NO REFUGE BUT IN TRUTH BY GOLDWIN SMITH TORONTO WM. TYRRELL & COMPANY 1908 COPYRIGHT, 1907-1908 BY THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1906 BY GOLDWIN SMITH CONTENTS. PREFACE. I. Man and His Destiny II. New Faith Linked with Old III. The Scope of Evolution IV. The Limit of Evolution V. Explanations VI. The Immortality of the Soul VII. Is there to be a Revolution in Ethics? The Religious Situation [Transcriber's note: Because "The Religious Situation" had its owntitle and verso page, it was split into a separate e-book. ] PREFACE. The letters collected in this volume appeared, with others, in the NewYork _Sun_, to the Editor of which the thanks of the writer for hiscourtesy are due. Appended is a paper on the same subjects commenting on one by the lateMr. Chamberlain, since published in the _North American Review_. Tothe Editor of the _North American Review_ also the writer'sacknowledgments are due. There appeared to be sufficient interest in the discussion to call forthe publication of a small edition. The age calls for religious truth. Nine thousand persons communicatedtheir cravings to the Editor of the London _Daily Telegraph_. By theirside the present writer places himself, not a teacher, but an inquirer, seeking for truth and open to conviction. The position of the clergy, especially where tests are stringent, callsfor our utmost consideration. But I submit that it would not beimproved by any attempt, such as seems to be made in a work of greatability before me, to merge the theological in the social question. Benevolence may still be far below the Gospel mark, and the Christianfaith may suffer from its default. But the increase of it and themultiplication of its monuments since the world has been comparativelyat peace cannot be denied; while of the distress which still calls foran increase of Christian effort, not the whole is due to default on thepart of the wealthier classes. Idleness, vice, intemperance, improvident marriage, play their part. Let us not be led away upon afalse issue. There is nothing for it but truth. I. MAN, AND HIS DESTINY. Time has passed since I first sought access to the columns of _TheSun_, ranging myself with the nine thousand who in an English journalhad craved for religious light. The movement which caused that cravinghas gone on. The Churches show their sense of it. Even in that ofRome there is a growth of "Modernism, " as it is called by the Pope, who, having lost his mediaeval preservatives of unity, strives to quellModernism by denunciation. Anglicanism resorts to a grand pageant ofuniformity, beneath which, however, lurk Anglo-Catholicism, Evangelicism, and Liberalism, by no means uniform in faith. TheProtestant Churches proper, their spirit being more emotional, feel thedoctrinal movement less. But they are not unmoved, as they show byrelaxation of tests and inclination to informal if not formal union, aswell as by increasing the aesthetic and social attractions of theircult. Wild theosophic sects are born and die. But marked is theincrease of scepticism, avowed and unavowed. It advances probablyeverywhere in the track of physical science. We are confronted withthe vital question what the world would be without religion, withouttrust in Providence, without hope or fear of a hereafter. Social orderis threatened. Classes which have hitherto acquiesced in their lot, believing that it was a divine ordinance and that there would beredress and recompense in a future state, are now demanding thatconditions shall be levelled here. The nations quake with fear ofchange. The leaders of humanity, some think, may even find itnecessary to make up by an increase of the powers of government for thelost influence of religion. Belief in the Bible as inspired and God's revelation of himself to manseems hardly to linger in well-informed and open minds. Criticism, history, and science have conspired to put an end to it. Theauthorship of the greater part, including the most important books, isunknown. The morality of the Old Testament differs from that of theNew, and though in advance of the world generally in those days, inmore places than one, as in the case of the slaughter of theCanaanites, shocks us now. There are errors, too, in the Old Testamentof a physical kind, such as those in the account of creation and thebelief in the revolution of the sun. Of the New Testament the mostimportant books, the first three Gospels, our main authorities for thelife of Christ, are manifestly grafts upon a stock of unknownauthorship and date. They betray a belief in diabolical possession, alocal superstition from which the author of the Fourth Gospel, whoevidently was not a Palestinian Jew, was free. There is discrepancybetween the first three Gospels and the fourth, notably as to the dayand consequent significance of Christ's celebration of the Passover. It is incredible that God in revealing himself to man should haveallowed any mark of human error to appear in the revelation. We