torious in the field, the Turks still held the fortresses, and two Turkish armies were on the frontiers, prepared to exterminate the rebels. But, through the diplomatic intervention of Russia, they were not allowed to proceed on their mission of blood. Negotiations were commenced; some of the rights of self-government were conceded to the Servians, and Milosch was officially recognised as their Prince. At the time of the Greek Revolution, when freedom again shone on the illustrious land that in old days echoed the lays of Homer and the thunders of Demosthenes, the Russians assumed a bolder attitude; and the Sultan was so intimidated that he consented to the demands made on behalf of Servia. He issued a HattiSheriff, containing the provision that the Servians 'might freely exercise in their country their mode of worship, and follow their own religion; that the administration of the internal affairs of their country might be under their own authority, and that the different kinds of taxes, revenues and capitation duties might be all consolidated into one sum.' Milosch's position as Prince was confirmed, and he had an opportunity of conferring signal benefits on the country; but his wisdom as a ruler was not equal to his courage as a soldier; and by his tyrannical measures he provoked such opposition to his government that, in 1839, he was compelled to abdicate in favour of his eldest son, Milan. The latter was in such bad health that it was not thought prudent to inform him of the startling changes that had been effected; and it is said that he died without knowing that he had been Prince. He was succeeded by one of his brothers; but the administration of the new ruler was not in harmony with the popular sentiment; and, being deserted by the soldiers whom he had engaged to uphold his authority, he resigned his prerogatives, and retired into Austria. A Provisional Government was formed, and Kara Georgevich, the son of the great Servian hero, Kara George, was invested with the princely honours. He had an enlightened perception of the wants of the country, and endeavoured to assimilate it to other European States, by forming roads and establishing schools and other progressive institutions. Had he been allowed to carry out his intentions, he would have done much to advance Servia in the march of civilization; but the adherents of Milosch conspired against him, and he was deposed. Milosch was recalled, and reigned until his death in 1860, when his son, Michael Obrenovich, became head of the Principality. In 1862 there was a serious quarrel between Turkey and Servia, in which the European Powers interested themselves; and, after a long diplomatic contention, the Turks agreed to withdraw from those Servian fortresses, which up to that time they had garrisoned. When the withdrawal was completed, the only sign of Turkish sovereignty in the land was the Sultan's standard on the walls of Belgrade. Prince Michael was assassinated in 1868, and his son Milan, the present Prince, was declared his successor. Since that time the lines of Servian history have run into the smoke and flame of war, and have been too carefully read by the public to need repetition here. The struggle between Servia and Turkey is intermitted; but it is not likely that Turkey will again be allowed to domineer over the Servian people, or to repeat the robberies and massacres of the past. There may be, if not a great, yet a prosperous, future for the land. Its soil is fertile, its inhabitants are stalwart and high-spirited, and, with the light of a purer religion irradiating its ancient churches and cloisters, it could scarcely fail to take a worthy place in the commonwealth of European States. FAITH AND PROGRESS: BY THE REV. W. L. WATKINSON. MANY of the disciples of progress regard the entire elimination of the spiritual from society as the grand condition of its development. The Church-the great symbol of the supernatural-is pronounced the archenemy of progress; and the first duty of all philanthropists-of all who aim to realise a social millennium -is to discredit the Church's faithby which we mean here generally the sensibility to an unseen universe-as fatal to the freedom and growth of the nation. They say: It allures man into false paths; disturbs him with mistaken, and exhausts him with unreachable, ideals; that the Divine existence, the invisible universe, a spiritual law, the immortality of the soul, are doctrines which have no object in man's life; the single duty of man is to confine his attention to earth, its immediate and positive interests and pleasures. Why lose this life by grasping at another? Let us longer, then, delude ourselves with religious ideas and hopes; renounce these large estates in the moon;' and, cultivating enthusiastically the earthly life, we shall find in it no unworthy inheritance. The aim of this Paper is to show, on the contrary, that the progress of society springs from man's spiritual instincts and aspirations; and that to discredit the spirituality of human nature is to inflict a fatal blow on human progress. no I. We will consider the subject first, in its relation to Science. Should the spiritual element be eliminated from society, science would discover that it had lost the fount of its inspiration. The secret power of science is to be found in man's sense of spirituality and infinity. Many consider that the first qualification for the scientific vocation is a cold, logical mind; the absence of passion, enthusiasm, imagination. The ideal scientist of this school of opinion would be recognised, we presume, in the philosopher Cavendish, of whom his biographer writes: 'He did not love; he did not hate; he did not hope; he did not fear; he did not worship as others do. He separated himself from his fellow-men, and apparently from God. There was nothing earnest, enthusiastic, heroic or chivalrous in his nature, and as little was there anything mean, grovelling or ignoble. He was almost passionless......An intellectual head, thinking; a pair of wonderfully acute eyes, observing; and a pair of very skilful hands, experimenting or recording, are all that I realise in reading his Memorials. His brain seems to have been but a calcu lating engine; his eyes inlets of vision, not fountains of tears; his hands, instruments of manipulation, which never trembled with emotion, never clasped together in adoration, thanksgiving or despair; his heart only an anatomical organ, necessary for the circulation of the blood.' * But can we imagine