reconciling the opposition between the two aspects of thought. Whether it was himself or an Alexandrian editor that applied to them the formula of the vépyeta and Súvaus, it is certain that the application is merely suggested, not carried out. The void between them remains unfilled. His highest utterance on the subject is that "thought is a form of forms as sensuous perception is a form of sensible things;" i. e., Thought is the unity to which all objects of knowledge are relative, as our consciousness of outward things is a unity to which those things are relative. The objects of thoughts, he proceeds, are involved in "sensible forms," i. e., in sensible things as known. Such a statement is in itself ambiguous. It may be taken as equivalent either to the "nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu," or to the "nihil in sensu quod non prius in intellectu." Neither maxim by itself would adequately express its meaning. Knowledge in its actuality or completeness is, according to Aristotle, essentially prior to knowledge as potentiality or in the making. As conveyed through the senses, it is of the latter kind; and thus the cogitabilia," though in the sensible things, are prior to them; thus "nihil in sensu quod non prius in intellectu." But in the order of our experience, he says, knowledge through the senses comes first; accordingly, "nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu." Yet this is knowledge only so far as the vonróv is in the air@nróv. The "form," under which alone we can know the simplest thing as distinct from another, is given by the same unifying and distinguishing self, of which the whole series of forms is the realization. Thus (though this is a result at which Aristotle never clearly arrived himself) the world is not composed of two opposite sets of things, the sensible and intelligible, the material and ideal. There is but one real world, the intelligible, which, however, is an actuality, of which, to us sense is the potentiality. The thought, which pervades it, on its potential side, is "passive," on its actual "creative."

แ

It should follow from this that a knowledge of the divine and eternal is not to be attained by turning away from the world of experience, but by understanding it. The "dualism," however, from which Aristotle only escapes fitfully in his theory of Reason, as developed in us, overmasters him more completely in his theory of Reason as divine. With him, as with Plato, the Divine Reason is related to the world as that which is unmoved itself, but a source of motion is related to that which it moves. When they spoke of the motion of the world, they probably had

before them chiefly the motions which are the object of what, with them, was the highest of sciences-astronomy. The conception, however, admits of a far wider application. Through all the compass of its notes," till the diapason closes full in man," the world is esientially in process. It is constantly becoming something which in itself it as yet is not. Now, with Aristotle everything that moves is, as such, a potentiality of that which it is not actually. The moving world, therefore, though in each stage an actuality relatively to the stage that preceded, is for the same reason for ever a potentiality in relation to one which is to follow. The end, or "final cause" of its motion is also its source or efficient; for a process of actualization presupposes a complete actuality, which is at once its beginning and its end. Such an actuality in relation to the moving world is God-a source of motion, but immovable himself. He is the eternal living Being, whose life is absolutely continuous, in whom is no variableness nor shadow of turning. As thus complete, He is the absolute good to which the whole creation moves. Such attributes are not to be found in any. thing material, for all matter must have something outside it which is not itself; nor in the highest forms of human action or production, which all involve a gradual realization of an end not yet attained. They are only to be found in pure "contemplation" (copía), in that action of thought where it is its own object; and where, accordingly, it has no void to fill, but is self-contained and its own fulness. In those moments of our own experience, when our whole intellectual self, instead of slowly realizing itself under painful conditions of sense and matter, seems to be before us at once, we have the faint image of the joy of the divine self-sufficiency.

