ILLUSTRIOUS LUNATICS.

Mr. J. Corbet, a recognised authority on insanity and kindred questions, contributes to The Arena a most interesting article on "Illustrious Lunatics," from which we quote the following extracts : —

At a moment when the grave sociological problem of the insane engages so much public attention and excites so much anxiety, and scientists and specialists are busy discussing the pros and cons on both sides, it may be interesting to bring to mind a few of the most remarkable personages who were either actually mad or whose mental deformity and moral depravity were such as to qualify them for place amongst the abnormal classes. At any rate, notwithstanding the "divinity" that, it is said, hedges kings, some plain speaking on the subject may have its uses.
 The verity of the aphorism expressed in the line " Great wits are sure to madness near allied," has many striking examples.
 One of the most remarkable instances of illustrious lunacy of a hereditary character in ancient times is that furnished by the family of the Cæsars. It would seem as if the insane taint originated with the great founder of the dynasty, who was afflicted with epilepsy, and, according to some writers, abandoned himself in his younger days to vice and intemperance. The youthful Caesar would have been more than mortal if he did not yield to the temptations by which he was surrounded on every side. He, moreover, when forced to fly from Rome, while yet in his teens, resided for a considerable time at the corrupt Court of Nicomedus, King of Bithynia, where immorality was rampant, and riotous living the rule.
 Cæsar's daughter Julia is said to have been a woman of the worst character. She had a son who was idiotic ; and several others of the immediate descendants and collateral branches of the family were hereditarily infected. It is unnecessary to go much further in this direction to show how moral brain-poisoning brought down the curse of insanity upon the Julian race, and how, even in the case of pagans, the sins of the parents were visited upon the children "to the third and fourth generation" and beyond.
 Alexander of Macedon furnishes another example of how the exercise of absolute power and the unrestrained indulgence of sensuality act upon the brain, destroy the faculty of self-control, harden the human heart, impair the understanding, and finally overthrow the reason. Numerous instances are recorded of Alexander's senseless savagery and bloodthirstiness. History credits him with sighing for more kingdoms to conquer, but his insanity was of the homicidal type, and his longing was not so much for more kingdoms to conquer as for more people to massacre. It is related of him that after the capture of Tyre he caused an immense number of persons, including non-combatants, to be put to death in cold blood. Nearly 20,000 inhabitants of Sangala were butchered by his orders after the city had surrendered, and his barbarities at the taking of Gaza were diabolical.
To come down to our own days, it is notorious that most of the Royal families of the present day have "the mad drop" in them—notably the Russian, German, Austrian, Danish, English, Portuguese, and Bavarian. The conservation and hereditary transmission of the insane taint in all these is assured by frequent consanguineous marriages. In fact, it may be said that all the Royalties of Europe are so married and intermarried amongst each other that there is considerable difficulty about fixing the degrees of relationship between their numerous members. Uncles, aunts, and cousins are jumbled up in a tangle that only the Herald's College could be expected to unravel. Those who are responsible for the making of such matrimonial alliances seem to ignore the fact that consanguineous marriages, especially where mental disturbance has already manifested itself on either side, are not only fraught with danger to posterity, but are certain to produce evil results, psychical or somatical The offspring of such marriages are rarely perfectly sound. If not mentally unbalanced they are not mentally vigorous, or else they are afflicted with physical imperfections, malformation of the limbs, scrofula, defective organs of speech, hearing, and the like.
 The Imperial House of Russia furnishes some examples.
 Ivan, called the Terrible, was nothing less than a violent lunatic. If an ordinary mortal he would undoubtedly have been shut up and ended his days in an asylum for the insane.
 Peter the Great was an epileptic, a drunkard, and a bloodthirsty tyrant. He left a legacy of all his evil qualities to his daughter Elizabeth, who was so dissolute and corrupt that her actions could only be accounted for by mental aberration, of which moral depravity was the outcome. So in the case of Catherine, generally known as the Great, who lead a life so shockingly debased, that, looking back on it from this distance, she also must be regarded as having been morally insane. Her son Paul, who succeeded her, became in the end a violent lunatic, and his subjects, wearied by his acts of cruelly and oppression, put him to death. His son and successor, Alexander, was, towards the end of his life, a victim of melancholia, and died in that state. Nicholas was of such an ungovernable temper that at times his frenzy amounted to temporary insanity. The mind of the late Emperor was supposed to be quite unhinged from fear of the Nihilists, and it is said his death was caused by his fears.
 The terrible tragedies in the Austrian and Bavarian Royal houses are so recent as to be within the memory of all. With regard to Bavaria, what the responsible statesmen could have been thinking about in allowing a madman like Louis II. to squander the substance of his people to the extent of millions upon licentious men and women, and in building palaces and castles in out of the way places, is inconceivable. 
 England also can supply many types and instances not only of hereditary ruthlessness and moral depravity in her sovereigns, but of insanity. The life of Henry VIII. was an uninterrupted career of crime, cruelty, lust, and murder. A gross sensualist and voluptuary ; his conduct towards his many queens, who he did not hesitate to put to death one after another when he grew tired of them, was such as to qualify him, if sane, for the hands of the executioner, and, if not, for a cell in a criminal lunatic asylum. His daughter, Elizabeth, despite her conspicuous abilities as a sovereign, showed clearly the hereditary taint. Her relations with men, and especially with Essex, and his subsequent fate, proved her to be "her father's own daughter," while her savagery in beheading the hapless Mary Queen of Scots, after keeping her in prison for twenty years, can only be attributed to the ruthless and sanguinary disposition inherited from her vicious and depraved parents.
 It is well known the Royal family of England is tainted on both sides. George I. and George II. drank to excess. There can do no doubt what ever their intemperance sowed the seeds which developed into positive insanity in George III.
 The mantle of the man-slayers, to whom reference have been already made, seems to have fallen upon the shoulders of another Eastern potentate, the modern lycanthrope, or wolfman, whose wholesale massacre of his own subjects have excited the horror and indignation of the whole world. It goes without saying that the army or fleet of any one of "the high contracting Powers," as they are pompously called, could stop the Imperial madman's career, and put him into a straight waistcoat at once. The only wonder is why they don't do it. The question may be asked, Is Abdul Hamid mad? Judged by his life, one of sensual excesses, and by his savage treatment of his Christian subjects, he is not only insane, but a criminal lunatic, qualified in every way to rank with the inhuman monsters of antiquity. Taking all these things into account, he may be set down as the most illustrious lunatic that has appeared upon earth from the days of Nero to the present time.

Burrowa News (NSW : 1874 - 1951), Friday 28 July 1899, page 1

ILLUMINATI NONSENSE

MORE DRUM-BANGING.

The "Loyalty League" of New Zealand has forwarded to us a pamphlet entitled "The Red Menace. An Exposure of the so-called 'Labor Party.' "

It goes back to the early Christian era and tells of bad boys' societies called the "Karmathites" and the "Assassins." Then later came the "Ismailites," the "Insinuating Brothers" "Weishaupt" and the "Illuminati" and the "Knight Templars." Out of the "Illuminati" arose the "Communists", and "Internationalism devised by Weishaupt, interpreted by Clootz, and, carried out by Marx and Lenin." The pamphlet concludes: "It is essential that the workers and members of unions should know the whole truth."

So, to divert their attention from wage-reductions and longer working hours, the workers must be told bed-time stories of the Karmathites, the Assassins, the Ismailites, the Illuminati, the Insinuating Brothers, the Goblins, and the Bogey Man.

The pamphlet was duly interred without honors, in the w.p.b.

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld. : 1912 - 1936), Saturday 24 October 1925, page 8

[Almost a hundred years of this paranoia keeps coming.]

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

SECULARIST LECTURE.

