own.' (Vol. i., p. 288.) Of 'the improvement of a world of which we are in a true sense masters'; and much more which sounds like conferring on mankind some new and wider freedom. Notwithstanding that the notion of invariable Order is ever the dominant principle, the Positive Doctrine must also keep in view the natural modifications, to which the Economy of nature is almost constantly exposed.' (Vol. ii., p. 33.) A sound conception of the Order of Nature implies a secondary idea of Variability, as well as the primary idea of Immutability.' (Vol. ii., p. 35.) Although the power of modification possessed by man, whether in his individual or collective character, asserts itself first in his control over the External World; it exists not less really, and is still more important, over the Internal world of Self.' (Vol. ii., p. 38.) And again, we are assured that we are the arbiters of our own destiny, 'within certain limits.'

But is this anything new? Is it not true that we regulate our own life and destiny within certain limits,' in the Christian scheme of life? Comte says, 'The old belief in Providence implied our remaining passive'; but this is a complete misrepresentation of the old belief. Where does the Christian Revelation enjoin any such passivity? And we may also ask, Does the history of the Christian world furnish any illustration of such a doctrine ? On the contrary, nothing can be more striking than the contrast between the unslumbering activity of Christendom, and the ruinous passivity which has prevailed in those lands where fatalistic doctrines similar to those of M. Comte have been held. The Christian theologian believes in the Order of Nature, the immutable will of God; but he believes also in the idea of Variability, and knows how much in the present and in the future depends

upon his intelligence, will, character and action. The question then resolves itself into this: Are the limits of the Human Providence wider than the limits of human action under the Providence of God? We answer in the negative. Comte takes us from under the government of God to subject us to the absolutism of his imperfect universe. The very essence of his system is, that we are the victims of the external Order. Positivism rests at every point upon the unchangeable Order of the world.' (Vol.i., p. 21.) When we reflect how dependent every part of our life, physical or moral, is upon time and place, each one of us feels the irresistible power of the true Great Being-a power which his own personal effort can only modify within very slender limits.' (Vol. i., p. 333.) He speaks with contempt of 'that visionary independence of which metaphysicians dream in their pride.' Or take these passages Without any break, then, the empire of the will is subordinate to that of necessity.' (Vol. iv., p. 34.) 'Man is entirely subordinate to the World, as each living being is to its own environment.' (Vol. iii., p. 15.) He speaks of the despotism exercised by the laws of the human organization, of which the course of civilization is merely the result.' (Vol. iv., p. 565.) 'Everything that the human race has effected, and can effect, must manifestly be regarded as being, in the last resort, a necessary consequence of organization modified in its results by external circumstances.' (Vol. iv., p. 581.) 'The laws most open to modification are the laws which make us most feel that such modifications, far from setting us free, do but in reality bind us with stronger bonds.' (Vol. iv., p. 145.)

The painful situation of mankind, according to the view of this philosopher, is vividly set forth in the following passage, with which we

conclude this aspect of the case: Mutual union offers itself to each as his principal resource against the Destiny without. Now this spirit of co-operation, so induced, never remains strictly confined to passive endurance, even in a case where the external Order remains wholly beyond our influence. For in the most irresistible pressure of external circumstances, every living being retains a certain capacity to submit to them in such a way as to mitigate their force. Even in death an animal so disposes itself as to suffer as little as possible.' (Vol. ii., p. 27.)

A sad situation indeed! We are no longer to regard ourselves as related to the will of a just, wise and generous Deity, but as the victims of the blind fatalities of nature, and the exceedingly imperfect institutions and forces of society. We stand face to face with a profoundly imperfect, cruel, inexorable Order: we are to bear it as well as we can; and when at last we are bruised and crushed, we are to taste sublimest consolation in the fact that we can imitate a dying dog which so disposes itself as to suffer as little as possible! With all its colour and music the universe is but a vast guillotine, and we all suffer in turn; yet, let us be thankful, we have the privilege of adjusting our neck to the block that we may perish as easily as possible. Will any philosophical education reconcile us, to this? Let it not then be supposed that Comtism gives any larger freedom of mind or action than we have already exercised under the theological régime; the very contrary is the fact. It frees us from the will of God, to chain us to external necessities. Instead of obedience to a wise, loving and omnipotent God, we have submission to a blind Fatality which encompasses our whole life, and which inflicts upon us deepest sorrows, against which we have no defence, for which we have no remedy and

no compensations. This is no charter of a larger freedom, no assertion of any wider, nobler sovereignty for our race. Under the pretence of granting us greater freedom, we are stripped of the last shred of independence.

