obliged in a sense to do that work in the college which ought to have been done in the upper school. The higher institutions are thus completely in the hands of the lower. Students must be received as they come to us, and in proportion to the meagreness of the preparation, so will it be difficult to do any satisfactory work in the line of that advanced education for which the college as such exists. There is then but one remedy, and it is practicable.

It is the more thorough and comprehensive study of elementary English in our upper schools, whereby the work, at present necessitated in our first collegiate year, may be remanded to its proper place in the preparatory department, and the college professor begin at once upon the basis of such work, the application of the philosophic method. In addition to exercises in punctuation, orthography, English grammar, and declamation, we see no reason why the entering student should not come to us tolerably well acquainted with the main historical facts of our language and literature, as well as with a good amount of intelligent practice in the simpler forms of discourse. Excellent manuals in all these branches are now accessible, and the student coming with his facts is prepared to enter at once upon the study of those leading principles, to which such facts give origin.

What remains, therefore, but that our American colleges and classical schools assume a position in this matter, that will be in keeping with the high ideals of such institutions! Some of our presidents and leading educators are doing already a noble work in this direction. The movement, however, must be a well-understood, combined, and vigorous one. To secure such unity of action has been and is the great difficulty. We are free to say, however, that if such general coöperation cannot be secured, a few of our leading institutions should take high ground on this subject, and at all hazards maintain it. The first colleges of this country, educationally, if not numerically, are not to be those whose doors are widely open to an indiscriminate preparation, but those whose standards are high and ever higher, as the interests of a liberal culture demand, who, disdaining to enter into those petty inter-collegiate rivalries, which obtain far too largely among us, take, at length, into their own hands the jurisdiction of the schools, which supply them and determine their character.

One thing is evident: if the grand department of English in our colleges is ever to become what it ought to become-a prominent factor in the very highest culture-and if the method upon which we are teaching it is ever to rise to the scientific and practical, then must the lovers of English and higher education address themselves with becoming ardor to the work before them. If our methods are wrong, we are to correct them. If, being right, they cannot be applied, a way must be opened for their application. The teaching of English is applied philosophy. We submit that the model instructor in English and all other branches is a philosopher, and not a pedagogue or pedant, an expositor of generic and germinal principles and not an official censor of recitations.

It is to Plato and Socrates that we are to resort as examples, and not to Diogenes or Cato.

Art. X.-HOW A PASTOR WOULD MEET

INFIDELITY.

By Rev. EPHER WHITAKER, Southold, L. I.

THE present phases of infidelity in this country are mainly three, viz.: materialism, spiritualism, and secularism. We name them in the reverse order of their destructiveness to the souls of men in our own day and land.

Materialism proposes to convert star-dust into life and plants and animals and man by physical forces only; also to generate ideas of virtue, duty. right, and wrong, moral obligation, by external excitement of the senses and consequent impressions of the brain; to turn thought into material motion and the movements of matter into thought.

But it is needless to master all the details and consequences of the theories of Lamarck and Oken and Vogt, in order to understand their main positions as materialists. So with Comte, Mill, Spencer, as well as Häckel, Bückner, Cope, Chapman, and others. And whoever accepts their doctrines must reject those of Moses, Isaiah, Paul, and John, and our Lord Jesus Christ.

One way of dealing with this phase of infidelity is to show that materialists do not agree as to the facts which their theories include. Take, for example, life and its origin. Some hold with the assertion of Lamarck, made at the beginning of this century, that "life is only a physical phenomenon." Others accept Spencer's dictum, that life is "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." We can understand that. For there is the stove with the self-regulating damper, and we can see the continuous adjustment of the internal relations of the fires to the external relations of the temperature. That, according to Spencer, is life.

Some maintain that "the evolution of life" includes its origin, and others attribute this to creation. Thus, Mr. Darwin speaks of "life with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one," but Dr. Chapman says there are "no vital forces which are not convertible into physical ones;" and Prof. Barker has undertaken to prove "the correlation of vital and physical forces," and he has undoubtedly proved the inadequacy of his own logic.

Some say that spontaneous generation takes place at the present time, and that the "mind is the impression of the brain derived from the external world through the medium of the senses," and "if a Newton could be developed from an ancient Briton, or his living representative, an Australian, an Australian could be developed from an ape." Others say, produce your ape developed into an Australian or ancient Briton. And not seeing him brought into view, they deny that mind is only impressions of the brain. They also reject the evidence adduced in support of spontaneous generation. They do not admit that the origin of a living being is parallel to the origin of a crystal. They say, with Prof. Tyndall, that notions of natural evolution "represent an absurdity too monstrous to be entertained by any sane mind."

