To Macaulay the "moderation of virtue" ascribed to Sir William Temple seemed littleness and meanness when he compared him with many of those frail men who, aiming high, but often drawn from the right path by strong passions and strong temptations, have left to posterity a doubtful and chequered fame. Clive, for instance, who, "like most men born with strong passions and tried by strong temptations," committed great faults. Of Cowper, on the other hand, as the contrasted schoolfellow of Warren Hastings, the historian observes, that having never been compelled to make a choice between innocence and greatness, between crime and ruin, his habits were such that he was unable to conceive how from the path of right even kind and noble natures may be hurried by the rage of conflict and the lust of dominion.

That which we do being evil, writes Hooker, "is notwithstanding by so much more pardonable, by how much the exigence of so doing, or the difficulty of doing otherwise, is greater,”—unless indeed this necessity or difficulty have originally risen from ourselves. To estimate the force by which temptation is overcome, said Sir James Stephen, you must ascertain the force of the propensities to which it is addressed. Robert South describes Him who came to save the lost, as never weighing the sin without weighing also the force of the inducement-how much of it is to be attributed to choice, how much to the violence of the temptation, to the stratagem of the occasion, and the yielding frailties of weak nature. De Foe is extolled by W. C. Roscoe as a great teacher of charity to those who are apt, as we all are, to think of the criminal outcasts of society as of persons removed from the ordinary conditions of humanity, and given up to a reprobate condition totally different from our own : one day we may be surprised to find that, while right and wrong continue to differ infinitely, the various degrees of human sinfulness lie within much narrower limits than we, who measure by the external act, are at all accustomed to conceive. Mit dem unglücklichen solte der glücklich nicht rechten, says a German dramatist. A deed done, a word spoken, is an act over which we can sit in

judgment; but how that word came to be spoken, the temp‐ tation which led to it, the human nature which yielded—there is quite sure, as one of George Eliot's reviewers affirms, to be something in the process with which we can sympathize; enough for pity and fellow-feeling to mingle with our virtuous indignation, and divest it of some of its harshness. There is a good clergyman in one of Mr. Froude's early fictions, to whom evil, in its abstract form, was so loathsome, and in its concrete so little familiar, that if ever he was obliged to transfer the judgment he had of the general to the particular, it was transferred whole: he could make no allowance; he knew not the infinite variety of natures men receive at the hands of Providence; nor had ever studied the strange laws which govern the moulding of them into characters; nor had any idea that the same temptation acts as variously on different men, as the same temperature on metals and gases. .

XXXV.

NATURE'S LAW OF LIFE OUT OF DEATH.

I. CORINTHIANS XV. 36.

N illustrating and enforcing his doctrine of the resurrection of the body, St. Paul meets one hypothetical objector with the trenchant reply, designed to be question and answer in one, "Thou fool! that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die.” Αφρον, σὺ ὃ σπέιρεις, οὐ ζωοποιεῖται ἐὰν μὴ ἀποθάνῃ.

With the Apostle's application of his argument we do not here propose to deal. The illustrative text is simply quoted as a starting-point for a digression on what may be called Nature's law of life out of death-the natural matter of fact, or the matter of fact in nature, that death is made to furnish new life, supplies the materials for it, and as it were actively as well as passively makes way for it.

If the indefinite term Nature,

thus conventionally used, be cavilled at, the cavil seems hardly

serious enough in practical import, however seriously urged and in whatever serious tones, to require explaining, or explaining away. And if objectors of another class take exception to the Apostle's argument, and urge that it is not the seed itself that dies-that the vital power of the seed, its germinating force, must remain, if there is to be any quickening process at all-we are not careful to answer them in this matter. We are concerned only with the applicability of the text to Nature's recognized method of evolving new forms out of decayed old ones, of bringing reconstruction out of decomposition, reorganization out of dissolution, life out of death.

We might thus apply to Nature the words of Bildad the Shuhite, and say: Behold, this is the joy of her way, and out of the earth shall others grow.

"See plastic Nature working to this end,

See dying vegetables life sustain,

See life dissolving vegetate again :

All forms that perish other forms supply,

...

By turns we catch the vital breath, and die."

