FRISKY THEOLOGY.

The work bearing the title of Erchomenon, or the Republic of Materialism, is one of the class of which Mr. Mallock's New Republic and Positivism on an Island are well-known instances. It is an attempt to satirise the doctrines of science and philosophy which hold the paramount place in the minds of thinking men at the present day. The method of doing this is by turning them into burlesque and extravagances, drawing all sorts of monstrous conclusions from them, and then leaving the reader to infer how absurd must be the principles of which such are the results. In works of this kind the aggressive temper of orthodoxy is often more apparent than the wit or brilliancy of the satire. We say nothing as to its justice, as there is no reason to suppose that this is regarded as at all a desideratum. In this case the narrator of the story hears a scientific and materialistic lecture on the "origin of all things," after which he tries to find and catch a cuckoo the notes of which he hears in the trees. He strays away into a new country, where he gets into a conveyance which flies through the air and takes him to London. The city is much grown and much changed. Indeed, the fashion of dress and the manners and social arrangements have all changed, and the visitor soon finds that in some way he is projected into a time six centuries ahead of the present era. He gradually discovers that people are very much emancipated in their religious and social ideas. If a man is injured by a serious accident, the doctor immediately puts him out of his misery, and sends him to "the boiling down establishment," of which a detailed and, as we think, very disgusting description is given. In this advanced stage of society women have grown to closely resemble men, and are even gifted with whiskers and moustaches-a development which is in some way associated with their abandonment of orthodox principles and adoption of the creed of science. Newspapers are superseded by phonographs—scientific instruments of which it seems to as that the author has only an imperfect idea. Religion is only represented by the workings of something which the printer has throughout the book persistently given as the Grand d'Etre a lapse which we see is included in the rather lengthy list of errata. It is needless to say that marriage is abolished, and is replaced by arrangements which we cannot stay to describe. Children are brought up in baby farms, and the deformed and sickly are sent to "the boiling-down establishments." One chapter, written in a strain of delicate humour, represents some people as holding that Darwin's famous discovery of the descent of man from the monkey was inspired by the fact that he was "so like a baboon himself that he had found it necessary to discover some way of connecting the race with a species to which he was so obviously allied." Another piece of scathing satire makes out that the descendants of Darwin had reverted to the parent stock, and were then in existence as a group of "as fine specimens of the ape family as can be seen in the whole range of the Zoological Gardens." It is quite consistent with the tenor of the book that the denouement should be the Day of Judgment, which is in full operation when the narrator again hears the "cuckoo," And awakes to find it is all a dream.

In this way are the haughty pretensions of science put to shame and turned into deserved and very pungent ridicule, and orthodoxy is triumphantly vindicated, and replaced on an assured and inexpugunable basis.

Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), Saturday 6 March 1880, page 8