illness, which, as we gather from the journal, he bore with unaffected piety, he was gathered to his fathers. His affairs were in that confusion which might have been expected from a man who habitually took no pains to keep them in order: but his death was sincerely mourned for; and the turmoil of petty squabbles, which kept the diocese of Meaux in hot water after the appointment of his successor, must have made all sensible men doubly regret the loss of the departed prelate. Of the many funeral orations preached in his honour, that which was delivered at the Propaganda in Rome was the most significant, as showing the influence obtained by the mere force of his character and the extent of his learning. Little as we shall be expected to agree with some of his views, and fatal as we consider was the influence of his support of despotic power, we cannot but admit that time has done less to dwarf his reputation than it does in the case of ordinary celebrities; and that as a practical controversialist, his equal, of whatever school, has not appeared since he left this world.

MODERN INDIVIDUALISM.

As our ancestors clipped their yew-hedges and their box-trees into walls and cupolas and weathercocks, liking better to see nature forced to imitate art badly, than "wandering at her own sweet will," and expressing the internal law of her growth; so did the ancients deal with man and with society. They weaved round him a mesh of external arbitrary law, and moulded him by stiff statutes, instead of studying his nature and aiding his internal endogenous growth with kindly appliances. Individuality was quashed by rigid formulas, and strict and absolute laws. Persons were nothing, the state was every thing. And in order to give life to this principle, in order to make persons willing to sacrifice their personality to the state, it was raised to something more than human, deified and worshiped. The real object of Roman worship was their city; "the eternally-prosperous, the everlastinglypowerful, the world-destroying and people-devouring Rome, to which every thing must fall a sacrifice." Its emperors were gods. In Greece, where this worship did not find place, yet the fate of the state,-the most highly-prized gain of ancient civilisation from the chaos of barbarism,-was considered of paramount importance, and the destinies of indi

viduals only memorable as subordinate to public history. In Egypt, Persia, Assyria, Babylon, the monarch vested himself in the insignia of the chief deity, and was worshiped in his place. The state or its representative was the great object of the worship of the ancient world. Its power too was frightful. The supreme state, the creature of man, rigidly defined by the laws that he had weaved around it, had the right, through its representatives, of requiring any person to sacrifice himself for its supposed good; or, in default of obedience, itself to sacrifice the struggling victim in spite of his refusals and his protests.

Such is the ancient state; a purely human creation, with divine rights over mankind. And the idea of this institution. influenced all the literature of antiquity. There all was subservient to the state; the acts, characters, and fate of persons were introduced only as bearing upon the fortunes of the whole. So also the jurisprudence of Rome considered the state alone; the well-being of all or any of its members was to be thought nothing of, when it came across the supposed well-being of society. But now both our literature and our laws are turned into another channel. Instead of the state, the person becomes paramount; and the feeling is carried so far, that, as in the case of Dr. Bernard, where the law is doubtful, citizens will often hazard the well-being of a state to screen a person from the legal consequences of his foolish and criminal acts. This principle was enunciated in all its nakedness by Lord Brougham in his speech in defence of Queen Caroline. An advocate, he said, knows but one person in the world-his client. "To save that client by all expedient means-to protect that client at all hazards and costs to all others, and among others to himself-is the highest and most unquestioned of his duties. . . . . Nay, separating even the duties of a patriot from those of an advocate, and casting them, if need be, to the wind, he must prove reckless of the consequences, if his fate should unhappily be to involve his country in confusion for his client's protection." Whatever exaggeration there may be here, a principle is enunciated which we conceive to be characteristic of modern times, the supremacy of personal considerations over considerations of state.

We suppose that this change is, on the whole, due to Christianity. It was a novel teaching to declare that it was of no profit to gain the whole world at the expense of one soul; that it was not lawful to commit a venial sin to save the whole human race from perishing. When this teaching entered political life, then, for the first time, law, instead of looking

to the state, looked to the individual. It was no longer the corporate existence that was the object of all the scientific providence of rulers. The Christian law addressed the individual soul; it defined the duties of each person to God, himself, and his neighbour; and it promised that if each person would look after his own conduct, Providence would look after the well-being of the whole.

man.

:

