corporate spirit, as practically going to make up the physical strength of their master. The obedience of a despot's army to the despot is a moral or immoral-obedience; but, when it obeys, it practically becomes a physical tool in the despot's hands. The master of an army becomes like those monsters of mythology who can use a hundred hands at once or enter a city by eight gates at the same moment. For a people in this sense physically weaker to withstand and overthrow such a power, the work of the old Greek against the Persian, of the Hebrew against the transplanted Macedonian, of the men of the Three Lands against the Austrian, of the men of the Seven Provinces against the Spaniard,-all these are the noblest instances of our general law. There we see, again to quote our apostle or one writing in his spirit, those choicest worthies of every age, those who, in his words, ἐνδυναμώθησαν ἀπὸ ἀσθενείας, ἐγενήθησαν ἰσχυροὶ ἐν πολέμῳ, παρεμ βολὰς ἔκλιναν ἀλλοτρίων.

Nor is it only on the field of battle that the weak have thus been made strong in the cause of right. We may fearlessly assert that, till, as was said above, modern science enabled great states to rise to the level of small ones, the small states held that same position in the political system of our earth which it may be that our earth holdsI am far from saying that it does hold-among the physically greater bodies of the universe. I need not go about to show where it is that we look in almost all ages for the real advance in politics, in art— counting even the military art in the higher sense, as distinguished from the mere invention of huge engines of destruction. It is clearly

to the small states of the world, to those which had mere numbers, mere extent of territory, mere physical strength in the secondary sense already spoken of, all arrayed against them. Our models, always and in all places, are the small states, the single cities, the small nations, the leagues of districts and cities arrayed together to withstand some overwhelming enemy. So it was in old Greece; so it was in mediæval Italy; so it was among the free towns and lands of Germany and the Netherlands. Nay, in days before we heard quite so much about "empire" as has been the fashion lately, we were, in our own island, pleased with the comfortable belief that, while physically among the smaller powers of the world, we ranked none the less among the greatest, and were disposed to think ourselves in some points the greatest of all. And indeed even "empire," set up as it is nowadays, where we used rather to set such names as justice and freedom, often is itself, like the armies of despots and their murderous inventions, a kind of perverted instance of the general law. Of all the wide-spread dominions that the world has seen, the really greatest, the most abiding, those which could claim something of moral power, were those whose dominion was most utterly out of proportion to their mere physical resources. Carthage, Venice, Rome herself, were cities which had become corporate despots.

Carthage and Venice, ruling over a scattered dominion, never became anything else. Rome, with a continuous dominion, could incorporate her provinces in herself. But in so doing she too fulfilled the law. Surely the strong were never more fully confounded by the weak, or rather the strong had their very being merged into the being of the weak, than when a village on a low hill by the Tiber brought, step by step, to be as it were part of her own substance, the cities and lands of Latium, of Italy, of the whole Mediterranean world.

In this last stage of our argument we seem to have come very nearly round again to its beginning. This new objection-if not literally new, as very likely it is not, this objection newly brought up again—which is to disprove the scheme of the Christian religion through a kind of scorn for our own earth and its littleness, seems really to have a good deal in common with certain views of history and politics of which we heard a good deal a few years back. They were chiefly put forth by one who assuredly knows better, one who, as it has been happily said, "sometimes dissembles." "sometimes dissembles." But, if they were not meant gravely, they were certainly often taken gravely. The tone of scorn which it has been sometimes thought fine to take up towards those small states to which the world owes its present enlightenment, is grounded on the fact of that physical smallness which was in truth the cause of their moral greatness. When we are asked what there could be to care for in a state like Athens, whose rivers were so much smaller than the Thames, which had so small a number of citizens, so small a tale of square miles of territory, a state which in its greatest battles could not kill so many men as a clever engineer could kill in "a good railway accident "-when we are left to make the inference how much nobler were Persia or Babylon, the Hun, the Mongol, and the Turk, than so paltry a state as this-when we hear talk of this kind, we are really hearing the same voice, we are listening to the same idolatry of simple physical bigness, as when we are told that this earth cannot be of that importance which Christianity assigns to it, and that therefore Christianity must be false, because the circumference of this earth is vastly smaller than that of Jupiter or Saturn, to say nothing of vaster bodies outside the system to which we belong. But the new teaching is further influenced from another It seems to imply that extravagant estimate of man's power of knowledge which is the weak side of some favourite branches of modern study. Every man who seriously works at any branch of study must be always having his own personal ignorance brought home to him. That is, the more he learns, the more he sees beyond him which he has not learned. This is eminently the case with the historian and the philologer, and I conceive it to be equally the case with the student of natural science. But the student of natural VOL. LV.