have, moreover, to ask why that on which the world's salvationdepended should have been withheld so long and communicated to so few. There remains of the Old Testament, besides its vast historicalinterest, much that morally still impresses and exalts us. Of the NewTestament there remains the moral ideal of Christ, our faith in whichno uncertainty as to the authors of the narratives, or mistrust of themon account of the miraculous embellishment common in biographies ofsaints, need materially affect. The moral ideal of Christ conqueredthe ancient world when the Roman, mighty in character as well as inarms, was its master. It has lived through all these centuries, alltheir revolutions and convulsions, the usurpation, tyranny, andscandals of the Papacy. The most doubtful point of it, considered as apermanent exemplar, is its tendency, not to asceticism, for Christ came"eating and drinking, " but to an excessive preference for poverty andantipathy to wealth which would arrest human progress and killcivilization. We have, however, a Nicodemus and a Joseph of Arimathea, as well as a Dives and a Lazarus. Nothing points to a Simeon Stylites. Self-denial, though not asceticism proper, is a necessary part of thelife of a wandering preacher, which also precluded the exhibition ofdomestic virtues. The relation of Jesus with his family seems to havebeen hardly domestic; we have no record of any communication betweenhim and Joseph; in his last hour he provides a retreat for his mother. We cannot appeal from reason to faith. Faith is confidence, and forconfidence there must be reason. The faith to which appeal is made isin fact an emotion rather than an intellectual conviction. But apart from the Bible, have we any revelation of the nature, thewill, the unity, the existence of deity? It must apparently be ownedthat, though we tremble at the thought, we have none. We are left uponthis shore of time gazing into infinity and eternity without clue orguidance except such as we can gain either by inspection of our ownnature with its moral indications and promptings or by studying theorder of the universe. We find in man, it is true, a natural belief in deity, which we mightthink was implanted by his creator; but it is not found in all men, andin the lower races it assumes forms often so low and grotesque that wecannot imagine its origin to have been divine. Between the God of theChristian and the god of the red Indian there is, saving mere force, noaffinity whatever. This we must frankly own to ourselves. The god ofthe Mexican demanded human sacrifice. On earth the creative power seems to be, as it were, contending againstitself. Good of every kind is in conflict with evil. Slowly andfitfully, with many reverses, good seems to prevail. Humanity as awhole advances, and if we could believe in its collective advancetoward an ultimate perfection which all who have contributed to theadvance should share, we might have a solution of the great problem. But of this we have no certain assurance. Multitudes come into beingwho to progress can contribute nothing. There is evil of all kindsthat so far as we can see can be followed by no good effect. Plagueand famine, with a great part of the common misfortunes of human life, seem merely evil. So, plainly, do the sufferings of animals, sometimeson a terrible scale and apparently quite useless. As long as effort, even painful, is the price of perfection the price must be paid and weacquiesce. But in innumerable cases there appears to be no room forthat explanation. The rocks display the fossil remains of whole racesof primeval animals produced apparently only to become extinct. Of theearth itself, man's destined habitation, large portions are utterlyuninhabitable. The legendary war between the powers of good and evil, God and Satan, Ormuzd and Ahriman, was a fable naturally devised, though the birth of the two powers and the division of existencebetween them is inconceivable. Can anything like a clear line be drawnbetween good and evil? Effort and resistance to temptation may seem necessary ingredients inthe formation of a virtuous character. So far we may think we have theclue. But what is to be said of the myriads of cases in which virtuouseffort seems to be morally impossible; in the case, for instance, ofbarbarous or corrupt and depraved tribes or nations in which generalexample is evil? What is to be said of deaths in infancy, when therehas been no time for character to be formed? To suppose that theCreator could not have helped it, that this was his only way to theproduction of virtuous beings, is to deny his omnipotence. A Satanwith horns and hoofs, struggling against the power of good, used to bethe solution of the problem, but belongs to the simple religion of thepast. A plan of which we are ignorant, but of which the end will be good, isapparently our only explanation of the mystery. The earth isbeautiful; we have human society with all its interests; we havefriendship, love, and marriage; we