The first of a series of three lectures on Secularism was delivered last evening at the Gaiety Theatre, by Mr. W. W. Collins, F.G.S., F.S.S., the vice-president of the National Secular Society of England. There was a very huge audience present, the entire seating accommodation of the theatre being occupied. The title of Mr. Collins's address was "A New Religion."
At the very outset he announced himself an Atheist, and requested his hearers to dismiss from their minds all previously conceived ideas of religion as that which he proposed to present to them, and which he asked their consideration, was not likely to resemble theirs unless they also held atheistic opinions. He did not wish to boast of his Atheism, although he contended that if anyone was entitled to boast of his views on these subjects, it was the man who at the present day was stigmatised as an Atheist. Nine out of every ten Christians if they were honest would confess that they were so because their parents were before them, because they lived in a Christian community and had received a Christian education : but, the same could be said of the majority of Atheists. Their parents, homes, and education had been Christian, but they had dared to have the courage to think for themselves and to follow out, their processes of thought to their ultimate conclusions, and they then found that Atheism was the only tenable ground on which they could rest. Therefore, he considered the man who had dared to reason this problem out for himself was entitled to boast.
  Turning more particularly to the religion of Atheism, Mr. Collins went on to say that it would be granted that every man had a right to live, although the conditions of life were sometimes so hard that even existence was difficult. Granting the right, of man to life, he would contend that the true aim of life was to get as much happiness as possible out of it. This aim, however, had been greatly frustrated by the conditions of so-called religious thought, which robbed life of much of its charm. Secularism, and secularism only, would enable mankind to enjoy to the fullest the happiness of this life, because its principle and meaning was, as Colonel Ingersoll had defined it, "One world at a time," or "this worldism." Secularism was naturalism in morals, and in everything else, It stripped existence of all supernaturalism, and taught the philosophy of daily life, and the following of the precept, "Man, know thyself," for when this knowledge was acquired the understanding of one's fellow-man was possible, and the individual could mete out to others that consideration he desired for himself. This was the keystone of secularism, and upon this the structure of human happiness rested. The kingdom of man was the only one they wanted to know, and when they had understood it they would have become so accustomed to happiness here that if after all there was a future state, never fear but they would make it a happy one also. Hitherto the human race had been held in a bondage of the imagination, but when those fetters were cast aside, as they would be, man would be the better creature for it, and his happiness would be the greater because he would know that he had earned it by his own exertions and without supernatural aid. Belief in the supernatural was not necessary, he contended, to maintain a pure system of morals, and the man who was moral simply for fear of punishment was no more moral than the thief was honest, who did not pick a tempting pocket while a policeman was looking on. True morality consisted in doing right because it was right and refraining from doing wrong because of its lowering and degrading effect upon the man himself.
Mr. Collins contended that the moral perceptions of mankind had been rather weakened than strengthened by old religious systems. The new one would reverse this, for it would be a religion of deeds not creeds, and actions not dogma.

 The Brisbane Courier  30 May 1887,

EX-FATHER DALYISM.

(To the Editor at the Queensland Times)
SIR.-A surpliced Yankee has been treating us to his personal, religious, and questionable inconsequence. Old Romans gave their greatness—thanks to impossible gods and their decay—curse to Christianity. Comets were likewisely charged with battles and plagues, and the moon, in the name of lunacy, with much of human madness. A fellow-traveller of mine traced the Irish potato blights to railway engine smoke; and now a priest, changing the ignorance of his ways, while scooping in our golden opinions, issues on us samples, causeative and deductive, of deformed logic and withering sentiments. Such brawls of evangelists enabled the priests of wealth to keep defamed, disorganised, and disfranchised the sons of toil. They stopped, like furious exterminating Josuahs, the sun of fair play in its course. For human ruins are the work of darkness captained by social and sectarian shams.
 His reverence has the folly to recommend Protestantism by the gilty splendours of its mammonism. Per Dalyism, Turkism was godism, for its crescent eclipsed the Cross. This argument proves Protestant swagger to be schooled by positive ignorance, comparative stupidity, and superlative conceit. I once nearly lost my imperturbable good humour by the violent assurance of two austere Scotch friends that Italy was overflowing with Protestants. Why, all England's might couldn't stuff her own Ireland with them. The mammon argument is religiously and literally unhappy. If Spain, Italy, and Portugal are going to the dogs, where are the English peerage and other persons in high places going to? Misrule by pashas, dons, and land-swells, like that in Turkey, Ireland, and Australia now, could desolate Paradise. Hence, Heaven won't admit swell coves, and this because it distinguishes between the godlike creator of human support and the stealers of it. A Nemesis is on your brogue's trail, Father O Daly.
 Your yarns about self, a convert, and a bishop, if true, tell common-sense people that none of you had common sense—a not impossible probability. His reverence slowly awoke from Catholic delusions into confusions worse confounded. Petty ideas make worshipful impressions on dwarfed intellects, made such too often from babyhood, like Chinese ladies' feet. Some such little Protestant astonishments have been wondering why his reverence hadn't captivated me into Protestant admirations. To such I say: The ex-Father knows little of Catholic theology, moral or dogmatic, and was therefore apparently a priestly failure, or else, which is worse, he seems to my mind to distort his knowledge in matters of doubt, Heaven, and the Bible. From the altar and the States, he ought to have something really fresh, smart, ennobling, or Yankee-tall to tell us. I compliment him on his total abstinence from the usual filth pots. There is, therefore, a substratam of truth and honour supporting him, and hence with an heroic pang we past him as a gift to the cannons of opposing forts.
In his doles of toluances he seems a stranger to the up and down doings of all persuasions, and not to have heard of test oaths, the dates of emancipations, nor to forecast the revisings of the National Anthem, should the Queen turn Baptist or Borthist, We now enjoy a pretty profound religious truce, thanks, however, and only to the many drawn battles of religious intollerances which gave freethought time and opportunity to become policemen of our social peace. Secularism henceforth, and not fogy Orangeism, will do the storm scatter to the dreaded Irish Armada.
 In evermore we want no religious rabies, ascendancies or damning, nor their social counterparts, Christ summed up His whole law and the prophets in the love of God and the neighbour. In this sum total he gave to our everlasting disesteem the dainty sacred priest and levite who passed their suffering brother by, and gave to our everlasting admiration and like doing the wrong-religioned Samaritan who acted the friend in need. He put poor Lazares on Heaven's sofa, and sank millionaire Dives in sheol. If Churches pass by the unemployed, under-paid, over-worked, and harassed human masses, and leave it to the so called agitator to say the kind have inspiring word to outraged labour, then the Churches are not made for man, nor of God, and must divorce from our reverence. While socially and similarly, the shrewd Jacobs that seize upon labours weaknesses to fleece it, whose huge grabbing cut off from so many the means of decent living, and luxuriate while the masses writhe in want, they are no better than the Churches that sweat at closing Heaven and opening hell to fellow Christians. Now, then, Messrs. Daly and Co., drop the Orange alarm twang and, by presence and persuasion, paternise us. Mark me, ye sacred and secular sirs : Despots begat us State Churches, these libertinism and the stake, these Reformation and French Revolution, these free-thought and social questions, these popular education and influence, and these now rock the rights of every man to a fair share of labour, leisure, education, and suffrage. Your text be the people—not my pulpit, or any pilfered privileges.
Yours, &c,
 SHAUGHRAUN.

Queensland Times 29 October 1891, 

INFIDELS.

"BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM."

HORNE, in his introduction to the Scriptures, after giving a review of the leading infidels up to his own time, gives a brief account of the lives of those who attempted to destroy the Christian religion. He shows us that the lives of these champions of infidelity were of a most scandalous nature. We intend in the following article to call the attention of our readers to this subject, and show what we may always expect to see from those who adopt infidel opinions. If the leaders and teachers of infidelity are such disgusting creatures, what can we expect from their followers ? Infidels we know can point the finger of scorn at many a Christian professor, but he cannot put his finger on a single word in the bible which countenances vice, or encourages evil. The infidel teaches and practises evil. Christianity teaches purity, and holds in scorn all her followers who lead impure lives.
"While Hume and Bolingbroke," says Horne, "were propagating these sentiments in England, Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, Frederick II. King of Prussia, and other distinguished writers, had confederated for the avowed purpose of annihilating the Christian religion. The printed works of the three first-named writers exhibit a total disregard of truth and honour, together with such a compound of falsehood, envy, malignity, hatred, contempt of one another, and of all the world, as cannot but convey a horrible impression of the spirit and tendency of infidelity."
Let us now take a brief view of the precepts of infidels concerning morals.

Lord Herbert says that the indulgence of lust and of anger is no more to be blamed than the thirst occasioned by dropsy ! Hobbes says that every man has a right to all things, and may lawfully get them if he can !

Lord Bolingbroke taught that ambition, the lust of power, sensuality, and avarice, may be lawfully gratified if they can be safely gratified, that modesty is vanity, that the chief end of man is sensual gratification, that polygamy is a part of the law or religion of nature, that adultery is no violation of the law of nature!

Hume taught that adultery must be practised if men would obtain all the advantages of life; that, if generally practised, it would in time cease to be scandalous, and that if practised secretly and frequently, it would by degrees come to be thought no crime at all! ! !

Gibbon, the polished and more decent infidel, shows by his own biography that he was a man that had the most heartless and sordid selfishness, vain glory, a desire of admiration, adulation of the great and wealthy, contempt of the poor, and supreme devotedness to his own gratifications.

Voltaire and Helvetius both advocated the unlimited gratification of the sensual appetites. That unlawful intercourse with married women was not a vice.

Rousseau was a thief, a liar, and a debauched profligate, according to his own confessions.

