a pain; and if the machine is intelligent, our praise or blame will supply motives for its acts. This answer Mr. Morley commends as "proper, and perfectly adequate." It is true, he adds, that Holbach thus "empties the notions of praise and blame of the very essence of their old contents." Of course this is true. And that although Mr. Morley quite fails to perceive it-is a sufficient answer to Holbach. An ethical element is of the essence of what we mean by praise or blame. And for that element there is no room in the philosophy of Holbach or of Mr. Morley. Hence they are under the necessity of denying it, or of explaining it away, as Mr. Morley seeks to do when he grotesquely tells us that " machine whose springs are adapted so to fulfil their functions as to produce beneficent results" a "patent self-guiding perambulator," for example-must "be an object of respect, and affection, and gratitude." No. The moral element in praise or blame is not artificial. It is in the nature of men, and no fork of determinism will expel it thence. "I have a right to do my best, by praise and blame, by reward and punishment, to strengthen or to weaken, to prolong or to divert, the motives that are the antecedents of the action, exactly as I have a right to dam up a stream, or to divert its course, or otherwise deal with it, to suit my own convenience." Surely this is what Sir Toby Belch would call "exceeding good senseless." Right! Why every one has a right to do what he cannot help doing. The word "right" implies moral quality. But if our actions, good or bad, are simply the necessitated outcome of machinery, moral quality does not exist in them. "As if we could stay our hands from action, if our feelings were trained to proper sensibility and sympathy!" But if they are not so trained, the reason is that they cannot be trained, and it is no one's fault, but arises from the nature of the machine: "velle non discitur" is an axiom of determinism. "As if it were possible for a man of tender disposition not to interest himself keenly in all that concerns the lot of his fellow-creatures!" But men are not, as a rule, of tender disposition. Nor assuredly will the philosophy of Mr. Morley make them such. Empty men of the notion of God, which you denounce, with Mr. Morley, as hateful and ridiculous; abolish the old volitional morality, as "the pedantic requirements of unreal ethics," and substitute for it "usage and the requirements of social self-preservation; " teach man that his real dignity lies in this-that he is "one weak spring" in "the vast machine of nature," and, in point of fact, you hand over the human mammal, helpless and impotent, to the blind impulses of egoism, to the terrible heritage of savage instincts, accumulated in his nervous system, and now barely held in check by religion I and philosophy. The work of civilization is undone, and "homo homini lupus" is again the true account of the human race. Sensibility," and "sympathy," and "tender disposition ! " * confess this cant sickens me. The image of Joseph Surface rises before my mind, and I incline to say with old Sir Peter Teazle, "Oh! damn your sentiment." One knows very well what the issue of it really is; and how these rose-water revolutionists who set out with affirming that all is good in man's nature, end by finding the human race "suspect." Mr. Morley, as we have seen, professes to go by the facts. He glorifies "the great positive principle" that "we can only know phenomena, and know them only experientially." Let him keep to the phenomena of human life, and assuredly the optimistic haze in which he views it will soon fade away. As assuredly, experience will certify to him the fact that our motives can be within our power. Sir, we know that our will is frce, and there's an end of it," said Dr. Johnson. Of course this dictum requires to be limited and guarded, and thrown into scientific shape, before a metaphysician can accept it. But it is a rough-and-ready expression of a truth overwhelmingly demonstrated by the every-day experience of life, to which alone Mr. Morley, upon his own principles, has a right to refer. As to the argument from inanimate nature, where we all admit that necessity rules, to that which happens in what-pace Mr. Morleyis another province altogether, the human spirit, it is altogether irrational. "It is "-as a brilliant friend of my own has remarked with equal truth and pungency-it is "like saying that sight is impossible because we have no eyes in the stomach." For the rest, the practical consequences to human society of the ethics, or unethics, taught by the new religion, appear to me to be abundantly clear. What they are I pointed out elsewhere † a short time ago, in words which, as I cannot find others better to express my meaning, I may be allowed to repeat here: With what is called metaphysical liberty, with freedom of volition, merit and demerit disappear too. Human causality, human spontaneity, human responsibility, all die before the "uncreating word" of materialism. Its doctrine of absolute irresponsibility makes an end of ethics; its criminal legislation can be nothing but vanæ sine moribus leges. For the sting of punishment is not the actual fact "stone walls do not a prison make"-but the moral disapprobation of which the fact is evidence. But how visit with moral disapprobation those The "great central moral doctrine" of the Revolution, Mr. Morley tells us, is "that human nature is good, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions" ("Diderot," vol. i. p. 5). + See my article "Materialism and Morality" in the Fortnightly Review of November last. who were incapable of doing anything but what they did? Poor victims of temperament, of heredity, of environment, they are to be pitied, not blamed; while, indeed, we seclude them for the protection of our persons and pockets; for we are the numerical majority, we can appeal to the ultima ratio of force, if to nothing higher. It is no fancy picture which I am now drawing. Fifty years ago Balzac wrote: "Crime has been made poetical; tears are drivelled over assassins." True as his words were then, they are even truer now. The idea of law as the embodied conscience of a nation of persons, the belief in justice, in the old sense, as something quite transcending mere expediency-fiat justitia pereat mundus-the conception of the civil magistrate as a minister of the retribution ordained by that justice as "the other half of crime "-these things have well nigh died out from the popular mind, as, in place of the old spiritual principles of ethics, materialism refers us to natural history. Such, as it seems to me, will be the effect upon the public order of that determinism which is a primary dogma of the revolutionary religion. The bond of civil society is obedience to law, fenced round with penalties. But legislation rests upon the doctrine of human responsibility. To that