taking a criticism of the Code which can hardly fail (especially if it is completed in a reasonable time before the next session of Parliament) to improve it in many particulars, and to make up for his not having been a member of the Commission. In some points I differ from him, but I feel that the connection of his great name, almost unequalled experience, and splendid abilities with the Criminal Code will go far to assure the public that it is what it ought to be.

On a subsequent occasion I hope to make some observations on some of the leading characteristics of the Code, and especially on the more important changes in the administration of criminal justice proposed to be effected by it. The object of this will be to facilitate in some measure Parliamentary discussion, by showing which parts of the Bill it would be wise to take on trust, as being substantially re-enactments of the existing law, and which parts suggest changes the expediency of which may be considered without any technical legal knowledge.

JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN.

ATHEISTIC METHODISM.

My recent volume Is Life worth Living?1 has, I am told, been widely read in America, where by numbers its arguments have been endorsed as valid, and by others treated in an exactly opposite way. In the former case they have produced or expressed conviction; wherever they have not done that, they have roused intense irritation. A lengthy treatise, inspired by this latter feeling, has reached me lately from New York. The writer is anonymous; but the publishers vouch for it that, in his own line, he is a man of fame and eminence; nor, though he is apparently self-taught and very poorly instructed, do I see any reason to doubt their statement. Had the volume in question been more successful than I can yet learn it has been, I should perhaps have exposed its fallacies in some American journal. Possibly, indeed, I may yet do so. But whatever may be my course with regard to this special critic, I shall at all events have occasion to deal with certain of his criticisms. For these, most of them, are confessedly not his own. They are the common property of the positive camp in general. Their only peculiarity here is in the plan of their arrangement, and the explicit application of them to the arguments used by me. A few days after the above volume had reached me, I found myself the object of another direct attack, coming indeed from a quite independent quarter, but conducted in a manner almost exactly similar. My critic now was an English scientific lady, who has by this time devoted two essays in the Nineteenth Century to the exposure both of me and of my sophistries and to meeting all future doubt by a 'definite scientific utterance.' My fair enemy in England covers far less ground than her sterner cousin in America; but, when upon the same ground,. what the two urge is identical. It is not, however, with these only, or indeed mainly, that I have had occasion to concern myself.. Since the publication of my own volume there has appeared a third, and a yet more weighty reply to me-a reply not indeed designed to be such, but turning out so practically. I refer to Mr. Herbert Spencer's latest work, the Data of Ethics; which the writer implies,

1 Is Life Worth Living? London: Chatto & Windus, 1879.

2 The Value of Life, a Reply. New York: Putnam's Sons, 1879.

3

• Modern Atheism and Mr. Mallock,' by Miss L. S. Bevington, Nineteenth Century, October and December 1879.

and his disciples believe, to be the final and formal statement of the new philosophy of life. Now, of both my other critics Mr. Spencer is the avowed or evident master; all that they urge is virtually a repetition of him; and thus their own personal attacks on me may be fairly looked on as merely the special channels through which the condemnatory merits of his philosophy are applied to mine. Considering, therefore, Mr. Spencer's high repute, and how he has localised the scattered speculations of our modern non-theistic thinkers, such criticisms as those I have just alluded to have seemed to me full of deep significance, and worthy of my best attention.

My best attention has been given them, and not without result. They have strengthened my belief in all that I have urged hitherto, and in the ultimate helplessness of all that can be said against it. The views of life they embody are doubtless in some ways plausible, or they would not have found advocates amongst trained and instructed thinkers; and under certain special conditions of thought and feeling they may for a moment perhaps impose on any one. But let reason and common sense and a common knowledge of history be brought to bear on them, and their baseless fabric slowly melts away like a vision.

But though my critics have not convinced me of any flaw in my argument, they have shown me that something has been wanting in my own way of stating it. They have shown me that in certain places I have not been full or clear enough, or that I have trusted too much to the co-operation of their own intelligence. They have shown me also certain slight confusions of language, which I thought at the time were harmless, but which, it seems, have for some readers completely obscured my meaning. All this they have done directly; and indirectly they have done more than this. They have suggested fresh questions, which before I had not even glanced at, nearer, more definite, and more perplexing than any of those dealt with in my last volume, and which they themselves, though certainly almost touching them, seem to be altogether unconscious of. I see, therefore, a new task before me, which may take me some time to accomplish. A part of it, however, which is both easy and important, it has been suggested that I should at once proceed with. It has been suggested that I should apply to Miss Bevington, my late critic in the Nineteenth Century, such of my own remarks as may happen to bear on hers. And I do this the more readily because not only would the lady's talents make her doubtless a serious foe for any one, but because she for this very reason embodies something far more serious than herself. She represents, I think, in her two essays every main characteristic of the positive school of moralists, such, at least, as we know them in England and America. She represents their high average intelligence, combined with their strange intellectual confusion; their set determination to be virtuous, and above all

respectable, and the tangled lines of argument by which they declare that their determination supports itself.

