MR. PODS' ESSAYS.*

ONE of the least successful of some very interesting essays by Mr. Marcus Dods has been chosen by him to give the title to his volume. The picture of Erasmus as a man, indeed, attracts and repays attention, but a certain confusion arises when we try to understand the place which he occupied in the early days of the Reformation. Mr. Dods takes up the position, expressly rebated by Erasmus himself in his lifetime, that he was "the man who laid the egg which Luther hatched." In a letter written by Erasmus to John Gracchus, a Franciscan friar, in 1527, he says that "they lie most impudently who say that this Lutheran conflagration has been kindled by my writings, for no one has been able to point out one condemned proposition which I have in company with Luther. Collusion between me and Luther ! Yes, OA Hector colluded with Achilles !"

• Erasmus, and °the,- Essays. By Marcus Dods. London : Hodder and Ston;hton.

Mr. Dods does not, of course, stand alone in attributing to Erasmus in his early days an attitude at variance -with this disclaimer; but, as Professor Jebb has conclusively shown, its sincerity is perfectly consistent with the very real sympathy with the idea of Reformation which Erasmus unquestionably had. It may be said truly that the bitter satires of Erasmus on the abuses among the clergy, had their share in preparing men's minds for a revolt against the Papal Church ; but this was a result for which he neither looked nor wished. Mr. Marcus Dods does not throw him- self into the position of a man who was educated as_ a member of a Church claiming absolute authority over him.

He assumes tacitly throughout that Erasmus could not be in genuine opposition to Luther, because he was in sympathy

with reform. But reform need not be rebellion, and Luther, rightly or wrongly, judged rebellion to be necessary. Christian Europe was joined in one community of religious opinion under one authority. Against this authority Luther raised the standard of revolt. He attempted, not to produce a reformed Papacy, a Church free from grave scandals, even if this had been in earlier days his dream, but to do away with Papacy and visible Church alike; and, in fact, he succeeded in freeing half Europe from their dominion. Luther, indeed, enforced his own doctrines with

all the authoritativeness which attaches to a strong will and a strong nature—stet pro rations voluntas—but multiplied

authorities neutralise each other, and it was no accident that the lesson of private judgment ultimately prevailed. With Erasmus it was otherwise. Professor Jebb, in his well- known Rode Lecture, defines and illustrates his position in this respect very happily :—

" He (Erasmus) thinks of the Roman Church under the image of a temporal State. Grave abuses have indeed crept into the constitution, but the State contains within itself the only legiti- mate agencies for reform. A citizen is entitled to lift up his voice against the abuses ; but his loyalty to the head of the State must remain intact; if that head delays or declines to interfere, the citizen must be patient. And even in denouncing evils, he must consider whether there is not a point at which denunciation, as tending to excite turbulence, may not do more harm than good."

If Mr. Marcus Dods had understood this position, and had kept in view the distinction between zeal for moral reform and

an attitude of mental revolt, he would have presented a much clearer and truer picture of the great scholar. To miss it is, indeed, to fall in grasping the intellectual characteristics of his subject, and to lose the clue to a mind to which the Church as a power was so much, and the subtleties of theology so little.

Of the other essays before us, none has interested us more than the last,—that which deals with Marcus Aurelius. All are written in a clear, pure style, which occasionally rises into eloquence, notably in the treat- ment of the "Christian element in Plato ;" but nowhere is there such sympathetic analysis, or such power of thought, as the writer displays when he dwells upon the ideal religion of Marcus Aurelius, and shows us with lingering pity its in- herent hopelessness. Nothing is new under the sun, and the attempt to construct a religion without a basis of dogmatic belief is being made at the present time all round us. On such attempts, made again and again with pathetic hope- fulness, the same verdict must be passed as Mr. Dods

records in respect of the Roman Emperor's system. "It lacks root," he says, "in a defensible scheme of the universe." He gives a short and vivid sketch of the character aimed at in the Reflections, and its ethical basis, making free use of Marcus Aurelius's own words. To conquer the passions, to be "masculine, adult, political, and a Roman, and a ruler ; " to be "unsoiled of pleasure, unharmed by any pain, an-

touched by insult, feeling no wrong, dyed to the depths in justice, and with his whole heart welcoming what cometh to him and is ordained." To be " good, modest, trite, rational, equal-minded, magnanimous." To "labour not unwillingly,

