pointed out; and certainly there are very many directions-especially in regard to the cherishing of the weakly, and the restoration of the diseased-in which the operation of these affections interferes gravely with the more useful effects of the principle of the survival of the fittest. I can understand well enough why, if the spiritual part of man is to survive the physical, and all the arrangements of our universe are made with the intention of educating the spirit for that survival, the affections have been allowed to give the law, as it were, to the reason, in the shaping of human civilisation. But I cannot understand it at all from the secularist point of view, and I should certainly have expected to find Miss Bevington maintaining that the power of the domestic and social affections had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished. However that may be, I am quite sure of this, that when once you have ingrained into any one the belief that he and those whom he loves, are alike temporary phases of circumstance, about to disappear absolutely and for ever, the first effect on him will be to slacken the fervour of his heart, and to divert a good deal of attention from the object of these strange illusions. Of course, while the energies of my life are divided between temporary things and what I believe to be eternal beings, I give as much of that life as I may to what I believe may be mine for ever. Equally of course, if I find reason to think that this is all a dream, I shall restore the due balance of my activities by thinking more of the transitory relations of which I had formerly made too light, and less of those equally transitory relations which I had falsely conceived to be eternal. The most certain of all the results of the agnostic system will be to adjust the relations between persons and things so as to make us think more than we did when Christians of the latter, and less than we did when Christians of the former. And what will disenchant the deeper enjoyments of life more surely than such a revision of our inward existence as this? Hitherto our greatest delights in things have been snatched from the belief that behind the things was the shadow of a divine purpose, that the rainbow manifested the mercy of God, and the light His wisdom, that the splendour in the grass' is the splendour of His eternal freshness, the glory in the flower' the glory of His love. But if the agnostics are right, the process must be reversed. We must find in persons, more and more of the insignificance of mere things, in the brightest eye only a development of nervous function and a crystalline lens; in the sweetest smile only animal complacency lighted up by transitory sympathy, or the partial re-excitation of some faded current of parental instinct.

6

But of course the strongest case against the atheistic conception of our life as it is, is the view this school takes of the life of the conscience. Let this be once gravely adopted, and you must begin the whole conception of morality de novo, without the consciousness of freedom, without the sense of sin, without the dread of remorse, without the horrors of shame, without the conviction that what you do or omit

motives and resolves within. No revolution can be conceived half so absolute. It degrades the meaning of the greatest words in every language, and empties most of it out amongst the refuse of dangerous and deceptive falsehoods. And what is to be substituted for 'right' and wrong'? Why the life-wards' or 'death-wards' tendency of our actions-in other words, an unknown quality which it is nearly impossible to discern with certainty, and on the suggestion of which, even where we can discern it, we have no power to act unless nature has already been so good as to make us of that reasonable type whose actions are guided by their perceptions of what those actions ought to be. According to those who believe in the evolution of the race from purely material elements, of course the very conception of will as a selecting power between two alternatives is contrary to reason. Everything has sprung from a root which could have produced that only and nothing else. Right is that which tends to the evolution of still higher and more effective life; wrong is that which tends to the temporary degradation of such life as we see. But wrong is itself only wrong for those who can see it to be wrong, and can act on what they see; for those who cannot, that which would be wrong in another, is right, and may tend by a more winding path to a clearer right in time. Praise and blame are not really what they sound, but are modes of cheating those who deserve neither, into doing in future what we praise, and ceasing to do in future what we blame. Sin is not infinite in its character, nor absolutely evil. It is simply the imperfection of one being, understood and condemned by another at a higher stage of existence, but not condemned as we condemn that which we believe could have been resisted, but only as we condemn that which in us would be discreditable, and, indeed, impossible-as a well-mannered man condemns the vulgarity of the boor, or the accomplished mathematician condemns the ignorance of the shopman who cannot rightly compute his bill.

Further, every inward action of our minds is, on this view, really secret, and really of very transient interest. Infinite consequences of course it has, in the sense in which every vibration of the air produces infinite consequences, but not infinite consequences to us, not infinite consequences of any kind which are calculable or even guessable by us. Our moral life becomes, on this philosophy, a series of careful adjustments of our purposes to the great object of rendering that part of the world within our influence, beginning with ourselves, capable of as much healthy and happy life as may be in our power; its first great object being of course to remove from us that morbid notion that we or anyone else might have been either better or worse than we or they are, which is the root-fallacy of the spiritual system. Can anyone even for a moment doubt what a wonderful, what a bewildering transformation of our moral life this mode of thinking, if it could be introduced, would produce? very first metamorphosis it would make, would be to draw the most

