they have inherited from their fathers against the principles they are bequeathing to their children; but it will be In vain, in vain. The all-composing hour Before her fancy's gilded clouds decay, Such literally is the effect with which atheism threatens the present resources of life. In our own day, about us in England, we may see the prophecy beginning to fulfil itself. We may see in many quarters dulness and lassitude already setting in, and the very notion of content and happiness vanishing. And yet we are being told that our new aim in life is happiness, and that even if we cannot procure it for ourselves, we can help to procure it in a brighter future for others. We are told that the happiness of heaven was an idle dream, a vapid figment; that it vanished when we tried to conceive it; but that this human happiness is something that is solid and certain. If so, what is it? Even at present it is hard to procure, with all the interests of life at their present intensity. Much more will it be hard to procure when these interests lose their strongest hold upon us, and when all life's finest flavours shall have gone from it, as I have shown they must go with the final going of religion. When therefore our moralists talk about humanity, and the glory of its earthly present, and still more of its earthly future, I reply to them in the very words that one of themselves has used with regard to its heavenly future. I say to them as Mr. Frederic Harrison says to his opponents, “My position is this. The idea of a glorified energy in an ampler life is an idea utterly incompatible with exact thought; one which evaporates in contradictions—in phrases which, when pressed, have no meaning.' What, I ask, will the ideally happy man be like? What will he long for ? What will he take pleasure in? How will he spend his days ? How will he make love? What will he laugh at ? Let us have some picture of this nobler, ampler, glorified being of the future. Let him be described in phrases which, when pressed, do not evaporate in contradictions, but which have some distinct meaning, and which are compatible with exact thought. Perhaps such a being may emerge in the future. I can only say that I defy any one to imagine him, or seriously to hope for his production. If we really do believe that he is in store for us, the belief is as much an act of faith as the belief in heaven ; it is as vague; it is even more grotesque ; and what discredits the one equally discredits the other. For myself, I can conceive no more ludicrous spectacle than any possible picture of one such radiant being, except it were a whole race of them. In a life bounded by 6 a itself, in a life with no hope, no outlook beyond itself, in a life from which religion, the present salt of the earth (and I mean here, by salt, the flavouring as well as the preserving element), has been taken, it is impossible to imagine what any such radiance could be about. If a heaven with God is a state of blessedness that is unthinkable, a Utopia on earth without a God is much more so. As far, then, as observation and experiment will carry us, the one conclusion that we come to is this :-All the higher, indeed all the strictly human, pleasures of life-human as distinct from animaldepend, and have always depended, on the supernatural moral judgment; on the sense not that we are doing our own will, but the will of a Power above us, who is greater and more sublime than we, and yet is, in a sense, akin to us. Nor in saying this do I confine myself to the Christian centuries, nor to nations nor to ages that have risen to any higher kind of theism at all. The same tending towards a personal God is to be traced in all the great civilisations of the world. There has been the same moral passion, though it has often not been aware of its object, though it has been utterly unable to explain itself to itself. To understand this, it is enough to hint a comparison. This longing for God, man's strongest spiritual passion, has its analogue in his strongest physical passion. And as the latter is a mystery to itself in the youth of the individual, so is the former a mystery to itself in the youth of races. Our present school of moralists are men who would still retain the moral passion, but at the same time they deny the existence of its only possible object, and set up others that are utterly inadequate either to excite or to appease it. Such is the enthusiasm of humanity, which is now offered as an explanation of it. This is really nothing but the desire of God, which will not confess itself. George Eliot's books, to turn to a striking instance, are really instinct with a latent theism, with an unacknowledged religious dogmatism of the most absolute and severest kind. George Eliot is really, as Spinoza was, a person intoxicated with God. Mr. Frederic Harrison is another case in point. He, too, like George Eliot, is a suppressed theist. He is full of a longing for God that declines to own itself; and when he tells us that all his fine feelings are due to the teachings of Positivism, the best reply we can make to him is in the lines of Byron, with the alteration of a single word : If you think philosophy 'twas this did, I can't help thinking theism assisted. I am not speaking at random. I am simply calling attention to a fact as capable of investigation and proof as any other—that is, the intimate connection of morality and religion, or rather their essential identity, not their mere connection. They are, in fact, but different aspects of the same thing. “I desire to be pure in heart 'is only another way of saying 'I desire to see God.' Neither the value of purity nor the existence of God is a thing that can be proved; but this fact can be, that they stand and fall together. We can get rid of both if we like, but we cannot keep the one and reject the other. What destroys one will destroy both. The practical question, then, that is really before us is this :Has life, as we have hitherto viewed it, been viewed under a false aspect, a deceiving glamour ? Are all its pains and pleasures but a mixture of a nightmare and an ecstasy, giving to everything an exaggerated value both of joy and sorrow? Is the moral life only a dream we have been