DIDEROT.*

In these volumes on the life and labours of Diderot and his colleagues on the Encyclopedia Mr. John Morley closes a series of studies on the literary preparation for the French Revolution. The former works dealt with Voltaire and Rousseau, and the present is appropriately devoted to the man whose name is always associated with these as one of the great intellectual precursors of the Revolution. The work is characterised by all of Mr. Morley's thoroughness of treatment, which shuns no labour requisite to the full elucidation of its subject. Its style is admirably clear, trenchant, sinewy, and is a fitting vehicle for the keen, strong intelligence and energetic thought. The series of which it forms a part cannot but be attentively studied by every one who desires to attain to an adequate comprehension of the prolific 18th century, which, after it had, under the influence of a passing reaction, been despised as superficial and merely destructive by a couple of generations, we have been made to see, by the labours of such men as Carlyle, Leslie Stephen, Lecky, and Morley, was one of the most noteworthy eras of the intellectual activity and reforming progress of the world.

Denis Diderot was born in 1713, being thus, Mr. Morley reminds us, a few months younger than Rousseau, nearly 20 years younger than Voltaire, two years younger than Hume, and 11 years older than Kant. His family had been cutlers at Langres for two centuries in direct line. Like so many of the 18th century reformers, he was a pupil of the Jesuits. He was reduced to live by his wits as a man of letters. His life for many years was conducted among harassing conditions, and "haggard perplexities." But the squalid adversity he had occasionally to endure left no "sour sediment" in his temper. His spirit was always cheerful and carelessly indifferent to the spite as to the gifts of fortune. " If he found himself absolutely without food and without pence, be began moodily to think of abandoning his books and his pen, and of complying with the wishes of his father. A line of Homer, an idea from the Principia, an interesting problem in algebra or geometry, was enough to restore the eternally invincible spell of knowledge." The versatility displayed by his work in mathematics, philosophy, social science, poetry, and criticism, is wonderful; but, owing to some indifferent stewardship of his splendid talents, it is the fact that "he, perhaps alone in literature, has left a name of almost the first eminence, and impressed his greatness upon men of the strongest and most different intelligence, and yet never produced a masterpiece." Of his highly variable work Mr. Morley presents an interesting and impartial account. He does not stint his condemnation of the indecency of some of Diderot's lighter productions, and in regard to one of them says that after glancing into it he felt the propriety of Carlyle's injunction, " to bathe himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until the evening." Neither does he spare censure on the astonishing bad taste with which Diderot, in one of his more serious works, put some highly plain-spoken discussions of an almost undiscussible subject into the form of dialogue, in which a young lady of his time was given as one of the interlocutors. The justness and quick intelligence of his art-criticisms receive warm praise, and his anticipations of the leading thought of Lessing's Laocöon are pointed out. But it is admitted that his writings fail to explain the secret of his great reputation among his contemporaries. "Like Dr. Johnson, he was a great converser rather than the author of great books," and "his personality invested his talk, as happened in the case of Johnson and of Coleridge, with an imposing interest and a power of inspiration which we should never comprehend from the mere perusal of his writings."

Diderot's place in the literary history of his century is much less due to any single work from his pen than to his share of the production of what was regarded as the most wonderful intellectual edifice ever raised by the mind of man, and which proved one of the most potent agencies in the epoch of fundamental change soon setting in. We refer to the great Encyclopaedia, of which Diderot was the originator, the editor, and by far the largest contributor. It was Diderot's initiative which supplied the germ of this famous work, and it was his devoted slavish labour for many years which brought the daring scheme to a successful conclusion. Of this undertaking Mr. Morley supplies an interesting and valuable narrative. He draws attention to the independence assumed by Diderot and his illustrious colleague D'Alembert, and their consciousness of the power and exaltation of the calling of men of letters as qualities which "marked the rise of a new teaching order, and the supercession of the old. The highest moral ideas now belonged no longer to the clergy, but to the writers; no longer to official Catholicism, but to that fertilising medley of new notions about human knowledge and human society which then went by the name of philosophy." It was from the writers rather than from the ecclesiastics that the high ideas came, which reacted on the church itself, and raised it to a higher level of intellect and morality. " It was no Christian prelate, but Diderot, who burst the bonds of a paralysing dogma by the magnificent cry, Détruisez ces enceintes qui rétrécissent vos idées! Elargissez Dieu !" In the meantime the Church had no weapons to oppose to the reforming efforts of the new literary and scientific teachers, save relentless persecution. "Official religion was then a strange union of Byzantine decrepitude with the energetic ferocity of the Holy Office." " Yet," says Mr. Morley, "I should be sorry to be unjust. It is to be said that even in those bad days, when religion meant cruelty and cabal, the one or two men who boldly withstood face to face the King and the Pompadour for the vileness of their lives, were priests of the church. In spite of the utmost efforts of the church, supported by the Government, and in spite of the discouragement and desertion of many of the most valued of its contributors, the great work went on, thanks above all else to the amazing energy and persistency of Diderot.

The character of the movement of philosophic and scientific revolt of which the Encyclopædia was the outcome and the fruit, is admirably discussed in the luminous pages of Mr. Morley. He especially dwells on its humanising tendency and the social aim of alienating the social wretchedness of mankind, which was so conspicuously kept in view throughout these 40 vast folios. The philosophy of the encyclopaedists was, as anybody can now see, imperfectly thought out. But "if the metaphysic of these writers had been a thousandfold more superficial than it was, what mattered that so long as they had vision for every one of the great social improvements on which the progress, and even the very life, of the nation depended?" "It was this band of writers, organised by a harassed man of letters, and not the nobles swarming round Lewis the Fifteenth, nor the churchmen singing masses, who first grasped the great principle of modern society, the honour that is owed to productive industry." If it is affirmed that the Encyclopaedists deliberately prepared the way for a political revolution, "let us remember that what they really did was to shed the light of rational discussion on such practical grievances as even the most fatuous conservative in France does not now dream of bringing back." In regard to religion the Encylopædia represented the principle of rationalistic scepticism, and reserved its attacks for sacerdotalism. At the same time the work excited an indirect influence on religious thought. By its means "secular knowledge was made to present a massive and sumptuous front. It was pictured before the curious eyes of that generation as a great city of glittering palaces and stately mansions; or else as an immense landscape, with mountains, plains, rocks, waters, forests, animals, and a thousand objects, glorious and beautiful in the sunlight. Theology became visibly a shrivelled thing. Men grew to be conscious of the vastness of the universe." "As," says Mr. Morley, in concluding his important chapter on this grand work, " I replace in my shelves this mountain of volumes, 'dusky and huge, enlarging on the sight,' I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom again be disturbed by me or by others. They served a great purpose a hundred years ago. They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with all the profuse associations of history. It is no Ozymandias of Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile memories we contemplate. We think rather of the grey and crumbling walls of an ancient stronghold, reared by the endeavour of stout hands and faithful, whence in its own day and generation a band once went forth against barbarious hordes to strike a blow for humanity and truth."

In the second volume of his book, while still pursuing the thread of Diderot's life, Mr. Morley introduces sketches of three other noticeable contributions to what we may call the revolutionary literature of that day. We refer to the book of Helvetius on L'Esprit, Abbe Reynal's History of the Indies, and Baron Holbach's famous System of Nature. In this book, with its avowed atheism and materialism, and its fierce denunciations of the crimes and injustices of civil governments, were "gathered up all the scattered explosives of the criticism of the century, into one thundering engine of revolt and destruction." The vigorous attacks of the book on the "religious and political errors which have changed the universe into a valley of tears" form, says our author, "an incessant refrain that sounds with hoarse ground-tone under all the ethics and the metaphysics of the book." Some of its pages make us feel "as if Robespierre were already haranguing in the National Assembly, Camille Desmoulins declaiming in the gardens of the Palais Royal, and Danton thundering at the Club of the Cordeliers. We already watch the smoke of the flaming chateaux, going up like a savoury and righteous sacrifice to the heavens." Its author "lived to get a glimpse of the very edge and sharp bend of the great cataract. He died in the spring of 1789. If he had only lived five years longer he would have seen the great church of Notre Dame solemnly consecrated by legislative decree to the worship of Reason, bishops publicly trampling on crosier and ring amid universal applause, and vast crowds exulting in processions whose hero was an ass crowned with a mitre."

Our author, in his account of the declining years, which were also cheerful and peaceful years, of Diderot's life, glances at the imbecility by which the clergy were blinded to the nature of the position. In their complaints against the resolute attacks against the system of which they were the official champions, "we have no word of recognition that the only remedy for a moral disease is a moral remedy. The single resource that occurred to their debilitated souls was the familiar armoury of suppression, menace, violence, tyranny." In the midst of the rapid,smooth, arrowy drift of the current to the cataract that was now inevitable, the life of the weary but staunch and strenuous fighter whom we have under notice quietly passed away in 1784. With all his faults of conduct and temperament, his fitfulness of intellectual power, the somewhat slapdash and impromptu character of much of his best work, he had from the first to the last fought on the side of enlightenment, and progress, and equal justice, and human liberty ; and it is not for the generation which shares in the triumphs he helped to win to judge him unkindly.

* Diderot and the Encylopædists, by John Morley. London; Chapman and Hall 1878.


Australasian (Melbourne, Vic.), 19 October 1878, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article143001846

ENGLISH INFLUENCE ON FRENCH THOUGHT.

