confrérie. The principle of these organizations, which was that of the mutual aid and protection of its members, is among the oldest and most permanent ideas of the Teutonic race, and was in full operation for certain purposes long before free cities or trade corporations were thought of. In the days before the invasions societies existed in Germany and the North of Europe which were called gildes. They were so called because the word signifies a feast, given at the common expense of the society whose members partook of it, and at these feasts it was the custom for those present to take an oath to aid and protect each other. Here we see the first germ of that spirit of association and of mutual and voluntary helpfulness which has always distinguished, and to this day distinguishes, the Teutonic from the Latin races. The aid and protection which these gildes were organized to afford were not of that kind which their successors were called upon to give. The ancient Germans, of course, had no mechanic arts and no commercial occupations; but in the absence of anything like law or public order in those rude days they felt the need of seeking by combination with their comrades that protection for their persons and their property which their nominal chief could not or would not give them. The weak, therefore, associated themselves with the strong to make a common resistance to oppression; they bound themselves to each other by a solemn oath; they chose their leaders, and, when they became Christians, a patron saint; they ate and drank together at certain fixed periods; and, emboldened by their numbers, they asserted their power and became in time themselves the lawless oppressors of others. Out of this ancient and persistent habit of mutual helpfulness grew what was known in England's Saxon days as frank-pledge, by which, as I have before explained, a responsibility for the acts and offences of each member of the society was attached not primarily to himself but to his family, and especially to the gilde to which he belonged, and this frank-pledge thus became an important instrument of social order in those days. Any member could call upon his gilde brothers for assistance in case of violence and wrong; if falsely accused, they appeared in court as his compurgators; if poor, they supported, and when dead they buried him. On the other hand, each member was responsible to the gilde, as it was to the State, for order and obedience to the laws. A wrong of brother against brother was also a wrong against the general body of the gilde, and was punished in the last resort by expulsion, which left the offender a lawless man and an outcast. In its main features this was the organization of the trade gildes in towns, exclusive monopoly of work, and charitable aid to suffering comrades. But we must not forget that while the regulations of the trade corporations were founded upon the selfishness and cupidity of the citizen and the artisan, those adopted by the gildes or confréries were taught by that Divine charity which is the source of the virtues of the man and the Christian. The members of the confrérie concerned themselves about the happiness of their fellow-members, as the burghers did about their privileges. When in danger they invoked the Divine aid, and caused prayers and masses to be said for the benefit not merely of their own souls, but for those of their relations, friends, and benefactors also. Their object was to make of the members of the gilde, who were also generally of the same trade, one family united in one faith under the protection of the same saint and brought into close relations by the enjoyments of a common social intercourse. No one of the members was permitted to live in poverty: the two opposite principles of pride in their gilde, and the charity which was its ruling motive, alike forbade it. Like some of our modern institutions of charity which are the direct and legitimate successors of the gildes of the Middle Age, such as the Free-Masons, the Odd-Fellows, and kindred associations, a good deal of both time and money may have been wasted in processions, regalia, and the like, while they were carrying on some of their work; and yet we must not forget that the great motive and object of that work was to aid those whom sickness or misfortune had made helpless. When we think of the civilizing power in our days among workmen of mutual aid societies, we may imagine the influence of organizations with the same end in view in the Middle Age. Close union between workers at the same trade, social enjoyments in common, innocent recreation for the workman who was almost constantly penned up in his shop, prayers said in common, a large spirit of charity and mutual succor from the ills of poverty,—such was the ideal life of workmen belonging to the privileged gildes in the free cities of the Middle Age. Could it have been made the real and actual life of such workmen, what a paradise society would have become! THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. MONCURE D. CONWAY. [The writer of the selection given below, well known for his graceful and attractive essays and descriptive articles, was born in Virginia in 1832. He studied theology, and entered the Methodist ministry, but afterwards became distinguished as a Unitarian pastor and an active opponent of slavery. In 1863 he became pastor of a Unitarian congregation in London, England. Of his works we may men29 IV.-P พ tion "Tracts for To-Day," "The Golden Hour," "The Wandering Jew," and "Idols and Ideals," from the latter of which our present extract is taken. No compendium of literature to-day is complete unless it gives some degree of attention to the subject of evolution, which for the past quarter of a century has occupied so prominent & place in scientific literature, and has, in fact, infiltrated all literature and all thought. Mr. Conway has presented this subject, with its bearings upon theological opinion, with a clearness, neatness, and brevity that make his essay particularly suitable for our purpose, as showing in few words just what advanced thinkers mean by the evolution theory. We therefore extract the most pertinent portions of his essay.] WHAT, then, is the Darwinian theory? It is that all the organic forms around us, from lowest to highest, have been evolved the one from the other by means of natural selection. Natural selection is the obvious law that every power or trait which better adapts an animal to live amid its surroundings enables that animal to survive another which has not the same power or trait. The fit outlives the unfit. And because they outlive their inferiors, they will propagate their species more freely. Their offspring will inherit their advantages,—by the laws of heredity will still further improve upon them; and thus there will be a cumulative storing up of such advantages established. Each form less furnished with resources to maintain itself is crowded out before the increase of forms which are better supplied with hereditary abilities. A sufficient accumulation of slight advantages amounts in the end to a new form or species. An accumulation of specific advantages will be summed up in a new genus. And thus, as Emerson has said,— "Striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form." Now, to the merely scientific mind evolution is simply a scientific generalization. In its light he beholds the sprouting leaf hardening to a stem, unpacking itself to a blossom, swelling again to the pulpy leaf called fruit. He inspects the crustacean egg, sees the trilobite in the embryo stretching into a tiny lobster, shortening into a crab, and says trilobite, lobster, and crab pass from one to the other in this little egg-world, as the new theory shows they did in the big world. He will be interested to find out the intervening steps of improvement between one form and another, and will fix upon this or that animal as the one from which a consummate species budded. But, as I have stated, a truth in any one department of knowledge is capable of being translated into every other. We are already familiar with a popular translation of the Darwinian theory in the phrase which explains it as meaning that men are descended from monkeys. And by this common interpretation many conclude that it implies a degradation of the human species. But that phrase does not convey the truth of the theory, any more than if a rough pediment in the Museum were declared to be the splendid temple of Diana of Ephesus. For behind each one of the forms evolving higher, there stretch the endless lines and processions of the forms which combine to produce it. The ape may appear ugly, seen as he is among us, detached from his environment, when contrasted with man; but he is royal when contrasted with the worm in the mud. But neither worm nor ape can be truly seen when detached from the cosmical order and beauty. It matters little what rude form sheathed the first glory of a human brain. It does not rob the opal of its beauty that its matrix was common flint, nor does it dim the diamond's lustre that it crystallized out of charcoal. The ape may be the jest of the ignorant, but the thinker will see behind him the myriad beautiful forms which made |