the glory of God. There are no priests in this temple; each Christian is a priest, offering up himself as a living sacrifice. There are no preachers; each Christian in his life is a living gospel.

It is this consciousness under the name of religion, culture, or civilisation which is the life-spirit of society. But the truly religious spirit frequently inspires the individual with a sense of his own nothingness. The feeling of awe and wonder in the presence of the universe and God may paralyse such a man. He may abandon all interest in practical politics and let events take their course. He may declare it hopeless to attempt the regeneration of the world. Such fatalism is a sad result of self-consciousness. But it is more painful to see a hopeless conservatism, in which the individual is swept along by a rápid current of incessant change, against which he impotently struggles. Such a man is like the helpless savage who has not yet learned to cope with the power of the physical universe. On the other hand, the consciousness of power sometimes inflames the individual with the most aggressive zeal. It is often a mixture of zeal and ignorance which prompts men like the ancient giants, or the builders of Babel, to scale heaven itself and take it by storm.1 Such undertakings must fail, not so much

1 If the practice of rationalising old myths were not out of fashion, it might be suggested that the confusion of tongues is the first authentic example of the proverbial divisions in the Radical camp.

because they are impossible, as because the problem is misunderstood, the time selected is inopportune, and the means employed for its solution are inadequate. If the individual can become fully conscious of his function in the universe, if his zeal can be tempered with wisdom and discretion, no limits can be set to human achievement. If the individual can realise the honour of being a fellow-labourer with God, and at the same time remember that he can see only a small part of the process of development, for it is not granted to every man to have the keen eye of a Moses to see the promised land even from the top of some Pisgah, he will strive to act well his own part, and for the rest let "patience have her perfect work."

APPENDIX.

A.-NOTE ON THE USE AND MEANING OF THE TERMS "LAW," “POSITIVE LAW,” “NATURAL LAW.”

It may be found convenient to recapitulate some of the results of the foregoing lectures by discussing the various meanings in which the term "Law" is used. The words of Lord Stair are more true now than when they were written two hundred years ago:-"There is no term of which men have a more common but confused apprehension than what law is; and yet there be few terms harder to be distinctly conceived or described."

In English the word corresponds to two words in Latin and most European languages. These are Lex and Jus in Latin; Loi and Droit in French; Legge and Diritto in Italian; Gesetz and Recht in German, and similarly in the related languages. I begin with a Law:

1. A LAW is a statute, and corresponds to the German Gesetz. It may be derived from the Anglo-Saxon Laga or the Latin Lex, through the Norman. Hallam uses the word in this sense-" We know not of any laws that were ever enacted by our kings without the assent and advice of their great council." 1 The Latin Lex was used in a narrow technical sense- "Lex est generale jussum populi aut plebis, rogante magistratu." Later, it approaches the meaning of "law" in English. The modern French "Loi" is applied to an act of the legislature.

2. The next step is to assume the existence of such a rule from the fact of certain persons observing a certain course of conduct. A custom or usage is referred to an imaginary statute or law called a common law. So it has been said—" It would be most easy for the judges of the common laws of England, which are not written, but depend upon usage, to make a change in them."2 This explains

1 Constitutional History, chap. i. Elsewhere in that chapter he uses the words "law" and "statute" interchangeably.

2 North, C. J., quoted by Dr. Broom, Phil. of Law, p. 7.

how the phrase "a law of nature arose. Mankind generally act The existence of a law, as a rule or statute, was

in a certain way.

inferred as a cause.

3. A further step consists in the transfer of this idea to the physical world. A star or comet follows a certain course. The cause which impels it to follow this course is a law. The notion of legislation by God appears in the works of some early writers. So a modern writer says "If God be the Ruler of the world, the laws of nature are the laws by which He rules it." In one of Montgomery's hymns we have the lines

....

"Worlds His mighty voice obeyed:

Laws that never shall be broken

For their guidance He hath made."

And even at the present day a contrast is sometimes drawn in the pulpit between the obedience rendered by the planets and the tides to God's law, and that displayed in the conduct of men!

4. But it is found that further investigation simply pushes causes further and further back-that the scientific observer can only observe and record phenomena, and generalise them, and that the idea of cause does not belong to physical science. The name law is then transferred from the assumed cause to the generalisation. We then say, for example, that particles attract each other directly as their masses, and inversely as the square of their distance from each other, and stop here. We do not add that gravity or anything else causes this.2

5. The last development in this direction is well exemplified in the laws of mathematics, where the idea of cause is entirely eliminated. Thus, in the expansion of a binomial to a given power the number of terms is always one more than the index. The first term and the last are the two terms of the binomial raised to the power of the index, and so on. These are mere statements of facts, characteristics, qualities, or uniformities, with the idea of cause entirely eliminated.

It can hardly be disputed that the idea at the root of these

1 Natural Religion, by the author of Ecce Homo, p. 56. See also Grotius, De Jure Prædæ, chap. ii.

2 The Duke of Argyle's Reign of Law, pp. 64 and foll.; Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World-Introduction; Caird's Hegel, p. 170.