by the guillotine, by the fusillade at Lyons, and by the drownings on the Loire, five thousand men and women at the utmost suffered a comparatively easy death. Multiply the five thousand by ten, and you do not reach the number of those who were murdered in France alone in the two months of August and September 1572. Fifty thousand Flemings and Germans are said to have been hanged, burnt, or buried alive under Charles the Fifth. Add to this the long agony of the Netherlands in the revolt from Philip, the Thirty Years' War in Germany, the ever recurring massacres of the Huguenots, and remember that the Catholic religion was at the bottom of all these horrors, that the crusades against the Huguenots especially were solemnly sanctioned by successive popes, and that no word of censure ever issued from the Vatican except in the brief intervals when statesmen and soldiers grew weary of bloodshed, and looked for means to admit the heretics to grace.

With this infernal business before men's eyes, it requires no common intellectual courage to believe that God was on the side of the people who did such things-to believe that He allowed his cause to be defended by devils-while He permitted also good and brave men, who had originally no sympathy with Protestantism, to be driven into it by the horrible fruits of the old creed.

If this be true, then indeed, as an Oxford Professor tells us, our human conceptions of justice and goodness are no measure of what those words mean when applied to God. Then indeed we are in worse case than if the throne of heaven was empty, and we had no Lord and father there at all. I had rather be an atheist,' says Bacon, 'than believe in a god who devours his children.' The blackest ogre in a Negro fetish is a benevolent

angel compared to a god who can be supposed to have sanctioned the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

It is an old story that men make God after their own image. Their conception of his nature reflects only their own passions. Theological fury in the sixteenth century turned human creatures into fiends, and they in turn made God into a fiend also. The Neo-Catholics of our own day, while they will not disclaim the God of Gregory XIII., have softened the outlines, but have failed to add to its dignity. The divinity of the Ritualist imagination abandons the world and all its pursuits, cares nothing for the efforts of science to unfold the mysteries of the creation, or to remove the primeval curse by the amelioration of the condition of humanity-all these it leaves to the unconverted man. It takes delight in incense, and ceremonies, and fine churches, and an extended episcopate, and for the rest is occupied in its own world, and in helping priests to work invisible miracles. The Evangelical, far nobler than these, yet embarrassed still with his doctrines of reprobation, forms a theory which has some lineaments of superhuman beauty, but unable to rid himself of the savage element left behind by Calvin, offers us a Saviour at once all merciful and without mercy-a Saviour whose pity will not reject the darkest sinner from his grace, yet to those whose perplexed minds cannot accept as absolutely and exhaustively true the 'scheme of salvation' deals harder measure than the Holy Office of Seville. The heretic, in the auto-da-fé, endured but a few moments of agony. The Calvinist preacher consigns him without a shudder to an eternity of flames. Faith is the cry of all theologians, Believe with us and you will be saved; refuse to believe and you are lost. Yet they know nothing of what belief means. They dogmatise but they fail to persuade, and they

yet be separated from opinion, and brought back to life. For fixed opinions on questions beyond our reach, we may yet exchange the certainties of human duty; and no longer trusting ourselves to socalled economic laws, which are no more laws than it is a law that an unweeded garden becomes a wilderness of sting-nettles, we may place practical religion once more on the

throne of society. There may lie before us a future of moral progress which will rival or eclipse our material splendour; or that material splendour itself may be destined to perish itself in revolution. Which of those two fates lies now before us depends on the attitude of the English laity towards theological controversy during the next half century.

SOMER

OMEBODY has said, that if you would forecast the opinions of the coming generation, you must ask what speculative creed is held by the men between twenty and thirty years of age. If, that is, you wish to know what England will think and do a life-time hence, you must watch the philosophy of Young England' just now. Like most general maxims, this one misses as often as it hits. It seems good until applied; but at the rude touch of facts, it flies into pieces, and is seen to be made up of doubtful propositions. Still, we may put some trust in the broad underlying truth, that during the nine or ten years which follow the birth of manhood, the life beliefs of most people crystallise. As a rule, a Tory at thirty is a Tory for life; a Liberal at that age is always a Liberal; a Churchman always a Churchman; a Dissenter always a Dissenter. However, in the search for the political creed of Young England, that fact takes us but a little way; for the question whether Toryism, Liberalism, or Radicalism wins most sympathy from the growing minds, is seen to rest on a stupid blunder, when touched by the finger of analysis. A political 'whip,' indeed, tickets all men as Tories, Liberals, or Radicals, because to him all men are voting machines, so far gifted with a cunning semblance of will, that they can be induced to do one of three thingsvote with the Government, vote with the Opposition, or not vote at all. Most people, indeed, map out humanity on the same principle as the little flower-girl whom Heine met on first going to Paris, divided her wares. The poet tried to explain that the Linnean system classified flowers according to the