 A generous Frenchman has summarised in the July number of the "Fortnightly Review" the effects of the "influence of English thought on the French mind." Had an Englishman written this shining tribute to the distinctive genius of his countrymen, he might have been accused of national vanity, but coming as it does from the pen of M. Yves Guyot, the acknowledgment carries at once high literary authority and the stamp of impartiality. Few students of political philosophy have failed to observe the unbroken chain connecting the "Social Contract" of Rousseau with the doctrines promulgated by John Locke, who was in a sense the academic father of the French Revolution. The theory that society is a contract between the individuals composing it, and the sovereignty of the people, was first put forward by Locke, and it was upon this and the contrasting study of rational absolutism contained in the writings of Hobbes that Rousseau based his epoch making work, so that, strangely enough, the famous principles enunciated in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence may be distinctly traced by a circuitous route to that very England against which the American standard was raised. The Byronic cult in France and other Continental countries is also a commonplace of literary history, but it remained for M. Guyot to reveal the wide extent and remarkable dominance of the literature of England upon the mind of its gayer and more severely classical neighbour. The adherence of the French school to the dramatic unities upon the stage, to the syllogistic method in the investigations of science and the speculations of philosophy are often supposed to have been accompanied by a somewhat supercilious contempt for the more irregular style of Englishmen in literature and their patient exploration and reverential regard for facts in the domain of research. How Voltaire described Shakespeare as "a drunken barbarian," and how the French playwrights feared to stage "Hamlet" with the ghost lest the audience should laugh at the solemn scenes, are ancient gibes which the English have quoted unceasingly against themselves.
 M. Yves Guyot, tells another story. The British reader begins to suspect that he has hitherto suffered from the complaint of modesty in a more acute form than it generally appears in insular races. Voltaire's laugh at Shakespeare was, it appears, but the other and witty French side of a genuine admiration—so genuine that it took the sincere form of imitation. For it seems that the great Frenchman's Brutus was taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Zaire from Othello, two scenes; of Mahomet from Macbeth, and the spectres of Eliphile and Semiramis from Hamlet. This is not mere literary speculation, but is confirmed by Voltaire's personal acknowledgement. He described Shakespeare as a "genius full of strength and fecundity," and after his stay in England wrote:—"We have gained from the English their sinking funds, the building and working of vessels, power of attraction, differential calculus, the seven primary colours, inoculation, we shall insensibly take their noble freedom of thought and their profound disdain for all scholastic twaddle." But the admiration of English methods neither began nor ended with Voltaire. French Huguenot refugees before his time had contrived to circulate translations of English writers among their countrymen and the Abbe Prevost, Desmarzeaux, Rapin de Thoyras, Beat de Muralt, with others, sang the praises, made known the ideas, and told France the wonderful history of the English nation. In economics and political philosophy the British influence was at first strongest. J. B. Say embodied in his French works on economy the doctrines of Adam Smith, and to this day the academic economists promulgate the principles which Smith and his successors laid down, although it may be correctly stated in the words of M. Guyot that "economic science was the result of collaboration between French and English." Montesquieu has given French clarity to the constitutional divisions of power traced through the development of English Parliamentarism, and the study of Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, and others modified the Gallic habit of following blindly the sophistic style of reasoning inherited from the Greeks. Bacon, as is well-known, was the originator of inductive reasoning, so that from his method springs the scientific achievement of the last two centuries. And all along, as M. Guyot emphasises, the influence of Englishmen has been pre-eminent in scientific inquiry. "They transformed our methods," says M. Guyot, "in natural science." Newton, Lyell, Darwin, Spencer, these in succession are the finger-posts along the road of discovery, and they have been noted and followed by Frenchmen as often and as systematically as by Englishmen.
 In the field of pure literature the English influence has been especially powerful. In the eighteenth century the splendid realism of Defoe and Swift stamped itself on the French mind; and the nineteenth century novelists of Britain have been the stimulation of the French school. Henri Heine at the Salon of 1831, counted no fewer than thirty pictures representing episodes of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. "Alfred de Vigny," says M. Guyot, "borrowed Cinq Mars from him Merrimee borrowed the Chronique de Charles IX., Victor Hugo Notre Dame de Paris. Balzac les Chouans, and, as for Alexandre Dumas, he drew all his theatrical pieces and novels therefrom." But the Wizard of the North was not the only British inspirer of French fiction. Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot have had their influence especially in teaching the art of representing homely scenes and manners, the peculiar genius of the English in literature as it is of the Dutch in painting. In the drama Shakespeare's influence has been great since 1827, although the ideas derived from him have been recast in a French mould. From the beginning of literary intercourse between France and England Frenchmen seem to have outdone us in generous tributes to the national character. The Abbe Prevost, early in the eighteenth century, declared that "there is no country where one finds so much straightforwardness; so much humane feeling, such just standards of honour, wisdom, happiness, as among the English." Beat de Muralt, a Bernese, in a series of letters written in 1694 and 1695, declared :—"Among the English there are persons who think more strongly and who have those strong thoughts in greater number than intellectual men of other nations." And M. Yves Guyot himself, in summing up the results of his study upon the subject submits the following propositions:—
 1. The chief intellectual influence, is liberty; England has freed French thought, French science, from the "authority" argument; Shakespeare freed our theatre from the Aristotelian rules ; Locke and English institutions taught the rest of the world the true conditions of political liberty.
 2. The second form, which is a consequence of the first, is the scientific form. It is Bacon against Plato, Newton against Descartes, Lyell against Cuvier.... . It is reality opposed to the assertions and subtleties, which we inherited from the Greek sophists.
 And after tracing the purely literary influence he concludes:—
 In short, the intellectual influence of the English over the French taught the latter to subordinate their subjective conceptions to objective method, and to learn the character and utility of the competition in politics, in economics, and in biology.
 What M. Yves Guyot has shown is, after all, one side of the interaction of character upon character. There is in the English mind a certain love of substance, of plainness, and of seeking out the roots of things. Despite all their hypocrisy, as Meredith has observed, there is a genuine fibre of moral integrity running through the nation. This it is, perhaps, which impels Englishmen to discard mere forms as useless surplusage, or to disregard the character of the form so that the body it envelops, be sound. "No matter how the head lie so that the heart be right," jested a great Englishman when upon the scaffold. And this is a truth which penetrates to the marrow of the nation's bones. But while it is pardonable to believe these things of ourselves, especially when they are said by a foreigner, there is another side to be revealed. It is the influence of French thought upon the English mind. Locke studied in France, and what have we not learned from French wit, French chivalry, French clarity of vision and augustness and directness of expression ? When we come to modern times did not the French Revolution react upon England and upon the world, and was it not really the thunder of Democracy that shook the Bastille? Have not Rabelais and Balzac, Montaigne, and Voltaire, Taine, and St. Beuve, Hugo, and even Zola influenced our literature? Are not Laplace and, Pasteur intellectual brethren of Newton and Darwin? What do not chemistry and biology, astronomy, and engineering owe to Frenchmen? In the republic of letters language is the only barrier to that freedom of intercourse which strengthens and enriches thought, while in the region of pure science achievement speaks all tongues.

West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 - 1954), Saturday 1 August 1908, page 10

DR. LUDWIG STEIN ON THE ENGLISH.

———+———

THE MOST PRACTICAL PEOPLE

IN THE WORLD.

 ———+———

Professor Dr. Ludwig Stein, the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty at Berne University, and author of several philosophical and sociological works, who has also translated the autobiography of Herbert Spencer into German, delivered a lecture recently at Berne on "The English Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century."

The Professor's introductory words are given as follows in the "Anglo-German Courier" :—
 "Englishmen have always been realists, and have never indulged in dreams. While we Germans, were dreaming in our studies and building philosophical empires Englishmen sent their ships out to conquer empires. . . . .
"The English standpoint in philosophy has always been that the individual is real and not the universal ; the individual is the chief thing in the State ; the individual is the aim and the State is the means. Therefore, in England there was never an idolising of the social classes and of the State, as exists still on the Continent. According to English ideas, the individual always has been the central point with regard to economy, religion, and politics. Pronounced individualism is to the present day the most characteristic trait in English philosophy. English philosophy is but little occupied with 'transcendental' questions. The Englishman fulfils his religious duties on Sunday ; during the week he does not trouble himself about abstract questions.
 "One must be careful not to judge the character of the English people by the foolish, commonplace remarks that are so often spread about them. One must not think that the Englishman, with his disagreeable qualities we so often see in Switzerland, is the true type of the Englishman. This would be quite wrong. The impolite inconsiderate Englishmen we often see here are mostly parvenus — tailors or bootmakers, who, having got rich are making their Switzerland trip. He who sees the Englishman in his home is enchanted with his politeness and distinction. Of course, like all distinguished people, the Englishman of this type is reserved. In the English people there is a sound and sensible national vigour— the vigour of an ambitious man, who goes straight forward towards his goal without troubling himself about insoluble questions. This is his principle in life and philosophy.
 "In all the works of English thinkers there is splendid lucidity. We must never forget what we owe to the English people. Englishmen have solved the mystery of how to make a revolution — not a riot, but a total reorganisation of the State. An Englishman gave first to the world Magna Charta and the Habeas Corpus Act — those grand guarantees for individual freedom. . . . Who gave us the new physics ? Roger Bacon foreshadowed it in the thirteenth century ; then Newton ; in the nineteenth century, Herschel, Faraday, Maxwell, Crooks. Who gave us the new chemistry ? Boyle. Who showed new methods in medical science ? Harvey, the discoverer of the blood. Who made the great discoveries in biology ? Erasmus and Charles Darwin ; after them Hooker, Huxley, Wallace.
" England has also produced great poets. Think of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley. With regard to the other arts, think of the painters —Whistler, Turner, Beardsley, Alma Tadema, and the Pre-Raphaelites. In literature the names of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Walter Pater are in the first rank. To the greatest historians of all times belong Buckle, Gibbon, and Macaulay. In philosophy England is not behind any cultured nation. All great systems have their representatives in England— inductive logic in Bacon, materialism in Hobbes, the constitution on representative principles, the new psychology, the theory of knowledge in Locke, psychology also in Hartley and Priestley, idealism in Berkeley, scepticism in Hume. The most practical people in the world gave us the most practical science. Classical political economy was created, by Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus. In the nineteenth century there follow them Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, the men who understood the Positivism of August Comte incomparably better than Frenchmen themselves. In John Stuart Mill there are united all the chief traits of the character of the English people as in a cone of light."

