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the soul; in an unforeseen power of action granted to man in certain rare moments of faith, love, and supreme concentration of all the faculties towards a determinate and virtuous aim,-deserved therefore, and analogous to the power of revelation which the increased concentration of rays in the telescope communicates to the human eye: but we believe all these things, the pre-ordained consequence of laws hitherto withheld from our knowledge. We do not believe in the miraculous, as you understand it; in the infringement of laws already known and accepted by arbitrary will; in facts in contradiction to the general design of the creation, which would, we consider, simply testify to a want of wisdom or of justice in God.

You appeal in support of your theory to an idea of divine Free Will. We deny it. We are free, because imperfect: called to ascend, to deserve, and, therefore, to choose between good and evil; between sacrifice and egotism. Such free will as ours is unknown to God, the perfect Being whose every act is necessarily identical with the True and Just; who cannot, without violation of our every conception of his nature, be supposed to break his own law.

You believe in a God who has created and reposes. We believe in continuity of creation; in a God the inexhaustible source of the Life diffused perennially throughout the infinite; of thought, which in Him is inevitably identical with action; of conceptions, realised in worlds.

You believe in a heaven extrinsic to the universe; in a determinate portion of creation, on ascending to which we shall forget the past, forget the ideas and affections which caused our hearts to beat on earth. We believe in One Heaven, in which we live, and move, and love; which embraces-as an ocean embraces the islands that stud its surface-the whole indefinite series of existences through which we pass. We believe in the continuity of life; in a connecting link uniting all the various periods through which it is transformed and developed; in the eternity of all noble affections, maintained in constancy until the last day of our existence; in the influence of each of these life-periods upon the others; in the progressive sanctification of every germ of good gathered by the pilgrim soul in its journey upon earth and otherwhere.

You believe in a divine hierarchy of natures essentially distinct from our own and immutable. From the solemn presentiment enfolded in the symbol of the angel you have deduced no better conception than that of a celestial aristocracy-the basis of the conception of aristocracy on earth-and inaccessible to man. We recognise in the angel the soul of the just man who has lived in faith and died in hope; and in the inspiring, or guardian angel, the soul of the creature most sacredly and constantly loving and beloved by us on earth, having earned the recompense of watching over and

aiding us on earth. The ladder 'twixt earth and heaven of Jacob's dream symbolises, for us, the ascending and descending series of man's transformations on the path of initiation in the divine Ideal, and the beneficent influence exercised over us by the beloved beings who have preceded us upon that path.

You believe in an Eden surrounding the cradle of mankind, and lost through the fault of our first parents; we believe in an Eden towards which God wills that humanity-traversing the path of error and sacrifice-shall constantly advance.

You believe that the soul can pass at one bound from its human existence to the highest beatitude, or to absolute, irrevocable perdition. We believe the human period of our existence too distant from the highest ideal; too full of imperfections to allow that the virtue of which we are capable here below can suddenly deserve to reach the summit of the ascent leading to God. We believe in an indefinite series of re-incarnations of the soul, from life to life, from world to world; each of which represents an advance from the anterior; and we reject the possibility of irrevocable perdition as a blasphemy against God, who cannot commit self-destruction in the person of the creature issued from himself; as a negation of the law prefixed to life, and as a violation of the idea of love which is identical with God. It may be that we shall retraverse the stage over which we have already passed, if we have not deserved to ascend beyond it, but we cannot, spiritually, either retrogress or perish.

You believe in the resurrection of the body, such as it was at the termination of our earthly existence; we believe in the transformation of the body (which is naught other than an instrument adapted to the work to be achieved) in conformity with the progress of the Ego, and with the mission destined to succeed the present.

All things are, in your creed, definite, limited, immediate; bearing the stamp of a certain immobility, which recalls the characteristics of the materialist conception of life. In our creed all is life, movement, succession, and continuity.

Our world opens upon the infinite on every side. Your dogma humanises God: our dogma teaches the slow, progressive divinisation of man.

You believe in grace: we believe in justice. You, by believing in grace, believe-more or less explicitly, but inevitably—in predestination; which is but a transformation of the pagan and aristocratic dogma of the two natures of man. Grace, according to you, is neither granted to all, nor to be achieved through works; it is arbitrarily bestowed by the Divine Will, and the elect are few. We bieve that God called us, by creating us; and the call of God can neither be impotent nor false. Grace, as we understand it, is the tendency and faculty given to us all gradually to incarnate the

Ideal; it is the law of progress which is his ineffaceable baptism upon our souls.

That law must be fulfilled. wherein to exercise our free will. endeavour-hasten or delay the fulfilment of the law in time and space; multiply or diminish the trials, struggles, and sufferings of the individual; but not, as the dualism taught by your dogma would do, eternise evil, and render it victorious. Good only is eternal: God only is victorious.

Time and space are granted to us
We can-through our action and

Meanwhile, that dualism which dominates your doctrine of grace, of predestination, of hell, of redemption half-way upon the historic development of humanity, and every portion of your Dogma inspires and limits your Moral Code, and renders it irremediably imperfect and inefficacious to guide and direct human life at the present day.

V.

Your dogma is expiring. Your moral code is therefore rendered sterile and expires with it. It is deprived of its origin and its sanction; of that faith in the duty and necessity of regulating human life by its precepts, whence it derived its power to govern men's individual instincts, passions, and free will. You have but to look around you in order to perceive this.

