decided what Christianity was. It defined orthodoxy and heresy, thus involving the whole realm of religious conscience in the meshes of political intrigue.

As the Holy Roman Empire grew upon the ruins of the pagan empire, it continued to secularize and corrupt Christianity. Civil legislation relative to Sunday and other festivals and fasts prevailed during the dark ages. Our Saxon ancestors, converted under this empire, received this inheritance, and transmitted through the Saxon and English laws the entire genius of Sunday legislation to our own time. The chain is unbroken which binds the Sunday law of to-day to the first pagan Sunday law of 321 A. D.

There was little or no development of the Sabbatic idea, as drawn from the fourth commandment, until the time of the Puritan reformation. Under the theory that the fourth commandment might be transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week, Sunday legislation took on the more distinctively Sabbatic type which has prevailed in America. The theocracy of the New England colonies, which made the civil government subservient to the Church, instituted the most rigorous Sunday legislation. These early colonial laws were not only rigid, but were rigidly enforced. Their power was shortlived. As the colonial governments gave way to the States, and the States became united in the nation, Sunday legislation was continually modified and its influence steadily declined. The laws still exist, but are disregarded by all classes of society, according to choice or convenience. Religious men assemble in conventions, speak through resolutions, and editorials bewail the state of things and talk of the necessity of a more rigid enforcement of the Sunday laws. No one heeds such talk, and no law is enforced. Year by year we drift further away from a religious regard for Sunday. The most cogent arguments driven into the public mind are like a nail driven into the weak mortar of a thin wall; it looks well till you attempt to hang a weight upon it, when it gives way, deepening the sense of failure. Hence we say, as at the beginning, either the Sunday laws are not grounded in Christianity, or the public conscience has become wickedly indifferent. WHY THUS ?

The real philosophy of the situation is this: Sunday laws, coupled with the false no-Sabbath theories which were developed in the second century, have depraved the public conscience and produced the very results over which good men now mourn. Granted, for sake of the argument, that Sunday has rightfully taken the place of the Sabbath, and ought to be observed in accordance with a Christian interpretation of the fourth commandment. The fact remains that the civil law, assuming control of religious actions, places itself between the human heart and God. It shuts out the divine authority. It forbids the conscience to rise above the human authority. The result is, no conscience. If, on the other hand, the observance of the Sunday, or the

enforcement of the law, be urged upon grounds of policy and expediency, each man instantly claims the right to judge for himself as to what is expedient or necessary. Divine authority alone can give a Sabbath. Human authority can give no more than a holiday.

The results which confront us indicate an underlying philosophy against which it is useless to fight. They show that the pagan conception, which makes the state the source of authority in religious matters, the arbiter of disputes, or the regulator of acts, is not only foreign to the true Christian conception, but is destructive of it. The Christianity of the fourth century was widely removed from the Christianity of the apostles. No one element did more to create this degeneracy than the interference by the state in matters of religion. No form of interference affected the life of the people more than legislation concerning holy-days and religious festivals. The effort which Puritanism made to lift the whole question to a higher level has failed because it persisted in the fundamental error that the state may justly legislate concerning religious duties. Religious sabbatizing is a duty which men owe to God alone. Civil law can make a holiday, can institute a day on which business and labor will cease; it can never make a Sabbath any more than it can make an honest man. All appeal to civil law concerning Sabbath-keeping is necessarily degrading, and opposed to the genius of Christianity. Sunday laws have not become obsolete because men are comparatively more wicked than before, but because men have steadily risen above the pagan conception which permits the state thus to interfere. He who complains of the decline in regard for Sunday laws complains of an unavoidable fruitage which has always appeared and always will appear when the state interferes with religious matters.

The

Another result has developed in connection with our Sunday laws whereby the vilest and most nefarious business known to our civilization has intrenched itself behind them, and at the same time defies them. The enforced leisure which the Sunday laws and the customs concerning Sunday have brought about make Sunday the great harvest-day for the saloons and their associate evils. The Sunday laws prohibit many forms of legitimate business which our Christian civilization has come to allow, and any persistent effort to enforce the Sunday laws against the saloon is met by the saloonist with the countereffort to enforce the laws against legitimate business. In the absence of any struggle with the saloon, nobody thinks of enforcing the laws against legitimate business, or against popular amusements. Meanwhile the rum-traffic, content to close the front door, if that be really insisted upon, goes forward, and will continue to go forward, unchecked. Legitimate business can not afford to be interfered with, and the liquor power, holding the club in its own hand, says, "Permit me to go forward, through the side-door at least, or I will give you endless trouble through the same law whereby you seek to interfere

In many places, as in our Western cities, the liquor power is strong enough to openly defy every effort, and to push its business through the front door, regardless of law. Between the two methods, the rum-traffic has taken full possession of Sunday, and the larger half of its profits are gathered in on that day.

A still more deplorable evil has come upon the Church itself, through reliance upon the Sunday law, and through the acceptance of Sunday, which has neither Scriptural authority nor standing-room on the law of God. It has ceased to appeal to the law of God-except in a very weak way-as the source of authority in matters relative to the Sabbath, and has thereby become shorn of all real strength. Year by year the Church drifts further into the stream of Sunday desecration. The pulpit talks of the terrible disregard for Sunday which prevails, while the pews hasten out on Monday morning to pocket the profits of Sunday business and Sunday revelry. Thus, dependence on the civil law, and false theories concerning the abrogation of the Sabbath, have turned the heart of the Church itself away from the law of God, and left it to lean on a broken reed which is piercing it through.

The results are sad, but terribly real. They are legitimate, unavoidable, but none the less ruinous.

THE MENTAL FACULTIES OF MONKEYS.