Now there is much in this school that we ought all to treat with deference; and I should regret seriously having given scandal by my writings to any one of its members. And yet such is, I fear, the case with my critic of the Nineteenth Century; for not only have I roused her intellect against me, but in a still greater measure her wit and her indignation also. Not content with explaining at the outset how she will treat my arguments, she proceeds to explain further, how she will treat me. She believes me, she says, to be personally a most marvellous and unlovely portent. She believes me, if I may put together her own scattered epithets, to be a 'glib,' 'airily-assuming,' 'thoroughly unscientific,' 'clever,' 'young,' 'insinuating,' sinister' conjuror,' who is attempting by his tricks' and his logical 'hocus-pocus' to do a dark deed, and for a yet darker reason. My attempt is to deprive my critic of her inducements to live righteously;' my reason is that I may myself reap ‘advantage' from my critic's unrighteousness, and-more curious still-that she herself may be 'amused' at it. At any rate, she says, if this be not a true description of me, she finds it 'the best way to treat me as if' it were so. The import of this quaint indictment is to be found later on, in the wonder which she says she feels as to what possible cause, social, moral, or religious,' I could expect to serve by arguing in the way I have done. No conceivable good, so far as she can see, could come of it: and my only possible motive, as she strongly hints, must be either a degraded or perverse one. Others, perhaps, may also think as she does-indeed, my censor in America is even more severe than she is—and it may therefore be well briefly to say a word or two on the matter. To me the answer to the question seems sufficiently obvious: indeed, my critic has herself given a part of it. My arguments, she confesses, are of value to all scientific writers, who would know at what points in morals men were asking for definite scientific utterance.' Surely one would think that this was no superfluous task, to browbeat the reluctant oracle, by whose responses we are told that the whole world is to guide itself, and to force its lips to utter some definite and coherent sentence. And the task would be of equal use, whether its aim were to make the oracle help us, or to make it reveal its helplessness. Surely here is a motive that one would think is plain and sane enough. And is it not equally plain that there may be yet another also, springing out of and completing this one? What good, exclaims my critic, can I think to gain by elaborate attempts at reducing unbelievers to despondency, and at loosing their hold upon hopes which they are still struggling to cling to? The answer is near to hand. For those who hold that on theism the hopes of the human race depend, and that this alone can sustain it in the unexampled trial or transformation to which

it seems about to be subjected, it may be of the utmost moment to strip from the unredeeming philosophies all the fragments of truth which for a moment disguise their nakedness; and to show, though at the cost of pain and despair to many, that the end of these things is death. Whenever a fight grows hard between a false belief and a true one, there will be found worthy soldiers fighting on either side; and the iron will go through the souls of many, who, so far as we can see, have little deserved to feel it. But such pain in the present case does not seem needless. To the eyes of the believer, a large and leading body of men are entering an Inferno, which they honestly mistake for Paradise. At present they are only on the confines of the 'brown air;' and they trust that it will grow brighter as they dive further into it. To call them back by the way they have gone seems hopeless. The one course is to plunge them as quickly as may be to the lowest circle, where the God they have denied is most completely absent; that so at last they may emerge on the other side, and again see the stars.

And now having said this, let me proceed to what lies before us -to the special points that I am about to deal with now. The main questions that my late volume has treated have been, roughly speaking, two first, the relation of human life to theism; secondly, the relation of theism to exact knowledge and thought. It is the former of these only that my fair critic has touched upon; and what I am about to say will accordingly be confined to that. Let us define more closely the exact scope of the argument. It is concerned with the truth or falsehood of two statements of my own, which my two critics, English and American, have, for precisely the same reasons, formally contradicted. I have maintained that theism, with its attendant doctrine of man's personal immortality, 'has a practical effect upon practical life-upon what men do, and what they forbear to do what they think of themselves, and of one another.' Without these beliefs, I have said further, there can be no standard by which the quality of pleasures can be tested; that truth as truth, and virtue as virtue, cease to be in any way admirable.' And should these beliefs ever quite vanish from the world, I have predicted a catastrophe as the result, that might be not unfitly spoken of as the second fall of man. My critics maintain, on the contrary, that not even in its most modified form is such a catastrophe possible. That a vast change is imminent, they indeed admit readily, but it is a change, they say, that does not touch virtue, nor any of the great emotions that are at present connected with it. There is, they assure us, to be no lowering of life; our highest hopes and pleasures, and all our profoundest consolations, are to still remain to us; and 'so long as man is man,' says Miss Bevington, 'virtue, as virtue, will never cease to be admirable.'

Such are the counter-statements that I am again about to deal