The result was, that he went out to see the Jews, who remained outside of the hall, and declared to them, "I find in him no fault at all." (John xviii. 38.) This was doubtless said sincerely, but it did not accord with the determined purpose of the Jews. They therefore return to the charge, and now they accuse Jesus of sedition. "Nay, but he stirreth up the people, throughout all Jewry, beginning from Galilee, to this place." (Luke xxiii. 5.) The mention of Galilee suggested to Pilate how he might get rid of the case, for it is plain that he did not wish to condemn Jesus on such a trumpery charge, merely to gratify the vindictive hate of his foes. So learning that Jesus was a Galilean, he determined to send him to Herod, who had jurisdiction in Galilee, and who happened at that time to be in Jerusalem. But this step resulted in nothing. Herod put many questions to Jesus, but he made no reply. The priests and Pharisees continued to load him with accusations, but nothing was elicited that proved his guilt. So Herod, after having treated him with ridicule, sent him back again to Pilate, evidently seeing no foundation for any serious action in the case.

So back again they came with their prisoner to Pilate, determined to force him to give judgment in their favor. But Pilate still demurs. He tries to reason with the malignant mob. He said: "Ye have brought this man unto me, as one that perverteth the people, and behold I, having examined him before you, have found no fault in this man, touching those things whereof ye accuse him. No, nor yet Herod, for I sent you to him, and lo! nothing worthy of death is done unto him. I will therefore chastise him, and release him." (Luke xxiii. 13-16.] What! chastise an innocent man! Apply the scourge to one not convicted of crime! Here was another gross violation of law. But Pilate probably thought that by this concession he might satisfy the people, and escape any further trouble in the case. But he was mistakeneven the sight of their victim, bruised and bleeding from the blows of the lictors, only aggravated the fury of the crowd. Like hungry tigers they had tasted blood, and were only more inflamed with rage. Now is heard the fearful ery, "CRUCIFY HIM!" Their malice is unmasked; they openly de

mand his death, and by the shameful and horrible cross. The Governor hesitates, and plainly shows his great reluctance. Then, with a diabolical ingenuity, they touch him in the tenderest point, and charge him with a want of loyalty to the Emperor. "If thou let this man go, thou art not Cæsar's friend! Whosoever maketh himself a king, speaketh against Cæsar." (John xix. 12.)

The storm of popular fury had now reached such a height, that Pilate began to quail before it. He can not afford to despise that last significant suggestion. His official conduct can not bear too close scrutiny. Complaints have been made before. He does not stand too well with the imperial court. If he provokes this people to charge him with disloyalty, he may lose his office, perhaps his life. He can not make such a sacrifice to save the life of an obscure Galilean. And so, with a vain and contemptible demonstration of throwing the responsibility upon the Jews, he at last consents that it shall be as they will, and delivers Jesus to them to be crucified.

Over the sequel, the dreadful consummation, we cast a veil. We need not repeat the fearful story. The world knows it by heart. The testimony of eighteen centuries has been given concerning it, and that verdict will never be reversed.

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But, looking at this history purely from a Jewish standpoint, and considering Jesus of Nazareth only as a citizen, we think that we have established the truth, that never in all the annals of judicial proceedings, was there such a mockery of law, such a wanton disregard of the rights of an accused man, such a flagrant outrage upon simple justice. Jesus was not tried, and sentenced according to law, or agreeably to the forms of legal proceedings then existing."* The awful retribution which so soon overtook that devoted city, where this gigantic crime was committed, and the penalty which for so many centuries has pursued the nation, whose chief men were guilty of this fiendish deed, have testified to the vengeance of Heaven, and confirmed the charge made by the bold Apostle Peter, on the day of Pentecost: "Him being deivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken and with wicked hands have crucified and slain.”

* M. Dupin

ART. VI. THE ANTAGONISMS, PERILS, AND GLORY OF THE SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY.*

By JOHN W. MEARS, D.D., Prof. in Hamilton College, N. Y.

NO LIVING man has a right to be indifferent to the nature and laws of his own mind. Only a serious misjudgment and undervaluation of himself can lead to such neglect. The maxim, KNOW THYSELF, can not be disobeyed with impunity. Life in all its aspects, social, domestic, political, commercial, and even religious, without philosophy, will be common-place, hard, worldly; or it will be material, gross, luxurious; with no higher enthusiasm than for some merely utilitarian project; some march in the line of material greatness. It is the testimony of the eminently wise student of history, De Tocqueville, that though no metaphysician himself, he found the ages in which metaphysics have been most cultivated to be in general those in which men have been most raised above themselves.

