respect, and affection, and gratitude." No. The moral element in praise or blame is not artificial. It is in the nature of men, and no fork of determinism will expel it thence. "I have a right to do my best, by praise and blame, by reward and punishment, to strengthen or to weaken, to prolong or to divert, the motives that are the antecedents of the action; exactly as I have a right to dam up a stream, or to divert its course, or otherwise deal with it, to suit my own convenience." Surely this is what Sir Toby Belch would call "exceeding good senseless." Right! Why every one has a right to do what he cannot help doing. The word "right" implies moral quality. But if our actions, good or bad, are simply the necessitated outcome of machinery, moral quality does not exist in them. "As if we could stay our hands from action, if our feelings were trained to proper sensibility and sympathy!" But if they are not so trained, the reason is that they cannot be trained, and it is no one's fault, but arises from the nature of the machine: "velle non discitur" is an axiom of determinism. "As if it were possible for a man of tender disposition not to interest himself keenly in all that concerns the lot of his fellow creatures." But men are not, as a rule, of tender disposition. Nor assuredly does the philosophy of the Revolution make them such. Empty men of the notion of God, which you denounce, with Mr. Morley, as hateful and ridiculous; abolish the old volitional

Is scems that the card is rether.. your side. The fact of you being sickened thereby is not of necessity a fault of the atheism but may the pypto “A MAN OF SENTIMENT” of a marestised

III.]

.66

morality, as "the pedantic requirements of unrealfceperat.
ethics," and substitute for it "usage and the require-heath.
ments of social self-preservation;" teach man that
his true dignity lies in this-that he is "one weak
spring" in the vast machine of nature, and, in
point of fact, you hand over the human mammal,
helpless and impotent, to the blind impulses of
egoism, to the terrible heritage of savage instincts,
accumulated in his nervous system, and now barely
held in check by religion and philosophy. The
work of civilisation is undone, and "homo homini
lupus" is again the true account of the human race.
Sensibility," and "sympathy," and "tender dis-
position!" I confess this cant sickens me. The
image of Joseph Surface rises before my mind, and
I incline to say with old Sir Peter Teazle, "Oh!
damn your sentiment." One knows very well
what the issue of it really is; and how these rose-
water revolutionists who set out with affirming that
all is good in man's nature, end by finding the
human race "suspect." Mr. Morley, as we have
seen, professes to go by the facts. He glorifies
"the great positive principle" that "we can only
know phenomena, and can know them only experi-
entially." Let him keep to the phenomena of
human life, and assuredly the optimistic haze in
which he views it will soon fade away. As as-
suredly, experience will certify to him the fact that
our motives can be within our power. "Sir, we
know that our will is free, and there's an end of
it," said Dr. Johnson. Of course this dictum

requires to be limited and guarded, and thrown into scientific shape, before a metaphysican can accept it.* But it is a rough-and-ready expression of a truth overwhelmingly demonstrated by the every-day experience of life, to which alone Mr. Morley, upon his own principles, has a right to refer. As to the argument from inanimate nature, where we all admit that necessity rules, to that which happens in what-pace Mr. Morley-is another province altogether, the human spirit, it is altogether irrational. It is like saying that sight is impossible because we have no eyes in the stomach. For the rest, the practical consequences to human society of the ethics, or unethics, taught by the new religion, appear to me to be abundantly clear. With what is called metaphysical liberty, with freedom of volition, merit and demerit disappear too. Human causality, human spontaneity, human responsibility, all die before the "uncreating word" of the Revolution. Its doctrine of absolute irresponsibility makes an end of ethics; its criminal legislation can be nothing but vane sine moribus leges. For the sting of punishment is not the actual fact"stone walls do not a prison make"-but the moral disapprobation of which the fact is evidence. But how visit with moral disapprobation those who were incapable of doing anything but what they did? Poor victims of temperament, of heredity, of en

* I may refer those of my readers who desire to see a really philosophical discussion of this question to Lotze's Microcosmus, Book. ii. c. 5, and Book vii. c. 3.

III.] THE OLD BASIS OF SOCIAL LIFE.

95

vironment, they are to be pitied, not blamed; while, indeed, we seclude them for the protection of our persons and pockets; for we are the numerical majority, we can appeal to the ultima ratio of force, if to nothing higher. It is no fancy picture which I am now drawing. Fifty years ago Balzac wrote: "Crime has been made poetical; tears are drivelled over assassins." True as his words were then, they are even truer now. The idea of law as the embodied conscience of a nation of persons, the belief in justice, in the old sense, as something quite transcending mere expediency-fiat justitia pereat mundus—the conception of the civil magistrate as a minister of the retribution ordained by that justice as "the other half of crime"-these things have well-nigh died out from the popular mind, where, in place of the old spiritual principles of ethics, the Revolution has substituted natural history.

Such is the necessary, the inevitable effect, upon the public order of that determinism which is a primary dogma of the revolutionary religion. The bond of civil society is obedience to law, fenced round with penalties. But legislation rests upon the doctrine of human responsibility. To that doctrine necessarianism is fatal. And if law, with penal sanctions, be the bond of civil society, the family is certainly its foundation. Where wedlock and legal paternity are unknown, and complete promiscuity prevails in the relations of the sexes-as among the aborigines of Australia and Fiji-civilisation

does not exist. family, and the family depends upon marriage. Now, marriage, as it is still found in Europe, is mainly the creation of Christianity. Wordsworth gave utterance to no poetical fancy, but to the exact truth, when he sang of "pure religion breathing household laws." What will become of marriage, and of that virtue of purity of which it is the guardian, when the new religion imposes its ethics on the world, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is superseded by the Gospel of the Revolution?

The State depends upon the

Let us ever remember that the first law of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is self-denial: conformity to the mind of the Master, who pleased not Himself: the taking up of His cross: the immolation thereon of the flesh, with its affections and lusts. As I have written elsewhere:

"There can be no question at all that Christianity presented itself to the decadent and moribund civilisation of the Roman Empire as an ascetic doctrine: a doctrine of abstinence, not only from the things which it branded as positively sinful, but from things in themselves licit. The world-which St. John exhorts his disciples not to love, because the love of it is incompatible with the love of the Father, which he describes as lying in the wicked one, which over and over again in the New Testament the disciples of Christ are bidden to forsake and overcome, and which (such is the vitality of phrases) stands even in our own day for the complete antithesis of the Church--is the present visible frame of things, doomed, as these early preachers believed, soon to pass away with the lust thereof; the flesh-in which St. Paul declared no good thing to dwell, which it was his daily endeavour to keep under and bring into subjection-is the whole of man's lower or animal nature. Whatever is doubtful, this is clear. And to those who do not