autumn of 1087, and had succeeded to it in virtue of a solemn promise made to Lanfranc-a solemn promise which he violated at or after the Whitsuntide of 1088; after which event he had no further relations-at any rate, no further friendly relations-with the primate, who died in 1089.

When, then, did William Rufus violate that solemn promise of his? How many days, or weeks, or months, after the Whitsunday of 1088 was it that he did so?

And, again, what was the occasion of his violation of that solemn promise?

Eadmer says ("Historia Novorum"), "He pledged his word and his oath to Lanfranc that, should he be made king, he would in every business observe justice, mercy, and equity throughout his whole realm; would defend the peace, liberty, and security of the Church against all men, and would submit himself per omnia et in omnibus to Lanfranc's direction and advice. But when once firmly seated on the throne (i.e., after the pacification at the Whitsuntide of 1088) he made light of his promise, and pursued quite a different course. Lanfranc, perceiving this, took him gently to task, and reminded him that he was scarcely keeping his word. Whereupon he fired up, and exclaimed in a passion, What living man can keep all his promises?' From that moment, howhe restrained himself somewhat, so long as the Archbishop was alive." And William of Malmesbury ("Gesta Pontificum") traces the King's defection from rectitude to his resentment against the barons who had risen against him at the Easter of 1088. On the whole, then, it is scarcely to be questioned that the famous speech: "Who can keep all his promises?" was made on the earliest occasion after the Whitsunday of 1088, upon which subject of discord was mooted between the King and the Primate. Whitsunday in 1088 fell on the 4th of June. The Whitsuntide Court broke up between the 12th and the 19th. The Pope's letter reached England between the 15th and the 25th.

ever

In the course of the summer news came to Anselm, at Le Bec, of the serious illness of Archbishop Lanfranc, and with the news a request from the archbishop that he would conclude, or at any rate initiate, a "contract with Lombards" ("Sti. Anselmi," Ep. ii. 53). Now, if these Lombards were, as there can be little doubt, a guild or company of Lombard masons, two questions arise: What work can Lanfranc have had for them to do in England? and, When was such work undertaken by Lanfranc? The answer to the first question is ready to hand in the fact that, soon after the termination of the siege of Rochester, in the May of 1088, the King confirmed a grant made by Lanfranc to the See of Rochester, upon condition that the recent damage done to the fortifications should be repaired and the castle placed in a

condition of effective defence. The answer to the second question is supplied by the fact that the signatures to the royal deed of confirmation were appended in a full court, which must have been the Whitsuntide court. So, then, if Lanfranc's message about the Lombard masons was sent to Le Bec, as soon as possible after the execution of the royal deed of confirmation, and if Lanfranc had meanwhile fallen ill, he must have fallen ill within a few days, or at the utmost a few weeks, of the dissolution of the Whitsuntide gathering of the magnates regni. Now, it was within a few days, or at the utmost a few weeks, of that event that the letter of the new Pope reached England; and I suspect that the Pope's letter was the innocent cause of Lanfranc's illness.

For, certainly, that letter was all that was needed to set the already irate Prince in a blaze. His father had asserted, and he was bent upon asserting, four claims, unknown to England before the Conquest, upon ecclesiastical matters. One, and singularly enough, the first recorded by Eadmer, related to the recognition of a newly-appointed Pope; another, and that the second recorded by Eadmer, related to the receipt of Papal letters; the third, to ecclesiastical synods; and the fourth, to the excommunication of tenants-in-chief. On the third and fourth no casus belli could well have arisen at the time with which we are concerned, the June of 1088; but a difference might well have arisen upon the first and second. Urban's announcement of his succession reached Lanfranc between the middle and the end of June, and that announcement was as a spark to dry fuel. If Lanfranc read the letter without first showing it to the King, the second of the claims upon which, as the event showed, the King was resolved to stake his all, was infringed. And even if he showed it to the King before reading it, then, who and what was an Archbishop of Canterbury that he should presume to give advice to the Crown upon its contents? Otto, Bishop of Ostia, might be Pope, or Guibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, might be Pope; but the subject was one for him to decide, and not an Archbishop of Canterbury. It was thus that he spoke some years later to Anselm; and there can be no doubt that it was thus he claimed the right to speak, and little that it was thus he really spoke, to Lanfranc in the June of 1088.

On the whole, then, I suspect it was this letter of Urban's to Lanfranc that provoked the terrible ire of the despot. In which case, what better reply could Lanfranc make than remind the despot of his promise? "No man can keep all his promises," was the rejoinder.

Lanfranc was checkmated. It is hard to see what he could do. We know, taught by subsequent events of that dark and cruel

reign, that to have prolonged a discussion with such a man, and with such a man in such a temper, would have been worse than hopeless. What, then, was Lanfranc to do? Bowed down with incessant labours, and with a length of years which had surpassed by a decade the longer span of life assigned us by the Psalmist, the ancient prelate could but pray as he had prayed fifteen years before, when, dark as was the sky, it was brightness itself to the storm he now saw gathering, and await the desired end. He could but pray that, if it were God's will, he might be released from the prison-house of the flesh-de ergastulo hujus carnis animam meam in sui sancti nominis confessione educatand leave the rest to God. The one lever by which he had once hoped to repress the tyrant's omnipotence for mischief had snapped in his hands, and there was no mending it. He prayed as he had prayed; and by the next Whitsuntide the chair of St. Augustine, around which he had shed a new lustre, stood vacant in his own glorious basilica at Canterbury.

