eagerly, at the call of the President, to wage a warfare of blood with weapons of death? Are we in earnest, or are we trifling? Who believes for one moment that the attitude of the Church is consistent with a profound conviction that the nations are all to be brought into subjection to Jesus Christ at the earliest possible day? Every few months a paragraph goes the round of the religious papers that the growth of communicants in the evangelical Churches is more rapid than that of the general population, and many good people breathe a sigh of relief when they read the statement. But is this all that can be said? Is it enough that in a race between the children of the world and the children of God the latter are able to keep a little ahead? How long will it take to save the world if nothing better than this can be achieved? A thousand years will not suffice for the task, unless the whole body of Christian believers can be roused to a new life, inspired with a new spirit, filled with new courage, and led forward to assured victory.

The proposal so imperfectly set forth in this paper may have many defects, but no one should feel that it proposes too much. In God's name let us for once act as if we really believed in Him whose name we bear. Let us at least attempt something worthy of the commission we have received, worthy of the Gospel which we have so long proclaimed to the world, and worthy of the stupendous task which God has committed into our hands. The limited success of the past century must not be our standard for that upon which we are entering. We ought to do more, win more souls, and accomplish more good work in the first decade of the new century than we have done in the last five decades of the century now closing. With God's blessing we can do it, and much more than do it, and, without a thought of shrinking back, we should bravely and trustfully address ourselves to the task.

J. M. Thobun

ART. II.-JEAN VALJEAN.

THE hero is not a luxury, but a necessity. We can no more do without him than we can do without the sky. Every best man and woman is at heart a hero worshiper. Emerson acutely remarks that all men admire Napoleon because he was themselves in possibility. They were in miniature what he was developed. For a like though nobler reason, all men love heroes. They are ourselves, grown tall, puissant, victorious, and sprung into nobility, worth, service. The hero electrifies the world; he is the lighting of the soul, illuminating our sky, clarifying the air, making it thereby salubrious and delightful. What any elect spirit did inures to the credit of us all. A fragment of Lowell's clarion verse may stand for the biography of heroism:

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,

And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb

To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime

Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time,

such being the undeniable result and history of any heroic service.

But the world's hero has changed. The old hero was Ulysses, or Achilles, or Æneas. The hero of Greek literature is Ulysses, as Æneas is in Latin literature. But, to our modern thought, these heroes miss of being heroic. We have outgrown them as we have outgrown dolls and marbles. To be frank, we do not admire Eneas nor Ulysses. Æneas wept too often and too copiously. He impresses us as a big crybaby. Of this trinity of classic heroes-Ulysses, Æneas, and Achilles-Ulysses is least obnoxious. This statement is cold and unsatisfactory and apparently unappreciative, but is candid and just. Lodge, in his Some Accepted Heroes, has done service in rubbing the gilding from Achilles and showing that he was gaudy and cheap. We thought the image was gold which was, in fact, thin gilt. Achilles sulks in his tent, while Greek armies are thrown back defeated from the Trojan gates. In nothing is he admirable save that when his pouting fit is over

and when he rushes into the battle he has might, and overbears the force opposing him as a wave does some petty obstacle. But no higher quality shines in his conquest. He is vain, brutal, and impervious to high motive. In Eneas one can find little attractive save his filial regard. He bears Achates on his shoulders from toppling Troy; but his wanderings constitute an Odyssey of commonplaces, or chance, or meanness. No one can doubt Vergil meant to create a hero of commanding proportions, though we, looking at him from this far remove, find him uninteresting, unheroic, and vulgar; and why. the goddess should put herself out to allay tempests in his behalf, or why hostile deities should be disturbed to tumble seas into turbulence for such a voyager, is a query. He merits neither their wrath nor their courtesy. We confess to liking heroes of the old Norse mythology better. They, at least, did not cry, nor grow voluble with words, when obstacles obstructed the march. They possess the merit of tremendous action. Æneas, in this regard, is the inferior of Achilles. Excuse us from hero worship, if Æneas be hero. In this old company of heroes Ulysses is easy superior. Yet the catalogue of his virtues is an easy task. Achilles was a huge body associated with little brain, and had no symptom of sagacity. In this regard Ulysses outranks him and commands our respect. He has diplomacy and finesse. He is not simply a huge frame, wrestling men down because his bulk surpasses theirs. He has a thrifty mind. He is the man for councils of war, fitted to direct with easy mastery of superior acumen. His fellowwarriors called him "crafty," because he was brainy. He was schooled in stratagem, by which he became author of Ilium's overthrow. Ulysses was shrewd, brave, balanced, possibly, though not conclusively patriotic-a sort of Louis XI, so far as we may form an estimate, but no more. He was selfish, immoral, barren of finer instincts, who was loved by his dog and by Penelope, though for no reason we can discover. Ten years he fought before Troy, and ten years he tasted the irony of the seas-in these episodes displaying bravery and fortitude, but no homesick love for Penelope, who waited at the tower of Ithaca for him, a picture of constancy sweet enough to hang on the palace walls of all these centuries. We do not think to

