ecognize the tonic
of sea air if they did not know the sea was neighbor to them. We sight
the ocean, and then know the air is flooded with a health as ample as
the seas from which it blows. So we can not know our intellectual air
is saturated with Christ, because we can not go back. We lack
contemporaneous material for contrast. We are, ourselves, a part of
the age, as of a moving ship, and can not see its motion. We can not
realize the world's yesterdays. We know them, but do not comprehend
them, since between apprehending and comprehending an epoch lie such
wide spaces. "Quo Vadis" has done good in that it has popularized a
realization of that turpitude of condition into which Christianity
stepped at the morning of its career; for no lazar-house is so vile as
the Roman civilization when Christianity began--God's angel--to trouble
that cursed pool. Christ has come into this world's affairs
unheralded, as the morning does not come; for who watches the eastern
lattices can see the morning star, and know the dawn is near. Christ
has slipped upon the world as a tide slips up the shores, unnoted, in
the night; and because we did not see him come, did not hear his
advent, his presence is not apparent. Nothing is so big with joy to
Christian thought as the absolute omnipresence of the Christ in the
world's life. Stars light their torches in the sky; and the sky is
wider and higher than the stars. Christ is such a sky to modern
civilization.

Plainly, Jean Valjean is meant for a hero. Victor Hugo loves heroes,
and has skill and inclination to create them. His books are
biographies of heroism of one type or another. No book of his is
heroless. In this attitude he differs entirely from Thackeray and
Hawthorne, neither of whom is particularly enamored of heroes.
Hawthorne's romances have not, in the accepted sense, a single hero.
He does not attempt building a character of central worth. He is
writing a drama, not constructing a hero. In a less degree, this is
true of Thackeray. He truly loves the heroic, and on occasion depicts
it. Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome are mighty men of worth, but are
exceptions to Thackeray's method. He pokes fun at them even. "Vanity
Fair" he terms a novel without a hero. He photographs a procession.
"The Virginians" contains no character which can aspire to centrality,
much less might. He, loving heroes, attempts concealing his passion,
and, if accused of it, denies the ac