Lord Herbert, Hobbes, Lord Shaftesbury, Woolston, Tindal, Chubb, and Lord 
Bolingbroke, were all guilty of the vile hypocrisy of lying.

Collins, to qualify himself for a civil office, was so vile as to take the Lord's Supper.

Voltaire was a shameless adulterer, who, with his abandoned mistress, violated the confidence of his visitors by opening their letters, and his total want of principle, moral or religious, his impudent audacity, his filthy sensuality, his persecuting envy, his treachery, tyranny, cruelty, his profligacy, and his hypocrisy, will render him for ever the scorn of mankind.

Paine was a notorious drunkard.  

The lives of all these infidel teachers present nothing more or less than a reeking stye of licentiousness, infamy, and vice. But we may ask what effect would be produced upon the world at large if the teaching of these degraded creatures were adopted ? Horne shows us what was the effect produced when a whole nation did adopt infidel views. " The great majority of the French nation had become infidels. The name and profession of Christianity was renounced by the legislature, and the abolition of the Christian era was proclaimed.
Death was declared, by an act of the republican government, to be an eternal sleep. The existence of the Deity, and the immortality of the soul, were formally disavowed by the National Convention; and the doctrine of the resurrection from the dead was declared to have been only preached by superstition for the torment of the living. All the religions in the world were proclaimed to be the daughters of ignorance and pride, and it was decreed to be the duty of the convention to assume the honourable office of disseminating atheism—which was blasphemously affirmed to be the truth—over all the world. As a part of this duty, the convention further decreed, that its express renunciation of all religious worship should, like its invitations to rebellion, be translated into all foreign languages; and it was asserted and received in the convention that the adversaries of religion had deserved well of their country ! Correspondent with these professions and declarations were the effects actually produced. Public worship was utterly abolished. The churches were converted into "temples of reason," in which atheistical and licentious homilies were substituted for the proscribed service; and an absurd, ludicrous imitation of the pagan mythology was exhibited under the title of the religion of reason." In the principal church of every town a tutelary goddess was installed with a ceremony equally pedantic, frivolous, and profane; and the females selected to personify this new divinity, were mostly prostitutes, who received the adorations of the attendant municipal officers, and of the multitudes whom fear, or force, or motives of gain, had collected together on the occasion. Contempt for religion or decency became the test of attachment to the government, and the gross infraction of any moral or social duty, was deemed a proof of civism, and a victory over prejudice. All distinctions of right and wrong were confounded. The grossest debauchery triumphed. The reign of atheism and reason was a reign of terror. "Then proscription followed upon proscription, tragedy followed after tragedy, in almost breathless succession, on the theatre of France. Almost the whole nation was converted into a horde of assassins. Democracy and atheism hand in hand, desolated the country and converted it into one vast field of rapine and of blood." In one part of France, the course of a river, the "Loire," was impeded by the drowned bodies of the ministers of religion, several hundred of whom were destroyed in its waters; children were sentenced to death for the faith and loyalty of their parents, and they whose in fancy had sheltered them from the fire of the soldiery were bayonetted as they clung about the knees of their destroyers. The moral and social ties were unloosed, or rather torn asunder. For a man to accuse his own father was declared to be an act of civism worthy of a true republican, and to neglect it, was pronounced a crime that should be punished with death. Accordingly, women denounced their husbands, and mothers their sons, as bad citizens and traitors, while many women—not of the dress of the common people, nor of infamous reputation, but respectable in character and appearance— seized with savage ferocity between their teeth the mangled limbs of their murdered countrymen. "France, during this period, was a theatre of crimes, which, after all preceding perpetrations, have excited in the mind of every spectator amazement and horror.
The miseries suffered by that single nation have changed all the histories of the preceding sufferings of mankind into idle tales, and have been enhanced and multiplied without a precedent, without a number, and without a name. The kingdom appeared to be changed into one great prison, the inhabitants converted into felons, and the common doom of man commuted for the violence of the sword and bayonet, the sucking boat, and the guillotine. To contemplative men it seemed for a season as if the knell of the whole nation was tolled, and the world summoned to its execution and its funeral." Within the short period of ten years, not less than three millions of human beings are supposed to have perished in that single country by the influence of atheism. Were the world to adopt, and be governed by the doctrines of revolutionary France, what crimes would not mankind perpetrate ? What agonies would they not suffer ?


 Mercury and Weekly Courier 13 November 1885,

A FREETHINKER

TO THE EDITOR.
Sir—In your issue of the 22nd inst. there appeared a letter signed "B. T. Finnis," purporting to be a criticism upon my own, and apparently a quasi-defence of what are termed Freethought principles. In justice to myself I should like to have the privilege of reply. Your correspondent says that "Moses, the founder of Christianity, and the reformer Luther were all to be found upon the roll of Freethought." Why did he not say that two and two make four? Liberty to think for himself is the birthright of every man, and the right of private judgment is a principle that divine revelation inculcates. It is true that the persons referred to, in the true sense of the word, were Freethinkers, but then they were not Secularists. Moses, Luther, and the Founder of the Christian religion did not teach that right and wrong were only quibbles of the imagination; that passion and lust were no more blameworthy than hunger or thirst. They did not teach that man was not a responsible being ; that there was no future state of punishments and rewards, no soul, or no God. They taught the very antithesis of these assumptions. The true definition of Freethought, as expounded by Secularists, is—"License to think contradictorily, and to do wrongly." This I will prove to a demonstration, and to the satisfaction of every unbiassed reader of the Advertiser.
Proposition 1. Freethought (as thought by secularists) is—License to think contradictorily. Secularists have no defined system of thought; they have no creed. To define such a system, or to formulate a creed would be to violate their fundamental principle. The members of the fraternity can believe just what they choose, so long as they reject the Bible as a divine revelation; one secularist can pull down what another has built up. For instance, Sarah Giddings, the Freethought lecturess can teach—I believe in God, and in a divine standard of right and wrong. Her confrere. Thomas Brown, can assert—I am both godless and creedless; the idea of God is a mind creation; a divine standard of right and wrong is a myth. Another so-called Freethought exponent can affirm—I believe in a soul. His fellow associate can teach—I believe not in a soul Mind is only a modification of matter. That is my sole belief. Another comes along and asserts—I believe in a future state. His confrere teaches—I believe not in a future state. The only future state that I believe in is annihilation. Lastly one says—I believe in neither God, devil, heaven, hell, angel, spirit, right, wrong, good, nor evil. I am a Freethinker ! I am a Freethinker ! ! My creed is, " Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." Alas for our poor world and hapless humanity, if such belief were to become general. I think the first proposition has been established. Now let as turn to the second.
Proposition 2. Freethought (as expounded by Secularists) is—license to do wrongly. We may regard the following as an axiom— Whatever is contrary to right most be wrong. Then I ask—is it right to call a place set apart for the worship of God a "Gospel Shop?" Is it right to stigmatise a religious body, who are doing more good in a month, than Secularists will do till doomsday, a "Damnation Army!" Is it right to speak of churches, built by the liberality and devotion of our colonists, as "talking shops for clergymen?" Is it right to speak of the Bible—loved and referenced by millions—as the "house that Jack built ?" Is it right to treat with blasphemous ridicule the most sacred convictions of Christians ? Is it right to indulge in such coarseness that an Adelaide daily paper describes it as "an outrage upon decency and an offence to religion. The blasphemy is foul and offensive?" Is it right to caricature the character of Christ, and to blaspheme the Maker and Ruler of the universe? As the Earl of Chatham said in his reply to Lord Suffolk—"Such notions (we will add expressions) shock every precept of morality, every feeling of humanity, every sentiment of honor. Such abominable principles, and this more abominable avowal of them, demand the most decisive indignation." I think that the truth of my second proposition has been sufficiently proved. In concluding this part of my letter, let me say that any truly philosophical sceptic would turn away with utter disgust, and feelings of loathing, from such vulgarities and blasphemies as have been indulged in by a trio of so-called Freethought lecturers. Now let me turn more especially to "B. T. F.'s" letter.—In my original letter I laid down this proposition. The faculty for deciding between right and wrong is innate. The human mind is so constituted that upon the presentation of proper evidence it naturally developes a consciousness of right and wrong. Now there are so-called Freethinkers who deny that there is such a thing as right and wrong, which the mind naturally predicates. Hence, from my proposition I deduced the following :—That those who do so violate their consciences, pervert their reasoning faculties ; therefore Freethought become forced-thought. In opposition deciding between right and wrong is innate, and enters into a long harangue derived from some evolutionary philosophers, to sustain his assumption. This was altogether beside the question. If the faculty for deciding between right and wrong be not innate, how can we have a consciousness of right and wrong, which, undoubtedly we have? You cannot develope something out of nothing. You cannot evolve life from the dead. The moral faculty for deciding between right and wrong must be innate, or consciousness of these two contrarieties would have been an absolute impossibility. The moral sense in human nature is innate, just like the germ of life in the seed is. It is there, but it requires developing, and just as the genial rays of the sun and the refreshing showers develop the dormant germ of life in the seed, so the human ruled, by tuition and moral instinct, develops the innate consciousness of right and wrong; and whoever denies the existence of these two contrary senses must violate his conscience, and pervert his reasoning faculties. This some Freethinkers do, therefore Freethought becomes forced-thought.
The next proposition that I laid down in my original letter was—The idea of God is innate, and the human mind, upon the presentation of evidence, naturally develops a consciousness of the Divine existence. But some Freethinkers, so called, try to stifle all God-consciousness, and in opposition to the dictates of reason, the testimony of nature, and true scientific teaching, they assert—There is no God, therefore Freethought becomes forced thought. To this "B. T. F" replies—"The doctrine of innate ideas has perished; there fore, the early tribes of the human race could have no knowledge of God." To this I reply— That as far back as human history extends men have had a consciousness of the existence of the supernatural. As Bunsen says—" The religious consciousness, regarded as a sense of the presence of the Divine in the universe and among mankind, is found in all stages of human history." Let it be understood that the supernatural is only a disguised name for God. Now men universally have a consciousness of the existence of something supernatural. Throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and the islands of the sea, as far back as human history goes you find it, and if this consciousness be not the outcome of a mysterious truth inwrought by a Divine weaver in the constitution of man's moral nature, how do we account for its existence ? Where did it come from? When was it implanted in the human mind? By whom was it implanted? How is it that, although separated by oceans and continents, men everywhere and in all ages have had a consciousness of the existence of the supernatural? Let it be understood that when I speak of the idea of God as being innate, I do not mean that the human mind, independently of testimony, rises at once to a perception of God, but that the soul of man, from a realization of its wants, and the testimony of nature, naturally develops a consciousness of the existence of the supernatural. The idea is innate just as genius is. It is there, but it requires developing. The views here propounded are supported by Professor Max Muller, Drs. Reynolds and Pope, Joseph Cook, George Sargeant, and many other theological and philosophical writers. A man cannot deny the existence of the supernatural without doing violence to reason and to the spiritual instincts of his nature. Some so called Freethinkers do deny this existence; therefore, Freethought becomes forced-thought Mr.Finnis—after the fashion of his school—indulges in a sneer against the Christian religion. He hopes that I find happiness and enjoyment in the brighter light of Christianity. I beg to inform him that his hopes are realised, and that the fundamental truths taught by Christ have been demonstrated in my experience. The dreary negation of the school to which be belongs cannot be verified by experience. Therefore, in this respect I have the advantage. I should be sorry to forsake the Bread of Life for the cold, hard, dry, dead, disappointing stone of Secularism. I will close by giving Professor Max Muller's opinions of Christianity ;—" I make no secret," he says, "that true Christianity (I mean the religion of Christ) seems to me to become more and more exalted the more we know and the more we appreciate the treasures of truth hidden in the despised religions of the world."
I am, &c.,
 A FREETHINKER
  August 25, 1884.

