invigorating. But it is not the real truth, or rather not the whole truth-far from it. The world is not all radiant and harmonious; it is often savage and chaotic. In thought we can see only the bright, but in hard fact we are brought face to face with the dark side. Waste, ruin, conflict, rot, are about us everywhere. If tornadoes, earthquakes, glacier epochs, are not very frequent, there is everywhere decay, dissolution, waste, every hour and in every pore of the vast Cosmos. See Nature at its richest on the slopes of some Andes or Himalayas where a first glance shows us one vision of delight and peace. We gaze more steadily, we see how animal, and vegetable, and inorganic life are at war, tearing each the other: every leaf holds its destructive insect, every tree is a scene of torture, combat, death, everything preys on everything; animals, storms, suns, and snows waste the flower and the herb; climate tortures to death the living world, and the inanimate world is wasted by the animate, or by its own pent-up forces. We need as little think this earth all beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of loveliness and ghastliness; of harmony and chaos; of agony, joy; life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and deaf to the waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth.

And if beauty and harmony are ascendant in these spots of earth which we fill, are they in the South

Pole, and the North Pole, and the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific; or in the extreme icy heavens, and in the fiery whirlwinds of the Sun, and in those regions of Space where they tell us Suns explode and disappear, annihilating whole solar systems at once? The Moon of the poets is an image of peace and tenderness; but the Moon of science makes the imagination faint with the sense of a lifeless, motionless, voiceless, sightless solitude. What a mass is there in Nature that is appalling, almost maddening to man, if we coolly resolve to look at all the facts, as facts!

Nay, has this wandering speck of dust, that we call ours, one of the motes that people the sun systems, has it always been beautiful? Parts of it now are. But in the infinite ages of geologic time, even in the vast glacier epochs, and the drift, and the like, or when this island lay drenched in a monotonous ooze—— was beauty, or what man thinks beauty, the rule then? The flowers, the forests, the plantations, the meadows, the uplands waving with corn and poppies, are the work of man. The earth was a grisly wilderness till man appeared; and it had but patches of beauty here and there, until after man had conquered it. Man made the country as much as he made the town; the one out of organic, the other out of inorganic materials.

And what is beauty, and harmony, and majesty in Nature? Nothing but what Man sees in it and feels in it. It is beautiful to us; it has a relation to our lives and our nature. Absolutely, it may be a wilderness or a chaos. The poets indeed are the true authors of the beauty and order of Nature; for they see it by the eye of genius. And they only see it. Coldly, literally, examined, beauty and horror, order and disorder seem to wage an equal and eternal war. Morally, intellectually, truly, Man stands face to face with Nature-not her inferior, not her equal, but her superior, like the poet's last man confronting the Sun in death. The laws of Nature are the ideas whereby Man has arranged the phenomena offered to his senses; the beauty of Nature is the joy whereby he grasps the relations of his environment to his own being. When we think we worship Nature, we are really worshipping Homer and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley, Byron and Scott. As Comte said in a bold but not irreverent moment-the Heavens declare the glory of Galileo and Kepler and Newton; for the ceaseless spectacle of mysterious movement they present recalls to us the minds which first saw unity and law therein.

There is, as we say, another and a far deeper spirit of Pantheism, more subtle and more philosophical than any Nature worship, than this love of the beauty

and life in the world. It has forms infinite, that cannot be numbered: the sense of immensity in the sum of things-not-ourselves: the sense of stupendous Order around us, of convoluted Life around us, or Force around us: or it may be a trust that things are tending towards good around us: or that intoxication with the fumes of Godhead reduced to vapour which marked the metaphysical Pantheism of Spinoza. There are some whose faith is sustained on even more etherial food; who idealise the Universe as such, the Good, the Beautiful, the True.

What are all these, if we take them to be quite independent of God, and yet outside of and sovereign. over Man? I know what is meant by the Power and Goodness of an Almighty Creator; I know what is meant by the genius, and patience, and sympathy of Man. But what is the All, or the Good, or the True, or the Beautiful? What is the Anima Mundi, if it is neither God nor Man, neither animate nor inanimate, but both or neither? And what is the Eternal that makes for righteousness, if only Philistines can take it to be Providence? If God and Universe are identical expressions, we had better drop one or other. If the Universal Mind' is nothing so grossly anthropomorphic as the old idea of God, but really is the cause of all things and is indeed all things, if being and not being are identical and the identity of being

consists in its being the union of two contradictories, -let us, in the name of sense, get rid of these big vague words, and having got rid of God as a term of a narrow dogmatism, and Mind and Soul, as a verbal spiritualism, let us say simply Things, and have the courage of our opinions, and boldly profess as our creed 'I believe in nothing except in Things in general.'

For, what this metaphysical Pantheism gains in breadth and philosophic subtlety over the mere poet's worship of Nature, it loses in distinctness, even in meaning, till it becomes a phrase, with as little reality in it as the 'Supreme' of the latest school of unutterables. The 'All' is a very big thing, but why am I to fall down before it? The Good is very precious, but good for what, to whom? Cobras and mosquitoes are good at biting; volcanoes are good to look at from a safe distance; and bloody battle-fields are good for the worms underground. The 'All' is not good nor beautiful; it is full of horror and ruin. And Truth is simply any positive statement about the 'All.' When people decline to be bound by the cords of a formal Theology, and proclaim their devotion to these facile abstractions, they are really escaping in a cloud of words from giving their trust to anything; for 'Things in general as understood by myself' is a roundabout phrase for that good old rule, the simple plan viz. :-'what I like.'