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The religious views in which we have been | once when he was young he believed. In brought up, inevitably colour to the last our short, he does what the weakest of us do, tone of thought on all cognate matters, and what the most illogical do: he believes largely affect the manner and direction of our because he believes. Honour to the philapproach to them, even where every dogma of osopher who dares to say so! Let those our early creed has been, if not abandoned, yet deprived of its dogmatic form, as well as of its scoff at him who will, he shall have no original logical or authoritative basis. Not only scorn from us. We may grieve that he are doctrines often persistently retained, though can proceed no further that he cannot the old foundations of them have been under- go in at the doors open to us, or see what mined or surrendered-but beliefs that have it hath not entered into the heart of man dwelt long in the mind leave indelible traces to conceive; but for this vindication, even of their residence years after they have been though uttered somewhat against his will, discarded and dislodged. It would be more of pure Faith without foundation or reacorrect to say that they linger with a sort of loving obstinacy in their old abode, long after son, he is to be thanked, almost more they have received formal notice to quit. Their deeply than is another man who feels himchamber is never to the end of time quite self able to speak with fuller certainty and This confession is swept and garnished. The mind is never alto- a more definite hope. gether as if they had not been there. When a a triumph of that something above nature, "yes" or "no answer is demanded to a prop- above reason, above all that can be taught osition, for and against which argument and or learned: that something ineffable, inevidence seem equally balanced, the decision is comprehensible in us, which makes us sure to be different in minds, one of which what we are -which cannot be altogether comes new to the question, while the other has destroyed by brutality, nor altogether held a preconceived opinion, even though on eliminated by intellect; and which makes grounds which he now recognizes as erroneous or insufficient. It was my lot to inherit from us, on the whole, very indifferent to Mr. Puritan forefathers the strongest impressions Darwin's monkeys, even could we see as to the great doctrines of religion, at a time them in actual process of development. when the mind is most plastic and most tena- Tails are one thing--but souls are quite cious of such impressionsanother thing. The appendage might be got rid of; but the other is not to be got rid of nor accounted for. And here it stands, clear-shining, ineffable, poising on angels' wings over the big brain of this thinker, as over the smallest brain of any one of us. We trust and hope that there is a great deal more of this kind of faith present in the world at this doubting and doubtful period, than the Christian critics of the time have any idea of. It is a Faith which has little to say for itself, which sometimes may be somewhat ashamed of itself; but its very shame and its avowed want of absolute foundation are its most valuable qualities. It is like the testimony of an unwilling witness, of whom honour and truth demand that he should tell something which goes against the cause he favours.

"Wax to receive and marble to retain."

And though I recognize, as fully as any man of science, the hollowness of most of the foundations on which those impressions were based, and the entire invalidity of the tenure on which I then held them, yet I by no means feel compelled to throw up the possession merely

Decause the old title-deeds were full of flaws. The existence of a wise and beneficent Creator, and of a renewed life hereafter, are still to me beliefs-especially the first-very nearly reaching the solidity of absolute convictions. The one is almost a Certainty, the other a solemn Hope. And it does not seem to me unphilosophic to allow my contemplation of life, or my speculations on the problems it presents, to run in the grooves worn in the mind by its antecedent history, so long as no dogmatism is allowed, and no disprovable datum is suffered for a moment to intrude.

The feeling which dictates this plea is Another curious peculiarity of the phias little sceptical as that which makes the|losophy of our day is the modesty with firmest believer cling to his creed - nay, which it avows its absolute inability to it is almost, if we may be permitted to answer any of the questions it raises. say so, a more pure and unmixed Faith The very name of Mr. Greg's volume than are those beliefs which are founded shows his full acquiescence in this sentiupon authority, either human or divine- ment. To the deeper Enigmas of Life on Revelation itself, the great final au- which he here proposes he offers no anthority in which Christians trust. Mr. swer; he holds out no hope to us that any Greg rejects the idea of Revelation as a answer can ever be found by intellect or folly; he smiles at authority in matters thought. It is true that to the less lofty of the mind. He believes - because, as - to those which concern the physical we have said, he cannot help it; because wellbeing and progress of man-he behe had Puritan forefathers because | lieves in the possibility of a limited and

