would be exceedingly valuable for a proper apprehension of the needs of laboring people. It was a business career to help business men. It was this recognized knowledge of the work of man's hands which gave such significance to his words, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden."

But when, after eighteen obscure years, Jesus stepped forth to execute the great mission intrusted to him, the heated atmosphere, the turbulent conditions of town life would rapidly call forth his intellectual force to its highest possibilities. Jerusalem with its crowded populations and its metropolitan evils would supply this important factor in his mental development. How profoundly he would be moved by the spectacles he witnessed with a keener insight into their meaning than any other man could possess! Charles Lamb told Wordsworth that he often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. What must have been the emotions of Jesus when, gazing upon the hosts of Jerusalem with an eye which looked far beneath the perturbed surface of the multitude, he took up into his thought the problems of life and destiny which were but superficially apprehended by his countrymen-the ambitions, the passions, the poverty, the dreams, the wretchedness of the throng about him! His tears sprang not from excess of joy, but from depths of pity no philosophy has explored. And if the life of men in populous centers influenced the trend of Christ's thoughts, what did the contemplation of nature accomplish for him? If we turn to his public utterances for answer there is little to gratify our curiosity or to enlighten our research. Early he felt the lily of the field discourse to him of the invisible beauty, and the ravens tell him of God his Father. The facts of life about him, the loveliness of the world, the eloquence of river and mountain, of sky and landscape, of the ten thousand enrapturing sights which were visible in that most charming section of Palestine in which he was reared, unquestionably stirred his soul deeply. But it is remarkable that he never drew his illustrations from uncultivated nature; only from fields that were tilled, from the face of nature as it had felt the hand of man. The occupations of his contemporaries were ever at his command to express in a homely but marvelously effect

ive way the principles of the kingdom he had come to explain. There is little in his words to indicate that Jesus had what we call distinctively the poetic temperament. He was intensely practical. He saw the pulsations of the human heart in all the facts of life and reached forth to them through the whole tumult of things about him. Yet it is impossible to think of him as devoid of a profound feeling for nature which heightened his intellectual sensibilities and imparted a subtle charm to his speech.

But, whatever we may conceive to have been the effect of Christ's environment upon his mental habit, of his perfect adaptation to the requirements of his office there can be no question. It was his function to impart instruction through the medium of extemporaneous address to a thoroughly miscellaneous auditory. For this he was qualified to an extraordinary degree. He was essentially an orator, though it is not usual to think of him in this capacity. He possessed the physical and intellectual qualities requisite for the noble calling, and his forms of speech were the most suitable for the purpose to which he devoted his public ministry. In these suggestions we have a field for study which can only be dimly indicated within the limits of this article. If we add to the elements herein imperfectly sketched the supreme elevation involved in the possession of Christ's mental faculties by the Holy Spirit we have in outline the sufficient explication of his unparalleled intellectual vitality. We see in our day how the humblest men, with paltry endowments, devoid of scholastic training, coming forth from lowly habitations, are lifted by the energy of the Holy Spirit into heights of mental and spiritual illumination truly divine. We behold them through public speech achieving results in the transformations of character which reason fails to explain. Such disclosures of quickened intelligence through fellowship with the Spirit of God help us faintly to realize the possibilities in the intellectual life of Him to whom it is said "God giveth not the Spirit by measure," and whom we recognize as "God manifest in the flesh."

Gev P. Hmman.

ART. VII.-BROWNING'S "PARACELSUS."

STUDY of Browning usually begins as a fad and ends as a fever. The fascination is that of the search for gold: the long journey, the miles upon miles of soliloquizing solitude-all are forgotten in finding some golden nugget worth a prince's ransom. The amateur reader is a literary Klondiker who is just as likely to starve to death as to find a fortune. Three accusations may be brought against Browning-prolixity, obscurity, and fondness of the abnormal. As to the first accusation Browning must have lived in eternity, for he seems to have no sense of time. "The Ring and the Book" has twenty-one thousand one hundred and seventyone lines-two thousand one hundred and seventy-one more than Pope's translation of the Iliad. Browning states that when the inspiration to write this poem came upon him he felt

A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb
And lights my eye and lifts me by the hair.

