must go to the wall. It may, of course, be said that we have Christianity, that we are a Christian country. But this is only nominally the case. Though we have undoubtedly many individual Christians among us, we are not a Christian nation, have not a general, living, fruitful Christianity. The Christianity which we speak of as being one of the things needful for the permanent and general improvement of the condition of the working classes is not that of mere creeds, rites, and Sunday church-going; not the formal Christianity which is adopted as an element of respectability, but the Christianity of Christ, of the Sermon on the Mount, a Christianity under which brotherly love would abound, and the spirit of which would be visible in the life of the week-day, workday world, which would lead the rich to consider the poor, employers to be kind to, and thoughtful for, the employed, and the latter class to be just and honest to employers, not the mere eyeservants and time-servers that so many of them now are. This is the sort of Christianity that we want, and it is strictly practical to say that if we do not get it, whatever else may or can be done for the benefit of the working classes, will be less efficient without such Christianity than it would be in conjunction with it. The hopefulness of the outlook in regard to the condition of the working classes lies, in our opinion, in the fact that progress is already being made in two of the three things that we have spoken of as needful, while there are not wanting some slight signs and tokens favourable to the idea of progression in the third-Christianity. The anxiety, the warmth, and even the intolerance of feeling that are being displayed in connection with the Christianity of creed-ism, Ritualism, vestment controversies, and the like, may, we think, be taken as indicating a tendency, a direction of mind, that may ultimately result in a more extended development of that truer, nobler Christianity of which, as we have said, there are many individual instances among us-a Christianity that would cause an unjust balance to be an abomination to the conscience of man as well as to the Lord, and the now prevailing worship of mammon to be recognised as the ignoble idolatry it is. The once favourite ideas about men being educated above their stations, and working people being made discontented with their lot by education, are now happily exploded. The necessity for universality of education has been admitted upon all hands, and the machinery for securing it set in motion. How much-taken in its full sense as meaning higher intelligence, wider knowledge, and greater refinement-it is capable of doing and likely to do, need scarcely be pointed out. It will serve as a common ground to bring the various sections of the working classes closer together, and give to the general body something of that coherence the lack of which is at present their greatest weakness. It will enable them to discern what are the functions of governments, what those of individuals; and to wisely and effectively use the political power which is already legally and potentially in their hands, though it now remains a dead letter by reason of the want of a higher and more general education among them. Moreover, it will be a powerful means to the second great end-international federation. Internationalisation is even now a great, though as yet but insufficiently recognised actuality. Steam, telegraphy, machinery, the spread of the mechanical arts, and general facility of intercommunication, have internationalised the productiveness of all civilized countries. The stronger men, the governing, and capital-possessing classes areeven where they are unconscious of the true meaning of the matter -profiting by this, and the working classes are beginning to see that if they, too, would share in the good of the general material result of such a state of things, there must be international federation among them. The thinking men among them see this on two chief grounds. Firstly, that unless there is, those of the dealers in labour who hold it to be simply a marketable commodity-and at present a very large number hold that opinion-will play off the working classes of one country against those of another. Secondly, that for the working classes of any one country who happen to be at present in a more advanced position than those of others, to push on altogether regardless of any interests but their own, will be to create a Nemesis for themselves. Without some friendly understanding among themselves-without a knowledge upon the part of the ill-paid labourers of one country that the better-paid labourers of another sympathise with them, and are anxious to see their condition brought up to the higher level-without this there will always be the danger of the worst-paid labourers being used as an instrument to drag down the best-paid ones. These are the views that induce some of the working classes to join the International, and many others to regard at least its central idea with higher favour. It may be that the International is but a blind struggling towards the desired thing—that the wirepulling and wild political notions associated with it are reprehensible; but it at least shows that the thoughts of the working classes are falling in the direction of federation. It is true that the actual progress in the matter is but small, but that there has been progress let some of the proceedings in connection with the great Newcastle strike bear witness. That the present want of unity among the English working classes themselves may be used as a