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conditional answer, but that only by the | ago raised themselves "to the highest interposition of a philosophical millenni- summit which any nation has yet reached um-a time when all men will do justly—the culminating point of human intelliand love mercy, when sanitary science gence." To be able to think is surely a shall vanquish disease, when Peace shall greater gift, after all that can be said, have a universal reign, when men shall than to be able to flash a possibly foolish learn in all things how much better and message from one end of the world to the more comfortable it is for themselves to other in twelve minutes. Almost the do well than to do ill, and vice and dys- only way in which we can consider this pepsia shall alike vanish from the face of latter privilege as an unmingled boon, is the earth. We have no disposition to as- either when it works in the service of the sail with harsh criticism this foolishness affections and relieves the anxious, or of wisdom. We remember that another when it is used in the royal work of govphilosopher, more celebrated still than ernment, facilitating the action of a cenMr. Greg, once proposed the same sum-tral authority or summoning aid to a demary and delightful remedy for the woes, pendency in peril ;-yet we all know that not of the world, but of that small part in both these cases the telegraph has of it called Ireland: Let every man but probably done as much harm as good, do his duty; let all be good, sober, virtu- torturing the absent who cannot be of ous, honest, and peaceable, as it was right any service to a sufferer with all the flucto be, and lo, at once, without beating tuations of his malady, and confusing and about the bush, or search after elaborate stultifying the unhappy State subordinpolitical panaceas, the remedy was found! ate, who is now never out of reach of an So said Bishop Berkeley a hundred years ignorant chief, nor allowed to act as his ago. An older philosopher still-Fran- superior local knowledge sees fit. We cis, of the town of Assisi, in Umbria cannot see how this merely external held similar yet still wider views. His agency, great as it is, could, even if it had cure for Turk and Infidel was, not to cru- no défauts de ses qualités, be either an sade against them with armies and chiv- intellectual or moral influence affecting alry, but — the simplest thing, which any the minds or wills of men. And certainly poor monk was good for to convert its existence is no balance whatever to them! In such company Mr. Greg need the confessed non-existence of any not be ashamed to stand; and if he, too, marked and general elevation of intellect dreams of a time when the lion shall lie or wisdom in man. Yet, notwithstanding down with the lamb, and the sucking child all this, Mr. Greg still holds his ideal as lay its hand on the cockatrice' den, we realizable. Everything is possible. It is will not attempt to smile down his hope true he grants that we may still go on as as a devout imagination, as, we fear, did we have done for past centuries; that we venture to breathe a word of the mil- "passion may still be in the ascendant, lennium of the Apocalypse, he would do speaking in a louder tone than either into us. No; that obstinate hope in human terest or duty." "It may be so," he says, nature, which is one of the highest symp- and thus proceeds to explain what hope toms of the possibilities in us, is not one is in him of better things: which we can cast any scorn at; but the philosopher's faith in it is yet another proof of the endless potency of that principle which he despises scientifically, but which in the blessed inconsistency of human nature hangs by him still.

But there are three sets of considerations

which point to a more hopeful issue: the inevitably vast change which cannot fail to ensue when all the countless influences which have hitherto been working perversely in a wrong direction shall turn their combined forces the

In the paper called "Realizable Ideals," other way; the reciprocally reacting and cumulaMr. Greg sets forth candidly enough the tive operation of each step in the right course; absolute want of foundation for any such and the illimitable generations and ages which hope. Though he makes much more a yet lie before humanity ere the goal be reached. great deal than we should be disposed to Our present condition, no doubt, is discouragmake of those external signs of prog- ing enough; we have been sailing for centu ress which everybody dins into our ears ries on a wrong tack, but we are beginning, -the railway, the telegraph, gas, &c. though only just beginning, to put about the he acknowledges that man has reached when the condition of the masses shall receive helm. What may we not rationally hope for, no corresponding advancement; that that concentrated and urgent attention which neither thinker nor poet has gone beyond has hitherto been directed permanently, if not the range of Plato and Homer; and that exclusively, to furthering the interests of more the Athenians some two thousand years | favoured ranks? What, when charity, which

fierce and sanguinary wars in the world's history, to hope that this wretched and clumsy mode of settling national quarrels will ere long be obsolete; but no one can doubt that the commencement of higher estimates of national interests and needs, the growing devastation and slaughter of modern wars, the increased range and power of implements of destruction, which, as they are employable by all combatants, will grow too tremendous to be employed by any, and the increasing horror with which a cultivated age cannot avoid regarding such

