cannot be. Hence, whatever the strength of the motives by which we are impelled, no movement excited by finite good interferes with the freedom of the volition.

And now, is it true that our choice always answers to the strongest motives? This question may be understood in two ways, according as the motives are considered objectively or subjectively. The motives which are the strongest objectively may become the weakest subjectively, and vice versa. It is with our will moved by different motives as with the lever loaded with different weights. The heavier weight absolutely prevails over the lighter; but if the arms of the lever be suitably determined, the lighter will prevail over the heavier. Thus the lightest motives may prevail over the strongest ones, when our soul adapts itself to them, by shifting, so to say, its own fulcrum, and thus altering the momenta of the opposite forces. The motives which prevail are therefore the strongest in this sense only: that the will has made them such; and, properly speaking, we should not even say that they are the strongest, but only that they are the most enhanced by the will.

These explanations may be new to you, but they are the result of experience and observation. I abstain from developing them further, as it is no part of my duty to vindicate them by positive arguments. No truth is so universally and unavoidably recognized as the existence of free-will. A man of common sense must be satisfied of this truth by simply reflecting upon his own acts. Criminals may pretend that they have not the power to avoid crime; but doctors should not countenance such a pretension contrary to evidence. To excuse

crime on such a miserable plea is to encourage the triumph of villany and the overthrow of human society.

Büchner. Indeed, it has been said that "the partisans of this doctrine denied the discernment of crime, and that they desired the acquittal of every criminal, by which the state and society would be thrown into a state of anarchy. . . . What is true is that the partisans of these modern ideas hold different opinions as regards crime, and would banish that cowardly and irreconcilable hatred which the state and society have hitherto cherished with so much hypocrisy as regards the malefactor" (p. 247).

Reader. To denounce the state and society as hypocritical is scarcely a good method of exculpating yourself. Yet your denunciation is false, so far at least as regards Christian states and Christian society; for as regards anti-Christian societies connected with Freemasonry, and states fallen under their degrading influence and tyranny, I fully admit that they cannot, without hypocrisy, hate malefactors Those who plunder whole nations, who corrupt public education, who persecute religion, who sow everywhere the seeds of atheism, materialism, and utilitarianism, have no right to hate malefactors. As to those who teach that "neither deliberation nor religion can effectually neutralize the dispositions of man," and that "man, knowing the error of his ways, is yet unable to struggle successfully against his inclinations," what right have they to speak of crime or of malefactors? Can there be crime and malefactors without free-will? You see, doctor, that your materialistic doctrines do away with all morality, and that a society imbued with

them cannot be moral.

66

Hence it is bad taste in you to declaim against modern society, as you do (p. 247), on account of vices which are nothing but the result of materialism. "We are astonished," you say, that our SOciety is so ticklish as regards certain truths taught by science-a society whose social virtue is nothing but hypocrisy covered by a veil of morality. Just cast a glance at this society, and tell us whether it acts from virtuous, divine, or even moral motives! Is it not, in fact, a bellum omnium contra omnes? Does it not resemble a race-course, where every one does all he can to outrun or even to destroy the other? ... Every one does what he believes he can do without incurring punishment. He cheats and abuses others as much as possible, being convinced that they would do the same to him. Any one who acts differently is treated as an idiot. Is it not the most refined egotism which is the spring of this social mechanism? And distinguished authors who best know human society, do they not constantly depict in their narrations the cowardice, disloyalty, and hypocrisy of this European society? A society which permits human beings to die of starvation on the steps of houses filled with victuals; a society whose force is directed to oppress the weak by the strong, has no right to complain that the natural sciences subvert the foundations of its morality." These last words should be slightly modified; for the truth is that such a society is the victim of your modern theories, which you dignify with the name of natural sciences, and which have already subverted the foundations of social morality. The Society you describe in this pas

sage is not the old Christian society formed on the doctrine of the Gospel, but the materialistic society formed on modern thought. The moral distemper of modern society is the most irrefragable condemnation of all your doctrines. By its fruits we know the tree.

CONCLUSION.

