assume to us various shapes and meanings. It is not our present intention, as we have said, to enter upon the discussion of Schleiermacher's theological principles. The subject is too extended, and not particularly suited for these pages. We must notice, however, the fertile principle which lay at the root of all his theological views, and moulded them all, and which has so greatly moulded the course of theological thought since his time. We mean the principle of development. To Schleiermacher, Christianity presented itself throughout under an historical aspect. It was a seed of new life imparted to humanity, through the growth of which the course of human thought and life was to be evermore purified and exalted. It was a moral impulse communicated to the world, under the operation of which higher and still higher views of the Divine were to unfold themselves, and men were to become wiser and better in the expanding light of a boundless truth. There may seem at first nothing strange or new in this principle. Christianity is all this, none can deny. But to Schleiermacher, we may say it was nothing more than this. It was not to him, for example, as to the Roman Catholic, a definite institute, nor yet as to the Calvinist, a definite mode of thought. It necessarily took both institutional and dogmatical forms of expression in the course of its historical progress, but the spirit, or life, which thus variously developes itself, is the only essential Christian element. When this spirit, or life, is repudiated, as in the old Rationalism, to which he opposed himself, Christianity is denied, and Christian science is impossible. A mere Deism, or speculative Pantheism, were negations of Christianity with which he had no sympathy,-against which his whole teaching was directed. But starting from the Christian consciousness, as an integral and vital element in redeemed humanity, he recognised the widest diversity of spiritual thought and feeling. All expressions of the Christian consciousness were valuable and educative; none, not even the books of the New Testament, were absolutely authoritative. They were the original interpretation of the Christian feeling* and for this reason so peculiarly rich and instructive in meaning, and ‘so firmly established that we ought not to attempt more than further to understand and develop them. But of this right of development, as a Protestant theologian, he would allow no one to deprive him. Scripture was not merely the beginning of Christian truth; it contained in a sense its full significance; but then this significance only unfolded itself gradually to the growing Christian perception and feelings. There was no point at which the evolution, or what was really the same thing to Schleiermacher, the revelation of Christian truth could be said to terminate. This principle of development underlies and directs all Schleiermacher's theological speculations contained in the two works to which we have already referred. The course of theological study is divided by him into three great heads or outlines, respectively designated philosophical, historical, and practical theology. By the first he means the consideration of all that is necessary to exhibit the essential nature of Christianity as a peculiar mode of faith. Philosophical theology contemplates Christianity in its widest relations as α new movement of thought and life in human history, and considers what constitutes its spirit and essence, how and wherein it originated and established itself (apologetics), and how far it everywhere answers to its idea, or has departed from it and become intermixed with foreign elements (polemics). Historical theology again contemplates Christianity, first of all, in its primary expression in the New *Letter to Jacobi. Testament, or primitive Christianity, such as it is exhibited in its original and normal documents, the Gospels and Epistles (exegetics); then the knowledge of the entire course of Christianity-its total development from the time of its having obtained a settled footing as an historical phenomenon (Church history); then the knowledge of the state of Christianity at the present moment-the current Christian opinion and morality (dogmatics and social statics). Practical theology embraces the subjects of church worship and church government. Nothing perhaps can give a better idea of Schleiermacher's comprehensiveness and originality as a theologian, than these bare outlines 41 of the field of theological study as it appeared to him. Nothing can better show his distinctive mode of thought, and how widely it is separated from the dogmatic method which rests upon the text of Scripture as an irrefutable basis of Christian doctrine. The conception of the Christian consciousness as the source of doctrine, and of the New Testament as merely the primary and