Penshurst Free Press (Vic. : 1901 - 1918), Friday 20 July 1906, page 1

THE ROMAN INDEX

When Pope Sixtus V. determined to bring out an Italian Bible, Philip II. sent his ambassador to say that, if it were published, he would forbid it in his own Italian States. Sixtus was silent for so long a time that Olivares said, "Your Holiness does not answer me, I cannot tell what you think." "I am thinking," replied the Pope, "of throwing you out of window that you may learn respect for the Sovereign Pontiff." Nevertheless the very Bible, opposition to whose publication drove a Pope into threats of personal violence, was placed, in 1590, in the Index, and figures in the list of prohibited books.

It is a vulgar notion to identify the authorities of the Church of Rome with the Pope and the priests. They are only its officials; its real authorities are those who are most in harmony with the current public opinion of its members and have most power to wield it. Thus, in the present age of journalism, a newspaper editor named Louis Veuillot was for many years one of the most powerful authorities in the Catholic Church, far more powerful, probably, than all the bishops of France put together. In the seventeenth century this sort of loyalty was actually exercised by men who wore crowns; kingcraft was an art profoundly studied, and it chiefly consisted in being in harmony with, and so retaining the management of public opinion.

The fact that not only the ecclesiastical authorities, but the theology and policy of the Church of Rome, are the creation of its public opinion is most manifestly brought out in the history of the establishment of the Index as a permanent institution in the Roman Catholic Church. It is well known that when it became clear that Luther's movement was a popular success in Germany, and was oven carrying away the best minds in Italy, it was for some time a question at Rome whether the Church should not adopt the Reformation and the doctrine of justification by faith. A council of cardinals was appointed by Paul VII. to give their advice as to the reformation of the Church. Its corruptions and abuses were unsparingly denounced, and the Pope was plainly told that he ought no longer to exert arbitrary power. This council was appointed in 1537, and one of its leading members was the Caraffa who ascended the Papal throne in 1535, as Paul IV. He was still fiery for reform, but of a character so different that he transferred his own advice to the list of prohibited books. What had happened? Ignatius Loyola had founded his Society, and was obtaining a success which bid fair to balance that of Luther. The Iberian and Italian peninsulas, both purely Catholic lands, had given themselves in something like a national manner to its teaching. At Loyola's death, in 1550, the Society had fourteen provinces. Seven belonged to Spain and Portugal with their colonies, while Italy was divided into three. Thus it was clear that Jesuitism exactly harmonised with public feeling in the Roman Catholic Church at that time, and the minds of its officials recognised the fact and guided themselves by its light.

What was the first, and last idea of the Jesuit-craft?  "Obedientia caeca" : blind obedience. This state of mind was absolutely incompatible with free-examination and free discussion. It could only be produced by an act similar to that attributed to the ostrich when pursued by the hunter; the Iberian and Italian peoples placed their heads under the dry sands of a literature labelled orthodox, by their ecclesiastical pedagogues, and their consciences and their intellects seemed safe from the attacks of the German and Swiss heretics. I say the peoples, for it is manifest that a single man, be he called Charles V. or Philip II., could not have had power to compel a whole nation to this, unless he were its real representative. Now the establishment of the institution known to history as the Index, and which has ever since become an important part of the discipline of the Roman Church, exactly synchronises with the moment when the Jesuit body, immediately after the death of its founder, had reached a dominant position in that Church. Not of course that it was a new idea to suppress books objectionable to dominant popular opinion. In 1408 a Roman Synod had forbidden the reading of Wiclif's works, and in 1490 Torquemuda made a great bonfire of Bibles and manuscripts in Seville. But with printing a new era had come, requiring more organised methods of suppression. Here, as on other occasions, action did not begin with the Pope or the priests, but commenced when public opinion was most powerfully represented. In  1546 the Faculty of Louvain, by the order of Charles V., prepared a list of the works calculated to overturn the faith. The same prohibitory action had previously been pursued in Venice in 1543, and in France at the instance of the Faculty of Theology in 1544. Thus the Court of Rome was almost last in the field, its first prohibitory Index appearing in 1559.

But this was in accordance with its astute policy. It waited to understand public opinion, and finding it universally in favour of the suppression of all ideas contrary to the dominant ones—in favour, in fact, of religious tyranny, it made the utmost use for its own advantage of this state of the public mind. Thus, among the books the Roman Court indexed were not only the works of Hus, Luther, Calvin, Zwingle, Melanchthon and the rest of the reformers, but all works which defended the temporal authority against the spiritual, or the authority of Councils against that of Popes. This sign of Papal aggressiveness created so much discussion that the matter was brought before the Council of Trent, which in 1502 appointed a commission of inquiry; but the vast number of books struck rendered it impossible to arrive at a decision before the Council closed, and so the question was finally left in the hands of the Pope. On the 24th of March, 1564, Pius IV. published a Bull under, the title "Index of the Council of Trent," which announced ten rules for guidance in the work. This Bull laid heavy penalties on the trade of bookselling, left to bishops and inquisitors complete authority to interdict even books not comprehended in the ten rules, and pronounced excommunicated whoever should possess prohibited works.

The right of examining books was in the hands of the Inquisition until 1586, when Sixtus V. founded the Congregation of the Index, whose duty it became to examine all new works, to say what were entirely forbidden, what were permitted after correction, and to grant permission to learned and pious persons to read works otherwise prohibited.

The eighteenth century came with its immense impetus in favour of free thought, and Rome again bowed to public opinion, Pope Benedict XIV. publishing a Bull, in 1753, in which he blamed the Congregation of the Index for suppressing opinions free in the Church, and ordered them for the future to proceed more gently against Catholic writers. Papal authority has generally displayed more toleration than its supporters. The nuncio at Paris sold so freely permissions to read forbidden books that, in 1739, the Parliament of Paris issued an edict against the practice.

Nowhere was the Index more rigorously carried out than in Spain. In 1539 Charles V. obtained from the Pope a list of works forbidden; this may be considered the real starting point of the Index. The first Index in Spain is said to have been published in 1540, and from 1550 every book published had to bear a certificate stating that it was not on the Index. In 1662 it had become an immense folio. Under Philip II., confiscation of goods and pain of death was decreed against whosoever sold, bought, or had in his possession, a prohibited book. Up to 1640 the authorisation of the civil authority was required to publish the Index, but after this period the Inquisition acted as a sovereign power, and prohibited books without any control.

A list of the works which have been prohibited, even of the more important, is clearly impossible here; but it will serve to show how ineffectual has been this effort of the Church of Rome to hide its eyes and its ears from those pressing questions which follow us all, if I conclude this short account by quoting the names of some authors and of certain works which figure in the Index.

Philosophy has been forbidden in the persons of Machiavelli, Bacon, Grotius, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Malebranche, Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the French Encyclopaedists "en masse," Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Comte and Stuart Mill.

History has been ostracised in the persons of Guicciardi one of the earliest of Italian historians, in Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Volney, Sismondi, Hallam, Mignot, Michelet, Quinet, and in Botta, one of the latest of Italian historians.

Among other great writers such names appear as Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Montaigne, Milton, La Fontaine, Pascal, Fenelon, Swift, de Lamennais, and Victor Hugo.

Dante is condemned as an anti-Papal politician, rather than as a poet; but it is for writing "Paradise Lost" that Milton's name appears in the Index. So the "German Bible," the "Provincial Letters," the "Maxims of the Inner Lives of the Saints," the "Essay on the Human Understanding," "Emile," "The Words of a Believer," and the "Positive Philosophy," have been, one after the other, forbidden. "With what result? To cut Roman Catholic society up into two sharp divisions, one, ever increasing, which regards the Inquisition as the best proof that a book is worth reading, while the other, ostrich-like, thinks to find peace and safety by hiding its eyes and ears from the hunter. For the human mind is insatiable as Nimrod, and nothing will stop its career. A decree of the Index is as impotent for it as the command of King Knut to the ocean. All it can do is to emasculate the minds of those who receive it, render them weak and feeble, and an easy prey on the first occasion they take the liberty to pull their head out of the bush and try to run alone.

Nobody who is acquainted with the history of Europe during the last 300 years, but must feel that when the Inquisition established the Index, it did its best to reduce the intellect of Christendom to a poor, blind Samson, ready

"At once both to destroy and be destroyed."

How fruitless have been these efforts to put a gag on the mouth of the heretic or the infidel ! In Roman Catholic countries the man whose works the Index has prohibited more frequently than any others remains master of the popular mind.

When we reflect on the ever-increasing influence of Voltaire, and see that an Index prohibitory or expurgatory is only successful in reducing to silence that reverent thought which is most capable of meetings doubts, it would not be surprising to learn that Rome itself is beginning to question the efficacy of the Index, and that this is the meaning of its present rather spasmodic and perfunctory action.

In the sepulchral chapel of the Medici at Florence is a figure which fitly emblems the condition to which the greatest national intelligence in Europe has been reduced by such a policy as that of the Index. The statue represents a man seated on a tomb; his head loaded with a heavy casque rests on his elbow; he seems wrapt in silent thought, and that silence has now continued for three centuries. Michael Angelo wrote concerning this statue: "To see nothing, to feel nothing, this is the best of all possessions. Do not wake me! Hush!" What can be more touchingly true concerning the state of mind of those countries in which the Index has been most triumphant!

R. HEATH in the "Sunday at Home."

Watchman (Sydney, NSW : 1902 - 1926), Saturday 1 December 1906, page 3

OMAR KHAYYAM

 The Rebel's Library.

THE VOLTAIRE OF PERSIA.

 "The appearance in a threepenny edition of Fitzgerald's 'Omar Khayyam,' makes one regret the days when mischievous books were burned by the common hangman." — 'Daily Mail' (London).