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Heaven forbid that we should sneer at

any man for holding so hopeful a view. Yet of all unlikely things this philosophical Utopia seems to us the most unlikely a thing absolutely without warrant from experience, and little justified, so far as we can see, by the only agencies which are avowedly at command agencies wholly material, affecting our comfort, but neither touching our minds nor our hearts.

for centuries has been doing mischief, shall | It may sound romantic, at the end of a decade begin to do good? What, when the countless which has witnessed, perhaps, the two most pulpits that, so far back as history can reach, have been preaching Catholicism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Calvinism, Wesleyanism, shall set to work to preach Christianity at last? Do we ever even approach to a due estimate of the degree in which every stronghold of vice or folly overthrown exposes, weakens, and undermines every other;-of the extent to which every improvement, social, moral, or material, makes every other easier; of the countless ways in which physical reforms react on intellectual and ethical progress? What a gradual transformation-transform-scenes, are all clear, if feeble and inchoate, ination almost reaching to transfiguration will dications of a tendency towards this blessed not steal over the aspect of civilized communi- consummation. ties, when, by a few generations during which Hygienic science and sense shall have been in the ascendant, the restored health of mankind shall have corrected the morbid exaggeration of our appetites; when the more questionable in stincts and passions, less and less exercised and stimulated for centuries, shall have faded into comparative quiescence; when the disordered constitutions, whether diseased, criminal, or defective, which now spread and propagate so much moral mischief, shall have been eliminated; when sounder systems of education shall have prevented the too early awakening of natural desire; when more rational because higher and soberer notions of what is needful and desirable in social life, a lower standard of expenditure, wiser simplicity in living, shall have rendered the gratification of these desires more easy; when little in comparison shall be needed for a happy home, and that little shall have become generally attainable by frugality; sobriety, and toil? It surely is not too Utopian to fancy that our children, or our grandchildren at least, may see a civil state in which wise and effective legislation, backed by adequate administration, shall have made all violation of law all habitual crime - obviously, inevitably, and instantly a losing game, and therefore an extinct profession; when property shall be respected and not coveted, because possessed or attainable by all; when the distribution of wealth shall receive, both from the Statesman and the Economist, that sedulous attention which is now concentrated exclusively on its acquisition; and when, though relative poverty may still remain, actual and unmerited destitution shall everywhere be as completely eliminated as it has been already in one or two fortunate and limited communities. Few, probably, have at all realized how near the possibility at least of this consummation may be. An intellectual and moral changeboth within moderate and attainable limits and the adequate and feasible education of all classes, would bring it about in a single generation. If our working men were as hardy, enduring, and ambitious as the better specimens of the Scotch peasantry, and valued instruction as much, and if they were as frugal, managing, and saving as the French peasantry, the work would be very near completion.

We have not time to do more than indicate Mr. Greg's curiously fine and searching argument on the question of -a question so often and so disprayer agreeably discussed of late days, with what seems to us equal ignorance and bad taste on the sceptical side of the question, and much feebleness on the Christian. Here once again the fine spiritual sense (if we may use such an expression) of which Mr. Greg is incapable of divesting himself, comes in, lifting the argument out of the vulgar circle in which it has been bandied about from one hand to another, into a clearer and serener air. Mr. Greg's eyes are too keen and too candid not to see that in this case, as in so many others, it is a mere question with all thinkers which set of difficulties they will choose to protect and patronize,— those which set forth the impossibility of disturbing the order of nature by the interposition of such an agent as prayer or those which regard the still deeper impossibility of believing in a God and not appealing to Him. Mr. Greg considers both sides of the question carefully. He declares prayer to be "an inevitable consequence and correlative of belief in God," an "original and nearly irresistible instinct." "We cannot picture to ourselves," he says, with a force of expression which might well be consolatory to timid believers, "what our nature would be without it." He considers both sides

