as such served to throw back his own image magnified and refracted, like the cloud of the Brocken.

Any complete estimate of Mr. Mill's character and writings would lead beyond the bounds of a sketch like this. He was a man great enough to be understood only along with the whole society to which he belonged. The early training he received and the influences which limited his later life are but striking examples of that disintegrating tendency toward individualism and subjectivity which in spite of all the restraints of ancient imperialism and all the manifest perils of democracy are silently transforming the world about us and ourselves along with it. The ordeal of isolation to which he submitted from first to last was not imposed upon him by his teachers alone but by his times. It is ours too in one form or another, and in his case, as in ours, the result was decided by the manner of man he was. It is impossible to speak otherwise than with respect and even affection of Mr. Mill for the perfect sincerity, rectitude and earnestness which make his writings a revelation of character and not a mere impersonal manipulation of philosophic theories; but the truth is that he belonged to a class of men who just now determine the cast of English thought, men who have inherited the ideas of the century but not the interior resources of the men with whom the ideas were born. The poets, for example, are full of the self-consciousness of Wordsworth: each of them, like Mr. Whitman, sings himself; the trouble being that the self is so rarely sufficient for the song. In all of them, and in most of the great prose writers too, the art of ex. pression is bewildered between an ambitious ideal or aspiration and a defective power; and it is out of this bewilderment that the whole crop of affectations in thought and mannerisms in style which disfigure English literature to-day have grown. So Mr. Mill's dream is of Liberty, but there is the clank of the chain in all he wrote; and of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, yet he is not a happy man. What he wanted is what, according to Tennyson, we all want-"Life, more life, and better;" that is, amplitude, profundity, and power of feeling, and that clear intelligence and victorious force which spring from them. For a nature of this sort the only salvation is a most wide and varied culture, an unceasing intercourse

with the best there is in man and nature. Literature alone cannot give it; or art; certainly systematic philosophy cannot: there must be nothing less than the perpetual play of the whole of what Mr. Spencer calls the "environment." Where original genius is wanting the only adequate substitute is that culture which is the genius of mediocrity. It is proverbially easy to be wise after the fact, but we have seen the sort of culture Mr. Mill received and the consequences appear to have been very nearly what might have been expected. Carefully sheltered from wholesome wind and weather his mind was usurped and overpowered by a growth of alien and discordant ideas beneath whose chilling shade self-consciousness sickened into idealism and languid emotion into nihilism. The excluded and distant universe resolved itself into "permanent possibilities of sensation," or the "unknown condition" of sensation; mind, into the series, or assemblage of sensations themselves. This latter doctrine, of qualified phenomenalism or nihilistic idealism, is more Mr. Mill's own than any of the others and is the one by which his rank in philosophy is to be fixed. Here we desire particularly to call attention to the inevitable incoherence of theories which originate after this fashion. If Mr. Mill had been a mere passive recipient and interpreter of some established school of philosophy or system of thought we should have got from him at least consistent exposition: or if he had been a man of abundant resources and aggressive temper he might have added to philosophy a system of his own. Beyond most men of his time he combined the critical faculty and the habit of analysis with distrust of himself, and the natural product of the combination was a collection of doctrines half borrowed, half his own, which had no outer or inner bond of unity because coming from different quarters they found in his reception of them no sufficient faculty of assimilation, none of that white heat of the intellect and the imagination which fuses ideas into a homogeneous whole. The best illustration of what we mean is afforded by the papers on Nature, Religion and Theism published after his death by Miss Helen Taylor. The editor is aware of certain discrepancies between the first two of these essays which belong to the years 1850-1858 and the last which belongs to 1868-1870 but is of the opinion that they