The above was the welcome given by the Daily Mail to a people's edition of Omar Khayyam's wonderful poem "The Rubaiyat."
 Omar, the poet and scientist, was born in the latter half of the eleventh century, about the time of the Norman conquest of Great Britain. A great scholar, he was one of the eight men who reformed the Calendar. He was the author of astronomical tables, treatises on cube roots, algebra, and of various poems.
 The verses of "The Rubaiyat" consist simply of quatrains, little epigrams of four lines each. They are characteristic of Persian poetry, the subject of which is usually praise of wine and women, with speculations on religion.
 Omar was an inveterate iconoclast, and the way he enforces his rationalism is by praising wine, for he was brought up as a Mahommedan, to whom wine was a forbidden thing. Wine, with Omar, is typical of the enjoyment of the world, a beverage for unconventional Bohemians.
 The writings of Omar remained forgotten for centuries, banned by the clergy and shunned by publishers. They ultimately fell into the hands of Edward Fitzgerald, a sceptic and a poet, who made Omar known to all parts of the world as one of the greatest of ancient poets. Omar's poem savors of the dreamy and languorous East, whence come tales of beautiful houris and scented gardens, witching music and graceful dances, the Orient of luxuriance and barbaric splendor. As he sings to us, the Persia of byegone days is recalled— the caravan track, the dreamy tinkling bells of the loaded camels moving slowly over the dusty roads of the deserted plains, the fierce warriors armed to the teeth, the manners and customs of the towns, and the religious speculations of the people.
 Tennyson said that nothing else of the kind had been done "so divinely well." Yet, for some time, the book made its way slowly. It had to fight many allies of entrenched superstition, but it eventually triumphed and became the most popular book in Britain, where it made a profound impression.
 The irresistible charm of "The Rubaiyat" is that it splendidly voices the scepticism that is growing in all thoughtful minds, and makes magnificent music of it. In it Omar is revealed as the Voltaire of ancient Persia. There is no doubt about his freethought. He fails to find any Providence but Destiny or any evidence of any other world than this, which he invokes us to make the best of.

 "And that inverted bowl they call the sky,
Whereunder crawling, cooped, we live and die,
 Lift not your hands to it for help, for it
As impotently rolls as you and I."

 The poetry of Omar, like that of Lucretius, is full of argument on destiny and man's conception of the Deity. Of man's contradictory conception of a supreme being he says :

"What, out of senseless nothing to provoke
A conscious Something, to resent the yoke
 Of unpermitted pleasure, under pain
Of everlasting penalties if broke!

"What! from His helpless creatures be repaid
Pure gold for what He lent us, dross allayed—
 Sue for a debt we never did contract,
And cannot answer — oh, the sorry trade!"

 A fierce revolutionary ardour lurks in these lines :

 "Ah, Love, could you and I with him conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire;
 Would we not shatter it to bits — and then
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"

 On theological lies and fairy tales he makes a candid attack :

 "Oh, threats of Hell and hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain— this life flies.
 One thing is certain, and the rest is lies,
The flower that once has blown forever dies."

 He foreshadowed in lines of magic sweetness the modern conception of the indestructibility of matter:

"I sometimes think that never blows so red
 The rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
 That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
 Dropt in its lap from some once lovely Head.

 "And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean—
 Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
 From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!"

Of the world's pomps and vanities Omar, like Byron, had a supreme contempt. Byron longed for a desert for a resting place with some fair spirit for his minister, and Omar says:

"With me along some Strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
 Where name of Slave and Sultan scarce is known,
And pity Sultan Mahmud on his throne.

"Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A flask of Wine, a Book of Verse— and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
And Wilderness is Paradise enow."

 Omar stood erect; he never grovelled to the Sultan or pandered to the prejudices of the ignorant. He loved liberty and fought for it with every gift nature endowed him with. He was a lover of nature, and under the witchery of his genius we scent across centuries of time and thousands of miles of space the aroma from the gardens he sang of. In fancy we see the roses, the flame of the tulips, the sparkling Persian wine; we look into the eyes and wind our fingers in the tresses of the beloved. Through Omar our enjoyment is made more perfect, our faith in the ultimate triumph of humanity over tyranny and oppression strengthened. Omar in his day was the champion of reason against a corrupt Church and special privilege. Omar laughed at the Sultan, mocked the priests, and in his contests with them proved himself the sublimest poet who ever swept the lyre under the Mohammedan crescent.
 A rebel's library would be incomplete without a copy of Omar Khayyam's "Rubaiyat."

International Socialist (Sydney, 1916, )http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article120110727

DAVID HUME

The book on David Hume given as one of Professor Morley's series of English Men of Letters, could hardly have been entrusted to better hands than those of Professor Huxley. In the general tenour of their philosophical conclusions both the subject and writer of the biography substantially agree, and there is also a good deal of resemblance in the character of their intellects. Both are eminently characterised by the qualities of clearness and distinctness of vision, and precision and lucidity of statement. In their temperaments they, no doubt, differ considerably, and there is a strongly-marked contrast between the calm, cold spirit of Hume and the vigorous combativeness of Huxley. There is another difference between them of a more fundamental nature. Both are ready to recognise, or rather eager to affirm, the rigorous limits by which all human knowledge and human thought are restricted to the matter furnished by experience. But these limits having been accepted, the procedure of the two men is not exactly the same. With Hume all that lies outside the limits of experience— since we can know nothing of it, and it is childish to talk of, or care for, or be influenced by that which is and must remain essentially unknown—is for him virtually non-existent. That which we cannot in any degree know is equivalent for him with that which has no existence. But it is not so with Professor Huxley. He has, as has been said before, the tenets of unbelief, united with the temper of belief. He appears in many passages of his works to be haunted, and, indeed, almost oppressed, by the consciousness how much human feelings and human life, and the life and existence of nature, are influenced by the unknown amid which the little area of the knowable is but as a petty island in an infinite sea. And so it is that even in the case of self-assured science that visitations come of "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls," and all the old problems and the primal sense of mystery come back again to the mind with undiminished force.

Professor Huxley's account of Hume and his philosophy appears to be animated by an eager spirit of recognition due from what is most essentially characteristic of modern thought to Hume, as its truest and earliest representative. Hume remains the strongest and greatest Agnostic who has contributed to the philosophical thought of the world. If the desire of his present expositor had been to show how much of the agnosticism of the present day is directly derived from Hume as, if not its parent, its first reducer to a scientific system, he could not have done so more effectually than he has in the present eminently readable and valuable little book.

 Only a small part of the work is devoted to the uneventful life of Hume. But that is sufficient to give an interesting picture of a singularly calm, shrewd, upright, independent, amiable man. It is curious to be reminded of the estimate of Hume formed by his mother, a woman of great merit and intelligence, who is said to have observed, " Our Davie's a fine, good-natured crater, but uncommon wake-minded." A remark possibly as apocryphal as a lately-quoted criticism on Napoleon Buonaparte—" A good fellow, but stupid." Hume is one of the large class of original thinkers who have owed very little to schools and universities, and he acquired his knowledge and discipline by study and life long reading. He was intended for the law, but the profession was distasteful to him, and he, as he says, "could think of no other way of pushing my fortunes in the world but that of a scholar and philosopher." His reading contributed to the calm stoical temper shown in his life, and he tells us that while reading Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch "I was continually fortifying myself with reflections, against death, and poverty, and shame, and pain, and all the other calamities of life." He resolved to "make a very frigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvement of my talents in literature." His earliest work, his Treatise on Human Nature, was composed before he was 25, and though he afterwards spoke of it as having fallen "deadborn from the press," it seems that it attracted attention, and was reviewed on its appearance as showing "incontestable marks of a great capacity, of a soaring genius, but young and not yet thoroughly practised." Subsequently he published his Essays, Moral and Political, which were received with much more notice and pecuniary success. His various philosophical and historical works followed, and broadened and raised his reputation till he became one of the recognised leaders of philosophic thought in Europe. He went to Paris as secretary of the embassy of Lord Hertford, and was received with honour in the highest circles of France. He returned to Edinburgh in possession of the "very opulent" income of £1,000 a year, and, as Mr. Huxley says, he "determined to take what remained to him of life pleasantly and easily," a result to which his easy, circumstances and charging temper contributed. Indeed, it may be said that the only malevolent emotion which ruffled, his peace of mind was hatred to England and Englishmen. When the London mob went into an ecstasy of excitement, cheering and Liberty," Hume wrote :—"Oh ! how I long to see America and the East Indies revolted, totally and finally—the revenue reduced to half—public credit fully discredited by bankruptcy— the third of London in ruins, and the rascally mob subdued! I think I am not too old to despair of being witness to all these blessings." He died at the age of 65, having just before written My Own Life. . . . .

In the account which Professor Huxley has given of Hume's philosophy, he has gone beyond the province of a compiler, and even of an expositor. In some points he shows that Hume has been inconsistent with his own most settled principles, in others that he has not sufficiently developed their consequences and results. He admits that "here and there, it must be confessed that more is seen of my thread than of Hume's beads. My excuse must be an ineradicable tendency to try to make things clear." In pursuance of this object he has endeavoured to exhibit and to harmonise Hume's views on the scope of philosophy, the origin and warrant of knowledge, necessary truths, miracles, the origin of religions and theology, the doctrine of immortality, liberty of the will, and the principles and sanction of morals. It is needless to say of Professor Huxley's work that it is throughout clear and intelligent, and the compressed space into which he has put his sketch of the remarkable labours of the great thinker is such as to mock any attempts at further condensation.

