which rests her existence as a great empire has been seriously threatened by foreign competition, not only in all the markets of the world but even in her own United Kingdom. To hold her own thus far England has cheapened her labor until its price has been forced down to the lowest possible rate; but to no avail. Her eyes now see that what she must have to maintain her position is neither cheaper labor nor cheap labor, but labor of the greatest possible skill and worth. This idea wrought into the English mind has already accomplished much. The nation has at last resolved to put it into execution. Once aroused to a necessity the Anglo-Saxon character never balks. In 1870 Parliament provided a system of public schools by which splendid results far beyond anticipation have been secured. This year $15,080,000 have been appropriated in aid of national education in addition to the large sums raised by local and other measures. The employment of children under the age of fourteen unless they have first been well trained at school is restricted by law. There are now in attendance upon day and night schools no less than 5,080,000 pupils, or one in six of the entire population. Compulsory education is doing much for the laboring classes. But in addition to these public schools an extensive system of technical schools has been established in the principal manufacturing centers, where young men are trained in the application of science and the fine arts to industry. The laboring classes are now urged by every means to save their earnings. The postal savings bank even sends a clerk on pay-day to stand by the workman's side and ask him to make a deposit. There are savings banks connected with 1718 schools, that frugal habits may be encouraged in children. Great increase is noted in the number of depositors, the amount of deposits, and the average sum deposited by each person. England has come to see the folly of the old poor law and by reform legislation has with an increasing population decreased the number of paupers. An increase in the average of wages during the past fifty years is also to be admitted. A diminution of crime and a decline in the rate of mortality are also reported. The Reform Bill recently passed by the House of Commons, which aims to enfranchize 2,000,000 of men and thereby nearly double the number of voters in Great Britain,

will doubtless prevail in the end over the determined opposition of the House of Lords; for the workingmen led by Gladstone and backed by the Commons and public opinion, are no longer to be despised. The Lords must yield or be swept away by the rising storm. Bad then as the present condition of the laboring classes in England may be, we are justified in hoping that the worst has been, and that the tendency to better things will continue.

The large emigration is itself a hopeful sign. Its benefit is not so much in that every one that leaves makes a place for another, as it is that it shows English capitalists that now since modern invention has made migration so easy and America offers so many inducements to English operatives, England must ameliorate more and more the condition of her workmen, if she would keep them at home and away from the workshops of competing nations.

The abuse of a discovery of modern science will tend to make England persevere in her good resolution to give labor its fair share of remuneration-the discovery of dynamite. Labor is no longer powerless. With dynamite so easily made, concealed, and exploded, labor, if prohibited from social recognition, excluded from political rights, kept in ignorance of and aloof from religion, poorly paid, fed, and housed, crowded out of the country into the purlieus of the cities, crazed with rum, defying in its desperation all right and justice, may blow up raw material and machinery, capital and capitalists, overseers and all, into disorganization and anarchy, if not into annihilation.

English conscience and English interest are now seen to be one in the demand that the English laboring classes shall have their share in the outcome of English life. English conscience and English interest working at cross purposes have accomplished strange things in history. But when both work together they never fail of their purpose.

But what if the English working classes gain knowledge and power divorced from morality and religion? What if they have not self-restraint and self-direction? What if now they get the power and use it to settle old scores and take sweet vengeance? The thought makes the world tremble. Despo

tism embodied in a Charles I. could be wounded to death by the headman's axe; but if the myriad-headed populace should become the despot, who could play the part of executioner?

Secular and technical education are good so far as they go. Food and raiment and a place to lay one's head are essential; but the laboring classes cannot "live by bread alone." "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth." Self-restraint and self-reliance can only be secured by the soul's recognition of and submission to the power and beauty of the moral law, eternally executing itself, as embodied in a personal God of justice and of love.

There are two kinds of agnosticism, that of the philosopher and that of the multitude; they seem alike, but their similarity is the similarity of extremes. The philosophical agnostic is the one who has rejected the idea of God that has been calmly scrutinized. The agnosticism of the laboring classes is that of those who have not so much as heard whether there be any deity; the name they have heard, but the real content of the idea of God has never occurred to them.

