intelligence; the teachers of the succeeding generations were Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau; and the orthodoxy of the Grand Siecle was succeeded by the atheism of the Revolution. 6 , Thus the conduct of the Church fell to the Jesuits, who still hold it. The Jesuits, the controlling spirit of the Church,' were the object of Döllinger's ceaseless hostility. 'The Jesuits,' he writes, are incarnate superstition combined with despotism.' Opposed to science, to liberal theology, to national rights, they have made the Church Italian instead of Catholic; have abolished the liberties of the Gallican, the Spanish, the German Church. By degrees they got into their hands the Papal elections; reduced all national usages to the Roman model; monopolized education into the hands of their order, exalting the deductive method of argument at the expense of Science, and ignoring alike Bacon and Newton, and the progress of discovery and invention; destroyed Jansenism, Quietism, and Molinism; put an end to the Huguenot movement; inspired the persecuting policy of the Emperors and Bavarian princes in the Thirty Years' War, and the dragonades of Lewis XIV. Dr. von Döllinger draws attention to the fact that in France, as well as in Austria, Spain, and elsewhere, the Papal autocracy had been allied with civil despotism. From Philip II. of Spain to Ferdinand II. of Naples one system prevailed in priestridden and king-ridden countries, the system carried out in France by Lewis XIV. What was done by the secular government in France and Austria was effected for Spain and Italy by the Inquisition. The policy of the Jesuits from the date of their institution till the present day has been the same. The result has been that the breach between the Roman Catholic religion and the progress of secular learning and political science has ever widened; until we see in these days, on the one hand, Liberalism degenerating into anarchy, and science into universal negation; on the other, the dogma of Infallibility, and Pius IX. declaring against freedom of worship, progress, and recent civilization. In his work on The Reunion of Christendom,' published in 1872, Döllinger utters this remarkable prophecy :— 'The time will come . . . when the Petrine and Pauline‡ Churches will develop into a Johannine Church, or, as used to be said in medieval times, to the period of the Father and the Son will succeed *'Briefe,' &c., p. 105. + Ibid. I.e. Protestant. the the age of the Holy Ghost. . . . I do not only believe, but know, that the rule of this order (the Jesuits) in Germany will not be of long duration; that their brilliant victory, I mean especially the battles won on 18th July and 31st August, 1870,* will at no distant future be turned into a defeat. The clear testimony of history leaves no doubt about it.'† Döllinger, as we have said, hoped for a reunion of Christendom, not from a return to Rome, but from combined action on the part of the Eastern, the Protestant, and the Roman ConReunion is to be found by looking for points of agreement, not of difference. The fundamentals of Christianity are common to all. Baptism admits all; invincible ignorance is by common confession a bar to heresy. The existing Churches must learn and receive of one another, and set a higher price on the doctrines and creeds which they have inherited and confess in common than on what divides them.' We must shake hands,' he said, 'over the hedges of doctrinal confessions.' What Rome cannot or will not do, Christendom may do; but the time is distant, and hope is long deferred. Will the Pope Angelicus ever appear? * The dates of the dogma of Papal Infallibility and the submission of the German Episcopate. On the Reunion of Christendom,' pp. 13, 139. Ibid., pp. 13, 14. ART ART. III.—1. On Right and Wrong. By W. S. Lilly. Second Edition. London, 1890. 2. Types of Ethical Theory. By James Martineau, D.D., LL.D. 2 vols. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1885. 3. The Methods of Ethics. By Henry Sidgwick. Edition. London, 1884. 4. The Science of Ethics. By Leslie Stephen. 3. The Data of Ethics. By Herbert Spencer. Third London, 1882. N the long story of the making of England, no word has exercised a mightier influence than Duty, with all that it implies. The infinite nature of Duty' has been to this imperial and self-centred race a religion, a code of laws, and the heart of that intense yet not wholly inhuman pride which has stamped Englishmen all the world over, as it did the Romans, to whom in so many ways they bear a resemblance. The Nelsons, Wellingtons, and Gordons of this nineteenth century nail the signal to their masts, thunder it over the battlefield, make it their staff of pilgrimage and rod of empire in the African wastes. The Howards, Wilberforces, Shaftesburys, bear it in their bosoms as a gospel of life; and neither faint nor weary until they have accomplished the task it has laid upon them. The Faradays and Herschells are drawn by its magnetism to scientific discoveries of highest moment, undegraded by ambition. The poets hymn its sacred name with Wordsworth and Tennyson; the prophets, as little resembling one another in style or temperament as John Henry Newman resembled Thomas Carlyle, are yet agreed that Duty is the supreme utterance of the voice of conscience; that its dictates are those of the aboriginal Vicar of Christ'; and that following it we have a clue to the labyrinth in which man is entangled. But the analytic philosopher is not satisfied, and he asks, In what, after all, does the nature of Duty consist?' There never was a more astounding transformation scene than follows upon this simple-seeming question. We have learned, chiefly from Carlyle, that it is the nature of English genius to be inarticulate.' It can, apparently, do anything, from writing Shakspeare's tragedies to founding empires under the Southern Cross, on condition of not being required to explain what it does in terms of philosophy. It is dominated by influences and powers which it seems to be incapable of understanding, and the very existence of which it obstinately denies. The Low Dutch temperament, as we know it in these islands, is enthusiastic, eccentric, full of unquenchable fire, adventurous Vol. 172.