will notice, in the letters of Heloise, the thoroughly human cry of a sensitive heart for recognition by some word of gentle sympathy—a cry uttered often and piteously, but in vain, stifling itself at last through heroic self-devotion into a sob and then into silence. He will be reminded, by the allusions of Heloise, of the absolute self-surrender which has withheld nothing from him, and of the long neglect and withholding of confidence which have requited it. He will question the genuineness of that monastic delicacy which can appeal so humanly for sympathy in its own behalf, but can so inhumanly withhold like sympathy from one to whom it owes so much.

Turning to the autobiography, like natural reasons for divergent impression are readily discoverable. For on the one side the circumstances are genuinely pathetic in themselves; there is an impressive air of ingenuousness in the telling, and the intensity of self-denunciation does fairly suggest exaggeration through over-sensitiveness. But, again, the prosaic reader will be apt to brush aside sentiment with the remark that the story professes not to be a confession of wrong-doing, but a "story of misfortunes," displaying abundance of shame and resentment, but no contrition; the writer being forward to call himself a fool," but never a villain.

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When astronomers find the heavenly bodies unaccountably falling into eccentricity of movement, they suspect, and begin to seek for, some hitherto unrecognized disturbing cause. The like suspicion and the like search seem naturally suggested in case of curious critical aberrations such as are here disclosed. If such a clue can be discovered, our recapitulation of contradictions will not have been in vain. Perhaps the very contradictions may be as instructive as concurrence would have been. More than once the old proverb has fulfilled itself: "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness."

One cannot fail to be impressed with the circumstance that the most heartily sympathetic of the interpreters of Abelard are precisely those who most earnestly protest against literal acceptance of his words. It appears paradoxical that the very men who believe most in him should believe least in his account of himself. Yet it may not be an inexplicable nor indefensible attitude; for it may reasonably be maintained that with increasing richness and complexity of nature the man becomes less capable of reporting himself or being reported in human speech. For words cannot be safely gauged and passed by mathematic computation, like cord-wood or cotton cloth. Like all representative currency, they are liable to shrink and swell in value, and must be dealt with accordingly. They are invested with an atmosphere of personality, of which they are the creatures and expression. Like clouds, therefore, which take on perpetual and subtle change of form and hue, and sometimes move, above and below, in opposite courses, the more grotesque and inexplicable their transitions become the more clearly do they hint of the intricacy of the occult aerial forces behind them.

If the genuine words and the undisputed circumstances of the life of

Abelard be taken as thus indicative of the personal atmosphere of the man, it may reasonably be inferred to have been an extraordinary one, rich in elemental forces, breezy, electric, and capable of high temperature. But these forces were as ill-adjusted as they were tremendous; so that the sky was restless, tempestuous, explosive. It cannot be fairly doubted that he was a man of large contents-mental, passional, volitional-nor that these failed to be, in scripture phrase, "fitly joined together and compacted." The Damascus blade could take an edge keen enough to cut the floating gauze, and yet could bend upon itself until point touched hilt. The hardness that permitted the one and the toughness that endured the other were not in the original metal, but due to the exquisite art of the metalman. By the dexterous balancing of fire against water he had learned how to work in the blade that still more dexterous balancing of hardness against toughness which is known as temper," on the exactitude of which the excellence of his work depended.

Unhappily, fire and water seem to have played, unharnessed and untamed, upon the crude elements in Abelard. For lack of some Damascus metalman, the forging went awry. Rarely has keener falchion flashed in dialectic tournament than that which cut down so many mighty men and won so loud plaudits from the multitude in the famous University of Paris. But the combats were relatively fruitless, and the victory was insecure. Hardness without complementary elasticity brings brittleness. The very keenness of edge which brings present victory must be bought at the cost of thinness and consequent frailty of the weapon. So it befell Abelard. He flashed and broke. Like many another, he had "won heights which he was not competent to keep."

