condition of man is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith and calling upon God."

And yet, without this power of turning himself, how can he attain the perfection of his nature, after which he is constantly sighing-the ivépyea, which Aristotle requires as the first condition of mind; the denial of self, which Plato describes as the very essence of virtue; the regal sovereignty of the Stoics; the liberty and spontaneity, without which modern philosophers have assumed that there is neither goodness nor happiness? How, perhaps it might even be said, can we be to other moral beings—even to God himself—an object of love and affection, as an independent moral agent?

And yet again, one more difficulty: how, if this independent power be attained, is it to be reconciled with the absolute unity and supremacy of God, as the one sole fount of all power, from whom all creation flows, and without whom nothing can exist ? This is, and always has been, the great problem of ethical philosophy; and human reason never has solved it, and never will.

And yet it has been solved by the Church. The Church comes to man, enslaved as he is to the outward influences of the natural man, and not only brings before him more facts, more knowledge, new relations, higher promises, more awful threats, and a more powerful body of advisers, to counteract them. This would indeed be much; and some men seem to imagine that it is all. And yet, if what was said before is true, even all this would be useless. It would be only an external power; and external power alone cannot change the heart. And therefore the Church gives more: it puts into the heart

1 Articles of Religion, x.

a new principle, or rather a new being, or rather, if we may so dare to speak, God himself, by imparting to it the Holy Spirit, and uniting it to the Body of Christ. It is from this Holy Spirit, and this only, that all the real power and spontaneity of man proceeds. It acts as the individual himself, because it is united to himself. It is given secretly and imperceptibly; so that in an action he cannot discriminate what comes from heaven, and what from himself, except from the consciousness of the fact that he is resisting evil. He does make this resistance, he suffers pain voluntarily, he feels the whole force of the attraction of evil, and yet remains firm against it; and discovers no power but his own which is thus acting; and yet he knows that it is not his own.

“I can do all things,” says St. Paul, in the full consciousness of his individual personality. And yet he says again, “Not I, but Christ that is in me." It is, after all, God, and God alone, who works within us, “to will and to do of his good pleasure.” Every act of power is thus referred to him: and the man who is doing good, traces up every element out of which his goodness is formed to the hand of the one supreme Author of all good. The laws by which his mind works-the external circumstances of the material world in which he is placed—the constitution of his body—the conditions of his birth, family, education, profession, association with other men, all of them co-operating to produce one general end-more especially his admission into the Church -the free gift of the Holy Spirit, the subsequent opportunities of keeping it alive within him-and all the other aids of Christian doctrine and practice, --all come from God. And thus is solved the problem-how to create an agent possessed of the consciousness of individual independence, and yet to reconcile that independence with the absolute uni

versal sovereignty of the supreme Creator. Man is placed here upon earth apart from the direct presence of God, before which, from the constitution of his nature, it might be wholly impossible for him to sin by disobedience: the influence would seem to be overpowering, leaving no opening for free agency. He is subjected to external influences, which his own heart condemns, and against which he is warned by all the solemn admonitions of his moral teachers, and the Church, and by the punishments of Nature -but warned only; no power is exerted over him, to drag him back against his will. And thus, in following evil, he feels that he is acting of himself -he makes a choice-he resists good-he becomes an åρxù πρážɛws, an originating agent; and this he never could become, were he placed only before one road, and tied down to it by influences of good only, as a steam-carriage is propelled upon a rail-road; for no sense of power can be generated without something to resist, and without a sense of power there can be no consciousness of independent personality. And then, while this evil power, if power it may be called, continues still in action, secretly and silently another power is insinuated into his heart, which raises him up to resist in a contrary direction, to fight against evil, to overcome it; while still he has the choice of submitting to it. And this power being God himself, the omnipotence, and predestinating will, and entire supremacy of God, is reconciled with the consciousness of free agency in man. Looking forward, man feels that he is free: looking back, that he has entirely been moulded by the hands of God. Here again there are two doctrines, the one seemingly incompatible with the other. Human reason will acknowledge one, and exclude the other. And yet both have found their advocates, and both are incontestably asserted by facts.

Catholic Christianity holds them both. It warns, encourages, blames, praises, punishes, and rewards Christians as free: it declares to them, at the same time, that they are wholly the creatures of God, that they can do nothing without him. It commands men to hold both these truths; and though they cannot be held in the mind at one and the same moment, to think of one at one time, and the other at another—of their free agency when they are about to act, of their predestination when they have acted. All indolence, weakness, carelessness, and despair, is to be checked by the consciousness of our individual responsibility, and sense of the power within us, given to us by the presence of Christ. All presumption and self-gratulation is to be crushed by the acknowledgment of Him as the one sole author of our goodness. And as at no moment, while life remains, can we be without a field of action, without something to do, and some opportunity of doing right, the Church absolutely forbids us ever to think of predestination when we are looking back upon our sins. “The Lord,” we know, "hath made all things for himself; yea, even the wicked for the day of evil” (Prov. xvi. 4). But it is not for us to dwell on this, when we are conscious of being wicked: our duty is to escape, to act, to think of the future more than of the past. We have no business with the thought of predestination then, as we have no business with the thought of free agency when we are looking back upon our goodness. Regulate and distribute the thoughts, each under their proper occasion, and all will be right. So God is all love; and yet he is all justice. Merge either love in justice, or justice in love-as human reason is prone to do and what becomes of our religion and our virtue? Hold them both, and yet misapply them; speak of God's love to the hardened sinner, and of

his justice to the trembling penitent,-and you confirm the recklessness of the one, and stifle the reformation of the other. Adjust them rightly, and you may save them both. And so with the mysterious union of man's free agency and God's predestination. Do not attempt to reconcile them, that is, to merge one in the other; but hold them both, and only be careful how you apply them. Follow, in one word, the Church, as she has declared her doctrine in a form, which sound moralists must always regard as combining the profoundest philosophy with a precise, discriminating, moderate, and practical prudence, and as affording a most admirable specimen of the true ethical spirit of the Catholic Church.

Let us conform to the seventeenth article. No philosophy ever surpassed it in its conformity to facts. No education can be good which does not follow its practical advice, which is the same that I have here endeavoured to put forth. I will go further, and say, that an education which endeavours to slur over this problem as one full of danger, (which it is), and does not positively and boldly take its stand on a definite declaration of the truth, will be pregnant with mischief. Has man any individual personality, or is he a mere machine? This question must be answered both by the teacher and the pupil, before it is possible to decide on the system by which he is to be governed and moulded. In the present day, alarmed at the extravagances of Calvinism, perplexed still more by the embarrassments of a rationalistic controversy on such a mysterious subject, in which rationalism must always be lost, because its very principle is to retain only one doctrine, when experience declares that there are two,--men have endeavoured to evade the question. They have almost prohibited its discussion; and yet they cannot prohibit themselves from pronouncing