sarcastic comment upon the idea of a working class "federation of the world" we are well aware. But the idea has taken root, and is destined to be more or less fruitful in results, as education gradually eradicates the weeds of ignorance which now retard its growth. Of our grounds for looking hopefully towards a development of the higher and truer Christianity, we have already spoken. The force of many noble examples is at work. The desire to be "written as one who loves his fellow-man;" to write it of oneself in the golden lettering of Christian deeds, is spreading. A wider development of the veritable Christian life seems to us to be among the coming events that are casting their shadows before, and from it, should it come, the working classes have more to hope than from aught else. It too, like education, and even more than education, will tend to effect the realisation of the grand idea of friendly international federation. It will bring us infinitely nearer than we now are to a state of things in which "Man to man the world o'er THOMAS WRIGHT. WHAT HAT can be in our days the interest of mythology? What is it to us that Kronos was the son of Uranos and Gaia, and that he swallowed his children, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Pluton, and Poseidon, as soon as they were born? What have we to do with the stories of Rhea, the wife of Uranos, who, in order to save her youngest son from being swallowed by his father, gave her husband a stone to swallow instead? And why should we be asked to admire the exploits of this youngest son, who, when he had grown up, made his father drink a draught, and thus helped to deliver the stone and his five brothers and sisters from their paternal prison? What shall we think if we read in the most admired of classic poets that these escaped prisoners became afterwards the great gods of Greece, gods believed in by Homer, worshipped by Sokrates, immortalised by Phidias? Why should we listen to such horrors as that Tantalos killed his own son, boiled him, and placed him before the gods to eat? or that the gods collected his limbs, threw them into a caldron, and thus restored Pelops to life, minus, however, his shoulder, which Demeter had eaten in a fit of absence, and which had therefore to be replaced by a shoulder made of ivory? Can we imagine anything more silly, more savage, more senseless, anything more unworthy to engage our thoughts, even for a single moment? We may pity our children that, in order to know how to construe and understand the master-works of Homer and Virgil, they have to fill their memory with such idle tales; but we might justly VOL. XIX. A Lecture at the Royal Institution. H suppose that men who have serious work to do in this world, would banish such subjects for ever from their thoughts. And yet, how strange, from the very childhood of philosophy, from the first faintly-whispered Why? to our own time of matured thought and fearless inquiry, mythology has been the ever-recurrent subject of anxious wonder and careful study. The ancient philosophers, who could pass by the petrified shells on mountain-tops and the fossil trees buried in their quarries without ever asking the question how they came to be there, or what they signified, were ever ready with doubts and surmises when they came to listen to ancient stories of their gods and heroes. And, more curious still, even modern philosophers cannot resist the attraction of these ancient problems. That stream of philosophic thought which, springing from Descartes (1596-1650), rolled on through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in two beds—the idealistic, marked by the names of Malebranche (1638-1715), Spinoza (1632-1677), and Leibnitz (1648—1716); and the sensualistic, marked by the names of Locke (1632-1704), David Hume (1711-1776), and Condillac (1715—1780), till the two arms united again in Kant (1724—1804), and the full stream was carried on by Schelling (1775-1854), and Hegel (1770-1831),-this stream of modern philosophic thought has ended where ancient philosophy began-in a Philosophy of Mythology, which, as you know, forms the most important part of Schelling's final system, of what he called himself his Positive Philosophy, given to the world after the death of that great thinker and poet in the year 1854. I do not mean to say that Schelling and Aristotle looked upon mythology in the same light, or that they found in it exactly the same problems; yet there is this common feature in all who have thought or written on mythology, that they look upon it as something which, whatever it may mean, does certainly not mean what it seems to mean; as something that requires an explanation, whether it be a system of religion, or a phase in the development of the human mind, or an inevitable catastrophe in the life of language. According to some, mythology is history changed into fable; according to others, fable changed into history. Some discover in it the precepts of moral philosophy enunciated in the poetical language of antiquity; others see in it a picture of the great forms and forces of nature, particularly the sun, the moon, and the stars, the changes of day and night, the succession of the seasons, the return of the years-all this reflected by the vivid imagination of ancient poets and sages. Epicharmos, for instance, the pupil of Pythagoras, declared that the gods of Greece were not what, from the poems of Homer, we might suppose them to be-personal beings, endowed with superhuman powers, though liable to many of the passions and frailties of human nature. He maintained that these gods were |