For the essence of all religion, says Mr. Morrison, is sacrifice, and he indicates, or rather suggests, how, as mankind attained to worthier conceptions of the Divine nature, the sacrifice of man's own baser instincts replaced the propitiation of a malevolent or jealous God by self-inflicted sufferings and material offerings. "I know," says Solon in Herodotus, "that the Deity is altogether malevolent and fond of troubling"; yet the Jewish prophet had already learnt that Jehovah desired obedience and not sacrifice.

Christianity taught with new emphasis that the sacrifice of self to the divine will and to the welfare of others was the service most pleasing to God. And, although in the earlier ages of the Church, if not in the Gospels themselves, faith was insisted upon as a not less essential-our author maintains as a far more essential-part of religion than charity, yet, on the one hand, the development, with the progress of civilization, of the more social emotions, and of greater susceptibility to the pain of others, and, on the other hand, the decay of religious belief-or, at any rate, a less lively sense of God's nearness to us-and a consciously or unconsciously modified conception of His nature, have, even in believers, caused greater value to be attached to good works, and especially to such good works as alleviate human suffering, and have thrown the importance of faith into the background. Zeal in the service of men has grown in proportion as belief in God has diminished; when, therefore, faith shall have disappeared, not only will this service be continued, but it will be pursued in a more unselfish spirit, and with a far clearer insight; "the spirit of sacrifice, the postponing of self to others, the giving up what the natural man loves and values, whether possessions or cherished lusts, is so little restricted to the worshippers of a God or gods, that it may be said in its highest form to be unattainable by them "-since, apparently, they cannot rid their minds of the idea of a present or future recompense, although St. Paul could wish that he were "accursed from Christ for his brethren."

And under the guidance of science we shall serve our fellows more effectually as well as more unselfishly: "when the mental and moral qualities of men are regarded as subject in common with other forms of life to the law of heredity and variation, their cultivation and improvement will be conducted on the scientific basis which has already produced such striking results in other parts of the animal and vegetable kingdoms "

Having all of us become reasonable evolutionists and determinists, we shall apply ourselves to the amelioration of the individual and of society. Our individual nature is to be improved by cultivating our bodies, our minds, and our feelings.

As for our bodies we already pretty well know what we ought to

do, if we would but do it, and Mr. Morrison thinks it probable that, "in a reformed public opinion of the future, a breakdown in health, when obviously caused by excess or imprudence or culpable ignorance, will be regarded as a species of bankruptcy, and severely punished "—a hope which does not seem quite consistent with the repudiation elsewhere of the idea of moral responsibility.

The improvement of the mind-education-is passed over with a warning against specialism, but the cultivation of the heart and feelings is discussed at some length.

First of all we must get rid of the mischievous notions of grace and free will; we must cease to believe that a man may become good in a moment by an act of God's mercy or of his own volition. Would the farmer take due pains to select and cultivate his fields if he believed their produce depended not on the natural fertility and subsequent preparation of the soil, not on the seed and the manure employed, but on the chance of the season, or on some incalculable caprice of nature which might produce the finest crops on the most barren and neglected land? So neither shall we cultivate human nature intelligently and perseveringly until we recognize that what a man is depends entirely on his characterthe hereditary and other tendencies with which he is born-and on his training.

This view, it is true, cannot be reconciled with moral responsibility; but so much the better for society. "The sooner it is perceived that bad men will be bad, do what we will, though, of course, they may be made less bad, the sooner shall we come to the conclusion that the welfare of society demands the suppression or elimination of bad men, and the careful cultivation of the good only." Mr. Morrison would call not sinners but the righteous to repentance. “This is what we do in every other department. We do not cultivate curs and screws and low breeds of cattle; on the contrary, we keep them down as much as we can. . . . Nothing is gained by disguising the fact that there is no remedy for a bad heart, and no substitute for a good one."

In short, the bad are to be deterred from evil action by being got rid of; the good are to be stimulated by appeals to their sympathy: "Sympathetic natures recognize the claims of others, and are unhappy if they do not pay their debt, do not do their duty. . . . If we are wholly selfish, no teaching will persuade us; if we are generous, loving, and heroic, we move towards self-sacrifice by a natural gravitation."

The virtuous man is he who takes pleasure in virtue; only because a man is virtuous, and so far as he is virtuous, will his virtue bring happiness to him. Those people are happy "who have one or more tastes, inclinations, or passions so strongly marked

that they are always ready or even thirsting for their gratification, which never comes amiss." The good man has such a passion for virtuous action, and, therefore, he is happy; and happier than the senualist because the satisfaction of his passion is unaccompanied by satiety and loses none of its edge by indulgence. Yet he does not escape the universal law that the gratification of the passions is more or less attended with pain. "Moralists have been so set upon edification that they have been over-anxious to persuade men of the desirability of virtue by expatiating on the sweetness of its pleasures, that virtuous people had an ample quid pro quo for their virtue. And so they have at times, and in one sense, always; but they have also dark and bitter moments in which they are ready to faint; doubts within and dangers without, yea, even death itself in isolated desolation, when all forsake them and flee; when the hero has nothing to turn to but his own heroic heart." So, then, it would seem that no more certain consolations are to be derived from the service of man than from the service of God. But, continues Mr. Morrison, we cling to religion; and, even when we have lost our own faith, shrink from disturbing that of others, for no reason so much as because we believe that if God did not exist, He would have, in the interests of morality, to be invented. This is a mischievous delusion, and he therefore undertakes to show that Christian doctrine would seem, à priori, unlikely to promote morality.