Looking only at the results which have arisen from Hume's philosophy, the student is tempted to doubt whether any thinker, from the days of Aristotle downwards, ever succeeded in exercising a more profound and permanent influence on the currents of human thought. This is not so much due to the commanding intellectual power of the man—considerable as this was—as to the fact that he, with that good fortune which only comes to men of great insight and sagacity, placed himself in the direct line which human thought has since his time mainly pursued. On one side Hume is to be largely credited with supplying the stimulus which initiated the cause of intellectual thought which gave birth to the philosophy of modern Germany, which, whatever may be thought of its results, will always remain one of the most wonderful movements of the intellectual powers of mankind. As every student of philosophy knows, the obligations of Kant to Hume were great and direct, and much as the philosopher of Königsberg differed in his completed results from the Scotch thinker, it remains true that it was the pregnant doctrine of Hume respecting causation that first set Kant on that analysis of the conditions of human knowledge which gave birth to the famous Kritik der reinen Vernunft, which exerted so profound an influence on modern philosophy. While these were among the results of the influence of Hume in Germany, in England the effects of his teachings have been different. There it has been rather the negative, the limiting and restricting influences of his philosophy, that have been the most powerful, or we might say the most seminative. To us he has been, as we called him before, the first and the greatest of the Agnostics, and that spirit which is everywhere found in present day thought, even in the most unlooked-for quarters, which exhibits itself by a cheerful or a sad, an eager or a despairing recognition of the very narrow limits within which human knowledge is confined, this is traceable by direct ascent to Hume as its source and first representative. That spirit which, when it finds transcendental metaphysicians disputing about the Unconditioned or the Absolute, or theologians consigning each other to perdition about differences regarding matters about which they know no more than a child, reminds them how rigidly human knowledge is restricted by the limits of human experience, and that all beyond this is to us as the "luminiferous ether" or the infinity of space—that is to say, mere void forms of thought—all this is the spirit of Hume still potent in its mild, cold, keen, slightly sarcastic intelligence. His method of thinking has received a vast accession of strength from the growth of physical science. That method was essentially the application to the method and products of thought of the system of experimental inquiry which had proved so powerful and productive in the field of science. Since his days the realm of science has enormously enlarged. Its sovereignty is now so vast and commanding that the forces which formerly opposed its growth have shrunk and faded in its presence. The addition to the mental arsenel of mankind of a new and most potent organism of thought, the idea of evolution, has changed and transformed all human knowledge. Starting from the facts of experience, inquiry has been enabled to discover an experiential origin of what seemed most intuitive and transcendental in the world of ideas, and we have been able to discover in the race education and race inheritance of humanity sufficient origin for all those instincts and ideas which are given, as it were, a priori to the individual. It has proved that by strictly adhering to the rule of limiting ourselves to the bounds of experience those bounds have widened, and the term experience has acquired a new meaning. It now signifies not the narrow petty experience of one individual life, but all the vast aggregate of the thoughts and observations, and sentiments, and education of the great whole of humanity, from its dawn on the world to the present day, a great and matchless inheritance, wider, richer, more ample, more various than the wildest imaginations of metaphysics or myth, and at the same time a living reality in which even the meanest of mankind has a share and interest.

It would be far beyond our limits to attempt to indicate even the main points in which Hume and modern Agnosticism are at one with each other. The method on which the Scottish philosopher relied for the destruction of the fallacies of false metaphysics and superstition was "to inquire seriously into the nature of human understanding, and show, from an exact analysis of its powers and capacity, that it is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects. We must submit to this fatigue, in order to live at ease ever after; and must cultivate true metaphysics with some care, in order to destroy the false and adulterated." Upon which Professor Huxley remarks, " Near a century and a half has elapsed since these brave words were shaped by David Hume's pen, and the business of carrying the war into the enemy's camp has gone on but slowly. Like other campaigns, it long languished for want of a good base of operations. But since physical science, in the course of the last 50 years, has brought to the front an inexhaustible supply of heavy artillery of a new pattern, warranted to drive solid bolts of fact through the thickest skulls, things are looking better; though hardly more than the first faint flutterings of the dawn of the happy day, when superstition and false metaphysics shall be no more, and reasonable folks may 'live at ease,' are as yet discernible by the enfants perdus of the outposts." It is in the new science of the present generation that the labours of Hume and other pioneers of human emancipation find their strongest ally. Those labours would appear but merely negative and even destructive in confining the thought of mankind within the narrow limits of experience and reality, were it not that science has during the last generation taught us how rich those limits are in unexplored resources. And if, after all, it remains true that the human mind refuses to be restricted by any such bounds, and persists in trying to pierce the obscurity beyond, these efforts will at least be made in a different spirit from that of the childhood of the race. Man will be content to regard a mystery as a mystery, and will call darkness darkness, without trifling with his hopes and his yearnings so far as to people the very home of mystery with myths and legends and dreams of his own, and then to present these as answers to his difficulties and solutions to his doubts.

*English Men of Letters: Hume, by Professor Huxley. London: Macmillan and Co. 1879.

Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), Saturday 21 June 1879, page 8

LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE

BY REV. R. EYTON, M.A.

Rev. R. Eyton, M.A., commenced a series of lectures on Shakespeare...

Mr Eyton said: "Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time," said Ben Johnson, his friend, and it did credit to his perception that he grasped this fact about him. About much writing and literary effort which attracts and often too, arrests the men of any age, the crucial question remains to be answered " Will it live," and only men of real insight are able to give the answer. That Shakespeare's plays have lived was sufficiently evidenced by the fact that more quotations from his works have entered into common speech than from any other source except the Bible. One of those half educated women often found in London society was taken to see one of his plays and her only remark was that it was "full of quotations." There could not be a more convincing proof of the way in which his phrases have become the property of all because they were recognised as the truest expression of the facts of common life. In the wonderful grasp that he had of human nature in all its phases, grave and gay. " Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time." But he was also a man of his own age as his great rival called him in the same poem "The Soul of the Age." Every man who moves the world powerfully must be. He must be the child of the previous ages — their outgrowth — receiving from them a vast inheritance. Shakespeare showed that he was this in his historical plays especially. But he must be also the man of his own time, colored and influenced by its tendencies and aims, ethical, religious, political, social— and the Elizabethean age was pre-eminently a strong one in its temperament, in its facts, in its activities — it was an age of awakening and an age of growth, it was an age of great men with great minds, strong in literary power, for it was the age of Spenser, Raleigh, Shakespeare, Bacon, strong in its statesmen, such as Burleigh, strong in its theologians such as Hooker. It was an age in which a great man was sure of understanding, and of that audience which elicits his greatness ; a protestant age, a monarchical age, an age eminently practical, it knew what it wanted and how to get it, an age that was alive, very much alive indeed, full of vitality.
  It would be worth our while to go a little more into particulars in order to understand the nature of the forces which culminated in the appearance of Shakespeare. (1) We must take into account the two great preceding movements, the Renaissance and the Reformation. Through them the world had again arrived at the curiousness of being alive in every sense of the word. The Renaissance had flooded Europe with a great literature which had been long since dead and buried and with countless forms of art it had come like the spring after the long wintry frost of the middle ages. We make a mistake, however, when we suppose that there was no interest in the classics in the middle ages. Let us be just in acknowledging our debts. It was to the monks that we largely owe their preservation and the scholars of the 13th century probably knew the great latin authors. Horace and Virgil as well as the scholars of our day. Dante, in the 14th century, Petrarch a little later, had done much to make the best Latin poets familiar, while Boccacio about the same time (1313 — 1375) did some thing to create an interest in the Greek poets. The awakening made some great progress even before the invention of printing (1440) came like a new gift of tongues upon the earth and lent wings to knowledge. But though the monks preserved the classics to a large extent it must also be said that they kept a knowledge of them to themselves. It was not till the fall of Constantinople (1453) that Europe (Italy above all else) was covered with the fugitives of that mighty ruin. It was these who escaped with apparently little more than their lives who yet saved out of the general wreck treasures of unspeakable value and not only a living familiarity with Greek but Greek authors almost unknown in the West. The more distinguished refugees were received gladly, often with extravagant honor by the Princes of Italy, by Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence, and at Rome by Popes such as Nicolas V, founder of the great Vatican Library, by Pius II (1456— 1464) and by Leo X.  Professorships, canonries were found for them; almost every little place had its academia centre of classical studies and of a stirring intellectual life, and if Italy was the cradle for this new enthusiasm it went forth throughout Europe. In Italy new learning became almost a new religion, so we read of Licinius burning a lamp before the bust of Plato as, though be were a saint, a most significant fact was the expression of such a homage but the movement did not remain Italian. The youth of Europe was attracted to Italy, Colet and Linacre, for example from England, and carried back to their own land the learning which they had acquired. And in other lands the revived interest in classical antiquity assumed a much more healthy diversion than it did in Italy. The foremost of our English humanists were Sir Thomas More and Colet, Melanchthon in Germany, Erasmus in Holland were the best representatives in their own lands, they put the new learning into its right place us the handmaid of theology they threw their knowledge of Greek into elucidating the true meaning of the Scriptures which had been darkened and overlaid in the middle ages. "The best grammarian," said Luther, "is the best theologian." It was an exaggeration, but one not without meaning and underlying truth.
 Out of the Renaissance grew the Reformation, though the Renaissance would never have produced the Reformation. It was to Pagan in its spirit ; it is faith that overcomes the world, and the forms of the medieval Papacy would have been too strong for a spirit like that of the Renaissance nourished merely by acquaintance with the beauties of classical literature. In the reformation we believe that the world was born again into religious freedom, not into Paganism or unbelief. The history of Erasmus, the chief of the humanists, is the most instructive as showing how it was possible to combine ceaseless activity in editing and elucidating heathen authors with producing the first edition of the New Testament in the original Greek that had ever appeared, an edition whose publication (1516) gave a great impulse to the Reformation though he himself never took any real share in the progress of that movement. Yet he remains the real father of the Reformation ; "The bird that laid the egg that Luther hatched," and it is impossible to over estimate his services to the cause of religious truth as we conceive it. These two great movements the Renaissance and the Reformation which we have barely glanced at made Shakespeare possible. He would not have been possible before that time. His view of life was too broad ; he had not the contempt for all the vanities of the world which characterised the best medieval thought to contrast his attitude towards life with that of Dante who finds his highest imagination centred, not in Florence and Pisa and Venice, but in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The kingdoms of the world were by the medieval writers given over to Satan, and all who did not abandon the world and become monks were more or less Satan's servants. In such a world Shakespeare would have been impossible, inconceivable, a fish out of water, for there was in him a present sense of truth, an overshadowing divine order, which makes men see the importance of a realisation of facts as they are, and especially of the greatest of all, the moral law of the universe. The sense that he spoke of—

 The divinity that doth shape our ends,
 Rough hew them as we will.

