Next to Carlyle, Emerson presents the highest type of the antagonism which literature assumes towards the Christian faith. A lover of the truth, who will not commit his trust to the limits of any formula, he says:

'I am glad to hear each sect complain that they do not now hold the opinions they are charged with. The earth moves and the mind opens. I am glad to believe society contains a class of humble souls who enjoy the luxury of a religion that does not degrade; who think it the highest worship to expect of Heaven the most and best; who do not wonder there was a Christ, but there were not a thousand; who have conceived an infinite hope for mankind; who believe that the history of Jesus is the history of every man, written large.'

And these are the 'excelsior' heights which he sees from afar in the empyrean:

"There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in the manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man home to his central solitude, shame these social supplicating manners, and make him know that much of the time he must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no coöperation, he shall walk with no companion. The nameless thought, the nameless Power, the super-personal Heart,- he shall repose alone on that.'

With this partial introductory survey of influences, we may now offer some general reflections on their spirit, significance and effect:

1. It cannot escape observation that unbelief, the extreme of dissent, has the characteristic of present thought — increased moral earnestness. It is far more sincere, discriminating, and just, than formerly. Instead of revelling in the ruin which it effects, it confesses with pain its inevitable conflict with human aspirations, and bewails the impossibility of solving the enigma. It has a deeper appreciation of the system it protests against or assails, and, not destructive only, it aims to be reconstructive. The difference lies in the more subjective and spiritual tone which has passed into every department of mental activity, which lifts even the man of science-as in the noble instance of Tyndall — above the grovelling idea that facts are to be sought solely for the purpose of utility.

2. It must be clear that the history of religious ideas has been an onward process of development. Theology, for example, has abandoned the geocentric theory of the universe, which there once seemed plenty of texts to support. It no longer combats the discoveries of geology which have renovated and transformed

the six-day interpretations of Genesis. Death and pain, once believed with unfaltering assurance to be the fruit of disobedience in Paradise, are acknowledged to have raged and revelled on the globe ages before it was trodden by man. The alarm over evolution, once considered subversive of the Bible, has subsided in the gradual conviction that the question at bottom is one of method, and that Darwinism needs a God as much as does the old view. Witchcraft, to disbelieve which was once the eccentricity of the few, has passed into the region of fables. The old-fashioned doctrinal sermon has almost totally disappeared. Hell-fire, once deemed fundamental, has become a metaphor. The words 'eternal punishment' stand; but in how many ways are they defined? The God of wrath is displaced by the God of love, whose judg ments are meant only for correction. Would you realize how completely the aspect and complexion of religion have altered, consider your feelings as you read the following passage from The Sight of Hell, a tract for children and young persons,' by a priest of the Roman church, who, living in the present, is still in the bondage of the Middle Ages:

His

'See, on the middle of that red-hot floor stands a girl; she looks about sixteen years old. Her feet are bare. She has neither shoes nor stockings. . . . Listen! she speaks She says, "I have been standing on this red-hot floor for years. Day and night my only standing-place has been this red-hot floor. . . Look at my burnt and bleeding feet. Let me go off this burning floor for one moment, only for one single short moment." The fourth dungeon is the boiling kettle. ... in the middle of it there is a boy. . . eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two long flames come out of his ears. . . . Sometimes he opens his mouth, and blazing fire rolls out. But listen! there is a sound like a kettle boiling. . . . The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones. The fifth dungeon is the red-hot oven. . . . The little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats itself against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. ... God was very good to this child. Very likely God saw it would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished much more in hell. So God in His mercy called it out of the world in its early childhood.'

Consider the surprise, the repugnance, the horror which these infamous sentences now excite; yet consider again how perfectly they harmonize with the realizations of rather more than two hundred years ago, when even the latitudinarian and impassioned Taylor could write:

Alexander, the son of Hyrcanus, caused eight hundred to be crucified, and whilst they were yet alive caused their wives and children to be murdered before their eyes, so that they might not die once, but many deaths. This rigour shall not be wanting in hell. Mezentius tied a living body to the dead until the putrefied exhalations of the dead

had killed the living. . . . What is this in respect of hell, when each body of the damned is more loathsome and unsavoury than a million of dead dogs? . . . What comparison will there be between burning for an hundred years' space, and to be burning without interruption as long as God is God?'

3. To suppose religion endangered by these changes, or future ones, is altogether misleading. As the satisfaction of an ineradicable want, it is deathless. Only the visible body waxes old as a garment. The vital element is indestructible, growing with the race and revealing itself. The dogma perishes; the intuitionthe instinct of devotion can never die. Transition is the sign of life. The 'increasing purpose' of the ages, by the orderly processes of natural law, brings ever to the front fresh modifications of belief. Without change, no expansion. To be perfect is to have changed often.