We have not here in the slightest degree gone beyond Aristotle's own statements. We seem to have before us the Platonic idea of good, with new formulæ for expressing its activity and relation to the world. At first sight these formulæ seem to be greatly in advance of the Platonic, and to present the Deity as the fulness of the world instead of its emptiness, as immanent in it, yet distinct from it, as a man from his acts. The Divine reason, says Aristotle, moves the world as an object of intellectual desire." Now, as such desire implies a complete reciprocity between the subject and object of it, this properly conveys the idea that God is in the world, "desiring" his own realization, and that this desire underlies its process of development. This idea, however, if it once appears, is in no way carried out by Aristotle. Having apparently

idealized the world as a series of the "thoughts of God," which we may think after him, and of which each is in necessary relation to, and qualified by all the rest, he cannot sustain himself at this conception, but habitually treats the world as subject to conditions, which have a reality other than as objects of thought, and so cease to form an organic whole, which is the negation of each in particular. Thus limitation in space, instead of being a mode under which things are thought of, and which, when thought out effaces itself, is to him a fixed property of the real world, which of necessity excludes from it the indivisible God. So in a region of more practical importance, the moral action of man, as prompted by an unsatisfied desire, which implies something outside of, and as yet unappropriated by the subject, is, according to Aristotle, exclusive of the divine. Here again the externality effaces itself when thought of. However absolute it may seem to the subject of the desire at the time, we know that an object of desire which a man does not take into himself is no such object; that his character makes it what it is to him, while it on the other hand is an element in the formation of his character. The whole moral life is, in fact, a process in which, though it be sometimes like a stream that seems to run backward, man, as an unrealized self, is constantly fusing the skirts of the alien matter that surrounds him, and fashioning the world of his desires to a universe adequate to himself.

To the individual man, no doubt, the absoluteness of his limitations never wholly vanishes. The dream that it can do so is the frenzy of philosophy, and its practical effect may be seen in the immoral heresies of early Christendom, which were mostly crude attempts to realize in action ideas which for us have only a regulative and anticipatory truth. To us who in virtue of our animal properties are limited stages in the world's process, the process cannot be complete in the stages; the whole can never be fully seen in the part. Yet if we were simply thus limited, we could never raise a question about our limitation. We should be as incapable of error as of true knowledge, of sin as of moral perfection, if we could not place ourselves outside our sensations and distinguish ourselves from our desires. As it is, there is that in us which is the negation of each of our acts, yet relative to each of them, and making them what they are. In virtue of this presence, and not otherwise, can we conceive of a God who is in the world but not of it; the "causa immanens" of each stage in its development, yet not interchangeable with

any; realizing himself in its totality, yet prior to it as that without which it would not be a whole at all. If God cannot be described but by negatives, neither can the self within us; and if we can yet gradually come to know ourselves through the acts of which it is the negative, so far may we come to know God through the works which are his, though not himself. If in any true sense man can commune with the spirit within him, in the same he may approach God as one who, according to the highest Christian idea, "liveth in him." Man, however, is slow to recognise the divinity that is within himself, in his relation to the world. He will find the spiritual somewhere, but cannot believe that it is the natural rightly understood. What is under his feet and between his hands is too cheap and trivial to be the mask of eternal beauty. But half aware of the blindness of sense which he confesses, he fancies that it shows him the every-day world, from which he must turn away if he would attain true vision. If a prophet tell him to do some great thing, he will obey. He will draw up "ideal truth" from the deep, or bring it down from heaven, but cannot believe that it is within and around him. Stretching out his hands to an unknown God, he heeds not the God in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He cries for a revelation of Him, yet will not be persuaded that His hiding-place is the intelligible world, and that He is incarnate in the Son of Man, who through the communicated strength of thought is Lord also of that world.

With Aristotle, as the creative reason is at once before and after the development of the passive reason in us, its beginning and its end, so God is at once the "prime mover "of the world and the end to which it moves. But as the rigid limits of matter, in which, according to him, every act of "passive" thought is bound, prevent him from conceiving of the creative thought as present in its development, so his conception of the world of nature and man's affairs as subject to limitations, not transient, but fixed and final, prevents his thinking of God as immanent in it. God with him, as xwpiσtós, is not merely distinct from the world, but virtually out of relation to it; not the perfect actuality of which the world is the Sivapus, but an actuality absolutely årev dvváμews. His own conception of substance might have shown him a more excellent way, for substance, as we have seen, is xoptatós, as individual and separate from all things else, yet known through relations which are the negative of this mere individuality. This conception, however, he never works

