XIII. 



THE rsi; 01 ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 



FAT long fit of indignation \vliicli seizes all generous 

 _ natures when in youth they begin contemplating hu 

 man affairs, having fairly spent itself, there slowly grows 

 up a perception that the institutions, Beliefs, and forms so 

 vehemently condemned arc not wholly had. This reaction 

 runs to various lengths. In some, merely to a comparative 

 contentment with the arrangements tinder which they live. 

 In others to a recognition of the fitness that exists between 

 each people and its government, tyrannical as that may be. 

 In some, again, to the conviction, that hateful though it is 

 to us, and injurious as it would be now, slavery was once 

 beneficial was one of the necessary phases of human pro 

 gress. Again, in others, to the suspicion that great benefit 

 has indirectly arisen from the perpetual warfare of past 

 times ; insuring as this did the spread of the strongest races, 

 and so providing good raw material for civilization. And 

 in a few this reaction ends in the generalization that all 

 modes of human thought and action subserve, in the times 

 and places in which they occur, some useful function : that 

 though bad in the abstract, they are relatively good aro 

 the best which the then existing conditions admit of. 



A startling conclusion to which this faith in the essen 

 tial beneficence of things commits us, is that the religious 

 creeds through which mankind successively pass, arc, dur- 