love Ulysses, nor can we work ourselves up to the point of admiration; and he is the best hero classic Rome and Greece can offer. No. Register, as the modern sense of the classic hero, we do not like him.

He is not admirable, yet is not totally lacking in power to command attention. What is his quality of appeal to us? This: he is action, and action thrills us. The old hero was. in general, brave and brilliant. He had the tornado's movement. His onset redeems him. He blustered, was spectacu lar, heartless, and did not guess the meaning of purity; but he was warrior, and the world enjoys soldiers. And this motley hero has been attempted in our own days. He was archaic, but certain have attempted to make him modern. Byron's Don Juan is the old hero, only lost to the old hero's courage.

But what was the old hero's chief failure? The answer is, He lacked conscience. Duty had no part in his scheme of action, nor in his vocabulary of word or thought. Our word "virtue" is the bodily importation of the old Roman word "virtus," but so changed in meaning that the Romans could no more comprehend it than they could the Copernican theory of astronomy. With them "virtus" meant strength-that only—a battle term. The solitary application was to fortitude in conflict. With us virtue is shot through and through with moral quality, as a gem is shot through with light, and monop olizes the term as light monopolizes the sky. This change is radical and astonishing, but discloses a change which has revo lutionized the world. The old hero was conscienceless-a characteristic apparent in Greek civilization. What Greek patriot, whether Themistocles or Demosthenes, applied conscience to patriotism? They were as devoid of practical conscience as a Metope of the Parthenon was devoid of life. Patriotism was a transient sentiment. Demosthenes could become dumb in the presence of Philip's gold; and in a fit of pique over mistreatment at the hands of his brother citizens Themistocles became a traitor and, expatriated, dwelt a guest at the Persian court. Strangely enough-and it is passing strange-the most heroic personality in Homer's Iliad, the Greek's "Bible of heroisms," was not the Atridæ, whether Agamemnon or Menelaus, not Ajax nor Achilles, nor yet Ulysses, but was

Hector the Trojan, who appears to greater advantage as hero than all the Grecian host. And Homer was a Greek! This is strange and unaccountable irony. Say once more, The old hero's lack was conscience. He, like his gods and goddesses who were deified infamies, was a studied impurity. With his lewdness and rodomontade he is excused from the stage. We have had enough of him. We are done with the actor, and want the man. And this new hero is proof of a new life in the soul, and, therefore, more welcome than the glad surprise of the first meadow lark's song upon the brown meadows of the early spring.

A reader need not be profound, but may even be superficial and yet discover that Jean Valjean is fashioned after the likeness of Jesus. Michael Angelo did not more certainly model the dome of St. Peter's after Brunelleschi's dome of the Duomo than Hugo has modeled his Valjean after Christ. Plainly, Valjean is meant for a hero. Victor Hugo loves heroes, and has skill and inclination to create them. His books are biographies of heroism of one type or another. No book of his is heroless. In this attitude he differs entirely from Thackeray and Hawthorne, neither of whom are particularly enamored of heroes. Hawthorne's romances have not, in the accepted sense, a single hero. He does not attempt building a character of central worth. He is writing a drama, not constructing a hero. In a less degree this is true of Thackeray. He truly loves the heroic, and on occasion depicts it. Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome are mighty men of worth, but are exceptions to Thackeray's method. He pokes fun at them, even. Vanity Fair he terms a novel without a hero. He photographs a procession. The Virginians contains no character which can aspire to centrality, much less might. He, loving heroes, attempts concealing his passion, and, if accused of it, denies the accusation. After reading all his writings no one. could for a moment claim that Thackeray was the biographer of heroes. He is a biographer of meanness and times and sham aristocracy and folks, and can, when he cares to do so, portray heroism lofty as tallest mountains. With Hugo all is different. He will do nothing else than dream and depict heroism and heroes. He loves them with a passion fervent