either, think that the Christian Church and so-called religious folk have squandered the attention that should have been given to improving the world and their own condition in it, upon the cultivation of an artificial relationship to an imaginary Providence called the Christian God, or, what is almost as bad, the God of the theists. Their notion is that if there be any such person, we shall find it out quite time enough when we come naturally to it; that if there be any future or immortal state we shall find that out too when we arrive at it : but that here and now there is pressing business to be done, and urgent happiness to be enjoyed, — happiness and business wholly peculiar to this time and place, and that we misdirect our energies when we allow any thing else, no matter how sacred its name and pretensions, to divert our thoughts and efforts from this present world and its natural immediate work. - But this is not the most illuminated class yet. There is in Germany and France still another set of philosophers, — not without disciples in this country, who go much further than this, and insist, not only that religious speculations and interests, whether called natural or revealed, narrow the mind and heart and impoverish the life, but that moral questions have a similar narrowing tendency; that the world is ridden to death by an artificial conscience; and that all this solicitude about right and wrong is a waste of precious energy and time and feelings. Wrong, they insist, has just as good rights as any thing else. What we call moral evil is quite as necessary, and in accordance with our nature, as moral good. The bad is the counterpart of the good, and as necessary to it as the night to the day. Criminals are such by a necessity of their constitutions; and crime is merely a conventional offence against a conventional code which the majority of social beings have set up for their own protection. The selfcomplacency, or feeling of moral superiority, which the righteous and pious indulge in the presence of the vicious and impious, is as unreasonable as a dove's complacency in her freedom from the serpent's sting, or a lamb's in his exemption from wearing the tiger's claws and teeth. We have had a plain purpose in leading our readers through the logical career of that protest against the narrowness of a positive and historical faith, which induces some of the finest and freest minds among us to object to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the exceptional authority of the Christian religion. We have endeavored to show that, if narrowness, meaning definiteness, and an authority not purely self-justified and impersonal, is a fatal objection to a religion, we shall be obliged to give up natural religion and all religion. Philosophy is far wider than any religion can be; and life is still wider than philosophy. Fatalism is, in one sense, even more widely religious than any system which recognizes free agency and human accountableness; because it makes God the sole agent in the universe, and gives his sovereignty absolute sway. All the odious ideas of personal affinities and pre-ordained relationships, which have from time to time disparaged and set aside marriage vows and the Christian conceptions of wedlock, have come in under the claim of a higher spirituality and a broader understanding of › moral and religious laws. • We are well aware that the argument from consequences is one which superstition and fanaticism have abused, and are always likely to abuse. We remember, too, that it is not fair to hold people accountable even for the logical consequences of their opinions. But you may properly hold the opinions themselves accountable for their own logical consequences; and this is a distinction which it is very important to appreciate. For we do not hesitate to say, that the pure and lofty lives of many persons, holding what we consider to be very nonChristian opinions, is helping to delude many with the idea that there can be no danger in opinions which such excellent persons entertain: But this proceeds wholly on the assumption that they gained their excellence by the aid of these opinions, and not rather in spite of them. Ideas never produce their consequences in the generation that gives birth to them, but rather in the next. Opinions dwell inoperatively in the intellect of their producers, but passionately and ac tively in the blood of their inheritors. Each generation lives mainly on the ideas of its precursor; for it is only what has passed out of the understanding into the prejudices, or rather instinctive thoughts and feelings, that shapes a man's conduct, and characterizes his temper and spirit: and the same is true of an age. Communism did the early apostles no harm; but all know what its wretched fruits were in some of their successors. The French Revolution was started by pure and philanthropic men, whose worst thoughts were uttered under solemn convictions of truth and duty; but how soon its mischievous but honest notions slipped into horrid, bloody filth and cruelty we all recall. Principles and ideas, not triable by abstract methods, must be judged by their consequences; but these consequences must be sought in a large, generous, average way. It will not do to judge the law of primogeniture by three or four generations; but when it ends in putting half the lands in all England into the hands of less than one hundred and fifty proprietors, and threatens, first, the outbreak of Chartism, and next, Fenianism; and, finally, a general rising of the disfranchised