as exists between gregarious animals, or such as has been exhibited between horses and dogs.

So far, however, from there being anything like an absolute standard of right and wrong, Mr. Darwin declares that he does not wish "to maintain that every strictly social animal, if its intellectual and social faculties were to become as active and as highly developed as man, would acquire exactly the same moral sense as ours." He furnishes a striking instance of what he means. "If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can scarcely be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering." That is to say, the sole reason why fratricide and infanticide are regarded by man as abominable and unnatural offences, is because of the conditions and circumstances in which he has been placed; there is no absolute wrong in such actions; there is no absolute right which would condemn them. This is to undermine the very foundations of morality; to make man an earth-problem left to grapple with problems of earth, with no higher sense of duty than he can extract for himself from his "conditions of life." This throws down all the barriers of moral obligation, as well as fails utterly to account for the authority which men accord to the dictate of the moral sense. How Mr. Darwin can quote Kant's fine words, in connection with his theory as to the evolution of the moral sense is incomprehensible. Says Kant:-"Duty! wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in the soul, and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience; before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel." But the social instincts are only social appetites, working alone by means of pleasure or pain; the pleasure of gratification, or the pain of dissatisfaction; and the mystery becomes only more mysterious how man himself has erected one class of appetites, his social instincts, into a "naked law in the soul," with authority enough to silence all other appetites, "however secretly they rebel." To say that the moral sense is nothing more than one class of appetites subordinating all the rest, is to abolish the moral sense, and not to explain it.

I can conceive of nothing so fatal and revolutionary as such a doctrine of the moral sense. Could ever such an hypothesis be firmly rooted in the minds of the masses of this, or of any country, society would be impossible. Crowded together as men are in most countries

of the old world, the rapid multiplication of their species renders their struggle for existence an increasingly arduous conflict. Seriously to convince men that they sprang from brutes; that their reason is nothing more than developed instinct; that there is no such thing as absolute right and wrong; that their moral sense is only the creature of their social appetites, regulated according to their conditions of life; that there is in reality no other accountability than to the community; that conscience is only an inherited faculty, modified through many generations out of a consciousness of pleasure or of pain in respect of certain actions; that there is no truth in religion, and that there is no life after death, would result in subverting the very foundations of society. Brutal appetites would then demand brutal gratifications, without impediment or restraint. Many who now form the orderly class would then ally themselves with the class of disorder; the inequalities of social position, and the unequal distribution of wealth, with the intellectual gratifications, the æsthetic delights, and the social pleasures which wealth affords to its privileged and responsible possessors, would even more bitterly than at present incense the masses, and breed continual revolutions: the many would no longer consent to labour incessantly, while the few should reap the profits; they would naturally decline to repress their appetites, in order that the few might invent new wants, so as to discover new gratifications; life would cease to be safe, female honour to be respected, and property to be secure. If "Thou shalt not steal" is nothing more than the outgrowth of a social instinct, it is easy to understand the position of those French economists, who declare that "to hold property is to rob society." One thing is certain, even as an hypothesis, a large community could not exist, if crowded into a comparatively small tract of territory, which denied religious sanction and authority to the moral sense. It is beyond dispute that no such community, so denying the religious authority of the moral sense, ever did exist. Infidelity may be easily possible to a few educated thinkers, or even to a minority of a community; gross ignorance and superstition are not incompatible with social order; but a religious faith of some kind has ever been indispensable to the permanence of society: a community in which all were disbelievers in God, in immortality, and in the religious obligation of the moral sense, would not last through two generations. What was true of Babylon, Egypt, Idumea, and the Jews, is likewise true of all nations, when the "sun" of the love of goodness is darkened, when the "moon" of faith is perverted, when the "stars" of religious

knowledges fall to the earth of sensuality and selfish indulgence, the doom of that nation has been uttered; the destructive agencies seething in its midst will overbalance the conservative restrictions; the spasm of revolution will burst the belt of constituted authority, and at once disrupted from within, as well as assailed from without, it will add to the list of ruined empires and kingdoms which have fallen, because they violated the necessary laws of national existence, and became a solemn warning to the world. What is true of a nation is so true, only because the same truth is also applicable to each individual comprised in the nation; inasmuch as the condition of a community is only the aggregate of the conditions of all its parts, or members. The only difference is that a dozen motives operate on individual thinkers to induce them to repress appetites, or to conceal them, and to refuse to follow out in practice admitted premises to their logical conclusions; while in a community, the thinkers form one class, and the men who labour to realize their conclusions form another, and the latter class may know nothing of the subtle sophistications and limitations by which the speculators justify their thinking one set of doctrines to be true, while acting as though another and contrary set of doctrines were true. Hence, I do not pretend to say that holding a pernicious doctrine as to the moral sense does necessarily corrupt those who accept it; but I do affirm that the practical tendency of such a conviction, if generally held, would be to undermine morality, and make society impossible.

