and even inquiring Jews, who, with the best intentions to act up to the truth, could not discern their long-promised national Messiah in the despised Jesus of Nazareth. What, therefore, He was appealing to was that divinely ordained correspondence between fact and thought of which the Son of God, who came to do the Father's will, must have had an intense intuition, and what He relied upon was the conviction that there was a profound essential truth lying at the root of all things, which must in the long run vindicate itself. And therefore He bids all honest men to bend their utmost endeavour to ascertain absolute truth, emptying themselves of self-love and its deceptive dogmatism, sometimes succeeding, often failing, yet never forsaken by God so long as they remain true to themselves. And thus will wisdom be justified of her children.'

2. This leads us naturally to faith, or being of the truth.' It is simply the faculty of believing that things are as they are without positive proof, or even against the apparent weight of evidence. As applied to things secular or things religious, the only difference that I can see is that verification by positive proof is much more common in the former than the latter. The faith of religion is that which catches at truth and holds fast by it, simply because the man's spiritual being corresponds accurately with the facts with which it is correlated, because his self-consciousness returns an accurate note when questions concerning truth are presented to it. Hence faith is pre-eminently the deciding virtue of religion, that which makes a man to be a Christian or not. Let us state the moral results of right belief (that is faith) or wrong belief (that is superstition) in unmistakable language. If the revelation of Christ be founded on facts, then is the humblest Christian peasant true in the inmost recesses of his moral being in a sense in which the most brilliant sceptical philosopher is false. And if, on the other hand, it is not so founded, then is the shallowest unbeliever that ever aired his doubts true in the inmost recesses of his being in a sense in which the most holy and devoted saint is false. A thousand other influences may conspire to make the mistaken man a better man than the other; nor need it be said is there a ghost of an idea that men will suffer a retributive penalty hereafter for mistakes that have cost them dear enough here. All questions as to the future are as far outside the matter before us as they are beyond the moral perception or mental faculties of the writer of this paper. All we can safely say is, that, other things being supposed equal, the man who believes or disbelieves rightly is in a better moral position, and betrays a better moral character SO FAR, than he who disbelieves or believes wrongly. The whole set of his nature is in a right direction; he sees things in a clearer light; he is gifted with an inner harmony and power of self-adjustment, which issues in a higher and more complete moral activity. I desire to keep the alternative of right or wrong belief steadily in view, because I am arguing, not that Christianity is founded upon a true belief, but that

it is morally justified in appealing to historical events, a correct belief as to which begins by placing men in the right track as regards religion, and so goes on to make them better and wiser than they would otherwise have been. It is the vindication of the Christian method that is so sorely needed, and not the mere proof of the Christian creed.

3. And thus we glide imperceptibly to the consideration of what is meant by judgment. It is an eternal discrimination between rightness and wrongness, which divides what is true in each man from what is false, and also the man who is correct from his brother who is mistaken. And at this point we arrive at some solution of a very painful moral problem. All history declares that, at times of great revolutions in religion or science, there are numbers of good men who, with however small an amount of moral culpability, take the side of error, who resist the truth, and not only remain in darkness themselves, but strive with infatuated energy to bind the chains of falsehood upon the souls of all the world besides. The fanatical temper asserts that it is purely their own fault, to be punished hereafter by an appropriate penalty; the cynical, that it makes little matter what men believe so long as their heart is in the right. A wiser philosophy, while deploring, will not deny, the plain fact that much of human virtue and honesty has been too often enlisted in the ranks of error and ignorance, and, while refusing to award moral censure for honest mistakes, will never cease to stimulate men's minds towards the ascertainment of truth by insisting on the evils and even miseries which those who remain in darkness bring upon themselves and upon their fellows. It is the word of truth that judges communities at the last day of an epoch, individuals at the last day of their mortal existence.

And yet, while thus acquiescing in inevitable sadness, and while admitting that there must be a multitude of well-meaning persons who are either believing wrongly or disbelieving wrongly in the Christian revelation, the philosophy of absolute truth, as expounded by evolution, affords a magnificent prospect of ultimate triumph for the cause of right. I venture to think that the most determined opponent of Christianity or its most vigorous defender would in his secret heart prefer the victory of his antagonist to that one other worse alternative-that men should go on doubting and disputing for ever. Is it conceivable, or, if conceivable, would the thought be endurable, that many centuries hence the minds of men should be in the same state of opinion as to the veracity of the Christian history (that they should be in the same state as to the meaning and nature of Christianity is too absurd to suppose possible) as that which is revealed to us in the current literature of the present year of grace? Terrible enough to have to realise that the 1881st year of the Christian epoch should find us no nearer agreement, our minds no more definitely made up than they are! But if what we have advanced be true, there is the certainty of escape held out to us. Men cannot be mistaken for ever; there must be an end of doubt as of

Can we say

all things else; sooner or later the truth of things must appear in the minds that are the offspring of the universe, and are continually being trained to recognise the sources of their own origin. And I cannotrefrain from claiming once more for Christianity that most powerful and impressive argument legitimately accruing to it from the simple fact that it makes its appeal to fixed and certain truth, absolute in its own nature, and sure to prevail by its own innate force. as much for science in its attitude towards religion? Might it not rather be plausibly urged that from not taking up the challenge face to face, from not endeavouring to drive from the field of man's beliefs a religion which, if not true in fact, soon becomes a mistaken and enfeebling superstition, modern scientific thought runs in some danger of committing that capital crime against truth and progress which contributed so powerfully to the decay and ruin of ancient civilisations. Once let philosophers acquire and propagate, or even sanction, the idea that it does not much matter what the vulgar' believe, and that a little graceful superstition may be useful and becoming in the minds of the common people,' so long as their own are untainted by it, and not all the victories of positive science, nor all the engines of modern civilisation, will save the society which connives at this high treason in its bosom from destruction, first moral, then intellectual, and finally, as the judgment of God or nature, whichever we please to call it, material also.