When you open the book to read this poem you know just how the author felt—at least so far as his hair was concerned. Browning's obscurity has been attributed to the "panther-like restlessness and panther-like spring of his intellect." It is claimed that there is a connection from point to point, but that the panther-poet passes on so quickly that the ordinary mind cannot follow. On many a page the thought is well-nigh murdered by a mob of words -apparently disjointed irresponsible conjunctions, subjectless verbs, orphaned pronouns, and nondescript phrases—that gather from time to time and drag the poet's meaning in the dust. And then Browning really seems to revel in the abnormal. Himself eminently sane, he evidently delights in the analysis and portrayal of erratic characters. His masterpiece is an old Roman murder tale. Not content to tell it once, he repeats it again and again. It may be urged that his purpose was to portray the whole of life, but this is disease, not life. The morbid and horrible have no place in a great and healthful life. John Bright was right in believing that only high motives and noble characters will be found in the literary masterpieces of the future.

"Paracelsus" is an example of this morbid tendency. The poem has for its subject a singular and erratic character, a sort of peripatetic doctor and ambulatory theosophist who flourished under this name, with the addition to it of Philippus Aureolus, about three hundred years before. He was born in Einsiedeln in 1493, and his name, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Without a thorough education even for those times, he made his way until he secured a professor's chair at Basle. Here he astonished everybody. He scorned all authorities. In a most dramatic manner he burned the works of Galen before his students and assumed supreme authority in all matters pertaining to medicine. His arrogance was equaled only by his evil habits. To escape welldeserved punishment for a serious outrage against a magistrate he finally fled to Alsatia, and, resuming his wanderings, ultimately reached Salzburg, where he died in 1541. Paracelsus was an exponent of Esoteric Buddhism three hundred years before Madam Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society. He taught very nearly all the points of Christian Science three hundred years before Mrs. Eddy became afflicted by "mortal mind."* He was an alchemist and charm worker. Hudibras says of him:

Bumbastus kept a devil's bird

Shut in the pommel of his sword,

That taught him all the cunning pranks

Of past and future mountebanks.

Bombastus Theophrastus being such a worthless fellow, why, you wonder, did Browning select him as a subject for his poem? Not wholly because of the poet's love for the abnormal. Certain qualities in the man and his story were well suited to serve the poet's purpose and enforce the principles he desired to teach: First, with all his grotesque inconsistencies Paracelsus expressed, for his age, the scientific method and spirit. He must be judged by the standards of his time, and so considered he has some claim to scientific credit. He was the first to use laudanum, and prac tically gave that drug to the world. Professor Furguson says: "His positive services to medicine are summed up in his wide application of chemical ideas to pharmacy and therapeutics; his indirect and possibly greater services to be found in the stimulus,

*G. W. Cooke, Browning Guide Book, p. 259.

the revolutionary stimulus, of his ideas about method and general theory." Contradictions did not trouble Paracelsus. He believed in magic and astrology, and held a curious incomprehensible doctrine of signatures, but he was also an emphatic prophet of the scientific method. Kingsley says: "He had one idea to which if he had kept true his life would have been happier-the firm belief that all true science was a revelation from God and was not to be obtained second or third hand, but by going straight to nature and listening to what Bacon calls 'the voice of God revealed in facts.'"

A second reason for this choice of subject was Browning's well-known view that intuition is a source of truth. This was a pronounced personal conviction and teaching of the historic Paracelsus. And the third reason was the fact that the history of Paracelsus illustrated, in a highly dramatic if not tragic way, the failure of the life of the intellect when divorced from the life of the heart. These three elements will furnish an analysis of the poem. Paracelsus is an earnest student intent upon gaining truth. He has a "wolfish hunger for knowledge," and gives up his whole life to intellectual attainment. He devotes himself to this one aim. He says to Festus:

New hopes should animate the world, new light

Should dawn from new revealings to a race

Weighed down so long, forgotten so long.

His motives seem mixed and shifting; at one time he would win fame, and again he would be an oracle for God, but upon one point he was always insistent: he must know. He declares:

I cannot feed on beauty for the sake
Of beauty only, nor can drink in balm
From lovely objects for their loveliness;
My nature cannot lose her first imprint;

I still must hoard and heap and class all truths
With one ulterior purpose: I must know.

It would be difficult to find a better statement of the scientific method than "to hoard and heap and classify all truth,” and “I must know" is the exact dictum of the scientific spirit. We shall