proper activity, is to engender self-deception and hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious; it is an egoistic intoxication of the individual by supposed altruistic emotion, with an incapacity of corresponding selfsacrifice in action. The ideal practical life might be described as the full and exact and fit response of work to impression-in other words, as thoroughly adaptive reflex function. Such an apt life of fit feeling and action is an excellent way to keep emotion in due proportion and congruity; for just as it imparts real and exact meaning to language, which, without it, is vague, confused, and of double sense, so it compresses and utilizes, in order to form fruit, the emotional energy whose unrestrained tendency is to run into luxuriant growth of useless foliage, whereby there comes to pass little or no fruit of self-renunciation in homely good works, but, instead, much talk thereof with selfish action. Is uninformed emotion any better really than uninformed understanding? frenzy of feeling worth more than frenzy of thought?

All this one may devoutly believe, without on that account entertaining the smallest expectation that people will cease to gratify themselves with the excessive stimulation of emotion and with the outpouring of it in fitly answering wails and cries and shrieks; or that they will fail to procure the increase of it through the infection of numbers undergoing a similar

self-inflaming process-such contagious increase as the many and absurd epidemics of superstitious emotion in the past, affecting whole bodies of people, witness to.*

* Several examples of which will be found related in Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages. Similar epidemics occur still from time to time. In July, 1885, at the village of Corano, near Piacenza, in Italy, a little girl of eleven years of age saw on the mountainroad a most beautiful lady, dressed in blue, who informed her that she was the Madonna. She then disappeared, but a few hours afterwards all Corano had learnt what the girl had seen. This was what thereupon ensued, according to the correspondent of the Times newspaper

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Some were incredulous, but the greater number did not for a moment discuss the veracity of the girl's statement. Desolina was hailed as the favourite child of the Madonna, and the whole population went out in procession to the spot at the entrance of the wood. From that moment there commenced a literal epidemic of ecstasies and visions. While I write, more than thirty little girls declare that they have seen and are in direct communication with the Madonna. To these are added men and women, young and old, married and single. For miles round this village the country has the appearance of the Tuscan Maremma at the time of the unfortunate prophet of Arcidosso, David Lazzaretti. Hanging from the branches of the trees and on the hedges on all sides are offerings presented by the peasants to the miraculous shrine, which at present consists of a basket, draped with three or four cloths, on the roadside, to the right, as you proceed towards Corano.

"Hundreds and hundreds of persons are seen labouring up the steep ascent, under the burning rays of the July sun. Some girls scramble up the bare rocks, supplicating the Virgin with loud cries to appear, until they faint with fatigue. Recovering their senses, they say that they hear the voice of the Madonna, while all present fall on the ground, kissing the earth, with convulsive sobs and floods of tears. A profound impression is produced. To aggravate matters, women known to be hysterical sing, laugh, and cry, causing others to imitate them. While I write this, thousands are thronging hither from

If there is one thing which the history of the human race discloses plainly, it is the eagerness with which it has addicted itself to the use of intoxicants of one kind or another wherever it has had the opportunity. Indeed, it is an observation not less curious than instructive, that, while the nations of the past, whether savage, barbarous, or comparatively civilized, have shown everywhere a remarkable

ingenuity in the construction of weapons and in the discovery of substances to inflict injuries and diseases, they have shown little or none anywhere in the discovery of the medicinal substances which are useful in the cure of injuries and diseases; the only substances of the kind which most of them did discover being such as created a momentary kingdom of illusive bliss by stimulating the passions of mind and body— intoxicants and aphrodisiacs. Always has man felt the necessity, and been carried away by the delight, of being transported into the realm of idealism: always has he been urged to supplement the pessimism of facts by the optimism of theory. And what privilege of nature has the delirious feeling and imagination which a person deliberately generates by

the valleys of the old Duchies, from Piedmont, from Liguria, from Lombardy. The number is estimated at sixteen thousand.

The authorities are now interfering, and it is high time. Several doctors who have visited the place declare that the spread of this hallucination is likely to assume very alarming proportions."

a process of self-induction over the delirious feeling and imagination into which he deliberately drugs himself? The artificial privilege of birth it may

have, other privilege it has none.

SECTION VI.

ISOLATION OF SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE.

Ir the foregoing exposition be true, it is not surprising that progress in understanding of things material and temporal, and progress in the revelation of things spiritual and eternal, do not go along together. Their principles are plainly so antagonistic and mutually exclusive that, unless they keep entirely aloof, the issue of their conflict must inevitably be the subjection of the one to the other. The reforms in religion which have come to pass in the world at different times appear to have been independent of the understanding, which they did not improve, and often of the character too. Those who accepted the new faith were not made wiser, even when they were made better by it. To take one example: however much there may be to admire in the character and conduct of the great hero of the Protestant Reformation—and one large class of Christians find nothing at all to esteem in him-no one can admire the bigoted ignorance

with which he clung to his barbarous and cruel notions concerning witches and their doings, and the gross inhumanity to them which he earnestly advocated. "I would have no pity on these witches; I would burn them all," he says. Following his teachings in that respect, and the higher teaching of God's commandment to Moses, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," the Protestants and Puritans of old and new England, in the tortures and deaths which they inflicted on the poor wretches suspected or accused of witchcraft, contributed to history one of the most humiliating chapters in the annals of human folly.

So it was a mighty revolution of religious thought and feeling, springing from a revolt against idolatry and superstition, without the least solvent effect upon a superstition so degrading and grossly silly that it has always been and is the widespread and afflicting scourge of savage and barbarous peoples, and directly repugnant to an elementary knowledge of natural things. Nay, so far from the effect being to weaken, it was to strengthen, the hideous superstition; for it was in the name of God, and in pious zeal for His honour and glory, that the bloody persecution was undertaken and carried relentlessly through. That was the proof of earnest Christianity then which would be thought the negation of Christianity now. Ample proof, were proof necessary, how entirely a