MISS ADA CAMPBELL ON FREETHOUGHT.

TO THE EDITOR.



Sir—As there seems to be a great deal of ignorance abroad on the subject of Freethought principles and Freethought morality, I shall feel obliged if you will insert this letter, which is a reply to one which appealed in your issue of August 27, signed "A Freethinker." That the nom de plum is altogether out of place if self-evident throughout the whole letter, that to, according to the proper definition of the term, which means a person who claims to think apart from, or untrammelled by religious beliefs. In that sense of the word Jesus of Nazareth was a Freethinker. He on several occasions denied theism of the Old Testament. "It hath been said in the olden times an eye for an eye." . . . "But I say unto you,"so forth. To such an extent was Jesus a Freethinker that he was accused of blasphemy by the priests of his time. "A Freethinker" says in his letter that "liberty to think for himself is the birthright of every man. " "A Freethinker" evidently clings to the antiquated dogma of freewill. He speaks as though a person were free to think what he should believe and what he should reject. Sir W. Hamilton writing on this subject says :— "How the will can possibly be free must under the present limitations of human faculties be wholly incomprehensible." Free thought is a term used relatively. In the ultimate sense of the word there is really no such thing as Freethought. Beliefs are determined by hereditary predispositions to particular lines of thought, by inculcated prejudices, by habits, passions, customs, the intellectual and religious training which a person has received. What Mr. Herbert Spencer would call all the super organ in facts of life. Darwin, Spencer, and Wallace declare that race, climate, soil, and food modify and change human beliefs, and that these beliefs or modes of thought are transmissible from parent to child. J. E. Mill says:-"Everything in the universe exhibits a fixed certain and constant accession of events which bear to each other the relation of causes and effects." A study of ethnology would teach "A Freethinker" differently. Has physical constitution nothing to do with modes of thought? Can the simple brain of a savage grasp a complex idea? Is an Australian aboriginal free to think according to the modes of thought of a Darwin, Spenser, or Mill? Is "A Freethinker" not aware that a subjective examination of the mind through consciousness reveals the fact that a belief is a state of the mind—a development of thought and not an act of the wits? Is a person who has never heard of Christianity free to think according to the doctrines of that belief? "A Freethinker" says "Freethought as taught by Secularists is "licence to think contradictorily and do wrongly." Would "A Freethinker" oblige by giving his authority for that quotation? I never heard of such teaching, and do not believe such a statement was ever made by any Secular authority. "A Freethinker" says "Secularists have no defined system of thought; they have no creed." It is a pity that a person making such pretensions to piety should not become thoroughly acquainted with facts before scattering false accusations broadcast amongst the public. Our creed is a very simple one. 1st. To live our very best to this world. 2nd. To do all the good we can to ourselves and others. 3rd. To promote happiness as far as lies in our power; to have every enjoyment that is not detrimental to ourselves or others. 4th. That every enjoyment which is innocent is lawful, because such enjoyments prolong life and develop a kindly spirit in human nature. 5th. That reason is the criterion of truth, and that instead of sacrificing reason on the shrine of faith we must do our best to increase the sacred light. 6th. That when a truth is found it should be given unreservedly to the world, 7th. That human beings must bear the consequences of their own misdeeds. Therefore it behoves them to be careful of their actions if they wish to escape real punishment in this world instead of an imaginary punishment in the next.
"A Freethinker," and others of his order of mind, seem to think that Freethinkers possess no moral sense, and have no code of morality. Would it surprise him to hear that freethinkers possess a higher moral sense than Christians, and that they have a code of morality far superior to that of Christianity. In a secular catechism for children, Mr. O. F. Holyoake teaches under the head of moral sense, "What is the greatest power you have? Answer—The power of doing my duty; when I do a right thing I do that which is noblest and best. What is your duty ? Obedience to the laws of nature. What is your duty to your own   body? To keep it pure and stainless by cleanliness, exercise, and honest work, by not eating and drinking that which will do me harm, in order to gratify my appetite, and being temperate in the enjoyment of all pleasant things. For what purpose should you use your tongue? I should use my tongue to gain knowledge by asking explanations of what I do not understand and to make known my true thoughts in the gentlest way. I should never deceive with my tongue even in uttering a single word; never speak unkindly, but be honest and loving in all I say. Should you ever prefer bodily pain to bodily pleasure? Yes; it is better to be honest and truthful, even when bodily pain will be the consequence, than tell a lie or be dishonest. It is my duty to help those who are unfortunate and miserable, and to make glad those who are desolate and sad." In fact, the sum total of our morality is we are to do good, not through fear of punishment or hope of reward, but because it is right to do good. That is a far superior morality to doing good or being good through fear of punishment or hope of reward in this world or the next, as the Christian religion teaches. No man is strictly moral who is moral through fear of consequences or hope of gain.
"A Free thinker" calls attention in his letter to the different views held by freethinkers. That is to be expected. No number of persons will agree upon all subjects. One freethinker believes in a Supreme Being; another believes in a Supreme power, and so forth; it is for each according to his or her mental development. Do the Christians all agree relative to matters of belief? Are not the Christians divided into sects, and each one has bitterly opposed and persecuted the other when opportunity offered (except the Quakers, who have never been charged with persecution)? At any rate we shall not persecute each other, no matter how we may differ in matters of this sort.
"A Freethinker" demonstrates to his own satisfaction that it is the height of immorality for me to call churches talking shops, to speak of the Bible as the house that Jack built (which is untrue, what I said or demonstrated was there was no more science in the Bible than the house that Jack built); to call the Salvation Army a damnation army, who do more harm in a month than secular teachings will be able to undo in years, to, as he calls it, blaspheme the maker of the universe, to ridicule the sacred convictions of the Christians. A Freethinker is on a par with those Christian priests, who declared that heresy was more than murder, theft, or adultery. Blasphemy is always the cry of people who feel that argument cannot be answered. Common-sense in matters of religion is always blasphemy. The cry of blasphemy is an appeal to ignorance, prejudice, and passion; blasphemy in the olden times lighted fagots and sharpened instruments of torture. The Catholics have called the Protestants blasphemers, and the Protestants have returned the compliment to the Catholics. Blasphemy to a geographical question and a question of progress, what is blasphemy in in one country is not blasphemy in another. What is blasphemy in one age is not blasphemy in another. How can I blaspheme the Maker of the Universe when science has demonstrated that the universe never had a Maker? They blaspheme who impute crimes to a God that they would be ashamed to commit themselves; for instance, stoning a man to death for picking up a few sticks on a Sunday, and ordering the wholesale murder of the Canaanites by the Israelites, and other cruel, wicked commands said in the Bible to have come from a God.
As to ridiculing what Christians hold sacred. How do Christian missionaries treat the gods and religions of other countries. See Christian missionaries spit in the faces of the gods of other nations to show people how impotent their gods are to protect themselves from insult. "A Freethinker" further says, "That the faculty of deciding between right and wrong is innate.
That is a mistake which a knowledge of the different mental development of different races would soon dispel. There are people so low in the scale of humanity as not to have the remotest idea of morality in any force. There are people so low as to have scarcely any ideas beyond the mere gratification of physical instincts. Children do now show what moral ideas are innate; parents know that children require careful watching and training, to keep them from being immoral. Suppose a number of infants of both sexes, even isolated from human companionship and consequently allowed to grow up untrained, there would be abundant proof that the faculty of deciding between right and wrong was not innate. Morality is evoked from experiences for the well-being and preservation of the individual and society ; that is, of accumulated experiences handed down. If moral sense is innate, what is the faculty of deciding between right and wrong; how is it that human sacrifices are offered to idols, even the sacrifice of children by their patents. Is not much of what is called moral really immoral, and vice versa, and what the world calls morality is very often a geographical question, The inhabitants of Utah consider polygamy moral, and quote passages out of the Bible to prove it, and affirms that it is upheld by the lives of the patriarchs and the Israelitish kings. For a Hindoo to throw himself into the sacred River Ganges is considered moral in India, whilst it is considered highly immoral in England. If the faculty of deciding between right and wrong be innate, how ist it that much of what the Fijians consider highly moral, is shuddered at by those whose moral ideas are the outcome of European civilisation. The mistake which "A Freethinker" makes is thinking that consciousness is a faculty instead of a state of the mind. "A Freethinker" lays down false premises, and reasons from them into absurdity. "A Freethinker" has evidently not emerged from the anthropomorphic stage of human thought when he speaks of "truth inwrought by a Divine weaver." There we have the great man of theology shaping human consciousness out of pre-existing material, and doing his work so badly that no two races and no two ages agree as to what is truth and what constitutes morality. In dealing with the incongruous ideas bracketed together in "A Freethinker's" letter I have been led into trespassing further on your space than I intended.
I am, &c.,
 ADA CAMPBELL.
 4 September 1884