If, then, these surmises be correct, Lanfranc, so far from being disloyal to the See to which he owed his pallium and his jurisdiction, died in its cause; and, so dying, accomplished a career unique in its manifold splendour of unexampled intellectual activity, and unrivalled literary conquest; of self-surrender and self-sacrifice, complete and absolute; of exhaustless enterprise in all that might conduce to the refinement and elevation of his halfbarbarous contemporaries in Normandy and in England; of exquisite prudence in the adjustment of rival claims vast and conflicting, and of single-hearted devotion to duty and to Heaven. MARTIN RULE, M.A.

ART. VI. THE RELIGION OF GEORGE ELIOT.* WENTY volumes comprise George Eliot's message to her

first, as is publicly stated, of her literary undertakings. That book itself we have never seen, and there may be some mistake in ascribing it to her; or perhaps she did not suffer it to rank with her remaining and wholly original works lest they, in so startling a connection, should be seldom read. What was the book, then? Well, it appears that she first came forward with a translation in her hand:-the version of a significant and much

*The following paper was written mostly in March last, as an integral part of the article on "The Genius of George Eliot," to which it now forms a conclusion.

criticized essay, known as "The Life of Jesus," by Frederick Strauss. And as we are taking up again our parable concerning this dead great woman, it seems not undesirable to touch, at least, upon the possibility of such a fact: for it strikes, we may say, the fundamental chord of her Credo, that "deep andante, moving in a bass of sorrow" which rolls so mournfully through the music of her writing. We need hardly remark that Strauss, in that first edition of his, throws himself into the attitude of the Mythical School; and that its peculiarity lies in this:-it blows away, as dust of a summer threshing-floor, all that is divine, miraculous, and superhuman in the history of our Lord; but upholds His moral teaching so far as it offers to mankind a pattern of perfect conduct and principles shining by their own light. For, as George Eliot would tell us, there are such principles in the New Testament, "that want no candle to show them :" and we may adore the ethical beauty of the Beatitudes, though shrinking from the belief of His disciples that "the Mouth which spake them was Divine." Thus the New Religion has decreed, and George Eliot teaches.

But let us take heed how we fall in with a plausible misconception. It is often said that George Eliot and the multitude whose oracle she is in Literature, are, as to their moral teaching indeed, Christian, only not dogmatic or metaphysical :-that they distinguish the Words of Christ from the Person of Christ, and are willing to receive whatsoever He has taught concerning good and evil, and the sources of rectitude. But is the new Morality Christian? We fear it is not, either in the theory which it lays down or the practice which carries it out. Unless Quietism be Christian morality-the true teaching of our LordPositivism is not Christian either. For, in the strange revolutions of this dizzy world, the sublime, but absurd and impossible, aphorisms of Madame de Guyon, and the "Maximes des Saints," have found men and women to admire them, to make them the sum of morality, to set them above churches and councils and all former systems of religion or of law,--though these very men and women do not believe in God. Atheism and Quietism have met together in the so-called Utilitarian doctrine of Stuart Mill and the Altruism, the Religion of Sympathy, wrought out by George Eliot. Wonderful enough, and yet true! For the Quietist, believing in God, shaped his moral system in the mould of that one principle which he termed Pure Love, saying that we must love God simply and always and in every sense for His own sake, not in any sense for ours; that to act with a view to reward is something evil; and that moral goodness and moral perfection are the same. Other springs of human action, he said, there must be none but love. Now then, let us

imagine that the supreme object of morality is not God, is something widely different: let us imagine there is no God for whose sake we can act, but instead of God the Race to which we belong,— Humanity, in its length and breadth,-surely, it is clear that we may still exalt Love as the sole and absolute source of goodness; we may still condemn the motive that has mingled with it regard for self. Religion will exist without an Infinite Living God, if it can behold in His empty Throne the crowned figure of Humankind, itself immortal though its members are doomed to perish ;-as Apuleius said, "Singillatim mortales, cunctim perpetui:"-and then Religion will be reasonably anthropomorphic; Adoration will have become sympathy; and therein will be viewed the finest exhibition and exercise of feeling within reach of our spirit. Religion will be Morality, grounded on the permanent advantage of well-doing to us all, justified as Bentham would justify it, by its inevitable sequel of happiness to us all, and made glorious by the emotion it must needs evoke when the individual casts away his life or his treasure in the cause of good;-for the maintaining and preserving of that great human society apart from which no individual can in fact exist. To what a height of enthusiasm will not he ascend, who is the willing martyr of Humanity? Will he not count it his gain to draw into the radiance, as it were, of one starry moment, all the scattered light-beams of happiness and enthusiasm that might have made beautiful the longest life? Or, if he is so noble, will he not exchange his pleasure and success, whatever he could dream or hope to call his own, for that better time which he shall never behold, for the good his example may make possible when himself is mingled with the dust, and only his memory survives?

We can fancy George Eliot arguing more passionately still, asking us, "Since the quality of mercy, in our poet's creed, is not strained, is not on compulsion, why should the quality of love, of benevolence, be strained either?. Though I despair of an Hereafter for me, may not Pity subdue me to devise and compass an hour of joy for the unborn whom I shall never know? Cannot I forecast some gleam in a happier future, where all that is best of me may irradiate lives that were otherwise dim, troubled with clouds and sadness? Wise and tender is the great soul that fasts from man's meaner joy' to shape things lovable and helpful for its mortal fellows. If the house of clay must fall after a season into ruin, why complain, and not rather staunch the wounds that are now waiting for a brother's hand? Nature and Fate and Wisdom are one: things cannot come to the best, but they are made better when we love and cherish them. Let Optimism be a dream of the moralist, an impossible Ideal, like the Beauty which all artists worship and none have seen: but Meliorism, VOL. VI.—NO. II. [Third Series.]

G G