Thus in the several orders of terrestrial forms, as Shaftesbury words it, "a resignation is required," a sacrifice and mutual yielding of natures one to another: the vegetables by their death sustain the animals, and animal bodies dissolved enrich the earth, and raise again the vegetable world. "All lives, and by succession still revives. The temporary beings quit their borrowed forms, and yield their elementary substance to newcomers. . . . New forms arise: and when the old dissolve, the matter whence they were composed is not left useless, but wrought with equal management and art, even in corruption, Nature's seeming waste and vile abhorrence. The abject state appears merely as the way or passage to some better." As Friar Lawrence muses, herb-gathering :

"The earth, that's Nature's mother, is her tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb."

Among the Crumms Fal'n from King James's Table, and respectfully picked up and preserved as too good to be lost, by his complaisant courtier and alleged victim, Sir Thomas Overbury,

...

this fragment occurs: "All corruption is nothing but dissolution, and the last dissolution of everything is into the earth, which shows that from thence we began." His Majesty reasons not like Lucifer in Byron's Cain, when he bids his air-borne pupil, though out of sight of earth, deem not he can escape it : he shall soon return to earth, and all its dust: ""Tis part of thy eternity, and mine . . . And mightier things have been extinct To make way for much meaner than we can surmise." Dust we are, and to dust we return. It is not wonderful, said Dr. Rowland Williams, that those who accept no clue out of the labyrinth save speculation, and who observe completeness in the round of Nature, become tempted to class man with other animals, in the vast circle of life and decay, in which all things that breathe enjoy their hour, and relapse into that field of death, from which new harvests spring. "Why should the forces which moulded us, not mould out of ou rremains fresh forms of life? Air to air, dust to dust; the grass greener with The Lucretius of the laureate bids

our flesh."

"Great Nature, take, and forcing far apart

Those blind beginnings that have made me man,
Dash them anew together at her will

Through all her cycles-into man once more,

Or beast or bird or fish, or opulent flower."

Heraclitus, we are told, was the first to proclaim the absolute vitality of Nature, the endless change of matter, the mutability and perishability of all individual things, in contrast with the eternal Being, the supreme Harmony which rules over all. He said there was nothing but a perpetual flux of things, that the whole world of phenomena was as a flowing river, everchanging yet apparently the same. "Another truth I now unfold," said Empedocles: "no natural birth

"Is there of mortal things, nor death's destruction final;

Nothing is there but a mingling, and then a separation of the mingled, Which are called a birth and death by ignorant mortals."

We may be reminded of Schelling's expression of the accepted idea of life, as depending on the incessant disturbance and reestablishment of an equilibrium; or again of De Blainville's

definition of it, as a continual movement of decomposition and recomposition. Two streams circulate through the universe, said Julius Hare, the stream of Life and the stream of Death: each feeds, and feeds upon, the other; for they are perpetually crossing, like the serpents round Mercury's Caduceus, wherewith animas ille evocat Orco Pallentes, alias sub Tartara tristia mittit. Victor Hugo presents the grim aspect of the vext question when he dilates on the fact, that all nature which is under our observation is alternately devouring and devoured: the prey prey on each other. Nor is he over-eager to accept the solution of Bonnet, whose notions may be thus summarized: Universal death necessitates universal sepulture: the devourers are the sextons of the system of nature. All created things enter into and form the elements of other. To decay is to nourish. Such is the terrible law from which not even man himself escapes. So fleeting, as Mr. Carlyle moralizes, is the habitation of man-"his very house of houses, what we call his body, were he the first of geniuses, will evaporate in the strangest manner, and vanish even whither we have said." La fange, writes Lamartine, devient homme et fermente encore :

"Puis un souffle d'en haut se lève, et toute chose

Change, tombe, périt, fuit, meurt, se décompose,”

as in Emerson's preception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life, and life out of death-" that law by which in nature, decomposition is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a new creation." In a later work the essayist says of Nature that she turns her capital day by day; deals never with dead, but ever with quick subjects: all things are flowing, even those that seem immovable:* the

*The labours of Rouelle, Desmarest, Dolomieu, and Montlosier, made familiar to their countrymen, as Mr. Buckle remarks, the previously strange conception, that the surface of our planet, even where it appears perfectly stable, is constantly undergoing most extensive changes; that this perpetual flux takes place not only in those parts of nature which are obviously feeble and evanescent, but also in those which seem to possess every element of strength and permanence, such as the mountains of granite which wall the globe, and are the shell and encasement in which it is held.