siderations, then, thus naturally suggested on History, I sought more clearly to define, not only my philosophical views, but the aims and objects of my proposed travels in the birth-countries of that greatest product of the contact of Aryan and Semite-Christianity.

2. So I first recalled at Malta how, many years before urged, not merely by speculative curiosity, but by the practical necessity of gaining for morality and religion surer bases than Hebrew Tradition, and Spiritist Philosophy, beliefs and doctrines which Aryan science had already caused to appear incredible mythology, and puerile supernaturalism-the necessity of finding for morality surer bases than the legend of God's descent on Sinai with the Tables of the Law; surer bases for religion than the legend of the Holy Ghost' conception of a Jewish girl-I had turned to a more systematic study of the history of Man. It was at Rome that such a but also for that Britannic race, chief elements in the formation of which have been Welsh, Irish, and Scottish immigrants. Nor is the term 'Anglo-Saxon' justified by a qualitative, any more than by a quantitative, predominance of the Teutonic element in our variously composed race and nationality. For let a list but be made-out of the so-called 'Englishmen ' or 'Anglo-Saxons' who have during, say, the last two centuries, been most distinguished, and have exercised the widest influence in the various directions of intellectual activity, philosophical and literary, political and military, legal and commercial. It will, I believe, be found that a very large proportion of these so-called 'Englishmen' are, on one side, or on both, Scotsmen; many also Irishmen, or Welshmen; while many even of the great Englishmen, properly so called, will, if their ancestry is looked into, be found, if not as much Anglo-Celts as the Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh, most certainly at least not 'Anglo-Saxons.' See the present writer's essay on Arthurian Localities, prefixed to vol. III. of the Early English Text Society's Merlin, pp. xix, xlii-iv, cxxxi-ii.; see also Huxley, Critiques and Addresses (British Ethnology), pp. 177-8; Murray, Dialect of Southern Scotland, pp. 1-92; and generally Nicholas, Pedigree of the English People. As to special literary influence, compare Arnold, Essays on Celtic Literature.

course of research as the only likely means of issue from doubt, and its consequent aimlessness, first became clear. It was at Rome, amid the immortal memories of those successive world-empires of the Cæsars and of the Popes which have twice given unity to the human race,1 that the undefined emotion at least, if not as yet the definite conception, arose of a unity vaster and more sublime than any hitherto outwrought, a new unity of which the creative force would, as ever, be a new Ideal. It was at Rome that despair, at least, was allayed when, in contemplating the Gods created by classic, and by romantic art; in contemplating the triumphant Apollo, and the transfigured Christ; the divinity of Man himself was felt, the divinity of the creator of Gods. What mattered it, then, though it should be found necessary wholly to abandon the notion of miracle? Christianity would not, therefore, cease to be divine. Our conception only of the nature of the divine element in human history would undergo a change; we should have but to consider it also as the subject of science; and so to picture it as a golden thread, not miraculously let-in, but continuously interwoven in the web of History-a golden thread of which the pattern is determined by ascertainable laws.

3. And, with such thoughts as these, Malta took for

1 The great unity, the one life of the world, had twice been elaborated within her walls. Other peoples, their brief mission fulfilled, disappeared for ever. To none save to her had it been given twice to guide and direct the world.'-Mazzini, Life and Writings, vol. 1. p. 37. And so Mr. Freeman, The history of Rome is in itself the great example of the oneness of all history.'-The Unity of History, p. 43. But, as we shall see in the sequel, it is in the history of Thought that the complete oneness of history is to be found.

me something of a symbolic meaning. In its aspect, both physical and architectural, as in its history, its population, and its language, it is half of the East, half of the West. Our windows, sun-protected by a verandah, opened on the broad flat roof of a lower part of our hotel. There, one might walk about in the cool of the day, and thence one might look down on two very different scenes. On the one hand, narrow crowded streets, under grave, stately houses, with great expanses of wall, and but few windows, save massively balconied ones at the corners, and over the gateways; on the other hand, our own courtyard, on which, as usual, opened most of the windows of the house for delicious shade, and sight of trees and flowers, and sound of birds and falling waters. Enlarging one's view, two other very different scenes met the gaze. For from our housetop one might look over more than half the island-it is but 17 miles by 7— from the forts of Valetta to the ridge on which is Civita Vecchia; or, half-blinded by the glare from the sandstone rocks and the stony soil, on which, except in the old gardens of the Knights of St. John, there grows scarce a tree but a solitary palm or two, one might look to the east over the blue sea. And it was eastwards, over that historic sea, that I chiefly looked. For landwards, the view of sentinelled fortifications, antiquarian remains, and glaring barrenness, was too much like the aspect of that 'west-eastern' islet of Christian Orthodoxy, on which there are, indeed, many interesting relics of various old superstitions, and on which there is a very strong fortress of selfish interests,

but which is now but a barren rock, from which I had long looked over the gleaming sea of History, in the hope that, voyaging across it, I should come, at length, to a Morningland of fuller and fairer life.

4. But, elevating above the mere interests of the moment, the outlook over the history of Man is beyond aught else suggestive of those sublime questions of the speculative intellect-Where? Whence? and Whither? One finds oneself for a few years an existence in the infinite system of Nature; for a few years a consciousness in the incalculable progress of Humanity; and one would know something of where one stands; something of whence one has come; something of whither, when one departs into the Unknowable, these, one's associates of a day, will be borne. And it is in History that is to be found the most approximate, though still, how infinitely far from being the complete, answer to those great questions to which it elevates. For all we know is but states of consciousness; and the history of Man is the history of consciousness. Where? Whence? and Whither? In the consciousness of being a part of this incalculable progress, all knowledge is felt to be self-knowledge, and the craving for it no idle curiosity, but the godlike desire to know oneself. TA ZEαUTÓY. The maxim has a wider meaning now than in ancient philosophy. For I am but a moment in the development of Humanity. And to know oneself, therefore, the past facts of human consciousness and its future possibilities must be known. And thus contemplating the starry Universe;

1 See below, p. 18.

thus meditating on the succeeding Ages; and thus realising our oneness with the All-how far soever we may feel ourselves from a complete solution of the mysteries of our being-Where? Whence? and Whither?-we may rise, at least, above the embarrassments, the misunderstandings, and the hates of momentary life, and above the fear of enfranchising death.

2

5. Christianity, however, in an intellectual point of view, is an historical theory which professes finally to answer all these questions. Suppose, then, that, with such thoughts as these in our mind, we should pass a day alone on the beach which has been identified with that on which the ship which carried Paul a prisoner to Rome was run aground, 'being exceeding tossed with a tempest; suppose that our reading of his Acts, and reading in his Epistles, should work as a spell, raising the great Apostle of the Gentiles to bodily presence before us; and suppose that to him we should put these great questions, urged on us now by the study of History'Where?' 'In the midst,' he answers, of the miraculous scheme of Christ's Redemption.' 'Whence? The question he declares to have been long ago rendered unnecessary by the record of the Creation preserved for us in the Scriptures of the Jews. 'Whither?' 6 To the final consummation,' he cries,

1 Wrongly, however, perhaps. Compare the argument against, in Falconer's Dissertation on the Voyage of St. Paul, controverting, in its second edition, those for Malta, in Smith's Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, and Conybeare and Howson's Life and Epistles of St. Paul. Renan follows the last-named authors.-St. Paul, p. 556.

2 Acts xxvii. 18-44.