that cold, mechanical, emotionless, unspiritual men of this type could sustain permanently a vital and progressive science? Cavendish must be regarded as a curiosity in science; for, with very rare exceptions, the great heralds of scientific progress have been men of exquisite sensibility, prescient imagination, prophetic ideality. Many even of our naturalistic writers are free to confess that a cold, sceptical realism is inimical to scientific progress; and a little reflection will show that, in order to signal success, science requires a kind of faith: some vision of the invisible, some conviction of things not seen; the sensibility which takes delicate hints from things pre * Life of Cavendish, by Dr. Wilson, p. 105. sent to divine what is distant and occult; this faith-faculty is as much the characteristic of the heroes of science as is religious faith of the princes of God. Dreams go before discoveries. The present age is proudly practical; and, at the approach of an idealist, men scornfully exclaim, 'Behold! this dreamer cometh.' Let us temper our scorn. As the mirror which Alexander fixed on the summit of the pharos is said to have revealed the approach of fleets at a distance of a hundred leagues, so great discoveries have first mirrored themselves in the imagination of sensitive and prophetic thinkers; and thus society at large has been put on the alert, and prepared to hail the richly-freighted argosies. Dr. Gladstone, in a lecture on Faraday, says: 'But this passion for experimenting, and this manipulative skill, would never have made him the great philosopher he was. If he had worked constantly, of course he must have made some discoveries; but if s man merely makes apparatus, sets that apparatus working, and watches what happens, without any particular view, Nature is not likely to give him very satisfactory or very instructive answers. Faraday did not do that. He usually had some idea or conception in his mind; and then the experiments were devised so as to prove the truth or falsity of that idea. He was greatly indebted to his wonderful imagination.' In a very remarkable chapter, Buckle contends for the indispensableness of poetry to philosophy. With all his hard materialistic theory, this author is constrained to recognise the value of the deductive method of reasoning; and it is refreshing to hear the prophet of mechanism pouring benedictions on emotion, sensibility, imagination. He thus vindicates Black, the discoverer of latent heat, whose method of reasoning was that of mystics and theologians: These, like many other of the specula * tions of this great thinker, will find small favour with those purely inductive philosophers, who not only suppose-perhaps rightly-that all our knowledge is, in its beginning, built upon facts, but who countenance, what seems to me, the very dangercus opinion, that every increase of knowledge must be preceded by an increase of facts. To such men it will appear that Black had far better have occupied himself in making new observations, or devising new experiments, than in thus indulging his imagination in wild and unprofitable dreams. They will think that these flights of fancy are suitable, indeed, to the poet, but unworthy of that severe accuracy, and of that close attention to facts, which ought to characterize a philosopher. In England especially there is, among physical inquirers, an avowed determination to separate philosophy from poetry, and to look upon them, not only as different, but as hostile......That the imagination has a dangerous tendency is undeniable. But they who object to it on this account, and who would, therefore, divorce poetry from philosophy, have, I apprehend, taken a too limited view of the functions of the human mind, and of the manner in which truth is obtained. There is, in poetry, a divine and prophetic power, and an insight into the turn and aspect of things, which, if properly used, would make it the ally of science instead of the enemy. By the poet, Nature is contemplated on the side of the emotions; by the man of science, on the side of the understanding. But the emotions are as much a part of us as the understanding they are as truthful; they are as likely to be right.'* : Lastly, Professor Tyndall has given us an elaborate and well-known plea for The Scientific Use of the Imagination. Some of the old philosophers maintained that all the solid matter in the solar system may be contained within a nutshell; the Professor affirms that the quantity of matter in our sky could be condensed into a snuff-box; and although this seems to indicate some falling off in speculative boldness in the modern scientific world, as compared with the ancient; yet, in the Address from which we quote, the Professor shows very forcibly how much his own fame rests on the History of Civilization, vol. iii., f. 377, ctc. vigour of the faculty in question. From the testimonies thus adduced from various quarters-testimonies which are open to no suspicion of sentimental or theological bias, we may believe what Professor Tyndall declares The faculty of imagination is the divining rod of the man of science.' Now, we are quite aware that the sensibility to the unseen which the Scriptures call faith, and the imagination for which men of science plead, are not one and the same thing; but we do believe that they are so intimately associated that to shut out from the human mind the grand ideas and hopes of the spiritual universe is to break the divining rod of the man of science.' As faith in the supernatural dies out, the mood of faith in regard to all questions will be destroyed; and when the philosopher ceases to be poet and prophet, and becomes positivist alone, he will find at he has exchanged the magical rod which opened the unknown, for the blind man's walking-stick with which he can hardly grope his way on plainest pavement. Already some of our writers observe a defect of inventiveness and originality in our age as the result of our intensively secular tendencies. Let Mr. Buckle testify once more : The scientists of the seventeenth century, by using hypotheses more boldly than our scientists, and by indulging their imagination more frequently, did certainly effect greater things, in comparison with the then state of knowledge, than our contemporaries, with much superior resources, have been able to achieve. The magnificent generalizations of Newton and Harvey could never have been completed in an age absorbed in one unvarying round of experiments and