'Orl. Fair youth, I would I could make thee

believe I love.

gained so much influence among the Pan-fer to conjugial love. An observer of the working theistic class of thinkers, some of which of the heart well knows that conjugial love are quoted in another article of the same springs from the woman and returns to her. It number of Fraser's Magazine to which we originates with the woman. It is a gift from have referred, take such a saying as "A her to the man, which he feels in himself as right and true man would be felt to the very ly that it will even vanish awaythough he originated it, and feels this so strong-as the woman centre of the solar system," or this, "The is herself well aware- if she by acting failed pulses of thought, which go to the borders to keep up this strange delusion in his mind. of the Universe, let them proceed from the Shakespeare makes Rosalind relate the art embosom of the Household," what are these ployed to effect this purpose, among the other but the imaginative apotheosis of sentiments female secrets he allows her to betray under her which women would have used in a veiled male disguise form to support the dogmatic authority of the system which had laid most hold upon them? The religious Comtists, in impersonating their imaginary Grand Etre as a "mother,"-depriving God of all personal character first, and then as if in irony calling Him "Her," Theodore Parker, who, though an earnest Theist, insisted frequently on the same grotesque transformation of divine gender, are all following in the same path, seizing on a vague sentiment which women would have carefully subordinated to some visible and authoritative system, and recklessly enthroning it above all visible and authoritative systems, to show how much they prefer warm sentiment to tradition, evidence, or revelation. But the

most curious illustration of this remarkable tendency in "the modern spirit" boldly to enthrone a sentimental feminine element where no woman ever would have placed it, above all other elements of modern religion and theology, is one that proceeds apparently out of the Swedenborgian school of thought. In a curious litle book* that has just appeared, and which is so sincere, fresh, and evidently written out of genuine personal emotion, that we hope to give it a more extended notice in these columns, Mr. Horace Field attempts to establish a rigid fatalism on spiritual grounds, by attributing our apparent free-will to what we must call a loving feminine finesse on the part of God. Nay, this is the express analogy which he finds for God's goodness in making us fancy we are free when we are not, that it is just what a woman does when she makes her husband think he originated some token of love to her, while in reality she puts him up to it :

'Ros. Me believe it! You may as soon make her that you love believe it; which I warrant she is apter to do than to confess she does; that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences.' Now, the remarkable part in all this is, that the delusion in the man's mind, that he himself originates the love, is essential to the exitsence of the love itself; just as when doing any act at the direct bidding of God, the delusion that we do it ourselves is the heart of all social existence. Human nature is full of such contradictions. say may, for example, to a mischievous child, 'Your whole life is needfully a cause of trouble and give as little needless trouble as you can, to all about you; you ought to try, therefore,

We

not that we do not all delight to take trouble for you we should, indeed, be lost without it - but our delight will pass away if we do not see you endeavour to relieve us of all the trouble you can;' and this desire to rob us of trouble is the only way to keep up our delight in it; and these contradictions must be in the heavenly nature, if we regard its essential life to be love, the essence of which is the complete abself-sacrifice, until they culminate in conjugial sorption of the gift by the receiver, and its consequent return to the giver. In conjugial love, then, the woman plays toward the man the part of Deity. She gives that all-engrossing heavenly love to him, accompanied by the persuasion that he himself originates it. She first selects him from among other men, and he perceives it; each advance is hers, and he feels it as his declaration, but the man speaks the word, and own, because he loves it; she induces the final heaven and earth cannot persuade him that he is not the author of it, because he pours out his whole being in it; and these persuasious she will induce in him at any cost, and will not disturb him in them no, not at the price of life itself. And what does the wise man do when My statement is, then, that God Himself convinced of these truths? He accepts these directs all our movements, and so directing, doings on the part of the woman as of her true the feeling gives us that we direct ourselves. nature; he revels in the delusion itself thus valThere is a process so strangely parallel among our ued by her, and thus supported, as the richest social relationships that I cannot pass it by. I re-jewel in her diadem, and as men thus deal with

* Heroism; or, God Our Father, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent. By Horace Field, B. A. London: Longmaus.

women as to conjugial love, so should the whole race deal with our Father in heaven as to freewill, receive the inspiration to the deed, accompanied by the love for it, as His gift, and

adore Him for ever that the gift thus given persuades them that they, and not God, are the authors of their acts."

