sets forth his religious experience, the problems of life were intolerable to him till they became overwhelming, as he saw them to be insoluble, and supplied their own answer. He pondered over this strange scene of confusion, of pettiness, of indistinct disaster, seeking for a plan; he sought in vain, and the vain search answered itself. Just as the critic blames his desultoriness and heterogeneity till he sees that it is the very object of his art, so he rebelled with bitter protest against the meaninglessness of life, until he traced here also the intention of the Supreme Artist. With that discernment all becomes clear. This edifice of civil society, erected by the toil and energy of countless generations, is in very truth a crumbling ruin; let the Christian cease to wonder at its flaws, ponder no more over a crack here, a yawning fissure there, but once for all turn his eyes to his true home, and leave the hut of the campaigner to tumble into ignoble ruin. We are not translating Count Tolstoi's belief into any rhetorical distortion. If "Resist not evil" mean, as he interprets the words, "Let every wrongdoer go his way," there is no such thing as a Christian State. The world would be thus divided between a band of martyrs, suffering at the hands, not only of the civil authorities, but of any ruffians who chose to pillage and illtreat unresisting victims, and, on the other hand, a set of average men and women, including many of the best and worst specimens of both, who openly repudiated all adherence to Christianity. But those who found themselves members of the Church of Christ, Tolstoi thinks, would trouble themselves very little about aught beside; and he speaks with authority, for he believes himself to have found truth, and to discern its antagonism to all that this world has to give, which certainly it has given him.

And yet no one has ever painted more vividly than he the struggle of those instincts in man which recognize the State -those relations which shape the life of the secular world-with another set of instincts and relations which make up what we may call the church, and centre in man's relation to God. Tolstoi does not shrink from testing the problem in its most difficult aspect; he

Anna Karénina"

forces his reader, in (a novel which, for the reason we have given, we incline to think a better work of art than "Peace and War'), to ask the questions: "Is there any unity but that of the soul and God? Is the family to be considered as a whole any more than the nation? Is there to be any sanction on its oneness? any punishment for the faithless wife and the adulterer?" If we have rightly connected the tendencies apparent in the novel with the religious belief set forth in the later work, Tolstoi intends us to reply in the negative.* The injured man would not even refuse permission to the guilty mother to feast her eyes on the child she has deserted (so we understand the implied lesson), if he were ready to exercise the forgiveness due from a Christian. Tolstoi depicts with wonderful power the effort of an injured husband to follow what he conceives the law of Christ; he fearlessly confronts that law with all the most potent influences which rise up against its fulfilment; he does not shrink from hinting that the strongest of those influences is the consciousness that the command is, in a certain sense, easy to the coward. The husband who dares not kill the adulterer, is forced, as he strives to forgive him, to recognize the strange complex difficulty of a base ally on the Christian side. The picture of the relation between the two men is very revolting to an English reader. Count Tolstoi, perhaps, would say that, for this very reason, the case is fitted to test the Christian's obedience to the command of a Lord who can less consent to share a divided allegiance than the husband a divided fidelity. True; but let us face also the fact for here lies the very kernel of the problem—that, if we understand the duty of non-resistance to evil in this sense, we give up the unity of the family. Man and woman cannot be one flesh, if either may experiment at will in foreign relation, and then return to the oneness they have

*The translator of Christ's Christianity" tells us that Tolstoi's views underwent a radical change after writing this novel. It appears to the present writer that though the situation described above is given as a mere problem, the answer was already latent in Tolstoi's mind.

temporarily abandoned. If it can never be forfeited, neither can it ever be gained. And let no one suppose that he can avoid the problem by ignoring Christianity. Ours is, in the deepest and widest sense of the word, the age of unreserve; all that our forefathers held sacred is brought forward to be flung into the crucible of research, and the relation of the sexes is no exception. The art which depicts the whole of life corresponds to a theory which sanctions the whole of impulse. The disintegrating tendencies of our age come from opposite quarters; and the question suggested to the reader of Tolstoi by the spectacle of an injured husband who strives to obey Christ, will be echoed by the study of many a writer to whom all but the name of Christ is almost unknown.