This sense of an overruling God manifested in a present moral order would put him for ever at issue with, at the best, as well as the worst side of the middle ages, the mystic grief that sighed for Urbs Beata Jerusalem, or lamented over the vanity of human life and human grief. But under the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation man recurred to hard facts, the earth was good ; it was not damned or damnable. The earth was meant to be explored. Instead of bringing back from his voyages stones of demon haunted valleys, Raleigh brought back the potato plant and tobacco. The great moral discovery of the time lay in the dawning conscience of the immanence of God, both in nature and in man. In the middle ages God had been conceived of as afar off, as only touching earth through rare points of contact, and these beyond the sphere of nature. It began to be realised that he was not far from every one of us, that human life was sacred and time was in eternity. The modern Elizabethean spirit then would interrogate nature and investigate human life. It wanted no miracles nor interferences of ecclesiastical Magii. It found that the more truthfully it looked at things the more full of light things as they were in themselves appeared. Conscience and actual sense of sin, and an actual need of righteousness were things which would not be dealt with by ecclesiastical mechanism. Woman was neither a Satanic bait to trap the soul of man nor was she the ideal of the chivalric devotion of the Middle Ages ; she was just woman, the complement, the helpmate of man, often tiresome, always interesting. The blessings and curses of human life were substantial and indubitable facts and must be dealt with as such. Such was the atmosphere of the period that produced Shakespeare. As Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress makes the essential problem of Puritanism how a man may escape from earth to heaven, so his contemporary Spenser's "Fairy Queen" endeavors to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline. It was an age when man wanted to be great and do great things, an age conscious of the greatness of human power, and Spenser wrote his illustration of its tendencies in his fashion. Then again is the scientific movement represented by Bacon. Bacon's one link with Shakespeare was in his desire for facts and for inference from facts and observation and experience. In some sense he was the pioneer of the scientific movement. His aim was to extend man's dominion over nature, and to enrich man's life. Science was to be the minister to human welfare, which was conceived by Bacon no doubt in a materialistic fashion. Devotion to the fact, a return from supernatural to material and human, this is the characteristic attitude.
 Besides the ethical and scientific influence of the age there was the religious influence. The English Reformation only came to its final form in Elizabeth's reign by combined firmness and easiness of temper, by concessions, by compromises, by good sense. A Reformed church emerged in which a man could find a refined type of pity free from ceremonial or emotional extravagance, offending neither by excessive rigidity or exaggerated fervor. Anglicanism grew up as a system after the Marian persecution chiefly taking the note of the majestic commonsense of Hooker. The renaissance philosopher had appealed to human reason alone. Hooker would assign a judicial place to reason but he appealed also both to scripture, church, and tradition. His aim was to root feeling in concrete fact. His work which always lay close to reality was always practical in its tendency, always moderate, always sensible. But its innermost idea is a thorough realization of facts as they are. He is the embodiment of the ecclesiastical wisdom of England. Anglicanism as a system owes at once its obvious defects and its chief characteristic excellencies to the spirit that animated Hooker.
 I may not pursue a tempting subject. I only alluded to it to illustrate the trend of spirit that permeated at once every species of thought and influence that was alive in Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare's genius grew in the age of Bacon, Spenser, and Hooker, and the great thing common to all is the characteristic of the age, the strong feeling of the positive concrete fact ; only Shakespeare's work was to be true to facts, not in scientific research like Bacon, not in realisation of facts in reference to religion like Hooker, but to facts received dramatically, that is to human character in living play. And even the moat casual reader of his plays must be struck by the absolute truth of the picture that he presents. It is the stuff of life itself, the coarse and the fine, the mean and the heroic, the humorous and the tragic, the grotesque and the terrible. There is the mixture everywhere in the characters themselves. Life itself is put before us with a truth, a reality, a perfection, the highest ever attained by man. Life in its strength and life in its weakness, life in its possibilities, and life with its terrible burden of a self caused necessity. Everyone is in his eyes going through a kind of perpetual trial, though the fact of the trial is never obtruded ; yet it is always there. Has the man strength and honesty to break through the meshes of pretence and plausibility, or will he let himself be fascinated, spell-bound, blinded by evil. It is that sense of truth to life which makes the intense interest of his dramas. The agony of temptation is there vividly before us and the man's freedom is there too — if he chooses he need not do the thing — there is no false or irrational necessitarianism or any false excursive attitude for once allowed. It is in his absolute truth to human nature, to its possibilities and to its dark damning failures, to its splendid achievements and its piteous insincerities, it is the picture drawn with such vivid colors of the trial of the human soul ; that affects us so powerfully, whether it be the picture of the captive king musing over the vanity of a world which he has misused or the frenzy of a revenged father driven to madness by children's ingratitude and his own folly, or in that piteous debate in which the alternative is a brother's death or a sister's shame, or in the jealousy of the husband who yields against his better self to the fiendish treason of the slanderer, or in the terrible struggles of the sinner who would repent and cannot, who only binds the web of self deceit faster round him, "O timid soul that struggling to be free, art more engaged." It is his wise and accurate presentation of the facts of our experience and observation that make his works as powerful a moral factor in our own age as in his. We are like, then, in our temptations and trials and weaknesses, is our verdict on his characters. Again it is the strength of Shakespeare, that is a perpetual attraction. Strength of life is always perceptive of the reality of the darker and the lighter side of tragedy and comedy. Love and hatred, life and death, become very real to a rigorous nature.
 Languid existence knows of neither passion nor resurrection. Strength of life—a vigorous vitality alone, can conceive extremes of rapture and woe. A languid emotionalism may try to paint them, but the coloring is blurred and sickly in hue. Shakespeare's characters live in their joy and sorrow. The unutterable woe of Lear, the spasm of anguish which makes Othello writhe in body as in mind, are one side of real life, and the trembling expectation of Troilus before the entrance of Cressida,the rapture of Pericles on the recovery of Marina are as real at the other end. (Troilus and Cressida, Act 3, Scene, II, " I am giddy, etc.,"). And this same strength helps him to understand the deep contrasts which make the comedy of life. The earnest man who is conscious of his own earnestness is not afraid to laugh. He knows that he may have his laugh out and that the reality of things will not be disturbed. The weak and languid life never understands this, it regards all laughter as mockery. The laughter that is not afraid to laugh at things, because they are too real, and the laughter that giggles at everything because it holds nothing close. These people who are only half in earnest, who cherish their seriousness for the sake of their dignity never laugh properly. So, it comes to pass that an age of reality when great tragedies can be written, great comedies can be written also. But when it grows trivial as in the Restoration, in the reign of Charles II, great tragedy ceases, false heroics and mere sentimentalisms takes the place of tragic passion. The laughter of men becomes brutal and joyless, the crackling of thorns under the pot.
 There is no mere preaching in Shakespeare, no mere efforts to improve the occasion. But the moral tendency, and even the religious, is immensely powerful. All the more powerful through being indirect, through the fact that it recognises the action of the Divine on human affairs without vulgarising it or reducing it to bald commonplace. But the need evidently felt most of all was to bring back sanity into the estimate of human things, to have the things as they are, the good things of the world as they are, the good things of the world that are common, the good things of the world that are rare, to show that life is not a little common dust. He was practical and this appears in all his view of things and he does not think it necessary to answer every question. He knows that there are mysteries, he feels the supreme problems. If he does not furnish us with ready made answers, he tries to give us that feeling of solemn awe which alone can appreciate the answers when they have come, and to bow the head in reverent silence until they came.
 The question is still discussed as to whether Shakespeare was a Protestant or a Catholic. A celebrated German holds that the question is settled by the remark in Romeo and Juliet (Act 4, Scene I) " Or shall I come to you at evening mass." No Catholic would have spoken of evening mass. But it is a question hardly worth discussing, because whatever the form of his religion, the influence of its working is easy to read. That influence is the fostering and sustenance of a certain type of human character which, at any rate, has its greatest historical representatives in Protestantism. The character that is shaped by energy, by devotion to fact, by self control, by tolerance, by disbelief in the minutiae, by indifference to externals, these are the habits of thought and feeling which belong to the Protestant ideal of manhood. This much, at any rate, is evident and indeed, unless he were in antagonism to his old age it would not be otherwise, for with all its defects and faults the characteristic of every thing that was great and strong in the Elizabethan age, not merely in its negative aspects, but in its positive tendencies in the formation of its characters it was essentially Protestant. Farther than this one cannot go. It seems rather true his was one of those gifted minds, who see that there is a great unity underlying all religions, that if you descend to the inner life and all deep things and essence of character, to the internal and imperishable, then delimitations necessary enough to our ordinary thought become blurred and pass away. The great gift, which his genius was meant to convey, and did convey, his great and lasting legacy to his country and to the world was a resolute call to strength and to courage and to pursue the path of rectitude, honesty, and virtue, with clinging resolution through pain or through joy, and weal or woe.

National Advocate (Bathurst, NSW 1904,) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article157215105

RATIONALISM. ITS AIMS AND HISTORY.

SOCIALIST PARTY LECTURE.

 Mr. G. Pearce (secretary of the R.P.A.), delivered an address on the subject of "Rationalism."

"Rationalist," he said, is the latest name assumes by those who question the supernatural authority of the Bible. The Rationalist is the lineal descendant of the infidel, heretic, atheist, free-thinker, and materialist; these changes of name seem to have been prompted largely by the success with which the theologian has grafted on to those names the imputation of vice and immorality. Rationalism, as a word expressing a definite mental attitude, is now becoming widely known through the agency of the Rationalist Press Association, commonly referred to as the R.P.A. This association was formed in London about 17 years ago, with the following objects (a) to stimulate freedom of thought and inquiry into ethics, theology, philosophy, and kindred subjects; (b) to promote a secular system of education, which shall cultivate in the young a moral and intellectual fitness for life; (c) to maintain and assert the same right of propaganda methods as that granted to traditional beliefs and creeds; (d) to publish and distribute books and periodicals designed to promote the above objects.