have art and music. We must trustthat the power which will determine the future reveals itself in these. The belief that man has an immortal soul inserted into a mortal bodyfrom which, being, as Bishop Butler phrases it, "indiscerptible, " it isparted at death, has become untenable. We know that man is one; thatall grows and develops together. Imagination cannot picture adisembodied soul. The spiritualist apparitions are always corporeal. Free will surely we unquestionably have. Necessarianism seems toassume that in action there is only one element, motive. Butreflection seems to show that there are two elements, motive and will;and of this duality we seem to be sensible when we waver in action orfeel compunction for what we have done. Is it possible to explainmoral repentance or morality at all without assuming the freedom of thewill? Habit may enslave; but to be enslaved is once to have been free. What is conscience? When we repent morally are we looking only to theimmediate consequences of the act, or are we also looking to the injurydone to our moral nature? If the latter, does it not appear that thereis something in us not material and pointing to a higher life? Much ofus, no doubt, is material. Memory and imagination often act unbiddenby the will; imagination often when we are asleep. We may find amaterial element even in the character as moulded by physical or socialcircumstance or need. But is there not also a conscious effort ofself-improvement not dependent on these? That all is material, nothingspiritual, does not seem yet to have been proved. It is by close examination of our own nature and its workings, perhaps, that we are most likely to solve the enigma of our being. The wordspiritual surely has a meaning; it suggests self-culture not only forthe present but for a higher state. Evolution is a great discovery. But evolution cannot have evolveditself, nor does there seem to have been an observed case of it. Points of similarity between the ape and man are not proofs oftransition. Has any animal given, like man, the slightest sign ofself-improvement or conscious tendency to progress? The putting on by the mortal of immortality, it must however be owned, baffles conception. In the apologue of Dives and Lazarus the deadappear still in their human forms and talk to each other across thegulf, apparently narrow, which divides the abode of the damned fromthat of the blessed. This clearly is the work of imagination. Nor, seeing the infinite gradations of character and the frequent mixture ofgood and evil in the same man, can we understand how a clear line canbe drawn between those who are admitted to heaven and those who arecondemned to hell. Mere difficulties of sense or intellect on mundane questions might bemet by appeal to the mysteries of a universe which may conceivably beother in reality than to us it appears. But it is to be supposed thatdivine beneficence would give its creatures all powers of intelligencenecessary to their moral welfare, above all those entailing reward orpunishment in a future life. What is to be said in this connection of man's aesthetic nature, of hissense of beauty and melody? Can they be the offspring of materialevolution? As they meet no material need, we might almost take themfor the smile of a beneficent and sympathizing spirit. The basis ofthe gifts no doubt is physical, but we cannot easily understand howthey can have been developed by a purely physical process. To ghosts and apparitions of all kinds, spiritualism included, we bid along farewell. We turn to the universe, of which while we believed in the Incarnationour earth was the central and all-important scene, but in which it nowholds the place only of a minor planet. We see order and grandeurinexpressible, but with some apparent signs of an opposite kind--theconflagration of a star, a moon bereft of atmosphere, errant comets andaerolites. In our own abode we have variations of weather, apparentlyaccidental and sometimes noxious, atmospheric influences which begetplagues, ministers of destruction such as earthquakes and volcanoes. The plan, if plan there is, transcends our sense and comprehension. Still, be it ever borne in mind, of the human race, progress, moral andmental, is the unique characteristic, and the one which suggests adivine plan to be fulfilled in the sum of things. It distinguishes manvitally and immeasurably from all other creatures. Fitful, oftenarrested, sometimes reversed, it does not cease. It may point to anultimate solution of the enigma of our chequered being such as shall"justify the ways of God to man. " This may be still the world'schildhood, and the faith which seems to be collapsing may be only thatof the child. Whatever trouble, moral, social, or political, a great change of beliefmay bring, there is surely nothing for it but to seek and embrace thetruth. Whatever may become of our creeds and of the dogma, so plainlyhuman in its origin, of some of them, we have still the Christian