V.

The Goodness and the Severity of God.

ROMANS xi. 22:

"Behold the goodness and the severity of God."

THE cases of difficulty in our moral life are those of conflicting or mutually qualifying feelings, when contrasted sentiments struggle together and modify each other, and adequate expression has to be given to them all. In an act of judgment upon the character of an historical event, or of a transaction within our own times, touching our bosoms and interests, it is easy to be engrossed by one impression-to take what is called a strong view of a subject, which generally means to mistake some single feature for the whole countenance of a deed-to regard with an unmixed feeling of sympathy or censure, as if it was a simple question of absolute right or absolute wrong, some most complicated interest in which, as in most things human, good and evil have blended together in mystic fellowship. Or, where the difficulty is not one of right judgment, but of the faithful and courageous, yet scrupulous, utterance of that judgment, when the mental act of

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discrimination has been performed, and what remains is to give legitimate effect to it; as, to take the simplest illustrations, when in private life the character of your friend has become a subject of anxiety and solicitude, and the difficulty is to give such expression of your tender regard as will convey also the expression of your highest moral sentiment; or when in political life the character of your party, of those you act with, along with much that you approve has become complicated with some impure element or mode of administration. that you cannot approve, and the difficulty is, on the one hand, not to weaken what deem a vital cause, and, on the other, not to stand pledged to anything from which your own loftiest honour secretly recoils;— in all such cases it is easy to be silent or to speak partially, but to give faithful, and at the same time judicious, expression to your whole state of mind, is perhaps the most delicate problem in practical morals. And there is, for the most part, very little respect due to what are called decided characters, men who can settle things in a summary manner,-in whose field of vision there are so few objects that what they do see stands out in absolute prominency, like a tower upon a plane,—who have no doubts because they are without the fineness and fulness of perception that give the materials of doubt,-whose force of impulse has an uncontrolled strength from the narrowness of their sympathies, and who, having once determined upon

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what to them seems good, can set themselves to beat down whatever stands in apparent opposition to it, with no discrimination and with no relentings. It would be painful, perhaps over-curious, to inquire how far the most conspicuous practical successes have been owing to this obtuseness of vision, to this hardness of purpose, which, open to no perception but one, touched by no sentiment but one, has swept into destruction whatever was associated with the interest it was seeking to destroy, leaving it no place to return and harbour in. In the work of Religious Reformation, for example, how much has the world lost, and lost for ever, of the sublimest efforts of man's genius, of his devotion to the eternal and the spiritual labouring to express in outward and adequate symbols his ideas of worship, only because those outward monuments of the invisible, vast, shadowy, undefined as the sentiment of Reverence itself-those mystic courts of Prayer that might have breathed to latest generations the inspirations of loftiest piety, giving a tone to the mind like strains of solemn music-had become associated with a superstition, and the ruthless hand of Reformation, instead of carefully separating and cleansing it away, with an impulse of fierce hate rather levelled with the dust the temples where it dwelt. Those losses are irrecoverable; for, in the first place, the descendants of such fell reformers are too apt to inherit their ungenial antipathies; and, in the second, it would appear that

only once in the history of a people can there be that predominance of Symbolism in the expression of religious ideas, that subjugation of all thoughts and interests by the spiritual element in an unarticulate form, through the mystic utterance of Art and Architecture, of which these were the products. Men strive to express through the forms of Art the aspirations and ideas which they cannot define in words; but that is a stage in its religious life and manifestation which never occurs twice in a nation's history. Protestantism, with its defined theology and sharp verbal distinctions, has seldom built a cathedral, or originated or needed an architecture, of its own; all the distinctive ideas it has it can express in words. Doubtless it would be a weakness of sentiment to deplore such losses, if God saw that the ancient superstition would return and nestle beneath its ancient altars so long as the altars stood, and even have power to seduce and assimilate to itself the purer worship; but since God's acts of providence are, as it were, determined by the wisdom and strength of man, it may still be permitted us to deplore that man had not, and has not, that union of largeness, force and tenderness of nature, which, in the reformation or destruction of what is evil, makes it safe for him to preserve the beautiful or the solemn, with which it had become so intimately united as to seem part of its life and working.-You may spoil a man for a popular reformer by giving him too many

sympathies; as you may spoil him for a popular orator by giving him too many perceptions.

The only description of decided character that is truly moral, is when, in the strength of equal and full justice to all the interests involved, we are enabled to resist a mere impulse; and when the impulse we do obey is not one of passionate purpose or of wilful sympathy, but the resultant of all the real forces, flowing out of the large wisdom, the wide thoughtfulness, the delicate and careful susceptibility, of a just and of a gentle nature. Not to work right onward with a blind unmodified energy, nor to pursue one object with an undivided gaze, is the test of the true decision of character; but to have your tempered judgment as firm and forcible as other men's unqualified passions,in the largeness of your view to lose nothing of the concentration of your purpose,-to be as truly devoted to all the interests of a case, as earnest to do entire justice, as other men are to carry a single point, whose brain burns with only one desire, who have only a single impulse to work out. The man who acts only on a predominant feeling, though it be a good one, soon ceases to gain respect even for his goodness. He is considered as one carried away by his own nature, without wisdom or breadth of character, following his instincts, rather than as one capable of looking with a moral eye upon all the interests concerned, and if necessary of putting a restraint upon himself in