their conduct, seem intent on realising the justice of the slur cast by Tacitus on Christianity, as if it meant "hatred of the human race. A vicious system exercises a contaminating influence on everything connected with it. Churchmen, married or unmarried, have ever formed a class apart, standing, even under the most favourable circumstances, in a questionably sinister relation to their fellow men. Their interests are not the common interests, and their style and language are something peculiarly their own. The Times of July 15, 1862, thus remarks on the Church Congress recently held at Oxford under the presidency of "the indefatigable bishop of the diocese":

"The reverend or very reverend speaker,―right reverend we must not add,-writes or says what looks well on paper, begging every question, describing everything just for the purpose, and offering airy suggestions, interlarded with unctuous phrases, vain regrets, and specious promises. Heaven knows where the people who talk, and preach, and write on these subjects, get their notions of men and women. Certainly not from this weary, working, week-day world. According to them a human being is either a soul to be treated by some theological process, or a body to be buried and paid fees for, or a name for a subscription list, or an 'object' for some charitable institution, or the unit of a neglected population,' or the occupant of a free seat, or perhaps, under peculiar circumstances, a proper subject for vows, a peculiar dress and a breviary. As one reads their lucubrations, in which sacred words and terms of holy endearment have been inserted to repletion, something tells you that it is all outsides, a mere play of human counters, and that as Bonaparte regarded men as food for powder, these people regard their fellow creatures as the objects of institutional enterprise and of ecclesiastical manipulation. You look round and consider the deepest personal interests and spiritual anxieties that have occupied, or, may be, still occupy, your life; the people you see, and know, and care for, and would give the world to see saved, or in the way to it. What good will five hundred of such priests and prophets do to them or you? On all sides in this great metropolis one hears the earnest wish that the church which talks so much would come home to people a little more, and help them in their actual difficulties. It is but too plain that we must go

elsewhere for this purpose than to institutional Christianity, parochial organisations, and Ecclesiastical Congresses.

"But the congress was practical, and dealt with realities. At once softened and sobered by the bright eyes of some hundred ladies in the galleries of the Sheldonian theatre, the Congress rather stoutly deprecated vows of celibacy in Sisters of Mercy. Then, that solemn old impostor, the church-rate, intruded itself, and, unwelcome as the subject must have been to some of the clergy, there was no help but to join in the vulgar cry for its perpetual maintenance. Pew-rents, too, came in for just execration, as a dissenting novelty, and a surrender of the poor man's church. The offertory is so much more graceful, so much more medieval, and, as we are assured, actually successful in some Staffordshire churches. But what excited the Congress to the highest pitch of enthusiasm was the right of pronouncing the Church's last solemn benediction on every dissenter, schismatic, or infidel who might be brought to the churchyard. Whatever degree of interest the Church may feel in the living, it is determined that once dead they shall belong to her alone. Once dead all controversy shall end. A ceremony shall wipe off all scores, and the man with whom the Church had no more to do than with the dogs that wander about the streets shall be forwarded to the other world with at least a viaticum of good wishes. These are the questions which the Church militant fights about. Yet we read somewhere about the dead being left to bury their dead, as if it did not so very much signify how the poor dust was disposed of when the soul had once sped its unknown But the Church of the dead will be for the dead, and jealous of their guardianship."

way.

C.-(PAGE 62.)

On the Religious Import of Philosophy.

very

zealous

We suffer not so much from want of knowledge as of moral courage and integrity. Why do not the legitimate originators of new ideas display more zeal in promoting their "intellectual infiltration." But ill practice infects theory; and the conceptional estimate of religion sinks to the level of its usual treat

ment. The view of philosophy taken by Macaulay in his account of Bacon is such as to supersede the necessity of an apology for the following remarks in justification of a different one.

Macaulay's view of philosophy is connected with a narrow view of religion, considered as unprogressive political establishment, instead of being itself the very soul of progress, the highest and most energetic form of man's spiritual life.

He claims the name of philosophy exclusively for utilitarian science, narrowing the term far more rigidly than Bacon intended. Bacon no doubt looked to knowledge with a view to power, or to increase human comforts and conveniences. But he considered the power susceptible of indefinite expansion proportioned to the enlargement of knowledge; endeavouring to promote this enlargement until its range should be coextensive with that of nature; whereas his politically warped followers would limit its range to a special side of nature, at the same time disparaging theoretic knowledge generally, although by so doing they in fact disparage the theorist Bacon, and degrade science itself to the level of mere empirical art.

