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lutionized theoretic ethics, and deeply imperiled, so far as they are accepted, the existence of human virtue. It is in vain that the plea is often entered on the side of faith that, after all, Darwin only showed how conscience has been evolved, possibly by divine prearrangement; and that we may allow its old authority as before. He has done much more than this. He has destroyed, for those who accept his views, the possibility of a rational reverence for the dictates of conscience. As he himself asks: "Would any of us trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind? The doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which have been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value." Who, indeed, could attach the same solemn authority to the monitions of the

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"Stern Daughter of the Voice of God,"

and to the prejudices of ancestors just emerging from apehood? It was hard enough heretofore for tempted men to be chaste, sober, honest, unselfish, while passion was clamoring for, indulgence or want pining for relief. The basis on which their moral efforts rested needed to be in their minds as firm as the law of the universe itself. What fulcrum will they find henceforth in the sand heap of hereditary experiences of utility?

Thus the scientific spirit has sprung a mine under the deepest foundations of morality. It may, indeed, be hereafter countermined. I believe that it will be so, and that it will be demonstrated that many of our broadest and deepest moral intuitions can have had no such origin. The universal human expectation of justice, to which all literature bears testimony, can never have arisen from such infinitesimal experience of actual justice, or rather such large experience of prevailing injustice, as our ancestors in any period of history can have known. Nor can the "set of our (modern) brains" against the destruction of sickly and deformed infants have come to us from the consolidated experience of past generations, since the "utility" is all on the side of Spartan infanticide. But for the present, and while Darwinism is in the ascendant, the influence of the doctrine of hereditary conscience is simply deadly. It is no more possible for a man who holds such a theory to cherish a great moral ambition than for a stream to rise above its source. The high ideal of goodness, the hunger and thirst after righteousness,

which have been the mainspring of heroic and saintly lives, must be exchanged at best for a kindly good-nature and a mild desire to avoid offense. The man of science may be anxious to abolish vice and crime. They offend his tastes and distract him from his pursuits. But he has no longing to enthrone in their place a lofty virtue, demanding his heart and life's devotion. He is almost as much disturbed by extreme goodness as by wickedness. Nay, it has been remarked by a keen and sensitive observer, that the companionship of a really great and entirely blameless man of science invariably proved a "torpedo touch to aspiration."

Turn we, lastly, to the influences of the scientific spirit on religion. It is hardly too much to affirm that the advance of that spirit has been to individuals and classes the signal for a subsidence of religious faith and religious emotion. Judging from Darwin's experience as that of a typical man of science, just as such an one becomes an embodiment of the scientific spirit, his religious sentiment flickers and expires like a candle in an airless vault. Speaking of his old feelings of "wonder, admiration, and devotion," experienced while standing amid the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, he wrote in later years when science had made him all her own: "Now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become color-blind.» Nor did the deadening influences stop at his own soul. As one able reviewer of his Life in the Spectator wrote: "No sane man can deny Darwin's influence to have been at least contemporaneous with a general decay of belief in the unseen. Darwin's Theism faded from his mind without disturbance, without perplexity, without pain. These words describe his influence as well as his experience."

The causes of the anti-religious tendency of modern science may be found, I believe, first, in the closing up of that "Gate called Beautiful," through which many souls have been wont to enter the Temple; second, in the diametric opposition of its method to the method of spiritual inquiry; and, third, to the hardness of character frequently produced (as we have already noted) by scientific pursuits. These three causes, I think, sufficiently account for the antagonism between the modern scientific and the religious spirits, quite irrespectively of the bearings of scientific researches and criticisms on the doctrines of either natural or

traditional religion. Had science inspired her votaries with religious sentiment, they would have broken their way through the tangle of theological difficulties, and have opened for us a highway of faith at once devout and rational. But of all improbable things to anticipate now in the world is a scientific religious reformation. Lamennais said there was one thing worse than Atheism—namely, indifference whether Atheism be true. The scientific spirit of the age has reached this point. It is contented to be agnostic, not atheistic. It says aloud, "I don't know"; it mutters to those who care to listen, "I don't care."

