CIVILISATION.

T is said that Kaid Abderrabman Ben Abder-Sadek,

Governor of Fez, the Bey delegated by the Emperor of Morocco to attend the Coronation of King Edward VII., exclaimed on the eve of his departure from London, "England is a great country, but I am glad to be going back to civilisation again.". It is certainly by no means unlikely that he should have given expression to a feeling that lies deep in the hearts of many of the strangers from far lands who have recently sojourned in England. To them this country, despite its wealth, greatness, and unlimited resources, is the land of the barbarian. The climate, they have little doubt, is always detestable, the great cities present aspects of ugliness • and squalor that they cannot understand, the habits of the natives are strange, and manners, especially , in the case of outspoken and Shamelessly unveiled women, there are none. We are, they feel, a race of infidels who indulge in innumerable forms of religious infidelity ; we have no sense of the picturesque, no love of the beautiful; we moil and toil from tender youth to tottering age, heedless of the call to prayer, regardless of the claims of rest. It is tree that there are no lepers in our streets, no poor with running sores to touch the hearts of the charitable; but there are sights and scenes as lamentable, as incurable. So Abderrahman Ben Abder-Sadek turns with a glad heart back to his own civilisation :— " Happy he, who lodges there! With silken raiment, store of rice, And for this drought, all kinds of fruits, Grape-syrup, squares of coloured ice, With cherries serv'd in drifts of snow " ;— happy with power to build— "Houses, arcades, enamell'd mosques ;

And to make orchard-closes, fill'd With curious fruit-trees brought from far With cisterns for the winter-rain, And, in the desert, spacious inns In divers places."

Can this barbarian-crowded land compare, he seems to say, with the civilisation of my own country, with its abundance of faith, its eternal sunshine, its brilliancy of colour, its pictu- resque simplicity? How much rather would one wend south with a caravan through •Tafilet to Tim.buetu by way of the great free desert, oasis to oasis, along the road of cisterns and caravanserais and sheltering palm and date, than make this

terrible pilgrimage to. London, where the kaffirs vex one another night and day."

But perhaps it is truer to say that to this notable, as to many another of our guests, Western civilisation is rather a puzzle than a failure; that it is a phase of human existence that stands outside, not merely their experience, but the limits of their aspiration. Their ideals, equally with their ideas, belong to another atmosphere, to another region of thought. It is valuable to realise this, and to endeavour for the moment to emerge from the life that we live and to look at it from an outside point of view, though not, of course, the point of view of those races whom we may legitimately consider below ourselves in the upward path. Detachment from the environ- ment of the times is now and again a first necessity if one would think truly and clearly about the needs of the times.

In the whirl and bustle of life one's hand is ever doing the next thing, and it is hard to approach, unless occasional

detachment is secured, the numberless problems that beset us. with any touch of pure intelligence, with that unfettered, un- biassed, but informed judgment which is necessary in the solution of social questions. We do not think enough, though we work and talk and read more than enough :— "The world is too much with us ; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."

To understand the needs of the world, to help forward its civilisation, we must from time to time remove ourselves in the spirit far from it, and in astronomic mood examine it. at large. In the world but not of the world, the question' of civilisation takes for us a deeper, a more imperative and personal meaning.

We see, as in a glass darkly, the civilisations that have vanished. The misty images of Asiatic, of African, of Grecian, of Roman social organisation move in mysterious procession acrosi the mirror of the mind, and each vanishing casts a. deeper gloom over the spirit of the beholder. Is our civilisa- tion doomed likewise to pass away ?-

"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind."

Deep melancholy, as we survey the succession of civilisations, seems inseparable- from contemplation. When we behold an Egyptian society that thousands of years before our era revelled in ecstasies of art that possibly even Greece herself did not surpass; when we regard Greek art and thought.— inseparable twins of excellence ;—when we watch a Roman civilisation that evolved methods of law and government that made the Eternal City the heart of the world ; when we gaze

upon a mediaeval Renaissance that brought learning and art to a new and an undreamed perfection; when we see these visions pass across the mirror of the mind and vanish, the sense of tears and sadness comes, and one seems to under- stand something that was in the mind of the artist when his sphinx was wrought, of Skopas when he fashioned those faces that peer deeply into the infinite, of Michael 'Angelo when he produced his figures of Night and Day, Evening and Dawn. Is Egypt to-day the better for her catena of civilisa- tions? Is Greece, Rome, Italy, nay, is the world itself advanced at all in proportion to the stress and storm that accompanied the evolution of successive societies ? Is there, on the whole, any, advance ? Is not our civilisation,, now grow- ing towards ripeness, not doomed likewise to natural decay? Is not civilisation like an annual garden plant that rises and flowers in beauty, fades and casts its seed,—seed that will in due time rise in glory and east its seed, and so on year by year until at last exhaustion or the gardener's hoe ends all?

Pessimism is apt enough to take such a view, and not the less so perhaps because of the fact that analogy is more con- vincing than analysis. But even by the use of analogy another and a more cheering aspect of the question may be shown. Let us take it that the earth is a garden, that civi- lisation is a slowly flowering plant, a great aloe, bitter in leaf, exquisite in bloom ; that the Gardener is One Who neither slumbers nor sleeps. From such premises one would expect to happen exactly that which has happened. A process of selection would go on, experiment after experiment, millennium after millennium—for with this Gardener a thousand years are but as yesterday—would be made, until at last there would le

evolved, out of innumerable apparent failures, a flower of such transcendent glory that it would remain a joy for ever,— the final and sempiternal type at which the great Gardener aimed.

There is not necessarily, therefore, a sense of hopeless despair involved even in the idea that our own civilisation must fade away, if we are only convinced that we are playing a part in the evolution of a civilisation that will fully realise in the ripeness of time the potentialities of the race. To be so convinced introduces into the life of the race a new factor that will hasten the days of gladness. The sense of personal responsibility arises in each optimist, and the belief that something of final importance turns on his or her every action drives the mind forward to accomplish something that will hasten the end. Civilisation as we understand it to-day differs totally from all other and all earlier conceptions of civili- sation in the fact that we now realise that every unit of humanity is related to every other unit by a law as real as the law of the inverse square, and that the perfecting of society depends upon the full comprehension of the laws that under- lie the relationship of man and man. All the discoveries of science, all the investigations of pure thought, all the manifestations of art, the relation of religion itself to earthly life, are but means to this end. The awful blots on modern civilisation will be gradually wiped away when the law of self- sacrifice—the duty of man to his neighbour—has been applied to life at large with the aid of religion, science, philosophy, and art. We are far away from that day. Ignorance, pauperism, disease, crime, and vice are still rampant in our midst,—weeds in the garden flourishing almost unchecked. But after all, it is something to know that they are weeds, even if we have not the strength to root them up, and, more- over, that there is a Gardener, though we, like Mary, often fall to recognise Who He is.