Many of the hinderances to the study of mind are common to all ages and circumstances. The mind needs to be stimulated and keyed up to the work of self-inquiry. Turning away from the visible, the audible and the tangible, from the varied and interesting phenomena of nature, from things that may be weighed, and measured and numbered, from the monuments of literature, and history and art, it gives us a sensible shock to pass into those inner regions where not the most shadowy material forms are to be met, to the simple, sacred, silent shrine of thought, of truth, of being. In calling forth and cultivating the reflective consciousness, it is as if a new sense was brought, with pangs, into being, and long and patiently must the dim forms of thought be scanned, and the powerful spell of a keen and unvarying attention must be laid upon the Proteus, that assumes all the changes of which it is capable, in an almost indivisible moment of time.

How irksome to break up that characteristic half involun

* Inaugural Address delivered at Hamilton College, July 18, 1871.

tary flow of the mind's experience, which is determined by the laws of association, by the current of passing events, or by the necessities of business! Indolently the mass of men let the inward tide flow on. Drifting is so comfortable! But to know the nature, the dimensions, the laws, the dynamics, the sources of the stream which is bearing them on, would require them to face the current, to ply the oar, to dam up the waters and to turn them into altogether a different channel. Philosophy is the reverse of revery, and it is the most opposite and uncongenial pursuit to lazy folk that can be found.

Naturally the mind is not patient of self-inspection. It is exceedingly awkward to be the student and the thing studied at the same moment. Generally, it is a severe enough trial to keep the mind to the text-book, or the problem before us; but to be the problem which one is to solve; to hold the mind as the book which the mind is to master; from this, indolent, easy-going, worldly-minded, peace-at-any-price human nature turns, with an aversion well-nigh unconquerable. And yet those who do master this central, supreme domain of knowledge, who penetrate to the core of things, who comprehend the might of ideas, who advance the limits of human knowledge on the field of philosophy, rule the thoughts of men and at last have the world itself at their feet. For men who do not study philosophy, are keenly alive to the broad philosophic generalizations, which touch society, politics and religion. "After all," says De Tocqueville, “men in every age like to hear about their souls, though they seem to care only for their bodies. Indeed, though I care little for the study (of metaphysics) I have always been struck by the influence it has exercised over the things which seem least connected with it and over society in general. Even among the nations that read least, certain ideas, often indeed. very abstract ideas, in the end govern society. Condillac, I have no doubt, drove many people into materialism who had never read his book."

Without doubt, we have lighted upon an age, in some peculiar respects, unfriendly to the pursuit of philosophical studies; an age whose professed philosophical studies even

are antagonistic to the essential character of philosophy, and some of whose most elaborate and able systems proceed upon the negation of a large and leading field of philosophical inquiry as chimerical. To all man's native hinderances or disinclination for such pursuits, especially in their higher branches, we now must add a certain uncongenial atmosphere, a certain ubiquitous, unfriendly sentiment, a discouraging posture of much of the thinking mind of the world at large. I deem it not amiss for one entering upon the position which I have been called to hold, on such an occasion, to dwell upon the Antagonisms, the Perils and the Glory of the Spiritual Philosophy.

Certain it is, that the last of the great lights of that philosophy have ceased now for half a generation to shine upon the earth. Sir William Hamilton, dying in 1856, closed the line of great teachers in the Scottish school, himself the greatest of them all. The strength and majesty of his character, the purity and loftiness of his aims, the giant energy of his thought, the matchless keenness and subtlety of his dialectic; the clear and healthful glow which he poured around the obscure and tangled field of his inquiry; his aspiring genius linked to the most conscientious sobriety in investigation; his vast erudition, which never detracted from his originality, made him the fitting close of that eminent line of thinkers to whom the mature Anglo-Saxon mind of this day owes its chief philosophical training. In that grand intellectual phenomenon of our century, Teutonic modes of thinking, long uncouth and foreign, became thoroughly Anglicised; they were guaged and fathomed, they were mastered and analyzed by Sir William Hamilton, as by no one out of the country of their origin; their pretensions were exposed, and their errors were rebuked, with a power that startled the thinking world; while their excellencies were recognized and appropriated and made current as the common treasures of philosophy.

Gone too are the days of those famous, and, in many respects, unparalleled, masters of speculation, who, from the time of Immanuel Kant, for a century, made Germany mistress of the universal empire of thought; made Koenigsberg, and Heidelberg, and Jena, and Berlin, more classical and more