THE WIT AND WISDOM OF GEORGE ELIOT. BY REV. DR. S. P. ROSE. The time is forever past when, either by prohibition or persuasion, the Church may hope to dissuade her young people from reading fiction. For good or evil the novel has come to stay. Whether it be for good or evil will depend largely upon what sort of fiction is read. There is every variety of novel in evidence, from the "mere fashion plate devoted to the description of costumes soon out of date," to "books which mirror human life veraciously," and bear "witness to the innate and indestructible faiths of the human heart." If the Church would save her young people from the frivolous and harmful, she must direct them to what is wholesome. may only hope to overcome the evil by displacing it with the good. 66 We As a small contribution to this desired end, I invite attention to the wit and wisdom of George Eliot. The established place of this author in literature renders any extended reference to her works superfluous. She has written nothing which is not above the average; she has written much that will endure. My preference is for her earlier tales. Adam Bede" is her classic. But I must confess a distinct partiality for "Scenes of Clerical Life," not that the tales as such are very remarkable, but because of the charming bits of wit and wisdom which one meets upon almost every page. A careful writer (the Rev. T. G. Selby) has well said of our novelist: Perhaps few students adequately realize the singular service that much of George Eliot's work may be made to render to the truth." One cannot read her works attentively without repeatedly feeling the force of this judg 66 ment. To give any who may be unfamiliar with her style a "taste" of the good things which abound throughout her writings, the following quotations from "Scenes of Clerical Life" are offered, in the conviction that those who have read these paragraphs oftenest will reread them with the most pleasure, and that any who read them for the first time will hasten to form an abiding acquaintance with so gifted a teacher. Our author does not share the desire, oftener expressed than felt perhaps, that we might see ourselves as others see us. 66 What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his own doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air vessels of our own conceit; alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence! The very capacity for good would go out of us. Let me be persuaded that my neighbour Jenkins considers me a blockhead, and I shall never shine in conversation with him any more. Let me discover that the lovely Phoebe thinks my squint intolerable, and I shall never be able to fix her blandly with my disengaged eye again. Thank heaven, then, that a little illusion is left to us, to enable us to be useful and agreeable; we are able to dream that we are doing much good-and we do a little." Teachers, preachers, and public speakers may wisely consider what follows: "Nothing in the world is more suited to the simple understanding than instruction through familiar types and symbols ! But there is always this danger attending it, that the interest or comprehension of your hearers may stop precisely at the point where your spiritual interpretation begins." What shrewd and vivid portraiture these lines contain ! "He was like an onion that has been rubbed with spices; the strong original odour was blended with something new and foreign." And this, written of the same cleric, Rev. Amos Barton : "The Rev. Amos was very fond of chess, as most people are who can continue through many years to create interesting vicissitudes in the game, by taking long-meditated moves with their knights, and subsequently discovering that they have exposed their queen." Profoundly wise is the following : 66 It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion." George Eliot, like all great teachers from the Prophet of Nazareth to to-day, believed in the common people. "Yet these common-place people-many of them-have a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not pathos in their very insignificance-in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence, with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share? Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones." You are at once brought into relations of acquaintanceship with the man, quite a typical man in his way, of whom it is written : "It was not in his nature to be superlative in anything; unless, indeed, he was superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity." Our novelist speaks to the bitter experience of too many, and repeats a warning which we are so slow to heed: “Oh, the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings; for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God has given us to know !" Supplementary to this wise word she writes thus in another tale : "It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too—as if it were comparatively a light thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother who has to climb the whole toilsome steep with us, and all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey." Too many churches have a history like that of New Zion which had been built "with an exuberance of faith and a deficiency of funds." The philosopher and the poet speak in the sentences which follow : "But it is with men as it is with trees; if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree, expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical, misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty, and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered." A doctrine which youth is unwilling to profit by, but of which old age is painfully conscious, is taught in the following excerpt: The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know when they are gone." Those whose pathway is overshadowed with sorrow will appreciate our author's contention that, "When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted for an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst." The complement of the painful doctrine, so true to the world's experience, that whatsoever we sow we reap, is suggested: "But there is seed being sown silently and unseen, and everywhere there come sweet flowers without our foresight or