LITERARY NOTICES. 



705 



jihysical and mental, very great kindliness and 

 very great audacity, enthusiastic disinterested- 

 ness and almost measureless irreverence. He 

 was a great master of gymnastic, vvlio, wlien lie 

 rame out second wrangler at Cambridge, was 

 much prouder of being mentioned in " Bell's 

 Life" as a great athlete than of being second 

 wrangler. "His nerve at dangerous heights," 

 wrote a friend who was his rival in gymnastic 

 feats, " was extraordinary. I am appalled now 

 to think that he climbed up and sat on the 

 cross-bars of the weather-cock on a church- 

 tower ; and, when, by way of doing something 

 worse, I went up and hung by my toes to the 

 bars, he did the same." During a journey in 

 France, when the boat had left the quay at 

 Havre, Cliflford, arriving late, jumped on board 

 of it, " with one of those apparently unpremed- 

 itated sprinLjs which look so well in the gymna- 

 sium." His flexibilityand complete command of 

 his own powers, both of mind and body, were 

 probably as great as any human being ever pos- 

 sessed. And as he seems to have been entirely 

 free from anything like giddiness in his gymnas- 

 tic feats, so he seems to have been equally free 

 from anything like awe in the equally marvelous 

 gymnastic feats of his mind, treating the infinity 

 and eternity in which his fellow creatures be- 

 lieved with the same sort of contemptuous famil- 

 iarity with which he treated the ecclesiastical 

 height he had once reached, only to balance him- 

 self by his toes on the weather-vane. He speaks, 

 indeed, in the least irreverent of his antitheistic 

 papers, of having parted from his faith in God 

 "with such searching trouble as only cradle 

 faiths can cause."' And no doubt he must have 

 felt something which entitled him to use this 

 language, for Clifi'ord was sincerity itself. Nev- 

 ertheless, this is almost the only passage we 

 have met with which points to his having gone 

 through any crisis of the kind, while there are a 

 great many in which he treats the faith in God 

 with such utter, such cold contempt, that it is 

 not easy to understand how he could ever have 

 regarded it as being the light of his light and 

 the life of his life, and much less how he could 

 have realized that other men were still so regard- 

 ing it, while he was launching his satire at them. 

 In such a passage as the following, for example, 

 he seems to be trying to show that he was as 

 reckless of the awe which the faith in God and 

 eternal life generate, as when, hanging with his 

 toes on the church-vane, he was reckless of the 

 fears which such a position as his would impart 

 to most men: "For, after all, such a helper of 

 man outside of humanity, the truth will not al- 

 low us to see. The dim and shadowy outlines 

 of the superhuman deity fade slowly away from 

 before us ; and, as the mist of his presence floats 

 aside, we perceive with greater and greater 

 clearness the shape of a yet grander and nobler 

 figure— of Him who made all gods, and shall un- 

 make them. From the dim dawn of history, 

 and from the inmost depth of every soul, the 

 face of our father Man looks out upon us with 

 the fire of eternal youth in his eyes, and says, 

 ' Before Jehovah was, I am.' " We transcribe 

 VOL. XVI. — 45 



the words of this parody with reluctance, and 

 something almost of shame, but still with the 

 feeling that they are essential to the understand- 

 ing of the erratic man who wrote them, and who 

 never could have written them if he had not 

 been strangely deficient in those many fine 

 chords of sympathy with his fellow men which 

 in other skeptics like himself remain vibrating, 

 and securing for them a certain community of 

 sentiment with their fellows, long afterthe sym- 

 pathy of conviction, necessary originally to agi- 

 tate them to their full extent, has vanished. 

 Doubtless, Clifi'ord held all moral conventionality 

 in utter horror. As he once told an audience, in 

 face of the great danger which threatens nations 

 that they may crystallize, like the Chinese, into 

 inflexible habits of thought and feeling which 

 would shut them out from progress, "it is not 

 right to be proper." But still such a parody as 

 we have quoted on what is to so many men the 

 most sacred of human utterances, one indeed 

 embodying the most solemn passion of convic- 

 tion through which the heart of man has ever 

 passed, would not have been, in most men's 

 mouths, so much a violation of propriety as a 

 deliberate insult to the heart of multitudes. 

 That Professor Clifi'ord did not so regard it 

 seems to us quite evident. But that only 

 shows how curiously destitute he was of some 

 of those chords of sympathetic feeling, without 

 the help of which it is impossible to judge with 

 any adequacy the moral world in which you live. 

 And with all his wonderful talent for society, 

 and that extreme kindliness of his nature which 

 so fascinated children. Professor Chfi"ord cer- 

 tainly showed signs of a curious nakedness of 

 the finer moral sympathies, a nakedness dimin- 

 ishing in great degree both the impression of 

 cruelty which the mordant end contemptuous 

 character of his attacks on religion would other- 

 wise make upon us, and also, in some degree at 

 least, the intellectual weight to be attached to 

 his undoubted genius when it worked upon 

 subjects of this kind. 



An Essay on the Bible Nakkative of Cre- 

 ation : Genesis I.-II. By Professor A. 

 R. Grote. New York : Asa K. Butts. 

 What to do with the first chapters of 

 Genesis has long been a perplexity with 

 those who hold it to be a veritable account 

 of the origin of the universe, and who at 

 the same time accept the conclusions of 

 modern science on that subject. Differences 

 are confessed and great ingenuity has been 

 expended in reconciling them. In a thin 

 volume of eighty-two pages Professor Grote 

 gives us the results of his study of the 

 question. He gives two versions side by 

 side, the Hebrew text in English letters, 

 together with the translation. Then fol- 

 lows a chapter on " Literary Criticism." 

 In this the writer follows the researches 



