Redeemer of mankind and the Saviour of the world. The same historian comparing the Jesus of Herder with the Jesus of Harnack, for instance, sees that the conception of each portrait is essentially the same. Harnack, like Herder a mystic, paints from ampler critical knowledge, and paints more tranquilly; but a hundred years of critical investigation have established only the more firmly Herder's belief that, if Jesus is to be depicted at all, all our knowledge of him must be corrected and transfused with love.

It remains to say a few words touching Herder's famous dialogues about Spinoza; dialogues that he entitled with curt and compelling energy, GOTT. The German people are profoundly religious, not in any narrow but in the most comprehensive sense, and their religious feeling is deeply rooted and continually replenished by their love of nature. Ancient chronicler and modern poet, ancient hero and modern soldier, ancient bard and modern thinker bow their heads and listen awe-struck to the crashing loom upon which are woven the garments of God. Woden, the Storm-god, the leader of souls, who rushed through the air with the spirits of the departed, became, naturally enough, for our German forefathers the god of knowledge and of poesy, the giver of victory and of all good. Wolfram von Eschenbach accords the Holy Grail to Parsifal, the child abandoned by his mother who grew up in the solitude of the forest and who bewailed the birds that fell before his bow. It was amid the trees of Thuringia as they bent before the storm and trembled to the thunderbolt that Martin Luther fell prostrate, crying, "Help me, St. Anna! I promise to become a monk." Schiller in his Götter Griechenlands, bemoaned the vanished days:

Wo jetzt nur, wie unsere Weisen sagen,

Seelenlos ein Feurball sich dreht,

Lenkte damals seinen goldnen Wagen

Helios in stiller Majestät.

Diese Höhen füllten Oreaden

Eine Dryas starb mit jenem Baum;

Aus den Urnen lieblicher Najaden
Sprang der Ströme Silberschaum.*

* "Where now, as our sages tell us, only a ball of fire is rolling lifeless on its axis, there of old Helios in quiet majesty drove his golden wagon. These heights were in those days thronged with Oreads; a Dryad died with yonder tree; from the urns of lovely Naiads sprang, silver-foaming, the mountain streams."

And Wordsworth, Saxon that he was, utters the same lament in his daring outcry,

Great God! I'd rather be

A pagan suckled on a creed outworn

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Now Herder's studies of Hebrew poetry, his intimate acquaintance with the teaching of Jesus and of Paul, united with this primitive German reverence for nature, this primitive and enduring recognition of the seen-unseen, to make the study of Spinoza an epoch in his intellectual life. For in the tranquil mirror of Spinoza's mind he saw an image of God grander and more beautiful than he had found in any modern thinker. His essay enchanted Weimar and intoxicated Goethe. The latter wrote in rapture:

Was wär ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse!
Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen
Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen,

So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist
Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst.*

Well, Herder knew that a Soul of the world shaping it from within is just as human a conception as that of an Almighty outsider who keeps it spinning with his finger. He said, rightly enough, "I do not understand your phrase 'outside the world.' Outside the world means nowhere. A God living outside the world lives nowhere." But he said also "God is not the world, and the world is not God; of this there can be no doubt. When we speak of God we must forget our notions of space and time, else our best efforts will be fruitless." Let us, he adds, detect and disclose the laws of nature without bothering ourselves about the place of God's residence or about his particular purposes. "Whoever can show us the laws of nature, how all creation, animate and inanimate—minerals, plants, animals, men-originates necessarily and according to the coworking of forces in such organs as they acquire, would promote a nobler admiration and reverence

"What were a God who could touch the universe from outside only to keep it spinning with his finger? It beseems the Eternal to move the world from within, he abiding in nature and nature abiding in him, so that whatever breathes and weaves and has a being never lacks his force, never lacks his mind and soul."

for God than one who preaches to us God's cabinet secrets, telling us that our feet are to walk with, our eyes to see with, and other such marvelous discoveries."

...

It is interesting and instructive to compare these words with the utterances of an older contemporary never to my knowledge named in connection with Herder, the great New England theologian Jonathan Edwards. "Absolute sovereignty," he writes, "is what I love to ascribe to God. . . . His excellency, his wisdom, his purity, and love seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, and moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature. . . . I often used to sit and view the moon for continuance; and in the day spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things. . . . And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning. . . . I felt God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunderstorm; and used... to fix myself in order to view the clouds and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God's thunder, which oftentimes was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God. . . . It seemed natural to me to sing, or chant forth my meditations; or to speak my thoughts in soliloquies with a singing voice." Alas! for Edwards and for Herder; such ecstasies may not endure in feeble frames. Edwards bemoaned "a low tide of spirits; often occasioning a kind of childish weakness and contemptibleness of speech ... much unfitting me for conversation," and Herder's sublimity of thought failed to tranquilize his troubled heart and irritated nerves. Mournful indeed is the discontent of his closing years; it warps his feelings and lays waste his powers. The preacher of light dwells in clouds and darkness, the teacher of God's cooperant forces in nature and in history converts the sweets of friendship into tormenting discords that ruin his joy, the prophet of immortality crouches at the feet of Death, imploring just a few more days on earth. Into the causes of this suffering I do not enter; it is not for us to apportion the blame of it between him and his ancestors and his neighbors and the inscrutable forces of nature whose harmony he proclaimed. Enough that he saw

the burning bush which was not consumed, and that, in spite of suffering, he repeated to us the word of the living God that proceeded from the seen-unseen; enough that in intervals of rapture he heard and repeated to us the music of the spheres and the voice of the adorable trinity of Light and Life and Love.

The day before Herder died Ludwig van Beethoven began in a mood of desperate resignation his thirty-fourth year. He was already incurably deaf. Inexorable silence had imprisoned him. within the music of his own creative genius; never more to hear the voice of woman, or the song of birds, or the sound of instrument, or the murmur of the tree tops, or the rush of mountain torrents. Was the Ninth Symphony possible without the misery of Beethoven? The visions of Herder without his sorrows? I do not know. What I know is this: They were possible in spite

of them!

Charles J. Little

ART. IV.-UNIFORMITY IN NATURE DISPROVES

AGNOSTICISM.

IF nature be an organized whole, as is a prerequisite to the possibility of a system of science, there must be uniformity of movement between corresponding parts. But in such an extensive and complicated organism there will be many seemingly discordant movements, or such as are incomprehensible by a finite mind at any stage of scientific inquiry. For as we explore the constantly increasing domain of knowledge the periphery of the circle will present an ever-widening field, no matter how limited be the arc examined, and there will be at every step new fields opening out where the movements of natural law and their application to fresh instances will present difficulties which are inseparable from each advancement made into the undiscovered region. This is to be expected; for if the course of science offered no seeming contradictions, and hence no difficulties which could not be resolved at any given time, this would involve infinite knowledge in the investigation at the outset, and dispense with all effort. In that case all would be understood at first, and there would be no room for progress since every man would be as wise before investigation as after. Difficulties and seeming contradictions are therefore to be expected in scientific progress, and present the same sort of conditions as those to which our life is subjected everywhere; for it is our appointed destiny to gain our substance, whether for body or spirit, at the expense of the sweat of our brow, and knowledge must be acquired and character built up by courageously meeting and laboriously overcoming the difficulties which beset our pathway.

Nevertheless there must be uniformity of action as a basis for investigation, and an assurance that we shall obtain a definite result for our labor, else no person would work and no progress would be possible. For if the same means acting under like conditions produced a varying result there could be no inducement for us to put forth any effort. We never could be sure whether the responses to our actions were from the causes we had set in