We may, therefore, wisely turn away from contemplating such dangerous and baseless speculations, in order to study the real relationship between man and the animal kingdom, as set forth in the writings of Swedenborg. J. H.

(To be continued.)

THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE CHURCH.

It is one of the interesting and instructive characteristics of the New Church that every truth is a link in the chain that depends from the throne of God, and connects the creation, in all its degrees, with its Creator. The Church is visible and invisible, because in every being and every thing there is a visible and an invisible part. This distinction is universal in creation, because it exists in Him from whom the Creation had its birth. In the Divine Being there are Esse and

Existere, Divinity and Humanity. The Esse or Divinity is the invisible and incomprehensible; the Existere or Humanity is the visible and comprehensible, and as all creation bears, more or less perfectly, the image of the Creator; man, and therefore heaven and the Church, have a visible and an invisible part, or an esse and existere also. This distinction in the Divine not only accounts for the fact, but explains the mode, of the visible and invisible in every finite object. Every one who has entered intellectually into the subject knows that Esse means the inmost principle of the Deity, and derivatively and simply of whatever He has created, and that Existere means the outward principle which the inmost produces from, and by which it manifests, itself. Esse means literally to be, and the existere means literally to exist. Unfortunately these English words, which are the nearest equivalents of the original ones, have nearly the same signification, and do not convey an exact idea of the distinction which our author employs the two Latin words to express. Esse means to be, and this expresses accurately enough the simple idea of being; but existere literally means to rise, to spring, to appear, be seen; and the idea which Swedenborg employs it to express is not merely that of existing, but of coming into existence.

"Of the Lord is principally predicated esse and existere, for He alone is and EXISTS. As to what further concerns esse and existere, it appears as if they were nearly the same thing, but they are not so; every person and every thing has esse from conception, but its existere from birth, consequently, as conception is prior to birth, so is esse prior to existere: the soul is the very esse of man, but the sensitive or corporeal principle is his existere, for the former exists in the latter; celestial and spiritual love is the very esse of the regenerate man, but the rational and sensitive principle, when it is influenced by that love, is his existere; the case is thus with all and each of the things in the universe, for there is nothing given, which has not its conception in order that it may be, and its birth in order that it may exist; which may also be illustrated by this consideration (but this is for the learned), that every effect has its cause, and every cause has its end, and the end is the esse of the cause, and the cause is the existere of the end; in like manner the cause is the esse of the effect, but the effect is the existere of the cause." (A. C. 2621).

The distinction between esse and existere is like that of essence and form. The essence is the invisible part, and the form is the visible part, of the same being or thing: but the form is from the essence, and is that by which it comes into, manifests existence. These two parts may be distinguished, but they cannot be separated. There can be no esse without an existere, no essence without a form, therefore no invisible without a visible. If we speak of an essence without a form, what is it the essence of? if we speak of a form without an essence,

what is it the form of? As there can be no essence without a form, and no form without its essence, there can be no invisible church without a visible, no visible church without an invisible.

Man is the church in its least form. The invisible church in him consists of the principles of love and faith, as they exist in his will and understanding; and the visible church in him consists of the principles of love and faith, as they are manifested in his words and actions. These two things that make up the church may also be called internal and external worship. If we believe in God and love Him, we will worship Him, both with the invisible worship of humility and gratitude in our hearts, and with the visible worship of prayer and praise with our lips and in our lives. These two parts of the church, or of religion, cannot exist separately,—one cannot exist without the other. There may be a seeming separation between them. There may be outward worship and order without any corresponding inward humility and love. But this arises from hypocrisy or superstition; and such worship is not living but dead. It is the form of godliness, but without the power. It has what may be called an essence, but its essence is not the love and worship of God, but the love and worship of self. So far as regards the worshipper, there is neither the essence nor the form of the Church, neither its invisible nor its visible element: for that visible which does not spring from the invisible, as an existere from its esse, is not anything, but an appearance. It is something put on, not put forth; and having no vital principle, it is but as a dead body galvanized, which puts on a semblance of life so long as the artificial stimulant actuates it.

We must not, however, run into the extravagant error of supposing that it is useless and even wrong, as being mechanical, to engage in external worship, as a form which has been trained and prescribed for us by others; but that one must wait till we are spontaneously moved by a constraining power from within. Those who wait, but are never moved, show that they have not an inward principle to move or constrain them. But it is necessary for us sometimes to constrain ourselves, even to do what is right, as well as to avoid what is wrong. And if, in doing so, we act from a sense of duty, we act from an inward principle—an invisible principle desiring to clothe itself with a form that will make it visible. Self-constraint, when the motive is good, is the internal constraining the external. There could be no self-constraint if there were not a power to constrain, and a power to be constrained. Therefore self-constraint is one of the truest signs and one of the noblest acts