-No. 343. F in in the extreme, sensitive (as its landscape-painting proves) to every aspect of Nature, to sea and sky, to storm and tempest The history of English enterprise is a daring romance, choke full of improbabilities and individual traits of character, in virtue of which every league of salt water has owned the British flag, and one-seventh of the habitable globe has com under its sway. Yet, when we ask the most eminent thinker: of the same race,—for such, it would appear, we are to accoun the late Mr. Stuart Mill, and the present Mr. Herbert Spencer -to furnish a philosophy which shall be not unequal to thes transcendent facts, the result is so jejune and feeble, s intellectually commonplace, that we could wish the nativ metaphysician were not merely inarticulate, but had lost the gift of speech altogether. For enthusiasm he offers us mecha nism; for indomitable will, motive-grinding'; for the high heroic career, which scorns emolument, a calculating or alread calculated pursuit of agreeable sensation'; and by som process of diabolic chemistry he boils down Duty into a mes of pottage called 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number, for which no Esau coming from the field, though he were bu a tired farmer's man, would exchange the meanest of his God given inheritances. Over against that Puritanism which severe and forbidding in its lineaments, has yet been a powe of moral goodness in the nations it has ruled, stands, like figure of grave irony, the 'Sensism' or 'Utilitarianism,'-i has a thousand expressive names, in whose blank denial o the Divine and the supernatural Milton would have descried the last of the Antichrists, and Carlyle did perceive the 'everlasting No,' whose main business, stretching over a couple of centuries, it would be to clear out by fire the jungle o superstition,' and then itself fall to soot and ashes. And this, we make bold to affirm, is the truth of the matter. There is no criticism so conclusive as to let a system, whether of metaphysics or any other, explain itself at length, describe its own problem, and state in terms chosen by its author the solution he has to propose; after which, we have only to ask whether between the beginning and the end, the data and the quæsita, there is a true equation. If life was given at the outset, we shall reasonably expect it in the outcome; if the Infinite or the Absolute, what man will satisfy us when his alembic yields only the Finite as the reward of his patient distillations? The dissecting table may be the final stage in materialist surgery: but our demand that life should be, so far as possible, explained. is by no means met when life has been abolished. L'homme,' remarks Bayle, 'est le morceau le plus difficile à digérer qui se * e présente à tous les systèmes.' It may be easier to digest im when the wonder and the mystery of his nature have een left out; only it is in virtue of them, and not of the shes at the bottom of our crucible, that he is man. To leave hem out is to analyse him, and human society by consequence, nto jarring atoms with chaos for their dwelling-place. And Ingland, which was built up to its present greatness by men ho believed in Duty as a revelation, the highest that could e given, from out of the heart of Eternity, will be pulled down to the dust if, as various signs portend, a religion of agreeble sensations (for as many as can compass them) be cognized and acted upon by the governing majority. Worse, far worse, it is than 'a curious symptom of this time,' at the pursuit of sensuous good, of personal pleasure in one ape or other, should be the universally admitted formula of an's whole duty.'† It means, according to the boast of Ir. Leslie Stephen, that the theory of an independent or atonomous conscience' is 'part of an obsolete form of specution.' So convinced is Mr. Spencer that we are witnessing he decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit,' at he throws aside his other work, important as he deems in order with the greatest possible despatch to fill up e vacuum' which has opened in front of society.§ In the aris School of Medicine it has been lately prophesied that when the rest of the world has risen to the intellectual level of rance, the present crude and vulgar notions regarding morality, ligion, divine providence, and so forth,'-there is much rtue in an etcetera, and here, as it happens, not a little ggestion of vice,- will be swept entirely away, and the eta of science will remain the sole guides of sane and eduted men.' What the 'dicta of science' thus construed will arrant the new generation in believing and practising, we all endeavour to find out in the sequel. But we may affirm nerally that they are things of which an apostle has told us at it is a shame to speak. The assailants and defenders I the established morality agree as to the likelihood of a idespread revolution in the maxims of conduct, and conquently in conduct itself, should the 'scientific' — or, in ainer terms, the materialist-basis of ethics be substituted for e religious and 'transcendental.' We propose to examine hat the new system is, and on what grounds it is put forward. nd then, if it appears not to satisfy the problem which it Sterling, 'Secret of Hegel,' ii. p. 612. + Carlyle, Miscellanies,' iii. p. 90. Vide Lilly, p. 38. undertakes |