and landless millions, before which the solid powers of a throne and an aristocracy more than a thousand years old tremble and totter, justified in characterizing it as an unjust, impolitic, and unChristian institution. So it will not do to judge democracy by an occasional mob in a city, or the disgraceful municipal legislation in a metropolis that receives and admits to suffrage the scum of all Europe. But when we behold it producing, in less than one century, a nation like our own, having the largest number of independent homes, and the greatest relative proportion of educated and virtuous people, to be found in any country in the world; when we see it sustaining itself, its order, its laws, and its finances, under the vastest civil war ever known to history,- we are entitled to say, "Democratic principles have proved themselves, by their consequences, to be the true principles on which to found stable governments." we are It will not do to judge polygamy by Utah,—a sink of all violence, corruption, and filth; but the history of all the VOL. LXXXII. -NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. I. 9 nations in which it has been allowed has determined its absolute incompatibility with social progress, political freedom, or moral dignity. Thus nobody could venture to say in advance what would be the final consequences of setting up a purely natural religion, into which all moral and spiritual truth of Christianity, pressed out and separated from its mere historic and personal concomitants or circumstances, had been drained off. Prior -- to experience, it certainly looks as if such a religion of sound principles, absolute in its self-proving and self-recommending authority, in which God was deemed and taken to be the synonym for absolute goodness and wisdom and holiness, but without the limiting notion of personality; and retribution wholly the operation of self-acting laws; heaven a frame of mind, and hell its opposite; sin an offence wholly against one's own soul; immortality exclusively a state of feeling, — it looks as if such a religion ought to produce very worthy and commendable disciples. But we are not left to speculation and surmise in regard to the success of such a religion. The plan has been fully tried. In fact out of Judea, so far as thoughtful, philosophic and lofty minds had any religion at all prior to Christ's coming, it was precisely this absolute and universal religion. It had its very distinguished and lofty teachers. Confucius, Zoroaster, Zeno, Plato, and Socrates, among the wisest of men, taught this absolute religion. It was the very flower and fruit of their philosophical studies; but, whatever influence it may have had in the academy, the porch, or the haunts and groves of philosophy, who ever yet heard of its producing any moral or saving influence upon the people at large,—who, indeed, under that system, were deemed not worth attention? The moment the ideas of mere philosophers reached any shape which brought them within the people's range, the essential truths of natural religion were blent in with the coarsest and most puerile superstitions. We may see what the lofty piety of Confucius became by studying the idolatrous and disgusting religion of the Chinese at this late day. We have ourselves been in their josh-houses or religious temples in California, and seen them cutting off the feet and heads of chickens as offerings to those wooden and tapestried idols, taking care to carry home the only edible portion of the offering for their own consumption. Natural religion, even in the form which Socrates and Cicero gave it, the purest and highest form it has attained out of Christian bounds, had no influence upon the personal character of any persons excepting a certain select few, who themselves cultivated it more as a theme for literary ambition than for personal growth and guidance. There never was a worse era than that of Socrates, if it were not Cicero's, - the two greatest moralists of Greece and Rome. We are firmly convinced that what is called natural religion, - that is, the last result of unassisted human thinking on the theme of man's relations to God, is a thing which never had, as an operative system of thought, any clear statement, except out of Christian mouths; or any considerable influence except over those born and bred under Christian influences. Take away from it the support of Christian institutions, founded on a revealed gospel, and we are entirely convinced it would fall to the ground in half a century, and leave the world the prey of atheism, idolatry and universal worldliness and folly. General ideas, however pure, demonstrable on absolute principles, and self-recommending, have no force until embodied in institutions, and made a part of the methodical training of society. Nations, like individuals, are finally shaped by their habits more even than by their ideas,— by their usages and customs, more than by their abstract opinions. You may have ever so much vague and unorganized Protestant thinking going on in Italy; but it is the organized Catholic Church that shapes the Italian mind. You may have ever so much red republicanism floating in the minds and fancies of Frenchmen; but it is the Emperor, the Court, the bayonet, and the octroi that settle the features of French society. You may have ever so much Liberal Christianity suspended in the literature, the air, the thought or tastes and tendencies of the American people; but it is Orthodoxy, holding the churches. and keeping the schools, that really shapes the American |