Perhaps one of the strongest points of interest in Tolstoi's account of his religious experience, for an English reader, is its illustration of the influence exercised by the fact that the writer belongs to a non-historic race. He has not inherited, from scores of his ancestors, the conviction, gradually strengthening through all, and reaching the last with the accumulated force of the whole descent, that nothing can be good which impairs the unity of the nation. He is quite ready to listen to evidence in this direction, but he requires evidence. An Englishman can hardly begin to inquire whether national life be a desirable result of social evolution. History is too strong for him. We by no means make the comparison in the interest of our own nation. A Russian is, we concede, or rather we earnestly urge, better prepared than an Englishman to consider the scope of those commands of Christ which seem to ignore, almost to deny, the supremacy of the State. He does not start from the assumption that they must be explained away. He sees on every side men who are ready to lay down their lives if they may destroy every symbol of national unity; it can be no difficulty to him to conceive that for far other motives than theirs an unseen Lord should demand a like surrender. Many a Nihilist surely must feel it harder to take life than to lay it down. Can it be hard to do that for Christ, which so many are ready to do NEW SERIES.-VOL. XLVI., No. 5

for a hope they are utterly unable to justify on any rational ground? The problem is more urgent for a Russian, but the time presses it upon us all. We, standing in the full noon of our modern European civilization, must sometimes be tempted to ask, surely-What is it all worth? For an Englishman with a University education, it may be an actual element in satisfied consciousness. "That Chatham's language is his mother tongue, And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own."

But what of those who form, after all, the bulk of the people? What of some inhabitant of the East-end who has never known a moment's solitude except in the streets, or an hour's physical comfort except in the ginshop? Is it a tangible advantage to such as these to feel themselves the members of a nation? And if not to them, must we not confess that our civil order has failed, and may as well make way for something different?

These pages are written by one who believes quite as firmly as Count Tolstoi does that if any one, with his eyes opened to the meaning of eternal realities, had to choose between the inestimable advantage of being the member of a nation on the one hand, and on the other of obeying the commands of Christ, he would not hesitate for a moment to fling aside all that vast inheritance of political life to sacrifice which for any other reason were a grievous crime. further concession to the view of Count Tolstoi-that the words of Christ do, at first sight, appear hostile to the life of the State-may be made without any personal limitation. The very words so often cited as a concession to civil claim form the strongest evidence on the side of one who would exhibit this hostility.

66

The

Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's" was a clear renunciation, on the part of the Jew, of that protest against the claim of the Cæsar which the national instinct demanded; and the Pharisee who had asked that question must have felt in hearing the answer that the dangerous prophet was discredited in the eyes of the Jew who would throw off the yoke of Rome. The Sermon on the Mount is read by Count

4I

Tolstoi as a protest against civil life, and he is nearer the truth in so reading it, we firmly believe, than are those who take it for the utterance of a string of truisms. The commands of Christ mean not less but more than the commands of other men. Perhaps it will be discovered, by one who sets himself to obey them, that these commands, far from being mere suggestions for a saintly perfection which the average man may admire at a distance, or mere rhetorical exaggerations of elastic rules of kindliness and moderation, are just as absolute, and, in the mere natural order of things, just as impossible as they seem.

The prudent critic, perhaps, would take leave of Count Tolstoi with two remarks, not likely to be controverted by any reader. One is that any one does Christians an inestimable service, who forces them to ask what the commands of Christ really mean; the other is that the same cause which hurts Tolstoi's power as an artist, interferes with his power of interpreting the message of his Lord. An imprudent critic ventures on an expansion of this last criticism so as to include suggestions for a fuller answer. In poring over the command,