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science is perhaps more tempted than the others to fancy that, though he himself does yet not know everything, yet he or somebody else may some day know everything, that in short the human mind. has no bound to its powers of knowledge. And yet of all men he ought most keenly to know that there is a bound; for, when he has, with wonderful skill, pointed out and defined a long series of causes for any process, there is at last a point at which he has to stop, a point at which he can no longer define his cause, when he has to talk about "force," which is in truth a conventional way of saying that his knowledge has come to an end. After all, we know the final why of very few things. Newton did not find out why the apple fell from the tree; he did find out that the falling of the apple was one of a wonderful range of phænomena, taking in the motions of vast bodies in our system and beyond it. He found out what we may for convenience call a law; he did not find out how the law came to be enacted or by what means it is enforced. It is a wholesome discipline to learn, not only that there are many things which we do not know, but that there are many things which, with our present faculties, we never can know. With those faculties we never can know what may be the real position, other than one purely physical, of our earth among the other bodies of the universe. We know nothing, and it is not wise to guess. Christianity does not really profess to teach us anything. In this article I have assuredly not committed myself or any one else to any position on such matters whatever. But if it should be true that our earth does hold a kind of moral place in the universe out of all proportion to its physical size, the fact will be one of exactly the same kind as the fact that so small a continent as Europe was chosen to play the foremost part in the world's history, and that so small a part of Europe as Greece was chosen to play the foremost part in Europe.

And here, is it wrong to whisper, very gently to whisper, that some of those who most zealously assert the new argument, who look with the greatest scorn on their own insignificant species and the paltry planet which it inhabits, stand themselves in the greatest need of the general law which we assert? If it is fair in such an argument as this to bring in the history of religions, and specially of that particular religion which is called in question, one might say that nowhere does the law of the weak confounding the strong come out more plainly than in the history of both Christianity and Islam. Both were assuredly among the weak things of the world when they started, and both assuredly were made strong out of their weakness. And the Christian may perhaps be allowed to say further that Christianity made the conquest of its own Roman world while it still remained in its physical weakness, while Islam made the conquest of its own Arabian world largely by allying itself with physical force. The same might be

said of other religious bodies in later times. If, for instance, the Religion of Humanity" is destined, in some future age, to overspread the world as Christianity and Islam have already overspread it, none surely will be so ready as its triumphant votaries to allow that their day of victory has grown out of a day of weakness; none surely will be so ready to cast aside the philosophy and vain deceit, the science falsely so called, which measures things by physical bigness only, and which might haply teach us to despise a small state, a small planet, a sect whose census would hardly need a Colenso to reckon it up, forgetting that, be it by a divine will or by some subtle evolution of causes, yet, as a fact, the law of the world is that the weak are chosen to confound the strong, and even that the things that are not are chosen to bring down the things that are.

And now what ground can we hope to have made in this argument? We have assuredly proved nothing. We have assuredly disproved nothing. We have not proved the truth of any Christian doctrine. We have not disproved any serious objection to any Christian doctrine. We have said nothing that can convert anybody who disbelieves on any serious ground. But we may have shown that no one who believes need cast away his faith, that no one who is otherwise disposed to believe need believe any the less, on account of a certain objection which is not serious. We may have shown that a certain alleged argument which at first sight sounds very clever is undoubtedly clever as a piece of rhetoric, but is of no strength at all as a piece of reasoning. We may have shown that no Christian need have his faith shaken simply because three centuries back it was found out that the earth goes round the sun, though it would seem that the full results of that discovery were reserved for our own day. If thus much has been done in the present paper, it is enough, because it is all that there has been any attempt made to do. Where I am now writing, I have no means of turning to the works of Bishop Butler. I have not read them for many years; it may be that he has forestalled every point that I have attempted to argue. I find that the spread of enlightenment at Oxford has turned his writings out of the Oxford course. I can only say that I am glad that, three and forty years ago, his Analogy, and yet more his Sermons, still formed part of that course. If so old a memory has kept on the faintest trace of his spirit or method to guide me in what I have now written, I shall be well content.

EDWARD A. FREEMAN.

Palermo.

IMPRESSIONS OF AUSTRALIA.

IN

V. RELIGION AND MORALS.

N the religious life and thought of Australia, and in its ecclesiastical organizations, I found less originality than I expected. The Churches-all the Churches as far as I could learn-have too faithfully reproduced in new circumstances the customs and institutions of the mother country. The Congregationalists in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide hold the same number of religious services on Sunday as the Congregationalists of London, Liverpool, and Manchester; and the same number of religious services in the week. Notwithstanding the differences of climate they hold their services at the same hours-at half-past ten or eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, just when, in summer, the day is becoming intolerably hot; and at half-past six or seven o'clock on Sunday evening, before it has become cool. Their services are of the same kind. They sing the same hymns to the same tunes. The clearer skies, the intenser light, the fiercer sun, the new constellations, the orange groves and the vineyards, the unfamiliar trees and flowers, the fertile virgin soil, the immense pastures which are being gradually covered with flocks and herds, the terrible droughts, the hot winds, the solitude of the settlers in the Bush, the hopefulness and the buoyancy of the people in the towns, their joy in their material prosperity, their affectionate memories of the old country-none of these, as far as I know, as yet touched the imagination and the heart of a devout poet-none of them has passed into the hymns of any of the Churches. Great hymn-writers like Watts and Charles Wesley are very rare; but it seemed to me rather remarkable that no hymns had been writtenor, perhaps, I ought to say, that no hymns had come into general and ordinary use-that had caught the colour and inspiration of the new country and the new environment of Church life.

has

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