 The South Australian Advertiser 27 August 1884,

SOCIALISM IN GERMANY: Sermon

  preached by the Rev. Jas. JEFFERIS, LL.B.

 Sydney : Foster and Fairfax.
. . . . .
Few phenomena of our age are more remarkable than the gourd-like growth of Socialism. Of course, we are far from saying that it is a purely modern doctrine. The condemnations of Clement XII., Benedict XIV., Pius VII., and the Bull quo graciora of Leo XII., are alone sufficient, to show that it has been long watched with anxiety by the Church. But in the early days of its history, Socialists were regarded as mere visionaries, who deserved an asylum rather than a place in the hearts of the masses. Even the French, when the great revolution had produced its natural reaction, laughed to scorn all idea of a community of goods. Germany regarded the doctrine as beneath notice. In North Italy alone could Socialism find a home, and it was probably to this circumstance that the attention of so many Popes was drawn to it. Despised by the world, and condemned by the Church, as it was there was a fascination about it, however, that captivated the poor and ignorant. There is nothing a man naturally dislikes more than hard work, the apostles of Socialism promised him ease and comfort. A poor man will naturally envy the riches of the master, and his new teachers promised him his share of them. He was to have the double satisfaction of rising above his poverty at the expense of those whom, after the Pope and the priests, he most hated. Given sufficient ignorance and cupidity, and nothing is more probable than that a wicked man should become a Socialist. Although traces of Socialism are to be found in the teaching of the Anabaptists and Socinians, although it is present in the writings of Voltaire, and was one of the first fruits of the French revolution, it was not until about fifteen years ago that Europe was thoroughly frightened. In the year 1864, the first convention of Socialist leaders was held at Brussels. They were now sufficiently backed up by numbers to come before the public and to make no secret of their principles and designs. The former may be said to be the negation, not only of all religion, but of every feeling that could elevate human nature. No God, no eternity — all they looked to was this life. The motto over their graves is — "There is no hereafter and no meeting again." The political aim of such men was as might have been expected. Individual rights of property were to be abolished, Christianity was to be proscribed, and to make sure of the permanent establishment of their principles, Secularism was to replace religious teaching in the schools of the young. The evil had now gone too far to be met with sneers. The symptoms appeared very mildly in England, but in France, Italy, and Germany, repressive measures had to be resorted to. Once again the Holy See spoke out. In September, 1865, Pius IX. published an allocution, in which the Socialists and Internationalists were condemned "together with all other societies of the same nature under the same pains and penalties as those specified in the constitutions of our predecessors, and this concerns all Christians of every condition, rank or dignity in the world." Would that such a formal condemnation had never been made necessary — that, the world had recognized in the vigilant pilot over the vessel of the Church the truest friend of our civilization ! But, the plague had seized the people. The last revolution in Paris tells us how deeply the French are infected. Yet the symptoms in France are mild compared with those shown by Germany. A Socialist dies and ten thousand followers see him into the earth with every mark of respect, to his memory, and with the most obtrusive tokens of a disbelief in his resurrection ! The only offence of the Emperor seems to be that he is rich and their ruler ; therefore two attempts have been lately made to murder him. Such is the last development of Socialism which has called forth Mr. Jefferis's sermon.
To a Catholic the most interesting portion of Mr. Jefferis's sermon is that in which he deals with the religious aspect of the movement. Nothing astonishes us more than the great candour with which he states the case, or disappoints us more then the way in which he leaves the cause of such a religious condition unaccounted for. If a few expressions in the following passage which betoken the Protestant mind had been left out, it would not have been altogether out of place in a bishop's pastoral.
"Socialism alone does not receive and express the thoughts which are so full of dark omens for the future. Protestant Christianity in Germany has become cankered to the very core of it by unbelief. A score of philosophers have attacked by turns the Gospel— the old Gospel (according to Paul and Luther). Honest endeavours to present views of God perfectly spiritual have ended in thinnest ether or blackest smoke. Strauss himself, the chief modern prophet of the nation, beginning with a sublime mythical theory about Christ, ends even on his dying bed with a denial of a personal God, with the declaration that there is no supreme intelligence in creation, or in history, or in society, and that the only God modern thought can recognize is the universe, the great whole, the sum total of all things, and so public opinion generally, beginning by impugning the truths of Biblical history, has come to deny the possibility of miracles, the efficacy of prayer, the interference of the Almighty. What room for the profession of faith? What, room for the worship of God? Go to the churches of Protestant Germany to-day and what will you see? Vast and gloomy edifices almost empty ; a few women, and yet fewer men. No fervour, no enthusiasm, no passion. An eminent German authority, speaking of the condition of Protestantism in the land of Luther, says, ' It is eaten to the core by unbelief, it is sapped to its very foundations by infidelity.' Government, strives to do what it, can to stem the advancing tide, with the success that usually attends Government effort in religious matters. The closest union exists there between the Church and the State, and the power of the State is employed in every department of life to uphold the authority of the Church but all in vain. The Evangelical Church, which is the Church of the Empire and the Prime Minister, has persecuted bitterly the other Protestant Churches."
But does Mr. Jefferis consider the Socialism in Germany as primarily due to such causes as these? He attributes the rise of Socialism to the utter want of religion : to what, does he attribute the utter want of religion? We are told that German philosophers have attacked the Gospel, that the Protestant churches are empty, that there is no fervour, and that German Protestantism "is eaten to the core by unbelief." We have not the slightest doubt that this was the immediate cause of German Socialism, but what caused this universal scepticism in Protestant Germany? Mr. Jefferis stands mute when brought face to face with that question.
A loyal Protestant, will probably give every answer to that question but the true one. The natural depravity of the human heart, says one — but is not the human heart naturally depraved in the Church, and yet scepticism and Socialism have never taken root in her ranks. Another says that the Germans are an intellectual and speculative people— we have yet to learn that they are more so than many other nations in which Socialism has never yet appeared. We know it is an unpalatable answer that Socialism is the logical result of Protestantism, but the answer is none the less true because it is unpalatable. Mr. Jefferis says that scepticism has caused socialism. What has caused scepticism ? We answer, the so-called right of private judgment. When a religious difficulty arises, the Protestant professes to go to the Bible, and by the interpretation which his private judgment places on the Bible he solves the difficulty for himself. The German is logical ; he goes a step further, and exercises his private judgment on the authority of the Bible itself. What answer can he give to this question?  To a person outside the Catholic Church there can be neither external nor internal evidence that the Bible is the Word of God, or possesses the slightest authority before which he is to submit his intellect. A Catholic knows the Bible to be inspired because the Church tells him so ; but the case of a Protestant is far different, because he denies that authority upon which a knowledge of the inspiration must rest. Humanly speaking, this is a necessary result of the Protestant principle. We may take years for the result to develop itself, but it is as certain as is the conclusion of a correct syllogism. No wonder Mr. Jefferis jibbed at tracing Socialism to its original cause!
As a sermon, it is a tolerable specimen, short, and, as far as it goes, to the point. The charm of it lies in the fact that the preacher, who if he adheres to the first principles and is logical ought to be a sceptic, and yet he has the courage to acknowledge half of the truth that tells against his religious position. Beyond this there is little to recommend it. It contains no evidence of real learning, and it evinces a poverty of thought which no affectation of fine writing can conceal.

