practise thee?

There is inexhaustible help for the suffering man in an adequate knowledge of the sufferings of others; how they originated, and to what issues they led; the warnings of those who were defeated by their trials and ignominiously perished under them; the examples of those who vanquished theirs and came out in victorious cheer. Nothing can be more stimulative and fruitful for the unambitious recluse than sympathetic contact with the experience of the noble spiritual heroes who have spotlessly worn their crowns, throned on the summits of society. On the other hand, nothing can be more blessedly solacing and sedative for the overwrought champion of the arena than contemplation of the inner drama of those delicate and listening minds, those deep and dreamy hearts, who pass their days in an ideal sphere detached from the intoxicating prizes of outward life, far from the bewildering roar of the world. This is indeed the choicest value of literature, the deepest art of life, to supplement the defects of our own experience by appropriating from the experience of others what we stand in want of.

Beyond a question, the welfare of society and the happiness of the multitude have increased from the palmy days of Egypt, or those of Sparta, to the time when the serfs of Russia were emancipated, and when the telegraphic cable girdled the world. Beyond a question, on the other hand, when we turn from Cyrus to Napoleon, from Pericles to Pitt, from Socrates to Schopenhauer, from Pindar to Lamartine, we must see that the moral discontent of individuals, the difficulties in the way of inward unity, the mental fatigue and soreness of superior persons, have been increasing. This is owing to the greater complexity of elements and stimuli in modern life; also to the greater development of conscience, alliances with impersonal interests, obscure connections of dependence and responsibility with huge masses of public good and evil. The greater the number of the interests a man carries, and the greater the number of external relations he sustains, the more delicate and arduous becomes the problem of harmonizing them, fulfilling his duties, and satisfying his desires. The sympathetic ties of the individual were far less numerous and extended formerly than at present. Consciousness spreads over a wider surface and along more lines; every breast is a telegraphic office throbbing with the vibrations of the communicating web of civilization. Christianity, the historic moral progress of the race, has also introduced quicker and larger standards of right and wrong, developed an intenser sense of divine authority and human brotherhood, and made men feel themselves amenable to a much more diffused and exacting spiritual tribunal than was known to the careless children of the early world. All this increases the difficulty of any chronic self-complacency; and, as Aristotle says, "happiness is the attribute of the self-complacent." It is natural that as extension and complication remove narrowness and simplicity from the life of the individual, he should with diminishing frequency attain the happiness of a contented unity with himself. This must be especially true when a profound sense of the presence and perfection of God, of the rebuking examples of the saints, of the infinite nature of duty, gives him a constant feeling of his own unworthiness, vanity, and transitoriness.

In antiquity the individual was sunk in the mass as a political tool. Now he has a keen feeling of a separate personality, freedom, and responsibility; yet, at the same time, and as a consequence of the same causes which have produced this, he has an acute feeling of his moral relations with the mass. The deep sense of God, humanity, duty, eternity, which adds so much to our dignity and joy when it is healthily co-ordinated with our nature, often makes us so much more susceptible to self-reproach, grief, and fear. In every age an earnest experience of religion has segregated men from the world; but Christianity did this in an unprecedented degree when it filled the deserts and valleys and mountains of Christendom with hermits. One great consequence of the modern enhancement of self-consciousness, and enhancement of the consciousness of the external relations of self, has been the feeling of individual loneliness in the crowd, a melancholy shrinking and sinking of the heart from the miscellaneous public, a sad or fond courting of solitude for the application there of ideal solaces to the soul. There is in the following lines by Sterling a tone of sentiment marking them so distinctly as a product of our modern Christian epoch that no one could suppose them written by any poet of antiquity.

Lonely pilgrim through a sphere
Where thou only art alone,

Still thou hast thyself to fear,

And canst hope for help from none.

Andrew Marvell, the friend of Milton, and quite his mate in soul, thus describes a noble character withdrawn into his garden and musing there; a character rich in mind and heart, and avid of a quiet retreat aside from the busy littlenesses of life:

Marvell, depicting the glory of Adam in Eden, thinks there was one drawback to his bliss, namely, that he had a comrade.

But 't was beyond a mortal's share
To wander solitary there :
Two paradises are in one

To live in paradise alone.

It is a touch of sentiment tinged with humorous satire impossible to any writer of India, Egypt, Persia, Greece, or Rome. There is an ineffable charm for the modern heart in the picture of Paul and Virginia alone together on their island. But the Philoctetes of Sophocles, the classic Crusoe, ten years alone on desolate Lemnos, listening to the lonely dash of the breakers, himself his only neighbor, the cliffs echoing his groans, reveals the horror the social Athenians had of solitude, and shows by contrast the joy the sunny-hearted Greek took in the society of his fellow-men. There is something grand in the words of Gotama Buddha, as reported in the Dhammapadam - "If you can find no peer to travel with you, then walk cheerfully on alone, your goal before, the world behind better alone with your own heart than with a crowd of babblers." But how clear the difference between the temper of ancient Buddhist isolation and the temper of modern Christian isolation is when we compare with the above sentence the following one by Martineau ! "Leave yourself awhile in utter solitude; shut out all thoughts of other men, yield up whatever intervenes, though it be the thinnest film, between yourself and God; and in this absolute loneliness, the germ of a holy society will of itself appear; a temper of sympathy, trustful and gentle, suffuses itself through the whole mind though you have seen no one, you have met all, and are girt for any errand of service that love may find."

The same reasons that make the feeling of loneliness and moral wretchedness more frequent and strong in modern times than it was before the Christian era, likewise make the achievement of a steady concord and happiness more arduous to the man of exceptional sensibility and ambition than it is to average men. Unhap