most comprehensive expression of this consciousness, is an entire revolution in the old system of Protestant thought. To what extent it is a true or false revolution, and what are the real relations of authority between the Christian sentiment or conscience and Scripture, it would be out of place here to discuss. J. T. A JANUARY REAKFAST is over. No, don't BREAK draw round to the fire, or I shall never get you to leave it. Throw down that Times; surely you must have read its twelve pages through, from the first birth to the address of Francis Goodlake, printer, when you kept it so long at breakfast. Just look at this thermometer outside the window, as well as you can see through the crusted pane-down to twenty-one now, and only slowly rising from twelve, whereat the register shows it to have stood in the night. Of course with this on the top of yesterday's frost, the pool at the end of the fox-cover would bear an army. Up, let us go and make the first wrinkles on its maiden face, before the brave 'prentice-lads from Trotborough can get their holiday and come over to spoil it. I thought it was not for nothing that I had to break the ice in my tub upstairs this morning, and felt my hair crackle under the brushes like a cat stroked the wrong way. Come, step out at the window, and change that atmosphere of coffee and fried bacon, for this crisp refreshing ether outside, meet for the lungs of gods and lips that press nectar and ambrosia. Never DAY. mind your hat: why, you look as reluctant about it as a certain other bare head must have been on a certain other cold January morning two hundred and twelve years ago, when it too emerged from an open window to no pleasant fate; the less pleasant perhaps now (who knows?) in that we of the sixth and seventh generation are happily no longer taught to call it Martyrdom. Small thanks 'the noble army' owed us, I think, for inflicting that recruit upon them, and keeping him in their ranks by our services and calendar for two centuries. How the delusion came to last so far into these enlightened days has always been a mystery to me; a deeper mystery even than the worship of our other great martyr, St. Thomas of Canterbury, who did die in a church in a certain perverted sense for the Church and in days when superstition was always ready with her magnifying-glass. But we, the good protestants of the Reformation, the hard-headed proprietors of what we glory in calling English common-sense, the independence of Britons, and so forth,-how came we to adopt and preserve in our ritual that absurd piece of flunkeyism to the memory of a bad king to catch the favour of a worse? Surely that great and glorious muster-roll of heroes is the brighter and nobler for the erasure of the names of St. Thomas and St. Charles; and I think that January may hold her head higher among months than heretofore with consciousness of having got rid of the latter imposture from her corner of the almanac. Well, as you are not going to lose a head, or even a crown, perhaps you won't mind leaving off that shivering fit; a run up and down this gravel walk, heaving and boiling volcanically upwards with the frost, and crunching under our feet as though it had been macadamized by Messrs. Huntley and Palmer, will leave you warmer and happier than the very brightest of fires and the very snuggest of armchairs. See, here is the doctor, with a still more wonderful story of the coldness of the night; but then I have often remarked the extreme sensitiveness of his particular thermometer, which, as read by himself, falls invariably two degrees lower than its neighbours' in a frosty night, and rises as invariably on a July day three degrees higher in the shade than anybody's else in the sun. Often too have I wished that the delicate susceptibility of the instrument had extended itself to the owner, and rendered him more cautious of acquiring his rather weak reputation for accuracy. But at least I can believe him when he says that the pool, as he passed it, looked hard, and black, and smooth as a large slate, and I yearn like any schoolboy to go and scribble upon it. Let us lose no time. The grease in which they have lain embalmed since last winter, must first be rubbed from our skates. Bring a gimlet, and a cork to sheathe it in for fear of accidents; and now we are ready. We will just tell the girls where we are going, and I daresay they will be so many Hebes unto us, and bring us something by way of luncheon when they come down to see us in the afternoon, as they of course will; earlier we must not hope for them, there being some inscrutable cause which makes young ladies regard the going out of doors before luncheon as a crime not to be thought of in a well-regulated household, and impels them to devote their mornings to the graver and more profitable duties of worsted-work, letter-writing, and