amount of wine he was to drink, were also fixed. The high priest daily praised the king in his presence, and ended by blaming the faults he might chance involuntarily to commit."1

The Indian law of Manu exhibits the same multiplicity and tenuity of the meshes of the vast net in which a theocracy, at a certain epoch, envelopes humanity. This law indicates the manner in which the Indian is to eat, drink, clothe himself, relieve his bowels, wash his feet, cut his nails and hair, bathe, and even perform the most secret functions. It designates with precision the hours of rising and going to rest; it tells him what precautions he is to take for his personal security; it enunciates the rights and duties peculiar to each caste and each subdivision of caste, the washers, the weavers, the tillers of the soil, &c.2 A Brahman may not void himself without observing twentythree rules, some of which refer to the choice of a spot, some to cleanliness, some to the thoughts on which he is to occupy his mind at the time. He is not to speak, nor munch even a crumb, nor to look at the sun or at certain specified trees and plants, but he is to think three times on Vishnu and to drink thrice to his honour. 3

But this interference with the liberty of the individual, for the purpose of slowly and surely undermining his independence and originality, is the result aimed at by secular government every whit as much as by a theocracy. The reason is obvious. A people reduced to mere machines are far more easy to govern, far more pliable than one effervescing with energy and independence. Peru was an illustration. The Inca was to his people a father indeed,

1 Diod. Sicul. i. 70.

2 Laws of Manu, iv. 43 seq., 60 seq., 76-79, 92, 93, 152, 201, &c.

3 Dubois Mœurs, Institutions, &c. de l'Inde; Paris, 1825.

for his people were reduced to the condition of childhood; they had no will of their own, no power of exercising choice as to the work they were to do, or when they were to do it, what food they were to eat, and how it was to be cooked, when and whom they were to marry. The Chinese are without religion, yet they have all been moulded into one type; they are without individuality, they act alike, talk alike, think alike, look alike; and the agency in this case is that public opinion which is the public law. The tyranny of democracy is quite as depressing as that of autocracy or theocracy. We feel it in a measure in our own day, when the many strive to thrust every wheel into the same rut, and flatten every mental and moral irregularity of outline to the level of commonplace; when, to accomplish this task, public opinion penetrates into our most sacred privacy and passes judgment on our inmost thoughts, and condemning its erratic geniuses to the workhouse or the asylum. As Jean Paul Richter truly says, "Our century is tolerant of opinions, but is intolerant to actions. We dare express every opinion freely, but practise no virtue without fear of ridicule. We venture to judge without knowing the opinions of others to guide us, but we do not venture to act differently from others. We tolerate all sorts of freethinkers, but not all sorts of saints."

This disciplinary minuteness is a political necessity at a certain epoch of civilization. Without it the execution of national undertakings on a large scale would be imperfect. In warfare the principle is to this day admitted; and a host of savages fighting each for himself without reference to his companions flies like chaff before a handful of disciplined soldiers acting as articulations of one body. In the age of primeval barbarism, the social unit was the individual; in the nomadic epoch, it was the family; in

the despotic period, the unit was the nation. The family is strong because, in it, some five or six interests are fused into a single force; and the despotic organization is mighty because, in it, millions of energies are directed as the energy of one.

The method pursued to destroy originality is the expenditure of mental force on trivialities, the whipping of the vital stream into a froth of ritual observance. This reduces man's originality to zero, and makes him but a living wheel in one vast mechanical structure.

In a theocracy there is neither individuality, personality, nor originality; there is but a community, an organization, and a law: it is an infallible, absolute, all powerful, universal, and immutable government, exercised in the name of divinity by religious chiefs, interpreters of the divine commands, ministers and representatives of God upon earth.

That a theocracy is beneficial at certain ages cannot be doubted. It has educated nations, taught the principle of cohesion, fostered science, encouraged art, developed literature. That in other ages it is mischievous cannot be doubted either. It has restrained independence, shackled commerce, conventionalized art, mummified science, cramped literature, and stifled thought.

If there is to be a religion at all, there must be community, organization, and law; and the defect of a theocracy is not the recognition of this truth, but exaggeration in its application of it.

CHAPTER XI

THE ETHICS OF RELIGION

The moral sense an intellectual faculty-Arises from the perception of pleasure and pain, and the belief in causation-Necessity of ethics to man-Growth of the moral faculty-Conscience directed by the law -Sense of responsibility-Duties to man, to God, to beasts, to selfPrecepts of an ethic code-Jewish code-Mazdæan code-The ethical bearings of Polytheism-Greek morals—Scandinavian morals-The ethical bearings of Monotheism-Jewish morals—Mohammedan morals--The ethical bearings of Pantheism-Aristotle's ethics-The desire of happiness the key to moral activity-This is self-love, a natural instinct— Ancient confusion of responsibilities-Modern disengagement of duties and their systematization.

Is

the moral sense an intellectual faculty, or is it a sentiment? It is certainly the former. Religion may be emotional, but ethics must be intellectual.

Morals are a science founded upon conceptions of the mind, and bear some analogy to that of geometry. A child does not enter the world with a mind stored with mathematical figures, nor with a conscience graduated to the admeasurement of right and wrong. It enters the world with an inherent faculty of disengaging conditions of being one from another, and of comparing impressions, and then of classifying them. It arranges into groups, for instance, the qualities of material objects: the colour it separates from the form, and the form from the size, and the size from the weight. It reduces each group to a system. In

that of colour, it tabulates the reds, and the blues, and the yellows; distinct impressions, but arranged by the mind side by side, because of a certain likeness of nature observed between them. In the group of shape it places circles, ovals, squares, triangles, &c. The mind acts in a similar manner to produce ethics. But there is this distinction to be drawn between the method by which geometric forms are conceived, and that by which moral concepts are reached. These latter are based on observation of acts, the former on observation of objects. Distinction in form is arrived at by a process of comparison on variouslyshaped material objects, distinction in morals by a process of comparison of the results of different acts. Thus the mind classes acts together, some as just, others as unjust; some as merciful, others as cruel; the just it opposes to the unjust, as in colour it contrasts red with green, and as in form the circle with the square. But the mind does not regard acts with the same equanimity as it does forms, colours, and the like, for this reason, that these acts effect the self pleasurably or painfully. If the nerves did not transmit sensations of delight and of anguish, men would discuss the morality and immorality of acts with as supreme indifference as they do the forms of figures and the tints of colours.

The distinction of right from wrong, being an intelligent process, is imperfect or complete according to the quality and education of the mind. An Australian Indian has no word for triangle; because he does not distinguish shapes in the abstract. A man who does not distinguish between the morality and immorality of acts is in an analogous condition of mental barbarism.

The elements of pure mathematics are ideas of quantity, of indivisibility, of unity either in number or in space, of