The moral code is eternal you say, and you point to the precepts of love towards God and man, of sacrifice, of duty, of preference given to the salvation of the soul over the desires and interests of a day.

Yes; those precepts spoken by the lips of Jesus do live, and will live; they are as undying as our gratitude towards Him. His cross, as symbol of the sole enduring virtue,-sacrifice of self for others,may still be planted, without any contradiction, upon the tomb of the believer in the new religion; but a moral code which is to have a fruitful, active influence upon mankind, requires far more than this.

The precept of love, which is inborn within the human soul, is the basis, more or less apparent, of all religions; but each religion gives a different value and larger interpretation to that general formula of Duty. The moral problem, the solution of which progresses with the epoch, is the problem how we are to worship God, how we are to love man, how we are to work out the soul's salvation, and it is the mission of the religion of each epoch to give the force of a law, supreme over all and equally binding upon all, to the definition of the How, and to compel the fulfilment of the duty thus defined by linking it with heaven, tracing it back to the Divine conception of the creation. Even if your moral code were sufficient for the intelligence and the

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aspiration of the epoch, it would still remain sterile; a mere inert, inefficacious dead letter, because this link is lost. Your heaven exists no longer, your conception of creation is proved false. The telescope has destroyed it for ever in the fields of the infinite; geology has destroyed it on earth; the recently-recovered tradition of the past of humanity has destroyed it in the kingdom of intelligence, and the presentiment within us of a new law of life has destroyed it in our hearts. But your moral code, holy as it was before it had become adulterated by your corruption, intolerance, and cowardly compromise with the atheistic powers of the world, is unequal to the obligations imposed upon us by God.

The dualism of your dogma, transferred into your moral code, generated that antagonism between earth and heaven, matter and spirit, body and soul, which, no matter to what grade of the doctrine you belong, essentially narrowed your conception of the unity of life, and of its mission here and elsewhere, rendering it impossible that the great social questions of the day should be solved through help of your religion.

In the face of an empire believed to be omnipotent, and founded upon the prestige of material force placed between a religion which sanctioned the dogma of the two human natures (freeman and slave) and a philosophy which consigned mankind to the dominion of fatality, in a world in which there existed no conception of the collective life of humanity, or of an innate faculty of progress in individual man—having to address himself to men either intoxicated with tyranny and lust, or crushed by poverty and the abject servility induced by despair of a better future-it was impossible for Jesus to conceive any other mission for the benefit of the brother men he loved so well, than that of effecting their moral regeneration, or any other consolation for their wretchedness on earth than that of creating for them a country of freemen and equals in heaven. It was his purpose to teach men how to save, to redeem themselves, in spite of, and against, the earth.

From the legend of the temptation, in which the earth is evidently the heritage of the evil spirit, down to the "render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's" of the three first Gospels; from the opposition between the law of God and the flesh, of Paul (Rom. vii.), down to the "love not the world," of John (2 Ep. ii. 15), the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles constantly insist upon our divorce from all terrestrial things, as a condition of moral improvement, of salvation. In their eyes our earthly abode is overshadowed by the curse of sin and temptation; and our sole hope of salvation from this curse lies in our suicide of the man within us. As Tell even in the midst of the tempest spurned from him the bark that bore the oppressor, each of us is held bound to spurn from him the earth, to cast loose every tie

that binds him to it, in order to raise himself on the wings of faith to heaven.

The result of these teachings is a moral code which may be thus summed up: Adoration of God, and faith in Christ, as the necessary intermediate to our salvation; renunciation of every natural desire; abdication of every aim of social transformation; indifference to every earthly good; resigned acceptance of every existing evil, either as a means of expiation, or of imitation of the sufferings of Jesus; war to the body and to the senses; submission to the powers that be; exclusive importance given to the work of internal purification, especially to the realisation within ourselves of faith in heavenly grace.

The holy nature of Jesus's own mind diffused a breath of love over the whole of his teachings, and generated a spirit of charity and disposition to good works in his hearers; but it was the love of men who, despairing of vanquishing the evil existing in the world, sought only to alleviate the more immediate sufferings of individuals. Christian charity was rather a means of purifying one's own soul, than the sense of a common aim, which it was God's will that man should realise here below. It did not overpass the limits of benevolence, and led the believers in the new religion to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and heal the sick with whom they came in contact; but to no attempt to destroy the causes of human hunger and misery. Even as the earth itself was despised, so were all the good things of the earth to be despised as a perennial source of temptation, and the gifts to the poor and to the Church testified to this belief. Poverty itself was preached by the majority of Jesus's followers as a blessed mortification of the flesh, and regarded by all as an incontestable necessity. Love of country, and that love which embraces the generations of the future, and is devoted even unto sacrifice for their sake; that love which will not tolerate the brand of inequality or slavery on the brow of a brother man, was unknown to Christian morality. The true country, the real home of Christian freemen and equals, was heaven; every man was bound to direct his course thither; and the greater his sufferings on earth, the stronger the hope he might entertain of his soul's future, and of celestial joy. The world was abandoned to Satan. Religion taught man to renounce it; religion, which was alike his isolation and his refuge; it imposed no mission of earnest and resolute struggle, and of slowly progressive, but certain victory.

Such was, such is, your Moral Code. Solitary contemplation and monastic life were its first logical consequences. At a later period, when you were triumphant, when the necessity, which all religions undergo, of transforming society in their own image, compelled you to mingle in social and political life, you frequently (with immense advantage to civilisation) obeyed that uncertain and instinctive sense

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