idealof character, which has not yet been seriously challenged, does notdepend on miracle or dogma for its claim to acceptance, and maycontinue to unite Christendom. Superstition can be of no use morally; even politically it can be oflittle use, and not for long. In the Christian ideal we still have arule of life. Robinson, the good Puritan pastor, taking leave of themembers of his flock who were embarking for America, bade them notconfine themselves to what they had learned from his teaching, but to"be ready to receive whatever truth might be made known to them fromthe written word of God. " If there is a God, are not all truths, scientific, historic, or critical, as much as anything written in theBible, the word of God? September 20th, 1908. II. NEW FAITH LINKED WITH OLD. A preacher cites a lecture of mine, delivered nearly half a centuryago, a part of which has had the honour of being embalmed in the workof that most eminent theologian, the late Dean Westcott, on "TheHistoric Faith. " I turned rather nervously to the lecture to see whatit was that I had said. Not that I should have been much shocked had Ifound that my opinions had even been completely changed. Since thatlecture was delivered science and criticism have wrought a revolutionin theological belief, likely, as it appears to me, to be regardedhereafter as the most momentous revolution in history. With the wholepassage cited by Dean Westcott I will not burden the columns of _TheSun_, but part of it is this:-- "The type of character set forth in the Gospel history is an absoluteembodiment of love, both in the way of action and affection, crowned bythe highest possible exhibition of it in an act of the mosttranscendent self-devotion to the interest of the human race. Thisbeing the case, it is difficult to see how the Christian morality canever be brought into antagonism with the moral progress of mankind; orhow the Christian type of character can ever be left behind by thecourse of human development, lose the allegiance of the moral world, orgive place to newly emerging and higher ideals. This type, it wouldappear, being perfect, will be final. It will be final not asprecluding future history, but as comprehending it. The moral effortsof all ages, to the consummation of the world, will be efforts torealize this character and to make it actually, as it is potentially, universal. While these efforts are being carried on under all thevarious circumstances of life and society, and under all the variousmoral and intellectual conditions attaching to particular men, aninfinite variety of characters, personal and national, will beproduced; a variety ranging from the highest human grandeur down to thevery verge of the grotesque. But these characters, with all theirvariations, will go beyond their sources and their ideal only as therays of light go beyond the sun. Humanity, as it passes through phaseafter phase of the historical movement, may advance indefinitely inexcellence; but its advance will be an indefinite approximation to theChristian type. A divergence from that type, to whatever extent it maytake place, will not be progress, but debasement and corruption. In amoral point of view, in short, the world may abandon Christianity, butit can never advance beyond it. This is not a matter of authority, oreven of revelation. If it is true, it is a matter of reason as much asanything in the world. " I went on to dwell on the freedom of the Christian type of character asembodied in the Founder of Christianity from peculiarities of nation, race, or sex which might have derogated from its perfection as a typeof pure humanity. In those days I believed in revelation. But myargument was not from revelation, but from ethics and history. Theundertaking of Christianity to convert mankind to a fraternal andpurely beneficent type of character and enfold men in a universalbrotherhood, baffled and perverted although the effort has been invarious ways, appears to have no parallel in ethical history. There isnone in the Greek philosophers or the Roman Stoics, high as some ofthem may soar in their way. Aristotle's ideal man is perfect in itsstatuesque fashion, but it is not fraternal; it is not evenphilanthropic. Nor does the Christian character or the effort tocreate it depart with belief in dogma. Do not men who have totallyrenounced the dogma still cultivate a character in its gentleness andbenevolence essentially Christian? Theory, I have none. I plead, on a footing with the nine thousandcorrespondents of the _Daily Telegraph_ of London, for thoroughgoingallegiance to the truth, emancipation of the clerical intellect fromtests, and comprehension in the inquiry not only of the material, butof the higher or spiritual nature of man, including his aspiration toprogress, of which there cannot be said to be any visible sign inbrutes, whatever rudiments of human faculties and affections they mayotherwise display. But though I have no theory, I cannot help having aconception, and