Ethics. It accords with the hard, Philistine temper of the age, that the utilitarian school of morals and politics should be at present extremely influential in England. Spencer and Bain are prominent names, but John Stuart Mill has done more to popularize and spread it than any other of its members. His father, stern and repellant, was an uncompromising disciple of Bentham. 'He resembled,' says the son, 'most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and by the absence of demonstration starved the feelings themselves.' 'His entering the room where the family was assembled, was observed by strangers to operate as an immediate damper.' He resolved so to educate his son that he should be 'a worthy successor.' 'In all his teaching he demanded of me not only the utmost I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done.' The child began Greek at the age of three, by means of 'lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English,' written out for him on cards by his father. At eight he had read the Anabasis, the Memorabilia, part of Lucian, two orations of Isocrates, and six dialogues of Plato. In addition to this, lessons in arithmetic in the evening; then, according to his taste, the histories of Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, Hooke, or the Annual Register. At twelve he was put upon a severe course of logic, beginning with Aristotle's Organon, followed by the Computatio of Hobbes. As he read and studied, he made notes on slips of paper for the daily report required to be given, while father and son took their morning walk. Already, at seven, in the composition of a brief Roman

history, he had made his début in authorship. Is it a matter of wonder, after such an education, that this man should be true to the theoretical convictions in which he had been drilled? Is it surprising that he should define happiness to be 'the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct'? Here is the formal statement:

"The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, utility or the greatest happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.'

If it be observed, as a fact, that virtue is often desired for its own sake, the explanation is:

'We gradually, through the influence of association, come to desire the means without thinking of the end; the action itself becomes an object of desire, and is performed without reference to any motive beyond itself. Thus far, it may still be objected that the action having, through association, become pleasurable, we are as much as before moved to act by the anticipation of pleasure, namely, the pleasure of the action itself. But granting this, the matter does not end here. As we proceed in the formation of habits, and become accustomed to will a particular act . . . because it is pleasurable, we at last continue to will it without any reference to its being pleasurable.'

Very plausible, but no essential modification of Hartley's doctrine of association, and—we need not further argue — unable to account for the unique and preeminent position which mankind have assigned to virtue. The principle is the same, but the spirit has altered. We have travelled far since we left Hobbes. The main object was then to depress human nature by resolving the noblest deeds into gross elements; the main object is now to sublimate conceptions of happiness so as to include the highest displays of heroism. Bentham held that nothing but self-interest would serve for diet,' though, 'for a dessert, benevolence is a very valuable addition'; Mill affirms that even hygienic precepts should be inculcated, not chiefly on prudential grounds, but because by squandering our health, we disable ourselves from rendering services to our fellow-creatures.' Not less significant is the position, that 'the mind is not in a state conformable to utility, unless it loves virtue as a thing desirable in itself.' Rather conciliatory, and very gratifying. At this rate there will soon be no quarrel (because so slight difference) between utilitarian and intuitive moralists. Still more important are the concessions that there is a distinction of kind in pleasures, and that human action may have 'its æsthetic aspect, or that of its beauty.' We remember, however, that his boyish fancy revelled,

when permitted, in Robinson Crusoe, Arabian Nights, and Don Quixote; that he was often mentally depressed, as if the spirit were struggling to rend the bonds which had been laid upon it; that he found genuine comfort in the poetry of Wordsworth; that he himself had a poetic temperament, starved in the training; that of his dead wife he has said, 'her memory is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all worthiness, I endeavor to regulate my life';then we see that the foundation of him is the ideal; that utilitarianism only separates him from the ethical idealism to which his inmost self is inclined; that the beauty of his style, the admissions (inconsistent with his method) into which he is frequently betrayed by his sympathy with the spiritual, are the overflowings of the ideal nature, which transcends the boundaries vainly set for it. Therefore is he better than his logic.

Below the surface stream, shallow and light,

Of what we say we feel; below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel,- there flows,
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.'

We quote once more:

The contest between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest of progressive against stationary morality, of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit.'

Nothing, as we have before had occasion to explain, could be more fallacious. That the standard of duty may become progressively higher is fully admitted; but the change is only a development. The moral idea is original and underived; circumstances determine the nature and range of its application. In itself immutable, the future will but give it a grander sweep. The opposite system of morals is represented by the learned Whewell, the judicial Lecky, and the brilliant Martineau. Forty years ago Tocqueville declared:

The Americans do not read the works of Descartes, because their social condition deters them from speculative studies; but they follow his maxims, because this very social condition naturally disposes their understanding to adopt them.'

He concluded that the Americans display more readiness and taste for general ideas than their transatlantic forefathers, because democratic institutions tend to expand and dilate thought, and to suggest the indefinite perfectibility of man. Be this how it may, our foremost speculative thinkers-as Bascom, Haven,