5 86 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



with a dozen highly respectable persons of both sexes and all ages, 

 not one of whom has any thought of going to church that day. Such 

 an experience would be impossible in England. The mistake has 

 arisen from comparing England as a whole, which has classes below 

 the line of church-going or indeed of civilization, with Australia as a 

 whole, where such classes hardly exist. Compare Australia in this 

 respect with the English middle classes, and the fallacy will be 

 manifest. 



When a colony has hived off from the parent state at a time of 

 religious excitement, and especially when it has religion for its raison 

 d'etre, it starts fully equipped on lines of its own, the earlier natu- 

 ralistic stages being dropped. English theology and Puritan religion 

 emigrated to North America in the seventeenth century, and there 

 for two centuries they for the most part remained. Ever since, in 

 New England and the States of the middle belt, religion has played 

 the same high part as it did in old England under Oliver. There 

 has, therefore, been a theological development in the United States 

 to which, till fifty years ago, there was no antecedent parallel in the 

 mother country. While it has produced no theologian or pulpit 

 orator of the first rank — no Calvin, but only Jonathan Edwards; no 

 Bossuet or Chalmers, but only Channing and Beecher — its theologi- 

 cal literature compares favorably with that of England during the 

 same period, and its preachers are acknowledged to be the best in 

 Christendom. States and colonies that have grown up more nor- 

 mally get at length on the same lines, and as they put on civilization 

 the tendency is to adopt ever more of the dogmatic system long in- 

 separable from it. By a well-understood sociological law it generates 

 its contradictory and corrective, and there springs up a higher type 

 of denial than secularism — what Huxley felicitously named Agnos- 

 ticism — the position of those who know nothing about the matters 

 which theological dogma defines, not the position of those who say 

 that nothing can be known. As the Evangelical develops into the 

 High Churchman and he into the Catholic, the Secularist refines into 

 the Agnostic and rarefies into the Unknowabilist. 



The literature of colonies is at first theological, as the literature 

 of all countries is at first hieratic; the priest alone can write. But 

 it is long before the stage of original production is reached, and books 

 have to be imported before they can be written. The daughter must 

 go to school with the mother, who supplies her with hornbooks. 

 The continuity of the spiritual germ-plasm is insured by the trans- 

 mission of books. Rome was thus initiated by Greece in every 

 theoretical branch of knowledge. Rome thus educated early Europe. 

 Chests of manuscripts from Thessalonica, Byzantium, and Crete 

 were the precursors of the Renaissance. Books brought by Benedict 



