have more to say for themselves.

Their error is

traceable less to want of knowledge than to partial We refer to those who

and incomplete knowledge.

refuse to have their children vaccinated, as the law requires, on the plea that the (vaccine) lymph used for the operation has, or may have, become vitiated by long transmission through the human constitution, of which it may have contracted, and does occasionally convey, some of the impurities, and even some of the diseases—one, at least, certainly of the most offensive. The fact on which the plea is advanced is admitted—is undoubtedly valid for requiring the amendment and modification of the law; whether it ought to be recognised as warranting violation of the law may assuredly be questioned. The arguments pro and con lie in a nut-shell, and the premisses on which they are founded are not disputed. Small-pox is about the most loathsome disease to which our race is liable, and was for long the most fatal. It was also the most rapidly and inescapably contagious. Nobody could argue that it concerned himself or his family alone. Every smallpox patient was a curse and a probable agent of death to all with whom he came in contact. Vaccination, when pure and well administered, used to be an almost absolute preservative. It is so still, even as at present administered, in ninety cases out of every hundred. Still, it is admitted that the lymph employed is not as good as it once was, having been humanised,' as we are assured, to the extent of two and a half per

cent., and even diseased in quality in very rare cases.1 But vaccine lymph procured direct from the animal has now been introduced in Belgium (and now, we understand, in St Petersburg) with the most complete and unexceptional success, and without the slightest liability to the objection which has to some slight extent given countenance to the aversion which has arisen here. With this amendment of the system once introduced, it becomes obvious that the law of 'compulsory vaccination' is a righteous one, and that the dislike and opposition of any individual to a beneficent arrangement determined by the sense, and appointed for the safety of ninety-nine of every hundred in the community qualified to form a judgment, ought to be sternly over-ridden. Conscience is a far more unendurable plea for disobedience in this case than in the last. There disobedience threatened only the life of the offender's child; here it threatens the lives, health, and comeliness of thousands of his fellow-citizens.

The practical conclusion to be drawn from all these considerations, stated nakedly and broadly, would strike most persons as somewhat startling. It is this that conscientiousness in its absolute formthat is, being a slave to your conscience, always doing what it tells you to do, is commendable or defensible only on the preliminary assumption that you have taken every available pains to enlighten and correct it. You can be safe and justified in obeying it implicitly only when you have ascertained, or done all in

1 See Sir Thomas Watson-Nineteenth Century, June, 1878.

1

your power to ascertain, first, that it is qualified to command, and secondly, that what you take for conscience is not in reality egotism, ignorance, incapacity, intolerance, or conceit under a thin disguise. Το make sure of this is no easy business. It requires not only good sense (a much rarer gift than we fancy), but great intelligence, a cultivated mind, modest as well as earnest searching after truth, to entitle a man to give himself over to his conscience. Never must

he be allowed to plead it as an excuse for mistake or wrong. In fine, and in plain truth, it is not every man-perhaps we might say it is but few men-that can afford to keep a conscience-a conscience of this absolute and imperious sort at least. To direct floundering or blinded souls, just as much as to cure diseased bodies, needs a licence and a diploma from some college competent to confer such.

In the navy, and I believe in the merchant service as well, it is the practice, as soon as a ship is ready for sea, or ordered on a expedition, to pass her through a preliminary ceremony, known technically as being swung.' It is absolutely indispensable: she is not held to be fit for duty till it has been performed. It consists in verifying her compasses-ascertaining by actual and minute comparison with compasses on shore that those instruments by which she is to direct her course throughout her voyage are perfect and accurate, point aright, are impeded in their operation by no fault of construction, and liable to no deviation from the influence of disturbing attractions.

As a

matter of fact the magnetic compasses of few ships are found to be thoroughly exact, or to point truly and precisely to the north-sometimes swerving from that direction as much as ten degrees, and owing this variation most commonly to the position and amount of iron of which the ship is partially constructed. Before the ship is suffered to sail, this variation must be either rectified, or, as is more commonly the practice, registered and allowed for. It is obvious that, unless this were done, not only would the vessel not know for certain whither she was steering, nor arrive except by accident at her intended port; but that ship, cargo, and the lives of the crew might every day be wrecked on any hidden rock or headland,—in fact, that her course and fate would be at the mercy of chance.

In the case of ships setting forth upon voyages across the Atlantic Ocean all this anxious caution is observed lest the guiding instrument to which they trust should be imperfect or misleading. Yet men habitually set out upon the voyage of life-far longer in duration, beset with perils from rocks and hurricanes immeasurably greater, and fraught with issues incontestably more serious-with a compass as their guide, which they trust as blindly and obey as implicitly as any mariner who ever sailed the seas, yet which in countless instances they have never been at the pains to test before installing it in a position of command, and which they seldom, if ever, pause to question, verify, or adjust.

XI.

THE PROPHETIC ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS.1

THE paper from the pen of Mr Hutton which appeared in the July No. of this Review was in my judgment at once so frank and candid in its admissions, so fair and so bold in the ground on which it placed the argument involved, and so original and striking in the line of reasoning pursued, as to be refreshingly rare in the field of theological controversy, and to merit the gravest consideration and the most respectful treatment at the hands of all of us, even though we cannot unreservedly concede his premisses, and must demur to the most important of his inferences. It cannot fail to have much weight with those who are still pausing on the middle ground between Scepticism and Conviction, and will probably appear absolutely conclusive to settled believers. A first perusal, I confess, somewhat shook the confidence I had placed in one or two of my previous opinions, but a second began to show the weak places in Mr Hutton's argument, and when I had read the paper a third time I felt satisfied that it need not have staggered me at all. It is to these weak places and inadmissible assumptions that

1 Contemporary Review, November 1875.