We ask the indulgence of our readers for having led them through so many disgusting details of pestilential philosophy. Without such details it was impossible to give a clear idea of the futility and perversity which characterize the teaching of one of the greatest luminaries of modern infidelity. We have shown that Dr. Büchner's Force and Matter, in spite of all its pretensions, is, in a philosophical point of view, a complete failure. We have omitted many of the author's passages, which we thought too profane to be inserted in these pages, and which, as consisting of vain declamation, arrogance, and assumption, had no need of refutation. As to our mode of dealing with our adversary, we have been pained to hear that some consider it harsh. We beg to say that a man who employs his talents to war against his Creator has no right to expect much regard from any of God's creatures. Men of this type are frequently treated with too much forbearance, owing to the false idea that every literary character should be treated as a gentleman. Blasphemers are not gentlemen, nor should they be dealt with as gentlemen. They should be made to feel the disgrace which attaches to their moral degradation. Such was the practice in the good old times; and we may justify it by the example of One who did not hesitate, in his infinite wis

dom, publicly to rebuke the Scribes and Pharisees in terms not at all complimentary, and certainly much

stronger than those which we have used in censuring the author of Force and Matter.

THE winter of 1855-56, memorable for its excessive and prolonged cold, while it brought suffering to many a household throughout the land, and is recalled by that fact almost solely, is fixed in my memory by its verification of an old Indian legend of the ice-wigwam of Minnehaha. Longfellow has made this name familiar to the English-speaking world, and beyond. A little waterfall, whose silvery voice is for ever singing a love-song to the mighty Father of Waters, and into whose bosom it hastens to cast itself, bears the name and personates the Indian maiden.

On the right bank of the Mississippi, between the Falls of St. Anthony and the mouth of the Minnesota, is a broad, level prairie, starting from the high bluffs of the Mississippi, and running far out in the direction of sundown. In the month of June this prairie is profusely decked with bright flowers, forming a carpet which the looms of the world will never rival. Stretching far into the west is a tortuous ribbon of rich, dark green, marking the path of a stream which stealthily glides beneath the shadows of the long grass. As it nears the eastern border of the prairie, this stream becomes more bold. Its expanded surface glistens in the noon-day sun. Here it passes slowly under a rustic bridge, upon an almost seamless bed of rock.

Then its motion quickens, as if in haste to reach the ledge which overhangs the broad valley of the Mississippi, when, with one bound. it plunges into its basin sixty feet below. This is Minnehaha, the little hoiden who throws herself upon the outstretched arm of the great Father of Waters with a merry laugh that wins the heart of every comer. Beautiful child of the plain! How many have sought you in your flower-decked home, and loved you! Hoiden you may be; but coquette, never. Your life is freely given to be absorbed in the life of him you seek.

But Minnehaha is at times the ward of another-an old man whose white locks are so often the sport of the winds, whose very presence makes the limbs of mortals tremble, and their teeth chatter at his approach. Yet he is wondrous kind to his beautiful ward-touchingly kind is the Ice-King of the North. When the blasts from his realms, freighted with the chill of death. scourge the lands over which they pass, and a silence awe-inspiring and complete falls on all; when the flowers are being buried beneath the snow, and the mighty river bound with ice, then it is the iceking exhausts his powers to build for Minnehaha a palace worthy of her. The summer through (and spring and autumn scarce are known where Minnehaha dwells) the maid

has worn about her, as a veil, a cloud of mist and spray. O wondrous architect! Of mist and spray you build a palace even Angelo might not conceive in wildest dreams, were marbles, opals, pearls, all gems and stones and precious metals, cut and fashioned ready to his hand! Thy breath, O ice-king! fashions mist and spray into grand temples, palaces, more chaste and cold than any stuff Italian quarries yield! Behold the ice-king build! He breathes upon the mist, and on all sides strong-based foundations fix about the space he would en close. The walls on these rise up, as mist and spray are gathered there and set with his chill breath. Height on height they rise, until the arch is sprung; and then the dome is gathered in to meet the solid rock above, and all the outer work is done. Within, the decorations form as do the stalactites within the caves. Then these are covered with the diamond frost, such as December's shrubs and trees so oft put on to greet the rising sun. And Minnehaha, so the legend says, sings here the winter through. This is the masterpiece of the great ice-king. Solomon in all his glory possessed no temple to compare with this, nor Queen of Sheba ever saw its counterpart.

