74 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



laws againt unlicensed association or combina- 

 tion were the unhappy root of all the persecu- 

 tions, 1 too far even in holding that they were the 

 instrument by which all these persecutions were 

 carried on. These laws were the branches rather 

 than the root, but they were in living union with 

 it. There can be no doubt that the laws regu- 

 lating colli ffia, and repressing all unlicensed asso- 

 ciations, had from the beginning a close connec- 

 tion with the majeslas of the state, and especially 

 with its right to institute and enforce religion. 2 

 The two things worked together, and they did so 

 in theory and practice. A claim of Jesus merely 

 to found a universal religion might, no doubt, in 

 practice, have come into collision with the laws 

 of Rome. But his claim to found it as a king- 

 dom, though not of this world — " une association 

 dans l'etat en dehors de l'etat," as it is happily 

 expressed — seems to me to have been essentially 

 inconsistent with the public principle of that law. 

 Christianity, in short, was incompatible with 

 the Roman public law, and that not merely be- 

 cause its contents were different from those of the 

 old religion of Rome, but because its claim to 

 universal individual acceptance and public con- 

 fession conflicted with the unlimited and un- 

 balanced sovereignty of the Roman state. And 

 on these very points that law came into conflict 

 with the Author of Christianity. It does not, 

 perhaps, follow that Pilate, as its administrator — 

 supposing him to have apprehended the existence 

 of this religious conflict, as he apprehended the 

 non-existence of any civil conspiracy — was bound 



to condemn Jesus. As Trajan explains in his fa- 

 mous letter to the Governor of Bithynia, it was 

 the duty of the higher magistrate to use his own 

 discretion in dealing with those who had trans- 

 gressed the law on religion. Pilate seems, in- 

 deed, to have believed Jesus to be both just and 

 harmless ; and, so believing, he sinned in swaying 

 from his first judgment, and betrayed the inno- 

 cent blood. But when he ultimately sent him to 

 the cross it was as claiming to be a king, and on 

 the original charge of acting advcrsus majestatem 

 populi Romani. And in point of fact, whatever 

 his judge may have thought, the claim of Christ 

 was truly inconsistent with the claim of the state 

 which Pilate represented ; and the world must 

 judge between the two. 



In considering the most famous of all trials 

 from a merely legal and, indeed, formal point of 

 view, we have come to some conclusions. We 

 have found that it was a double trial, and that 

 both parts of it were conducted with a certain 

 regard to the forms of the two most famous juris- 

 prudences of the world. In both the judges were 

 unjust, and the trial was unfair ; yet in both the 

 right issue was substantially raised. And in 

 both that issue was the same. Jesus Christ was 

 truly condemned on a double charge of treason. 

 He died because in the ecclesiastical council he 

 claimed to be the Son of God and the Messiah of 

 Israel, and because before the world-wide tribunal 

 he claimed to be Christ a king. — Contemj^orary 

 Review. 



COSMIC EMOTION 



By W. KINGDON CLIFFORD. 



BY a cosmic emotion — the phrase is Mr. Henry 

 Sidgwick's — I mean an emotion which is 

 felt in regard to the universe or sum of things, 



1 " La seule chose a laquelle Vempire Romain ait de- 

 clare la guerre, en fait de religion, c'est la theocratie. Son 

 principe etait celui de l'etait lai'que ; il n'admettait pas 

 qu'une religion eut des consequences civiles ou politiques 

 a aucun degre ; il n'admettait surtout aucune association 

 dans l'etat en dehors de l'etat. Ce dernier point est essen- 

 tiel ; il est, a vrai dire, la racine de toutes les persecutions. 

 La loi sur les confreries, Men plus que Intolerance reli- 

 gicusc, fut la cause fatale des violences qui dcshonoroivnt 

 ies K-gnes des meilleurs souverains."— Eenans "Les Apo- 

 tres," p. 351. 



2 " La pr6texte de religion ou d'accomplissement de 

 tc3ux en commun est prevu et formellementindiqu6 parmi 

 les circonstanees qui donnent a une reunion le caractere de 

 delit ; et ce delit n'etalt autre que celui de lese-majeste, au 

 moins pour l'individu qui avait provoqu6 la reunion."— 

 P. 362. 



viewed as a cosmos or order. There are two 

 kinds of cosmic emotion — one having reference 

 to the Macrocosm or universe surrounding and 

 containing us, the other relating to the Microcosm 

 or universe of our own souls. When we try to 

 put together the most general conceptions that 

 we can form about the great aggregate of events 

 that are always going on, to strike a sort of bal- 

 ance among the feelings which these events pro- 

 duce in us, and to add to these the feeling of 

 vastness associated with an attempt to represent 

 the whole of existence, then we experience a cos- 

 mic emotion of the first kind. It may have the 

 character of awe, veneration, resignation, sub- 

 mission ; or it may be an overpowering stimulus 

 to action, like the effect of the surrounding or- 

 chestra upon a musician who is thereby caught 



