"that the duty of abstaining from the forcible propagation of religious truth may be maintained by an argument of universal application-one to which a Mohammedan or a Pagan must yield, as well as a Roman Catholic or a Protestant. It consists in the impossibility, in almost all cases, of demonstrating that what is persecuted is really error. We have already remarked, that most of the disputes which separate Christian sects relate, not to practical morality, but either to questions respecting Church discipline and government, which may receive different answers among different nations, and at different times; or to questions as to the nature and attributes of the Deity, and as to His dealings with mankind, which depend on the interpretation given to certain portions of Scripture, as to which men have been differing for eighteen centuries, with a tendency rather to further divergence than to agreement."

"The Trinitarians think that the eternal co-existence of God the Father and God the Son is the Scriptural doctrine: the Arians think that the Begetter must have existed before the Begotten. The Latin Church believes that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son: the Greek Church believes that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father. Each of these opinions has been supported by hundreds of learned, conscientious, and diligent inquirers; each has been adopted by millions of enthusiastic votaries; each has been propagated by violence, and resisted by endurance; each has had its doctors, its persecutors, and its martyrs."

"It is possible that many of the opinions for which we persecute one another, relate to matters which our faculties are unable to comprehend. It is possible that, if our controversies could be submitted to the decision of beings of higher knowledge and intelligence than those of man, they would tell us that, for the most part, we are disputing about words which signify no realities, and debating propositions which, being unmeaning, possess neither truth nor falsehood. One thing at least seems clear-that, if the Being who inspired the texts on which different sects found their arguments, had intended us to agree in one interpretation of them, He would not have left them susceptible of many."

"The fact, then, on which the expediency of persecution depends-the falsehood of the persecuted doctrine-being, in general, incapable of demonstration, it follows, as a general rule, that persecution is not expedient. We say, in general; for there are some religious opinions so obviously mischievous, that the magistrate may be bound to put them down. Such are the doctrines once attributed to the Church of Rome-that faith is not to be kept with heretics; that the Pope may release subjects from their allegiance; and that indulgence may be purchased

for the darkest crimes. And, with respect even to such doctrines as these, all that the State ought to prevent is their active dissemination. The mere holding them being involuntary, is not a fit subject for legislation."

There is obviously no subject which man ought to approach with such reverence, such caution, indeed such timidity, as the attributes of the Deity. We cannot venture to set any bounds to them. We cannot venture to treat His power, His knowledge, or His benevolence, as limited. But nothing that is unlimited is conceivable by the human mind. A Being, therefore, of infinite attributes is to us incomprehensible. When we attempt to reason about Him, it is only on hypothesis, and by analogy. Our hypothesis-an hypothesis which looks rash and absurd, and probably is absurd, but is after all our only hypothesis-is, that His motives and His conduct resemble the motives and the conduct of the only being with whom we can compare Him—a wise and benevolent man.

Now, if a man, with power to express his meaning clearly, and with knowledge enabling him to foresee how his words will be interpreted, uses language susceptible of different interpretations, we cannot but infer that he intends it to be differently interpreted.

The Archbishop answers, that "if men were designed to hold all diversities of religious belief, the natural inference is, that it is no matter whether we hold truth or falsehood, or rather, that there is no truth at all in any religion."

This must be admitted.

But the Archbishop, perhaps from inadvertence on his part, perhaps from a want of perspicuity on the part of the author of the article, has not apprehended his meaning. He does not affirm, nor does he believe, that men were designed to hold all diversities of religious belief, or that it is in consequence of the will of God that men are Buddhists, Hindoos, or Mohammedans. Why they are so why false religions are permitted to spring up and to endure, is a portion of the insoluble problem of the origin of evil-a problem which meets and arrests every speculator, Christian, Pagan, Deist, or Atheist, at every turn.

The questions as to which he ventures to think that men are designed to differ, are narrowly limited in kind and in number; and, so far from including all diversities of religious belief, apply only to the Christian creed, and to a very small portion of that creed. They are "questions as to the nature and attributes of the Deity, and as to His dealings with mankind, depending on the interpretation of certain portions of Scripture."

The examples given in the article, are the disputes as to the pre-existence of the Father, and the procession of the Holy

Sects.

Spirit;-disputes which relate, perhaps, to matters above our comprehension, and may resemble those of blind men as to colours, or of deaf men as to sounds.

The Archbishop adds-"This is not all; the same reasoning would go to prove that, since there is no infallible and universally accessible guide in morals, and men greatly differ in their judg ments of what is morally right and wrong, hence we are to infer that God did not design men to agree on this point neither.”

Now, the author's reason for holding that men were intended to differ as to some of what may be called the metaphysical questions in theology, is not the absence of an infallible and universally accessible guide, but the supposed presence of an ambiguous revelation. If the Sermon on the Mount were as susceptible of different interpretations as are the texts which Greeks and Latins cite against one another, it might be imagined that our Saviour intended it to be differently interpreted. But the moral precepts of the Gospel are as perspicuous as some of what may be called its metaphysical statements are obscure. There is scarcely a Christian sect which has separated from the general Church solely on any moral question. The schisms which have been founded on points of doctrine, or of discipline, or of ceremonies, may be counted by hundreds.

We may add, that we see some reasons, we will not say for affirming, but for suspecting, that such schisms are not without their utility.

