MOTIVES AND HABITS.

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any attempts at inculcating the reasonableness, the joy, and the beauty of virtue; and its doctrines of faith and repentance are utterly destructive of the true motives of action which, when clearly understood and habitually learned by the child, will make the man good and happy. Children who have been taught that sin is to be avoided in order to please an invisible and incompre hensible God, and at the same time that faith and repentance will blot out all their sins, will not be well prepared to withstand any strong temptation to pleasant or profitable wickedness, while a similar temptation would hardly be felt by a man, whose conscience and will had been carefully and scientifically formed and fortified. There is no inherent depravity in human nature; man's propensities and desires can be made subordinate to his reasoning and reflective powers, and naturally tend more to good than to evil. Men can be taught and habituated in childhood to be virtuous, more uniformly and more easily than they can be educated in London to be professional thieves totally devoid of compunction, and in Hindostan to be religious plunderers and assassins without remorse or repentance. But what effect can be produced by the mere barren rules of morality, enforced by such unnatural, artificial motives as religion offers, and attenuated by the doctrines of faith and repentance to a very unimportant position ? Contradictory as are the doctrines of the various Christian churches, they all concur in teaching, with more or less emphasis on different points, that the attainment of an implicit, humble faith in some particular doctrines, and an attendance on certain religious observances, are the first objects for human consideration; that of ourselves we can do no good action; that good works spring from faith by the grace of God, and that even then they are in his sight but as "filthy rags ;" and that without the necessary faith virtue has the nature of sin. And it must ever be so; Christianity, and all other religions, must exalt faith, and must depreciate virtue, otherwise they could not support the claim, which each of them advances, of the only divinely-appointed road to holiness and to heaven being through a belief in their doctrines.

66 Knowledge of truth is essential to correctness of practice;" truth is the foundation of all virtue and happiness; there is but

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THE AGE OF SCEPTICISM.

one cause of misery-error; all crimes may be reduced to onelying. Since those two great epochs in European history, the invention of printing and the Reformation, science and general knowledge have rapidly advanced, with a decided improvement in morals and a vast loss of faith; the moral standard of the present day, and the morals of educated men, are higher than they have ever been in any period of strong religious fervour,

cence,

This is not a period of religious fervour. Even if religion has been useful as a means of "keeping the people quiet," and of inculcating morality, it is most certain that the age of faith has passed away-the Reformation destroyed it; and religion has now become unnatural and distasteful to a large majority in all classes of society. Religious education produces many more sceptics than devotees, and to the doctrines of Christianity the mass of professing believers now give merely a languid acquiesThere are sincerely devout, and there are enthusiastically religious, and there are outrageously fanatical men among all classes and under every denomination; but these are very few when compared with the respectably lukewarm and sceptical, the fashionably and recklessly indifferent, and the rapidly increasing number of unbelievers. "There is one sin," said Rowland Hill, "that destroysits millions-levity;" in other words, religion will not bear levity now-a-days: the slightest dereliction in religious observances, a very short cessation of the religious excitement, any indulgence in joking on doctrinal or scriptural subjects, leads the modern Christian to scepticism or indifference, both of them conditions of mind most fatal to morality and happiness. Contented scepticism too often involves a loathsome selfishness. From some minds the baneful effects of discarded superstition are never thoroughly eradicated; no definite system, no visible teachers of Rationalism are available for their guidance or assistance, and scepticism leaves them without efficient motives to virtuous action, and blinds them to their true duties and interests.

At the present time, the great coming event in the progress of mankind is the destruction of faith in the Christian superstition, an event which will bring many other events in its train. Every religious revolution has always involved many other changes of

RESPECTABLE INACTION.

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opinion which were neither anticipated nor intended. Will those among our ruling classes who can see what is passing before their eyes, take no part in the movement against religion? Will they still stand aloof? Will they leave the work entirely to men whose knowledge, experience, and judgment they are constantly declaring to be inferior to their own-whose operations they sometimes profess to fear, and sometimes to ridicule—whose influence is almost entirely confined to the working classes, from whom they have sprung, or among whom they are reduced almost exclusively to labour? For although there are perhaps at present more sceptics and infidels among the higher ranks, yet it is hardly possible to point to three avowed and active opponents of religion among them. Numbers are standing still in scepticism or concealed unbelief, and educating their children, merely on account of its respectability, in a superstition which they secretly despise. This treachery, this general insincerity of mind, will lead to no good for those of whom it is the characteristic.