Resist not him that is evil," Tolstoi seems to us to lose sight of the promise, "I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." He takes the Sermon on the Mount as the legacy of one whose voice can reach us no more; we would read it as the first word of a leader ready to command his army as long as it exists. The first word of a leader gives the key-note of his generalship. If any one be not ready for that sacrifice which the Sermon on the Mount demands, let him not call himself a Christian. There is a part of the nature to which it is always addressed. So far as man is alone with God, so far he must, if he would follow Christ, turn the cheek to the smiter, give the coat to him who has taken the cloak, and go the last weary mile, when he has gone far before. If any one thinks the command, thus understood, to be easy, he has never tried to obey it. Each one of us constantly refuses to acknowledge the moral domain where he is alone with God; he will not consent to that arduous isolation. Else all unkindness, all grudge, all that spoils the sweetness

of life, would vanish utterly. Who would clutch at this piece of worldly gain? who would refuse that measure of toil? who would resent this injury, if he felt that it were for him alone to gain or to endure? Pain is always pain, and we perhaps speak of it too lightly; but it is not the refusal to endure what poor human nature can hardly contemplate that comes between man and man in the ordinary commerce of life, it is the intrusion of the self into that region of claim which belongs only to the group; it is the "I" in each one of us which takes the place of the "we." But we are not therefore at liberty to invert this process and abdicate our post in the region of claim. Each one is a member of a larger unity, and has to resist whatever impairs the organic unity of the group, be it the family or the nation, which he has the power to guard. The husband is not a mere atom, to be injured only in his own person. He is the guardian of the family. He may not endure any injury to that which he is bound to guard; to him the command of Christ is that, never noticed by Tolstoi, “If he repent forgive him." How can he, it may be asked, guard the unity of that which the faithless wife has already broken? He can keep unhurt the protest of a withheld forgiveness which must only be granted to repentance. In England, it may be thought, there is little danger that he should ever do otherwise. Those who think thus are destined, we believe, to be rudely undeceived before many years are past, but the danger, as it is illustrated by the creed of Tolstoi, is not so much that men should cease to follow those instincts by which family and civil life are guarded, as that they should identify Christianity with the spirit which opposes those instincts, and insists on a mere individualism annihilating claim. If all Christians manifested steadfast purity and love in their own lives, even if they refused to enforce it on their own children, they would, perhaps, be better men and women than they are now; but the bulk of mankind, forced to choose between Christianity and a principle of civil and family life, will not choose Christianity. Count Tolstoi's creed will leave on the mind of the ordinary man an impression that

THIS Jubilee year of the only Queen who has, as far as we know, ever completed her half-century of reign, must have suggested to many persons the question, -What is the real value of that new female influence which has had this female reign as its era? It would be childish, no doubt, to lay any stress on the concurrence of the long life of an individual with the growing prominence of a sex. If the fact of a long and prosperous female occupancy of the Throne has afforded those who desire to establish a class of female citizens with a telling argument in favor of woman's civil capacity, that is as much as it has done. Still, such an epoch affords a good opportunity for considering the moral result of that change which we sum up under the head of the emancipation of women. No one will deny that our day has revealed women as possible rivals to men in regions where formerly they were not thought of as serious critics; or dispute the importance of such a change. many will question its beneficence. Whether women work or starve, whether they are educated or uneducated, whether they marry from choice or necessity, these are alternatives about which our generation has made up its mind. But we may still inquire how far the gain is unmixed, and whether the price be inevitable.

Not

Let us put before our readers, as a contribution toward an answer, a quotation from a little work which certainly does not, at any rate, belong to the Conservative side of thought. The Religion of Socialism is a manifesto from the party most especially opposed to Con

servatism; it is the expression of that group of sympathies for which the emancipation of women is one of the most salient triumphs. Yet it is the opinion of the writer that

"For some time past the tendency of the bourgeois world, as expressed in its legislation

and sentiment, has been toward a factitious exaltation of the woman at the expense of the equality man,-in other words, the cry for alization become a sham, masking a de facto inequality. The inequality in question presses, as usual, heaviest upon the working-man, whose wife, to all intents and purposes, now has him completely in her power. If dissolute or drunken, she can sell up his goods or break up his home at pleasure, and still compel him to keep her and live with her to her life's end. There is no law to protect him. On the other hand, let him but raise a finger in a moment of exasperation against this precious representative of the sacred principle of womanhood,' and straightway he is consigned to the treadmill for his six months, amid the jubilation of the D. T. and its kindred, who pronounce him a brute, and sing pæans over the power of the

between the sexes' has in the course of its re

law to protect the innocent and helpless female. Thus does bourgeois society offer sacrifice to the idol,' equality between the sexes.'