6

In taking what, so far as I can see, will be a final leave of this subject, I desire to be permitted to adduce one more closing argument, and that is—myself. I am a country clergyman, discharging the daily routine of professional duties proper to that office in the sphere for which the Church of England has pronounced me competent. There is not a day in which those duties are not made easier and pleasanter to me by my acquiescence in the teaching of modern science, and especially in the doctrine of evolution. As to feeling any incompatibility between the two, I should consider it an insult to both of them even to imagine it. But if this be the case with me, why may it not be also the case with thousands like myself, more especially of those who occupy a similar position? And I must warn the genius of doubt that it will never get rid of Christianity until it has disposed of the country parsons, and that we are a stubborn and positive race to deal with. I can imagine a thousand reasons why our brethren in towns should be able to derive their religion from their inner consciousness or some other transcendental source; but for us-why, we must get ours, as our neighbours get their living, FROM THE GROUND. And if, in the attempt to do this for myself, I may have assisted a stray soul here and there in the struggle to obtain a firm footing, it is as much as circumstances allow me to hope for, and I shall be more than satisfied.

T. W. FOWLE

'FOUR CENTURIES OF ENGLISH

LETTERS.' '

I

THE life of the Past survives in its letters more than in any other records, and though historians may have taken careful account of one or another of them to supply information and authenticate facts, no history can so reanimate the time of which it writes as the letters themselves. It is well, therefore, that these four centuries should rise before us in their habit as they lived;' and, ghosts though they be, tell us what it is given to ghosts only to reveal. The magician who brings them before us (Mr. Scoones mentions in his preface the magic of patience' as the occult art in which he puts his trust) has used his powers with excellent effect, and if in what I have to say about letters I do not avail myself of examples to be found in his book, it is in deference to the appeal made in his preface, where, admitting that many a gem must still lurk in dark corners,' he invites the assistance of all who may take an interest in his design to bring them to light. His design is mainly, though not minutely, chronological; and it is of course by such a sequence that historical instruction can be best given. But very various are the ways in which human nature can be illustrated by letters, and very vivid the lights they can throw upon it; and if this work should be as successful as it deserves to be, it may be well that it should be followed by one having a different scheme of assortment; consisting, shall we say, of subdivisions, to disclose severally the Political, Ecclesiastical, Military, Diplomatic, Social, and Domestic features of the age in which the letters were written? Or, without reference to one time or another, shall they be so subdivided as to give us a specific insight into human nature in each of its several moods and passions-melancholy or merry, angry or amorous, self-seeking or patriotic ?

If we inquire into human nature as differing in different ages, we find that custom, born of circumstance, can bring into combination elements which, without the evidence of history, and indeed without that kind of evidence which extant letters afford, might have seemed

Four Centuries of English Letters. Edited and arranged by W. Baptiste Scoones. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co. 1880.

altogether incompatible; and having seen what blind contradictions mankind in servitude to custom has been capable of in the past, we may be led to open our eyes on the present, and strain our sight to discern what there may be in ourselves that future ages will read of with wonder in the letters we leave for their instruction.

What was buccaneering in the sixteenth century? Ferocious, merciless slaughter of men, women, and children, some of them called savages, by Englishmen more savage than they--more savage if we were to judge according to the sentiments of our own time, and yet possibly on some other side of their nature as tender and conscientious as a Nelson or a Collingwood.

The buccaneer Cavendish might be taken to be a fiend by those who read of the horrors he perpetrated in South America; but before we send him back to the region which might be supposed to have given him birth, let us read a few words in a letter he wrote from his death-bed on board ship as he was returning from his last enterprise :

And now to tell you of my greatest griefe, which was the sicknesse of my deare kinsman John Locke, who by this time was growne in great weaknesse, by reason he desired rather quietnesse and contentednesse in our course than such continual disquietnesse which never ceased us. And now by this, what with griefe for him and the continual trouble I indured among such hel-hounds, my spirits were cleane

2 Since the above was written I have read in the Pall Mall Gazette of January 26 what follows:

'A former member of the 9th Surrey Volunteers, whose name out of consideration for his friends we suppress, has been describing the fighting in Basutoland in letters, to which he is not ashamed to attach his name, in the Richmond and Twickenham Times. When he left this country he was no doubt a humane product of nineteen centuries of Christian civilisation. But for some time past he has been fighting the Basutos in South Africa; and, to judge from his letters, the demoralising influence of a campaign against a semi-savage tribe has been too much, not merely for his humanity, Christianity, and civilisation, but for the elementary ideas of soldierly duty. What other conclusion can be drawn from the following extracts from a letter dated Dipherring, Basutoland, November 21 ?

"The niggers have massed an immense army. There are about 30,000 or 40,000 of them, but I hope we shall yet be able to give it them hot, and pay them well for all their cruelties to us. The colonel has given orders for no man to take a prisoner, but to kill at once, and that we are all glad to hear. The other day a nigger came to our camp and pretended to be friendly, but one of our men took up his gun and blew his brains out. He was only five yards from him, and the bullet went clean through his head. The man was brought up for court-martial, but all of us—2,500 in number said we would lay down our arms if he got punished, so Colonel Clarke told him he was exonerated from all blame, and the announcement was received with great cheers all around the camp."

"When "an officer and a gentleman" can take part in threatening a mutiny to prevent the punishment of the perpetrator of a cold-blooded murder, and can write home to his parents announcing the delight with which he hailed the order that no quarter was to be given, no further evidence is required as to the brutalising effect of these native wars.'

I had vainly hoped that even wars with savage tribes could not carry us back to the darkness and gnashing of teeth we read of three hundred years ago.