The Arguments against Religious Persecution. 401 to silence the persecutor, he would still rest stubbornly on the fact, that if he did not take the most ruthless means to stop the spread of heresy, the Church would no longer retain her old dominion. But the Church was the most valued of old-world possessions. She had no competitor. Science had not distracted the people from religion. Political life had not furnished a new source of activity. Gigantic trade had not arisen to enlist men's time and sympathies. Speculative philosophy had not sown distrust in the theology of tradition. Heaven was a living verity, hell an awful reality. Every occupation of his life was linked with thoughts of supernatural beings, who had been sent from on high to reward. him, to punish him, to lead him back when he should go astray. Deaden or destroy in the peasant's mind the belief that he was on trial before heaven, that the Church was his guide, and that the Judgment Day should assign him a place among the blessed for ever, or doom him to burn everlastingly with the damned in hell, and you took away the half of his existence. Hence to him heresy seemed some such crime as the most wicked of murders seems to us. He was quite prepared to applaud the decision of the Inquisitor that the heretic should die. And the Inquisitor himself, as the representative of the whole clergy, dealt out terrible vengeance to the heretic, because he felt that the heretic was striving to rob the world of every blessednessof religious comfort in this life, of eternal felicity in the next. We are not denying, of course, that argumentative discussion does much to change the world's convictions. already shown the effect of Casuistry, in which that form of discussion plays a large part. And we admit that, in the long-run, it has a powerful effect, by constantly presenting truths in certain lights, and by prompting men to think in a certain groove. Thus it helps in some measure to create what has been felicitously called a new climate of opinion.' And it is specially powerful when it takes the form of speculative teaching. That teaching draws attention away from practical questions, and awakens less prejudice than direct attacks on existing doctrines or institutions. A man who is firmly convinced that transubstantiation is a reality may study the speculations of Berkeley; may then conclude that we have no reason to believe in the existence of the outward world; may next hold that substance, as opposed to accidents, is an unmeaning term; and hence may afterwards find, or think he finds, that the theory thus firmly lodged in his mind cuts at the root of the sacerdotal doctrine. Conversion often happens in this way. A plausible defence, indeed, might be offered for the idea that the metaphysicians rule the earth. The truth is, however, that argu VOL. XLVII.-NO. XCIV. 2 C ment by itself is feeble, and that in the case both of intellectual and moral opinions, the grand source of change is the development of social conditions from the simple to the complex; a development mainly caused by the two instincts of which we have traced the operation, the instinct of self-preservation and the instinct of accumulation; a development quickened, but not distorted, by the influence either of dogmatic or argumentative teaching; a development corrected at every turn, and kept from giving permanence to low moral types, by the law of Natural Selection. We may be charged with taking no account of two other sources of moral advancement, in the revelations of Moses and of Christ. The answer is that, in so far as each lawgiver went with the current of his age, the ethical problem will best be solved by watching the current itself; and that, in so far as each worked by supernatural means, the question is beyond the domain of science, and does not come within the scope of our discussion. We may also be charged with impugning the immutability of moral truth, since we have shown that ethical systems change from age to age. The answer is, that we have given the highest proof of the immutability of Moral truth, by showing that the change is only a development; that from the infancy of man the highest virtues of civilisation were practised; that they were practised on a narrow scale merely because such a scale was imposed by the necessities of existence; and that the future will never change their essential character, but only give them a grander sweep. As well might you impugn the immutability of the principles of logic, on the ground that induction led Thales to one result and Faraday to another. It is the circumstances of their respective ages that brought Thales and Faraday to different opinions; not the logic which each applied. So is it with moral truth. Moral truth is immutable, but the circumstances of the age determine the nature and range of its application. Gathering together, then, the scattered threads of the argument, we note, first, that the combined influence of the Statical and the Dynamical laws of society breaks down the provincial barriers which separate family from family, tribe from tribe, and nation from nation; secondly, that the change gives affection, generosity, self-sacrifice, and every other feeling of our nature a freer range; thirdly, that moral types are thereby developed which have a fitness for all times and all places; fourthly, that other types are produced, which, being essentially local, are essentially weak; fifthly, that Natural Selection severs the two varieties, and smites the weaker with death; sixthly, that science, literature, and direct moral teaching, go hand in hand with those agencies, but are not disturbing causes; and finally, that the Natural History of Morals is the history of social conditions. We have hurried over the vast field so quickly that we have been able only to scratch the surface. Our purpose has been to give merely a rough and rapid outline of the great task that still awaits the moralist. The ground is, to a large extent, virgin, and it offers a bounteous harvest to the strong hand that shall guide the ploughshare of thought and learning through the rich subsoil. It is no bare prospect, no dead mechanic past, that we unveil, but a past majestic with the sequence of ordered law, and working through seeming confusion, and unceasing strife, and the din of angry voices, to that 'far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.' To the eye of the Moralist, the history of the race, with its restless life, its sins, its sorrows, its heroisms, its records of destruction, its immortal legacies of beauty, its faiths and its scepticisms, its Sodoms and its Babylons, its Jerusalems and its Romes, opens up some such stupendous world of progression as the inscriptions on the rocks summon before the eye of the geologist. Away into the boundless distance sweeps. the mysterious swelling sea of mountain and plain, laying bare at intervals some slow deposit, on which is written the history of dead and living moralities; of simple types, hardly organized as yet, that from the world of civilisation have for ever passed away; of more complex types that struggled with death for ages before they perished; and finally, of the richly-organized types that came into being when life had gathered a myriad complexity, and that fight with each other for existence in this teeming, many-peopled, many-sounding age. Everywhere Nature strews her path with dead heroisms, and dead nobilities, and sin, and suffering, and mysterious doom. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, "A thousand types are gone." The earth is a moral graveyard. The very dust is the ashes of the dead. The soil in which our virtues grow is the débris of a buried world, that sinned, and suffered, and did ignoble deeds, and lived heroic life, and watered the seed-fields of the future with its tears and its blood. And our virtues and vices will, in turn, be but fossils which the eye of science shall curiously scan, and they will finally crumble into dust, from which the moral harvests of the future shall spring; and the world that shall draw its moral life from our ashes will also in time form but one tiny layer of dead bones in the never-ending strata of existence; and thus shall it be throughout the weary generations of men. ART. V.-1. Report of the Commissioners appointed to Inquire into the Recruiting for the Army, 1867. 2. Notes on the Military Forces of the Kingdom, 1867. 3. On the Expediency of the General Introduction of the Military Drill and Naval Exercises in the School Stages of the Elementary Schools; and of employing Soldiers on Civil Work in time of Peace. By EDWIN CHADWICK, C.B., Correspondent of the Institute of France. 1867. 4. Statistical, Sanitary, and Medical Reports, Army Medical Department, vol. vii., 1867. 5. Memorandum on the Prussian Army in relation to the Campaign of 1866. By Lieut.-Colonel REILLY, C.B., Royal Horse Artillery. 6. Was wollen wir? Armee-Reorganisation oder Armee-Desorganisation? Vierte Auflage. München, 1867. 7. Organisation Militaire. Exposé de M. Staempfli, Ancien Membre du Conseil Fédéral et Ancien Chef du Département Militaire Suisse. 1866. 8. Das Leben der französischen Officiere und Soldaten. Darmstadt und Leipzig, 1867. 9. De la Démocratie en Amérique. Par ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE. 14me Edition, tome iii., 1865. 10. L'Ouvrier de Huit Ans. Par JULES SIMON. Paris, 1867. 11. L'Armée Française en 1867. [GENERAL TROCHU.] Douzième Edition. Paris, 1867. 12. Revue des Deux Mondes, 1867. 'WE have arrived,' observes General Trochu, in one of the ablest and most interesting of the many essays on Military Organization which the war of last year has produced, 'at one of those periods of transition in the existence of armies, which mark the end of certain systems employed in the wars of the past for the inauguration of others to be employed in the wars of the present. It is the merit and the fortune of Prussia in 1866, as formerly in the time of the great Frederick, to have foreseen this evolution of the art of war, to have studied its conditions attentively during a long peace, to have discovered them for the most part, and to have opportunely and resolutely applied them.'1 We cite the observation, not merely for the importance in itself of the double conviction of high military authority in France, that military systems have arrived at a period of transition, and that Prussia has correctly apprehended its conditions, but because the passage raises inquiries 1 L'Armée Française en 1867. respecting the causes, objects, and tendencies of the vast armies of the Continent, which it did not fall within the purpose of General Trochu to treat of, though they are inquiries of the first importance to the people of this country, to many of whom the 'period of transition in the existence of armies' in prospect, has long been a period of general disarmament. The questions which General Trochu discusses, are, indeed, far from being military questions only. To his credit as a man and a citizen, as well as a soldier, he looks at an army not as a mere instrument of victory, but as a powerful social agent for the improvement or the corruption of a nation. Every year, he urges, an army withdraws from different parts of the body of society, and every year it returns to it a number of citizens,- Une redoubtable question se présente, sont-ils dans l'ordre moral, sont-ils dans l'ordre physique, améliorés ou dénaturés?' Public spirit, public morality, public health, the power of the race to increase, the gradual elevation or degradation of the life of the nation in some of its most important conditions,--such is the immense theme which, for fifty years, has agitated legislation on recruiting for the army.' We too, in this country, are deeply interested in the moral and social effects of different military systems, as well as in their efficiency for war; but the theme which they present to our minds is yet vaster. Why do these mighty armaments exist? Do they threaten war? Are they all aggressive or defensive alike? Is England safe in her present military system? Even an unreformed Parliament, full of promotion by purchase, could it have realized the period of transition in the existence of armies' at which we have arrived, might have been moved to repentance by the powerful voices which have but preached in the wilderness, Army Reform. Nor will the return of a reformed Parliament suffice of itself to insure the sort of army reform that is needed. The sort which eminent Parliamentary Reformers have advocated before now has been army extinction. So many indeed are the reasons for believing that war must finally disappear before commerce and civilisation, that not only is the question of the probability of war always discussed by practical men in this country with reference to some passing cloud in the political sky, but powerful speculative thinkers, both here and on the Continent, have found in the very institution of the standing armies of modern Europe an evidence of the cessation of warfare. Montesquieu, it is true, in a passage cited by M. Jules Simon, lamented, a century and a quarter ago, that a new plague was spreading over Europe, disordering its sovereigns so as to lead to the maintenance of inordinate numbers of troops. As soon as one State increases its forces, the others at once increase theirs, so that nothing is |