On the other hand, Mr. Darwin avers that man does come through the monkey from some far remote animal greatly inferior to the monkey. While Mr. Wallace, another advocate of the theory of natural selection, declared that this will not account for the development of man, and appeals to the differences between savage men and the brutes in respect to their brains, their hair, their voices, and other features. He says he does not know how Mr. Huxley passes from those vital phenomena which consist only of movements of particles of matter to those other phenomena which we term thought, sensation, or consciousness."

Thus it is easy to set the materialists at war with each other, while we take little part in the contest.

There is another way of dealing with them, for they are generally over-rated, and their arrogance often passes for superiority. It may be sometimes well to show that they build their pyramid top downward; that their generalizations are far too broad for their facts; that their principles require them to keep close to their physics, and not to introduce, as they do, speculative and metaphysical elements. into their work. And it is not a hard task to make it manifest, “that speculation is exceedingly dizzy and dim-eyed among the leaders of this phase of infidelity, and that nowhere else does logic more pitably limp and stumble than among them. For one illustration, see Huxley with his "Physical Basis of Life" in the light of Sterling's "As Regards Protoplasm.”

It may be occasionally not amiss to point out that the various schools of nescience and false relativity carefully ignore what every sound and thoughtful mind well knows. For the tendency of materialism unceasingly is to deny that we know anything more than sensation gives us, and to affirm that soul and body are identical, or at least that mind is no more than a function of the body, and can not be known to have an independent existence and its own laws; that it is impossible to know any one who " is a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth; that it is unreasonable to worship the unknown and unknowable, to have any regard for it in our daily conduct, to cherish any hope or fear respecting it, or in respect to any existence of our own beyond the duration of our mortal bodies.

Now, in opposition to all this, it may be needful to show that we know our own minds as well as we know our own bodies or our own homes, or any other thing, and that we know the Creator and Ruler of the world, so far as his works manifest his existence and character, as well as we know the founder and ruler of any kingdom among men by his works.

The best way to deal with this phase of infidelity is to expose its narrowness, its ignorance, its self-conceit, and its baseness; to emphasize that superior part of man which the materialists keep out of view, to appeal to the spiritual part, to magnify the moral powers, to explain the moral contrast between man and the brute creation; to exalt the uniqueness and grandeur of his conscience; the nobility of his desire for immortality; the benign influence of the expectation of an eternity of holiness in the worship and service and love of the infinitely holy and benevolent God. The way to do this has been

shown by Dr. Henry B. Smith in his review of the "New Faith of Strauss.'

But there is a spiritualism, as well as a materialism, which avowedly or virtually rejects the Bible, and it is far more pervasive and destructive, because more attractive to the people.

There is a reason for the popular choice, according to the wellknown utterances of Lord Bacon, namely: "I had rather believe all the fables of the legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind." Materialism is cold and repulsive. It is heartless and hopeless. Spiritualism affords scope for the aspirations of the imaginative, and gratifies the sentiment of the fanciful. It clasps the heart in bereavement, and directs the grief which materialism cannot even touch. When death invades the families of John W. Edmonds, Robert Dale Owen, the chief mourners, in their anguish, fly not for sympathy and support to the grim and desperate negative of "the dirt philosophy." They may be impelled to a false spiritualism, but to spiritualism of some kind they will go.

We must prevent men from going astray by teaching them that Christ is the resurrection and the life. He came from heaven to bring life and immortality to light through the gospel; the heart of the infinitely tender God is in him, so that he is touched with the feeling of our infirmities; his ear is open to the moan of the smitten one; he bears our griefs and carries our sorrows; he has atoned for our sins, and gone to prepare a place for us in his Father's house of many mansions; and all who trust him, even the thief who died upon the cross, pass by death immediately into paradise with the Lord. We must make known how this has been the safe and sweet haven of peace, through all the Christian ages, for the soul tossed by the storms and billows of this world, where we cannot say there is no more sea. We must intimate that God has revealed in his word all that divine wisdom and love deem needful for our use, in order to prepare us for an eternity of bliss, and that Christ holds in his own hand the keys of death and of the world unseen-that world without end, to which we hasten.

But our supreme peril comes from another quarter; and to name the most destructive phase of infidelity-for the want of a better word— we call it secularism. This brushes away all science, philosophy, religion, which hinders the gratification of lust. It is worldly, sensual, devilish. It appears in the form of the most delicate voluptuousness, and also in the form of the most besotted sensuality. If it seems to worship man more, it is only to make this inferior god more obedient

*See Presbyterian Quarterly, April 1874.