When the portals of this world have been hind, and this "body of death" has dropped passed, when time and sense have been left beaway from the liberated soul, everything which clouded the perceptions, which dulled the vision, which drugged the conscience while on earth, will be cleared off like a morning mist. We shall see all things as they really are-our

other punishment, whether retributive or purgatorial, will be needed. Naked truth, unfilmed eyes, will do all that the most righteous vengeance could desire. Every now and then we earth. Times come to us all when the pas have a glimpse of such perceptions while on sions, by some casual influence or some sober

of the question-and he makes no an- | Mr. Greg condemns; but we do not swer to it. We especially recommend to know where else, except in Isaiah, to find the notice of the reader the few sentences a more terrible or a more powerful picin which he suggests the idea that any ture of a real and spiritual hell: extraordinary or importunate search for human aid, such as those which love and wealth make continually, is as much an interference with the rigid sequence of nature as any appeal for divine aid can be. "If," he says, "as philosophers have maintained, we all and always live under the dominion of settled law; if the present in all points flows regularly and inex-selves and our sins among the number. No orably from the past; if all occurrences are linked together in one unfailing chain of cause and effect, and all are foreseen by Him whose foresight is unerring; if indeed they are mere portions of an order of events of which the motive power has been set in action from the beginning,―ing shock, have been wholly lulled to rest, when then is not aid rendered to us by our all disordered emotions have drunk repose human friends in consequence of our entreaties as an effect of that cause-as much a disturbance of the ordained law of sequence as if God Himself had directly aided us, in compliance with our prayers to Him?" This will show, though Mr. Greg gives no conclusion, and evidently feels no certain conclusion possible in such a question, that he treats it in a different spirit, and with a different feeling of its gravity and profound interest, from that which has shown itself in many recent arguments arguments such as discredit science without having anything really to do with her- and which disgust us by that irreverence for human nature which is even more revolting to the human spirit than profanity towards God.

"From the cool cisterns of the midnight air." and when for a few brief and ineffectual instants the temptations which have led us astray, the pleasures for which we have bartered away the future, the desires to which we have sacrificed our peace, appear to us in all their wretched folly and miserable meanness. From our feelings then we may form a faint imaginawhen this occasional and imperfect glimpse tion of what our feelings will be hereafter, shall have become a perpetual flood of light, irradiating all the darkest places of our earthly pathway, piercing through all veils, scattering all delusions, burning up all sophistries; when the sensual man, all desires and appetites now utterly extinct, shall stand amazed and horrorstruck at the low promptings to which he once yielded himself up in such ignominious slavery, the reflected image of his own animal brutality; and shall shrink in loathing and shame from when the hard, grasping, sordid man, come now The most striking passages in Mr. into a world where wealth can purchase nothing, Greg's volume will, however, be found in where gold has no splendour, and luxury no the last of its chapters - the singular meaning, shall be almost unable to comprehend and touching paper called "Elsewhere," how he could ever have so valued such unreal in which, by way of showing the mistakes goods; when the malignant, the passionate, of "divines" in setting forth the conven- the cruel man, everything which called forth his tionally religious view of future rewards vices now swept away with the former existence, and punishments (drawn, we presume, ers upon earth, shall hate himself as others shall appear to himself as he appeared to othfrom the vulgarest type of old-fashioned hated him on earth. sermons, but probably supposed by Mr. about all things there, perfectly and constantly, We shall see, judge, feel Greg to represent the preaching of his as we saw, judged, and felt about them parown day), he sets forth his own views on tially in our rare better and saner moments this profoundly interesting subject. The her We shall think that we must have been idea of entirely spiritual retribution is not an original one, and commends itself more completely to the mind than any other conception of final punishment. But though the idea is not new, it has seldom been more powerfully expressed. The following picture might probably be equalled in the pages of some "divine" of higher range and older date than those

mad, if we did not too well know that we had been wilful. Every urgent appetite, every boiling passion, every wild ambition, which obscured and confused our reason here below,

will have been burnt away in the valley of the which we blinded or excused ourselves on shadow of death; every subtle sophistry with earth will have vanished before the clear glance of a disembodied spirit; nothing will intervene between us and the truth. Stripped

