all sorts of buyers and sellers, and to forming quick and shrewd judgments of the character and intentions of those with whom their vocations brought them into contact-that these men had derived from their experience so low an opinion of the actual morality of their fellows; that they had plainly reached the conclusion that there are few indeed who are really honest except so far as they think it their best policy to be so. See what the fruit-buyer's words really come to: In all his dealings with the growers, he had never encountered but one trustworthy man, and he would not be surprised to have even him turn out a knave on the first especially favorable opportunity; it was "the way of the world!"

Now the point I wish to make is just this: We ordinarily treat our fellow men as if there were a strong presumption that they would take unfair advantage of us if they could; we know by experience (if the trial has been made) how much easier it is to acquire new faults than to relinquish those we have, while observation clearly teaches that evil communications are far more apt to corrupt good manners than are good manners to over-awe evil communications; and we shall be told every day, on inquiry of the men most experienced in the rough struggle for life, that "it is the way of the world" to assume a cloak of virtue to hide the intention of vice-confirming Herbert Spencer's generalization that in the management of business, "instead of assuming, as people usually do, that things are going right until it is proved that they are going wrong, the proper course is to assume that they are going wrong until it is proved that they are going right."*

These facts, established and indisputable, do not entirely cover the ground of the theological doctrine of total depravity; but do they not furnish us, in phenomena of which every student of the human race is bound to take account, a close parallel to that doctrine, which is often overlooked by mystical believers in the "something good" in every depraved and abandoned man?

* Popular Science Monthly, December, 1882, vol. xxii, page 272.

II.

The world wearied long ago, as well it might, of the endless disputes in which many thinkers capable of better work have engaged about free will and foreordination. There is perhaps no more unprofitable task than to endeavor to reconcile in words these two conceptions as harmonious with each other. But let us keep clear of metaphysics and look at nature.

That man is free in his choices, surely few persons outside of jail and bedlam will deny; whoever affirms that he is unable to decide as he pleases on every question of right or wrong do ing, may well be suspected, if he speaks seriously, either of fraud or insanity. One may of course persuade himself that he is too weak to carry out his purposes, and so may go wrong while he says he means to go right; but that is quite another matter. It is the decision, the choosing, with which only we are here concerned; and the drunkard of most frequent drunkenness, or the profane person of the most multifarious oaths, while pleading earnestly the tyranny of long established habit as an excuse for his bad practices, will invariably use language that presupposes and admits his unimpaired ability to resolve upon a reformation. "I honestly meant to go right home that night, but I had to pass so many drinking places, and you don't know what struggles I went through before I yielded to the temptation"-what employer, about to discharge a dissipated man, has not heard language like that, in palliation of the last disgraceful debauch? And what employer, or what court of justice, though pitying and at the same time despising the weakness of the culprit who only means and wishes to do right, while persistently in fact doing wrong, will acquit him of responsibility for the results of his vicious courses on the ground that he could not abandon them? The whole structure of every description of government and discipline, from the family up to the nation, has for its fundamental principle and corner stone the universally accepted belief that man is morally free.

Yet what feature is more obvious in our daily experience than this—that the most carefully considered course of action is apt to bring about results entirely different from those de

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sired, and that not only one's visible career but even the inner personal life very often shapes itself, so to speak, into forms quite other than those that were intended? "So strangely," writes Macaulay, "do events confound all the plans of man! A prince who read only French, who wrote only French, who ranked as a French classic, became, quite unconsciously, the means of liberating half the Continent from the dominion of that French criticism of which he was himself to the end of his life a slave." The same conception has crystallized itself into a dozen popular proverbs: "man proposes-;" "the best laid plans-" "there's many a slip"-how familiar, how threadbare, is the idea! And how few men there are who ever either do or become what they intended! How little is mental development, how little are our tastes and habits, governed in the long run by deliberate purpose; or rather, how often do they grow in directions diametrically opposed to the fixed intention! No man surely who knows anything of himself or of mankind, will compare a human soul to the steamer that plows her way through the billows regardless of wind and current, or even to the ship that may be tossed about this way and that, but finally reaches the port of destination. Rather does it resemble the climbing vine, embodying indeed a principle of growth and of a certain kind of growth, but depending chiefly for its form and its direction upon circumstances lying entirely outside of its own nature. Now the orthodox doctrine asks only a slight extension of these well-known truths. Substitute for Macaulay's vague term "events," the perfectly clear and intelligible conception of a higher power influencing events, and one sees instantly that the free will of the creature may have its fullest exercise, while yet the purposes of the Creator are brought to

pass.