nor without regard to the common interest," but to be indifferent to the praise or the opposition of men. "Sup-

pose that men kill thee, cut thee in pieces, curse thee; —what can these things do to prevent thy soul from remaining pure, wise, sober, just ? " The reward of

virtue is to be virtuous. All other incentives to virtue are

disposed of. Fame and all rewards in this life are to be despised, while the Emperor owns that he does not know if there is any future at all for men in another. In the prospect of death he comforts himself by the certainty that "death is according to Nature, and nothing is evil which is according to Nature." Nature, then, is wise and beneficent, and to live in harmony with Nature is the highest state of man, and he is not called upon to distress himself about "matters regarding which he has no certain information."

This is what has been called a kind "of common creed of wise men," and we cannot do better than put before our readers the eloquent passage in which Mr. Dods discusses how far it could ever be the religion of human nature,—of either its wisest or its weakest men :—

"There is no introduction of any doubtful sanctions ; no demand is made for a belief that cannot be yielded. Attention is fixed upon what is certain, and Morality is based on Conscience alone. That is to say, we find here the scheme of thought which is so anxiously desiderated by many at the present day—a scheme in which duty and human life shall stand upon their own feet, and in which we shall not first of all be asked to believe in things super- natural. Is not this scheme of the Emperor's sufficient, and why should we puzzle ourselves any more about miracles and immor- tality and a personal God ? The question is answered as soon as put. The craving for a scheme of life which shall be independent of all that is beyond common knowledge is stayed, as we read these earnest yet saddening pages. Every reader is infallibly drawn to admire and love this soul that is boldly pioneering through the jungle and cutting a path for others while forcing his own way through. But as you watch him, you feel on the point of crying out to him that already the true path is found and cleared. For through all his manly cheeriness and courage, you see the expression of settled melancholy on his face. It is the admirable but most pitiable courage of the captain that stands to the last on the bridge giving his orders steadily, while he knows that the ship is going down beneath his feet. You admire and love, and learn from him, as you admire the blind man who rapidly threads his way through the crowd, but you cannot but think how pitiful it is that, when light is there, he should not enjoy it. For, after all, his scheme of thought and belief is the offspring of his individual character, and lacks that basis in reason which would fit it for propagation among men of all kinds. He himself had strength enough to live a manly and unselfish life, in the faith that all things are wisely ordered, and that he was set in this world to do his best. But if any one asked him why he believed and acted thus, he had no answer. Nay, he himself clearly saw the pettiness and paltriness of human life ; he found it, to use his own strong expression, mere dirt and darkness' (v., 10), and wished himself out of it. What, then, waa the inducement to do one's best for such a world ? Was it for the world's sake ? Why labour for a race which is continually in a state of flux, one generation of fools and greedy cowards giving place to another generation of the same ? Was it for his own sake? What was the inducement to sacrifice pleasure, to strive and sweat and toil, to attain a character ever eluding the grasp, and even at the last only shining before him as an unattained ideal? Hope was entirely wanting in his scheme, and without hope for the race and for the individual, most men, though happily not all, will prefer and will defend the Epicurean motto : Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' In fine, the element of belief which our modern philosophers struggle to discard is that very element the absence of which proved fatal to the ethics of Marcus. His system stands, like his own statue, beautiful, perfect, but cold and ineffective as marble. And that which it lacked to give it life was the belief that there is an unseen spiritual world and a life beyond the grave. Spasmodic efforts will always be made to find the meaning and reason of human we within itself; but all such efforts fail. You might as well seek the reason of the earth's orbit, and of all the changes that pass in the earth's climate in itself, and with no reference to anything beyond."

Marcus Aurelius stands in history in close juxtaposition to the heroes of early Christianity. The flower of heathen morality was to come to its perfection on the soil wet with the blood of Christian martyrs. Would not Mr. Dods have penetrated still further into the causes of the ineffectiveness of the ethics of the Reflections, if he had drawn the contrast which this juxtaposition suggests ? It was not love of magna- nimity, honesty, benevolence, nor even the hope of a future life, alone which nerved young boys and girls to suffer a death of torture. It was the love of a Personal Divine Christ. As the march of Christian heroes passes on through suffering and death to final conquest, the most winning of heathen teachers offers to man an alternative creed. But he can give them not only no hope for the future, but no object for their love in the present. Love is as essential as hope to the per- fection of Christian constancy. "Hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us."