my present conception of the historical relation ofChristianity and its Founder to humanity and human progress does notseem to me to be so different from what it was half a century ago aswhen I came to compare the two I expected to find it. It seems to mestill that history is a vast struggle, with varying success, toward theattainment of moral perfection, of which, if the advent of Christianityfurnished the true ideal, it may be deemed in a certain sense arevelation. Assuredly it may if in this most mysterious world thereis, beneath all the conflict of good with evil, a spirit strivingtoward good and destined in the end to prevail. If there is not such aspirit, if all is matter and chance, we, can only say, What a spectacleis History! January 20th, 1907. III. THE SCOPE OF EVOLUTION. In discussing the ground of ethical science some writers appear to holdthat evolution explains all; but surely the illustrious discoverer ofevolution never carried his theory beyond the material part of man. Henever professed to trace the birth of ethics, idealization, science, poetry, art, religion, or anything spiritual in the anthropoid ape. There is here, apparently, not only a step in development but a _saltusmortalis_, a dividing and impassable gulf. Our bodily senses we share with the brutes. Some brutes excel us inquickness of sense. They have the rudiments, but the rudiments only, of our emotions and affections. The mother bird loves her offspring, but only until they are fledged. The dog is attached to the master whofeeds him, commands him, and if he offends whips him; but withoutrespect to that master's personal character or deserts. He is as muchattached to Bill Sykes as he would be to the best of men. The workingsof what we call instinct in beavers, bees, and ants are marvellous andseem in some ways almost to outstrip humanity, but they are not, likehumanity, progressive. The ant and the bee of thousands of years agoare the ant and the bee of the present day. The bee is not even taughtby experience that her honey will be taken again next year. Still lessis it possible to detect anything like moral aspiration or effort atimproving the community in a moral way. Beavers are wonderfullyco-operative, but they have shown no tendency to establish a church. Of the science of ethics the foundation surely is our sense of thedifference between right and wrong, and of our obligation to choose theright and avoid the wrong for our own sake and for the sake of thesociety of which we are members and the character of which reacts uponourselves. This sense seems to me to be authoritative, whatever itsorigin may be. Different conceptions of right and wrong may to someextent prevail under different circumstances, national or of otherkinds, giving room for different ethical systems, as a comparison ofthe ethics of the Gospel with those of Aristotle shows. Still, thereis always the sense of the difference between right and wrong and ofthe necessity, individual and social, of embracing the first andeschewing the second. If the Christian system is found by experienceto show itself essentially superior to all other systems and to satisfyindividually and socially, it is supreme, and is presumably the dictateof the author of our being, if an author of our being there is. The necessarian theory, which in this connection is still advanced orimplied, largely accepted as it has been, I cannot help thinking isreally traceable to an oversight. If in action there were only onefactor, that is to say, the motive, the action would seem to benecessary and to be traceable in its origin apparently back to thenebula. But surely there are two factors, the motive and the volition. Of the second factor in actions which are matters of course we are notconscious; where there is a conflict of motives or hesitation of anykind, we are. Huxley at one time held that man was an automaton. Ibelieve my illustrious friend afterward receded from that position. Yet on the necessarian theory automatons we must apparently be. February 10th, 1907. IV. THE LIMIT OF EVOLUTION. Your last correspondent on the subject of my letters treats thequestion lightly. Perhaps he is young, enjoying the morning of lifeand thinking little of its close. On the mind of a student of historyis deeply impressed the sadness of its page; the record of infinitemisery and suffering as well as depravity, all apparently to no purposeif the end is to be a physical catastrophe. Comtism, while it bids usdevote and sacrifice ourselves to the future of humanity, canapparently hold out nothing more. I accept evolution, if it is the verdict of science as to the origin ofphysical species, the human species included; though it certainly seemsstrange that, the chances being so numerous as they are, no distinctease of evolution should have taken place within our ken. But thetheory apparently does not pretend to account for the development ofman's higher nature. That there is a gap in the continuity ofdevelopment