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law, order and unity, that serve no purpose, are no evidence of wisdom of design.' * * * The obligation, then, that a man is under to act in one way rather than in another, is owing to its tendency to happiness or to the avoidance of pain, and Morality may be defined as the the science which teaches men to live together in the most happy manner possible.' — (Helvetius.)” * Bentham says, "No man ever had, can, or could have a motive differing from the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain."

J. S. Mill says, "A volition is a moral effect, which follows the corresponding moral causes as certainly and invariably as physical effects follow their physical causes." To present these moral causes then is the object of the moralist. "To prove that the immoral action is a miscalculation of self-interest; to show how erroneous an estimate the vicious man makes of pains and pleasures, is the purpose of the intelligent moralist."-Bentham. Man's freedom consists in being able to do as he pleases, which is all-sufficient; the object then must be to present such motives as will make him please to do that which will be most for the lasting interest of himself and society.

MORAL RESPONSIBILITY.—But if no action of our lives in the then state of our minds, and the circumstances in which we were placed, could have been different, what becomes of our Accountability or Responsibility? It consists in the consequences of our actions, which are pleasurable or painful as they are right or wrong, that is, as they tend to benefit or injure ourselves or society. It is for the moralist then to guard, and if necessary to increase, these pains and pleasures, and as man necessarily seeks that which is pleasurable and avoids that which is painful, the interests of

* Philosophy of Necessity, p. 87 to 89-90.

morality are sufficiently assured. But if all actions are the same, per se, and could not possibly have been otherwise under the circumstances, what have we to preach about?

What becomes of sin and iniquity, &c.? All that may be safely buried, and all we have to do in morals as in physics, is to show the consequences of our actions. The laws of morality are as fixed, and determinate, and unvarying, as are those that keep the planets in their sphere.

The common and erroneous idea of Responsibilty—of man's being an accountable agent is the rightfulness of inflicting punishment, that is, of apportioning a certain amount of suffering to a certain amount of sin, which he is supposed to have deserved because he could have done differently; but as this is not the case- as he could not have acted differently, all responsibility in this sense would be unjust, and as such actions are already past and could not be recalled, it would be as useless as unjust. The pains and penalties, or punishments, attending our actions, are for our good; to show us when we have done wrong, that is, done that which will injure us; and to prevent our doing it again; and we are so punished whether our actions are voluntary or not, that is, whether they are what is called free, or merely accidental. Whether we fall into the fire or put ourselves in voluntarily, the pain is the same, the object being to make us get out again as soon as possible and thus avert the consequences of being burned. It is the same in other penalties, whether the pains are those of conscience or merely bodily. Forgiveness of sins then, or to be relieved from that punishment which is for our good, would be simply doing us an injury,-and not to forgive, if no good comes from punishment, would be mere vengeance. The myriads of human beings whom, it is said, God has "fore-ordained," that is, designed beforehand, to be punished to all eternity, "to the praise of his glorious

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justice," as the Westminster Confession has it, may consistently with that justice be safely released. Moral Responsibility, so much contended for, is merely the supposed right to take revenge for injuries done to us.

* See also the sermon of Jonathan Edwards, the unanswerable champion of Philosophical Necessity, on the "Justice of God in the damnation of Sinners," and the diary of Mr. Carey on the "pleasure" and "sweetness he had experienced in reading that sermon.