 Freeman's Journal 20 July 1878, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article111096945

RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT*

By Herbert Spencer.

Unlike the ordinary consciousness, the religious consciousness is concerned with that which lies beyond the sphere of sense a brute thinks only of things which can be touched, seen, heard, tasted, &c., and the like is true of the untaught child, the deaf mute, and the lowest savage But the developing man has thoughts about existences which he regards as usually inaudible, intangible, invisible, and yet which he regards is operative upon him. What suggests this notion of agencies transcending perception. How do these ideas concerning the supernatural evolve out of ideas concerning the natural? The transition cannot be sudden ; and an account of the genesis of religion must begin by describing the steps through which the transition takes place.

The ghost theory exhibits these steps quite clearly. We are shown that the mental differentiation of invisible and intangible beings from visible and tangible beings progresses slowly and unobtrusively. In the fact that the other-self, supposed to wander in dreams, is believed to have actually done and seen whatever was dreamed—in the fact that the other-self when going away at death, but expected presently to return, is conceived as a double equally material with the original, we see that the supernatural agent in its primitive form diverges very little from the natural agent—is simply the original man with some added powers of going about secretly and doing good or evil. And the fact that when the double of the dead man ceases to be dreamed about by those who knew him, his non appearance in dreams is held to imply that he is finally dead, shows that these earliest supernatural agents have but a temporary existence; the first tendencies to a permanent consciousness of the supernatural prove abortive.

In many cases no higher degree of differentiation is reached. The ghost-population, recruited by deaths on the one side, but on the other side losing its members as they cease to be recollected and dreamed about, does not increase, and no individuals included in it come to be recognised through successive generations as established super natural powers. Thus the Unkulunkulu, or old old one, of the Zulus, the father of the race, is regarded as finally or completely dead, and there is propitiation only of ghosts of more recent date. But where circumstances favour the continuance of sacrifices at graves, witnessed by members of each new generation, who are told about the dead, and transmit the tradition, there eventually arises the conception of a permanently existing ghost or spirit. A more marked contrast in thought between supernatural beings and natural beings is thus established. There simultaneously results a great increase in the number of these supposed supernatural beings, since the aggregate of them is now continually added to, and there is a strengthening tendency to think of them as everywhere around, and as causing all unusual occurrences.

Differences among the ascribed powers of ghosts soon arise. They naturally follow from the observed differences among the powers of the living individuals. Hence it results that while the propitiations of ordinary ghosts are made only by their descendants, it comes occasionally to be thought prudent to propitiate also the ghosts of the more dreaded individuals, even though they have no claims of blood. Quite early there thus begin those grades of supernatural beings which eventually become so strongly marked.

Habitual wars, which more than all other causes initiate these first differentiations, go on to initiate further and more decided ones. For with those compoundings of small social aggregates into greater ones, and re-compounding of these into still greater, which war effects, there, of course, with the multiplying gradations of power among living men, arises the conception of multiplying gradations of power among their ghosts. Thus in course of time are formed the conceptions of the great ghosts or gods, the more numerous secondary ghosts or demigods, and so on downwards—a pantheon, there being still, however, no essential distinction of kind ; as we see in the calling of ordinary ghosts manes-gods by the Romans and elohim by the Hebrews. Moreover, repeating as the other life in the other world does, the life in this world, in its needs, occupations, and social organisation, there arises not only a differentiation of grades among supernatural beings in respect of their powers, but also in respect of their characters and kinds of activity.

There come to be local gods, and gods reigning over this or that order of phenomena ; there come to be good and evil spirits of various qualities ; and where there has been by conquest a superposing of societies one upon another, each having its own system of ghost-derived beliefs, there results an involved combination of such beliefs, constituting a mythology.

Of course ghosts primarily being doubles like the originals in all things, and gods (when not the living members of a conquering race) being doubles of the more powerful men ; it results that they, too, are originally no less human than ordinary ghosts in their physical characters, their passions, and their intelligences. Like the doubles of the ordinary dead, they are supposed to consume the flesh, blood, bread, wine given to them—at first literally, and later in a more spiritual way by consuming the essences of them. They not only appear as visible and tangible persons, but they enter into conflicts with men, are wounded, suffer pain, the sole distinction being that they have miraculous powers of healing and consequent immortality. Here, indeed, there needs a qualification, for not only do various peoples hold that the gods die a first death (as naturally happens where they are the members of a conquering race, called gods because of their superiority), but, as in the case of Pan, it is supposed, even among the cultured, that there is a second and final death of a god, like that second and final death of a ghost supposed among existing savages. With advancing civilisation the divergence of the supernatural being from the natural being becomes more decided. There is nothing to check the gradual dematerialisation of the ghost and of the God and this materialisation is insensibly furthered in the effort to reach consistent ideas of supernatural action; the god ceases to be tangible, and later he ceases to be visible or audible. Along with this differentiation of physical attributes from those of humanity, there goes on more slowly the differentiation of mental attributes. The god of the savage, represented as having intelligence scarcely if at all greater than that of the living man, is deluded with ease. Even the gods of the semi-civilised are deceived, make mistakes, repent of then plans ; and only in course of time does their arise the conception of unlimited vision and universal knowledge. The emotional nature simultaneously undergoes a parallel transformation. The grosser passions, originally conspicuous and carefully ministered to by devotees, gradually fade, leaving only the passions less related to corporeal satisfactions, and eventually these, too become partially dehumanised. 

These ascribed characters of deities are continually adapted and readapted to the needs of the social state. During the militant phase of activity, the chief god is conceived as holding insubordination the greatest crime, as implacable in anger, as merciless in punishment ; and any alleged attributes of a milder kind occupy but small space in the social consciousness. But where militancy declines and the harsh despotic form of government appropriate to it is gradually qualified by the form appropriate to industrialism, the foreground of the religious consciousness is increasingly filled with those ascribed traits of the divine nature which are congruous with the ethics of peace : divine love, divine forgiveness, divine mercy, are now the characteristics enlarged upon.

To perceive clearly the effects of mental progress and changing social life thus stated in the abstract we must glance at them in the concrete. If without foregone conclusions we contemplate the traditions records and monuments of the Egyptians we see that out of their primitive ideas of gods brute or human, there were evolved spiritualised ideas of gods and finally of a god ; until the priesthoods of later times, repudiating the earlier ideas described them as corruptions ; being swayed by the universal tendency to regard the first state as the highest—a tendency traceable down to the theories of existing theologians and mythologists. 

