of that age, and not his own personal and peculiar transgressions-I mean, such defects as the being too sanguine and ardent, hasty and imprudent, too ready to form friendships and trust strangers, too vehement in love and in expectation, somewhat too confident of one's own opinion. Just in proportion as any of these were a voluntary transgression, they will call for and produce humiliation, but no further. But again, whatever may have been our past sufferings, yet when at last we obtain honourable and permanent repose, the remembrance of them is rather pleasant; and if they have brought us spiritual improvement, we may well count them a real good. No amount then of mere outward suffering, not connected with our own sin, during this short life, need cause the slightest difficulty in our present argument. All evil is ultimately annihilated, in comparison with the good. As concerns the moral evil in which each of us may have been involved, no one can repine and justly regret, if the fire which burns in the soul from this cause is fierce and gnawing. If remorse do its work, and the man learn to go softly all his days in the bitterness of his soul; he will only the better learn that sin stingeth as a serpent and biteth as an adder. In fact, as regards the mass of mankind, perhaps no wise man would desire to have the tormenting power of remorse lessened. Nevertheless, as in the case of slight transgressions,-an unkind word-a proud thought-a selfish neglect of another-there is a soothing of the conscience, when contrition has wrought its results, confession and restitution; so of greater offences there may be a genial repentance, quite unlike mere remorse, and where there is, some ultimate lesson may be taught both to the offender himself and to others: and though it is not to be imagined that it is better for him to have gone wrong, than to have been both wise enough and good enough to go right, yet his sin may in the end be a mere process of rising higher; just as the false notes on a violin are but a state of transition towards better play. Hence even the worst cases of guilt become reconcilable with the divine wisdom in ordaining the present scene of things: for in short, though all are transgressors, yet at the worst one portion is led on towards moral perfection and consequent happiness; and another portion, if it does not attain this, yet at some period ceases to exist. No difficulty arises, except on the belief that the sin and misery of the latter is unsubdued and everlasting. Exclude this conception;-believe that goodness alone is eternal; and it remains clearly intelligible,

how the divine wisdom may have ordained, on the one hand, that man should gain a stable independent holy will, so as to be capable of friendship with his infinite creator; but that, on the other hand, this essentially demanded that he should be left free to sin, and consequently moral evil has abounded and abounds, but only for a time. Sin and its effects, remorse and misery, are to be abolished, and the fruit of holiness shall flourish to everlasting life.

But it will be inquired, is not this, after all, to maintain, that the holy God uses base and unholy means to work out his designs? Does it not confound our sense of moral distinctions, and make evil to be good when it tends to a good end, if the view above given is correct? This objection exerts a force that is hard to account for upon many minds; for it does not seem to have any intrinsic weight. It might seem to have been borrowed from the barbaric reasoning of King Agamemnon in Homer, or from a bye-gone Predestinarian school, whose doctrine annihilated all human agency, and imputed to the deity the acts of all men. Certainly such a doctrine makes it impossible to defend the moral character of our creator. If vice and cruelty are bad, and he is as truly responsible for their existence, as though he were the immediate agent, there is an end of reasoning. The tyrant may justify himself, by saying, that when he oppresses, he is only the tool by which God scourges men. But the first principle of all intelligent worship recognizes in ourselves a power to resist the will of God, which constitutes sin against him. It is in extravagant inconsistency with this first principle, to imagine that because God gives us the power to sin, therefore God ordains the sin and is responsible for it. If with reverence we may use the phrase, we may say that he is responsible for the general result of investing us with such a power. Consistently with goodness and wisdom, he must have foreseen that in the long-run this arrangement was beneficent; then it surely may co-exist with a fixed hatred of moral evil. A wise father will give his son an allowance of pocket money, in order that he may learn to spend judiciously: and even when he sees him about to employ it foolishly, he will not check him, deeming it better that he should learn by experience, than by dictation. Without alleging that the cases. are perfectly parallel, this suffices to put into a clear light the fact, that to make a beneficial disposal of affairs, well knowing that the parties so invested with power will partially abuse it, is quite consistent with the purest disapproval of such abuse. All

that is needed to justify him who so ordains, is, a clear belief that in no other way will so good a total result be gained.

