draw attention to the great superiority of society and its government in the "ages of enlightened piety" as compared with society and its government in the "ages of Epicurean indifference," in an age when religion no longer formed the basis of civil government.

But to bring to bear upon this grave question the highest pos sible opinions, we will produce in support of Southey's position, authority to which even Macaulay might bow: Schelling, Hegel, Müller, and Maine :

"A people,' as Schelling says, 'exists only when it has determined itself with regard to its mythology. This mythology, therefore, cannot take its origin after a national separation has taken place, after a people has become a people; nor could it spring up while a people was still contained as an invisible part in the whole of humanity; but its origin must be referred to that very period of transition before a people has assumed its definite exist. ence, and when it is on the point of separating and constituting itself. The same applies to the language of a people; it becomes definite at the same time that a people becomes definite.'*

"Hegel, the great rival of Schelling, arrived at the same conclusion, In his "Philosophy of History" he says: The idea of God constitutes the general foundation of a people. Whatever is

the form of a religion, the same is the form of a state and its constitution; it springs from religion, so much so that the Athenian and Roman states were possible only with the peculiar heathendom of those peoples, and that even now a Roman Catholic state has a different genius and a different constitution from a Protestant state, The genius of a people is a definite, individual genius, which becomes conscious of its individuality in different spheres, in the character of its moral life, its political constitution, its art, religion, and science.'

"But this is not an idea of philosophers only. Historians, and, more particularly, the students of the history of law, have arrived at very much the same conclusion. Though to many of them law seems naturally to be the foundation of society and the bond that binds a nation together, those who look below the surface have quickly perceived that law itself-at least, ancient law-derives its authority, its force, its very life, from religion. Mr. Maine is no doubt right when, in the case of the so-called laws of man, he rejects the idea of the Deity dictating an entire code or body of law as an idea of a decidedly modern origin. Yet the belief that the lawgiver enjoyed some closer intimacy with the Deity than ordinary mortals pervades the ancient traditions of many nations. According to a well-known passage in Diodorus Siculus (L. i. c. 94),

"Vorlesungen über Philosophie der Mythologie," vol. i. p. 107 seq.

the Egyptians believed their laws to have been communicated to Mnevis by Hermes; the Cretans held that Minos received his laws from Zeus, the Lacedæmonians that Lykurgos received his laws from Apollon. According to the Arians, their lawgiver, Zathranstes, had received his laws from the Good Spirit; according to the Getæ, Zamolxis received his laws from the goddess Hestia ; and according to the Jews, Moses received his laws from the god Jao. No one has pointed out more forcibly than Mr. Maine that in ancient times religion as a divine influence was underlying and supporting every relation of life and every social institution. A supernatural presidency, he writes, is supposed to consecrate and keep togother all the cardinal institutions of those early times, the state, the race, and the family' (p. 6). The elementary group is the family; the aggregation of families forms the gens or the house. The aggregation of houses makes the tribe. The aggregation of tribes constitutes the commonwealth.' (p. 128). Now the family is held together by the family sacra (p. 191), and so were the gens, the tribe, and the commonwealth, and strangers could only be admitted to these brotherhoods by being admitted to their sacra (p. 131). At a later time law breaks away from religion (p. 193), but even then many traces remain to show that the hearth was the first altar, the father the first elder, his wife and children and slaves the first congregation gathered together round the sacred fire -the Hestia, the goddess of the house and in the end the goddess of the people. To the present day, marriage, the most important of eivil acts, the very foundation of civilised life, has retained the religious oharacter which it had from the very beginning of history."*

We therefore submit it as another consideration, to be added to those already put forth in this paper, why the speedy conciliation of Science and Christianity is a thing to be most earnestly desired, that a subversion of the religion of our country would involve the subversion of its society, the destruction of its institutions, and the destruction of its government.†

This is the charnel-house of ruin to which scepticism conducts humanity. Man is led by religion up the height of civilisation, but before the summit is reached he turns from his path and begins to descend again to the dreary and uncultivated plain below, to a

* "Science of Religion," lecture iii. Max-Müller.

The manifest inclination of some rather to divorce religion from education altogether, than education should be in the hands of the Church-to substitute secular teaching for that which is really education-the nurturing of religious and moral feelings-might also be cited as an example of the indifference of the present generation to the happiness and well-fare of the country.-ED.

state of existence worse than savagery, because it is one of anarchy. How far we have advanced along this perilous path we cannot conjecture, but we must have made some way since Edmund Burke's time; for he wrote:-" We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort. In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition with which the accumu. lated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety." When scepticism has become, not only tolerated, but invested with a kind of merit, as a sign of emancipation from the thraldom of superstition, we begin to suspect that our approach to an age of lawlessness and disorder is much nearer than most of us would care to recognise.

