cism. Catholicism is altogether a preternatural system, treating the world as a place of trial and temptation, and the devil as a main director of what seemed greatest and most powerful in it. The temper of a saint is quite different from the temper of a world's great man. Broken-hearted penitence is not likely to produce the effects which seem to worldly people so admirable. The hold of Christianity was not on the reason, but on the heart. Reason is not the whole of man, and alone must ever lead to infidelity. Protestant Christianity on the Continent had uniformly developed into Socinianism and thence to Pantheism. Confessedly, Christianity was mysterious-the mysterious solution of a mysterious world, not likely to be reasonable. Unbelief was a sin, not a mistake, and deserved not argument, but punishment. The Reformers in allowing reason to sit in judgment on matters of faith were introducing an element which the subject (which was divine and not human) did not recognise.

'The English were Protestants in the fullest sense of the word; but in spite of this unhealthy symptom the English Church had retained, apparently providentially, something of a Catholic character. It had retained the succession; it had retained the sacraments; it had retained liturgical forms which committed it to the just Catholic understanding of them. The question with the Tract writers was whether, with the help of this old framework, they could unprotestantise its work

ing character-re-inspire it with so much of the old life as should enable it to do the same work in England which the Roman Catholic Church produced abroad; to make England cease to produce great men (as we count greatness); and for piety, courage, daring, enterprise, resolution, and broad honest understanding, substitute devotion, endurance, humility, self-denial, sanctity, and faith.' (Pp. 145 to 152.)

Other and more recent attempts have been made in the same direction, but with no happier result, in the shape of revivals, missions, and the like, which have received the sanction of a large number of the clergy. What hope can there be of the improvement of mankind if we are to look for guidance to a body of men who, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, can suggest nothing better to rouse the world and put it in the right way than a fortnight's prayer-meeting? Can we wonder that the more intelligent of the working classes look on with contemptuous indifference? Certainly this is not the way to deal with the crying evil of the day-the immense mass of destitution and ignorance, and consequent vice, among the lower classes.

General ignorance, and, among the masses of mankind especially, the almost utter absence of moral and religious training, are at the root of the evil which we all deplore-ignorance of their own nature and

concerns-ignorance of the world in which they live, of their duties there, and of everything therein on which their chances of well-being and happiness depend. The elements of comfort and happiness are within the reach of all, or nearly all, if only the proper means be taken to secure them; but those means require to be discovered and made known, and they are only to be made available through diligent and persistent efforts for perhaps many ages; and this must be the work of education-an education founded on an intelligent comprehension of man's nature and of the system of the world.

To make a beginning with this work is the great difficulty. The masses of the people in our great centres of population for whom there is no employment and who are in a state of utter destitution present the most prominent obstacle. How to deal with this large amount of destitution and wretchedness is the question. In the midst of privation and suffering it is in vain to hope to inculcate instruction of any kind. The physical condition of the people must be improved before we can hope to make any impression upon them. Emigration might do something towards this, by enabling us to get rid of the excessive numbers; but unless a recurrence of the evil can be prevented, we cannot look for any permanent relief from this source. A time must come, moreover, when upon the present system the

outlets themselves will be full: the only real cure for a redundant population must be sought in self-restraint and a higher morality. With the aid of emigration as a temporary source of relief, enabling a commencement of the good work to be made, and by working downwards from the better class of workmen, a higher standard of what are deemed the necessaries of life may by degrees be established among all. It is a primary object that the tastes of the lower classes of working men should be elevated and their ambition stimulated, and that they should learn to prize independence and respectability of character, and to aim at a higher quality of domestic comforts. With better habits only can we look for the moral and mental cultivation necessary to render improvement per

manent.

No hope can, however, be entertained of real and permanent improvement in the condition of the masses of the people until the world shall have courage to look steadily at that inexorable law of nature which is at the root of the difficulty in which the world finds itself, viz., the tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence. Nature is profuse of animal life, as well human life as that of the lower animals. In each the tendency is to increase beyond the means of living. In the case of the lower animals the equilibrium is in some degree restored by corre

sponding destruction. With man the same law of nature prevails, and unless, by the exercise of his reason and through the influence of enlightened moral training, he check the undue multiplication, the natural law inevitably takes its course, as we painfully witness in our great cities and other large centres of population, where poverty and privation do the work of destruction.

On this question, the one on which, perhaps, more than any other the happiness of the great mass of mankind ultimately depends, our working men have hitherto been left almost without instruction or guidance. In the middle ranks and among the wealthier classes, intelligence, forethought, and a rational regard to the future, interpose to some extent the elements of prevention in lieu of the terrible agencies of destruction; but with the masses the natural increase of the race in this country is almost entirely left to be counteracted by the destructive force of poverty, with its attendant sickness and premature death. On this head the influence of the Church has, with very little exception, been exerted for evil. As Mr. John Mill has remarked, sentimentality rather than common sense is the genius that presides over the discussion of this question, and the working classes naturally listen willingly to sentimental teachers who mislead them.

It is the same throughout Christendom. The late Sir George Cornewall Lewis, in one of his published