If it be true that the temper of Abelard was thus imperfect, if the incoherencies, the fickleness, the self-stultifications of his career, are to be thus accounted for, then the contradictions of the critics are not hard to comprehend; they are but magnified reports of elemental contradictions in the man himself. Abundant phenomena, supplied by the records, strongly indicate that the idiosyncrasies of Abelard are due to such a lack of healthful balance and interplay of the intellectual, emotional, and moral powers. Most conspicuous in his relations with Heloise are the indications of a curious walling apart of intellect and passion. In the first outburst of his sensuous nature, his intellectual energies are overwhelmed and swept down the stream helplessly. He is like a tropic sun, whose excessive heat evokes a tumid haze in which its own light is swallowed up. But the noontide

of feeling passes. The stately intellect resumes its sway. The warm

mists are gone. There is unobstructed light again; but, as revealed in the later correspondence, its rays are pale and cold as those of the distant, burned-out moon. If it seem incredible that passionate animalism and passionless intellectualism should thus coexist in the same nature, without interfusion or interaction, it is needful only to appeal to literary history for confirmatory parallels. More than once has genius, towering above its

neighbors, seemed chastely beautiful through the haze of oratorical or poetic sentiment, like a mountain robed in virgin snow. But a nearer and deeper glance has shown the scarred sides encrusted with congealed lava, the abiding witness to hidden fires beneath whose blazing outflow tender life has been destroyed. The conduct of Abelard in many of its features and the stinging reproaches of Heloise in her letters certainly lend color to the belief that in him passion had never been truly endowed with those richer elements of vitality, by the help of which alone it ripens and mellows into love.

Closely related to the infirmity thus specified is that "sad lack of moral earnestness" by which Archbishop Trench is most of all impressed. There is in the healthful moral nature an alertness and clearness of response that gives its judgments affinity with sensation, and yet a steadfastness that gives them the aspect of rational conviction. The co-operation of the instinctive and deliberative faculties thus implied may be too subtle for analysis, but its reality is too obvious to be denied, and the evil consequences that spring from its disturbance are serious in the extreme. Cardinal Newman seems to point rather vaguely at this disjunction of forces, meant for united action, when he describes Abelard as a man of "weak head and heart, weak in spite of intellectual power." Taken each by itself, it would be untrue to describe either head or heart as weak in Abelard. As a philosopher, his fame was world-wide, and, apparently, justly earned. And whether "heart" be taken to mean emotional or moral instinct, he did not lack heart; for he was sentimental even to morbidness, and he was not insensible to the ideal distinction between right and wrong. But the heart ought to nourish and suffuse the brain, and the brain ought to modulate the heart. Here, again, Abelard was singularly weak corporately, while elementally strong.

His autobiography being impeached as evidential of facts recited, might not safely be used to decide upon them; but no such suspicion attaches to it when cited as illustrative in form and tone of the traits of the writer. Seeking to lay aside wholly all prepossessions derived from other sources, let us try to surmise what impression it would make upon a reader who, being ignorant of the author, should come upon it for the first time. He would probably remark the intensity of self-accusation in it, but only as one of several equally conspicuous and cognate features. He would detect a tone of sentimental exaggeration in every allusion to the personality of the writer a magnifying of personal woes, implying an appeal for pity, and of personal wrongs as begging sympathetic indignation against foes; a grotesque self-conceit that lauds itself, exposes itself in minute unreserve, and condemns itself with a kind of theatrical vehemence that betrays the conscious presence of an audience. He would find evidence of the recog nition of the hatefulness of injustice and of the certainty of retribution for transgression. But as the injustice denounced is always that of others, and as the sufferings of the narrator are invariably described as calamities,

he will be puzzled to decide whether he means to represent himself as a sufferer for sin, or rather a victim of his own indiscretion and the spite of others. On the whole, he would feel sensible of a certain lack of delicacy, dignity, sobriety, and equipoise throughout.

And yet he could not mistake or ignore an open-heartedness and blank unconsciousness of eccentricity that almost disarms criticism. It is the self-engaged, artless, petulant, pleading cry of the hurt and indignant child; a cry of indiscriminate resentment against that which hurts, whether person or thing; the cry, in fact, of a nature as yet unripe, untrained, and unpoised, whose moral judgments are, therefore, correspondingly crude. (To be concluded.)

