the censorship of the press cannot be defended. The newspaper is bread to the soul of the Russian, but he is not free to read until he goes from home, and then, by force of dieting, he suffers from mental indigestion. Speculative nihilism is a moral infirmity congenital to the soul of the Russian; active and political nihilism is the fruit of the peculiar condition of the empire. Russia is in a state of transition, and is at present sufferingly stumbling along toward the future, with occasional fits of dementia and epilepsy; and good intentions count for nothing, whether the latent generosity of revolutionists, or of government and Czar.

Such, in fragmentary outline, is Madame Bazán's study of the situation in Russia. Though in her plan merely preliminary to her study of Russian literature, it will, we believe, prove of most vital and enduring interest to the public. She is a disciple of the realism which in art and literature has had its recent day. Pushkine is, in her vivid pages, the demigod of Russian verse; Lermontoff, the Russian Byron: the two were the great geniuses of Russian lyric poetry.

Gogol was the founder of Russian realism, and his novel, "Dead Souls," modeled on the "Quixote" of Cervantes, was the most profoundly human book that has ever been written in Russia. This admirer of absolutism and autocracy was, strangely enough, the one to precipitate Russian literature into its present mad whirl, the path of nihilism and the currents of revolutionism.

Turgenieff receives most elaborate treatment and highest praise. He alone, of all Russian writers, possessed exquisite artistic intuition. He stood in the gulf that separates the two halves of Russia, yet he maintained the equipoise which belongs to all true thinkers. His marvelous style shows its beauties even through the veil of translation. The effect produced by the reading of his works is a sweet and solemn symphony, and he is the best word-painter of landscape that ever wrote.

Dostviëwsky, one of the four great Russian novelists, maintains this place, not because of his European reputation, but by reason of his unique influence in Russia. No writer, not even Gogol and Turgenieff, so closely approaches the mysterious dividing line, thin as a hair, which separates insanity and genius. Involved in a political conspiracy in the revolutionary atmosphere of 1848; long imprisoned in a dungeon; pardoned on a scaffold in the public square after he, with others, had been tied to posts and the soldier executioners were formed in line ready for the word

"Fire; "setting out on his sad journey to Siberia with a fellowsufferer who had lost his reason, laden with chains, he slept for four years with a copy of the Gospels under his pillow, which he read incessantly, and taught his fellow-prisoners to read also. His book, “The Dead House," is Dantesque, and is the most profound study written in Europe of the penitentiary system and criminal physiology. The effect of his works is not wholesome, but he had, among his own countrymen, greater influence and popularity than Turgenieff. When the monument to Pushkine was unveiled in 1880, the popularity of Dostviëwsky was at its height: when he spoke, the people sobbed in sympathy; they carried him in triumph; the students assaulted the drawing-rooms that they might see him near by; and at his death, in 1881, the multitude fought for the flowers that were strewn over his grave.

Tolstoï, last and greatest of the four leading Russian novelists, is the supreme artist of nihilism and pessimism, and at the same time the apostle of a Christian socialism newly derived from certain theories of the Gospels dear to the Middle Ages. He is the interpreter to the world of Russian mysticism. He is a great writer, a social fanatic, a mediæval mystic, and a novelist of realism à la Zola. His state of mind is a fine dementia which snaps the mainspring of the human will. He is like a fiery charger dashing on at full gallop, that leaps and plunges, and stays not, even on the edge of the precipice. Impulsive and enthusiastic, he does not trouble himself to be consistent. The sublime and compendious message of the Son of Man has been for nineteen hundred years explained and defined by the loftiest minds in theology and philosophy, who have elucidated every real and profound phase of it as far as is compatible with human needs and laws; but Tolstoï, extracting at pleasure that passage from the Sacred Book which most strikes his poetic imagination, deduces therefrom a social state impossible and superhuman. In the light of his theory of non-resistance he condemns revolution, yet he is forwarding it all the while by his own radical socialism; and under the hallucination of his mysticism he is making shoes and drawing water with the hands which God gave him for weaving forms and designs of artistic beauty into the texture of his marvelous narratives.

Madame Bazán closes her remarkable book with characteristic caudor and modesty, and in a tone of exquisite sadness, which will be echoed most truly by those who have most profoundly studied and most carefully observed the Russian people and their country:

"A few words of humble confession and I have done. I feel that there is a certain indecision and ambiguity running through these essays of mine. I could not quite condemn the revolution in Russia, nor could I altogether approve its doctrines and discoveries. . . . My vision has not been perfectly clear, therefore I have offered no conclusive judgments, for conviction and affirmation can only proceed from the mind they have mastered.

"Russia is an enigma; let those solve it who can, I could not. The Sphinx called to me; I looked into the depths of her eyes, I felt the sweet and bewildering attraction of the unknown, I questioned her, and like the German poet I wait, with but moderate hope, for the answer to come to me, borne by voices of the ocean of Time." M. B. Norton.

CHICAGO, ILL.

MR. BELLAMY AND CHRISTIANITY.