In this light we must look on the men who are generally regarded as the scourges of mankind. Who can read without shuddering the atrocities of a Timour or an Attila? Indeed, in the latter, it appears less frightful from his very savageness. We judge of him as a wild beast, rather than as a man. But Timour was a legislator and a would-be reformer. Alexander the Great was eminent for political intellect. Our question, however, is not, What are we to think of the men? but, How are we to vindicate the divine providence which permits their action? It does not seem to be difficult, after the above. Indeed, an Attila may be classed with earthquakes or volcanoes; fearful visitations not caused by moral evil; and no one who holds that these physical evils are consistent with divine goodness (partly as the results of good laws impressed on nature, partly as directly remedial) will find much difficulty in believing the same of Attila. But we may go further. Not only is it certain that we should injure man's nature, if we could wholly extinguish ambition; certain, that the flame which in Alexander or Napoleon burned to intense and baneful fury, is in its milder forms quite essential to man's welfare: but it is credible, that, if we did but know the alternative possibilities (which we never can know), we might find that the permanent good effected (blindly) by Alexander, by Julius Cæsar, by Napoleon, far more than out-balances their evil. We may even venture to believe, that, until mankind is otherwise more perfect, it is beneficial on the whole that men of unbridled ambition do exist, and will exist. This is God's great influence for fusing into one the separated tribes of the human race by conquest; the method by which the superior energies and talents of one nation are ultimately diffused over another: and although it produces countless miseries on the way, inasmuch as the conquerors are not aiming at good or concerned to use virtuous methods (and this is their sin), yet an extensive survey of human history will convince any well-judging mind, that our race would never have attained its present elevation or its present prospects of improvement, if ambition had always been thwarted before it could overflow in conquest.

It is striking to contemplate the analogy offered us in the whole field of nature, as to the slow progresss of whatever is to be ultimately great. In the botanical world it has been long proverbial,

that vast growths are slow; and the discoveries of geology magnificently illustrate the saying. But there is another aspect from which the same facts may be viewed. In one sense, the material universe may be called always the same. Having the same repulsions and attractions and the same material masses, only the same phenomena (it might seem) must for ever recur, did not organic life break in to disturb the monotony. The influx of vegetable forms introduces wonderful variety; yet each vegetable in itself is, within near limits, ever like itself; nor does any improvement in the individual, nor much in the species, take place. Moral growth is the last and most complicated of organic growths. If ferns took many thousand years to perfect themselves, it is but little to allow a hundred thousand years to man.

CHARLES SUMNER

ON

THE GRANDEUR OF NATIONS.

[1845.]

ABRIDGED FROM THE "PROSPECTIVE REVIEW," No. VII., 1846.

WHEN

HEN we consider at how recent a time most unnatural and deadly hostilities with the United States of North America threatened this country, and how few among our Trans-Atlantic kinsmen dared to lift up their voices against the warlike spirit which had unhappily attained a political predominance, we feel that a debt of gratitude is owing to every American citizen who in the last year publicly protested in favour of peace, and denounced the profligate and inhuman spirit of territorial aggrandizement. Mr. Sumner spoke with an immediate practical object, and with the actual position of the United States filling his view. This alone enables us to forgive his extravagant overstatements and oftentimes fanatical declamation. But because of the extreme importance of the subject, we deprecate all overstatement of the argument; for this occasions a waste of moral power and of valuable enthusiasm on the part of the advocates of peace, lays them open to the dangerous, because just, assaults of ridicule, and alienates from their co-operation thousands of humane, able, but practical men. We exceedingly differ from Mr. Sumner as to his invidious interpretation of the term national honour, which he wishes to explode altogether. The case is, we submit, exactly the same as with personal honour. There are coxcombs and bullies, who often fancy they are insulted, and pick a quarrel in defence of what they call their honour; but we cannot infer that there is no such thing as dishonour to be feared from too passive a submission to injury. If a man is walking in the street with his wife, and a ruffian attacks her, we hold that it would be a deep dishonour in him not to defend her, and if occasion required, he must defend her with as much "boar's" or "lion's might as he can summon into his frame. Mr. Sumner injures his case by the superfluity