none-of fostering tendencies which, if transmitted to future generations, would exert mischievous effects on the development of the race, and that of fostering such tendencies in persons past the danger of transmitting them to posterity. For instance, a woman who had but a few years to live, and who would then be permanently extinguished, who knew herself incapable of injuring posterity by transmitting her character to it at all, would be doing what, so far as we can see, would be no evil, in thinking evil which it might amuse her to think, so long as she kept her evil thoughts carefully imprisoned in her own mind. It may be said that this condition is impossible, and so perhaps it is. But none the less, the enormous relative difference between the evil committed by those who may be injuring a whole host of descendants by their bad habits of mind, and the evil committed by those who injure others, if at all, only by the comparatively insignificant influence of a less open and serene countenance or a more forbidding expression, remains. It must remain, on the new system of thought, a crime of an infinitely greater kind, for one intending to be a parent, to taint the stock from which many may derive their life, than for one who is to cease for ever from all share in existence within a few years, and can transmit nothing directly to future generations even within those few years, to think the very thoughts which the other must avoid. The evolutionary morality is bound to deal comparatively lightly with a moral phenomenon of a very transitory kind that cannot reproduce moral phenomena of a like order, and very gravely with one which is likely to reproduce itself in future. In short, it ought to draw up one code of blame and penalty for the parents of the future, quite another and different code for those who, if they affect others at all, affect them only by the much slighter influence of expression or example. Nay, put example out of the case by strict secrecy, and the blame, in every sense of the word blame, which remains to be attached to those who think only that which would be evil if it were made an example, or were transmissible as a habit to others, but which is actually evil only so far as it injures by the indirect influence of moral atmosphere, should be very slight indeed. The evolutionary morality would thus set up three distinct standards of evil: that which is evil in the highest degree by tending to injure the race, as well in other ways as through hereditary transmission; that which is evil in the secondary degree, by tending to injure through the example of the individual, but not by hereditary transmission; and that which is evil in the lowest degree, by merely affecting for the worse the countenance and general manner of the evil-thinker, but which is kept locked within the heart, and could never be transmitted as an evil tendency to offspring. I point out this necessary distinction in the evolutionary morality of materialism, only because I wish to note how highly artificial and inconsistent with the moral judgments of the conscience, as we know it, that morality is. Only imagine a man feeling himself

as he grew unlikely to transmit to posterity any new evil habits he might form! Such a man, according to the straightforward and natural view of the human race, as we know it, would be a more wicked, not a less wicked man than one who had made a life not originally pure, a steady process of purification. But a system which sees nothing in men which is not transitory-except to some extent the species and which sees no spiritual goal for old age but death, cannot square its ideas in any fashion with the habits of the human conscience as we find it in the highest life of the present day.

I believe, then, that the morality of materialistic Atheism cannot ever find its way to even the barest approximation towards the highest morality of the present day, far short as that is of the Christian morality. In one word, this materialistic evolution is a system which, honestly realised, must inevitably tend to damp the zeal for truth, to dwarf the nobler passions, to dull and depress the personal affections, to disenchant the highest enjoyments, and to smother the conscience of the human race.

RICHARD H. HUTTON.

WHAT IS A BANK? AND WHAT DOES IT DEAL IN?

EFORE speaking of Banking it is necessary to give a brief ex

Not a

cheque, though it is often called money by many persons. It fails in one of the most marked characteristics of all money-it does not circulate, does not run about the town as it performs its work as a tool of exchange. A cheque is an order addressed by a creditor to a banker, who is his debtor, to pay money to a person named directly or indirectly on the cheque. Sometimes, but rarely, a cheque passes through a second person's hands before it is presented for payment. A cheque then is money in the sense that it can pay for goods, through an indebted banker; but as cheques do not circulate, it is very inexpedient to call them money.

A bill possesses in a somewhat higher degree the quality of circulating. A bill is a written undertaking by its drawer to pay a sum of money on a given day, either himself or through a person on whom he draws, after an interval often extending over months. Bills impart a very valuable convenience to trade. By their help a buyer obtains possession of goods at once, whilst he is not obliged to pay for them till after a considerable delay. He purchases upon an agreement to pay at a later period; and thus he may acquire possession of merchandise, say in India, and he may have sold the goods again in England before the bill is due and he is summoned to pay. The businesses of great merchants and manufacturers would shrink down to insignificant dimensions but for the happy contrivance of bills they borrow the goods without payment for a time more or less long. They are a mode of borrowing. Now, it commonly happens that the man who has sold and been paid with a bill has need of the money before pay day has arrived; to relieve this inconvenience the law has conferred on bills the power of endorsement. The man in whose favour the bill is drawn can transfer his right to receive payment to another person whose name he writes on the back of the bill. He then borrows of a second lender, and the lender acquires the right of payment belonging to the man in whose favour the bill was drawn originally. No limit is assigned by law to the number of names to whom the bills may be endorsed in succession, so that they are able to effect a certain number of purchases. This gives them some amount of circulation, and thus they are able to perform the true work of money. But they are subject to the inconvenience that payment must be demanded at a given place on a given day; otherwise serious risks might be incurred. The value of a bill depends mainly on the solvency of the man who drew it, or