pass by irrevocably when salvation would be possible; but the child will not thereby escape discipline altogether. If parents neglect their duty, society will not neglect its duty. The world has no weak pity for the spoiled pet of a foolish home. There is nothing more dreadful than the thought of a poor, untrained, self-willed creature, whose every whim has been law to its indulgent father and mother, suddenly launched upon the world to buffet with its billows. You who do not exercise firmness at an early stage of your children's training little know what miseries you may be storing up for the little one whom you worship and the circle in which your child must one day move. But a prudent parent need exercise no harshness in teaching the lesson of obedience. The surrender to parental authority may be as silent and unconscious as compliance with the law of gravitation. If the parent is a sphere of good sense and noble feeling, the little one will be kept in his orbit without a word of command being spoken by the parent, or a singleassertion of centrifugal force being made by the child. People talk about the struggle for existence ! The most pitiful and yet the most contemptible struggle for existence is that which too often goes on in the nursery between a weak parent and a

wilful child. On the other hand, what sight more beautiful than that of a meek and manly youth, to whom the wisdom of his father, the love glances of his mother, are a silent attracting power that draws his soul to heaven? A child has not been trained aright when only stern command brings about unwilling obedience. The properly trained child is the one that freely in the spirit of love complies with the wise parent's will. Wisdom in the parent is as essential as obedience in the child. And here, in the first stage of life, we have, with the best results, the weak yielding place to the strong.

Now let us follow the youth from the nursery and the schoolroom to the university, where it is popularly supposed that the best thing for him is to measure himself against other minds. Never was there a greater mistake. Who that has passed through a university course and has acquired some experience of life, does not look back with amused pity on the antics he played in the philosophy classes and in the college debating society? The raw youth, of limited mental vision and scanty ideas, did not scruple to make himself the touchstone of the greatest thoughts of the greatest minds. The ripe generalisations of a Plato, an Aristotle, a Kant, or a Hegel, had to be tested by his juvenile intellect

before they were deemed worthy of a place in his consciousness. His intellectual development was to be achieved by a series of duels between him and all the brilliant champions in the history of thought. And he supposed that his growth was going on most rapidly and successfully, when in the debating society he was inflating his own small figure in emulation of the great ones of the earth. A different attitude would have led to better results. Matthew Arnold tells us that the highest function of criticism is to reveal the best thoughts of the best minds. The wisest course for a student to follow is to own that there are thoughts of great men which are as yet beyond his grasp, and up to which, by patient docility, he must gradually rise. The Cartesian philosophic doubt will come in surely enough to perform its function in the great world development. But faith, not doubt, is the mood of mind that will lead the student into the sanctuary of thought. He must yield himself like a little child to the spiritual attraction of greater minds, and gradually be moulded into their image from glory to glory. It is not half so good a thing to be able to point out twenty of Aristotle's faults as to have assimilated one of his excellences. In a very deep sense, the culture of a soul is a process of self-sacrifice, a yielding up of the

crudities and the ignorances of the pupil to the ripe wisdom and the full knowledge of the master. Step by step the full strength of intellectual manhood is attained by the weak, in the innermost sanctuary of his spirit, giving place to the strong. And the highest stage of soul-development is reached when a man surrenders himself to the great governing principle, which one names the not-ourselves that makes for righteousness, and another finds incarnated in the Son of Man. There may be a difference of mere words, but there is identity of essence.

Pass we now from individual to social interests, and see how the principle applies there. Here is an imaginary case which has been put to me as an insuperable difficulty. Of two persons, one of whom is physically and intellectually strong, and the other is weak in both these respects, the latter voluntarily gives place to the former. But the weaker man, by the very act of voluntarily yielding, shows himself the spiritual superior of the other, and therefore is entitled to prevail. This is a specious objection when it is stated in such a general way. But the difficulty vanishes when we take a particular case. Suppose the particular work to be done is the government of a colony, for which the physically and mentally strong but selfish and ambitious man

is the best fitted. It does not follow that because the weaker man is ready to recognise the superior fitness of his stronger brother, the weaker man will therefore be the better governor of the colony. The strong man with all his selfishness may still be best entitled to the post, only he too will owe a reciprocal duty to the man, who in certain moral respects is his superior; and his moral weakness should yield to the spiritual strength of his rival in the way of eliminating selfishness, and discharging his governmental duties with a single eye to the public good.

Again, a worthless wretch is drowning in a river, and a man of first-rate usefulness is passing by. Does the theory that the weak should give place to the strong require the strong man to let the worthless drown? Assuredly not. It would be a moral Irish bull to say that the drowning wretch should, as a matter of duty, desire the useful man to leave him to his fate, and not run any risk that might rob the world of the strong man's services. But the world would lose more by the good man shunning danger in such a cause, of however great service he would subsequently be, than if he generously sacrificed himself to save the worthless.

The principle here inculcated would summarily