Kuno Fischer, in his work on Bacon, shews how the great philosophic innovator and reformer naturally took a negative and hostile attitude to preceding systems, thus becoming unfair to history in defiance of his own rules. He found the old in evident antagonism to what he held to be the true; and hence, in his sanguine anticipations of the magnificent future of science, he was led to condemn the past as the world's helpless youth, and to treat yesterday as the thwarting hindrance instead of the parent of to-morrow. But the view which three centuries ago was natural and salutary is no longer applicable now. Since Bacon's time history has become part of philosophy, and it has been usual since Leibnitz and Lessing to look at ancient and modern civilization as intimately blended and connected, as a continuous development, the Providential education of the human race. Bacon did not possess the psychological key to history so as to unravel the conditioning relations of past and present; history to him was only the raw material for ulterior scientific manipulation; although he was the first to feel that the human mind has a history; that it is the pupil of nature in a course of progressive education.

Macaulay fails to apprehend these circumstances. He makes Bacon's defect still more defective, not only vaguely depreciating the preceding philosophy, and placing science in disadvantageous contrast with shoemakers, but making what in Bacon was an incidental though inevitable misapprehension into a fundamental axiom.

Judged by its flowers and leaves, says Macaulay, the tree which Socrates planted and Plato watered is the noblest of trees; but if we take the homely test of fruits, our opinion may be less favourable. This philosophy exercised the faculties of disputants, but did nothing to increase the comforts of man. The Stoics and Epicureans were declaimers, canters, and wranglers; trifles, false assumptions, engaged the vigorous intellects of the Schoolmen; the Florentine Platonists did some little good by offering a choice of speculative tyrants, and a spark of freedom was produced by the collision of adverse servitude; still during all these ages philosophy was barren; it consisted of words, mere words!

But words represent thought, and thought is man's great prerogative, his spiritual life. The vacancy complained of is really in the defective appreciation of the observer. And what an extraordinary blank in the mind of a philosophical historian; how great the delusion which, though recognizing in Socrates and Plato "the greatest men the world had ever seen," condemns all their efforts as useless and fruitless; as having been expended on a treadmill of dialectics, producing much exertion and no progress!

Macaulay's error, says K. Fischer, consists in the indiscriminate adoption of a Baconian prejudice. Bacon pleaded for a closer intimacy with nature, and disclaimed what seemed to him the false and empty character of preceding speculation; Macaulay decries all speculation, making Bacon's relative disclaimer into an absolute and universal one, although Bacon's rashness in generally undervaluing the opinions of antiquity as idola theatri was already an "idol of the forum and den" in himself.

Vulgar utilitarianism sees no possible advantage except in material things palpably contributing to the comforts of life. Philosophy, according to Macaulay's dictum, is for the use of man, not man for the use of philosophy. The true measure of the value of speculation is doubtless its utility; and no philosophy

was ever so merely speculative as to have no human want in view. But there are spiritual wants as well as sensual ones; the bodily appetite appeased, human nature presses on instinctively to know, and needs no license from "literary criticism" in seeking unlimited gratification of the want, although in the first stages of founding an intellectual empire the subject of religion was omitted by Bacon as a matter both anomalous in itself, and as already provided for by the positive regulations of the State.

Yet even now the utilitarian politician, to whom religion is a State institution, cannot see the religious import of philosophy; he cannot relish the aroma of the "flowers" which refreshed the soul of Socrates in his last moments, or appreciate the elevation of thought which makes Seneca after all rank higher than the shoemaker. It were out of place here to try to shew how in the very philosophies disparaged by Macaulay the human mind was slowly laying the firm basis of all its future conquests by definitively establishing its own freedom; how the idealism of Plato or of Christianity, although abstract and inadequate to present requirements, were indispensable preliminaries in the assertion of this freedom. The free feeling of religion anticipated the slow gradations of later progress; and if the narratives of the first explorers of an unknown territory are still interesting even to those familiar with the country traversed, how much so when they record the prophetic aspirations of fresher and far more vigorous intellects in search of a region still undiscovered and untrod! Morality and philosophy, education and religion, -are but different aspects of one thing; for all moral existence is an education; and all morality-the continuous search for a higher good under conditions, or according to a given law which it is the province of philosophy to define, may be said in the widest and most universal view of it, to be religion; for the circle and comprehension of the good increases with the capacity and culture of the observer, until he rises from common-place utility to the contemplation of a wider good, and finally to supreme or universal. For an interesting elucidation of these subjects in their historical as well as philosophical aspects, reference may be made to the preliminary chapters of the first volume of Kuno Fischer's "History of Modern Philosophy," and to the first series of Jouffroy's "Melanges Philosophiques;" and the reader may