IV. THE PRAISE OF THE SANCTUARY.

BY WILLIAM M. TAYLOR, D.D., NEW YORK CITY.

PRAISE may be defined to be the ascription of glory to God for His works in creation, providence, and redemption, or the expression of gratitúde to Him for His goodness, in words of rhythmic cadence and poetic fervor, sung to appropriate music. It is akin to prayer, and, indeed, in some of its outpourings is hardly distinguishable from it save in the measured form which it assumes and the melody to which it is chanted. But in their rudimentary features the two are easily marked off from each other. Prayer in its simplest form is the making of a request, and praise in its root idea is the giving of glad thanks to God; the one is the exclamation of a soul in need, the other is the joyful overflow of a full heart. But both are addressed to God; and as on earth we are constantly travelling between our own emptiness and God's fulness, it is not difficult to understand how it comes that the one merges so often into the other. If, with many, we regard adoration as included in prayer, that is the very essence of praise; while again, if we take the Psalms of David as models of praise, we shall find that the elements of confession and petition enter into them as frequently as those of thanksgiving and adoration. Nor is the philosophy of all this difficult to discover, for the reception of an answer to prayer stimulates the heart to praise; and, on the other hand, the joyful rehearsal of God's goodness to us in the past encourages us to pray more fervently for blessings to come. Still, though they thus run into each other, the predominant feature of the one is request, while that of the other is thanksgiving; and the Apostle James has given us the differentia of each when he says: "Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms." They are co-ordinate branches of the same tree-both growing out of our dependence on God and our trust in Him; but in the one that trust is expressed in supplication and in the other in song; the one is a cry for assistance, the other is a celebration of deliverance; the one is a miserere, the other a hallelujah.

Now in praise, as in prayer, the one great essential is sincerity. First and before all things else must be the melody of the heart. We must appreciate the grandeur of the works for which we give God the glory. The deliverance which we celebrate we must ourselves have experienced. The gratitude which we express we must really feel. This is fundamental. No matter how beautiful the words which we use or the music to which we sing them, there is no real praise unless the heart be in them; while if the soul truly appropriates the sentiment and utters it as its own, the praise is acceptable to God even though the voice may be harsh and the music may seem anything but melodious to a cultured ear.

But while this must never be lost sight of, we must remember, also, that for praise we need the poetic form and the musical expression. And between these two, again, we must discriminate in favor of the poetic form. The words are more important than the tune. This does not mean, however, that the tune is of no importance whatever. On the contrary, in its own place, the tune demands special attention. It must be appropriate to the sentiment, so that there may be no division in the soul of the singer, the words taking it in one direction, and the music in another. It ought to be reverent in its associations, partaking of the majesty of Him to whom it is sung, and not carrying our thoughts to the opera or the theatre. It ought to be so simple in its structure that even a child may learn it without difficulty, and so strong in its texture that it may bear with ease the weight of the united voices of the great congregation. It ought, in fine, to be so wedded to its own spiritual song that any other words would seem to be unfitted to it, and that the moment it is sounded it will bring up the same song to the memory. The music thus should be as perfectly the expression of the words as the words are the expression of the thoughts of the singer; and so in praise, we have a trinity corresponding in some sense to the Trinity of Him to whom we raise it-the heart, the words, and the music-and it is then only in highest perfection when we can say "these three are one."

But now restricting ourselves more especially to the substance of praise, which, as I have already said, is concerned with the works of God in nature, providence, and redemption, and is the poetic expression of the emotions of the heart regarding these things, it seems clear that if a man has the poetic gift and can make a song for himself on such topics, he is at perfect liberty to use it in the praise of God. Or if he finds that the words of another thoroughly correspond to his feelings at the time, he may appropriate them and make them the vehicle of his devotion. And what one may thus do for himself the members of a congregation may do for themselves. But the great majority of us must be content with the words of others; for as it is not every musician that can compose a tune, so it is not every Christian that can write a hymn. True, there are many hymns. which, after they have been written, seem to be so natural and so appropriate to all believers, that each feels that it has given expression to that within.