tables of the heart," to be ever with us and gleam by night as well as day? We forfeit the chief source of dignity and sweetness in life, next to the direct communion with God, if we do not seek converse with the greater minds that have left their vestiges on the world. Rather let us keep a constant eye upon the light of their spirits, and never quit our hold of the shadowy hands, of which the nearest is almost at our door and the furthest feels the touch of Christ and disappears in the effulgence of God. If it is not given us, with the inspired apostle, to reach "the third heaven" in the twinkling of an eye, or, with the rapt mystic, to spring aloft on the wing of prayer and float straight into the arms of the Infinite Love, they will draw our feebler spirits upward by insensible attraction, and bring us to the same end at last. This blessed dependence, this holding on of link to link, of soul to soul, of age to age, is the true "communion of saints," which bridges the waters of death, and embraces its opposite banks in one City of God.

XIX.

The Godly Man.

PSALM xii. 1.

"Help, Lord; for the godly man ceaseth."

WITH many a bright child, many a high-minded youth, restive under Puritanical guardianship, it would seem, I fear, no bad news that "the godly" were ceasing; and his suppressed feeling would be that they could very well be spared. For the phrase has become appropriated to a type of character far from lovely in even its best aspects, and so adverse to natural joy and dreary in its idea of perfectness as to repel all large and genial minds. It is the standing infatuation of divines, first to spoil the poetic depth of religion by reducing its speech to technical use, and then to charge on human corruption the repugnance which the dismal product excites. The kind of person to whom they would award the epithet "godly" is familiar to us all;—the man of evangelical piety, whose life is ruled by gratitude for unmerited salvation and desire to

rescue others from the perdition which he has escaped; who can glibly say the creeds without a pause of doubt, and is duly shocked with the superstition that adds anything to them or the heresy that takes anything away; who looks on his Church as the great agency by which God is in contact with the world, and measures by its rule all men and things, all history, all life, all progress; who pours his gifts into its treasury, and makes it the almoner of all his bounty. That a character of this form is compatible with many excellences,—nay, is even a pledge of them,-we need not deny but the selection is narrow and peculiar; it carries with it grave deformities and faults which it consecrates as sanctities; and it omits, as if profane, many human characteristics which must for ever remain objects of admiration and trust.

Even apart from its abuse in the religious dialect of a school, the word "godly" has come to mean something vastly more limited and less certainly significant of nobleness, than it once denoted. It marks only one special aspect of character,-one order of feelings and habits, viz., those which are directed towards God. No doubt these ought to carry in them all else that is pure and good, and to refine and perfect every other side of the moral nature. And wherever God is present to the thought as the everlasting life of beauty, truth, and goodness, and kindles their faint authority with the glow of personal affection, there, to live in con

scious relations with him will sustain the whole action of the soul at its highest, and be equivalent to righteousness all round; and secret communion with him will take the mind to the very well-spring of every better love, and revive the aspirations drooping in the heat and dust. A spirit always rightly disposed towards a perfect Being can neither be in disorder within itself, nor be wrongly disposed towards any other. But then religious susceptibility is often keen, where the conditions, intellectual or moral, of so manly and comprehensive a piety are wanting; and a worship may be paid which sanctifies the discord of the passions and confirms the confusion of the conscience. And, on the other hand, there are secular forms of character, undeniably high and noble, which seem to have no sympathies on the spiritual side, and are unconscious of light from above. It would be a monstrous and a monkish rule to measure men in our time by their devotions; to admit to the glory of godliness every assured intimate of heaven, and exclude from it every one from whom the living presence of the Most High is hid.

It may check this overbalance of our estimates on the side of piety to remember that the word "godly,” in its primitive intent, means only "godlike." It expresses, not the personal affections which have God for their object, but the characteristics which may bring a human soul into resemblance to him. To the strong

and simple builders of our speech he was a godly man who drew their reverence, not whom they found constantly expressing his own; with whom they felt themselves in the presence of something divine; whom they trusted as a rock of righteousness; to whose shelter they could fly in every storm of wrong. Such a one they would doubtless take to be "the Friend of God"; but the sign of it to them was not in his devotions and private demeanour towards the world above; rather in this, that he stood to them in the place of God, and was the chosen Organ of eternal Right. If, with this clue, we seek for the central essence of the character, we shall certainly not rest with the pieties exercised in conscious worship. For precisely here it is that we stand on purely human ground, and are disposed of by affections which the Supreme Spirit cannot share. To look up, to aspire, to adore, to weep the tears of failure and breathe the sighs of hope, are the pathetic privilege of finite natures, planted on the open borders of the infinite. God lives without personal relations above him: He has no prayers to say, no creed to repeat; and the beauty of holiness in him can have no fitting emblem in the uplifted eyes and patient looks of the true saint. Of his perfection we can think only as of a spontaneous conformity with an inward righteousness and a pure preference of the best; as an inherent love of planting out the germs of this moral order in other minds;