may the waxing forces of a scientific theory of conduct largely at variance with the present ideal.

§ 5. From a human or purely historical point of view, the success of Christianity is due to this resolute detachment. It quiets the fears, and encourages the hopes, of the average man, by giving a type of Divine character startlingly different from the ordinary manifestations of 'power' and 'wisdom' shown in creation. Philosophy, ever attempting in vain to secure a humanistic basis for speculation, finds itself beaten back again into the open sea of Naturalism,-which, sometimes open and unabashed, sometimes in the masquerade or disguise of pantheism, denies to man any real significance, save, perhaps, as preparing for some new and inconceivable order of things. "I tell you," says Don Juan in Mr. Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman,-"I tell you that, as long as I can conceive something better than myself, I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life's incessant aspiration to higher organisation, wider, deeper, intenser selfconsciousness, and clearer self-understanding." "Later on," he says, "Liberty will not be catholic enough: men will die for human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly. . . . Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. . . . If you can show a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, what he will later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to him personally." This self-surrender, to the service of a cause without counting the cost is indeed man's most conspicuous differentia; but can it be asserted that it finds any rational justification elsewhere than in the Christian religion? A triumph won at the expense of our present sufferings by some higher creature could find no place in any righteous scheme of the universe, as we count righteousness and justice to-day. If this is the last word of scientific speculation, it will not be long before the enthusiasm wears off. "Shall I beget beings like myself," says Fichte, in the Destiny of Man, "that they too may eat and drink and die, leaving behind them beings like themselves to repeat over again the same things that I have done? To what purpose this ever-revolving circle, this cease

less and unvarying round, in which all things appear only to vanish again, and pass away only that they may reappear as they were before;-this monster continually devouring itself that it may again reproduce itself, and bringing itself forth only that it may once more devour itself?" There is no certainty of some 'far-off Divine event'; there is no proof, nor even probability, of any certain advance' or 'progress' (if we can attach conceivable meaning to these terms.)

§ 6. Writers who have been reluctant to break entirely with the Christian and altruistic theory of life, have long played with this kind of delusive Realism (in the medieval sense) as a substitute for personal comfort. But such hopes, in the perfection of man or society, apart from the Christian message, are wild and visionary. Nature or the cosmic process knows nothing of a terminus, a goal, a realised ideal. What looks like attained perfection, as Professor Huxley begins in his Evolution and Ethics, is but the unstable point whence begins the gradual descent. Equilibrium is not life, but death; development can only strictly be used of individuals, not of collective entities, which are only called one for convenience; education, as Lotze argued against Lessing's vague mediævalism, can only apply to the growing and continuous experience of conscious beings, not to the general term which combines them in a class. The average man has a few provisoes in attaching himself to a cause unreservedly; it must be righteous, intelligible, it must include himself. One is forced (so often is the taunt levelled at Christianity) to repeat that the doctrine of immortality satisfies not so much a selfish instinct as a rational demand. Apart from it, righteousness, virtue, justice, happiness cease to have a meaning. The Gospel satisfies at once man's desire to know himself and to know God: "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." The axioms of this architectonic science must be received in faith, but must and can be tested by experience: belief must precede and pass into knowledge. The answer is made to the appeal of unhappiness and unrest; in its origin quite selfish, "What must I do to be saved?" The anxious question is put not by the thinker or the citizen, but by the average man ; who before he works in the vineyard wishes to be assured of his own value, that he is not labouring in a bad or a mean

ingless cause. The special work, talent, equipment, is a minor matter; in a very true sense works add nothing to faith. Christianity gives a conviction which seems wanting in other religions, of co-operation in a Divine scheme, in which the recompense is not so much distinct achievement as the willingness of service itself. And this willingness, as is shown in the experience of numberless Christians (even of St. Paul, who prays to be anathema for his brethren), depends upon the absolute confidence that each one of us is safe in the hands of a Master who cannot deceive. Else were resignation and devotion unrighteous, a useless and stubborn defiance of the laws which govern things. That this is an act of faith (often on the slenderest evidence) cannot be denied; but it is not greater than is demanded by any moral choice of which the issue and the consequence is obscure, the sole guidance, "I must for I ought, I can for I must.”

SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE II-A

ON THE NECESSITY OF BASING INSTITUTIONS UPON AVERAGE HUMAN NATURE

§ 1. Curious ignorance of human nature betrayed by designers of Utopian society: neither the virtue of the rulers, nor the drowsy contentment of the subjects, could survive in equilibrium.

§ 2. The modern State and statesmen are also to blame in their hasty judgment of man's needs: problem of sovereignty, State or individual? the modern theory due to Luther and to Machiavelli: force and expediency: suspicious relations of State and subject in the modern State: notable exception of personal loyalty, an anomaly: no appeal to moral feeling.

§ 3. Average man unsusceptible to the influence of abstractions: the post-Reformation State might have been remodelled, independently of Church tutelage, without such loss: became not merely un-religious but un-moral.

§ 4. Error in basing reconstruction upon a supposed Classical model, not on the feelings of average man: the voluntary element might have been retained: Government might have become the extension rather than the denial of the family.

$5. Justification for those who seek to restrict the scope of government (Tolstoy): some believe this movement inevitable: perversion of preventive action of State: decay of the spontaneous.

§ 6. The Christian has no such widespread distrust in average human nature: this is better and more generous than the social system: a better acquaintance with ordinary impulse and springs of conduct might have been expected, and is not yet too late.

§ 1. Human nature is very much better (using the word in its widest and most popular sense) than its professed exponents and eulogists seem willing to recognise. All Utopias for the last four hundred years have discerned the ideal in a vov Tóλis superintended by a scientific and disinterested aristocracy. They have extolled the latter at the expense of the former, the refined minority at the expense of the great bulk of the people,-and this with all their pretensions

to democratic sympathy. There is no reason to trust the dutifulness of an intellectual more than of a hereditary or plutocratic ruling caste. Ability has its temptations as well as avarice or pride of assured position. A republic-that is, a people shorn of its natural representatives-is exposed to unscrupulous wealth and unscrupulous ambition. But an equal mistake, and perhaps one more mischievous, is to be found in the conception of the still governed and subordinate classes. It is presumed that a uniform distribution of comfort will expel envy and satisfy the heart's desire. It is almost needless to say, it would effect neither one nor other. It could not free men from the passion of competition, nor would it lull into forgetfulness their higher sensibilities. Striving is for the people the essence of life, first for self, next for a cause. Acquiescence and rest in equilibrium, as was said in the last essay, is impossible whether in Nature or in the State. The dignity of man, if it is not attained in ideal feudal vassalage to a trusted and beloved master, is certainly not won by subservience to a food-distributing committee; nor could human nature find satisfaction in such a society, bound as it must be by rigorous laws, supported by picturesque myths, safeguarded now and again by a secret and murderous attack on revolutionary ideas. We are concerned at present not with the Utopians' unwarranted confidence in a scientific ruling class, but with their curious ignorance of original human nature, of those impulses which lie at the root of all human action. It will appear an undeserved calumny upon the poor and lowly to believe that they have no aspiration beyond a uniform and tiresome plenty; that in the shifting of responsibility from parent to State (the aim of all Utopian schemes since Plato) they will be glad of relief from a distasteful burden. In our still uncertain and precarious life of to-day, having even yet some element of hazard and adventure, it is impossible to enter fully into this ideal of a leaden and ascertained monotony; but from the moral point of view, it cannot be doubted that such an existence would be inadequate to the needs of human feeling.

§ 2. If the visionary has failed to interpret and make allowance for the deeper side of man, the modern State, the modern politician, has also been at fault. It would seem