Men do not seem to be improved by being thrown together in great homogeneous masses. The Chinese Empire-the largest aggregation of human beings with one government, one language, and substantially one religion, that was ever collected-contains, perhaps, the most corrupt and the least improvable people that can be called civilized. Differences of language, of climate, and of habits, seem to be among the means employed by Providence in order to break men into smaller communities, in which individual merit may hope to make its way, and which improve one another by emulation and collision.

Some of the speculative differences which divide Christians may be intended to produce the same effect. We have no doubt that we owe much of the earnest religious belief and feeling which distinguish the Anglo-Saxon race to the prevalence of dissent. The great improver of the English clergy was Wesley. In Italy there is no dissent; but how much is there of religion?

Bacon's Essay on Envy is the work of a man who had suffered much from the envious. He passed the earlier and the most active portion of his life in a small, ambitious, intriguing society, in which all were acquaintances and rivals; and the sovereign

the last and the best despot that England has ever enduredcould scatter prizes, such as, in our sober aristocratical community, only Parliament can give, and only once perhaps in a century. All the ambitious, all the covetous, and all the vain, crowded to the court, to contend, by flattery, by subservience, and, we must add, by real service, for the favour which gave power, wealth, and station. Such a court was a hot-bed of envy; and Bacon's masterly enumeration of those apt to envy, and of those apt to be envied, is evidently the result of personal observation and experience. It is remarkable that he appears to have been infected by the Oriental superstition of the evil eye.

"There be none of the affections," he says, "which have been noted to fascinate or bewitch, but love and envy: they both have vehement wishes, they frame themselves readily into imaginations and suggestions, and they come easily into the eye, especially upon the presence of the objects, which are the points that conduce to fascination, if any such thing there be. We see, likewise, the Scripture calleth envy an evil eye, and the astrologers call the evil influences of the stars evil aspects; so that still there seemeth to be acknowledged, in the act of envy, an ejaculation or irradiation of the eye; nay, some have been so curious as to note that the times when the stroke or percussion of an eye doth most hurt, are when the party envied is beheld in glory or triumph, for that sets an edge upon envy; and besides, at such times the spirits of the person envied do come forth most into the outward parts, and so meet the blow."

envious

We once, in Cairo, conversed on this superstition with an intelligent Cairene, who described it as the great curse of his country.

"Does the mischievous influence of the evil eye," we asked, "depend on the will of the person whose glance does the mischief?"

"Not altogether," he answered. "An intention to harm may render more virulent the poison of the glance; but envy, or the desire to appropriate a thing, or even excessive admiration, may render it hurtful without the consciousness, or even against the will, of the offender. It injures most the thing that it first hits. Hence the bits of red cloth that are stuck about the dresses of women, and about the trappings of camels and horses, and the large spots of lamp black which you may see on the foreheads of children. They are a sort of conductors. It is hoped that they will attract the glance, and exhaust its venom."

"A fine house, fine furniture, a fine camel, and a fine horse, are all enjoyed with fear and trembling, lest they should excite

1 Essay on Envy, p. 75.

Envy and the Evil Eye.

11

envy and bring misfortune. A butcher would be afraid to expose fine meat, lest the evil eye of passers-by, who might covet it, should taint it, and make it spoil, or become unwholesome."

"Children are supposed to be peculiarly the objects of desire and admiration. When they are suffered to go abroad, they are intentionally dirty and ill-dressed; but generally they are kept at home, without air or exercise, but safe from admiration. This occasions a remarkable difference between the infant mortality in Europe and in Egypt. In Europe it is the children of the rich who live; in Egypt, it is the children of the poor. The children of the poor cannot be confined. They live in the fields. As soon as you quit the city, you see in every clover field a group, of which the centre is a tethered buffalo, and round it are the children of its owner, with their provision of bread and water, sent thither at sunrise and to remain there till sunset, basking in the sun, and breathing the air from the desert. The Fellah children enter their hovels only to sleep, and that only in the winter. In summer, their days and nights are passed in the open air; and, notwithstanding their dirt and their bad food, they grow up healthy and vigorous. The children of the rich, confined by the fear of the evil eye to the 'hareem,' are puny creatures, of whom not a fourth part reaches adoles cence. Achmed Pasha Tahir, one of the governors of Cairo under Mehemet Ali, had 280 children; only six survived him. Mehemet Ali himself had 87; only ten were living at his death."

"I believe," he added, "that at the bottom of this superstition is an enormous prevalence of envy among the lower Egyptians. You see it in all their fictions. Half of the stories told in the coffee-shops by the professional story-tellers, of which the Arabian Nights are a specimen, turn on_malevolence. Malevolence, not attributed, as it would be in European fiction, to some insult or injury inflicted by the person who is its object, but to mere envy: envy of wealth, or of the other means of enjoyment, honourably acquired and liberally used.'

In distinguishing the persons more or less subject to envy, Bacon states, that "persons of eminent virtue, when they are advanced, are less envied, for that their fortune seemeth but due to them; and no man envieth the payment of a debt, but rewards and liberality rather."

The Archbishop has qualified this remark by the following very acute note:-"Bacon might have remarked, that, in one respect, a rise by merit exposes a man to more envy than that by personal favour, through family connection, private friendship, etc. For, in this latter case, the system itself of preferring