build a perfect cathedral, by taking the spire of Salisbury, and the nave of Canterbury, and the choir of York, and the cloisters of Gloucester, and the front of Peterborough, and the tombs of Winchester, and to form them into-one monster. So a poet might plan a poem, to include the solemnity of Milton, and the humour of Shakspeare; the terse diction of Pope, and the rude Doric of Chaucer; epigrams from Martial, and lyrics from Pindar; and the elegant witticisms of the last new novel, side by side with the awfulness of the warnings in the Bible. This is Eclecticism.

And yet, you will ask, ought we not to aim at perfection? And is perfection to be found in any separate system? Is it not the result of combination-of a collection of parts? Where is the evil of eclecticism? That some evil principle is contained in it is evident; but what is it?

In the first place, then, Eclecticism implies that you, the individual thinker, place yourself out of and above all other teachers and doctrines, and look down on them as a judge and critic; and, therefore, proudly and contemptuously. To praise implies superiority. We never praise the gods, says Aristotle; we wonder at and revere them. And to praise, instead of obeying, an ethical system, implies that we have within us some standard by which we measure it-a standard of more value than the thing measured by it, as every rule is more perfect than the line which it tries. But where does this standard come from? If not taken from any other teacher, or body of teachers, it must come from ourselves, from our own notions and feelings. And hence Eclecticism is but another word for independence and Rationalism; and in acting on it, men cull out what they like, reject what they dislike, assent to that which seems right in their own eyes,

deny all that they cannot understand. Their own minds are their only rule. Give a man, indeed, one certain fixed body of doctrine, received from competent authority, bind him to one school, whatever it may be, and then he may become an eclectic of the rest without becoming a rationalist. And a Christian, in submitting to the Church, may stand before all other systems of ethics as an eclectic; but with safety and wisdom. He may select in them all that is good, finding this doctrine more perfect in one, and that doctrine in another, but regulating his approval not by his own private notions, but by the standard of the Church. And thus the early fathers called themselves eclectics, and boasted of the title. Justin Martyr, St. Augustin,2 St. Basil,3 St. Jerome,4 Origen, Theodoret, Clement of Alexandria,7 Tertullian, all recommend eclecticism in this sense, but with the strict reservation in the words of Origen himself, "that the preaching and doctrines of the Church, transmitted by the order of succession from the apostles, and continuing unaltered to this time in the Church, be maintained inviolate; that such only be deemed truth which in no respect is discordant with ecclesiastical and apostolical tradition."9

5

In Plato, in Aristotle, in the Stoics, in the Ori

Apolog. II. p. 132. Thirlby edit. Apolog. 1.

2 De Civit. Dei, lib. viii. c. 9, 10.

3 Homil. 24. De legendis libris Gentilium ad adolescentes. Epist. 70 ad Magnum.

5 Epist ad Gregorium, Tepl apxŵv, lib. i

6 Curat. Græc. Aff., lib. i.

8 Testimon. Animæ, p. 8.

7 Stromat., lib. v.

Ο Περὶ ἀρχῶν, lib. i. "Servetur vero ecclesiastica prædicatio per successionis ordinem ab apostolis tradita, et usque ad præsens in ecclesiis permanens; illa sola credenda est veritas, quæ in nullo ab ecclesiastica et apostolica discordat traditione."

ental sects, they distinguished what accorded with the truths of the Gospel; and standing as they did on the high ground of revelation, could look down on all human systems, praising this and censuring that, acting as their judges and critics, treating them as inferiors, and measuring them by a standard of their own. And yet there was no presumption or danger, since the standard which they used was not invented of themselves, but was the revelation of God.

One fault, then, of eclecticism is, that it refers every thing at last to the judgment of the individual thinker.

It has another, that a system thus formed must always be full of inconsistencies. True it is that every work of nature consists of parts wrought into a whole. The body is made of limbs, the tree of branches and leaves, the human mind of many faculties and various capacities, the heavens of clusters of stars, society of families, families of groups of men, the Church of a distinction of orders. Without many parts there is no whole. But also nature has established one law for the formation of these wholes-a law which eclecticism sets at nought. How is the body formed? Not by bringing together legs, and arms, and heads, and rivetting them into one mass. It is developed from the embryo, in which all the outlines of the parts were originally included, and have only been drawn out and magnified by the growth of life. How is the tree produced? Is it by hammering together boughs and trunks, tacking on leaves here, sewing on flowers there? No, as botanists will tell you, the whole oak lies hid in the acorn, and is drawn out from that germ by light, and air, and the vitality which lies within it. So families spring from one first parent; so nations from some one head. Even where violence has

overturned and rooted up all original connexion with a patriarchal monarchical authority, yet society never can begin to organise itself again, unless some one man takes the lead; gathers round him followers who hang on him; by them collects more distant dependents; distributes his power through them; becomes to them as the acorn to the oak, as the embryo to the man. So the old British constitution was developed from the one germ of regal authority, not from independent conflicting prerogatives of people and king. So the holy Church, with all its multitudes of members, its generations upon generations, its various offices, its separate gifts, all sprung from one single Head. It was not an aggregate of individuals voluntarily combining together, as the Sophist Locke supposes. It was gathered by the Spirit of God pervading human hearts, attracting to itself whatever was congenial, swelling its own bulk, and spreading itself out into form and beauty by a power within itself. So, too, the doctrine of the Church. It lay hid all of it in the words of our Saviour, as they are delivered in the Gospel. It was drawn out and expanded more by the apostles in their preaching. It took a still more precise and developed form during the first three centuries:2 but it was not picked up in fragments, and nailed together, from the relics of heathen philosophy, after the fancy of an individual man. And the same may be said of its discipline and polity.

I dwell on this law of growth, not merely in illustration of the question before you, but because it is of vital importance in very many controversies of the present day, political, religious, and moral.

1 Letters on Toleration.

2 See an eloquent passage in Vincentius, Commonitorium adversus Hæreses.

And it never can be overlooked without fatal errors in reasoning, and still worse errors in practice.

And Eclecticism does overlook it. And if it produces anything, it must produce a monster, with the neck of the horse supporting the head of a man, and the body of a woman ending in the tail of a fish.1

Give a comparative anatomist (I am alluding to a fact) the claw of an unknown animal, and he will, and has been able to describe the whole skeleton before it has been seen. Shew an architect the moulding of a good Gothic building, and he can trace out its general plan. Put the fragment of a Grecian statue before a master sculptor, and he will tell you, by the position of a muscle, the attitude and intention of the whole figure. Why? Because in every high and perfect work of art or nature there is one leading design, which flows into and animates each part. The most distant limbs are held together by some secret sympathy; portions, between which a common eye cannot detect the slightest connexion, yet in some way are dependent on each other, because they are segments of a common plan, and spring from one fundamental idea. Why have all mammiferous animals seven vertebræ in the neck, and no more? Why have ruminating animals cloven feet? No one can tell; and yet these parts are in some way so connected together, that they have never yet been found separated.

But an eclectic, if he is to be really and truly an eclectic, can have no one common idea under which to arrange the fragments, which he pilfers from a variety of systems. If he has such a common fundamental idea, then that idea is his own system, and he is a rationalist, not an eclectic. If he has none, then, according to the fancy of the

1 Horat. Ars Poetic.