iron tear from the eye of Justice. Both these figures are foreign to the idea of law. Revenge looks from the fault to the individual, and says, torture and kill him; Love looks from the fault to the individual, and says, pity and save him; Law regards the fault alone.

We fully grant that revenge has thus a function in time. Love might conceivably become morbid, might degenerate into a weak sentimentalism, might cease to accept the stern necessity of not sparing the sin, whatever may be the feeling entertained for the sinner. And had it not been for the positive pleasure of revenge, perhaps the sorrow entailed upon men in the punishment of those among them who clog the wheels of progress, had caused its having never been proceeded with: so far, in strict psychological truth, does Mr. Carlyle err, when he speaks of the exercise of revenge being painful. Love may go farther than can be allowed it in the present condition of the human race, and then revenge may feel itself crushed and unduly outraged, and call out for a new fixing of that medium between extremes, which is all we can yet attempt. Nay, it is quite beyond our attention to deny that this may, in individual instances, have been the case in the philanthropic move

ment.

Love and revenge, considered thus in their relation to justice, are alike temporal. When men have re-attained their true, original, spiritual life, their work will have been completed; Justice will then for ever rule, and alone; but no longer over cowering, struggling, trembling creatures; for, when we look up, the iron brow shall have become gold, and we shall know, by the fadeless smile on the lip, that to eternity Justice and Love are one.

Now are we fairly at the point where we can decide upon the claims of philanthropy. Granting that love and revenge

are each and equally foreign to the idea of law, we ask this question:-In a state of progress, in a state of advancement from worse to better, shall we proceed toward the enlargement of the province of love, or to that of the province of revenge? Surely we may answer, without hesitation, that the advancement must be in the direction of love, and that, more and more, revenge will be driven away, as men attain to higher and higher development. When all passions fade away, their function being performed, love will also pass away, but only to become one with justice. We shall not hang such a curtain of murky darkness over the future of humanity, as to say that it is not toward love, but toward hatred, not toward mercy, but revenge, that we are advancing. Surely, if there is one instinct in the human heart which is entwined with its essential life, and which wings its proudest aspirations; if there is one universal faith written in the brightness which, even in its tears, the eye of humanity gathers as it looks toward the far distance; if there is one belief which preeminently stamps. earth as the place of hope, it is this that, despite volcanoes and thunder-storms, despite scaffolds and battle-fields, despite death and the grave, love is, by eternal nature and essence, holier than hate, and will ultimately prevail against it. Whatever their present mission, revenge and hatred are known by men to belong to a state of disease, to be in their nature, when between reasonable beings, not divine, but diabolic. Go to the poor Bedouin of the desert, and ask what is his idea of justice and of law. There, amid his burning wastes, where he clings on to the skirts of civilization, scarce able to count on his life for an hour to come, you find in full development the bare idea of force as what is to be feared, and obeyed, and worshiped. The foot that can crush him like a worm into the sand, the eye that will not relent for tears or groaning—these

he honors. Is not this the first rude idea of humanity? Must we still learn from the desert wanderer? Surely, at some point in the revolution of the ages, the soothing, softening, mighty influences of kindness were to begin to make themselves more distinctly felt than in the old iron times. It is a universal principle that, strength being secured, the milder every government is, the nearer does it approach to perfection: this holds good in the heart, the family, and the nation. And however philanthropy may as yet struggle amid obstruction and obscuration, we shall hail it as a streak, coming beautifully, though as yet faintly and dubiously, over the mist-wreaths of morning, of that mild sunlight whose power will one day replace that of the tempest. The times, we shall hope, had come for philanthropy, and Howard was sent to call it into visible form and working. And, methinks, even although such a dreadful thing has happened as that one or two fewer strokes have been inflicted on the writhing criminal, than fierce revenge, or even Bedouin justice, might demand, it is better to have it so, than that we should go back to the days of racks and wheels, of human beings distracted with sorrow, and guiltless creatures dying of jail fever. But this consideration is not required. We calmly rest the cause of philanthropy on these simple truths: that there is a discernible and distinct office performed by pity in our present condition, relating to justice; and that its function must go on expending if men advance. Philanthropy is a weapon from heaven's armory; we trust the time has come when we can use it; if not, the greater our shame, not the worse the weapon.

Extremes are always easy; this is as true as that they are always wrong. A maudlin, morbid pity, refusing the imperative conditions of our existence in time, is the one extreme; for it we offer no defense-it we deem perfectly distinct

from true Christian philanthropy: a savage, unsparing, execrating denunciation of philanthropy seems to us the otheran equally false, and still more easy extreme; against it we here specially strive. The difficulty assuredly is, to discover what is really valuable in philanthropy, to separate it from dross, and to shape it into a tool for our work, or a weapon for our warfare. What little we have to propose for the accomplishment of this, we shall declare hereafter. For the present, since it is of the idea of philanthropy and not of its developments we treat, we shall conclude with a word or two relating to the essential connection of the philanthropy we prize with Christianity, and what it gains from this connection.

We have hitherto spoken of love in its human aspect, and appealed merely to human reason and history. But it can in no quarter be deemed unimportant that an idea is approved by a religion, which, name it as you will, is the highest that ever appeared on earth, and has swayed more intellect than ever any other. Christianity sanctions and embodies philanthropy. The angel that led the choir over the fields of Bethlehem was named Love. Take away love from Christianity, and you have taken away its life: love, not alone to the just and the holy, but to the sinner; to the pale Magdalene, to whom no one but the King of men and of angels will deign to speak, to the poor publican, and the hated leper, and the raving maniac. It was at the voice of Christianity that modern philanthropy awoke, and it is in this alliance that we regard it with hope. Christianity gives us those fundamental truths of philanthropy, that sin can be hated and the sinner loved, and that love will be the end of all. Say not that this first is a filmy distinction, or that it will blunt the weapons and unnerve the arms that must in time carry on truceless war with evil.

If it is a cloud, it is as one of those interposed by kind supernal powers between the breast of Greek or Trojan hero and the mortal stab: it alone shuts our hearts against hatred of our brothers. And think not the second charge valid: all human history is against you. Men have always fought and toiled best when moved by impulses holding of the infinite. It is the banner painted on the clouds under which men will conquer; it was when, amid the battle-dust around Antioch, or coming along the slopes of Olivet, the worn crusader caught the gleam of celestial helms advancing to his rescue, that he became irresistible. The ill done us by a poor brother is a paltry motive: who would not rather strain his sinews a little harder, have a few more hot drops on his own brow, than kill the poor creature whom we had got down! We must have a motive, in our war with evil, that will be beyond the sounding and measuring of our own faculties. This Mr. Carlyle knows well; but he finds it in boundless wrath against the individual caitiff; we, by looking beyond time altogether, in a necessity of nature, and the command of God. Sin is an infinite evil; against it we can strive with unbounded indignation. To put it away from us, we must slay him who is fatally infected, and whose infection will spread: but not toward him are we necessitated to entertain any feeling but love; the whole fervor of our hate is against that snake whose deadly venom has utterly tainted his blood. It is by some mighty distraction in the order of things, by some staining of the "white radiance of eternity," by some disturbance of the everlasting rest, that sin has extended its influence to reasoning human beings. One great effect of this is, that, in time, and by man, the distinction between the sin and the reasoning human being it affects can not be perfectly preserved. But the infinitude of God's peace will one day envelop the little stream of time, and hush all its