BY MADAME CLÉMENCE ROYER.

HEN we compare the mental faculties and social instincts of animals, even of monkeys, with those of the superior races of civilized men, the distance seems immeasurable, and to fill the gap impossible. But, if we take the lower races of mankind, the differences appear less marked, and even analogies arise. Many of the moral and mental faculties, in fact, which we observe among the quadrumana appear common to them with savage peoples on the one side, and with some of the higher mammalia on the other side, which have welldeveloped social instincts-with, for instance, dogs, horses, and elephants. The animals which man has domesticated are, as a rule, those which belong to social species, and live in the natural state in more or less numerous groups. And, among the monkeys, it is not the large ones, those which most resemble men in stature, that are most social and most susceptible of domestication, but the smaller ones, the treeclimbers.

The gorilla, of Western Africa, lives in patriarchal and polygamous families, in which many females and their young submit to the authority of a single adult, and the habits of the chimpanzee are simibut the Cynocephala, most of the smaller species of the African

lar;

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Continent, and American monkeys, live in considerable troops, in a kind of general sexual promiscuity, in which the love of the mothers for their young, very strong while they need it in their weakness, does not outlive their growth out of helpless infancy. Similar habits have been noticed among some savage races; and traditions are preserved among many people of a time when family bonds did not exist. But traces of more durable family bonds between monkeys of the same blood seem to exist among the chimpanzees and gorillas, where the appearance of particular and exclusive affection is combined with rivalry with the members of other families. Savage, in the "Boston Journal of Natural History," tells of a female chimpanzee which was observed in a tree with the male and a pair of young of different sexes. She first started to hurry down and run into the thicket with the male and the young female; but, seeing the young male left behind, she went back for him and had taken him in her arms when she was shot. Houzeau, in his "Études" ("Studies on the Mental Faculties of Animals as compared with those of Men"), compares this trait with the indifference with which the New Zealand mother saw Cook take away her son, probably forever, as she was expressly informed. Houzeau also finds traces of paternal affection in the protection that old anthropoid apes accord to the members of the polygamous tribe of which they are chiefs. This kind of affection can, however, hardly be said to exist among all men. There are numerous tribes in which the fathers do not know their own children, in which the names pass in the female line, and where a man's heirs are the children of his sisters. Striking examples of conjugal love are sometimes shown among monogamous monkeys. An incident in point is that of a female of an American species which, tired of holding her young one, called up the male to relieve her. Another story is that of the male in the Jardin des Plantes which became inconsolable and starved itself to death after its companion died.

In the way of language, monkeys manifest their passions, emotions, desires, and fears, by cries and gestures, emphasized by significant accents, which vary with the species. Monkeys and children, together with savages and uneducated people of civilized nations, manifest an inclination to mimic the gestures and motions of all persons whom they see. We think that this trait is especially prominent in monkeys, but thousands of instances might be cited to show that mankind, old and young, shares it with them. The attitude and the sagacity of monkeys are so human that some savages believe that it is out of maliciousness that they do not talk. In fact, a monkey might pass for a dumb man, because he does not articulate the consonants clearly, as we do; but not all men have this power of articulation in an equal degree. We have stammerers by birth and by habit. Some savage tribes have a scanty alphabet complicated by clicks and nasal and guttural sounds that can not be imagined till they are heard. All monkeys have voices,

and many of them have very strong ones. Excepting the solitary and taciturn orang-outang, the species which live in troops are chatterers, and keep up a great hubbub. The principal tones of their noisy and rapid language, with the frequent repetitions of the same sounds, may also be found in the languages of the most savage peoples. They are, for the most part, complex, guttural, and harsh articulations, with few variations. But the alphabets of some of the African and Melanesian nations are not much richer. In both, it is generally the labials which are wanting. Laughter is not wholly peculiar to men, for some monkeys have a noisy and expansive laugh analogous to ours. Cook has stated that natives of the New Hebrides express their joy by a kind of guttural whistle, analogous to the jerky, rattling laugh of some monkeys. Monkeys are also capable of showing sorrow and weeping; and it is possible to follow on their faces the equivalents of the physiognomical changes which in man answer to the expression of his various emotions. Among these are the drawing back of the corners of the mouth and the contraction of the lower eyelid, which constitute the monkey's smile, and the depression of the eyebrow and forehead in anger.

It can hardly be doubted at this day that monkeys have collective feasts, which Houzeau compares with the new-moon festivals of the negroes, Hottentots, and Papuans. Such assemblies take place among South American monkeys, when, having eaten up the resources of one place, they are about to emigrate to another. Duvancel witnessed, at Deobund, in India, a great meeting of monkeys, which the natives said took place regularly, after intervals of several years. They came up by thousands, from different directions, all marching with sticks in their hands. Arrived at the place of meeting, they threw their sticks into a great pile.

The feasts of the black chimpanzees of Africa are more like those of the negroes. The animals come together, it may be, fifty at a time, leaping, shouting, and drumming on old logs with sticks which they hold in their hands and feet. They are taking their first lessons in music, as it were; and it is remarkable that that music is upon the most rudimentary form of a drum, which is, besides, the universal primitive musical instrument of the lowest savage human races, and the only one which many of them possess. Tamed monkeys can beat the drum and play with castanets.

If we may believe popular stories, the quadrumana have some kind of funeral ceremonies. The Chinese Pharmacopoeia speaks of a species of which, when any one of the band dies, all the others attend his funeral. A somewhat similar story, in which the dead monkey is covered with branches of trees, is told in "Purchas's Pilgrimmes"—a work which, however, is not of the highest scientific authority. But, however exaggerated these stories may be, it is not probable that monkeys are wholly indifferent to the death of their fellows-at least