RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 465 



and without us, to wliich, from moment to moment, our lives must 

 conform under penalty of one or other evil ; and that therefore our 

 first business must be to study this Order of Nature. Nor is estima- 

 tion of this intelligence raised on contemplating the outcome of this 

 established culture, as seen in Parliament ; where any proposal to 

 judge a question by reference to general laws, or "abstract princi- 

 ples " as they are called, is pooh-poohed, with the tacit implication 

 that in social affairs there is no natural law ; and where, as we lately 

 saw, 300 select spokesmen of the nation cheered frantically when 

 it was decided that they should continue to vow before God that 

 they would maintain certain arrangements prescribed for them by 

 their great, great, great, etc. grandfathers. 



On turning to the moral manifestations, we find still less that is 

 calculated to excite the required religious feeling. When multitudes 

 of citizens belonging to the classes distinguished as " the better," make 

 a hero of a politician whose sole aim throughout life was success, 

 regardless of principle, and have even established an annual com- 

 memoration of him, we are obliged to infer that the prevailing senti- 

 ments are not of a very high order. Nothing approaching to adora- 

 tion is called forth by those who, on the death of a youth who went 

 to help in killing Zulus, with whom he had no quarrel, and all that 

 he might increase his chance of playing despot over the French, 

 thought him worthy of high funeral honors — would, many of them, 

 indeed, have given him the highest. No feeling of reverence arises 

 in one's mind on thinking of people who looked on with approval or 

 tolerance when a sailor of fortune, who has hired himself out to an 

 eastern tyrant to slay at the word of command, was honored here by 

 a banquet. A public opinion which recognizes no criminality in whole- 

 sale homicide so long as it is committed by a constituted political 

 authority, no matter how vile, or by its foreign hired agent who is 

 indifferent to the right or wrong of the question at issue, is a public 

 opinion which excites, in some at any rate, an emotion nearer to con- 

 tempt than to adoration. 



This emotion is not changed on looking abroad and contemplating 

 the implied natures of those who guide, and the implied natures of 

 those who accept the guidance. When, among a people professing 

 that religion of peace preached to them generation after generation 

 by tens of thousands of priests, an assembly receives with enthu- 

 siasm, as lately at the Gambetta dinner, the toast, " The French 

 army, the highest embodiment of the French nation " — when, along 

 with nominal acceptance of forgiveness as a Christian duty, there 

 goes intense determination to retaliate ; we are obliged to repro- 

 bate either the feeling which they actually think proper, or the hy- 

 pocrisy with which they profess that the opposite feeling is proper. 

 On finding in another advanced society that the seats of highest 

 culture are seats of discipline in barbarism, where the test of man- 



VOL. XXY. — 30 