A party of four started from St. Paul in the latter part of March, 1856, to visit this wonder of the North. For many years the winters had not been protracted enough to permit the planting of a Maypole upon the ice of Lake Pepin, nor had eye seen the ice-wigwam of Minnehaha. Marquette, Hennepin, Lesueur, and the early Catholic nissionaries had carried with them their love for the month of Mary into that cold region, and settlers and Christian Indians made the

opening day of this month one of joyful festivity. To plant a Maypole upon the ice of Lake Pepin (which is always the last point on the Upper Mississippi where the ice breaks up, as no current helps to cut or break it) was quite an event. event. The May-pole, decked with garlands of green and dotted with. the many-colored crocuses that spring up and bloom at the very edge of the melting snow, and long before the drifts and packs have disappeared, if planted on the ice, permitted dancing on its smooth surface, and pleasanter footing than the loose, moistened soil. May-day can seldom be pleasantly celebrated in that region out-of-doors, except upon the ice. Ice on Lake Pepin, then, is to the young folk of that latitude as important an event as a bright, sunny day in latitudes. below.

During the month of March, 1856, a bright, warm sun melted the snows to such an extent as to cover the level prairies with several inches of water, confined within banks of melting snow. Wheels were taking the place of runners. Our party drove over the undulating prairie to St. Anthony, crossed the Mississippi by the first suspension bridge which spanned its waters just above the Falls of St. Anthony, and from Minneapolis, on the west bank, moved out into the dead level which extends south and west toward the Minnesota River. A splashing drive of four miles brought us to the bridge above the Falls of Minnehaha, from which we could see on our left a cone of dirty ice, disfigured here and there with sticks and stones and clods of earth; its base far down within an icelined gorge, its top close pressed upon an overhanging ledge. Was this the wonder we had come to

see? A wonder, then, we came. But we did not turn back at this unsightly scene. There was a charm about this legend of Minnehaha's ice-wigwam that surely did not have its source in the charmless thing before us. Nor could we believe the imagination of the red man capable of drawing so poetic an inspiration from so prosaic a source. We therefore set to work to discover the hidden things, if such there were. With large stones we broke away the ice about the top of the cone, hoping to peer through the opening by which the water of the stream entered. We failed in this, but let in the western sun through the opening we had made. Then we descended to the bottom of the gorge, over ice and snow, to seek a new point of observation. Here, to the east, lay the broad, snow-covered valley of the Mississippi; before us, at the west, rose the cone of ice full sixty feet in height, its wrinkled surface all discolored and defaced, inspiring naught of poetry, stifling imagination. Moving northward around the ungainly mass, and part way up the north side of the gorge, we reached a terrace which led behind the cone and underneath the overhanging ledge. We enter from the north (by broad steps of ice, each rising three or four inches above the other) a hall twelve by twenty feet, floored, columned, curtained, arched, and walled with ice. At somewhat regular intervals ellip tical columns of ice rose from floor to spring of arch. Between these columns curtains hung, with convolutes and folds and borders, filling all the space-and all of ice. Above us was the ledge of rock overhanging the basin of the fall, behind us the bluff, and under our feet the terrace of earth midway

the cone; and all was paved and curtained and ceiled with ice. Before us stood the upper half of the cone, meeting the ledge above.

While giving play to admiration of the architectural beauties of the place, our ears were greeted with a sound muffled or distant, as of falling water. Whence could this come? Could there be life or motion within that frozen mass? In the chill of that drear winter was not the laughing voice of Minnehaha hushed?

The sun was dropping down the western sky, and a shadow lengthened in the gorge below. The broken edges of the ice which overhung the quiet stream gave back the borrowed rays of sunlight more brilliant than they came.

One of the party had, slung to his side, the customary long-knife of those days. With it in hand he started in search of the creature whose voice lured him on, not, as the siren, to destruction, but to a scene of beauty, brilliance, glory, with which the fabled cave of Stalacta was but as shadow. him and the voice he sought a wall of ice imposed. The knife at once was called to play its part. Between two columns this wall was cut away, a window opened, through which we saw the glories of the wigwam. Our eyes were dazzled and our senses mazed. The curtain rent exposed to view the inner surface of a dome high-arched and perfect in its curves. From base, through all its height, it was hung with myriad stalactites of ice, whic › seemed to point us to the laughing voice still rippling on the waters far below. These stalactites were coered thick with richest frost-work; and from ten thousand upon thousand points the glinting light fell off in floods. Near to the centre of the