contention. If I should cite what seems to be a selfdenying act for the relief of the stranger, it would be answered that the agent had a self-regarding motive, viz. to relieve himself of the sympathetic pain or to acquire sympathetic pleasure. By putting the sympathetic animus, and not an act which it might incite, as the subject of disinterestedness, I cut off space for sophistical evasion. I do not imply that egotistic and affectionate non-egotistic benevolence are not disinterested, I merely contend that disinterestedness is essential to "super-affectionate" benevolence.

The quality, Benevolence, is at once a faculty and a propensity, a faculty as being intuitive, a propensity as being the matrix of beneficent motive and intention. As intuitive faculty it unites with ascriptive emotion in the apprehension of the object of its sympathy. The discernment of a given emotion of another is quite different when it is involved in ascriptive emotion only and when it is involved in a sentiment partly determined by ascriptive emotion and partly by benevolence. The intuitive function of benevolence embraces moral intuition involving moral approval and reproach: in other words, it is a moral faculty. Grateful moral approbation tends to swell the heart of the benevolent observer of any striking instance of benevolent selfsacrifice, and compassion for pain believed to be caused by the cruelty of a free-agent is a matrix of moral reprobation of the agent.

6a. The mental quality, Reverence, is, quâ faculty, the source and subject of the sentiment of the sacred, and, quâ propensity, the source of deferential behaviour,— whether worship or mere unaffected politeness. It may be a source of altruism, but not of that which

involves heterogeneous sympathy. It exists at first in the germinal state, and, to germinate, needs to be quickened by the bearing on it of a personal object that presents to it an aspect of sacred dignity and authority. A good and judicious father presents to it such an aspect. It is because fathers are, for the most part, the first and most imposing of the objects of reverence, that God is apprehended as "Father." The filial sentiment is the pivot of godliness. But when reverence is so developed as to have become a dominant habit of the mind, it is capable of surviving faith in the Personal divine, and of seeing sacredness in man however flagitious or imbecile. All conscious being may, in this widowed state of the faculty, be sacred in its view; not in such wise as to protect noxious forms of life, or prevent one from complying with the predatory system on which the existence of certain races of men has been made to depend, but so as to make one recoil from the infliction of useless pain. Man, above all, may rank in its view as a being of inalienable sacredness, but not to the prejudice of needful austerity; not so as to exclude its sanction of the civil surgery which relieves both society and the criminal of a life or liberty that can only be a nuisance. The sentiment of sacred duty—I shall -show that there is a sentiment of duty which discerns no sacredness in its object-is proper to reverence. It originates as sentiment of obedience due to personal authority, primarily to that of the parent, especially the father; subsequently, when belief in God obtains, to the authority of God. According to a very rare experience it is capable of surviving faith in a Creator and Providence, and then it is a sentiment of obedience due to an impersonal authority. The few who have

experienced the Impersonal imperative have not found. that its force is less than that which they apprehended as being the command of God. I have the hope that amongst the good and able of those whose faith in a Creator and Providence has been extinguished by science and by their experience of the infernal in nature there are some who can bear witness to the existence and force of the impersonal imperative, and that this testimony will sufficiently corroborate me.

66. That reverence is incapable of heterogeneous sympathy is a truth which it peculiarly concerns the Christian, and more peculiarly the Christian of interior life, to know. What chiefly differentiates the religion of Christ is that it enjoins Charity, and charity is super-affectionate heterogeneous sympathy, not that which pities and disposes to succour one's own children in pain, or those who are agreeable to us, but that which knows no distinction of persons, which goes out to a man in pain whether he be or be not of our blood, country, or religion, whether he be repugnant or agreeable, the love of the neighbour enjoined in the eleventh commandment. How potently the human mind is influenced by reverence is shown by the history of religion, and how feebly by benevolence the flagrant history of " man's inhumanity to man" attests. To apply the hot-house ardour of godly reverence for the development of the feeble germ of benevolence so as to enrich human nature with adult benevolence, is the intention of the eleventh commandment, and, if my Christianity do not deceive me, was the main motive of Calvary. Thus far the divine intention has been in some degree baffled by an error which mistakes a counterfeit of charity for charity. The counterfeit

describes itself as love of the neighbour for God's sake. A man of passionate godliness which disposes him to obey the eleventh commandment is liable to be duped by the idea that he is fulfilling the intention of the commandment when, at cost of self-denial, he succours his neighbour for God's sake. Benevolence has nothing to do with the act. It contributes no constituent to the motive. The agent is moved only by reverence. The direct nutritive value of the act serves only to enhance godliness. Heterogeneous sympathy admits of no intervention between it and the symbol of the ascribed emotion which is its proximate cause;-it cannot be roused by the idea of God's sake soliciting it to come into existence and embrace the subject of the ascribed emotion. Whatever pretends to be charity and is not the counterpart of what a benevolent infidel would experience under the same circumstances, is not charity. An Epicurean motive avails itself of the error and nurtures it. A peculiar pleasure attends the exercises of godliness when the subject is not in what is known as the "dry" state. The pleasure varies from a minimum to ecstasy. Its inconsistent tendency to move one to violate duty is not unfamiliar to the religious of the Roman Catholic Church. Madame Guyon detected it moving her to neglect her husband and household duties for the luxury of prayer. Viauney, the Curé of Ars, whom popular authority has already canonised, deserted on his way to the camp to which the conscription had called him, although, but a few days before, he had declared to his cousin that he understood the call to be from God. The conscription disappointed his passion for priesthood which his desertion enabled him to gratify. According to Mont

alembert, St. Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary, to satiate

her passion for ministering to the loathsomely diseased, used to disregard the prohibitions of her spiritual director. The pleasure of godliness is at once the motive and reward of martyrdom, of ascetic self-torture, and of missionary zeal. This pleasure tends to absorb one in God, to magnify Him at the cost of all beside, to strip the rest of being of importance except in so far as it serves to glorify God. It would fain efface all other pleasure and make worship the eternal occupation of the blessed. The bigotry begotten of this pleasure distrusts benevolent emotion because it is not the love of God, and will have charity to be the love of God with a human distress stuck in it. If benevolence interfere, people of vocation1 think that it is a

1 The ascetic, natural priest, or man "of vocation," is a natural species; and this species Christ made the key-stone of Christendom. The apostles belonged to it. The young man who kept the commandments from his youth upwards, but could not sell all he had, give to the poor and follow Jesus, did not belong to it. He was a good natural layman, not a natural priest; he was without vocation. In the natural priest the Christian Spirit was to be first and most fully realised. To him it is possible to reckon his power and be reasonably resolute to advance against the hostile king,-to count the cost, and be sure he has wherewithal to complete the tower. To this species corresponds another, viz. a kind of man of which tendency to lean upon the priest is the differentia. I have seen Protestant members of this species, when they came in view of a truly sacerdotal religion, rush with instinctive impetuosity to their specific place. Of these two species Christ constructed His Church, making himself the head of the priesthood,—the great high priest. His religion, at least in its first (the actual) epoch, is essentially sacerdotal. That asceticism is a natural differentia determinative of a natural human species is proved by conclusive evidence. Its manifestations are as old as history, and have been so opposed to one another, so capricious, and, in many ways, so repugnant to wisdom, that they could not be reasonably imputed to an influence wholly divine. Even within the domain of Christianity they give irresistible proof of a source that is at least partially the reverse of divine. The spirit it evinces has outraged modesty by sending fanatics naked into churches. It occasioned the Epicurean