Again if putting aside speculations, and not asking what historical value the Iliad may have, we take it simply as indicating the early Greek notion of Zeus, and compare this with the notion contained in the Platonic dialogues we see that Greek civilisation had greatly modified (in the better minds, at least) the purely anthropomorphic conception of him;the lower human attributes being dropped and the higher ones transfigured. Similarly if we contrast the Hebrew God described in primitive traditions manlike in appearance, appetites, and emotions with the Hebrew God as characterised by the prophets there is shown a widening range of power along with a nature increasingly remote from that of man. And on passing to the conceptions of him which are  now entertained, we are made aware of an extreme transfiguration. By a convenient obliviousness, a deity who in early times is  represented as hardening men's hearts so that they may commit punishable acts, and as employing a lying spirit to deceive them, comes to be mostly thought of as an embodiment of virtues transcending the highest we can imagine.

Thus, recognising the fact that in the primitive human mind there exists neither religious idea nor religious sentiment, we find that in the course of social evolution and the evolution of intelligence accompanying it, there are generated both the ideas and sentiments which we distinguish as religious ; and that through a process of causation clearly traceable, they traverse those stages which have brought them among civilised races, to their present forms.

And now what may we infer will be the evolution of religious ideas and sentiments throughout the future? On the one hand it is irrational to suppose that the changes which have brought the religious consciousness to its present form will suddenly cease. On the other hand it is irrational to suppose that the religious consciousness, naturally generated as we have seen, will disappear, and leave an unfilled gap Manifestly it must undergo further changes ; and however much changed, it must continue to exist. What, then, are the transformations to be expected? If we reduce the process above delineated to its lowest terms, we shall see our way to an answer.   

As pointed out in First Principles section 96, evolution is throughout its course habitually modified, by that dissolution which eventually undoes it; the changes which become manifest being usually but the differential results of opposing tendencies towards integration and disintegration. Rightly to understand the genesis and decay of religious systems, and the probable future of those now existing, we must take this truth into account During those earlier changes by which there is created a hierarchy of gods demi-gods, manes-gods, and spirits of various kinds and ranks, evolution goes on with but little qualification. The consolidated mythology produced, while growing in the mass of supernatural beings composing it, assumes increased definiteness in the arrangement of its parts and the attributes of its members. But the antagonist Dissolution eventually gains predominance. The spreading recognition of natural causation conflicts with this mythological evolution, and insensibly weakens those of its beliefs which are most at variance with advancing knowledge. Demons and the secondary divinities presiding over divisions of nature become less thought of as the phenomena ascribed to them are more commonly observed to follow a constant order ; and hence these minor components of the mythology slowly dissolve away. At the same time, with growing supremacy of the great god heading the hierarchy, there goes increasing ascription to him of actions which were before distributed among numerous supernatural beings: there is integration of power. While in proportion as there arises the consequent conception of an omnipotent and omnipresent deity, there is a gradual fading of his alleged human attributes ; dissolution begins to affect the supreme personality in respect of ascribed form and nature.

Already, as we have seen, this process has in the more advanced societies, and especially among their higher members, gone to the extent of inciting all minor supernatural powers in one supernatural power ; and already this one supernatural power has, by what Mr Fiske aptly calls deanthropomorphisation, lost the grosser attributes of humanity. If things hereafter are to follow the same general course as heretofore, we must infer that this dropping of human attribute will continue Let us ask what positive changes are hence to be expected.

Two factors must unite in producing them. There is the development of those higher sentiments which no longer tolerate the ascription of inferior sentiments to a divinity; and there is the intellectual development which causes dissatisfaction with the crude interpretations previously accepted. Of course, in pointing out the effects of these factors, I must name some which are familiar ; but it is needful to glance at these along with others.

The cruelty of a Fijian god who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a god who condemns men to tortures which are eternal ; and the ascription of this cruelty, though habitual in ecclesiastical formulas, occasionally occurring in sermons, and still sometimes pictorially illustrated, is becoming so intolerable to the better-natured that while some theologians distinctly deny it, others quietly drop it out of their teachings. Clearly this change cannot cease until the beliefs in hell and damnation disappear. Disappearance of them will be aided by an increasing repugnance to injustice. The   visiting on Adam's descendants through hundreds of generations, dreadful penalties for a small transgression winch they did not commit ; the damning of all men who do not avail themselves of an alleged mode of obtaining forgiveness which most men have never heard of ; and the effecting a reconciliation by sacrifice of one who was perfectly innocent, are modes of action which, ascribed to a human ruler, would call forth expressions of abhorrence ; and the ascription of them to the Ultimate Cause of things, even now felt to be full of difficulties, must become impossible. So, too, must die out the belief that a power present in innumerable worlds throughout infinite space, and who during millions of years of the earth's earlier existence needed no honouring by its inhabitants, should be seized with a craving for praise ; and having created mankind, should be angry with them if they do not perpetually tell him how great he is. Men will by and by refuse to imply a trait of character which is the reverse of worshipful.

Similarly with the logical incongruities more and more conspicuous to growing intelligence. Passing over the familiar difficulties that sundry of the implied divine traits are in contradiction with the divine attributes otherwise ascribed—that a god who repents of what he has done must be lacking either in power or in foresight ; that his anger presupposes an occurrence which has been contrary to intention, and so indicates defect of means ; we come to the deeper difficulty that such emotions, in common with all emotions, can exist only in a consciousness which is limited. Every emotion has its antecedent ideas, and antecedent ideas are habitually supposed to occur in God ; he is represented as seeing and hearing this or the other, and as being emotion ally affected thereby. That is to say, the conception of a divinity possessing these traits of character necessarily continues anthropomorphic, not only in the sense that the emotions ascribed are like those of human beings, but also in the sense that they form parts of a consciousness, which like the human consciousness, is formed of successive states. And such a conception of the divine consciousness is irreconcilable both with the changeableness otherwise alleged, and with the omniscience otherwise alleged. For a consciousness constituted of ideas and feelings caused by objects and occurrences, cannot be simultaneously occupied with all objects and all occurrences throughout the universe. To believe in a divine consciousness, men must retrain from thinking what is meant by consciousness—must stop short with verbal propositions ; and propositions which they are debarred from rendering into thoughts will more and more fail to satisfy them. Of course, like difficulties present themselves when the Will of God is spoken of. So long as we refrain from giving it definite meaning to the word Will, we may say that it is possessed by the Cause of All Things, as readily as we may say that love of approbation is possessed by a circle ; but when from the words we pass to the thoughts they stand for, we find that we can no more unite in consciousness the terms of the one proposition than we can those of the other. Whoever conceives any other will than his own, must do so in terms of his own will, which is the sole will directly known to him —all other wills being only inferred. But will as each is conscious of it, presupposes a motive—a prompting desire of some kind : absolute indifference excludes the conception of will. Moreover will, as implying a prompting desire, connotes some end contemplated as one to be achieved, and ceases with the achievement of it ; some other will, referring to some other end, taking its place. That is to say, will like emotion necessarily supposes a series of states of consciousness. The conception of a divine will, derived from that of the human will, involves like it, localisation in space and time : the willing of each end, excluding from consciousness for an interval the willing of other ends, and, therefore, being inconsistent with that omnipresent activity which simultaneously works out an infinity of ends. It is the same with the ascription of intelligence. Not to dwell on the seriality and limitation implied as before, we may note that intelligence, as alone conceivable by us presupposes existences independent of it and objective to it. It is carried on in terms of changes primarily wrought by alien activities—the impressions generated by things beyond consciousness,and the ideas derived from such impressions. To speak of an intelligence which exists in the absence of all such alien activities is to use a meaningless word. If to the corollary that the First Cause, considered as intelligent, must be continually affected by independent objective activities, it is replied that these have become such by act of creation, and were previously included in the First Cause ; then the reply is that in such case the First Cause could, before this creation, have had nothing to generate in it such changes as those constituting what we call intelligence, and must therefore have been unintelligent at the time when intelligence was most called for. Hence it is clear that the intelligence ascribed answers in no respect to that which we know by the name. It is intelligence out of which all the characters constituting it have vanished.

These and other difficulties, some of which are often discussed but never disposed of, must force men hereafter to drop the higher anthropomorphic characters given to the First Cause, as they have long since dropped the lower. The conception which has been enlarging from the beginning must go on enlarging, until by disappearance of its limits, it becomes a consciousness which transcends the forms of distinct thought, though it for ever remains a consciousness

" But how can such a final consciousness of the Unknowable, thus tacitly alleged to be true, be reached by successive modifications of a conception which was utterly untrue ? The ghost theory of the savage is baseless. The material double of a deed man in which he believes never had any existence. And if, by gradual de-materialisation of this double was produced the conception of the super natural agent in general—if the conception of a deity, formed by the dropping of some human attributes and transfiguration of others, resulted from continuance of this process—is not the developed and purified conception reached by pushing the process to its limit, a fiction also? Surely if the primitive belief was absolutely false, all derived beliefs must be absolutely false."

This objection looks fatal ; and it would be fatal were its premiss valid. Unexpected as it will be to most readers, the answer here to be made is that at the outset a germ of truth was contained in the primitive conception— the truth, namely, that the power which manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently-conditioned form of the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness.

