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Richard can succeed. The whole world cries out against him; he must not succeed. To allow his success is to invite chaos. There can be no ultimate, permanent triumph of disorganizing forces. The stream of tendency that makes for righteousness is too strong a tide for any Richard to turn back. It overwhelms him. The unvarying tendency of evil to defeat its own ends is shown most strongly in Iago. Sin has corrupted his heart, but it has also disturbed the balance of his judgment. He cannot understand goodness, repentance, righteousness. He can see how a man might be good for a price, or a woman virtuous for value received. But how amazed he is to discover that his wife, who has surely nothing to gain by it, can turn on him and denounce him! The possibility of such a thing had never entered into his calculations.

And so, apart from any personal faith in the Absolute, in God, in the power that rules the world, Shakespeare makes us take sides with righteousness. To him sin is abnormal, disintegrating, and ultimately self-destroying. Shakespeare was no sectary, and it is as easy to prove him Roman Catholic as Protestant. There be those who have taken briefs on either side, and have made out their case, to their own great satisfaction. But in religion, as in all else, the impersonality of the poet's work yields no clue to his private peculiarities of faith. In a large sense we are safe in saying that he had no faith in any emancipation of the soul from sin by external processes. Regeneration is not mechanical. We feel that Antonio strikes a discordant note when he requires Shylock to become a Christian. It is not Shakespeare's usual way. He does not love forced conversions, compelled reformations. The way of the transgressor is hard, even when it leads to repentance and regeneration. So Lear finds it, with dead Cordelia as the fruit of his imperious self-love and desire for praise. So Gloster finds it, with his staring sockets open to every outer thing save light. So Montague and Capulet find it, when they see how their long-cherished feud has slain the flower of both their houses. If Iago will not repent there

must be no compulsion. For the unrepentant there is retribution, and the call to repentance is not universally obeyed. There is sharp distinction here. The master principle of life is not to be touched from without, and we feel that in the Hamlet catastrophe the four deaths are not an ending of all difference. Hamlet dies not as the King and Queen and Laertes. To him death is a portal of promise; to them, the mouth of the pit.

Another phase of this thought is seen in Shakespeare's treatment of forgiveness. Pardon must affect two, before it can be operative, he who gives and he who takes. Except there be the will to forgive and the will to be forgiven, it is vain. There is no real forgiveness in the closing of the trial scene in the "Merchant of Venice." No jot of hate has left the Jew's heart-only the power to give it exercise. No hint of mercy is in Antonio's final settlement with Shylock. Both are as they were, the one malignant, bitter, vengeful; the other scornful, arrogant, and lifted up. Twice their relation has been changed by outer circumstances, but not for a moment have they ceased to be at odds. There is no real fullness of forgiveness even in Prospero's wholesale dealing out of freedom and amnesty. To most of those whom it affects it is real forgiveness; but not to Caliban, nor Sebastian, nor Antonio, whose inner nature is not touched by it. They are as they were, and for them Prospero's large-hearted nobleness is but new opportunity for them to exercise their evil powers. Hermione forgives, and her forgiveness has real worth, because her husband is ready for it. He is pitied of her; his self-abasement and real repentance have prepared a soil where pardon can spring up into new happiness.

Perhaps the greatest of Shakespeare's teachings on sin is the sureness of its punishment. He pushes this truth home in every tragedy. Righteousness really rules the world, though sometimes it is slow to make its ruling felt. Retribution is sure to come. It may come from without, as in Richard, or from within, as in Lear; it may be in life, as in Shylock, or in death, as in Claudius. Shylock's malignant