And the sentiment of M. Comte's writing is in keeping with his stern philosophical position. His treatises are full of a dignified despair. The undertone of sorrow is always there, and frequently he gives utterance to his pain in most pathetic and hopeless lamentations. Miss Martineau tells us how delightful were her feelings in translating Comte: Many a passage of my version did I write with tears falling into my lap.' (Autobiography, vol. ii., p. 391.) The serious reader of these volumes may well weep, but scarcely tears of joy. In the midst of the many tribulations of life, which Positivism fully recognizes, we have no consolation and no hope. As to the crowning sorrow-death, it attempts no solacement. If we die early, this is Comte's reflection : 'Whenever I see a really superior man thus pass away before his time, I deplore the fate of Humanity in being powerless against the external laws which rob her of her best organs. ......Theological optimism prescribes a stupid respect for such calamities. But the Positive Religion bids us deplore them as the most painful of the imperfections in the Universal Order.' (Vol. iii., Preface, p. xx.) If we die late, this is the reflection of Mr. Atkinson, one of Comte's disciples:

every way. Some suppose that if we could get rid of Theology, we should get rid of the blackness of life; the study of Comte will show such, that when Theology has been repudiated, disease, desertion, toil, poverty, bereavement, death,-all the blackness of life yet remains, and we have simply got rid of the rainbow. Poe has a story in which he describes a prison with a deep black pit in the centre: the iron walls of the prison are movable, and each day they slowly and remorselessly come nearer together, until, in the end, the miserable captive is pushed into the pit. Such a prison is the universe in the eyes of M. Comte: we are bound in by iron laws which we cannot resist, and slowly, but surely, are we being pressed toward that charnel pit, into which we cannot look without a shudder.

But it is asked finally, Have we not gained in reality, in this new Supreme Being? This is the grand boast of Positivism-that it assures us reality. Its doctrines may sometimes be harsh, they may at all times be destitute of that lustre which Christianity contrives to throw on the tragic problems of life, but anyhow, says the Comtist, we look facts in the face, and hold only what is real, solid, objective, demonstrable. Comte is ever exulting in the reality of the new Deity of whom he is the prophet. We fail to appreciate this assumption. So far as the Universe is to be regarded as a living Being, and a proper object of love and homage, we are treated to a piece of pure idealism, to which there is no answering reality whatever. And can anything more be said of the new Supreme Being, so far as Humanity is concerned? Comte affirms that the individual man is a mere abstraction, and Humanity is the grand tangible reality. 'Positive doctrine constantly impresses upon us that only the Whole is real; that the Parts exist only in abstraction.'

(Vol. i., p. 178.) 'Man, indeed, as an individual, cannot properly be said to exist, except in the too abstract brain of modern metaphysicians. Existence in the true sense can only be predicated of Humanity.' (Vol. i., p. 268.) Is not this an arbitrary reversal of the true order in thinking and speaking? Can it be sound sense to affirm that an individual treecannot properly be said to exist, except in the too abstract brain of metaphysicians, and that existence in the true sense can only be predicated of a forest? Idealism runs riot in the pages of Comte. The whole race of poets, romancers, mystics, from the beginning, never dreamed dreams half so wild as the Utopias with which this positive philosopher has sought to construct a consistent system of thought and life; and the Supreme Being he sets before us-the arbitrary abstraction called Humanityis the airiest and most grotesque of all his eccentric creations. To generalize, and treat the population of the earth as constituting a grand Whole called Humanity, is quite a philosophical thing, and such a term has a very real and profound meaning; but to idealize a world of sinners into a Supreme Being worthy to be loved and worshipped is the coinage of a

disordered brain. Comte remarked to Sir Erskine Perry: 'It is necessary to personify in order to concentrate ideas......Humanity supplies the intellectual want.' (Nineteenth Century, Nov., 1877.) Thus God is postulated in the Positivist scheme, as a mere personification to meet an intellectual want. Comte's Deity is-what Plato called the bachelor's wife-a cold armful. It may be objected that the God of theology is a mere figment of the imagination, but we believe Him to be an actual Person, and worship Him as such; whilst Positivism asks us to bow down to what we know to be a chimera. The Christian may be credulous, but in directing his faith

and affection to One Whom he believes to exist, and in Whom he believes all perfections centre, he preserves his intellectual consistency.

