and the most absurd contradictions and shifts occur in the courts of law; and the question remains a difficulty, and as unsettled as ever. The question still is urged, what is the limit of Man's responsibility? You may as well try to ascertain the limits of time, and where eternity begins. The folly of all this is, that men judge by their feelings, and not by their reason and the fact and again, from their want of faith in truth; for they will say, "suppose this thing to be true, it is not wise to say so:" which is the presumption of human wisdom. A wise churchman hath said, "Whenever I perceive any glimmering of truth before me, I readily pursue, and endeavour to trace it to its source, without any reserve or caution of pushing the discovery too far, or opening too fresh a glare of it to the public."

Until the philosophy of human nature be admitted among the sciences, and laws and material conditions of mind understood, it seems to me that we are little removed from savages, and are still living in the dark ages, romancing rather than using our "gift of reason." All that a judge and jury have to ascertain is how a man has behaved: but it remains for wiser men than judges and juries at present are to say what treatment the moral patient requires ; the undergoing which treatment will be the best check upon other inferior natures. We must remove the gallows, and no more use the rod; for these are not instruments of reform and civilization, but the instruments of barbarism* and the cause of brutality.

Hell drives men to despair and to madness: the gallows ripens crime, and brutalizes and degrades a nation. How men can repeat the Lord's Prayer, and hang a man in the same breath, is astonishing, and exhibits the utter depravity of a Christian Legislation.

XXI.

H. M. TO H. G. A.

Ah! how true it is that Christianity has not, as you say, Christianized the world! There is something curious in the spectacle of the embarrassment of every sect of Christians in accounting for this fact. I know no subject on which there is more miserable floundering among incompatible views and untenable assertions. From those who, with a foregone conclusion, set about estimating how much Christianity has done for the world, to those who give the matter up, and declare the delay to be a mystery of Providence, I find none with whom I can for a moment agree. To me, the wonder would be if it had Christianized the world. Its unfitness for saving the race, for an universal reception by mankind,—seems to be shown clearly enough by the rise of Mohammedanism, and by the spread of that faith so far beyond the extent that Christianity ever

attained as to include, in our day, a fifth part of the whole human race. That religion, imperfect as we see it to be, met needs and gratified faculties, among certain races of men, which Christianity wholly neglected. We are not of the races whose needs could be met by Mohammedanism: nor are we supplied, even on the most superficial view, by what Christianity offers us. As the omission of a provision for the antagonistic at once with the fatalistic faculties of men made Mohammedanism necessary, so the neglect, amounting to discountenance, by Christ, of the domestic passions and affections, nullifies its operation with us. After all the straining of divines to make the most of the Cana marriage, and of all incidental mention of any of the family relations of the disciples, there remains an unquestionable vacancy in regard to the passions and affections which are of the most importance in our life. It is not necessary that there should have been either teaching or sentiment in regard to the domestic institutions which are still of high importance among us: such as the conjugal and parental, as at present existing; because these, and all groupings into households by the rule of marriage and blood-relationship, may be easily conceived to be a matter of rule and arrangement, and therefore of limited duration; but the passions and affections of which these arrangements are the temporary form, seem not to be recognized by Christianity,—or, if at all, not in any proportion to their place among our

faculties. Yet more striking, perhaps, is the ignoring of the faculties, and their action, which are concerned in the pursuit of science and speculative truth. But there is no need to dwell on the particular omissions, while the fact is before us that Christianity has not Christianized the world, nor has the slightest prospect at present of doing so,-failing even to produce the remotest likeness of itself where it is most loved and honoured. From some once Christian nations it has avowedly died out and among us, and in America, where it is supposed to be held in its highest purity, it fails to make men less worldly, more sincere, more courageous, or more kindly, than they are elsewhere. At home, we have bishops living in palaces, while hundreds and thousands of the people are neither taught nor duly fed: and in America, we see the clergy, and prayerful merchants and professional men, taking the aristocratic and oppressive side on the slavery question,-rushing to conquest, grasping at wealth, and indulging in a conceit and boasting as little compatible with the spirit of the Gospel as the march of a caravan to Mecca, or the fetish rites of the savage on the Niger or the Ganges. And we have quite as much, happily, of the breaking out of the higher as of the lower impulses of men, in opposition to Christianity, or independence of it. We have "nature bursting through theology" in an upward, as well as a downward direction. What an insult it is to our best moral faculties to hold over us the promises and

threats of heaven and hell, as if there were nothing in us higher than selfish hope and fear! Did you ever meet with those anecdotes of Wilberforce and Clarkson, which, put together, make one of the most instructive stories I know? They give us the characters of the two friends, and offer us very much more. Some one was one day praising Wilberforce to his face for his toils and sacrifices on behalf of the slave. "Oh! you know I must," said the good man, who was quite unconscious how much better he was than the doctrine he professed. "You

know I must do this work, for the sake of my salvation. I must save my immortal soul." At another time and place, a pious friend admonished Clarkson to attend to his religious duties, inquiring whether he had not been neglecting the safety of his immortal soul. 66 My soul!" said the simple old man, as he sat rubbing his knees, with his earnest, business-like look; "why, I don't know. I have been so busy about these poor negroes, that I don't think I have thought at all about my own soul." Who would not have been the Clarkson here? though we all know that Wilberforce was far above being benevolent from selfishness, however he thought it his duty to persuade himself that such were his

reasons.

If it is argued that such views of Christianity as he held were corrupt,-that the primitive Christianity did not promise and threaten the popular heaven and

* Appendix Y.