tellect, and after all the storms of pessimism and necessitarianism have passed over him. The reconciliation of the two certitudes, the two methods, the scientific and the religious, 'is to be sought for in that moral law which is also a fact, and every step of which requires for its explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity.' 'Nature is the virtuality of mind, the soul the fruit of life, and liberty the flower of necessity.' Consciousness is the one fixed point in this boundless and bottomless gulf of things, and the soul's inward law, as it has been painfully elaborated by human history, the only revelation of God.

The only but the sufficient revelation! For this first article of a reasonable creed is the key to all else—the clue which leads the mind safely through the labyrinth of doubt into the presence of the Eternal. Without attempting to define the indefinable, the soul rises from the belief in the reality of love and duty to the belief in 'a holy will at the root of nature and destiny' for 'if man is capable of conceiving goodness, the general principle of things, which cannot be inferior to man, must be good.' And then the religious consciousness seizes on this intellectual deduction, and clothes it in language of the heart, in the tender and beautiful language of faith. 'There is but one thing needful-to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, are so many ways of approaching the Divine, so many modes of tasting and adoring God. Religion is not a method: it is a life-a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits; a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.' And the faith of his youth and his maturity bears the shock of suffering, and supports him through his last hours. He writes a few months before the end: 'The animal expires; man

And so

surrenders his soul to the author of the soul.' . . . 'We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last resting-place alone. But there is nothing to prevent us from opening our solitude to God. what was an austere monologue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation passes into peace, and the sense of painful defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty'-' Tout est bien, mon Dieu m'enveloppe.'

Nor is this all. It is not only that Amiel's inmost thought and affections are stayed on this conception of 'a holy will at the root of nature and destiny,'-in a certain very real sense he is a Christian. No one is more sensitive than he to the contribution which Christianity has made to the religious wealth of mankind; no one more penetrated than he with the truth of its essential doctrine 'death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness.' 'The religion of sin, of repentance and reconciliation,' he cries, 'the religion of the new birth and of eternal life, is not a religion to be ashamed of.' The world has found inspiration and guidance for eighteen centuries in the religious consciousness of Jesus. The Gospel has modified the world and consoled mankind,' and so 'we may hold aloof from the Churches and yet bow ourselves before Jesus. We may be suspicious of the clergy and refuse to have anything to do with catechisms, and yet love the Holy and the Just who came to save and not to curse.' And in fact Amiel's whole life and thought are steeped in Christianity. He is the spiritual descendant of one of the intensest and most individual forms of Christian belief, and traces of his religious ancestry are visible in him at every step. Protestantism of the sincerer and nobler kind leaves an indelible impression on the nature which has once surrendered itself to the austere and penetrating influences flowing from the reli

gion of sin and grace; and so far as feeling and temperament are concerned, Amiel retained throughout his life the marks of Calvinism and Geneva.

And yet how clear the intellect remains, through all the anxieties of thought, and in the face of the soul's dearest memories and most passionate needs! Amiel, as soon as his reasoning faculty has once reached its maturity, never deceives himself as to the special claims of the religion which by instinct and inheritance he loves; he makes no compromise with dogma or with miracle. Beyond the religions of the present he sees always the essential religion, which lasts when all local forms and marvels have passed away; and as years go on, with more and more clearness of conviction, he learns to regard all special beliefs and systems as 'prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses of the mind;' misgrowths of thought, necessary in their time and place, but still of no absolute value, and having no final claim on the thought of man.

And it is just here-in this mixture of the faith which clings and aspires, with the intellectual pliancy which allows the mind to sway freely under the pressure of life and experience, and the deep respect for truth, which will allow nothing to interfere between thought and its appointed tasks-that Amiel's special claim upon us lies. It is this balance of forces in him which makes him so widely representative of the modern mind-of its doubts, its convictions, its hopes. He speaks for the life of to-day as no other single voice has yet spoken for it; in his contradictions, his fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant straining towards the unseen and the ideal which gives a fundamental unity to his inner life, he is the type of a generation universally touched with doubt, and yet as sensitive to the need of faith as any that have

gone before it; more widely conscious than its predecessors of the limitations of the human mind, and of the iron pressure of man's physical environment; but at the same time -paradox as it may seem more conscious of man's greatness, more deeply thrilled by the spectacle of the nobility and beauty interwoven with the universe.

And he plays this part of his so modestly, with so much hesitation, so much doubt of his thought and of himself! He is no preacher, like Emerson and Carlyle, with whom, as poet and idealist, he has so much in common; there is little resemblance between him and the men who speak, as it were, from a height to the crowd beneath, sure always of themselves and what they have to say. And here again he represents the present and foreshadows the future. For the age of the preachers is passing; those who speak with authority on the riddles of life and nature as the priests of this or that allexplaining dogma, are becoming less important as knowledge spreads, and the complexity of experience is made evident to a wider range of minds. The force of things is against the certain people. Again and again truth escapes from the prisons made for her by mortal hands, and as humanity carries on the endless pursuit she will pay more and more respectful heed to voices like this voice of the lonely Genevese thinker with its pathetic alternations of hope and fear, and the moral steadfastness which is the inmost note of it-to these meditative lives, which, through all the ebb and flow of thought, and in the dim ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowledge, and yet. rich in faith, grasp in new forms, and proclaim to us in new words,

'The mighty hopes which make us men.'