tittle-tattle. But let us not be hard upon prejudices which will to-day ensure us a supply of sandwiches; for if the ice is what I expect to find it, I tell you plainly that no earthly consideration, not the sharpest hunger, shall induce me to leave it till dark; and but for them my only luncheon would probably consist of a novel sandwich composed of Nothing, between-breakfast and dinner. What manner of skates have you got? Ah, very good; but not quite the best. Do you remember the wonderful weapons in use for skates in our schoolboy days, before cunning artificers had invented a means whereby the iron runner might be carried backwards under the heel, by bridging over the screw which fastens the whole machine to the boot? In those days we were compelled to skate upon tiptoe, with knees excruciatingly bent, and to affect perpetually a Narcissus-like attitude, making as though we would view our faces in the mirror beneath us. To skate backwards was a curious, wriggling, polyangular feat, very fatiguing to the crural muscles, and very liable to dash one into the position from which Mr. Thomas Sayers, that modern Antæus, so often had occasion to rise during the late fight for the championship. Then what an extraordinary complication of straps, and pads to support the straps, were wont to be heaped about the foot, till the circulation was as effectually stopped as by a tourniquet, and the extremities felt as if actually undergoing the operation which that instrument implies. Under these disadvantages skating was by no means that graceful and 'swan-like' art to which more recent improvements in the gear have elevated it. Gradually has the whole length of the foot been ironshod, as aforesaid, heel included. The old point at The old point at the toe, so sharp, so prominent, so beautifully adapted for catching in stick,or 'cat's-ice,' has been rounded, and after a few foolish by-plays of fashion in the shape of swans' heads and other vanities, has finally disappeared altogether, leaving the iron to end with the wood, like the keel of a vessel. The complication of straps has been simplified into one broad for the foot, and another narrow for the instep; to the rejection of an absurd substitution of springs intended to clutch the sole of the boot-a signal failure in practice. And the heel of the iron has been assimilated to the toe, rendering one a very Janus in the feet, and as apt at retrogression as a lord of the bedchamber. But perhaps the greatest improvement in the shape of the iron keel is, that formerly entirely rectilinear save at the up-turned point, it now presents (or should present) an edge gradually curved from the centre both upwards and horizontally inwards, a much more manageable conformation to anyone whose ambition extends to progressing otherwise than in the straightest possible forward line. For most of which advantages let us rejoice that we live in the latter half of the nineteenth century, nor grudge our meed of thanks to the zeal and skill of the London Skating Club. Here we are; and what a fine wide black floor we have got to disport ourselves upon, like a pavement of Galway marble, or a lake of frozen ink. And what a contrast to the hoary level around itas though some one had upset the Harvey's sauce upon Nature's tablecloth. You see the hob-nail of rustic boyhood has visited this corner of it already; and at early dawn, before the demon of labour was awake, there was doubtless a merry assemblage of villagers here, 'keeping the pot a bilin', and gaining an appetite all too big for the scanty pot which was bilin' for them at home. Who is the adventurous spirit who first essays a piece of ice with deep water underneath it? 43 Some such hero is always found for the emergency as soon as ever there is a chance that a given stream will bear; nay, even earlier still will fools rush in where angels might fear to tread but for the wings with which they are popularly furnished. I confess to a cowardice in this respect myself, and despite of knowledge of the great frost of last night, I am glad and so I dare say are you too-of the additional evidence of safety which these pioneering feet have left us. Let us essay an humble slide or two ourselves, before we are exalted to the prouder eminence of our iron stilts: we can't hope to attain the speed or length of course of which our nail-bearing predecessors have left signs, but-there-I don't think that was such a bad attempt, and I challenge you to beat it. What a singular attitude one has to compel oneself into while boring a hole in the heel of one's boot; and don't you always then wish that your knee-joint was inverted, as in the hind-leg of quadrupeds? The wonder indeed is that Nature has not so constructed the knees of the Dutch or the Esquimaux, or other nations to whom skating is a normal style