"Man may

It insists on faith rather than on good works. injure his fellows in their most vital interests, he may rob, murder, go through the foulest kennels of iniquity, there shall not remain in God's book a single charge against his soul provided he looks to the bleeding Lamb." By teaching that repentance and lively faith in Christ, even in the last hour of life, will suffice to salvation, it has blinded men to the danger of forming evil habits, for the sinner by an act of faith, and by God's grace, may at any moment pass into the ranks of the saints; while, human nature being what it is, if we are taught that the thief who turned to Christ on the Cross, that the labourer hired at the eleventh hour, are rewarded not less than those who have borne the heat and toil of the day, or who have earned the martyr's death by a devotion only inferior to that of their Master, we shall be sorely tempted to stand aloof till the end of the day, to endeavour to secure the wages of mammon before we turn to a God who gratefully accepts so tardy a service.

"If Christian priests could have said to men-it matters not how sorry you are for having done amiss, you must smart for it all the same, they would have had a powerful lever to keep men in the right way." Though, even then they would have been at a 4

VOL. X.

disadvantage, because of the remoteness of their sanctions. Heaven and hell are a long way off, and the love of the Redeemer appeals only to the tender and the imaginative, while the standard proposed is so exalted that instead of attracting the ordinary person to aim at reaching it, it discourages and repels him. But, surely Mr. Morrison is misled by the importance attached to the doctrines of Faith and Justification in theological literature. Must not any impartial student of the New Testament admit that, even if to save man, and not to improve his morality, was the primary object of Christianity, it has none the less emphatically insisted on morality as necessary to salvation? The believer's past life, it is true, is immaterial, but when once he has turned to Christ, when once he has put his hand to the plough he must not look back, he must strive to put away his unrighteousness, or his faith will avail him little. Not only St. James says, "Thou believest; thou doest well: the devils also believe and tremble'; but St. Paul, whose epistles are the source of that doctrine to which Mr. Morrison objects, exclaims, "Though I have all faith, so that I could move mountains, and have not charity"-i.e., a truly unselfish spirit—"I am nothing." And Mr. Spurgeon might justly maintain that his promises of equal joy to saint and repentant sinner are no encouragement to sin, since the repentance which alone could merit such reward implies the complete renunciation of sin. But, Mr. Morrison objects, the doctrine that at any moment a man may change his life and break the bondage of inveterate habit makes it appear comparatively unimportant whether and how such habits are formed; it encourages men to believe that they may act with injustice and sensuality, yet in the end be neither unjust nor sensual-a foolish and deadly delusion, yet to this objection a Christian apologist might reply in our author's own words: "Even an inveterate habit may be broken by a gust of passion, or a permanent mood of profound emotion... Ardent love, gratitude, veneration for Christ, when kindled, are able to snap the chain of habit, and sometimes to prevent their being welded together again." While from the time that the parable of the foolish virgins was spoken, Christian teachers have never failed to insist on the peril of delay in working out our salvation with fear and trembling, for "the wages of sin is death."

Mr. Morrison takes Christianity as elaborated by a long succession of theologians into a logical system, and to it many of his. objections, no doubt, apply; but to the Christianity of the Gospels, to the popular religion which has influenced men's hearts rather than their minds, which generations have learnt at their mother's knees, they do not apply.

Unless the promise of pardon had been extended to the contrite sinner there would be no answer possible to Mr. Morrison's complaint, that the ideal of Christianity is pitched so high as to repel men by the hopelessness of the struggle to attain to it. Who would not despair if a strict account were indeed to be demanded by the Omniscient Judge for every idle word and thought? Surely if here and there some few have been encouraged to linger on in sin by the reflection that, at the last moment, when indulgence has lost its zest, when only the husks remain, the fatted calf still awaits the repentant prodigal, a far greater number have found in the promise of forgiveness the hope which has inspired them with the strength to cast away the chains of degrading habit, and to escape from "the utter wretchlessness of unclean living."

It is not the least of the merits of the ethical teaching of Christianity that it bids us to strive to attain to the very highest perfection, for surely he

who aimeth at a star,

Shoots higher much than he who means a tree.

While, at the same time, it recognizes the infirmity of human nature, and encourages us by the promise of pardon to new struggles after our failures and our falls.

But experience, so Mr. Morrison maintains, confirms his à priori deduction, that Christian doctrine is not favourable to the moral progress of the mass of mankind. "Taking them broadly, the ages of faith were emphatically ages of crime, of gross and scandalous wickedness, of cruelty, and, in a word, of immorality; and it is noteworthy, in proportion as we recede backwards from the present age and return into the ages of faith, we find that the crime and the sin become denser and blacker." The England of the Regency or of Queen Anne was less sceptical, yet coarser and more immoral than the England of Queen Victoria. Louis XIV. and his age were bigoted, yet licentious; Spain in the seventeenth century was even more orthodox and more corrupt than France; in Calvinist Scotland grossness, cruelty, and profligacy co-existed with extraordinary religious fervour. Even in the thirteenth century, when the sway of the Church was most undisputed, the clergy were often immoral, and the religious houses sinks of iniquity.

But nothing is more difficult than to gauge the comparative immorality of different periods. The coarse and open vice, the brutality of a rude age, are more obvious and more repulsive, but not more vicious and more fatal to moral growth than the refined corruption, the selfish indulgence of a more civilised generation. Satirists and moralists dwell on what is evil, rather than on what is good; historians chronicle striking crimes rather than everyday virtues.