624 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tendom the attempt to cure any serious disease on that plan would 

 be followed by a prompt indictment for quackery. 



The possibility of diabolical apparitions is implied in a count- 

 less number of passages which our traditional creed requires us to 

 accept as infallible truth. Devils by scores and legions range the 

 land of faith, tempting the virtuous, afflicting men and animals 

 with strange diseases, or even taking permanent possession of a 

 human body still tenanted by a conscious soul. The report of a 

 five minutes' interview with the smallest of those imps would now 

 expose the narrator to the risk of a lunacy inquest. 



The worthlessness of earthly life is inculcated with a distinct- 

 ness which seems intended as an encouragement to the indirect 

 suicide of monastic asceticism ; yet the same moralists who bewail 

 this earth as a vale of tears take the liveliest interest in the pro- 

 longation of human life, and court popularity by indorsing every 

 measure tending to promote the progress of sanitary reform. 



The inevitable result of such inconsistencies is a moral confu- 

 sion resembling the bewilderment of the guests invited to the ban- 

 quet of Rueckert's Hakim Baba, who urged his visitors to indulge 

 in wine, but thrashed them fearfully if they showed any signs 

 of intoxication. 



From the chaos of conflicting theoretical and practical lessons 

 our children, by the aid of experience, somehow manage to evolve 

 a moral compromise code of their own ; but what a waste of time 

 could be saved, how many hours of doubt, perplexity, and repent- 

 ance could be obviated by a system of ethics inculcating precepts 

 in harmony with the laws of nature and the facts of actual life ! 



Yet the injury caused by the theoretical survival of obsolete 

 dogmas is far surpassed by the baneful results of the attempt to re- 

 establish their authority by the aid of legal enforcements. Moral 

 confusion in that case takes the more serious form of a moral 

 revolt which strikes at the very root of social order by making 

 injustice a synonym of law and order. The statesmen who con- 

 stantly warn us against the danger of attempting social reforms 

 by an appeal to " paternal legislation " have as yet failed to ex- 

 plain by what right they continue to employ that method for the 

 perpetuation of social abuses. They decline to meddle with the 

 affairs of their poor brother, for fear of sheltering him against 

 "the natural penalties of his shiftlessness " ; but they risk that 

 interference by enforcing laws to deprive him of the natural re- 

 wards of his labor, especially if their own position enables them 

 to evade the inconveniences of such laws. In other words, they 

 denounce meddlesome help but connive at meddlesome injury. 

 Their tender conscience shrinks from the injustice of confessing 

 an arbitrary, unearned blessing, but consents to the injustice of 

 inflicting an arbitrary, undeserved curse. 