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number of their stamens; la petite suivait une autre méthode, et comme elle me le disait, elle rangeait les fleurs en deux classes, celles qui sentent bon et celles qui puent. Je crois,' adds the witty poet, 'qu'elle observait la même classification chez les hommes, et c'est toujours plus raisonnable que de les ranger selon les étamines, comme Linné.' The plan answers well enough in Convocation, or the House of Commons; but it fails when we want, not to sell flowers, but to find how they range themselves in scientific order. Just as a delicious or a repulsive scent comes from a host of blossoms that have no family likeness, so the name of Liberal or Tory takes in types of men who have no bond of union, except that which results from their occasionally working in the same team. For the purpose in hand, then, it is of little avail to say that Young England is mostly Liberal, or mostly Tory. What kind of Liberalism does it profess? What kind of Toryism? Is it the Liberalism of Mr. Gladstone, or Mr. Bright, or Mr. Lowe, or Mr. Mill? Is it the Toryism of Lord Cranborne, or Mr. Henley, or Mr. Disraeli, or Lord Stanley? Even those questions do not afford. all the elements of the problem. In what soil are the various types of Toryism or Liberalism rooted? In what direction do they tend to develop? How do their blossoms stand the cold air and biting winds of this rough political climate?

We shall have the best chance of hitting on the right answer, if, for a moment, we put the political parties of England out of sight, and watch the great general currents of thought. The fact on which I wish to fix attention at the outset is the overmastering force with

which the current of Democracy is now flowing. Most men, indeed, see that current so clearly that it hardly needs to be pointed out. Even those who hate Democracy most fiercely hardly deny that, for the present, it is smiting down every institution with which it cannot harmonise. But when we ask what the Democracy of England is, what it means, what it aims at, what it must destroy, the question brings either silence or a war of words. Some men look upon it fearfully, and say nothing. To them it seems laden with the ruin of that England which is known to history; and, stricken with a sense of powerlessness, they turn away from the sight with the same despair as a French nobleman might, ninety years ago, have averted his eyes from that revolutionary cloud in the horizon, which, although no bigger than a man's hand, already seemed fated to cover the heavens with a veil of darkness, and to bring a St. Bartholomew's Night to old France. Others laugh at such fears. They say that, like the tide, Democracy comes up to a certain point only to fall back again. They see, indeed, what Democracy has done in France, what it is doing in Russia, what a strength it has gathered in America. They see the wreck of the old nobilities, the crowd of dethroned kings, the abolition of serfdom, the downfall of slavery, the cry of peoples for such national boundaries as have been set by nature, and for the destruction of those that have been framed by statecraft or by divine right. And, as they hear the rising surge, they cannot flatter themselves that the ebb is at hand. But they fancy that, sooner or later, the world will awaken to the criminal absurdity of putting political power into the hands of ignorant masses, and they believe that the day of sanity will come in time to save the institutions of England from ruin. They believe that, in spite of Beales and his

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roughs, the crown, the House of Lords, the nobility, and the Church will withstand the shock of revolution. True, those venerable institutions are not so strong as they were once. For two centuries we have been cutting bit by bit off the king's sceptre, until what remains is hardly long enough to be grasped by a man's hands, and is too light to be used for dealing a blow. The House of Lords has become little better than a court for registering the decrees of the Commons, and out of doors the slightest sign of independence among the Peers is greeted with an angry shout. pack of wretched philosophers' are beguiling the ignorant into the belief, that the land belongs to the people, that laws of entail are iniquitous, and that no man should be allowed to bequeath an estate to a child unborn; and if such pernicious doctrines shall fructify into practice, we may see our aristocracy gradually divorced from the soil, and coming down to the level of city traders, from the rank of kings. While Churchmen are asking whether it would not be well to think about the policy of some day doing something to strike out the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed, M. Ernest Renan's Vie de Jésus, done into English, lies on every book-stall, price fourteen pence; and the working men do not go to church; and the clergy say that the educated classes are as infidel as were those of France before the Revolution. While Archdeacon Denison is clamouring for more bishops, and plenty of them, many people are seriously inquiring whether there should be any bishops at all. While Lord Lyttelton is inviting Dissenters to throw themselves into the arms of a Church which has grave thoughts of washing herself, Dissenters are boasting that, when the Irish Establishment shall have been cleared away, the time will come for settling with the epi