Surely Free Will would be a most undesirable gift if accompanied by such possible consequences; surely God could never make his creatures "free" thus to injure themselves irretrievably! Infinite power and benevolence and eternal punishments are contradictions. But men are better than their creeds, they do not realize or really believe this horrid dogma; if they did it would put a stop to all action in this world -who could go about his daily work with such a possible doom hanging over him? or who but a selfish brute beast, acting upon mere brute instinct, would dare to bring children into the world whose possible and even probable fate was endless torment. To me it appears the blackest libel on the name of the Creator that Hell itself could invent, and wherever we find that the doctrine is received in any seriousness, it has, as we might expect, the most brutalizing tendency. Mr. Lecky, in his History of Rationalism, shows how completely this effect was produced in Scotland in the sixteenth century, in the torturing and burning of supposed witches, and in persecution generally. He says:"The Reformed clergy all over Scotland applauded and stimulated the persecution. The ascendancy they had obtained was boundless; and in this respect their power was entirely undisputed. One word from them might have arrested the tortures, but that word was never spoken. Their conduct implies not merely a mental aberration, but also a callousness of feeling which has rarely been attained in a long career of vice. Yet these were men who had often shown, in the most trying circumstances, the highest and the most heroic virtues. They were men whose courage had never flinched when persecution was raging around-men who had never paltered with their consciences to attain the favour of a king-men whose self-devotion and zeal in their sacred calling had seldom been surpassed-men who, in all the private relations of life, were doubtless amiable and affectionate. It is not on them that our blame should fall: it is on the system that made them what they were. They were but illustrations of the great truth, that when men have come to regard a certain class of their fellow creatures

As motives govern our volitions, we praise or blame, reward or punish, as motives to induce one line of conduct rather than another. A man who sets up his free will and refuses to be governed by motives is either a madman or a fool, and his actions are not the less caused. If a man could refuse to be governed by the strongest motive, all moral influences, and praise and blame, would be useless, and all reasoning upon his conduct impossible, for we should never be able to predict what he would do from what he had done. We judge of acts by their tendency; but as all mental action originates in motives, it is by motives that character must be judged, and an act is moral, not because it is free, but because it arises in moral motives.

as doomed by the Almighty to eternal and excruciating agonies, and when their theology directs their minds with intense and realizing earnestness to the contemplation of such agonies, the result will be an indifference to the suffering of those whom they deem the enemies of their God, as absolute as it is perhaps possible for human nature to attain." Of course under such a dogma, if only half believed, intolerance and persecution become the highest duty, and all human sympathy must be made to stand aside. The Spaniards, with their Inquisition, and the Scotch, only showed that they were more earnest in their belief than other na.ions who professed to hold the same faith. Mr. Lecky says, "If men believe with an intense and untiring faith that their own view of a disputed question is true beyond all possibility of mistake-if they further believe that those who adopt other views will be doomed by the Almighty to an eternity of misery, which with the same moral desperation, but with a different belief, they would have escaped, - these men will, sooner or later, persecute to the extent of their power. If you speak to them of the physical and moral sufferings which persecution produces, or of the sincerity and unselfish heroism of its victims, they will reply that such arguments rest altogether on the inadequacy of your realization of the doctrine they believe-what suffering that men can inflict can be comparable to the eternal misery of all who embrace the doctrine of the heretic? what claim can human virtues have to our forbearance, if the Almighty punishes the mere profession of error as a crime of the deepest turpitude?"

CHAPTER III.

UPON THAT WHICH UNDERLIES ALL PHENOMENA.

"And what if all of animated nature

Be but organic heaps diversely framed,

That tremble into thought, as over them sweeps,

Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the soul of each, and God of all?"

Coleridge.

"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return to God who gave it."-Ecclesiastes.

"In all phenomena the more closely they are investigated the more we are convinced that, humanly speaking, neither matter nor force can be created or annihilated, and that an essential cause is unattainable.— Causation is the will, Creation the act of God."— W. R. Grove. Correlation of Physical Forces.

We should have no grounds for supposing that matter existed if matter did not exert force, and the popular idea is, that matter could be separated from this force, or from its manifestations or accidents, and that the laws which govern matter are external to itself. But, as we have seen, it is most probable that the force, or manifestations, or accidents, or laws, are all that really exists.

Our faculties make us acquainted with qualities or attri butes without ourselves, and we assume that these must be qualities or attributes of something, and we have called it Matter; we have feelings and ideas, and we equally assume that they also must belong to something, and we call it