374 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or less sacred in scientific than in unscientific honseholds ? Is 

 there even ground to conjecture that such is the case ? If not, 

 such language as the above simply shows that Miss Cobbe, who 

 has written so much and so well in times past, is growing hysteri- 

 cal at the very period of life when we might have expected to see 

 her manifesting in a special degree the qualities of moderation 

 and self-control, of calm insight and wide sympathy. 



Miss Cobbe objects to the scientific spirit that it makes much 

 of disease and little of sin. If so, it is simply inverting the 

 habit of past times, which was to make much of sin and little of 

 disease. And what was " sin " in the apprehension of our ecclesi- 

 astically-directed forefathers ? To a large extent it consisted in 

 what the clergy of a certain church would call " irregularity " — 

 some want of conformity with ecclesiastical rules and require- 

 ments. It was by no means always coincident with immorality. A 

 man might have a lively sense of " sin " in connection with some 

 purely ceremonial matter, and very little sense of wrong-doing 

 in connection with the most grievous offenses against his fellow- 

 man. In obedience to the "code of honor," men who regarded 

 themselves as pillars of church and state would prepare to commit 

 deliberate murder ; while they would always consider a gambling 

 debt as vastly more sacred than one incurred for food or clothing. 

 The " Christian " nations have found enormous quantities of " sin " 

 in heresy, and very little indeed in mutual bloodshed on the most 

 appalling scale. Pious monarchs have appeased their consciences 

 by persecuting the Jews, and pious folk generally by hunting 

 witches. According to popular opinion in our own day, the Divine 

 anger is much more quickly kindled by the parody of a religious 

 rite than by the most hideous villainy perpetrated by a man upon 

 his neighbor. Every now and again there is a story in the papers 

 about some boy or man struck blind or dumb for blasphemy, or 

 of the personal appearance of the devil among some group of rev- 

 elers engaged in profanely mocking a religious ceremony ! So va- 

 rious have been the aspects in which " sin " has presented itself, 

 and so little relation has it seemed to bear in any of its best recog- 

 nized forms with practical morality, that it is not to be wondered 

 at if scientific men show some impatience with so vague and un- 

 satisfactory a conception, and prefer to consider all conduct simply 

 in its bearing on intelligible human interests. As to disease, they 

 necessarily regard it as the great enemy, primarily, of man's 

 physical estate, and secondarily of his intellectual and moral con- 

 stitution ; and if their chief efforts are bent on its extermination, 

 it would be hard to say in what more useful work they could be 

 engaged. 



The next fault that Miss Cobbe finds with the scientific spirit, 

 which she characterizes as " analytic, self-asserting, criticaV is 