Let it also not be lost sight of, that the humane, related, definite Object of love and worship, for which Comte contends, we have already in Christianity. He maintains that we cannot realize the Uncreated, the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal; that we can only know the Divine in the human. Is not Christianity pre-eminently such a religion of Humanity? Is not the Incarnation one of its most striking doctrines? We are not called upon to know and love the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal; but to know and love God manifested in the flesh. Dr. Duncan justly remarks: It is the great glory of God's Revelation that it has changed our abstracts into concretes; the infinite existence into the "I AM" of the Old Testament-the personal Jehovah; the infinite love into the personal Christ; and Jonathan Edwards could not have done better than translate his philosophical virtue, or "love of being in general," into the sum of the ten commandments: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart." (Colloquia Peripatetica, p. 117.) In the Christian Revelation we see the Divine in the human, historical, related Christ. Comte wishes to change our concretes back into abstracts, and give us instead of definite, objective, historical truthsmetaphysical notions quite as difficult

as any of the positions of the absolute philosophy. In the man Christ Jesus,' actually and fully, we find all that which Comte finds fictionally and inadequately in his crude anthropomorphism and unthinkable idealism. That which was from the beginning, which beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) that which we have seen and heard declare we unto

you, that ye also may have fellowship with us and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.' (1 John i. 1-3.)

The new Supreme Being can scarcely be pronounced a success. Whatever Comte may have done in science or sociology, he has not disturbed the pillars of God's throne. We shall not renounce Him Who is 'glorious in holiness,' for the soiled apparition of Humanity; or reject the just government of Heaven for a reign of terror; or substitute for 'the Gospel of the glory of the happy God,' a programme of despair; or turn from the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,' to pursue 'shadows of shadows self-chased along a barren ground.' 'Will a man leave the snow of Lebanon which cometh from the rock of the field?'

We

THE author of Self-Help has found in the life of George Moore a thoroughly congenial subject, yet he has not succeeded in producing so interesting a work as his recently published Life of Thomas Edward, the Scotch Naturalist. The volume before us is too bulky and too diffuse; had it been judiciously shortened by a hundred pages, it would have been more readable and more useful. do not think that it will take a place in the front rank of commercial biographies; for great and good as Mr. Moore undoubtedly was, he is hardly to be classed amongst the greatest and the best. Like Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, among David's mighty men, 'he was honourable among the thirty, but attained not to the first three.'

His

GEORGE MOORE was the descendant of a long line of Cumberland'statesmen'; in olden times the wild freebooters of the Borderland, in later days the yeomanry of Northern England. He was born at Mealsgate, a small village on the main road between Wigton and Cockermouth. father, John Moore, was 'a fine specimen of a North-country yeoman.' Scrupulously honest himself, he seems to have placed too much reliance on the uprightness of others, and his frequent unwise suretyships kept the family in comparatively straitened. circumstances. When George was only six years old his mother died; and five years afterwards his father married again. My step-mother,' he says, was invariably kind to me.' George's schooling began when he was eight years old. It was of just

such a character as might be expected in a district where the usual qualification for the teacher's office was to have a stick-leg, or a club-foot, or a claw-hand.' He thus describes his first school: The master, Blackbirdt Wilson, was an old man fond of drink. The scholars were sent out to fetch it for him three or four times a day. He used to drive the learning into us with a thick ruler, which he brought down sharply upon our backs. He often sent the ruler flying amongst our heads. The wonder is that he did not break our skulls. Perhaps he calculated on their thickness. His rule was to drive reading, writing and arithmetic into us by brute force." Things were decidedly better under Blackbird Wilson's successor, Mr. Allison; but it was not till he went to

6

a finishing school at Blennerhasset,' at which he remained only a quarter, that George at all understood the advantages of education.

But he had other schools and schoolmasters. He lived much in the open air and walked great distances: on one occasion, for instance, when only eleven years old, thirty-four miles in a day to see a man hanged at Carlisle. He would now and then ride after the hounds on his father's half-blind mare, or join the shepherds in their fierce pursuit of a fox in lambing-time. Moreover, he early became skilled in the great Cumberland art of wrestling, and from his childhood to the beginning of his life in London, was passionately fond of the sport.

At thirteen, his education being considered complete, he resolved to