While the numerous unbelievers in the higher classes are, in the education of their children, and in their own profession and behaviour, doing their best to perpetuate a system which they believe to be false, they are also perpetuating the deadly habit of hypocrisy and falsehood for the sake of respectability: a certain number of their children will become sincerely religious and opposed to progress; a larger number will become sceptics, scoffers, and triflers, though still preserving an outward disguise of religion, and without a faith or a hope beyond their apparent individual and immediate interests. It is by the concealment of the few that the many, who are dependent on the few for enlightenment, wander recklessly, or lie down to sleep, in contented or despairing scepticism. The few are the governing minds, the acknowledged or unacknowledged, conscious or unconscious leaders of opinion; the many will follow wherever these lead.

If the present ruling classes will stand still, will check or conceal the progress of their convictions, and stifle that doubt which is man's instinctive homage to outraged or neglected reason, they will soon find themselves behind the age. For what are the more intelligent of the working classes, the leaders of opinion among

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POPULAR ACTIVITY.

them, doing all this time? They are educating themselves and their children, they are shaking off religion, they are attacking religion, scepticism and hypocrisy are becoming more and more abhorred among them, and thus enlightenment is increasing and spreading, and will increase and spread ever more and more rapidly. What is enlightenment ? Not elegant accomplishments-not scholarship-(there were as good scholars among our ancestors as among us) not science, nor all of these. Enlightenment proceeds from the cultivation and employment of, and confi dence in, reason, and is evinced by abandonment and hatred of falsities, and by submission and obedience to the facts and laws of nature; and this knowledge is power. The Norman barons who signed the Magna Charta were more ignorant than the mechanics of to-day; what if the mechanics of to-morrow should be more enlightened than the English barons and landlords of their time? Who would be the rulers then, and who would obey?

The greatest symptoms of weakness and decay in our present ruling classes are visible in their too prevalent habit of sneering at earnestness and sincerity, and their fretful desire to be allowed to remain in their accustomed conventional routine. But notwithstanding the deficiencies and redundancies of the ordinary plans of education, the rich, as a class, are undoubtedly more moral than the great mass of uneducated labourers, because they know more and want less. It is when we compare their lives, principles, and aspirations with those of the educated and thinking labourers, that we see their great inferiority, and can estimate what, with their enormous advantages, they might be. The privations and bitterness of heart of the poor, the vices and degradation of the lowest and utterly destitute, exist principally because the rich do not know enough, because they have not the true motives to make them apply themselves to their greatest interest and duty, and their most refined enjoyment, the physical and moral improvement of the great human brotherhood. Scepticism blinds them as to where progress is tending; and if a genuine faith in Christianity remains, it does but serve to render the blindness more complete, and to misdirect benevolent energies.

THE HOUR FOR WORK.

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Call them by what names you please, there must be ranks and divisions among men. "Equality is a chimera, fraternity is a fact." We are all brothers, and are mutually dependent upon one another for our happiness: let the higher ranks bestir themselves, shake off their ennui, look around them, give up sneering at, or fearing truth, and show that they are the elder brothers of the poor. If the present ruling classes cannot do this, if they cannot prove themselves stronger, wiser, and better than their brethren, if they cannot take an active part in the progress of the nation, then they cannot much longer retain their position. The people are educating themselves, and the time will come when they will be governed only by those who are well approved as the wisest and best.

It is not safe to stand still any longer. The spirit and temper of the age in general warn us that the present state of things is unstable and dangerous. While commerce and capital have enormously increased, there has been no corresponding diminution in the privations and distress of the labouring classes; and the elegant taste and luxury of the higher ranks, together with the diffusion of cheap knowledge and free inquiry among the people, have only served to render more wide, more distinct, and more hateful, the great gulf between the rich and the poor. The labouring classes are becoming every day more conscious of their degraded position and of their power, they are discussing the first principles of morals and politics; it needs but the spark which a thousand circumstances might produce, and the mine would explode. Bloodshed, rapine, anarchy, despotism, who can tell what might arise from that war, which England has never yet seen, the war between the "two nations," the rich and the poor? There may be no reason to be alarmed for to-day, or tomorrow; but if we are wise we shall guard against it while we have time, and casting off scepticism and hypocrisy, and putting faith in truth and in humanity, try to fuse the "two nations" into one. Truth unveiled will beget more truths. Can any one still seek for safety in a false thing? When a people has risen, wrathful and desperate, with all its vague, indefinite desires and hopes, it is not religion that will stay its fury. Religion once had