oss a difficult and entangled country. It is not
enough for us to know that others have set out as we set out, that
others have faced the lions in the path and overcome them, and have
arrived at last at the journey's end. Such a knowledge may give us
heart--but the help it gives is nothing beyond teaching us that the
difficulties are not insuperable. It is the _track_, which these others,
these pioneers of godliness, have beaten in, that we cry to have shown
us; not a mythic 'Pilgrim's Progress,' but a real path trodden in by
real men. Here is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be
climbed; here is a morass or a river, and there is a bridge in one
place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in this forest, and wild
beasts in that; the tracks cross and recross, and, as in the old
labyrinth, only one will bring us right. The age of the saints has
passed; they are no longer any service to us; we must walk in their
spirit, but not along their road; and in this sense we say, that we have
no pattern great men, no biographies, no history, which are of real
service to us. It is the remarkable characteristic of the present time,
as far as we know--a new phenomenon since history began to be written;
one more proof, if we wanted proof, that we are entering on another era.
In our present efforts at educating, we are like workmen setting about
to make a machine which they know is to be composed of plates and
joints, and wheels and screws and springs:--they temper their springs,
and smooth their plates, and carve out carefully their wheels and
screws, but having no idea of the machine in its combination, they
either fasten them together at random, and create some monster of
disjointed undirected force, or else pile the finished materials into a
heap together, and trust to some organic spirit in themselves which will
shape them into unity. We do not know what we would be at--make our
children into men, says one--but what sort of men? The Greeks were men,
so were the Jews, so were the Romans, so were the old Saxons, the
Normans, the Duke of Alva's Spaniards, and Cromwell's Puritans. These
were all men, and strong men too; yet all different, and all differently
trained. 'Into Christian men,' say others: but the saints were Christian
men; yet the modern Englishmen have been offered the saints'
biographies, and have with sufficient clearness expressed their opinion
of them.

Alas! in all this confusion, only those keen-eyed