а

tend." I do not know how any student of history, who does not close the eyes of his understanding, can deny the immense elevation in the moral level of the Western world achieved during the Christian era, or doubt that it is mainly due to the religion which transformed for Europe the ideal and the standard of morality. In whatever respects we fall below former civilizations, here, as it seems to me, is our supreme, our immeasurable advantage over them. Here, and not in our marvellous physical discoveries, our innumerable mechanical inventions, our intimate acquaintance with the laws of comfort, the surprising acuteness of our criticism, the stupendous accumulation of our wealth, is our truest, our incomparably most important Progress. The leaven which the Great Teacher introduced into human life has been working for two thousand years, and still works. And if the whole is not leavened-as assuredly it is not-yet the most considerable portion of it has been potently and profoundly influenced.

There are those, indeed, who tell us that Christianity is co-extensive with moral civilization. I do not adopt the dictum. It is too trenchant. It is unjust not only to the great non-christian systems, but to all lower modes of faith. Even in the poorest fetishism there is an ethical element. But who that knows human history can honestly deny that Christianity presents the highest standard, both of spiritual aspiration and of the conduct of life,

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ever set before men? Indeed, one of the chief results of that application of the comparative method to the world's creeds whereof I have already spoken, has been to bring out this fact with startling clearness. "The unmistakeable superiority of that religion," an eminent German savant once characteristically observed to me, seems unfair to the others." But if it is too much to say that moral civilization is co-extensive with Christianity, we may, with entire accuracy, affirm that the most precious elements of our ethical life are mainly derived from, and are closely bound up with it. Nor is it always among those who name the name of Christ that these elements are most conspicuously discernible. The religion which for so many generations has ordered the wills and affections of men, has by the mere working of heredity become, not bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, but-far closer union-thought of our thought and spirit of our spirit. There is now in the world what we may call the Christian temper, with all its charities and courtesies, a temper of self-devotion to some worthy cause, of self-effacement for some high end, of fortitude and forgiveness, of purity and pitifulness, of generosity and gentleness. How easy to instance numbers who would not call themselves Christians, and in whom this temper is eminently seen. Certainly, speaking for myself, it is my privilege to meet in the daily intercourse of life many such "doctos ego quos et

amicos prudens prætereo." But I may be allowed to point as a type of them to an illustrious savant, now no more, M. Littré-" that saint who did not believe in God," M. Caro once quaintly called him. There is, I say, in the nations that have received Christianity, a deeply-rooted instinct of moral fitness, a progressive ethical insight, an ever-growing sensitiveness of conscience. Who can look around and not see the tokens of it, on every side? The idea of right is the source of moral development. And it has been observed by M. Troplong, not too strongly, that Christian philosophy lies at the root of our principles of right. In spite of the abounding Materialism of the age, Christianity is still the controlling ethical influence of modern society, the source and the bulwark of all that is highest and noblest and most beneficent in our civilization, the palladium of our Progress.

And here I may be told that "the essential doctrines of Christianity are the necessary and eternal truths of reason:" that, independently of it, we may have a correct ethical code, supported by such a knowledge of the existence of God, of the immortality of the soul, of a future state of rewards and punishments, as shall be sufficient for the practical reason of man. Well, I do not deny, but strenuously maintain that if Christianity were to vanish away, there would still remain what theologians call "the Theism of the natural order." I fully believe that those unwritten and cternal

1.]

NATURAL VIRTUE.

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laws-ἄγραπτα κἀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα—of which the tragic poet speaks, are written on the fleshly tables of the heart. I know that upon the sole foundation of the categorical imperative of duty, you may build up a magnificent moral edifice. But, as a matter of fact, the ethical principles most distinctive of this modern world of ours, hold not of natural virtue but of evangelical sanctity. What nobler prophet has the Theism of the natural order ever had than Plato? But think of the composure with which he viewed the great suffering masses of humanity languishing in slavery by his side, hardly so much as remembering that his countrymen had erected an altar to Pity. Or again, lofty in many respects was the religion which nourished the virtue of Regulus and the Scauri and Paulus. But how shocking is the selfishness with which the noblest Roman, in the noblest age of the commonwealth, regarded property, not even suspecting its limited and strictly fiduciary character. Is there anything in any legislative code more repulsive to our moral sense than are the provisions of the Twelve Tables concerning debtors? Once more: the legislators of revolutionary France, in the closing years of the last century, held firmly, for the most part, to the Theism of the natural order as expounded by Rousseau. The Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen is stated, in the preamble of that document, to have been framed under the auspices" of the Supreme Being

whatever they may have been. And, as we all know, Robespierre not only caused the existence of that deity to be decreed by the National Convention, so as to put the matter beyond doubt, but also pontificated at his fête, in "sky-blue coat made for the occasion, white silk waistcoat broidered with silver, white stockings, and shoe-buckles of gold." But the Revolutionary legislation may well serve to show how unsatisfactory a guarantee of ethics this Theism of the natural order proves. There is one social question which far transcends in importance all others; a question upon the true solution of which the moral life or death of a nation depends: I mean the question of the family. The whole structure of modern civilization rests upon the foundation of monogamy, holy and indissoluble. The National Convention reduced marriage to a civil contract, terminable, under circumstances, by the decree of a secular court; while, as a fitting pendant to this enactment, the law of the 12th of Brumaire, year II. of the Republic, placed natural children upon a footing of almost complete equality with children born in wedlock. Cambacérès, who acted as the rapporteur of the measure, would indeed have put them upon a completely equal footing. existing differences," he urged, "are the result of pride and superstition; they are ignominious and contrary to justice." Nor can there be any doubt that he here correctly expressed the general feeling

"The