We take this extract from a collection of essays with the substance of which we disagree and the tone of which we strongly disapprove, because it is from a party fanatically devoted to equality and enthusiastic in support of the weak that a complaint of the disadvantages of the strong and the privileged comes with most force. The complaint seems to us, indeed, exaggerated. But we desire to commend to the reader's attention the fact that it is possible.

"Christ's Christianity," p. 344. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.

The movement by which the female side of life has received a new honor, is characteristic of our own time in a special sense. But in a general sense we may say that it is characteristic of the eighteen Christian centuries, as contrasted with the life of classic antiquity. The ancients-(as we must call the young races of European life, but the phrase is one which brings out its absurdity)-lived in a hemisphere of our moral world; they knew only half the springs of all that we feel excellent. The best men admired what we may call womanly excellence quite as little in the ancient world as the worst men did. The Greek whose death will always be remembered beside that of Christ, speaks in his last hour contemptuously of his sorrowing wife; his disciple framed an ideal world in which no mother should know her own child. From the canvas where the Divine Mother clasps her son, the spirit of Medieval Christianity makes its undying protest against that mutilated ideal; the lesson, enshrined in immortal art, is secured for awakening intelligence in every age. That glorification of the Mother sanctions the claim of all weakness, hallows the promise of whatever is incomplete; it holds in germ the power of a boundless faith, the strength of an infinite compassion. All that supplies the infinite to human feeling lies in the mystic expansiveness of a mother's love; and a mother's love is but the focus of all that makes up womanhood. The worship of the Virgin symbolizes the sudden rapture with which men gazed on a new aspect of ideal humanity,-the sudden glow of reverence with which they turned to the passive side of human life, previously associated with slavery, and associated it with God. Eighteen centuries have not more than worked out the thought latent in that rapture; we are still exploring, as it were, that new continent of goodness which had no more place in the chart of the ancient world than America had. We have hardly begun to map out its limits; we are still occupied in recognizing its wealth and its extent. What is the whole movement of modern democracy on its best side but the working out of this ideal? So far as Democracy expresses the triumph of the majority, it is a totally unmoral principle, ready to be

come immoral the moment its dangers are forgotten. And, so far as Democracy expresses the triumph of the weak, it is identical with the elevation of this female side of humanity. Only by strange confusion has the influence of woman been dreaded as an aristocratic influence; the liberation of the slave, the elevation of the degraded, the concession of rights to the lowly, are at once an expression of all that side of excellence which is truly womanly, and a portion of the very process which has resulted in the emancipation of woman herself. Her political emancipation would, we believe-and history surely encourages the suspicion - tend to strengthen the revolutionary forces of the world. Woman looks toward the past, but even more does she look toward the future; hers is always the sympathy of the mother-she always yearns over the needs of the coming race. The true ballast of the world must always be kept by the man, and we feel it a grave drawback in our satisfaction at woman's enlarged scope that he shows some signs of forgetting his part of his vocation. Only those who would be slow to recognize such a danger at any time will deny that the manly elements of human worth are now in danger of being crowded out by the expansiveness of those sympathies which are typically female. Compassion for disaster expands to shut out condemnation of wrong. Sympathy with weakness contracts the rights of the powerful, and respect for every natural impulse seriously endangers the majesty of law. There is in our day a danger that strength, losing the credit of popular sympathy, should come to be allied with violence, and that the weak should lack defenders, because they have refused restraint.

It is a shallow and ignorant view of life which allows itself to set aside as something with which an advanced civilization has nothing to do, the influence of physical force. The question whether the citizen is prepared for the duties of the soldier lies at the heart of political philosophy. We do not say that it must never be answered in the negative. We insist only that the answer is important. The weaker half of mankind, by the mere fact that they are the weaker, have