of neutralizing the world's great highways is daily gaining ground, I here quote a summary of Sir George Elliot's views with respect to the project of a second canal being made between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Sir George entertains a strong opinion that the existing situation is capable of being met without resort to any new canal or railway. The widening and deepening of the existing canal he regards as the best and most economical way of meeting the requirements and difficulties of the time, because no canal, in his view, could be better situate than the Suez Canal. But for that canal to become all that it should be, it should be made an international concern.

The grand idea of the King of the Belgians, to unite in a great International Association all, without any distinction as to either nationality or religion, who are willing to do what they can towards advancing the work of civilization in Central Africa, is an enterprise at once so noble, so disinterested, so worthy of our age, that no nation could find grounds for refusing to recognize the neutrality of the stations founded by this Association in the sole interest of general humanity. England has but to say a word, and the work is done; the future of this great enterprise is assured. I do not hesitate to say that it would be a crying shame for the age in which we live, if one of its most noble conceptions were doomed to succumb through the indifference or hostility of States from which but a very simple thing is required--viz., to recognize an admirable institution which has been created by private zeal and the disinterested love of humanity and science. It is only from the French Government that any opposition can be apprehended. But as a Member of the International African Association recently remarked, in an open letter which was published at Brussels :

"France can do much to quiet present apprehensions, and she has already given too many proofs of her devotion to the cause of progress not to understand the grandeur of the part she would be called upon to play if, while maintaining the advantages of her own position there, she do her best to prevent particular interests becoming opposed to the general interests of civilization, which latter are represented in Africa by a flag whose chief merit consists in its being no nation's colours. Would France's position on the Congo be preferable if the African Association, goaded to the last limit by direct and indirect aggressions, imitated the example of the first grantees of Borneo and sold their rights either to a company or to a power. In the latter hypothesis M. de Brazza would, it is true, be in contact with the representatives of a European Government. But I do not see what France would have gained by the exchange."*

EMILE DE LAVELEYE.

* "Le Congo," article du "Courrier des Etats-Unis," sur M. de Brazza, et l'Angleterre et reponse d'un membre de l'Association Internationale Africaine. Bruxelles: Mucquardt. 1883.

AGNOSTIC MORALITY.

Α

GNOSTICISM, if we may trust some recent indications, is passing out of the jubilant stage and entering one of well-befitting seriousness. There lies the experience of a generation between the delirious exultation of Harriet Martineau over her "Spring in the Desert," and the sober sadness of the writer in the last number of this REVIEW on the "Responsibilities of Unbelief." The creed that "Philosophy founded on Science is the one thing needful," which the first considered to be "the crown of experience and the joy of life," has become to the second a burden and a sorrow-a "spring" indeed, but of waters of Mara. "I have been shorn of my belief," says one speaker in Vernon Lee's dialogue, "I am emancipated, free, superior; all the things which a thorough materialist is in the eyes of materialists. But I have not yet attained to the perfection of being a hypocrite, of daring to pretend to my own soul that this belief of ours, this truth, is not bitter and abominable, arid and icy to our hearts."

No reader of this thoughtful and powerful paper can fail to see that the indignant antagonism which the earlier blatant Atheism called forth, ought now to give place to mournful recognition of the later Agnosticism as a phase through which many of the most luminous intellects of our time are doomed to pass; the light which is in them waning till the thin crescent disappears. That it will be renewed again in the lustre of its fulness is not to be doubted, for this Agnosticism is no unfaithfulness to the true God of love and righteousness. It is precisely because the Agnostic fails to find that God where he persists in exclusively looking for Him—namely, in the order of the physical world-that the darkness has fallen on his soul. Perhaps the example of Agnosticism, as the last result of a logically

vicious method of religious inquiry, may not be useless in awaking us to the dangers of that method which has hitherto been used indiscriminately by friends as well as foes of faith.

All methods of religious inquiry resolve themselves into twothat which seeks God in the outer world, and that which seeks Him in the world within. Out of the first came the old Nature-worship, and dim chaotic gods with myths alternately beautiful and sweet, and lustful, cruel and grotesque; the Greek stories which Vernon Lee recalls of Zeus and Chronos and Cybele, and the wilder tales of ruder races, of Moloch and Astarte, Woden and Thor. In "the ages before morality," the mixed character of the gods drawn out of Nature, and who represented her mixed aspects of good and evil, was not felt to be incongruous or unworthy of worship. As morality dawned more clearly the gods were divided between good and evil, Ormuzd and Ahrimanes, Osiris and Typhon, the Devs and Asuras. Some ages later, in the deeply speculative era of Alexandrian philosophy, the character of the author of Nature and creator of the world presented itself as so dark a problem that many schools of Gnostics-Basilidians, Marcionites, Valentinians-deemed him to be an evil or fallen god, against whom the supreme and good God sent Christ to recall mankind to a higher obedience. The loftiest point ever reached, or probably attainable, by this method of religion was the Deism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and to reach it two things were needful not included in the problem—namely, that those who found so good a God in Nature should have looked for Him there from the vantage ground of Christian tradition gained by the opposite method; and secondly, that they should have been yet in ignorance concerning much in Nature which is now known, and so have raised their induction from imperfect premises. Pope, the typical poet of this Deism, could say as the result of his survey of things:

"One truth is clear-whatever is, is right."