of all the disguising drapery of honeyed words | sins. The pure and holy wife and the frail and false refractions, we shall see ourselves and sinful husband can live together harmonias we are, we shall judge ourselves as ously, and can love fondly here below, because God has always judged us. Our lost or mis- the vast moral gulf between them is mercifully used opportunities; our forfeited birthright; veiled from either eye. But when the great our glorious possibility-ineffable in its glory; curtain of ignorance and deception shall be our awful actuality - ineffable in its awfulness; withdrawn; "when the secrets of all hearts the nature which God gave us the nature we shall be made known;" when the piercing light have made ourselves; the destiny for which He of the Spiritual World shall at once and fordesigned us- the destiny to which we have ever disperse those clouds which have hidden doomed ourselves; all these things will grow what we really are from those who have loved and fasten on our thoughts, till the contempla- us, and almost from ourselves; when the trusttion must terminate in madness, were not mad- ing confidence of friendship shall discover ness a mercy belonging to the world of flesh what a serpent has been nourished in its boalone. In the mere superior mental capaci- som; when the yearning mother shall perceive ties, therefore, consequent upon spiritual life, on what a guilty wretch all her boundless and we cannot fail to find all that is needed, or can priceless tenderness has been lavished; when be pictured, to make that life a penal and a the wife shall at length see the husband whom purgatorial one. . . . .. But there is yet another she cherished through long years of self-denyretributive pang in wait for the sinful soul, ing and believing love, revealed in his true which belongs to the very nature of that future colours, a wholly alien creature; -what a sudworld; namely, the severance from all those we den, convulsive, inevitable because natural, love, who on earth have trod the narrower and separation between the clean and the unclean better path. The affections do not belong to will then take place! The gulf which has althe virtuous alone: they cling to the sinner ways existed is recognized and felt at last; corthrough all the storms and labyrinths of sin; ruption can no longer assort with incorruption; they are the last fragments of what is good in the lion cannot lie down with the lamb, nor the him that he silences or lays aside or tramples leopard with the kid. One flash of light has out: they belong, not to the flesh but to the done it all. The merciful delusions which held spirit; and a spiritual existence, even if a suf- friends together upon earth are dispersed, and fering one, will but give them fresh energy and the laws of the mind must take their course tenacity, by terminating all that has been an- and divide the evil from the good. But though tagonistic to them here below. Who shall the link is severed, the affection is not thereby describe the yearning love of a disencumbered destroyed. The friend, the husband, the lover, soul! Who can adequately conceive the pas- the son, thus cut adrift by a just and natural sionate tenderness with which it will cling though bitter retribution, love still; nay, they round the objects of its affection in a world love all the more fervently, all the more yearnwhere every other sentiment or thought is one ingly, in that they now discern with unclouded of pain! Yet what can be more certain, be- vision all that bright beauty, all that rich nacause what more in the essential nature of ture of the objects of their tenderness, of things, than that the great revelation of the which their dim eyesight could on earth perLast Day (or that which must attend and be ceive only a part. Then will begin a RETRIBUinvolved in the mere entrance into the spiritual TION indeed, the appropriate anguish, the desstate) will effect a severance of souls an in- olate abandonment of which, who can paint, stantaneous gulf of demarcation between the and who will be able to bear! To see those we pure and the impure, the just and the unjust, the love, as we never loved till then, turn from our merciful and the cruel-immeasurably more grasp and our glance of clasping and supplicadeep, essential, and impassable than any which ting fondness with that unconquerable loathing time, or distance, or rank, or antipathy could ef- which virtue must feel towards guilt, and with fect on earth? Here we never see into each oth- which purity must shrink from stain: to see er's souls: characters the most opposite and in- those eyes, never turned on us before save in compatible dwell together upon earth, and may gentleness and trust, now giving us one last love each other much, unsuspicious of the utter glance of divine sadness and ineffable farewell; want of fundamental harmony between them. to watch those forms, whose companionship The aspiring and the worldly may have so much cheered and illuminated all the dark places of in common, and may both instinctively conceal our earthly pilgrimage, and once and again had so much, that their inherent and elemental dif- almost redeemed us from the bondage and the ferences may go undiscovered to the grave. The mire of sin, receding, vanishing, melting in the soul that will be saved and the soul that will bright distance, to join a circle where they will be lost may cling round each other here with need us not, to tread a path to which ours bears wild affection, all unconscious of the infinite no parallel and can make no approach; and divergence of their future destiny. The mother THEN to turn inward and downward, and realwill love her son with all the devotion of her ize our lot, and feel our desolation, and reflect nature, in spite or in ignorance of his unwor- that we have earned it; —what has Poetry or thiness; that son may reciprocate his mother's Theology pictured that can compete with a love, and in this only be not unworthy: the Gehenna such as this! blindness which is kindly given us hides so much, and affection covers such a multitude of

The spiritual heaven which Mr. Greg

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