observations......I can hardly doubt that one of the reasons why we, in England, made such wonderful discoveries during the seventeenth century, was because that century was also the great age of English poetry. The two mightiest intellects our country has produced are Shakes peare and Newton; and that Shakespeare should have preceded Newton was, I believe, no casual or unmeaning event. Shakespeare and the poets sowed the seed which Newton and the philosophers reaped. They first impregnated the mind of England with bold and lofty conceptions; they taught the men of their generation to crave after the unseen; they taught them to pine for the ideal, and to rise above the visible world of sense. The impetus which they communicated survived their own day; and, like all great movements, was felt in every department of thought. But now it is gone; and, unless I am greatly mistaken, physical science is at present suffering from its absence......Our age, great as it is, and, in nearly all respects, greater than any the world has yet seen, has a certain material, unimaginative, and unheroic character, which has made several observers tremble for the future.'* So far, then, is the reign of doubt of a negative philosophy, of a hard realism-from producing the glorious results which some sceptical writers presage, it seems more likely-their own prophets being the judges-to reduce great discoveries to a minimum. In their crusade against faith, the scientific authorities overlook the fact that they are proscribing the rich, penetrative, suggestive power to which they are indebted for their grand achievements. Mr. Buckle assures us that the spirit of poetry must be incorporated with the spirit of science, if science is to lift the veil upon new worlds. Let us remember that the spirit of poetry would expire in an age of mere secularism. O, some answer, we need not that our thoughts should wander through eternity' to inspire a grand national poetry; enough that the bard feast his imagination with the fairy tales of science,' and the splendours of the physical universe which lies about us. A few words from a distinguished Comtist will show what regard will be paid to the Muses when materialism reigns supreme: 6 We pass to the earth, our common mother, as the general language of man *History of Civilization, vol. iii., p. 379. the correct index to the universal feelinghas ever delighted to call her; and from the earth we rise to the system of which she is a part. We look back on the distant ages when the earth was preparing herself for the habitation of man, and with gratitude and love we acknowledge her past and present services. With the same feelings, though with less intensity, we regard the heavenly bodies which, in a greater or less degree, influence this abode of man,the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth's fellowplanets; the World, in short, in the real sense in which we use the term. The stars in their brightness, the hosts of heaven are a sight of beauty, but beyond that (I speak broadly, not unaware that the statement requires a certain limitation scientifically) they offer us nothing. And in the spirit of self-discipline we accept their beauty gratefully; but we seek not to penetrate further, for we recognise the limits of our powers, and we can afford no waste of them.'* Here is a narrowing down of the universe! here is a fine prospect for the minstrels of the future! What grand poetry is to blossom forth when all fine frenzy has thus been quenched in eyes which watch the strange magnificences of midnight? That Bible of the Future, the Cookery Book, sums up in its motto the creed of Comte, and the final dictum of a sceptical science: 'He who invents a new dish is a grander benefactor to mankind than he who discovers a new star;' and when, by an inexorable logic, materialism has conjured the universe into a dinner-plate, where are the poets to be sought? You cannot then preserve to society its celestial inspirations. Our materialists may construct their wood duck, which eats and digests,' but they must not expect it to fly like the eagle. Let them build their 'man of wood and leather who shall reason as well as most country parsons,' but they must not expect him to sing like Chaucer or Milton. Let us hearken to the counsel which Mr. Buckle gives for arresting the entire secularization of life, and see what it is worth : Congreve's Essays, p. 289. 'We have lost much of that imagination, which, though, in practical life, it often misleads, is, in speculative life, one of the highest of all qualities, being suggestive as well as creative......Therefore, it is doubly incumbent on physical philosophers to cultivate the imagination. It is a duty they owe to their own pursuits, which would be enriched and invigorated by such an enlargement of their resources. It is also a duty which they owe to society in general; since they, whose intellectual influence is already greater than that of any other class, and whose authority is perceptibly on the increase, might have power enough to correct the most serious deficiency of the present age, and to make us some amends for our inability to produce such a splendid imaginative literature as that which our forefathers created, and in which the choicest spirits of the seventeenth century did, if I may so say, dwell and have their being.'t 6 But can we, from a sense of duty,' thus cultivate the imagination, and vitalize science and society? Can we, out of a sense of duty,' evolve Miltons, Shakespeares, Spensers? Can we preserve alive the poetic spirit because it is necessary to material interests? Surely we cannot retain Ariel on any such conditions ; we have no spell to constrain the delicate sprite to such menial services. In the coarse mind of this historian the world is like a whirligig at the fair, turned by steam, and the music produced by the same agency; and a little music, more or less, can be obtained by the showman adjusting the organ to the engine! whereas, the whole world has acknowledged from the beginning, that there can be no lofty song upon the earth, except where a sovereign, celestial breath sweeps through the trembling strings of sensitive and spiritualized natures. In the philosophy of materialism Parnassus itself is secularized, and the Castalian stream is to be turned on and off according to the exigences of the practical world, just as the water-supply of a city is regulated by some discerning turncock; whereas, † History of Civilization, vol. iii., p. 382. |