faith in the development of religious knowledge. Clement of Alexandria, in the beginning of the third century, admirably defined their relations. According to his view, faith is a natural result of knowledge, which, far from suppressing experiment, alone renders it possible, when we are considering first principles which one only grasps by intuition. An axiom is not admitted except by an act of faith which is identical with what Epicurus called "an anticipation of the mind." This intuition. of faith is really the very introduction of science, its true precedent condition. If this intuition is necessary, even for the first principles of all knowledge, how much more is it necessary when the subject of discussion is the highest of all principles, that Absolute Existence which is God. Clement of Alexandria says magnificently: "The mind transcending all worlds and all spheres of created being, ascends to that lofty plain where dwells the king of worlds. It has arrived at the unchangeable by a path itself unchangeable." Clement finds the legitimate function of the will in "that act of faith and intuition which lays hold upon the divine." The soul must first of all aspire after the higher truth. The beginning of wisdom is to cleave unto that which is useful. A steadfast decision is then of great value in the acquisition of the truth. The desire precedes everything. It is needful to rekindle in the depth of the soul the living spark which has been received, and to guard it from a vain curiosity, which might cause the mind, so to speak, to walk about in the midst of the truths for mere amusement, as one might walk about in a city to admire its buildings. More than that is necessary. The soul must be purified; for the temple of truth is like that temple of Epidauros on whose front these words were inscribed: "He must be pure whose feet cross the threshold of this sanctuary." Clement of Alexandria only developed the sublime method which should govern our searchings after truth when he traced back all his Apologetics to this principle: "To perceive the like by means of the like." Is not this fundamentally the basis of that experimental method which consists in applying the processes of observation to the nature of the objects to be observed? To push with one's whole soul toward existence and whatever is most marked in existence, that, said Plato, is the good. Clement, who believed

in a living and personal God, acknowledged His influence over the soul to clarify and vivify it. In his view this action commenced with the first illumination of reason or the primary intuitions. This action increases, develops, but does not change its character. Faith, in the supreme revelations of God in Jesus Christ, obeys the same laws as faith in the primary intuitions of consciousness and reason, by means of which they lift us up to God. Thus he escapes all the dangers of dualism. We never see him under pretext of strengthening human weakness setting up some wholly external power to impose its decisions upon the mind, and itself escape investigation. That implicit confidence which opens an unlimited credit at the tribunal of doctrine has no relationship to faith in the sense in which we have used it. Nothing is more dangerous than to rest upon the undoubted fact that reason as well as conscience is satisfied with what transcends its powers, in order to impose upon them what is decidedly antagonistic to them, and yet what as a simple result from its nature lies beyond all investigation or knowledge. M. Ollé-Laprune strangely compromises moral certainty, and at the same time makes it responsible for each individual item of accepted fact, when he turns it over to a pretended infallibility. Conscience never abdicates, under penalty of robbing us of that organ through which alone we can recognize moral truth. A person never closes his eyes in order to see farther or higher.

Thus far we have confined ourselves strictly to the problem of knowledge. We have in the first place regained by conquest its most noble domain from that positivism which forbade the investigation of the higher cause. We then showed how the principle of causality cannot be carried from within outward, and how it is lost in the simple association of ideas where we get only representations and sensations. After having again laid hold upon it in the reason as the essential element of the à priori which it finds nowhere but within itself, it has lifted us up to the very Cause of the causes of which we gain perception, and to which we aspire from the depth of our imperfection-an imperfection which proves that the great cause does not lie within us. Nothing has to our view weakened the great Cartesian argument, which has really derived benefit from the re

action of French and German criticism; for that criticism has delivered it from the intellectualism which compromised it, by making intellectual certainty entirely subordinate to moral certainty. We have not felt ourselves obliged with the critics to admit a contradiction between metaphysical and practical reason. We have established: first, that they both require for their accomplishment the action of the will; and, secondly, that since the categories of reason are the object of experience in the activity of the Ego, practical reason implies the reality of a world where its imperative finds accomplishment. The principle of causality, which naturally stands as an element of pure as well as of practical reason, or, better still, of the human mind in its totality, leads us by a most irresistible deduction to God, who is at once the Infinite Being and the Absolute Good; and thus introduces us into that domain which is par excellence moral, and into which we can only enter by putting ourselves into harmony with Him. Thence comes the function of the will in moral certainty. It might be said that if we confine our discussion merely to the problem of knowledge, the problem of spiritual life is already solved. But we have no right to stop satisfied here. We ought to go out of the realm of the ego and investigate the realms of nature and history (=experience) to see whether they corroborate or contradict the results already obtained. Thanks to that great principle of causality, which we have endeavored to put beyond doubt or dispute, we now know how to question these new witnesses. We have concluded with Descartes, that there should be at least as much character ascribed to the efficient cause as to the effect; that the effect can only draw its reality from the cause; that denying this fact accomplishes nothing, since that which is more perfect can never be the result of nor dependent upon the less perfect;* to sum up all in one word, the greater cannot proceed from the smaller.