Tennyson, on the other hand, who knows somewhat of the doctrines of the "Struggle for Existence" and the "Survival of the Fittest," when he has cast his glance around on Nature, "red in tooth and claw with ravin," and on all her "secret deeds" of wastefulness of the sceds of joy and life-feels that he can only "fall"

"Upon the great world's altar-stairs

Which slope through darkness up to God.”

The second method of religious inquiry, which seeks for God in the inner world of spirit and conscience, leads to a very different conclusion, even though it be but "in a glass darkly" that the mirror of the soul receives the Divine reflection, and many a blur of human error has been mistaken for a feature of the Divine countenance.

The prophets of all time who have heard in their souls the voice af God and have cried aloud, "Thus saith the High and Holy One who inhabiteth eternity," and the faithful who have hearkened to them because their hearts echoed their prophecies, have been together keeping step, till now Christianity in all its more vitalized forms, and Theism as everywhere superseding the elder Deism, alike affirm the absolute goodness of God, discarding everything in earlier dogmas repugnant thereto. The first method-the external-being the one to which Agnostics have exclusively had recourse, it follows inevitably that the result is, as we see, the denial of religion, because they do not find in Nature what Nature (consulted exclusively) cannot teach.

Of course the Agnostic may here interpose and say that the test of the truth of the second method must be to check it by the first, and see whether God, as He actually works in Nature, bears out the character which we derive from the testimony of our hearts. Such checking is every way right-nay, it is inevitable. No thoughtful man can avoid doing it, and encountering thereby all the strain of faith. But the difference lies in this, with which method do we begin, and to which do we assign the primary importance? If we first look for God outside of us, we shall usually stop at what we find there. If we first look for Him within, we may afterwards face with illumined eyes the mystery of Nature's shadows. The man who has found his God in conscience and in prayer may indeed shudder and tremble and "lift lame hands of faith, and grope" when he sees all the misery and agony of creation. But as he did not first find God in Nature, neither will he lose hold on God because Nature is to him inexplicable. He will fall back on the inner worship of God the Holy Ghost, the Teacher of all Mercy and Justice; and trust that He who bids him to be merciful and just, cannot be otherwise Himself than all-merciful, all-righteous. He will, in short, exercise, and can logically exercise, Faith, in its simple and essential form-i.e., Trust in One who has a claim to be trusted as a Friend already known, not a stranger whom he approaches without prior acquaintance. But, on the contrary, the man who has even succeeded in constructing some idea of a good God out of the inductions of physical science, has nothing to fall back upon when (as happens to all in our generation) his researches, pushed further, seem to lead him, not to a perfectly Benevolent Being, but to one whose dealings with his creation, appear so blended of kindness, and of something that looks like cruelty, that he finds it easiest to leap to the conclusion that He has no existence or no moral nature, rather than that He should be so inconsistent.

These are the obvious results of the use of the two methods of But I have attempted

religious inquiry, as used by men in all ages.

to define them here, because I am anxious to draw attention to the fact (which I deem to be one of great importance) that modern Agnosticism, as distinguished from earlier forms of disbelief, has bound itself to the physical-science method, and renounced appeal to the inner witness to the character of God, by adopting the Darwinian theory of the nature of conscience, and thereby discrediting for ever its testimony, as regards either morals or religion. This theory, as all the world now knows, is that of Hereditary Conscience; the theory that our sense of right and wrong is nothing more than the inherited set of our brains in favour of the class of actions which have been found by our ancestors conducive to the welfare of the tribe, and against those of an opposite tendency. According to this doctrine there is no such thing as an "eternal and immutable morality," but all orders of intelligent beings must by degrees make for themselves, what Vernon Lee aptly calls a "Rule of the Road," applicable to their particular convenience.* Thus at one and the same blow the moral distinctions of good and evil are exploded and reduced to the contingently expedient, or inexpedient, and the rank of the faculty whereby we recognize them is degraded from that of the loftiest in human nature to that of a mere inherited prejudice. How this theory overturns the foundations of morals, and by so doing deprives religion of its firmest basis, and so clears the way for Agnosticism, will become more evident the more we reflect on the matter. A better example of the working of the doctrine could not be desired than that afforded in a passage in this very article, which bears the stamp of a fragment of autobiography. "Baldwin," the character in the dialogue, who obviously represents the writer's own views, after expressing the intense desire he has felt to believe in "the beautiful dreams which console other men," goes on to say:

"Instead of letting myself believe, I forced myself to doubt and examine all the more; I forced myself to study all the subjects which seemed as if they must make my certainty of evil only stronger and stronger. I instinctively hated science, because science had destroyed my belief in justice and mercy; I forced myself, for a while, to read only scientific books. Well, I was rewarded. Little by little it dawned upon me that all my misery had originated in a total misconception of the relative positions of Nature and of man;

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* Mr. Darwin himself, in his "Descent of Man," expressly instances the worker. bees as a case wherein "conscience" might approve of the massacre of our brother drones. It may not be inopportune to remind readers who have not made a study of the philosophy or history of ethics that the older schools of "independent" morality taught that actions were "right" or "wrong," as lines are "right" (i.e., straight) or wrung from" straightness, and that (according to Clarke's definition of the doctrine) "these eternal differences make it fit for the creatures so to act, they lay on them an obliga tion so to do, separate from the will of God and antecedently to any prospect of advantage or reward." Mr. Herbert Spencer abjures both the doctrine and the metaphor. He says: "Acts are called good or bad according as they are well or ill adjusted to ends." Now this is exactly what the grand old terms Right and Wrong do not imply. A line is not "right" because it runs in a certain direction, but because of its character of straightness.