party, then it follows that the Conservative party is antagonistic to agricultural reform; and it is from Conservative advocates that we have this virtual confession that they are not true farmers' friends. The Alliance has produced a test by which the professed friends of farmers may be tried, and it has produced that test without any party objects in view. Some of the leading representatives of one party, in the press and on the platform, with surprising naïveté, have exposed themselves and their allies as politicians tried by that test and found wanting. It is, however, gratifying to find that numbers of Conservatives, especially amongst farmers, are also agricultural reformers, and these, in joining the Alliance, do so under the honest assurance of its leaders that the association will not be used for party purposes. The Alliance will support candidates who fairly and fully represent its principles, to whichever party they may nominally belong; and if such candidates happen to be more generally Liberals than Conservatives, they will be supported, not because they are Liberals, but because they are agricultural reformers. In short, Principles, not party,' is the motto of the Farmers' Alliance.

But the imminence of a general election only in part accounts for the public welcome given to the Farmers' Alliance. Merchants, shopkeepers, and all classes of professional men have become members, and volunteered their help in various ways, and the letters in which they have proffered their assistance show that they have long been in sympathy with the aims now made public as the distinct 'platform' of a new organisation. I conclude my paper, therefore, with a much more hopeful feeling than that with which I began it. The interest of the public in agricultural reform seemed dull and almost lifeless; but, in reality, as now appears, it was only dull as tinder is, which needs but a spark to kindle it into a flame.

WILLIAM E. BEAR.

THE

NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. XXXII.-OCTOBER 1879.

MODERN ATHEISM AND MR. MALLOCK1

WHEN We have to do with any excellent conjuror, and are bent upon discovering the secret of his trick, one of our first chances of success lies in learning to listen between his sentences. We must not miss a word of what he says, yet we must attend to it less for its own sake, or in hope of getting any direct light from it, than to observe what he does not say: what indeed he draws our attention away from in his actual utterances. Whatever he emphasises as certain, or airily dismisses as a matter of course, we must think over, chary of giving too unguarded an assent, unless we would allow him to delude us from first to last. We must suspect him of making new and unfamiliar use of old and familiar truisms, on the ground that the conclusions he makes them point to are clearly at variance among themselves.

During the past two years many of us have been reading the essays of Mr. Mallock. This clever but thoroughly unscientific young writer has apparently set himself by force of words to put what he calls the positivist' world out of conceit with its own inducements to live righteously, if not, indeed, to live at all: out of conceit, besides, with its own reasons for, or habit of, believing that there exist any real moral distinctions apart from a belief in God and heaven. Truth and purity are the two special forms of virtue which

'Mr. Mallock's Essay on Modern Atheism in relation to Morality, which appeared in January 1877, and to the examination of which I confine myself in the present article, contains in brief nearly all the arguments its writer has since elaborated. VOL. VI.-No. 32. RR

appear to vex Mr. Mallock most by their supposed inconsistency with the positivist's diminished body of beliefs.

It is not my intention to attempt any denial of what Mr. Mallock affirms as to the greatness of the loss we experience in the obliteration of a belief in a God who will certainly arrange the universe to meet our deserts after we are dead. The greater part of what he says on this head appears to me as true as it is depressing. But because his conclusions that life is not worth living, morally at least, without supernatural religion, and that morality itself is a system of chains any man is a fool to hug unless he believes in heaven and hell—because these conclusions do not square with the tenacity with which sane persons who fully understand him continue to cling both to life and morals, it may be well to ascertain what it is that he suppresses or overlooks; what it really is which makes for moral living within the positivist breast, and prevents the positivist from feeling himself a fool for it either. And to secure an arrival at conclusions in agreement with these facts of life rather than with those of hocus-pocus, I find the best way is to treat Mr. Mallock's arguments as those of a conjuror bent upon deceiving me for his own advantage, and for my amusement. And just as I grant the conjuror all he says that harmonises with my common sense, so will I grant Mr. Mallock nearly the whole of his written propositions, and for the same purpose, viz., to get my attention free to pry into what he never mentions, but which I yet know is there, and somehow at the bottom of the whole trick. Meanwhile I will not be imposed upon by epigram, which is ever apt to degenerate into clap-trap, serviceable to the speaker, but confusing to the listener.

It is not a pleasant task to go over Mr. Mallock's ground with him. Having looked at that to which he draws our attention, and reasoned out or felt out one by one the points on which he challenges dispute, one finds oneself in sad honesty bound to agree with him in a number of thoroughly dismal and sickening propositions to which, while hoping that as much virtuous happiness as there is in the world may be presently found to give them the lie, we yet assent for the nonce as seeming to hang together with a grim and nasty consistency. Then comes the question, What may there be which our conjuror haply suppresses or overlooks?'

In the present paper I propose to confine myself to the discussion, from a point of view other than his own, of the interesting problem which Mr. Mallock chose as title and subject of an early essay, appearing in the Contemporary Review for January 1877, namely, Modern Atheism in its relation to morality. It seems to me that Mr. Mallock's whole argument, as unfolded in his subsequent writings, stands or falls with the pretensions of premisses he, with much show of assurance, lays down in this his opening essay.

