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by the infallible Church to be essential to salvation. Those who could not find infallibility in a State Church went over to Rome, abandoning the Via Media; others were content with the high sacramental position of Anglicanism; the moderate Rationalists took shelter with the Broad Church; a few retreated into the cloudy refuge of transcendental idealism. The two extreme parties, the Broad Church and the Sacerdotalists, were at bitter feud with each other; yet they both denounced the common enemy. Arnold agreed with Carlyle that the Liberals greatly overrate Bentham, and 'the political economists generally; the summum bonum of 'their science is not identical with human life . . . and the ' economical good is often, from the neglect of other points, 'a social evil.' Newman held that to allow the right of private judgement was to enter upon the path of scepticism; and the latest infidel device, he says, is to leave theology alone. He set up the argument, well-worn but always impressive, that science gives no certainty; and Mr. Stephen contends against it with the weapons of empiricism:

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'The scientific doctrines must lay down the base to which all other truth, so far as it is discoverable, must conform. The essential feature of contemporary thought was just this: that science was passing from purely physical questions to historical, ethical, and social problems. The dogmatist objects to private judgement or free thought on the ground that, as it gives no criterion, it cannot lead to certainty. His real danger was precisely that it leads irresistibly to certainty. The scientific method shows how such certainty as is possible must be obtained. The man of science advocates free inquiry precisely because it is the way to truth, and the only way, though a way which leads through many errors.'

Mr. Stephen is himself a large-minded Utilitarian. He will have nothing to do with a transcendental basis of morals; and the dogmatist who dislikes cross-examination is out of his court. Dogmatic authority, he says, stands only on its own assertions; and if you may not reason upon them, the inference is that on those points reason is against them. You may withdraw beyond this range by sublimating religion into a philosophy, but then it loses touch with terrestrial affairs, and has a very feeble control over the unruly affections of sinful men. Newman himself resorted to scientific methods in his theory of Developement, that is, of the growth and evolution of doctrine. We may agree that these destructive arguments have much logical force, yet on the other hand such certitude as empiricism can provide brings little consolation to the multitude, who re

quire some imperative command; they look for a pillar of cloud or fire to go before them day and night, and a land of promise in the distance. Scientific exposition works slowly for the improvement of ethics, which to the average mind are rather weakened than strengthened by loosening their foundations; and religious beliefs suffer from a similar constitutional delicacy. Conduct is not much fortified by being treated as a function of character and circumstance; for in religion and morals ordinary humanity demands something impervious to reasoning, wherein lies the advantage of the intuitionist.

Mr. Stephen, however, is well aware that empirical certitude will not supply the place of religion. In his concluding pages he states, fairly and forcibly, the great problems by which men are still perplexed. Religion, as J. S. Mill felt, is a name for something far wider than the Utilitarian views embrace.

Men will always require some religion, if religion corresponds not simply to their knowledge, but to the whole impression made upon feeling and thinking beings by the world in which they must live. The condition remains that the conception must conform to the facts; our imagination and our desires must not be allowed to over-ride our experience, or our philosophy to construct the universe out of à priori guesses. To find a religion which shall be compatible with all known truth, which shall satisfy the imagination and the emotions, and which shall discharge the functions hitherto assigned to the churches, is a problem for the future.'

The Utilitarian doctrines, in short, though propagated by leaders of high intellectual power, and inspired by a pure unselfish morality, achieved little success in the enterprise of providing new and firmer guidance and support to mankind in their troubles and perplexities. But they were not content to look down from serene heights upon the world, leaving the crowd

'Errare atque viam palantes quærere vitæ.'

They laboured devotedly to dispel ignorance and to advance knowledge; they spared no pains to promote the material well-being of society. They helped to raise the wind that filled the sails of practical reform; they headed the attack upon legal and administrative abuses; they stirred up the national conscience against social injustice; they proclaimed a lofty standard of moral obligation. They laid down principles that in the long run accord with human progress, yet in their hopes of rapidly modifying society by the application of those principles they were disappointed; for