It had long been evident to workers in this cause that for wider propaganda the spoken word must be supplemented by a systematic issue of the written word, and a glance at the authors and their works, of which over, three million sixpenny reprints have been sold, makes one feel that the R.P.A. was not formed in vain. The list of sixpenny reprints contains the best writings of scientists like Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Tyndall, and Ray Lankester, of philosophers, such as Spencer, Hume, and Mill, of essayists, such as Matthew Arnold, Emerson, and Lewes, of historians, as Lecky, Bury, and Robertson, of critics as Voltaire, Renan, Andrew Lang, Ingersoll, Leslie Stephen, and Joseph M'Cabe. Many of these names stand high on the honor roll of benefactors of humanity, and if some suggest an aggressive attitude, their provocation has been great, and their books have revolutionised the whole attitude of man in his relation to nature and the Universe, and stand for a broad tolerant propaganda, which appeals to the thinking man.

The founders of the R.P.A., when formulating its objective, defined Rationalism as follows:—"The mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics, verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority." Reason shall be the sole judge; all evidence shall he capable of proof; and the authority due to tradition and ancient usage, or the feeling that it must be true, shall be ignored. This definition is practically an amplification of the motto of the Royal Society of London, formed some 250 years ago "for the improvement of natural knowledge by experiment." To-day fellowship of the Royal Society is an honor bestowed only upon the most eminent contributors to scientific knowledge, and the R.P.A. has addressed itself especially to the work of spreading the results of these researches at the lowest possible cost. Rationalism, being an attitude and not a religion, has no definite dogmas, no Thirty-nine Articles, does not set up any arbitrary system of scientific orthodoxy, but, in so far as "revealed" theological systems seeks to stifle freedom of thought, speech, and writing with the authority of tradition, it connects with them. Every religion sets aside every other religion, the Rationalist only sets aside one more: every believer in a God has denied the thousands of other Gods; the Rationalist only asks for evidence of the existence of that one.
Occasionally a common underlying motive caused the hatchet to be buried for a while, such as a general supplication to God to abrogate the laws of Nature and send rain; or to implore peace through the defeat of an enemy, from whom similar appeals are also issuing in all good faith—a position which must be a trifle disconcerting to the Almighty. Imagine at the present day any theologian willing to publicly pray for three or four hours' delay in the rising of the sun to enable an enemy trench to be occupied! Yet thousands prepared to join in a prayer for rain—the late Government went so far as to set aside a day for the purpose on one occasion—in spite of the fact that the science of meteorology is familiar with all the details that cause, rain, and the fundamental laws which control it are as unbreakable as those which keep the earth revolving. The explanation of this curious inconsistency appears to be that the man, in the street is not as yet as convinced of the operation of unbreakable law in the latter case as he is in the former. It is something more than a coincidence that simultaneously with the rise of the scientific attitude, nearly all the humane and ethical practices of modern civilisation have come into being and replaced such devilish methods of conversion as the tortures of the Inquisition and the burning of heretics and witches.

FREEDOM OF THOUGHT.

From the time of the adoption of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine, and its consequent rise to power, it crushed with an iron hand all speculation not conducive to its own advancement, and all freedom of thought in speech or writing, The following 33 centuries are truly called the Dark Ages, when the power and influence of Christianity, as interpreted by the Church, lay like a pall over Western civilisation, and it is only, as it were, through a rent here and there that we learn of the frightfulness it covered, and of the ignorance and debauchery of spiritual pastors.
And let it not he forgotten that it is due to the working of the spirit of rationalism that the Pankhursts and Thorps of to-day, and all who disturb the popular mind and say unpleasant things about those in authority, are more fortunate than their sisters of 300 years ago.

But if these were the sufferings inflicted on the poor and unfortunate, what of the fate of the intellectuals if the results of their thoughts and experiments tended in the slightest degree to discredit the teachings and dogmas of the Church? The more one ponders over this awful record of burnings and tortures, and the suppression of all speculative research in natural science features that especially mark out those Dark Ages from the time when Constantine made Christianity a State religion, until the seventeenth century, when a revulsion of feeling arose against the inhuman atrocities perpetrated in the name of a loving God and the scientific attitude and freedom of thought began to live again, the more one is convinced that there can be no God as portrayed by the Christian theologians. Only a Devil, and an inconceivably cruel one, could have permitted that long procession of human agony.

Common justice compels us to acknowledge that some of the great teachers within the fold, realising the hypocrisies they labored under, struggled for a more humane interpretation, and that ideal is still being nobly worked for in such movements as, for instance, the Modernist Association in Brisbane and Ethical Churches elsewhere; and if to-day freedom of opinion and the search for knowledge are among our most precious possessions, and indispensable to all progress, it behoves all of us to give our support to movements with that objective

It may be asked, when one contemplates the succession of men of science who have aggressively impeached or merely ignored the claim of theology to authority, why it is that the churches are still so influential and bulk so largely in our social and national life, rivalled only by the continuous picture palaces. Indeed, their power and in tolerance is still manifested in their successful opposition to other forms of entertainment on Sundays; the reading-room of the School Arts is closed on Sundays; the summer band concerts in the Gardens are delayed till church is over, and all efforts for any form of rational Sunday entertainment have been successfully opposed. The secret of this power—disregarding the obvious claim that the position of the Church is maintained by the providence of the Almighty—I believe rests firstly on the early training of the child, and secondly, and in a much less degree, to the appeal the ritual and service of the Church makes to women.

The earliest experience of most of us relates to the comforting prayers of childhood, followed later on by similar religious stories of the "Golden Thread," and the "Throne of Grace," and so on. Our first experience of the mystery and pleasure of music is in most cases the hymns learned at Sun day School, "Here we Suffer Grief and Pain" and "There's a Land of Pure Delight." Kindergarten teachers are well acquainted with the controlling power of music over the infant mind.
These impressions are made on clean, new intelligences straight from nature's laboratory, and thus, with the almost entire absence of any definite instruction in elementary science in our primary schools, color the child's whole attitude to nature and maintain their influence and reality until the battle of life invites a revaluation, from which too many of us shrink and which is rarely completed.

It is false assumption that if our school readers included such subjects, as the origin of man, the evolution of animal and plant life, the age of the earth as told by the rocks, stories of dead and gone civilisations, whose historical remains antedate the biblical creation by thousands of years, and also with the life story of Jesus, the life stories of those earlier pagan Christs, such as Buddha, such knowledge would involuntarily became part of our mental furniture and form the basis of our judgments of all things natural or supernatural. I am of the opinion that, if the spiritual attitude of the two metropolitan papers, the "Standard" and the "Worker," is typical of the spiritual attitude of the Government they have called into power, representation on these lines would not be unsympathetically received. Richard Cobden said he regarded his years of labor in securing the repeal of the corn laws as a light amusement compared with the task of getting priests of all denominations to agree to suffer the people to be educated.

WOMAN.

The second reason I advanced for theological influence to-day is the emotional nature of woman. The Church always adopts the attitude, as the Bishop of London once put it in a sermon, that " Christianity is woman's best friend." Other dignitaries have declared that the Gospels have given woman the position she holds to-day. The majority of women appear content to accept these statements, and to-day quite 75 per cent of the ordinary congregation is composed of women. And if the women follow their emotions in attending church, I feel sure that the younger portion of the other 25 per cent also attend for emotional reasons, though not always of the spiritual type. I can only say that the claim that "Christianity is woman's best friend" is a deliberate perversion of the truth, and in direct opposition to the findings of history.

Nothing impressed the Romans more, in their wars with the northern barbarians than their recognition of the equality of the sexes, the man's reverence for woman, and the woman's sympathy for man, and the high code of morality that was the natural outcome of this well-balanced state of society. In old Japan, before the arrival of Buddhism, men and women were practically equal in their social position; woman's political power was great, nine women had ascended the throne; their women were not inferior to men mentally, morally, or physically; and they distinguished themselves by their bravery on the field of battle. In ancient Egypt the legal status and property rights enjoyed by women gave them a position more free and more honored than in any country to-day. The security of those rights made her the legal head of the household. She inherited equally with her brothers, and had full control of her own property; before the law she enjoyed the same rights and freedom as man, and was honored in the same way.

Now let us compare these positions with that of the English woman of 60 years ago, after 18 centuries of shepherding by "her best friend." In Boston, in 1850, woman could not hold property, or any public office of trust or power. The status of a married woman was little better than that of a domestic servant, her husband was her lord and master. She even had no legal redress against punishment. Let all women bear in mind that the change between then and now is almost entirely due to the advocacy of "abandoned atheists," such as Owen, Holyoake, Mill, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, and other freethinkers. The clergy, when not actively opposing this change, kept silence; they never detected any injustice to woman, and only a few could see it when it was pointed out. There were a few honorable exceptions, such as Kingsley and Farrar, who protested against the social injustice to woman.

Further, this attitude of women and children to revealed religion is largely promoted by the peculiar position of many men who have themselves become convinced that "there's nothing in it," but are still obsessed by the idea that it would be very unsafe for women and children to hold this conviction; in other words, that our mothers, wives, and daughters, are only kept honest, chaste, sober, and industrious by the restraint of religion.

We must all realise that a useful and decent life is quite possible without a slavish adoration of the God of the Bible, and quite apart from a hope of His heaven or a fear of His hell. Considerations of space prevent the inclusion of two long paragraphs, one dealing with the destructive nature of modern Biblical criticism, and the other with the attitude of the Church to industrialism.

In conclusion, I wish to emphasise the difference between a knowledge of the findings of science and the spirit of scientific inquiry, the mental attitude that is of so much more importance than a mass of information. Facts may be, and often are, harmonised with our preconceived ideas, and the importance of the more unpleasant ones belittled, but the true scientific spirit is a disinterested search for facts verifiable by experience, without regard to their bearing upon our wishes, hopes, or fears.