would have disappeared had the essay on Theism received the final corrections of the author. They are alike in this, that all of them are the reactions late in life of Mr. Mill's milder but more melancholy temperament upon the hard abstractions of his father; but no revision could have eliminated the ruinous contradictions between the abstractions themselves and the fundamental principles of his thinking. Nature, as Mr. Mill describes her, is a compound of intractable material and omnipotent, or at least ungovernable power, wholly destitute of intelligence, conscience or compassion; a vast embodiment of brute force, part of which she spends in torturing and killing the sentient creatures engendered in her womb-a mother and an infanticide. Something might be said for this conception as a piece of pure anthropomorphic personification did it issue from the brain of a despairing rationalist, but nothing can be more certain than that Mr. Mill could have had no experience of a Nature like this and therefore that in his hands the speculation is extreme metempiricism; for the living world is as much a part of Nature as inauimate matter, so that what is called murder is in fact suicide or at any rate innocent death; the cruelty of Nature is her mortal agony-she is herself the Pometheus Bound and not the malignant power who sends the vultures. Mr. Mill's deity is if possible more inexcusably metempirical than his Nature. We can best describe him by saying that in intelligence and moral character he ranks indefinitely below Mrs. Mill, the one abstraction which awakens Mr. Mill's enthusiasm. He is a respectable and disinterested person who has undertaken to call Nature to order and to set her right; and has been lamentably worsted in the trial, the best that can be said of the creation so far being that it is as good as the "intractable material" and vicious temper of Nature has permitted. There are certainly no traces of this good-natured incapability in the universe and consequently none in Mr. Mill's experience. There are natural forces which encounter other natural forces and we who are caught in the collision suffer, but who can find any battle field where God and Nature have fought or any victory won by either. Mr. Mill's God is simply a very considerable Mr. Mill (which accounts for his inferiority to Mrs. Mill); a large being who has a critical

faculty and a conscience equal to the detection and disapproval of Nature's vices but not strength enough to compel her to reform. As to Religion, Mr. Mill does not say what his father said of modern Christianity that it is the ne plus ultra of wickedness, but that it is of doubtful utility and that we are quite as well off without it. This is logical if God and Nature have been represented truthfully; if we are right in our Manichæanism. we cannot be wrong in our irreligion. But it must be observed again that Mr. Mill confesses to having had no experience of religion, standing in this respect quite alone among his contemporaries. "I am," he says, "perhaps the one person of my time who has-not rejected a religion, but-who never had one." We do not say that this disqualified Mr. Mill from having an opinion on the Utility of Religion, but only that such an opinion must have been rationalistic and not empirical.

We have only one more question to put here. If the universe is of this sort; if there is the victorious incarnation of evil in the material world and an incapable apotheosis of good, a real creator however impotent and a real providence however baffled and thwarted over against the fatal dualism of nature; what becomes of sensationalism, idealism, and nihilism? Matter must be more than the bare permanent possibility or unknown condition of sensation if it wields all these tremendous forces: mind, divine or human, more than a bare aggregate of sensations if it sustains, even discomfitted, this conflict. It is the old dilemma of the Dualism of Force which has stared philosophers out of countenance from Spinoza to Spencer, and which as we hope to show makes short work with Mr. Mill's phenomenalism.

ARTICLE VI.—WOMAN'S VOICE IN THE CHURCH.

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Exposition of 1 Cor. xiv, 34, 35. "Let your women keep silence in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home; for it is a shame for women to speak in the church."

THIS passage is exciting very great attention in our day. The question of woman's place in the church, as well as in the world, is being widely discussed; and this teaching of Paul upon the subject cannot be ignored. We have lying before us seven or eight learned treatises, all issued within a short time, urging various different theories of this passage.* The foremost of these take the most extreme and emphatic ground against woman's speech. Thus, in the Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct., 1870, we are told, "that the injunction of silence is of perpetual obligation," "forbidding the women to speak at all in the assemblies;" "because in its very nature, whatever the manner of it may be, speaking in the assembly is inconsistent with the position of women in the churches." So also Professor Clapp. Others of these writers go to the very opposite extreme, and claim, that there is no limitation whatever put, either by Scripture or by reason, upon the speech of woman, any more than upon that of man. In the Congregational Quarterly, April, 1874, we are pointed in this direction.

Such is the interest excited upon this subject, and such the confusion and contradiction of views concerning it. An examination and determination of the passage before us is, therefore, extremely important for us all at this time; not only that we may save ourselves and others from the loose and dangerous

* 1. The Silence of Women Required in the Churches. By Rev. A. H. Ross. Bib. Sacra, 1870, April and Oct. 2. An Argument against Women's Voice in Church. By Prof. S. C. BARTLETT, in reply to Rev. Mr. Helmer. Advance, 1869. 3. Women not Forbidden to Speak, but to Babble. By Rev. HARMON LOOMIS; Cong. Quar., April, 1874. 4. Woman may not Speak in Meeting. By Miss AUGUSTA MOORE; Cong. Quar., April, 1874. 5. Speaking, not Babbling, forbidden. A reply to Mr. Loomis; Cong. Quar., Oct., 1874. 6. Several Essays in favor of Woman's Speech, as against Paul. 7. Professor Clapp's essay before the Illinois Association, May, 1876, on Woman not a Public Character, and sundry replies to it in the Advance.