EMOTIONS MINUS REASON.

In a recent conversation with an old, intelligent friend, pretty well off in earthly goods, we suggested as follows: The beauty and completion of this world of ours, with its marvelous phenomena and boundless resources, ought to be a perpetual object lesson to men, proving to them that we must have received the power of completion through a proper organization of our collective relations, since we come from that cosmical combination of forces, and return to them. The fact that

our completion, or any approach to it, is as far as ever, the perpetual clash among ourselves in all the most essential relations of our own existence, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the instability of all that appertains to human development, the great extent of unsatisfied longings with most of us, the skeletons in so many estimable family groups, not to speak of those among people apparently less deserving; all that should awaken the conscience of humanity and produce a grand revolt against the self-evident crookedness of our civilization everywhere, in every modern nation, proving that some great, revolting blunder lies somewhere at the root of our social turmoils, and calls for a general overhauling of that bad civilization.

The answer we received from our good friend was as follows: "I forget all about bad civilization, and only live with a loving Father who I know will some day bring good out of evil, and has a heart full of love for every one whom He has made." That answer is but one of the echoes of all religions, ancient and modern, in forms more or less direct and explicit, or implied, but does it represent the total sum of all human duties? To forget all about the wrongs that we allow right and left, by wholesale and retail, is that the proper way

for us to show our love to God and to each other? Is not that to actually abandon all love, and to simply narcotise our conscience because, lo! God may later on suppress all evil by suppressing the nations and the men who refuse to live in accord with His loving commands of human brotherhood?

Take the average father and mother with a lot of little children. Suppose the latter should tell the former: You love us so much, that of course we don't need to obey you. We only need to do just what we like, while we keep loving you as much as we can. If we break our toys, you shall be good enough to buy new toys for us. If we get sick by eating too many green apples from our orchard, you shall give us some medicine for us to be well again, after we have given piles of trouble to ourselves and to others. If we break the glass windows of our neighbors, you will pay for that, you are rich enough, and good enough for that too. Would not that breed a fine lot of children? Well, there we have the philosophy of most of our good people in their dealings with our beautiful Father in the heavens beyond. Is not that pitiful? All because we think yet that human life is but a question of emotions, sentimentalities, love of the kind that does not want to learn how to obey.

"If you love me, keep my commandments." "You will be my friends if you do whatsoever I command you." "Be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect." "Love one another as I have loved you.' How can there be any other kind of sensible love but that implied by such beautiful and many other fine, sublime teachings from the grandest teacher that history records?

And such teachings must necessarily predicate the need of a healthy, sensible civilization, of healthy, sensible national