labour. We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blos som and fruit that spring from no planting of ours." 66 more George Eliot recognizes the good that lingers in evil lives as those stirrings of the kindly, healthy sap of human feeling, by which goodness tries to get the upper hand in us whenever it seems to have the slightest chance." But she is too faithful to the logic of facts and to the power of a sinful will to thwart the divine intention, to teach that "good will be the final goal of ill.” The trend of rebellion against the laws of righteousness in one of her characters, is thus pathetically described : "It was rather sad, and yet pretty, to to see that little group passing out of the shadow into the sunshine, and out of the sunshine into the shadow again; sad, because this tenderness of the son for the mother was hardly more than a nucleus of healthy life in an organ hardening by disease, because the man who was linked in this way with an innocent past had become callous in worldliness, fevered by sensuality, enslaved by chance impulses; pretty, because it showed how hard it is to kill the deep-down fibrous roots of human love and goodness-how the man, from whom we make it our pride to shrink, has yet a close brotherhood with us through some of our most sacred feelings." Students of the history of popular religious doctrines will recognize the wisdom of the statement that, "Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody is itself detestable." Our novelist was too keen an observer to miss the truth that the baser metal is often mixed with pure gold in the make-up of the world's heroes. The significance of this fact is thus well stated : "The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men; and I should imagine that neither Luther nor John Bunyan, for example, would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is exalted, and does nothing but what is graceful. The real heroes of God's making are quite different. Their insight is blended with mere opinion; their sympathy is perhaps confined in narrow conduits of doctrine, instead of flowing forth with the freedom of a stream that blesses every weed in its course; obstinacy or self-assertion will often interfuse itself with their grandest impulses, and their very deeds of self-sacrifice are sometimes only the rebound of a passionate egoism." Aphorisms challenge attention in almost every page: "Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itselfit only requires opportunity." "Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature; like the gods; and sometimes, while her sword is yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch." "The daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else. In the night it presses on our imagination-the forms it takes are false, fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of definite, measurable reality." 66 Heaven knows what would become of our sociability if we never visited people we speak ill of; we should live like Egyptian hermits, in crowded solitude." NEW YEAR'S GREETING TO THE CENTURY. BY S. J. UNDERWOOD. Century, whose days are numbered, thou dost greet thy last new year, Scarce thy stiffened limbs with decence shall be straightened 'neath the pall, It is sad, O mighty century, that thy certain end is nigh, Think not thou shalt be forgotten, for the coming years so grand, And whatever more awaits us in achievements most sublime, Thine the sowing; when the harvest lieth white upon the lea, o, O century most reverend, be, I bid you, of good cheer, -Zion's Herald. SOME CONNECTING LINKS BETWEEN CANADIAN AND BRITISH METHODISM.* BY THE REV. J. S. ROSS, D.D. In a volume of nearly six hundred pages, recently published in London, England, entitled, "SideLights on the Conflicts of Methodism," by Rev. Benjamin Gregory, D.D., ex-President of the English Wesleyan Conference, we have a most interesting contribution to the literature of Methodist history covering a comparatively fresh field. The basis of the book is the "Notes" on Conference debates made by the late Rev. Joseph Fowler, extending_over a quarter of a century. Though the Notes themselves, in some cases, do not exhibit Rev. Dr. Bunting in the most complimentary light, yet, from the character of the man who took them, even Dr. Bunting himself acknowledged his belief in their trustworthiness, declaring, "I have great confidence. in one individual who has been accustomed to take, from year to year, copious notes of the proceedings of Conference." (Speech on Reporting Conference, 1849.) As the notes were taken at the time of the debates, and written out fully shortly afterwards, they are specially valuable for historical purposes. The Rev. Joseph Fowler was born at Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1791, was converted in youth, and began his ministry in 1811. He was elected a member of the Legal Hundred in 1841, and Secretary of the Conference in 1848. He was "Side-Lights on the Conflicts of Methodism during the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century, 1827-1852." Taken chiefly from the Notes of the late Rev. Joseph Fowler. By the Rev. Benjamin Gregory, D.D., President of the Conference 1879. Cassell & Co., London, 1898. odist Book Room, Toronto. Meth Mr. Fowler had two sons, one, Rev. Robert Fowler, M.D., of the Canadian Methodist Conference, who died in London, Ont., in 1887, and the other, Sir H. H. Fowler, for some time a member of the Gladstone Government, and still living. The author contrasts the latter, as a leading statesman, with the former, as "administering to the settlers in far Northwestern wilds the consolations of Christianity and the alleviations of science, and who was their veritable' Medicine man' in a two-fold sense. Here he preached and healed for the rest of his natural life." (Page 39.) To a Canadian who knows that not one of his appointments was among the aboriginal tribes, but in highly cultured parts of the country, the term " Medicine Man" is quite amusing. And, besides, fancy him ministering to the people of such "wilds" as the towns and cities of Oshawa, Toronto, Hamilton, Brantford, Orillia, Fergus, Ingersoll, Clinton, Listowel, and London! He lived and died a most conscientious and estimable minister of God. THE REV. WILLIAM SAVAGE. Another Canadian minister re |