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VI. The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Translated from the Latin Vulgate, diligently compared with the origiginal Greek, and first published by the English College at Rheims, A. D. 1582, with Annotations, References, and an Historical and Chronological Index. (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, 50, Upper Sackville-street. 1876.)

THE New Testament, when read with the fitting dispositions, especially in such passages as our Lord's discourse at the Last Supper, exceeds infinitely in force and unction all other spiritual lectures. The ordinary editions are printed in too small a type to be suitable for this purpose. Messrs. Gill's new half-crown edition is in large, clear type, and yet of portable size, and will be found very convenient for private use and for the pulpit.

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LECTURES BY A CERTAIN PROFESSOR.

XVI.-ABOUT EXPERIENCE.

EXPERIENCE is a fruit that grows on every life tree, but it is by no means of uniform quality. What taste it will have depends very much on the kind of tree on which it is grown. It may be sweet, or acid, or positively bitter. I like to try the flavour of a man's experienceto learn how things have presented themselves to him, what are his favourite points of view, and above all, I like to extract from him, as it were, the very essence of his particular life in the form of his opinions of men. There is nothing, to my thinking, gives a larger insight into the character of Brutus-Shakspeare's Brutus-nor is there anything in that character I more admire than the phase of it that comes to the surface incidentally, just when the shadow of doom was upon him—

"My heart doth joy that yet, in all my life,
I found no man but he was true to me."

Truth breeds truth, trust finds fidelity, and the actual experience of a genial nature is never cynical. If the predominant flavour of a man's experience be bitter, the bitterness came not alone from the outward circumstances that touched him, and of which he believes his experience to be but the reflection; but it came far more from an "aliquid amari," a little spring of bitterness that welled up from the very depths of his own character.

It seems universally true that a man finds in life just what he brings. His own soul creates the atmosphere through which it sees the world and men, and that atmosphere it is, quite as much as anything inherent in themselves, that gives them the precise colouring they seem to have. When you look at an object through a coloured glass, and pronounce it, say, red, you are describing not so much the colour of the object as the colour of the glass through which you look at it. When you sum up the result of your experience of men and things, do you think you are not portraying your own inner self rather than them? Be, therefore, careful what you say. I, for one, shall not think the better of you nor the worse of the world, if I find you describing everything and everyone as more or less a sham and a humbug-and thinking that the hand of everyone is, as a matter of course, against everyone else, that there is no such thing as disinterestedness, and that if you examine minutely you will find low motive nestling under the shadow of the sublimest actions of men. I have enumerated these opinions because they form the esoteric doctrines of a school of "men of the world," who would claim for themselves exclusively the possession of any experience worthy of the name. But I thank them for their fine tale. Their mistake is that while they think they are telling it about the world, it is really telling itself about them. Be careful of what you say, but be still more careful what you

think. A man's thoughts, springing from his present character, and reacting upon it, prepare for him a future character of intenser shade. Now, a man's thoughts are more in a man's own power than most people seem to imagine. He can change them very often, he can suppress them sometimes, he can always modify them. Faith in man is a great natural gift, and, like other of God's gifts, it grows larger and more valuable by proper use. Believe in the existence of nobility and worth, and lofty purpose, and disinterested motive, for such belief is an indispensable condition of your ever having any of these fine qualities to adorn your own life.

Now, if a man really believed in the existence of these things, he would be on the look out for them in the world around him, he would expect rather to see them occasionally than not to see them at all—and, with a little practice in looking, his eyes would grow keen enough to discover more or less of them in the ordinary lives of ordinary men, in whom assuredly a cynic would see nothing to admire.

Do I think that Brutus never was the victim of falsehood, that treachery never spun its subtle net around his trustful nature? Well, I believe that he was less the victim of such things than would have been a man who had less trust in men. I believe that trust, in nine cases out of ten, disarmed treachery; that men were, in spite of themselves, truer to Brutus than they would, nay, than they could have been to meaner men, and that, at all events, he was a thousandfold better and happier because he had large trust in others.

There is a common notion that experience and wisdom are correlative attributes. But it is not so; they may, and do, exist apart from each other. Every life tree, I began by saying, grows experience, but wisdom is a much rarer fruit. It is hard to find that precise combination of the prudence of the serpent and the innocence of the dove that constitutes wisdom. If you have ever known a really wise man, you will probably have known one whose character gave a first impression of childlike simplicity, which, on longer acquaintance, you found modified by a shrewdness that paralysed any attempt at deception. He was easy enough about small personal matters-but with him it was "penny foolish, or apparently foolish, but pound wise"-touch him on a matter of principle, and he was the most inflexible of men.