But here too is there ground for hope. There has been great increase in Great Britain of attendance upon Sunday schools, there being according to the latest returns an attendance of 5,217,000 scholars. General Booth with his Salvation Army, and Moody and Sankey with their gospel songs and homely phrases have been each in his own way preaching the gospel to the poor, healing the broken-hearted, preaching deliverance to captives and recovering of sight to the blind, setting at liberty them that are bruised. Good Samaritans have found the workingman to be their neighbor. Thousands have heard and believed, promise and first fruits of more to follow.

Jesus, the carpenter, communicated his own thoughts, his own emotions, his own purposes, to John, the fisherman, who lay in his bosom; by so doing John was made rich in thought, in emotion, in purpose; but Jesus was none the poorer for all he gave. Whatsoever of thought or feeling or purpose John received from Jesus he in turn gave to another, having freely received he freely gave; but in giving he lost nothing of it all. By giving he rather increased his own knowledge, emotion, and purpose.

Suppose the Hon. John Bright, as no doubt he may have done, should take his best thought, his most thrilling emotion, his noblest purpose, and communicate it from his own brain to the brain of one of his workmen, from his own heart to the workman's heart, from his own will to the workman's will; what would be the result of such communism as this? Would the Hon. John Bright be any the poorer? Would not he and the workman be both the richer? Suppose that the England, which John Bright so fully represents, should take the workingman to its own bosom and communicate to his brain, to his heart, to his will, England's own best thought, best emotion, best purpose, would this England be any the poorer? Would not the workingman be infinitely richer? Here is Christian communism; break this loaf to the English workingman and he will no longer cry for a stone!

Grand old England! What wonders has she not wrought? She has girdled the earth with her colonies and whitened every sea with her sails, and filled the earth with the products of her industry; she has battled victoriously for civil and religious freedom. She is our mother; God bless her! All this has she wrought with nearly a million paupers, with her laboring classes ostracized from good society, excluded from political power, deprived of education, destitute of religion, poorly paid, fed, clothed, and housed, driven from the country and penned up in the cities, with one-tenth of her vitality annually sacrificed to the demon of rum. What would she not have accomplished had she been freed from this terrible incubus? What will she not accomplish when in the near future her laboring classes shall be crowned with manhood, freed from the slavery of rum, liberally paid, properly clothed, fed, and sheltered in a home, when they and their children shall be educated, when social standing and political power may be safely put in their hands, when religion shall bind them with cords of love to a God whom they recognize as their Father and the Father of

men!

ARTICLE VIII.-IMMORTALITY AND EVOLUTION.

Is it possible for a man convinced of the truth of the law of Evolution, to believe in individual immortality? The scientific specialist as a rule answers the question decidedly in the negative. The man whose one desire is to keep up with the ideas usually called advanced, accepts his dictum, and talks contemptuously of the superstition of the past. The truly broad and catholic thinker, a George Eliot or an Emerson, is driven to a position of unstable equilibrium and negative doubt, practically equivalent to unbelief. The intelligent Christian holds the two truths side by side in his mind, carefully preventing any contact between them. That there is yet another possible position, which views the belief in a future life as positively strengthened by a clear comprehension of the law of progress, it is the object of the present paper to show.

With the alleged contradictions between Evolution and Immortality, this is not the place to deal. They all rest on the assumption that the correlative development of brain and mind points to the non-existence of mind as a separate entity, and hence to the impossibility of its existence after the dissolution of the body. How groundless is this assumption, may best be shown by one or two quotations. "The utmost possibility for us is an interpretation of the process of things as it presents itself to our limited consciousness," says Spencer. "Carried to whatever extent, the inquiries of the psychologist do not reveal the ultimate nature of mind." "The relation of thought to a material brain is no metaphysical necessity," writes J. S. Mill, "but simply a constant co-existence within the limits of observation. . . . . There is, therefore, in science, no evidence against the immortality of the soul, but that negative evidence which consists in the absence of evidence in its favor."

Leaving, then, all attempt at the reconcilement of two things which cannot be directly compared, let us see what results from considering the two sciences as complemental, and