Hence human interest came to be gradually concentrated on the elements of society rather than on society itself; governments became paternal; and though these have lost their original spirit, it still remains in society. The most popular literature of the day is biography and the novel, appealing to the interest which we feel in the ordinary pursuits, adventures, characters, and fortunes of individuals. Thus nature is gradually asserting her rights. One of her maxims is, like to like we can only understand and love that which we resemble: the novel gives us humanity in the concrete; history too often treats us to generalisations, where humanity is lost in figures and numbers. "The proper study of mankind is Now the state, however human, is not man; any one human being-John, Thomas, or Peter-is more man than society there is no soul in the state; but there is a soul in the individual; study him, and whatever may be his faults or disagreeable qualities, only make him show his soul, and you cannot help loving him: "As certain to be loved as seen, the soul stands forth." There is enough to love in any individual; people oftener want something taken away to make them agreeable than something added. Those who approach even the greatest malefactor come sometimes to love him, and to think him not much of a devil, however black he may be. In this way, too, may be explained the mawkish interest which our people take in condemned murderers. We are startled perhaps with some horrible crime; but the victim was personally unknown. It was policeman X 22, who has left a wife and four children; or it was an unhappy woman, of whom nothing was ever heard till her catastrophe at once made her famous. It was a human being, and so we are shocked; and our first feeling is one of vengeance against the murderer, of whom we know as little as of his victim. But the papers every morning contain some little personal trait of the criminal; we read of the coroner's inquest on his victim, and of the verdict against the murderer; we see his portrait; they tell us his history, and describe the visit of his mother to his cell; his trial occupies several days; his personality is brought out, and stands forth glaringly; his wickedness has not affected us; and we can all endure

crime with considerable equanimity till it injures ourselves, or those next to us. Thus the criminal is presented to us as an "unfortunate man;" and we congregate, whining and groaning and blubbering, at the door of his cell, and we get up petitions to the Secretary of State to rescue him from the gallows;—and all because his personality is brought before us vividly, sometimes perhaps more vividly by the greatness of his crime.

For, asks Plato, "think you that great crimes and consummate wickedness arise from an ordinary soul, and not from one of the highest natural force, whose lofty endowments have been depraved by circumstances of education? or do you imagine that a feeble spirit can ever do either much good or much evil?" It is the same with bold blasphemy. Strength, whether of mind or body, subdues the imagination. St. Jerome, perhaps the best heretic-hater that ever was, confesses as much of heretics: Nullus potest hæresim struere, nisi qui ardentis ingenii est, et habet dona naturæ, quæ a Deo artifice sunt creata. The heresiarch must be a man of genius, endowed by God with great natural gifts. On the whole, we cannot concentrate our attention on the personal qualities of any man, bad or good, without feeling an overwhelming interest in him, and caring relatively nothing for all others, whom, in regard to him, we reckon for the time rather as things than as persons. Nay, we may even school ourselves to a misanthropical hatred of mankind; but we are almost obliged to love men. "I have ever hated," says Swift, "all nations, professions, and communities; and all my love is towards individuals: principally I hate and detest that animal called man, though I heartily love John and Thomas." Even Timon is obliged to relent in favour of Flavius:

“How fain would I have hated all mankind,

And thou redeem'st thyself!"

Now we do not deny that all this individualism of modern society may often degenerate into selfishness, or into a dreamy sentimentalism, which is as bad; and that these corruptions may go far to provoke an antagonist feeling, tending towards the socialistic restoration of the old absolutism of the state. But we see the modern feeling strong even in socialism. The socialist philosophers would fain persuade all rulers to follow implicitly the wishes of the people; they would divest us of personality, and give the state a corporate intellect, in order that they might find themselves the brains of the new body. The present governors, forsooth, are to resign their functions into the hands of the mob, in order that the reins may be

VOL. IX.-NEW SERIES.

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seized by the oligarchy of orators, who make themselves the representative men of the people. None are so intensely selfish, so exaggerated in their personality, as these troublesome little men. The greatest crime we can commit is to misrepresent their meaning and doubt their intentions; and these are the apostles of the new philosophy, which is to annihilate individualism!

The current of modern ideas is too strong to be turned by such attempts. No orator will ever persuade us that we are the mere creatures of society, and that it is our duty and happiness to resign ourselves to do and suffer without question all that society requires of us. Christianity, or rather Christian civilisation, has brought out the idea of our personality too strongly for us ever again to resign ourselves to the notion that we are only the component molecules of a vast machine, which has the supreme direction of our destiny, and that this machine is the state, or society, or even humanity itself. Each molecule now feels that to himself he is of more value than all the rest of the mass together, and nothing will persuade him to sacrifice his own good to the good of the whole. You may persuade him that self-sacrifice is his good; that honour, benevolence, religion, may require the offering. But then he makes the sacrifice because it is best for him; not because the state requires it. Men of modern ideas will not be led or driven as sheep to the slaughter without question or without reclamation; they want to know the reason of it; they ask whether the cause is worth the sacrifice. Their courage is not passive, as those of uncivilised people, but active; they know what they give, and why they give it, and they make up their minds to the loss.

This increased consciousness of our personality and freedom, and the increased versatility of mind occasioned by the complexity of social relationships, have introduced great changes even into our religious ideas. Of old, when men arranged themselves into castes as if by nature, when they worked on monotonously at their hereditary crafts as if by instinct, without thought of improvement or change,-persons would retire by tens of thousands into the desert, and give themselves up as long as they lived to the direction of some venerable archimandrite. Though it was done at once, by one resolution, yet a man that retired from the conflict, after a few months' trial, was regarded as lost. He had looked back from the plough. What a change in the diminished numbers of monks; in the long novitiates they have to pass; in the distinction between simple and solemn vows, and the facility and frequency of dispensation from the former; in the num