It is a gracious and a graceful thing in young people to be very willing to accord to age every privilege with which prescription has endowed it. The easiest chair, the warmest corner, the shade in summer, the rare sun-gleam in the winter-none of these things will an ingenuous youth grudge to the man to whom has befallen what youth cannot help regarding as the calamity of having grown old. One privilege no one would think of denying them. It is the privilege of experience. They have lived long, therefore they are wise, is a common thought, if not a common argument-for men constantly mistake the mere possession of experience for the attainment of wisdom. Even when we do not see the wisdom, we bethink us that no wisdom can be expected to be always in action, and we give the old man credit for a certain latent wisdom that may, at the proper time,

produce the most marvellous results. In many cases the wisdom is so latent that it never comes to the surface. But what of that? The old man may be a pauper so far as actual wisdom is concerned-but we allow him credit for wisdom he ought to have acquired. I suppose young people are thus consciously credulous because they have a sort of notion that in this way they are bolstering up the comfortable theory that, by merely living to be old themselves, they will inevitably grow wise.

It is true enough that there is no man who lives long, who does not, by the mere fact of having lived, acquire a decided advantage over those who are younger. No matter how carelessly a man may have sauntered through life, there are scenes that cling to his memory, and maxims that stick upon his tongue-and above all, there is around him an atmosphere of reverence created expressly in his behoof by the imagination of those who are so young as to think that gray hairs and wisdom are inseparable; and all these things give him a decided personal advantage over younger men. In fact, if he only sit quietly, and say little, and shake his gray head at intervals so regular that some of the shakings must, on any doctrine of chances, be to the purpose, there is no kind of social superiority that he may not tacitly assume-tacitly, I say, for senile garrulity is fatal to reverence.

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But though all this be true, it is true, too, that to live long is not necessarily to grow wise. The keen-toothed proverb avers that there is no fool like the old fool." The truth is, unless a man be, so to speak, congenitally wise, he will never attain to wisdom. Unless he have within himself the root of wisdom, he will never wear its flower. Truer of the wise man than even of the poet is the dictum― "Nascitur, non fit." Time and its passing will not help a fool-nay, do not time and long practice give facility to folly as to other things? No amount of experience can make a man wise who has not at the outset an inherent capability of wisdom, just as no amount of study will make a scholar out of a blockhead. But people expect otherwise. Above all, parents have large faith in time, and seem to be under the conviction that foolish sons, and unwise daughters, if only they live to be of legal age, will awake some morning and find themselves wise. But if to-day does not make a man wise, how shall it make him wise merely by becoming yesterday-and that is all time does for some people, turns their to-days into yesterdays.

No, I repeat, experience alone is not wisdom. There is an experience that consists in a knowledge of an indefinite number of facts, that a man must necessarily accumulate by living a number of years. But such experience is very compatible with unwisdom, nay, even with downright foolishness. Not to speak at once of individuals, take the world, or that portion of it that dubs itself with the title of "civilized society." It is certain that the "world" has a vast amount of accumulated experience, and a very perfect adjustment of means for making that experience subservient to the purposes of life. But will anyone maintain that the "world" grows better, or nobler, or wiser for all its knowledge? Knowledge, to be sure, is power, but it is power in a very raw state; and a very subtle process,

needing very complex mental and moral machinery, is required before the raw material can be worked up to the condition of a serviceable fabric. Before that process takes place, mere knowledge is like money in the hands of a miser, who knows how to hoard but has not learned to use. The world seems to me to have acquired more knowledge than it can put to good account; and I believe that unused knowledge is a very unsafe mental possession. There is such a thing as knowing too much, just as there is such a thing as eating too much; and the illustration, homely though it be, has the advantage of helping to explain what I mean by too much knowledge. All knowledge is too much which a man cannot digest and assimilate by processes of acting and feeling. Undigested and unassimilated knowledge may increase the mental bulk, but it will certainly diminish the mental power, until a voracious feeder may attain surely and soon to a chronic state of fatty degeneration of the intellect.

If you happened to have some social or moral problem affecting your own conduct, your first and most natural impulse would be to bring it for solution before some one whose reputed knowledge on such subjects makes him be regarded as an expert. But you get no serviceable solution. He is oppressed with the mass of his own knowledge. He cannot give a plain answer, for qualifications keep rushing in upon him from every point of the compass. He sees so many possible roads out of the difficulty that he cannot bring himself to point out one rather than another; and, in any case, caring far more for the problem than for you, his decision, if given at all, will be too abstract to allow you easily to give it the desired practical con

creteness.

You then cast about for other help, and take your case to a friend, who, with a hundred times less knowledge, has a thousand times more sympathy. He soon either finds a road or makes one. Indeed, for this kind of royal roadmaking, there is no man so serviceable as the man of one idea. He may be wrong, indeed often is, but he is terribly effective.

Something, however, of all this of which I have been speaking is due not less to difference of mental constitution than to difference in the amount of acquired knowledge. There are minds that always move in straight lines from point to point. They are intellectually possessed with the axiom that a straight line is the shortest road between two points. They see where they are, and whither they wish to go, and they go there by the shortest path. It sounds well. Their mental position is mathematically unassailable; but such a condition of mind has its own drawback. It is this these men are completely ruthless in their onward stride. No sentiment can stay them, and even though a fact should lie in wait for them, and start up like an armed man to bar their progres, they murder it (the softer word is suppress), and pass on triumphant to the goal. These are the minds that seem to themselves to see things so clearly that anyone who does not see them precisely so must fall into either unpleasant category, mentally blind or perversely obstinate. To differ from them in opinion is to insult them, to argue is to exasperate them.

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