dreaming, and from which, in groups less or larger, we are now at last awakening? This is a question that reason cannot answer. The answer must be sought in a deeper part of our nature. The choice is between premisses, not between conclusions. Shall we set our affections on nothing but what cannot be doubted ? If so, we shall set them on nothing but the pleasures of sense. And this is what the entire science of the last three centuries has been schooling the world to do, though the real import of its teaching is only now at last slowly becoming apparent. At present, beyond a doubt, it is the world's tendency to accept this teaching. Indeed, in a great measure it has already accepted it. What I am trying now to point out is the certain practical result of this acceptance. That result is a paralysis of the moral judgmentthe paralysis, that is, of the sense by which all life's keener interest has been hitherto apprehended. And what will be the state of those on whom, one by one, in the world now about us, this paralysis seizes, as it is seizing day by day? They will be men looking before and after. They will see the life that the world has lived hitherto, but is now leaving behind it. They will see the life that the world is drifting into. The old feeling for virtue will still remain with them. They will still carry with them the importunate notion that life might have some high and worthy meaning. They will still have the wish to struggle after righteousness. Personally, very likely, they will still continue to do so. But all the while the conviction will haunt them, corroding their whole nature, that this struggle is, after all, an unmeaning one; and they will feel that to other men they can give neither blame nor praise. They will be forced to look with a desponding impartiality on the higher impulses that are yet surviving, and on the lower impulses that will always remain a constant quantity. They will not call the virtuous foolish, nor the vicious wise. They will praise one set of men no more than the other. They will merely say to each with the same listless impartiality: “Do as you please, so long as you do not interfere with your neighbours. If a man has principles, let him live by them. The principles are a dream, but no matter—to him practically they are facts. They will say the same to the man with 6 no principles: “Follow your vices; follow your passions; be a beast if you choose to be—do just as you like.' They will not deny that to many life may have a balance of pleasures. But this they do say—that if this balance be not realised here, and on this side the grave, then life has no meaning for us, and can have none. To the unsuccessful they will have no word of comfort. They can only say to such, “The end will come soon. Then draw the curtain ; the weary farce will be over.' No denial of life's worth can be more complete than this. It is all the more forcible, because it affects no impossible universality. It will leave life the worth of a toy for those that care to play with it; but to those who have outgrown toys it will leave nothing. This pessimism is very different from that of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's has been attributed to some form of mental disease—to some abnormal depression of spirits that made all life look black to him. But this pessimism is of a different kind. It will be possible for the most healthy and most joyous temperaments, as well as for the most morbid. It will darken the brightest moods as well as it will harmonise with the darkest. It will be ready to assail us in all our business and in all our pleasures, touching us with ever-recurring qualms of lifesickness. It is so simple that all can accept it. It is a kingdom into which even little children may enter. It may leave us mad; but to get a hold on us, it assuredly will not need to find us so. W. H. MALLOCK. SHOULD PRISONERS BE EXAMINED? SIR JAMES STEPHEN's article on Law Reform' in the December number of this Review deals with two subjects of grave importance affecting our criminal procedure—the policy of subjecting prisoners to examination, and the want of an effective Court of Appeal in criminal cases. It deals with the more general considerations from which the subjects ought in the first instance to be approached; and so considered, there is little in his observations upon either topic to which, as it seems to me, just exception can be taken, whilst the impartial and philosophical spirit which characterises them must command respect and enforce attention. Both questions, however, belong pre-eminently to a domain in which it is difficult to exaggerate the weight of considerations of a less dignified because more exclusively practical character; and nothing can be more certain than that, if any change be made without a thorough appreciation of consequences, and without their being thoroughly borne in mind before change is determined upon, or at all events before it receives the definite shape in which it may be finally carried into effect, the results will in all probability lead to great disappointment. I propose to make some remarks in which greater prominence will be given to certain practical difficulties, more or less serious, with which any reform of the kind now under discussion is beset. Unless they are well understood by those who may join in the discussion, or may help to bring public pressure to bear upon Government or Parliament, there inay be danger of our taking a very serious leap in the dark. I start with the admission-and, more than the admission, the strong conviction—that there are cases, more or less numerous, in which an innocent man accused of crime must simply thirst for the opportunity of telling his own tale, and letting himself be subjected to the most rigorous examination, and in which the fact that he cannot do so must appear to him an intolerable hardship and a crying injustice. Given a man of firm nerve, of accurate memory, of unflinching courage, either with nothing to conceal or resolved to conceal nothing, the absence of the opportunity of being examined and crossexamined must strike such a man, unjustly accused of crime, as a terrible blot upon our judicial system. Such men, however, are few |