other himself," there would be truth in this view. It would express that anticipatory assimilation of the world as spiritual which is the privilege of the philosopher, and which he shares with the poet and the saint. As the poet traversing the world of sense, which he spiritualizes by the aid of forms of beauty, finds himself ever at home, yet never in the same place, so the philosopher, while he ascends the courts of the intelligible world, is conscious of a presence which is always his own, yet always fresh, always lightened with the smile of a divine and eternal youth. Everything is new to him, yet nothing strange. The results of art and science, of religion and law, are all to him "workings of one mind, features of the same face; yet are the workings and the features infinite. No longer a servant, but a son, he rules as over his own house. In it he moves freely and with that confidence which comes of freedom. Such freedom and confidence, indeed, if divorced, as the Aristotelian doctrine divorced them, from the moral life, become a ridiculous conceit, fit for "the budge doctors of the Stoic fur," and are justly met with the reminder that

"There was never yet philosopher

Who could endure the toothache patiently, Howe'er he may have writ the style of Gods, And made a push at chance and sufferance." In their proper correlation to the moral life, however, as giving fruition beforehand of that of which the moral life is the gradual realization, they have the weakness, indeed, which belongs to all ideas not actualized, to all forms not filled up; yet are they not like faith without works, dead, but like faith as the Christian knows it, a permanent source of unhasting activity.

ART. V.-1. Sermons of English Divines.

V. Y.

2. Mediaval Preachers. By the Rev. J. MASON NEALE. 1856. 3. Post-Mediaval Preachers. By S. BARING-GOULD, M.A., Rivingtons, 1865.

THE English, since the Reformation, take it for all in all, may be called emphatically a "sermon-loving" people. We say this in the full hearing of the loud and impatient outery that is constantly rising from our intelligent coteries and from our public press in denunciation of the dulness of Sunday discourses; in face of the stupendous manufacture of platitudes which Dean Ramsay's

estimate of our four million annual homilies has statistically made evident. We complain of sermons, but, on the whole, we, the public generally and collectively, like them, and have always liked them, since we were a Protestant community. Our library shelves and our publishers' circulars, and the assertion of that cautious literary historian Hallam, prove the fact one way; our crowded churches and our constant church-building go far to prove it the other way; for though it is true that to go to church at all involves the necessity of hearing a sermon, as our present church services are constituted, and even those who dislike the preaching might not be prepared to give up the prayers, yet we doubt whether a remedy might not be found if the grumblers were not after all half-hearted in their complaints, or if the proportion of those who go in very great measure for the sermon's sake, were not the most considerable in almost every congregation. Why it is, when weknow so well, as soon as we hear the text, all the points that a preacher is going to bring before us, when we can turn to so many volumes of printed dis ourses far better, in all probability, than the one we are going to hear, why it is that we should not only tolerate, but on the whole desire, the weekly homily delivered in its viva voce form, it might be difficult to explain; but so it is, although unquestionably the thoughtful hearers of our day no longer find the sermon the stimulating food it used to be, when the attention of the highest intellects in the land was concentrated on sectarian strife and dogmas, and when every echo of the strife was suggestive; and, although, no doubt, its real strong. hold is to be found among that respectable but borné "middle class," whose mingled credulity and intolerance with all respect for their better qualities is really, we must fear, one of the causes which keeps down the calibre of the modern sermon to an inferior range of intelligence and reflection.

To the modern complaints, and to their possible remedies, we shall find occasion presently to advert. Our object at the outset of our article is to trace the rise of the venerable "institution" which still, with more or less of dignity, retains its footing among us, and then to indicate some of the types and fashions it has at different times assumed.

It is to the combination of customary respect with living interest and desire, that the British Protestant sermon owes the important position it has occupied from generation to generation in the national existence. The Church of the Reformation is not, like the Church of Rome, a body complete in itself,