to be of any value. Further, there is for these reactions an effective balancing point, the point at which the individual is spurred to his highest pitch of sustained energy. This point varies in different individuals. Some people, for instance, can work effectively at a stage of tearfulness that would eternally drown the good purposes of others. These reactions are always in inverse proportion after the point is reached when they are both called into action. The greater the reaction of emotion upon the nerve centers the feebler is its reaction upon judgment and will. Action diminishes as demonstration increases. It is plain, then, that the continued action of emotion upon the nerve centers after it has reached the point of arousing the will to action is so much loss of energy, and tends to defeat the very purpose for which alone the emotions ought to be awakened. The emotions, then, have their relation to character. Indeed, character may almost be said to have in them its center. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," and "out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies." These utterances of Him who made the soul point out the source of its soundness or disease and refer us back to the Old Testament warning, "Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." The assumed hostility between ethical and emotional activity has no foundation in fact or reason. Ethics must have an emotional basis before they can have any practical outworking in the life. Action never exists without emotion. You cannot induce a man to do anything unless you first lead him to desire to do it. You cannot restrain him from yielding to any desire that may seize him unless you can present another desire with power to neutralize the first. The notion that actions are ever without or contrary to emotion arises from defects in our power of observing and analyzing the mental processes of others. We never make such a mistake concerning ourselves. It is always some one else who is cold and emotionless. We cannot always know what particular feeling or combination of feelings is the spring of any given action, but when we attempt to account for it our inquiry is never satisfied until we fix upon some feeling to which the action in question may be traced. If this somewhat rough and hasty outline of the relation of emotion to character and action is even approximately correct the appeal to emotion in religion is imperative; without it there are no results. It is persistently asserted that emotional effects will be produced sufficiently by preaching addressed to the intellect. The argument is that the feelings can be reached only through the intellect, and that therefore we need simply to present the truth clearly and forcibly and trust it to awaken the proper feelings. This is a careless application of an abstract truth, and the extreme emotionalist might very properly retort that, since he produces strong emotional effects, we must acknowledge that he has made a strong presentation of the truth. The fact is that the bare truth, no matter how clearly or strongly or gracefully it is presented, fails to stir the feelings of the man to whom it has become a commonplace. He may be interested in the manner of its exposition, but its effect upon his feelings has been wrought out. New truth that is of real and vital importance moves men at once and deeply. But that feeling can be preserved in its first freshness and vigor only by being translated into life and action. If this is not done the feeling begins immediately to die away. The mere presentation of the truth of the Gospel is not sufficient to move the average American audience. The people already believe and fairly understand what we teach. They are even disposed to regard it with favor. What they need is not instruction, but arousement. The intimate relation between emotional and practical Christianity will receive illustration from a glance at the churches of to-day. Both in their ethical standards and in their religious activities the churches in which an emotional type of spiritual life is fostered are far in advance of those in which the spiritual emotions are repressed and the intellectual and æsthetic features made prominent. In the cold dry air of ritualism and intellectualism spiritual life and activity suffer a depression that one would scarcely think possible in the presence of the bare declaration of the facts of the Gospel. The inner history of denominational life tells the same story. A change of type in which there is a decrease of the emotional element is accompanied by diminishing activity and success. We may cite as an instance in point the record of the past decade in Methodism as compared with that of the former years. The feeble gains or slight losses of membership in times of great secessions from the Church or during the stress of civil war afford no comforting precedent for our failure in "these piping times of peace." Methodism has become less emotional, and at the same time less vigorous in spiritual effort, both at home and abroad. A study of revivals, both of the great general revivals that have taken place in the past and of the local revivals that have come under our immediate observation, leads to the same conclusion. They are all characterized by a display of profound feeling. In the work of any successful evangelist the appeal to the emotions more or less skillfully managed is very prominent. Two things, however, affect the work of the evangelist unfavorably. From the nature of his work he is led to fix his attention too exclusively upon immediate results, so that he is in danger of losing sight of the permanent effect which is desired and of touching the emotions superficially. At the same time it must be remembered that very often the preaching of the pastor is so unemotional, so purely intellectual, so regardful of dignity and propriety, that after the evangelist is gone the converts are frozen by the contrast. The genius of Christianity is in perfect accord with this demand for a quickening of the emotional life. Its inmost essential fact is a mighty appeal to our emotional nature. The cross, the center of our faith, awakens at once our indignation, our sympathy, our contrition, our gratitude, our hope, our love, our devotion, and our joy. As this Gospel begins to move and triumph among men, the whole circle of human feelings seems to attend its victorious course. Pentecost is not only a baptism of power, the instauration of a new spiritual force among men, an entirely novel awakening of conscience and intellectual conviction; it is a very whirlwind of emotion. After the lapse of centuries our hearts still burn within us as we read of the rapturous forthtelling of the "wonderful works of God," the exceeding bitter cry, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" and the spreading joy as each received for himself the gift of the Holy Ghost and went forth to rehearse the wondrous tale in the ears of others. There is a union of the supposed incompatibles, intense emotion and stability of life, for those who were saved continued steadfast. I might go on through the Acts and the epistles, but memory will readily supply what I would suggest. If we should return to the Christianity of Christ and the apostles, as we are vehemently urged to do, the emotional element will become prominent in our religious life and work. The present advanced and advancing state of psychology should stimulate us to appeal to the emotions with set and deliberate purpose and teach us to direct our appeal with greater steadiness and accuracy of aim, making it possible for us to enlist the whole tremendous force of our emotional nature to deepen and strengthen our religious life. Готлибансь ART. VII.-WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. PRIEST of nature, philosopher, and embodiment of the deep calm succeeding the fierce storms of the French Revolution, William Wordsworth is the exact representative in reflective poetry of the first half of the nineteenth century. His literary descent is direct and indisputable. He is the summary of one whole century. We trace the currents of thought and feeling of that century in Crabbe, Cowper, and Burns; their confluent streams disappear in the deep ocean of their illustrious and lineal successor. To this poet was given a long life of eighty full years passed with brief exceptions in the mountainous and lake region of northwestern England. There, amid scenes of pastoral beauty, with the simplest home surroundings, and in an affluence of soul developed by "plain living and high thinking," he acquired the independence of mind and spirit requisite for thought at once calm, religious, and philosophical. He became the seer who epitomized in his poems the best results of the great intellectual awakening of the eighteenth century, the mighty upheaval of democratic feeling called the French Revolution, and the subsequent reaction which made Shelley a visionary, Coleridge a mystic, Scott a mediævalist, and Byron a misanthrope. So round is the orb of his splendor that the mind fails at first to grasp its circumference. So Doric is his simplicity that the uncultured ear occasionally fails to detect his harmonies. So delicate and evasive is his high, poetic spirituality that only "the pure in heart" can grasp its richest meaning. Of nature, whom he interpreted, the simplest things offered him thought too deep for tears. Although nature was the source of his deepest inspiration, he was not a stranger in spirit or in fact in the sanctuaries and the palaces of man. He merely felt that the proudest monument reared by man bore no comparison with the humblest of God's creations. Instead of interpreting his peers, he aspired to interpret God in nature. In holding a sympathetic ear close to the heart of nature, he heard in its |