With small preamble he opens fire thus:

There is a certain foregone conclusion which to the world at large is held by each to justify and recommend his premisses, and which each is anxious to show as the logical result of them. This is the sacred and supreme importance of a high morality, the essential superiority of virtue over vice, the absolute antagonism of right and wrong. No appeal to the sacredness of truth would give credit to a system that avowedly placed vice on a par with virtue, and left it merely a matter of individual taste whether lust and gluttony were preferable to what have hitherto been considered as the highest affections.

Every word of this utterance is emphatically true: true, perhaps, in these modern days of Atheism' and public-spirited good-will as it has never been before. Even more is true in the same direction. Ethical controversy is animated throughout by a remarkable tacit assumption that it would be a terrible thing to be equally happy and equally prosperous, supposing such a case were possible, without a belief in right and wrong as such. Whether or no it be true that the only conceivable human end and aim of life, life itself being once secured, is the happiness of the living agent, it seems evident enough that a belief in right and wrong forms a very considerable element in the tacit popular conception of what happiness' necessarily includes. It is this assumption that gives its ring of bitter melancholy even to the lurid glee of the Lesbian singers in their ever conscious defiance of what the world calls virtue. Religious orthodoxy makes its strongest defence when it entrenches itself behind this unquestioned and almost universal feeling. Scientific scepticism comes nearer to making illogical concessions at this point than at any other. So far there is nothing to dispute with Mr. Mallock.

In the essay under consideration, however, this fact, pregnant though it be with suggestions undermining our writer's whole argument, is only brought forward to introduce the proposition that men's liking for their own consciences and their belief in the value of what these consciences endorse must stand or fall with their belief in the existence of a personal God and in the personal immortality of men. These are his words (the italics being my own). His aim is to shownot whether the beliefs [in God and immortality] be false or true, nor whether the change involved in their loss be for the better or worse, but simply that the change would be real-that, whether for good or evil, the belief in God and immortality has a practical effect upon practical life-upon what men do, and what they forbear to do, what they love and what they hate, what they think of themselves and of one another: that, whether we realise it or not, these two beliefs are implied in all the special praise men give to self-sacrifice, to heroism, to purity of heart, and in the special value they attach to the chastity of their wives and daughters. Without these two beliefs (he continues), I propose to show that vice under sanitary conditions ceases to be vice; that without them there can be no standard by which the quality of pleasures can be tested; that truth as truth, and virtue as virtue, cease to be in any way admirable; that, in short, the whole complexion of life will change, all our notions of life be turned upside down; and that those who deny this fact or try to conceal it from us are guilty either of unconscious inconsistency or unconscious fraud.

Mr. Mallock thus makes us a sinister promise, but he fails to keep

it. He 'shows' us nothing of this sort. The essay, within the limits wherein it aims at confining its reader's mind to work, is clever and complete; grant Mr. Mallock his airily assumed premisses, and his conclusion follows drearily enough-but the premisses, and they are stated and defended at length, amount only to this. All the morality there is in the world which does not happen to be based on immediate personal expediency, making it unworthy the name of morality, is the direct and exclusive outcome of religion as embodied in the two beliefs threatened by Modern Atheism '-1st, that God is, and 2nd, that He will deal with men in a future world according to their more or less adherence to a supernatural and super-expedient code of conduct in this world. Grant Mr. Mallock this much-grant that virtue is either valueless in the light of this life, or that, being valuable and shown to be so, its intrinsic excellence and beauty vanish-and we may go further, and grant that life will be changed in such a way as to lose its moral meaning and worth in proportion as its God dies and its heaven disappears. But these are just the two propositions to which careful consideration forbids our assent. Happily for the man whose happiness in any degree depends on the pleasures of conscience, Mr. Mallock is a juggler and a special pleader, and no discoverer or teacher of new truth.

Let us examine the above-quoted utterance phrase by phrase. I have italicised the only clauses which appear to me entirely inaccurate, and postpone their discussion for a few pages for the sake of observing how very much truth there is in the rest of the quotation, and how completely that truth is made to subserve what I conceive to be a radical misconception.

The first proposition above quoted as to the reality of the change that will come over our notions of morality when, if ever, the two primary doctrines of religion cease from among us, is true enough: the change will be real, is real enough in many a 'positivist' mind already. Our sanctions and prohibitions of one another's conduct, our approval and disapproval of one another's motives, will be awarded on different grounds,—are already in many directions coming to be awarded on different grounds;-and we may or may not retain the name of virtue for the conduct and motives we approve, and the name of vice for the conduct and motives we disapprove. All that I care to deny is that the change is of a kind subversive of moral distinctions; all that I here insist upon is, that, however implicit in our moral beliefs our religious beliefs may have been, the fact (never once glanced at by Mr. Mallock) remains that the reasons we give ourselves for a feeling or a judgment, and the causes to which we really owe that feeling or judgment, and which underlie it and give it practical validity, need not be, and by no means generally are, one and the same thing. We may, for instance, tell ourselves that we prefer sight to blindness because of what we can see with our eyes; really we prefer it because we inherit a liking for what has indirectly helped us into