And in regard to the operation of the higher power and its bearings upon the responsibility of the beings whom, free though they be, that higher power directs and restrains, do we not see every day how a stronger will may control a weaker, without trenching in the smallest degree on its freedom of action? The father of a bright, active boy, devoted to the sports of the field, may have a practically certain prevision that an invitation to go gunning will be joyfully accepted; and

bis giving the invitation is just as truly the cause of the boy's willing to avail himself of it, as any one event can be the cause of another. The boy's volition to go is absolutely free, and yet is the inevitable result of the father's action. Now suppose a father omniscient and omnipotent, understanding to perfection the disposition of his child, and possessed of every conceivable facility for presenting every kind of motive-what difficulty is there in understanding that he may exercise an unlimited control over the child's actions, while yet the child is free and must therefore justly be held responsible, both by his own conscience and by every tribunal in the universe, for whatever he does?

It may be thought, however, that there must be a fallacy somewhere in this reasoning; that though we think we see one will perfectly controlled by another, while yet acting with perfect freedom, the two processes are mutually inconsistent and cannot go on together. But it needs no more than an extremely superficial acquaintance with the elements of physical science to exhibit the folly of rejecting either one of two well attested truths because we cannot make them agree with each other. As has been well said, no satisfactory explanation of the phenomena of light can be made, without supposing the existence of a medium which presents the most contradictory and seemingly impossible properties. The cosmic ether is infinitely more attenuated than any gas, but yet in many respects bears a much closer resemblance to solid bodies! It is matter, of course, and all matter is supposed to be made up of unchangeable and distinct particles; yet, for many reasons, the ether cannot be thus constituted. And indeed the whole atomic theory-universally accepted as it is, necessary as it seems to be for the scientific statement of scores of classes of phenomena, and almost demonstrated to be true, as it is, by the results of countless experiments in chemistry, is yet, consid ered as a whole, a bundle of contradictions. From one point of view, it seems to be certain that the atoms of all substances are exactly alike; from another, equally certain that they are intrinsically very different in size, weight and character. There are strong reasons, almost conclusive proof, for believing the atoms to be perfectly hard, mechanically unchangeable; and

equally strong reasons for supposing them highly elastic. Yet the very investigators who are most busily engaged in developing this atomic theory, would have it believed that only the “scientific” view of any subject is worthy of attention, and that "science" (by which they mean physical science) is always intelligible and self-consistent. Nor will it do to answer

that the undulatory theory of light, and the atomic constitution of matter, are only working hypotheses. The simple truth is that all the facts point directly toward light-waves and the existence of atoms, as the only generalizations that can satisfactorily explain them, and that the waves and atoms are therefore believed in, notwithstanding the contradictions in which the thinker immediately finds himself involved beyond hope of extrication. How absurd then, how trivial a complaint it is against the theological doctrines of natural inclination to evil conjoined with moral responsibility, and man's free will coujoined with God's sovereignty, that we do not know how to state them without seeming contradictions! In natural science, dealing with brute matter that can be seen and handled and weighed and analyzed, we accept any fact for which satisfactory evidence is presented, without caring in the least for our inability to make it agree with other facts equally well attested. Shall we then in spiritual science, where the phenomena to be considered are infinitely more complicated, their laws infinitely more involved, and where our powers of comprehension and reasoning are hardly adequate to even skimming the surface of the great ocean of unknown and perhaps to us unknowable truth-shall we in spiritual science demand that every statement must be seen fully and exactly to square with every other before it can be rationally believed? If the student of natural philosophy, or the chemist, demands that this be done, he at the same time condemns his own methods of procedure as fundamentally erroneous, and their results as the delusive figments of his misguided imagination.

III.

In the anxiety which many foolish people display to find cruelty, oppression and injustice in the primary tenets of the orthodox faith, a forced and unnatural interpretation of the