or any supernatural intervention has never been suggestedby me; but it does appear that there is an ascent such as constitutesan essential difference and calls for other than physical explanation. In matter, said Tyndall, is the potentiality of all life. Matter iswhat we discern by our bodily senses. What assurance have we that theaccount of the universe and of our relations to it given us by ourbodily senses is exhaustive, or that the moral conscience may not haveanother source? Apart from anything more distinctly spiritual, where do we get thefaculty of idealization? Is it traceable to physical sense? Unless the moral conscience has a source higher than mere physicalevolution, what is to deter a man in whom criminal propensities arestrong from indulging them so long as he can do so with impunity?Eccelino had a lust of cruelty. Was he wrong in indulging it, so longas he had the power, which he might have had, with common prudence, tothe end of his life? I speak, as I have always said, from the ranks; and I am not presumingto criticise Darwin's theory as an explanation of the origin and natureof the physical man. But if the theory is to be carried farther, andwe are to be told that man's higher attributes and his moral consciencehave no source or authority other than physical evolution, we mayfairly ask to see our way. March 17th, 1907. V. EXPLANATIONS. Interest is evidently felt in questions which I have been permitted totreat in _The Sun_, and after the notices and the queries which I havereceived there are points on which I should like, if you will allow me, to set myself right. I. The leaning to orthodoxy with which I am gently reproached goes notbeyond a conviction, drawn from the study not of theology but ofhistory, that of all the types of character hitherto produced theChristian type, founded on a belief in the fatherhood of God and thebrotherhood of man, appears to be the happiest and the best. At itsbirth it encountered alien and hostile influences; Alexandriantheosophy, Oriental asceticism, Byzantine imperialism. Later itencountered the worst influence of all, that of theocracy engendered bythe ambition of the monk Hildebrand. Theocracy, not Catholicism oranything spiritual, has been the source of the crimes of the Papacy; ofthe Norman raids upon England and Ireland; the civil wars kindled byPapal intrigue in Germany; the extermination of the Albigenses; theInquisition; Alva's tribunal of blood in the Netherlands; the massacreof St. Bartholomew; the persecution of the Huguenots; Jesuitism and theevils, moral and political, as well as religious, which Jesuitism haswrought. Through all this, and in spite of it all, Christian characterhas preserved itself, and it is still the basis of the world's bestcivilization. Much that is far outside the Christian creed is stillChristian in character and traceable to a Christian source. II. I fully admit that society can be regulated by a law framed formutual protection and general well-being without the religiousconscience or other support than temporal interest. But if individualinterest or passion can break this law with impunity, as often theycan, what is there to withhold them from doing it? What is the valueof a clean breast? III. The fatherhood of God seems to be implied in the Christian beliefin the brotherhood of man. By that phrase I meant to characteriseChristianity, not to embark upon the question of Theism. It does notseem possible that we should ever have direct proof through humanobservation and reasoning of the existence of Deity or of the divineaim and will. To some power, and apparently to some moral power, wemust owe our being. We can hardly believe that creation planned itselfor that the germ endowed itself with life and provision fordevelopment. But what can have been the aim of creation? What canhave led to the production of humanity, with all the evil and sufferingwhich Omniscience must have foreseen? What was there which withoutsuch a process mere fiat, so far as we can see, could not produce? Theonly thing that presents itself is character, which apparently must beself-formed and developed by resistance to evil. We have had plenty of"evidences" in the manner of Paley or the Bridgewater Treatises, met bysceptical argument on the other side; but has inquiry yet tried tofathom the mystery of human existence? IV. One thing for which I have earnestly pleaded is the abolition ofclerical tests, which are in fact renunciations of absolute loyalty totruth. Would this involve the dissolution of the Churches? Nothingsurely can put an end to the need of spiritual association or to theusefulness of the pastorate so long as we believe in spiritual life. Ithink I have seen the most gifted minds, such as might have done us thehighest service in the quest of truth, condemned to silence by thetests. May 5th, 1907. VI. THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. There appeared the other day in the Washington _Herald_ a notableletter by Mr. Paul