hatred brings his ruin, Claudius' suspicious hatred of Hamlet brings his ruin, Richard's unbroken villainy brings his ruin. Lear's willful imperiousness is punished in his madness and his heart-broken grief. As becomes the poet, Shakespeare makes the punishment a fruitage of the sin. Sowing to the wind reaps the whirlwind. Macbeth's rise is a crime for which his fall is retribution, and the material for the retribution is the last successful detail of the crime, the murder of Banquo. Shylock is ruined by the law he has himself invoked. Iago is defeated by his tools and victims. He began to be a villain on Emilia's account, and at last Emilia exposes him. He makes of Roderigo a pliant instrument, and Roderigo's pockets accuse him. Cassio is one whom he aims to bring low, and Cassio, as Othello's successor, performs his first official function in sending Iago to the torture. In Richard III there is constant play and counterplay of retribution. Clarence betrayed Lancaster. He dies by the order of the brother whom his sin benefited, and dies reproached for the sin by the very murderers who dispatch him. The King has betrayed his brother, and his last moments are tortured by the vision of that brother's death, the disturber of his cheap-patched peace. Hastings exults over his enemies, and himself dies without shrift when no longer a fit tool for Richard. Retribution comes late to Richard, but at last it comes even to him, and before he dies he sees how hopeless his case has been from the beginning. Macbeth is long tortured by the avenging powers. His sin finds him out before any external catastrophe proclaims it to the world. He sees what an empty glory he has purchased with his soul's

peace.

It is venturing on uncertain ground when we seek to discover whether Shakespeare meant to hint that there would be a future to redress the balance of to-day. Hamlet had his misgivings about that bourne from whence no traveler returns, and certainly the catastrophe in the tragedies does not seem to have the note of finality. Othello has but just begun to live, when he dies; Hamlet is but just cured of that

fatal irresolution which has marred his life, when he falls. Moreover, we cannot believe that Hamlet and Claudius are dead the one in the same case as the other, or that Cordelia and her sisters are alike in death. But whether Shakespeare means to carry the consequence of sin beyond the grave or not, he is unvarying in his emphasis on the consequences here. This, then, is the poet's message, his doctrine of sin. Whence it came, and why, he does not know. He knows that it is possible to men. But he knows, too, that no man is under bondage to sin, save by choice. Even his villains cannot believe such necessity. "We make guilty of our disasters sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.

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I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled at my bastardizing." Temptation to sin, and invitation to goodness, is not compulsion. Sin is hopelessly and forever wrong, self-destructive, at war even with the sinner. Regeneration is an inner process, not an outer ceremony; no priest can absolve from sin or confer the power of righteousness. To the unrepentant sinner retribution is sure, though haply leaden-footed and unheeded. And finally-though there is not space to elaborate this thought, it runs through all the plays-self-abnegation is salvation. He that loseth his life shall save it.

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Dau Brummett

ART. VI-THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT DISCUSSION.

RECENT discussions on theological education in America have been around three points: (1) Beneficiary aid to students, (2) narrowness of the curriculum, and (3) unscientific character of the instruction on account of the bondage to creeds.

1. It is well known that in the older and wealthier theological schools financial aid is given outright to worthy and poor students. This aid is the result of funds bequeathed by pious founders. Their thought was: Not many rich after this world are called to the ministry; if those who are called wait till they earn sufficient money the best years will be taken up by worldly toil which ought to be given to study and actual preparation; as the government supports men studying arms, as the Catholic Church supports its candidates, so it is not unreasonable that the Church should see to it that worthy and promising young men are not turned aside from the ministry for lack of funds. Within the last five years this system of ministerial aid has been subjected to fierce criticism, and so great has been the influence of this criticism that some schools have either abolished altogether this method, or are preparing to do it. One of the chief opponents of eleemosynary aid is President Hyde of Bowdoin College, and he has been seconded by President Eliot of Harvard. It is alleged that this method destroys manliness and self-respect, and tends to undermine that feeling of independence which is the joy and pride of the minister, as of other men. It is also said that other professions, such as those of law and medicine, do not thus provide for their adherents, and there is no more reason why this should be done in the ministry. These arguments appeal to us. History, however, is a great corrector of a priori arguments. It is an actual fact that those Churches which have founded the most scholarships for needy students, and have trained the

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