of locomotion; and I think it not at all improbable that some future Franklin or McClintock in pursuit of an Antarctic passage to the Otaheite Islands (which, as everybody knows, would be an incalculable advantage to British commerce), may discover such a race of men in the yet unexplored latitudes of the South Pole. There, I have finished mine, and am ready to lend a hand to yours. Up with your foot to the gimlet. Sing out if the iron enters into your sole. Now a stamp before we finally tighten the straps; and so we start fair together. That preliminary burst round the pool has stretched our legs and opened our pipes, and shown us that the best piece of ice lies just under those glorious dark Scotch firs at the other end. May I have the felicity of dancing a figure of 8 with you? Here we stand, vis-à-vis as for a Highland reel or an Irish jig. Collect your breath and steady your eye; and now we are off. That's it; outside edge, first with right foot and then with left; in and out, and swaying with the stroke to this side and that like two pendulums; and ever round and round in a double circle, scoring time upon the ice in the similitude of an hour-glass, ourselves the sand flowing through it, as quickly, as noiselessly, and as punctually; foot, arm, eye, and swing of body keeping true harmony to a sort of physical duet with a slight fugue in it, for I must be just an exact demisemi-quaver before you at the point of intersection, or a hideously discordant cadenza-of both performers-will be the immediate result. And so goes on our tournamentnever say die ;-let us see which of the two shall first begin to describe his circles wide of the primal mark, marring the symmetry of our numeral;-shall first 'miss his tip,' and come up to the neck of our figure out of time, spoiling the harmony of our duet;-shall first stagger, or trip, or grow wilder in his attitudes; all signs of approaching giddiness and windedness, and of victory to his antagonist. Bravo! A drawn battle, I declare; for here, just in the nick of time to save either of two such heroes from owning a defeat, come Dei ex machina in the likeness of men, yea, in the form of the squire and the Christmas party from the Hall, disappointed of the meet of the East Bullfinchshire, advertised for the Park Cover this morning on trust of open weather, and scorning, like true sportsmen as they are, so much as to look at a pheasant while there is the smallest relic of last week's snow still lying in the preserves. We must needs go and welcome the lords of the soil to their own waters, and perhaps we of the cottage may be able to show them of the hall and castle a sport not very far inferior to those the loss of which they are even now lamenting. Here they come, ladies and all, with a regular camp-following of chairs and other useful paraphernalia. Not a bad idea that, too, to bring the old rocking-chair from the nursery-a first-rate extemporary sledge! Let me give one of you ladies a run while the gentlemen are getting themselves into their skates. She comes down to the invitation, the fairest and merriest of that goodly assemblage, a guest at the hall for many past weeks of dances and cheery Christmas meetings, in-doors and out; my partner in many-too many-a valse; my laughing and interested companion for many—ah, too many -a mile of jolly winter walks and rides. Down she comes to the sleigh, timid and hesitating, and begging not to be upset, but evidently trusting entirely nevertheless. Sit down; hold tight. Are you firm? Off we go, twice up and down the pool, and then stealing off up the narrow side-stream where the supply of water comes in. Swiftly we wind on among the trees and shrubs, which dash past us at most exciting speed ;-riding on a railway-engine is nothing to this! Up from our very feet darts the snipe as we rush on, and the heron flaps heavily away before us. Is it only the exercise that makes my heart beat so? Is it only the air that gives such colour to that cheek, such liquid lustre to those deep blue eyes, as I lean-the better to push, of course-far over the back of the chair, and gaze into her face, as we fly, at the closest and most irresistible proximity, cap-feather tickling brow, and flowing hair mingled with whisker. Oh that this stream led on for leagues for degrees of latitudefor ever! Oh to abscond thus, and rob the squire of his niece and his nursery-chair, and skate straight on to Arcadia, or Utopia, or the Enchanted Island, and never come back again any more! Oh forbut that confounded sudden turn of the stream has brought us back again into the pool; and Arcadia is farther off than ever, and the inquisitive eyes of broad and stern reality are staring at us from many a skating form. Yes, she tells them, she has had a delightful run, and it is so pretty up there. Cease, ye romantic visions; be |