times and under normal circumstances, men are not disposed to accept Atheism, in any shape, as having any positive value. It is simply a defect in the reason, as much as the want of an eyeball in what looks like an eye, or the want of a beard in what looks like a man. Men without beards, or women with them, will justly not be taken account of in the general estimate of the sexes.

The fact is, as Socrates says in the "Memorabilia," man is naturally and differentially a religious animal, and is not thoroughly or normally himself, unless when he is so. It has been so much the fashion lately to bunt out and to parade points of identity between man and the lower animals, that it may be a service to sound reason just to state the immense gap that exists betwixt the strange unfeathered biped called man and our first cousin the ape, if Dr. Darwin and Mr. Huxley will have it so. What monkey ever wrote an epic poem, or composed a tragedy or a comedy, or even a sonnet? What monkey professed his belief in any thirty-nine articles, or well-compacted Calvinistic confession, or gave in his adhesion to any Church, established or disestablished? Did any monkey ever smile or laugh (for a grin is not a laugh), or sing, or give the slightest indication of knowing even the most

elementary propositions in the first six books of Euclid, such as are easily crammed into the head of the dullest undergraduate of the term? Plainly not. And though men in Egypt, for some symbolical reason that may not have been so foolish as we imagine, paid certain sacrosanct attentions and pious ministrations to crocodiles, there is no proof that crocodiles or monkeys, or any other of the lower animals, ever worshipped anybody. Dogs worship men, you will say. Yes, but only in a fashion. Dogs have neither churches nor creeds; and as the god whom they worship is the man who visibly feeds them and tangibly flogs them, it is a very cheap sort of religion. Socrates was certainly right in this matter, rather than Darwin. He saw as great a gap betwixt man and the lower animals in the descending scale, as betwixt men and the gods in the ascending scale; and he recognised the peculiar differential excellence of the human species simply in this, that they could recognise the gods, and give evidence of the recognition by the reverential observances of what we call a religion. Surely this was a much more human, more normal, and more noble way of philosophizing than to take infinite pains, as some of our modern scientific men do, on the one hand, to restore our lost brotherhood

with the baboon, and, on the other, to raise up an impassable wall of partition between all reasonable creatures and the Supreme Reason from whom all creatures proceed. We miscalculate very much indeed if we imagine that the peculiar doctrines and favourite fancies of a few cultivators of physical science in this small corner of the world, and in this small half of a century, are likely to exercise any notable influence over the thoughts of men, after the one-sided impulse out of which they arose shall have spent its force. Not only all the unsophisticated masses of men, but all the great originators of philosophic schools and the founders of churches, have been theists. Moses, David, and Solomon ; Pythagoras and Anaxagoras; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno; St. Paul and St. Peter; Mahomet, St. Bernard, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Kepler, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Luther, Spinoza, Bacon, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke, Des Cartes, Kant, Hegel. Against such an array of great witnesses of sound human reason, it is only the narrowness of local conceit, or the madness of partisanship, that could plant such names as David Hume (if David Hume did indeed believe in his own bepuzzlements), Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. As for Confucius and Buddha, the two great prophets of the

far East, who certainly embrace a much wider sphere of human discipleship than any of our English sophists of the negative school, they lie outside of our Western European culture altogether; but in so far as they seem to have taught a morality without religion, or a religion without God, we shall say a word or two about them by-and-by.

That the general consent of the most cultivated part of the human race, taken in the gross, is in favour of theism, and against atheism, seems therefore, as a fact, plain enough. But whether there be certain races of human beings, up in the frozen North, or down in the fervid South, the tablets of whose inner nature, when nicely read, present absolutely no traces of the recognition of a superior worldcontrolling power, this is a question by no means easy in an exhaustive way to answer. One of the speakers in Cicero's book above named starts prccisely this question: "Whence," says he, "do you -i.e. the Stoics, who argue from the consent of the human race-prove the opinions of all nations? verily believe that there are many peoples so lost in savagery that they have not even the slightest suspicion of the existence of gods.' Here are two contrary opinions: the one that there is a universal

"De Naturâ Deorum," i. 23.

I

consent of all men and all peoples in the belief of a Supreme Being or Beings; the other, that there are nations so sunk in savagery that they entertain not the remotest suspicion of God any more than their cattle, their sheep, or their swine; and to make these adverse notions more than opinions, to turn them into knowledge, as Plato is fond of saying, it is manifest that what we want is facts. Now the facts in this case are to be sought in remote and little travelled places, under circumstances not without danger, and, what is worse, often discouraging and disgusting to civilised men. Who is to go and live among wild men of the woods and roving Nomads of the waste for years, till he has thoroughly mastered their language, and by this process acquired the key to their notions and sentiments and convictions about whatever lies behind and above and within that wonderful evolution of beauty and grandeur and power, which we call the world? We naturally look to Christian missionaries here in the first place. They alone, with very few exceptions, seem to possess the earnestness of purpose, the single-hearted devotedness, and the intensity of moral apostleship, which could lead civilised men to make a moral experiment of this kind. But even their evidence in such a matter