Every voluntary act yields to the primitive man proof of a source of energy within him. Not that he thinks about his internal experiences ; but in these experiences this notion lies latent. When producing motion in his limbs, and through them motion in other things, he is aware of the accompanying feeling of effort. And this sense of effort which is the antecedent of changes directly produced by him, becomes the conceived antecedent of chances not produced by him—furnishes him with a term of thought by which to represent the genesis of these objective changes. At first this idea of muscular force as anteceding unusual events around him, carries with it the whole assemblage of associated ideas. He thinks of the implied effort as an effort exercised by a being wholly like himself. In course of time these doubles of the dead, supposed to be workers of all but the most familiar changes, are modified in conception. Besides becoming less grossly material, some of them are developed into larger personalities presiding over classes of phenomena which, being comparatively regular in their order, foster the idea of beings who, while far more powerful than men, are less variable in their modes of action. So that the idea of force as exercised by such beings, comes to be less associated with the idea of a human ghost. Further advances, by which minor supernatural agents become merged in one general agent, and by which the personality of this general agent is rendered vague while becoming widely extended, tend still further to dissociate the notion of objective force from the force known as such in consciousness ; and the dissociation reaches its extreme in the thoughts of the man of science, who interprets in terms of force not only the visible changes of sensible bodies but all physical changes whatever, even up to the undulations of the ethereal medium. Nevertheless, this force (be it force under that statical form by which matter resists, or under that dynamical form distinguished as energy) is to the last thought of in terms of that internal energy which he is conscious of as muscular effort. He is compelled to symbolise objective force in terms of subjective force from lack of any other symbol. 

See now the implications. That internal energy which in the experiences of the primitive man was always the immediate antecedent of changes wrought by him—that energy which when interpreting external changes, he thought of along with those attributes of a human personality connected with it in himself ; is the same energy which, freed from anthropomorphic accompaniments, is now figured as the cause of all external phenomena. The last stage reached is recognition of the truth that force as it exists beyond consciousness, cannot be like what we know as force within consciousness ; and that yet, as either is capable of generating the other, they must be different modes of the same. Consequently, the final outcome of that speculation commenced by the primitive man, is that the power manifested throughout the universe distinguished as material, is the same power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness.

It is untrue, then, that the foregoing argument proposes to evolve a true belief from a belief which was wholly false. Contrariwise, the ultimate form of the religious consciousness is the final development of a consciousness which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous errors.

Those who think that science is dissipating religious beliefs and sentiments, seem unaware that whatever of mystery is taken from the old interpretation is added to tho new. Or rather, we may say that transference from the one to the other is accompanied by increase ; since, for an explanation which has a seeming feasibility, it substitutes an explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, there leaves us in presence of the avowedly inexplicable.

Under one of its aspects scientific progress is a gradual transfiguration of nature. Where ordinary perception saw perfect simplicity it reveals great complexity ; where there seemed absolute inertness it discloses intense activity ; and in what appears mere vacancy it finds a marvellous play of forces. Each generation of physicists discovers in so-called "brute matter," powers which but a few years before the most instructed physicists would have thought incredible ; as in stance the ability of a mere iron plate to take up the complicated aerial vibrations produced by articulate speech, which, all translated into multitudinous and varied electric pulses are re-translated a thousand miles off by another iron plate and again heard as articulate speech. When the explorer of nature sees that, quiescent as they appear, surrounding solid bodies are thus sensitive to forces which are infinitesimal in their amounts—when the spectroscope proves to him that molecules on the earth pulsate in harmony with molecules in the stars—when there is forced on him the interdict that every point in space thrills with an infinity of vibrations passing through it in all directions ; the conception to which he finds is much less that of a universe of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere alive ; alive if not in the restricted sense, still in a general sense.

This transfiguration which the inquiries of physicists continually increase, is aided by that other transfiguration resulting from metaphysical inquiries. Subjective analysis compels us to admit that our scientific interpretations of the phenomena which objects present, are expressed in terms of our own variously-combined sensations and ideas— are expressed, that is, in elements belonging to consciousness, which are but symbols of the something beyond consciousness. Though analysis afterwards reinstates our primitive beliefs, to the extent of showing that behind every group of phenomenal manifestations there is always a nexus which is the reality that remains fixed amid appearances which are variable ; yet we are shown that this nexus of reality is for ever inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once more, we remember that the activities constituting consciousness, being rigorously bounded, cannot bring in among themselves the activities beyond the bounds, which therefore seem unconscious, though production of either by the other seems to imply that they are of the same essential nature ; this necessity we are under to think of the external energy in terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic aspect to the universe, further thought, however, obliging us to recognise the truth that a conception given in phenomenal manifestations of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it is.

While the beliefs to which analytic science thus leads are such as do not destroy the object-matter of religion, but simply transfigure it, science under its concrete forms enlarges the sphere for religious sentiment. From the very beginning the progress of knowledge has been accompanied by an increasing capacity for wonder. Among savages, the lowest are the least surprised when shown remarkable products of civilised art : astonishing the traveller by their indifference. And so little of the marvellous do they perceive in the grandest phenomena of Nature, that any inquiries concerning them they regard as childish trifling. This contrast in mental attitude between the lowest human beings and the higher human beings around us, is paralleled by the contrasts among the grades of these higher human beings themselves. It is not the rustic, nor the artisan, nor the trader who sees something more than a matter of course in the hatching of a chick ; but it is the biologist, who, pushing to the uttermost his analysis of vital phenomena, reaches his greatest perplexity when a speck of protoplasm under the microscope shows him life in its sunniest form, and makes him feel that however he formulates its processes the actual play of forces remains unimaginable. Neither in the ordinary tourist nor in the deer stalker climbing the mountains above him, does a Highland glen rouse ideas beyond those of sport or of the picturesque, but it may, and often does, in the geologist. He, observing that the glacier rounded rock he sits on has lost by weathering but half an inch of its surface since a time far more remote than the beginnings of human civilisation, and then trying to conceive the slow denudation which has cut out the whole valley, has thoughts of time and of power to which they are strangers— thoughts which, already utterly inadequate to their objects, he feels to be still more futile on noting the contorted beds of gneiss around, which tell him of a time, immeasurably more remote, when far beneath the earth's surface they were in a half-melted state, and again tell him of a time, immensely exceeding this in remoteness, when their components were sand and mud on the shores of an ancient sea. Nor is it in the primitive peoples who supposed that the heavens rested on the mountain tops, any more than in the modern inheritors of their cosmogony who repeat that "the heavens declare the glory of God," that we find the largest conceptions of the universe or the greatest amount of wonder excited by contemplation of it. Rather, it is in the astronomer, who sees in the sun a mass so vast that even into one of his spots our earth might be plunged without touching its edges ; and who by every finer telescope is shown an increased multitude of such suns, many of them far larger.

Hereafter as heretofore, higher faculty and deeper insight will raise rather than lower this sentiment. At present the most powerful and most instructed intellect has neither the knowledge nor the capacity required for symbolising in thought the totality of things. Occupied with one or other division of Nature, tho man of science usually does not know enough of the other divisions even to rudely conceive the extent and complexity of their phenomena ; and supposing him to have adequate knowledge of each, yet he is unable to think of them as a whole. Wider and more complex intellect may hereafter help him to form a vague consciousness of them in their totality. We may say that just as an undeveloped musical faculty, able only to appreciate a simple melody, cannot grasp the variously-entangled passages and harmonies of a symphony, which in the minds of composer and conductor are unified into involved musical effects awakening far greater feeling than is possible to the musically uncultured ; so by future more evolved intelligences the course of things now apprehensible only in parts may be apprehensible all together, with an accompanying feeling as much beyond that of the present cultured man as his feeling is beyond that of the savage.

And this feeling is not likely to be decreased, but increased, by that analysis of knowledge which, while forcing him to Agnosticism, yet continually prompts him to imagine some solution of the Great Enigma, which he knows cannot be solved. Especially must this be so when he remembers that the very notions, beginning and end, cause and purpose, are relative notions be longing to human thought, which are probably inapplicable to the Ultimate Reality transcending human thought ; and when, though suspecting that Explanation is a word without meaning when applied to this Ultimate Reality, he yet feels compelled to think there must be an explanation.

But amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.

HERBERT SPENCER

* This article will eventually form the closing chapter of "Ecclesiastical Institutions Part VI of "The Principles of Sociology." The statements concerning matters of fact in the first part of it are based on the contents of preceeding chapters. Evidence for nearly all of them however, may also be found In Part I of "The Principles of Sociology," already published-H S

 The Argus 2 February 1884,