That this is not phantasmagoria is tested by the practical experience of daily life. There is a feeling of misgiving and uneasiness amongst the more thoughtful, which causes the reference to "good old times" to be more than usually frequent. It is also very generally the case that we feel our elders to be of a different calibre from ourselves; we feel differently towards them, they connect us with the assuring and reliable past; and perhaps many of us are seldom so sincere as when conversing with them. If they (honour to their grey hairs) happen to visit again the scenes of their youth, the contrast of the life they used to lead there with the life by which they are surrounded, causes them to feel its strangeness. The pretty English village, with its happy and peaceful inhabitants, the well-loved church, the merry green! At the sound of the old village bells the crust and the cobwebs of the puffing, fretting, and foaming life in the city they have left behind them, all vanish in an instant. Cowper very sweetly expresses this:

"How soft the music of those village bells,
Falling at intervals upon the ear

In cadence sweet! now dying all away,
Now pealing loud again, and louder still,
Clear and sonorous as the gale comes on.
With easy force it opens all the cells
Where memory slept."

But it is seldom the lot of these visitants to find their birth place unaltered. The spirit of our cities, though they be miles away, breathes in it; and, as a monument of the progress achieved in wealth and civilisation, atheism is roared in the gin- or the beer shop amidst the din of oaths and blasphemy.

We know that man is affected by outward circumstances, and it does, indeed, seem that the discovery of the uses steam and

magnetism has affected the spirit of our age. We are harder, more machine-like, and less like beings endowed with minds and souls capable of the highest aspirations than were our fathers. What we want is more poetry, more religion, more love. The ideal is fast losing its hold upon the minds of our countrymen, who, like their scientific leaders, "rather dive than soar." What incentive can there be to high and noble action when he who believes least and admires least is regarded as the most worthy to be believed and admired? If young people, instead of coming at loggerheads with questions which it requires a lifetime to qualify a man to investigate, would study and practice the noble 13th chapter of Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, they would be happier themselves, and, in many cases, dispel a cloud which their presence brings upon their homes. They would there learn that "charity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up (verse 4). Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away" (verse 8).

THOMAS F. ORDISH.

ONLY A FEW WEEKS,

BY

IN FOUR CHAPTERS.

FRANK ACTON.

CHAPTER I.

A LITTLE Lincolnshire village, deep in the fens, surrounded by a sluggish river, the Grange stands close to its banks, with its front facing the grass-grown road that runs though the wood.

The distant village with its ugly whitewashed vicarage, and the thatched cottages are a contrast to the quaint Elizabethan architecture of the Grange, with its old garden, laid out in the taste of past generations; dark yews cut into fantastic shapes border the stone steps leading to the bowling-green and fountain, moss-clad nymphs stand on tiptoe on their pedestals, and look down on the maze, and the overgrown rose-garden has hidden the sundial under leaves and roses.

Cicely Vane sat in the oak-room, a cool and shady place, even on this hot September afternoon, with its bare polished floor and panelled walls. The room was full of faint odours from the china bowls of tea vases, and a breeze wafted their petals on to the chaircushions, where mimic roses bloomed perpetually, the work of hands now mouldered into dust.

The faint sound of running water below the window, the rustling of grass and rushes, the distant chirp of grasshoppers in the meadows, all these sounds had made Cicely dreamy, and she sat looking idly down at the river. "What a pleasant world it is!" she thought, "I cannot understand why some people say it is full of sorrow and change. I think nothing has changed here ever since I grew up, except that perhaps Aunt Barbara may be a little fatter and have a few more grey hairs; but my life never changesnothing happens to me. I could almost fancy that Marshlands is a happy valley like the one Raselas lived in, out of which there is no escape-but no, that will not do, we have no hills here, this is like rather the Island, and I am the Lady of Shalott waiting for Sir Lancelot."

The sunlight flickered on Cicely's lovely face, through the shade of the Virginian creeper, as she leaned ovor the window-sill and fell into one of those vague day-dreams, full of impossibilities so dear to "" sweet seventeen and which lose their charm where the golden gates of early youth have been passed. She did not even awake from her reverie as a boat shot round a bend of the river, rowed by