their systematic theories were blocked by facts, feelings, and misunderstandings which had not been taken into calculation. They were averse to coercion, as an evil in itself; but though they would have agreed with Mr. Bright's dictum that Force is no remedy,' they were latterly brought to perceive that in another sense there is no remedy except force, and that the vested interests and preconceptions of society make a stiff and prolonged opposition to enlightened persuasion. They were disposed to rely too confidently upon the spread of intelligence by general education for preparing the minds of people to accept and act upon doctrines that were logically demonstrable, and to reject what could not be proved. Mr. Stephen has somewhere written that to support a religion by force instead of by argument is to admit that argument condemns it. The proposition is too absolutely stated even for the domain of spiritual authority, since it might be replied that no great religion, certainly no organised Church, has existed by argument alone, and it has usually been supported by laws. But at any rate the temporal power subsists and operates by coercion, and the sphere of the State's direct action, instead of diminishing, as the earlier Utilitarians expected it to do, with the spread of education and intelligence, is perceptibly extending itself. The Utilitarians demurred to religion as an ultimate authority in morals, and substituted the plain unvarnished criterion of utility. Upon this ground the State steps in, replaces religious precept by positive law, and public morality is enforced by Acts of Parliament. They were for entrusting the people with full political power, to be exercised in vigilant restraint of the interference by Government with individual rights and conduct; the people have obtained the power, and are using it more and more to place their affairs and even their moral interests under the control of organised authority. We do not here question the expediency of the movement; we are simply registering the tendency.

There are few literary enterprises more arduous than the task of following and demarcating from the written record of a period the general course of political and philosophic movements. The tendencies are so various, the conditions which determine them are so complicated, that it is difficult to keep hold of the clue which guides and connects them. Mr. Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century' took the broad ground that is denoted by its title; but, as he now tells us in his preface, he has found

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it expedient to reduce his present work within less comprehensive limits, by confining it to an account of the compact and energetic school of the English Utilitarians.' This reduction of its scope has not, however, damaged the continuity of the narrative, since in the great departments of morals, religion, and political philosophy the Utilitarians were mainly the lineal heirs of the characteristic English writers in the preceding century. It is true that Mr. Stephen has not been able to bring within the compass of his three volumes the subject of general literature, especially of poetry and novels, which in the nineteenth century have given their vivid expression to the doubts and the hopes, to the aims and aspirations of the time. But we can see that such an enlargement of his plan would have rendered it unmanageable, and that Mr. Stephen may have wisely considered the example of Buckle's History of Civilisation in England,' which was projected on too large a scale, exhausted the author's strength, and remains unfinished. Mr. Stephen's present work fulfils its promise and completes its design. The Utilitarians are very fortunate in having found a historian whose vivacity of style, consummate literary knowledge, and masculine power of thought will have revived their declining reputations, and secured to them their proper place in the literature of the nineteenth century.

ART. VI.-1. A Word to the Wise; or, an Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland. By GEORGE BERKELEY, D.D., Bishop of Cloyne. Dublin: Faulkner, 1752.

2. Maynooth College: its Centenary History. By the Most Rev. JOHN HEALY, D.D., Coadjutor-Bishop of Clonfert. Dublin Browne & Nolan, 1895.

3. Journals, Conversations, and Essays relating to Ireland. By NASSAU WILLIAM SENIOR. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1868.

4. History of England in the Eighteenth Century. By WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY. 8 vols. London: Longmans, Green, & Co.

5. Report of Her Majesty's Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Management and Government of the College of Maynooth. Dublin: Alex. Thom, 1855.

6. L'Irlande, Sociale, Politique, et Religieuse. Par GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT. 2 vols. Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1842.

CLERIC

LERICAL influence has been, during recent years, and especially in Ireland, so much the watchword of rival camps, and the subject of such heated polemic, that it is desirable to approach the question of the training and work of the priesthood, free from the associations of old religious controversies and modern politics. We cannot, perhaps, get better counsel in such a matter than from the pages of Bishop Berkeley, who combined, in a singular degree, the subtlety of the metaphysician and the practical good sense of the man of the world. If he saw through and and beyond the economic heresies of his time, he showed himself equally free from current prejudices, whether of class or of creed. A Protestant bishop, living in days of proscription and penal laws, he nevertheless saw that the Catholic clergy might become the regenerators of their unhappy country. In a letter entitled A Word to the Wise,' written in 1749, he thus appeals to the Catholic clergy:

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Be instant, in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort. Make them thoroughly sensible of the sin and folly of sloth. Show your charity in clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, which you may do with the mere breath of your mouths. Give me leave to tell you that no set of men upon earth have it in their power to do good on easier terms, with more advantage to others, and less pains or loss to themselves. Your flocks are, of all others, most disposed to follow

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