* Descartes, Third Meditation.

ARTICLE IV.-EASY DIVORCE: ITS CAUSES AND EVILS. A SOCIAL STUDY.

SOCIAL changes go on slowly. Society starts on a tendency which is subtle and obscure, and the effect is not observed at first. It is only after years, perhaps generations, of unquestioned movement in the given direction, that it is discovered at length that the tendency was a bad one, and that society has been fostering within its own bosom a fatal principle.

One of the tendencies of our times, wherever the influence of modern thought is felt, is towards greater freedom of divorce. This is the most noticeable in the freest countries. It is very marked in America. In earlier times divorce was comparatively rare in this country. Forty years ago persons who lived in any of the older States seldom heard of an instance, and a divorce suit caused about as much sensation as a murder trial. Recent statistics, however, on this subject are startling.

I. THE FACTS.

According to statistics* gathered by Rev. S. W. Dike, of Royalton, Vt., of which I have made free use, it appears that there has been a great increase of the frequency of divorce during the last quarter of a century in our country, except in four or five States, where within five years a more restrictive legislation has been adopted. In 1849, Connecticut granted 91 divorces. During the next fifteen years the number suddenly rose to an average of 445 each year, giving a ratio of one divorce to 10.4 marriages. Then, after the repeal of what was called the "Omnibus bill," the number of divorces fell in 1879, to 316, and in 1880, to 382. Massachusetts, in 1860, sundered 243 marriage bonds, and then acquired such facility in the use of the legal shears that in 1878 she clipped 600 ties. the ratio of divorces to marriages in 1860 being as 1 to 51, and in 1878, as 1 to 21.4. Maine cut the knot 478 times in 1878, and 587 times in 1880, being, as estimated, 1 divorce to 9 marriages. *Furnished to the New York Evening Post.

In Vermont, in 1860, 94 couples walked apart from wedlock with the sanction of the courts; in 1878, 197 couples;-being in the former year, in the ratio of 1 to 23.2, and in the latter, of 1 to 14, marriages. Rhode Island, in 1869, released from wedlock 1 to every 141 she bound in it; and in 1881, 1 to every 10.4. In Ohio, the ratio of divorces to marriages in 1865, was 1 to 26; in 1881, 1 to 17. In Michigan in 1881, there was 1 divorce to 13.25 marriages, in 24 counties. In one populous county in Minnesota, the ratio of divorces to marriages, in 1871, was as 1 to 29, and, in 1831, as 1 to 23. Louisville had a ratio of one divorce suit to 13.31 marriages, in 1881; and during the same year, St. Louis granted 263 divorces; and Cook County, the county of Chicago, had one divorce to 13.4 marriages.

Dark as these statistics are in the States east of us, the records of our courts in California disclose even a worse social condition. From inquiries addressed to the county clerks of the several counties of this State, I have gained the following facts: In 1882, Yolo County granted 77 licenses for marriages, and 4 divorces,-one divorce to 19.25 marriages; Nevada County, 121 licenses, 9 divorces,-1 to 13.44; Santa Clara, 283 licenses, 27 divorces, 1 to 10.48; San Francisco,* 2,605 licenses, 309 divorces,-1 to 8.41; El Dorado, 55 licenses, 7 divorces,--1 to 7.85; Placer, 86 licenses, 12 divorces,-1 to 7.15; Alameda, 598 licenses, 87 divorces,-1 to 6.87; Los Angeles, 348 licenses, 60 divorces,-1 to 5.6; Sacramento, 374 licenses, 81 divorces, 1 to 4.61; Butte, 112 licenses and 19 divorces,-1 to 5.89. Nineteen other counties have responded to the call, and sent in their divorce statistics for 1882. The two banner counties are, so far as reported, Marin and Sutter. Marin, having as its county seat, San Rafael, a snug and acceptable retreat, under the shadow of great cities, easy to flee to for the concealment or dispatch of the unseemly business, reports 57 licenses, and 27 divorces, one divorce to 2.11 marriages! Sutter County reports 25 licenses, and no divorces. Trinity County also granted no divorces, but issued only 13 licenses. The result in these 29 counties, out of the 52 in the State, is 5,849 licenses and 789

*The figures in San Francisco County cover the fiscal year, from July 1, 1881, to June 30, 1882, inclusive.