Society then may be described as a piece of architecture, for it is the objective side of human history; and if any persons demur to the term as too mechanical, let them remember that the whole universe is a mechanism, is a building-one thing is so set against another, that we dare not look at it in its organic structure and character alone; our bodily frames, our souls, our human institutions, our histories, all bear the evidence of rearing powers; all our modes of expression, by which we describe life as an endeavour or a discipline, humanity with all its societies as a progress or a development, all these suppose that there is behind all the forms of the ages a wise masterbuilder, that all men are so many minor builders and erectors of scaffolding for the great purposes contemplated by the primal Architect. Ages are the framework or the theatre on which the shifting tribes of Adam play their parts; men and thoughts thus become architects, remoulding, reconstructing, beneath, as has been said, the sanction of some imperative and overruling dispensation. In this view of things, history does not concern itself with the mere territory, the ground on which we move, it is not a question of space or of time, it has to do with the measure of the miles in space through which souls travelled, and the length of time they took to travel in, this is history; it is the great time-keeper of our planet, it is the science of moral chronometry; the names struck by the clock have no value in themselves, they derive all their value from the fact that they indicate the hour. In the success or the failure of the man we read the

disposition and the tendency of the world; for, in fact, it is not always true that the most noted or the most memorable is the greatest among men ;-true, some men create an age, some are created by their age, some by extraordinary intrepidity in threading the mazes of a new thought, in laying bare the intricacies of a new idea, even in a new theological dogma, -in a new scientific deduction, with few believers in their own time, writing, it may be, in a tone so abstract, that only the thoughtful and the accomplished can understand either their phraseology or their reasoning, yet these men make an age-never, or but seldom, during their life-time, but frequently long years after: Bacon, Bentham, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, and many other well-known names, are illustrations that we can never estimate the value of a book or a thought, it has conclusions and results which call into existence a class of thinkers who demand some one man, a man of action, to do for the multitude what the more exalted genius had effected for them; it is needful that in that man's soul should be fused down the thoughts, the feelings,-the impressions of myriads of men, not that he is really greater than they, perhaps not so great, but a clear-sighted enthusiastic man, disposed to devote his life to be the captain of an idea, to marshal its labourers into their places, to give laws to labour, and to defend and apologise for the idea which has roused his enthusiasm. Such is frequently a great man.

Great men then are the architects of an age,-those men who, like mountains, first catch the glimpses of

light before it penetrates to the valleys; like mountains some men are so happily situated, so elevated, that they possess the power of collecting and refracting the rays which shine even on other hills. Great men may be variously described, either as those in whose souls the light of their few equals and contemporaries brightens, in whose souls are fused down the souls of preceding men and times, or the originators of new thoughts and opinions, the heralds of new impressions; perhaps the great difference between men is in the relative amount of intensity, sensibility, and patience, distinguishing their nature; of these, indeed, there have been but few, and these seem to have been a providence in the whole life of their time; their birth and their education, and the circumstances which called them before the world; a gifted and superior sensibility, when it is allied with active virtue, is the truest character of the reformer; yet these men, who have been lifted so far beyond the ordinary men of their race, who look out into the centuries so far beyond them, do not these men move in harmony with certain laws? Are not great men, therefore, to be regarded as the individualizations of general thought? True, it may be said, that great men and great ages do not appear simultaneously, greatest men naturally precede great ages, they are the fathers of great ages; the men who figure through the stages and theatres of the modern movement are little men compared with those who originated the ideas which have made them great. The true method, of course, of estimating men is by the amount of moral power

they possess, force is the mere attribute of the brute; to become strong, the man must have conversed deeply with himself, must know his own nature well, must have wrestled with the wild tyrannies threatening that nature. Great men satisfy the present, but they then advance to the future; the same intentions and teachings which have enabled them to serve their own time, have also enabled them to advance forward to the future times; for while with most men the necessity of change is an appetite merely of the senses, the man who proposes to society the method by which its order is to be adjusted, does so in virtue of a spiritual and moral appetite within him, he, therefore, of all men, does not rest on the attained, or even on the apparently attainable; nay, it very frequently happens that he well knows what modern society demands, but knows too that there are men able to do that work, and he applies himself, therefore, to a labour at once more congenial to his moral tastes, and less likely to be performed; thus political action must be the work of lowest political estimation, since the political questions of the day are the moral problems of other preceding ages; while, in their turn, the moral problems of our own time will be the political questions of a future day.

The architecture of an age, then, is its outward manifestations, the power possessed by strong and intelligent minds of moulding its materials into buildings, its principles into institutions, its conclusions

into laws its architects therefore are its obvious and palpable workers, not so much its theorists and its

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speculative minds, not its organic influences, but its distinct evident workers and workings—the difference in short is as great as between the well-known action of steam and its boundless adventures, applications and modifications, and the electric current scarce known at all, as yet in the very infancy of its development; as great as between the enlargement of the franchise or the freedom of commerce, and the efforts for the remedying of prison discipline, the organization of labour or the moral culture of the people. Meantime it is exceedingly difficult, if it be not impossible, to define an age. From time to time we have seen ponderous treatises on our age," our era :" What do we mean by these terms? Is it true that as time revolves man enters into new cycles-that a series of years have in a sense the appearance of a lifetime, marked by peculiar temperaments, habits, and events that they manifest their periods of youthfulness, strength and decline? Has the world epochs? Does humanity move through a zodiac; or is there some law by which it is borne up to a higher plane in the moral heavens. It is even so. History truly recorded is the chronicle of those great events which have expanded the soul of nations and have made some days of our world's life like years, and some years like ages. History truly read is the narrative of the reciprocal influence of the world on man, and man on the world; it is the record of moral geography, it is the development of the march of ideas, it is the survey of the progress of thoughts and of principles. There are periods in the development