The scientific spirit has undoubtedly performed prodigies in the realms of physical discovery. Its inventions have brought enormous contributions to the material well-being of man, and it has widened to a magnificent horizon the intellectual circle of his ideas. Yet, notwithstanding all its splendid achievements, if it foster only the lower mental faculties, while it paralyzes and atrophies the higher; if reverence and sympathy and modesty dwindle in its shadow; if art and poetry shrink at its touch; if morality be undermined and perverted by it; and if religion perish at its approach as a flower vanishes before the frost, then, I think, we must deny the truth of Sir James Paget's assertion that "Nothing can advance human prosperity so much as science." She has given us many precious things, but she takes away things more precious still.

From an essay published in 1888.

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THE CONTAGION OF LOVE

T IS impossible to form the faintest estimate of the good-the highest kind of good, which a single devout soul may accomplish in a lifetime by spreading the holy contagion of the love of God in widening circles around it. But just as far as the influence of such men is a cause for thankfulness, so great would be the calamity of a time, if such should ever arrive, when there should be a dearth of saints in the world, and the fire on the altar should die down. A glacial period of religion would kill many of the sweetest flowers in human nature; and woe to the land where (as it would seem is almost the case in France at this moment) the priceless tradition of prayer is being lost, or only maintained in fatal connection with outworn superstitions.

To resume the subject of this paper. We have seen that the emotions, which are the chief springs of human conduct, may either be produced by their natural stimuli, or conveyed by contagion from other minds, but that they can neither be commanded nor taught. If we desire to convey good and noble emotions to our fellow-creatures, the only means whereby we can effect that end is by filling our own hearts with them till they overflow into the hearts of others. Here lies the great truth which the preachers of Altruism persistently overlook. It is better to be good than to do good. We can benefit our kind in no way so much as by being ourselves pure and upright and noble-minded. We can never teach religion to such purpose as we can live it. It was my privilege to know a woman who for more than twenty years was chained by a cruel malady to what Heine called a mattress grave. Little or nothing was it possible for her to do for any one in the way of ordinary service. Her many schemes of usefulness and beneficence were all stopped. Yet merely by attaining to the lofty heights of spiritual life and knowledge, that suffering woman helped and lifted up the hearts of all who came around her, and did more real good, and of the highest kind, than half the preachers and philanthropists in the land. Even now, when her beautiful soul has been released at last from its earthly cage, it still moves many who knew her to the love of God and duty to remember what she was; and to the faith in immortality to think what now she must be within the golden gates.

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From an essay on the "Emotions.»

W

WILLIAM COBBETT

(1762-1835)

ILLIAM COBBETT, born in Surrey, England, March 9th, 1762, was

one of the most remarkable of the race of agitators who by scolding and threats have compelled England to progress. He was the son of a farm laborer, and while he acquired by his own efforts an education much above the average, he never learned to value the graces of life either in writing or in associating with others. As a result, he made himself unnecessarily odious in doing a highly useful and necessary work which would have made him hated in any event. He was a hearty hater himself, hating the Tories for their tyranny and detesting the Whigs for their cowardice. He visited America in 1792 and remained until 1800. For some time he was highly pleased with the United States, but he concluded finally that his mission lay in England. Returning there, he attacked the government so effectively that he was repeatedly prosecuted and at last imprisoned. He died in June, 1835.

THE

AMERICANS OF THE GOLDEN AGE

HE causes of hypocrisy are the fear of loss and the hope of gain. Men crawl to those, whom, in their hearts, they despise, because they fear the effects of their ill-will and hope to gain by their good-will. The circumstances of all ranks are so easy here, that there is no cause for hypocrisy; and the thing is not of so fascinating a nature that men should love it for its own sake.

The boasting of wealth, and the endeavoring to disguise poverty, these two acts, so painful to contemplate, are almost total strangers in this country; for no man can gain adulation or respect by his wealth, and no man dreads the effects of poverty, because no man sees any dreadful effects arising from poverty.

That anxious eagerness to get on, which is seldom unaccompanied with some degree of envy of more successful neighbors, and which has its foundation first in a dread of future want, and

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