doctrine necessarianism is fatal. But if law, with penal sanctions, be the bond of civil society, the family is certainly its foundation. Where wedlock and legal paternity are unknown, and complete promiscuity prevails in the relations of the sexes-as among the aborigines of Australia and Fiji-civilization does not exist. The State depends upon the family, and the family depends upon marriage. Now, marriage, as it is still found in Europe, is mainly the creation of Christianity. Wordsworth gave utterance to no poetical fancy, but to the exact truth, when he sang of "pure religion breathing household laws." What will become of marriage, and of that virtue of purity of which it is the guardian, when the new religion imposes its ethics on the world, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is superseded by the Gospel of the Revolution? Let us ever remember that the first law of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is self-denial: conformity to the mind of the Master, who pleased not Himself: the taking up of His cross: the immolation thereon of the flesh, with its affections and lusts. As I have observed in a recent work: There can be no question at all that Christianity presented itself to the decadent and moribund civilization of the Roman Empire as an ascetic doctrine a doctrine of abstinence, not only from the things which it branded as positively sinful, but from things in themselves licit. The world-which St. John exhorts his disciples not to love, "Generale quippe pactum est societatis humanæ obedire regibus suis." (St. Aug. "Confes." lib. iii. c. 8.) are because the love of it is incompatible with the love of the Father, which he describes as lying in the wicked one, which over and over again in the New Testament the disciples of Christ bidden to forsake and overcome, and which (such is the vitality of phrases) stands even in our own day for the complete antithesis of the Church-is the present visible frame of things, doomed, as these early preachers believed, soon to pass away with the lust thereof; the flesh-in which St. Paul declared no good thing to dwell, which it was his daily endeavour to keep under and bring into subjection-is the whole of man's lower or animal nature. Whatever is doubtful, this is clear. And to those who do not admit it we may say, without discourtesy, that, whether through ignorance or prejudice, they are so hopelessly in the dark on this matter as to render any argument with them regarding it mere waste of time. The principle, then, which transformed the individual by the renewing of his mind, was the principle of self-sacrifice. And this was the principle which transformed society.* Now, the teaching of Christianity about the virtue of purity rests upon the asceticism which is so essential a part of that religion. To live out one's impulses with no restraints save those imposed by prudential moderation, was the highest counsel of that ancient naturalism which deified and worshipped the passion of desire. The precept of St. Peter is ἀπέχεσθαι τῶν σαρκικῶν ἐπιθυμιών : "to abstain from fleshly lusts"; and the reason he gives for such abstinence is, that they "war against the soul." "Bonum est homini mulierem non tangere" writes St. Paul. It is a counsel of perfection, given only to those who are able to receive it. To the multitude, whose lives are led upon the lower levels of humanity, marriage is conceded propter fornicationem, or, as the Anglican Nuptial Service puts it, correctly interpreting the unbroken Christian tradition of fifteen centuries, "that those who have not the gift of continence might keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body." It is conceded, and it is transformed. From a mere civil contract it becomes "magnum sacramentum," holy and indissoluble: the curb of man's lawless appetite and the bulwark of woman's fragile honour. There can be no question at all that upon this ascetic treatment of the most potent and deeply rooted of man's instincts, Christian civilization is based. It has been well observed by Mr. Allies: When [Christianity] began its great work, not only was the unity of marriage broken by repudiation of the bond and perpetual violation of its sanctity, but in the background of all civilized life lurked a host of abominations, all tending to diminish the fertility of the human race, and to destroy life in its beginning and in its progress. [The Church] succeeded not only in rolling back the tide of pollution, "Chapters in European History," vol. i. p. 84. 1 23 but in establishing the basis of all social life, the unity and indissolubility of marriage. The power of a sacrament had silently been insinuated into the decayed, the almost pulverized foundations of social life, and built them up with the solidity of a rock, which would bear the whole superstructure of the city of God.* Let us turn now to the gospel of the eighteenth century, and see what is its teaching upon this matter of such ineffable importance to society. Mr. Morley, in a passage of his "Voltaire," thus clearly indicates the attitude of the new religion towards what he calls "the medieval superstition about purity." † The adjective "mediæval" is, I suppose, rather vituperative than descriptive, the "superstition" in question being an essential part of Christianity, and no more peculiar to the Middle Ages than to any other period in the history of that religion: The peculiarity of the licence of France in the middle of the eighteenth century is, that it was looked upon with complacency by the great intellectual leaders of opinion. It took its place in the progressive formula. What austerity was to other forward movements, licence was to this. It is not difficult to perceive how so extraordinary Continence a circumstance came to pass. Chastity was the supreme virtue in the eyes of the Church, the mystic key to Christian holiness. was one of the most sacred of the pretensions by which the organized preachers of superstition claimed the reverence of men and women. So men It was identified, therefore, in a particular manner with that Infamous against which the main assault of the time was directed. contended, more or less expressly-first, that continence was no commanding chief among virtues; then that it was a very superficial and easily practised virtue; finally, that it was no virtue at all, but if sometimes a convenience, generally an impediment to free human happiness." + Quite in accordance with these views of the apostles and evangelists of the new religion, Mr. Morley declares "the Catholic ideal of womanhood" to be "no more adequate to the facts of life than Catholic views about science, or property, or labour, or political order or authority." He lifts up his testimony against "the "Formation of Christendom," vol. i. p. 306. +"Voltaire," p. 152. Ibid. p. 149. § "Diderot," vol. i. p. 76. I trust I may, without offence, intimate my |