SINCE "Looking Backward" did not so much create a new ideal of society as crystallize the thought and embody the desire of countless vague thinkers who hope that some form of Socialism is a panacea for the world's woes, the book may be taken as an epitome of a whole class of ideas, of which it is at present the most effective presentation. In the light of its philosophy, therefore, it behooves the Christian to consider the message and see if it is a new call to him. Methods are a secondary, not a first, consideration. If the underlying philosophy is a word of the Lord, methods may safely be left to time and experience. The question for us to decide is not whether nationalism is practicable, but whether the philosophy out of which it arises is Christian, because nationalism is only a method. For this purpose, Mr. Bellamy not only represents countless thinkers, but he seems to be their universally accepted prophet, and in considering his views we consider the whole class of theories. Is, then, this new theory, in whatever form it may be adopted, a new expression of Christian principles?

In a recent article Mr. Bellamy declares that the question for us to settle is, "Whether or not there has come to be between the intellect and conscience of men and the actual conditions of society and industry, such a degree of incongruity and opposition as to threaten the permanency of the existing order, and whether

there is enough ground for faith in God and man to justify a hope that the present order may be replaced by one distinctly nobler and more humane." He thus himself brings the question under the scrutiny at least of the religious idea. Certainly any reformer would admit that the present order must be "replaced by one distinctly nobler and more humane;" but Mr. Bellamy's suggestion that the conscience of man will no longer allow the present social condition, and his further question if faith in God is sufficient to justify the hope of an advance, implies that he would place this philosophy of development in the line of a providential order rather than confine it to the bare working out of law. He nowhere gives, however, any evidence that its relation to the religion of Jesus Christ much concerns him. He uses the words and life of that religious philosopher simply as striking illustrations, or as make-weights in an argument, but to him they are not apparently authoritative words or ideas. Religion has a message for him, but not Christianity. Not so the Church. She must make the philosophy of Jesus the test of all things.

In the article already quoted, Mr. Bellamy goes on to declare that conscience and faith really do now compel a new and distinctly nobler and more humane order, and then assumes that this new step in the world's progress is as follows. He holds it "absolutely beyond question that the next phase of industry and society, as based upon it, will be a plan of national coöperation, and that this plan cannot be permanently based upon any other principle than universal industrial service, with equality of national condition." Now methods are not our present concern; that is with the general proposition. Is it absolutely beyond question that the next phase of society, the new order, will rest on a basis of “equality of material conditions"? On the one hand, is this the next step in our social growth, according to the laws of its development; and, on the other hand (which is only another way of stating the same thing), is it the ideal of him who believes in God and man, as Mr. Bellamy and his friends so peremptorily assume?

It is the law of physical evolution that the strongest survive, and the weak disappear. This is the law of social evolution also. Hence any theory which contradicts this law contradicts the whole tendency of things, and cannot be true. Must, then, the weak go to the wall in a Christian state? The law seems to be universal, and any way of escape difficult to find. Mr. Bellamy can see but one way out, by so equalizing the environment

that all shall become strong, and there shall be no more weak, a hope that might well tempt the ablest, but which requires, first of all, a faith that the desired effect will follow from the cause. Christianity gives a different answer to the problem. She declares that it is her very genius to redeem the weak, but that she does this, not by arbitrarily putting the weak on the same level with the strong, which, in the nature of things, cannot last, but by a new standard of values, a new test of weakness and strength. According to this standard we have come now in the development of humanity where material achievement is no longer the test of who are "the strong," but moral achievement. In the new world of the kingdom of heaven, the law still holds that the strong survive, but it is the morally strong, and the fundamental question for us is, What is the best environment for developing moral strength? Thus our contention with Mr. Bellamy appears to be twofold: in the definition of the strong, and in the process which produces the type which will survive. The modern theory is apparently somewhat confused at this point. In one quarter it seems to agree that moral strength is, indeed, the next step, and endeavors to create an environment which will produce moral strength, along the lines of its theory that to this end the environment must be perfect materially. In another quarter the modern theory believes that the ultimate result must be happiness, not moral strength, and to bring about happiness we must first improve the material conditions. Thus these two conflicting theories are merged into the one belief that in any case it is necessary the material conditions should be perfect. This is not Christianity. With those who believe that happiness is the end and purpose of life she joins issue at once. Her only concern is with the other class, and deals with the relation of material conditions to virtue; and her first question is, whether, in Jesus Christ's theory of life, happiness was necessary to moral progress. If Mr. Bellamy's philosophy is to be adopted by the Christian world, he must show that this was Jesus's idea. Christianity seeks to create moral strength by the improvement of moral conditions, not material, and she does not believe that her great founder ever taught that happiness was a necessary element in progress. Virtue and holiness she holds to be the purpose of man's being, his contribution to the long story of development, and these may be, and often are, born out of the very fact that the material conditions are not good.

But this modern philosophy declares that happiness is essential to growth in virtue. It postulates its theory that virtue is impos