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld. ), 1916, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article179864011

M. RENAN'S HIBBERT LECTURES *

The brilliant lectures delivered by M. Renan in London last summer attracted a great deal of notice on their delivery, and will no doubt attract more in the able English translation and book form in which they now appear. There is no one alive equally competent with M. Renan to illustrate the important question he has here discussed of the influence of Rome on the early development of Christianity. His polished, flexible style is eminently adapted to the discussion of a subject the most delicate nuances of which require careful discrimination. There is, perhaps, no English writer on theological history who would have ventured to give expression to all the dissolving scepticism which M. Renan reveals and, indeed, assumes to be the only way of regarding the subject. The eminently French  quality of Mr. Renan's mind, its cultivated, cold, slightly sarcastic spirit, allows him to treat a rather tender subject with less partisanship than our English thinkers are accustomed to display. And assuming that the object of the late Robert Hibbert was really, as M. Renan says, to secure the application of rational and scientific modes of treatment to religious subjects, then the trustees were, indeed, happy in their choice of M. Renan as a lecturer, and it is to be hoped that they will take further opportunities of enlisting the aid of eminent thinkers of France and Germany in elucidating other branches of the inquiry.

Referring to the objects of the founder, M. Renan said " Why—the promoters of this reform have rightly said—why should not the method which has approved itself in all other departments of intellectual culture be applicable in the domain of religion also? Why should the pursuit of truth, without care of consequences, be dangerous in theology, when it is accepted by all in the domain of the social and natural sciences? You have believed in truth, and you are right. There is but one truth ; and it is to show ourselves something less than respectful to revelation, to confess that, in regard to it, criticism is compelled to modify the severity of its methods." This is a good illustration of the adroitness of M. Renan in alluring his adversaries to accept principles to which they are essential hostile, but which he presents in so attractive a form as to make them accepted even by their foes. Of course M. Renan knows that there are a large number of the defenders of orthodoxy who strenuously maintain that it is sinful to dream of applying to theology the same methods which have been so successful in discovering truth in other spheres, and who refuse to admit of any critical inquiry save on the condition that they may beforehand determine its results. But still his graceful statement of the case is equally successful whether its assumptions be admitted or denied. In the one case it leads to an inquiry from which truth must profit, on the other it serves to shed the light of satire and irony on a system of belief which implicitly avows its consciousness that inquiry must be fatal to its existence.

M. Renan loses no time in defining very clearly to his hearers the ground on which he, and, as he assumes, they also, stand. We do not now hope, he says, to resolve the problems with which religions undertake to deal. "We justly suspect all dogmatism, simply because it is dogmatic. We are willing to admit that a religious or philosophical system may, and even must, contain a certain element of absolute truth; but we deny, even before we have examined its claims, that it can possibly contain absolute truth itself." We are to look on religions simply as so many tentatives to attain the unattainable—tentatives, however, which have by no means been in vain. This constantly renewed effort is not without fruit. " The faith which escapes me when I examine in detail each of the religious systems which divide the world among them, in part returns to me when I reflect upon them as a whole. All religions may be defective and partial, but religion is none the less a divine element in humanity, and the mark of a superior fate."

Proceeding to his subject, he maintains that the time of "the sweet Galilean vision" was a period when the religious consciousness was most eminently creative, and when it laid down with most absolute authority the law of the future. This extraordinary movement came out of the heart of Judaism, but it had to transfer itself to the Greek and Latin world to secure the conditions of its development. His task is to trace the contribution of Rome to this work. For it is Rome that has propagated religion in the world, as it propagated civilisation. But the civilisation which it propagated was not the petty, narrow, austere culture of ancient Latium, but the grand and large civilisation which Greece created ; "so the religion to which it finally lent its support was not the mean superstition which satisfied the rude and primitive settlers on the Palatine; it was Judaism—that is to say, precisely the religion which Rome most hated and despised." M. Renan gives a liberal statement of the moral progress that was working itself out in the Roman world before Christianity became a power in the world. It is usual to look on this period as one in which every form of human corruption and crime attained its climax, and it is therefore, of interest to note how good a case M. Renan makes out for it as one of great moral improvement. The amplitude of the empire had reduced the pressure of the old narrow governments on the individual. Large conceptions of universal fraternity, for the most part the issue of Stoicism, as well as a kind of general sentiment of humanity, were growing in men's minds. Strange ideals were asserting themselves, and as Virgil's Fourth Eclogue shows, men dreamed of a new era and of new worlds. In spite of the corruption of the great capital, we have evidence of the existence of a middle class in the provinces, among whom kindness, conjugal fidelity, domestic virtue, probity, were general. Woman was gaining rights and liberties, the condition of the slave was becoming much improved, and "almsgiving, the love of the poor, universal sympathy, came to be looked upon as virtues."

M. Renan traces the origin and growth of the Jewish colony in Rome, and dwells on the unknown Syrian Jews, who, about the year 50 of our era, carried to Rome the belief in Christianity to which they had been converted. Aquila, the tent-maker, and Priscilla, his wife, were the most distinguished of these, and are the two oldest members of the church of Rome known to us. "There they are hardly remembered. Legend, always unjust, because always moulded by reasons of policy, has expelled from the Christian Pantheon these two obscure artisans to award the honour of founding the Church of Rome to names more fully answering its proud pretensions." It was not till 61 that Paul was taken a prisoner to Rome to prosecute the appeal he had made to the tribunal of the Emperor. Peter did not come till afterwards, and the lecturer believes there is strong probability for holding that both the great apostles perished in the terrible persecutions of the Christians directed by Nero after the fire at Rome. Of these cruelties M. Renan gives a painfully vivid account. He strongly insists on the serious nature of the doctrinal differences which divided Peter and Paul, and holds that the desire afterwards to compromise and conceal this fundamental dispute was the cause of much remodelling of early Christian history. Thus he conjectures that Clement of Rome may have inspired St Luke to write his gospel with a view of showing : that "Peter and Paul were absolutely at one; the Christianity of the one is the Christianity of the other"—giving sometimes a new turn to the evangelical history for the purpose of effecting this posthumous reconciliation.

All influences tended to make Rome the head of the church. The statecraft which the Roman Church derived from the Empire was wonderfully seconded by events. Thus the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus proved of immense advantage to the growth of Christianity. As the original tree of Judaism was overthrown, the sucker from the tree assumed an independent existence. "If the temple had remained, Christianity would certainly have been arrested in its development. The temple, still standing, would have continued to be the centre of all Jewish activity." Christianity would have retained the narrowness, the tribal character of Judaism, had it not broken loose from the church of Jerusalem. It was only by fixing the centre of its activity at Rome, modelling its organisation on that of the empire, and imbibing the spirit of Roman competition, that it became fitted to be the religion of humanity. A bright sketch is given of the way in which the bishops contrived to take away all authority from the church and centre it in the clergy, and ultimately in themselves. Thus the early liberty became exchanged for a hierarchy. "Men felt that the free church, such as Jesus had conceived it (Matt xvii. 20), such as Paul still understood it to be (2 Cor. L 21), was an anarchic Utopia holding no promise of the future. With evangelical liberty, disorder went hand in hand ; they did not see that, in the long run, hierarchy meant uniformity and death." He touches with gentle satire on the beautiful legends that were devised to effect the full reconciliation of Peter and Paul at Rome. They were tender and beautiful, they "only wanted a narrator, a man at once of genius and a simple mind. But it was too late: the vein of the first Christian literature was exhausted: the serenity of the author of the Acts was lost: it was impossible to rise to a higher tone than that of legend and romance." We may quote the following passage, with which M. Renan closes his third lecture, as giving a good example of the charmingly suave style of the lecturer :—

"Almost all of you will some day go to Rome, or, if you have already been there, will return once more. Well, if you retain any recollection of these lectures, go, in memory of me, to the Aquæ Salviæ, alle Tre Fontane, beyond St Paul without the Walls. It is one of the most beautiful spots in the Roman Campagna, solitary, moist, green, and sad. A deep depression in the soil, crowned by those grand horizontal lines which no sign of life disturbs, thither brings a spring of clear and cold water. Fever is in the air we breathe, the humidity of the grave. There the monks of La Trappe have established themselves, and conscientiously pursue their religious suicide. Sit there awhile—not too long-and while the Trappist gives you to drink of the water which rises from the three fountains that mark where Paul's head struck the earth, think of him who came to talk of these legends with you, and to whom you listened be courteously and with so kind an attention."

In his final lecture he traces the masterly process of management which made Rome the head of an organised church. All the rights and powers of the church were surrendered to the bishops, and gradually all or many of the powers of the bishops were concentrated in the Bishop of Rome. The democratic element in early Christianity had evolved from itself conservative and imperial institutions, which gave it order and permanence. While calling itself the Church of Peter, " by on unequalled tour de force, the Church of Rome had succeeded in giving itself the name of the Church of Paul also. A new and equally mythical duality replaced that of Romulus and Remus."

M. Renan ends by reverting to the tone of historic scepticism with which he began. Our only interest in these subjects is to understand them. "Our age is the age of history, for it is the age of doubt as to matters of dogma; it is the age in which the enlightened mind, refusing to enter upon the discussion of systems, says to itself 'If, ever since the birth of reason, so many thousand creeds have claimed to set forth the whole truth, and those claims have always been adjudged to be vain, is it likely that I should be more fortunate than so many others, and that this truth should have waited for my coming to make its final self-revelation?' There is no final revelation; there is only a pathetic attempt of that poor, disinterested creature, man, to make his fate tolerable." We could not end this notice in a way that would leave a fuller impression of the style and method of M. Renan on the ear and mind of the reader than by concluding it with the foregoing extract.

*The Hibbert Lectures, 1880: Lectures on the Influence of the Institutions, Thoughts, and Culture of Rome , on Christianity and the Development of the Catholic Church, by Ernest Renan. Translated by Chas. Beard. Williams and Norgate : London. 1880.
The Australasian 2 Oct. 1880