Chamberlain on Immortality. It took the same lineas an essay on the same question by Mr. Chamberlain's late father, which I had read in manuscript. Both the letter and the essay are onthe negative side of the question, which, in the essay at least, ispronounced the happier and better view, as conducive to unselfishness. Unselfishness, it must surely be, of a supreme kind. Annihilation isnot a cheerful word. Bacon has a highly rhetorical passage floutingthe fear of death. His was probably not a very loving nature, nor doeshe seem to have thought of the parting from those we love. The life of the late Mr. Chamberlain was evidently happy as well asgood. That of his son, I have no doubt, is the same. But of the lotof the myriads whose lives, through no fault of their own, are, or inthe course of history have been, unhappy, often most miserable, what isto be said? If for them there is no compensation, can we believe thatbenevolence and justice rule the world? If the world is not ruled bybenevolence and justice, what is our ground of hope? The negative conclusion rids us, it is true, of the Dantean Hell, whichpaints the Deity as incomparably worse than the worst Italian tyrant, and, as it is to be everlasting, concedes the final victory to evil. We discard all ghost stories and spiritualist apparitions as at mostsigns of a general craving. We resign all reasoning like that ofButler, who describes the soul as indiscerptible, assuming that itexists separately from the body. Nor can we be said to have anythingthat bears the character of Revelation. That the Founder ofChristianity looked for a future life, with its rewards andpunishments, is evident. But he brought no special message, lifted notthe curtain of mystery, did nothing to clear our minds upon thesubject. His apologue of Dives and Lazarus shows that to Him as to usthe other world was a realm of the imagination. Is there anything in man not physical, or apparently explained andlimited by the transient conditions and necessities of his presentstate, anything which gives an inkling of immortality? Our utilitarianmorality is the offspring and adjunct of our condition here. But isthere not an aspiration to character which points to something morespiritual and higher than conformity to the utilitarian code? Heroismand self-sacrifice are not utilitarian. We can hardly allow the investigation to be closed by the mere mentionof the talismanic formulary Evolution. There may be something still tobe said on that subject. Evolution cannot have evolved itself, nordoes it seem capable of infallible demonstration. It no doubtpostulates vast spaces of time for its action. But within the space oftime of which we in any way have knowledge, apparently no case ofspontaneous evolution has taken place. Rudimentary likeness betweenthe frame of the ape and that of man seems hardly in itself a proof ofthe generation of man from the ape. On no subject, however, does one who is not a man of science or aphilosopher feel more intensely his deficiency, and his need of havinghis paths lighted by the perfectly free while reverent inquiry, to prayfor which has been the object of these letters. August 11th, 1907. VII. IS THERE TO BE A REVOLUTION IN ETHICS? A revolution in theology and in our conception of the government of theuniverse such as we are undergoing is sure to draw with it arevolutionary movement in ethics. There lies before me a reviewarticle giving an account of a number of books on ethics which arewidely at variance, it appears, with the ethics of Christianity. Thegeneral tendency of the authors seems to be to reject altogether theChristian type of character as artificial and weak, and to aim atsubstituting for it something more robust and, it is assumed, more inaccordance with nature. One theorist is represented as regardinghumanity in its present form only as transient material out of which isto be wrought the "Superman. " In what respect, so far as ourconceptions extend, has Christian ethic failed? It has given birth tothe patriot as well as to the martyr, to the virtues of the softer aswell as to those of the stronger sex. Communities which have kept itsrules, as well as individuals, have been happy. The Christian ideal of character and life went essentially unchangedthrough the violence of the Middle Ages and the vices of the Papacy. It was somewhat perverted by asceticism; but it was radically the samecharacter in Anselm or in St. Louis, as it is in their counterpartsnow. Nor does it seem to lose by renunciation of theological dogma. The moral principles and aspirations of good free thinkers orPositivists remain still essentially Christian. The ethical ideal which is now being set up against the Christianapparently, is that of the Greeks. In literature and art Greece, orrather Athens, or, to speak still more correctly, a limited number offree citizens in Athens, was pre-eminent: but its pre-eminence, if wemay trust its own moralists, hardly extended to morals. May 3rd, 1908.