Indeed, the key-note of this remarkable little book-remarkable for combining real logical cohesion of thought with extraordinary feats of sentiment- is that while there is nothing, no other agency, in the world but God, He has managed matters with so loving and delicate a feminine finesse, that we all imagine ourselves to be doing freely what we are really constrained to do, and so enjoy as spontaneous in ourselves acts of self-devotion and prayer, which are really only God's acts passed through the funnel of our seeming personality. We attribute this curious doctrine concerning God's feminine finesse of tenderness to the Swedenborgian school of thought, both on account of the odd and objectionable word "conjugial," which we never saw in any other class of writings, and from the dedication to the "Bridegroom and the Bride, the Lamb and the Lamb's wife," which is a favourite vein of mystical allegory in the Swedenborgian school; but there is nothing in the book Swedenborgian in doctrine, Swedenborg himself having been, we believe, a strong believer in free-will.

ry fascination which beautiful women themselves exercise-over men.

Our inference from all this is that the positive side of "the modern spirit" in relation to religion is the tendency to fall in love with "the infinite," and to revolt, as lovers will, against the restraint of rational laws; while the negative side, the masculine side,

is the logical tendency to demand evidence for all asserted facts, and to reject all facts not established by evidence in the most satisfactory manner. The great religious calamity of our time is that so few seem to be able to combine habitually, and in the same religious mood, the two attitudes of thought, -to guide criticism by spiritual cravings, to check spiritual cravings by intellectual criticism. Our most religious feelings nowadays help the revolt against Revelation just because it is revelation; in other words, because God's revelation of Himself is governed by moral laws and limited by historic evidence, and so has not the delicious charm of the inspirations of vague and wayward passion. The critical spirit, on the other hand, one of the most hopeful evidences of the scrupulous intellectual conscience of the present day,

scrupulous intellectual conscientiousness of modern times, with the spiritual thirst which, without it, is so lawless and vagrant, but which, under its guidance, will prove a truer divining rod to detect the "living waters," than any authoritative Church, or any verbally inspired Bible.

is left unassisted in its investigations by that religious thirst which could alone enaNow, what can be more remarkable than ble it to detect the true springs of the water the fact that from so many different sources, of life. We shall never reach by our own from the Spinozistic school of Pantheism, investigations, and without the aid of that from Comte's school of rigidly phenomenal dogmatic "authority" which is gone forevgeneralization, from Theodore Parker's er, the true life of God, as He has so long school of robust, sometimes almost rudely been revealing it to us, till we can combine masculine, Theism, - from the Swedenbor- in the same attitude of mind and heart the gian school of types and allegories, there proceed the same tendencies to extol the feminine type of mind, - nay, as we have seen, even feminine finesse in action, not only above religious dogma, but even above the intellectual side of faith. To defend God for deceiving us as to free-will by saying that in this He is just like a woman who makes a man offer to her and makes him think he did it without any guidance from her, is surely one of the strangest apologies for Fatalism which the world has ever heard of. Yet though an exaggerated illustration of the modern tendency to substitute vague fascinations of sentiment for truths for which we can plead the authority of historical revelation, it is only one of many all going to show that the most popular elements of modern religious faith are those at which men vaguely grasp in moods of elevated feeling, and for which they require no evidence in the proper sense of the term, except just the very sort of momenta

From the British Medical Journal.

WAS LUTHER MAD?

In the recent trial, in which the validity of the will of Mrs. Thwaites was disputed, because of the extreme religious delusions which she was proved to have had for many years, Mr. Serjeant Ballantine elicited from Dr. Williams, of Bethlehem Hospital, in cross-examination, a confession of opinion that Luther was mad, or, at any rate, not altogether sane. Dr. Wood is stated

in the newspaper reports to have given similar evidence. Whatever we may think of their opinion, we must admire the rare candour of these physicians; for the admission was anything but calculated to serve the cause in the defence of which they were called.

For

an instant. a state into which he had
nearly reduced me more than once.
no mortal can endure and withstand them
without the peculiar assistance and power
of God."

With this compare what Whitefield says
in his journal, about whom a report was
once raised that he was mad, and who says
of himself that "he might very well be
taken to be really mad, and that his rela-
tions counted his life madness."
"One
morning, rising from my bed, I felt an un-
usual impression and weight upon my
chest. In a short time, the load gradually
increased and almost weighed me down,
and fully convinced me that Satan had as
real possession of my body as once of Job's.
I fancied myself like a man locked

my body; prayed under the weight till the sweat came. How many nights did I lie groaning under the weight, bidding Satan depart from me in the name of Jesus."

But was Luther mad? The spiritual temptations which he underwent he described as "buffetings of Satan;" with these he was frequently tormented; he called them conflicts between him and Satan. The terrors he experienced he called "the Devil's traps," from which he earnestly prayed God to deliver him. If this were madness, then every preacher who describes the evil impulses of the heart as the instigations of Satan is surely mad himself, and teaches madness to his hearers; and that, too, with-up in iron armour; I felt great heavings in out the excuse which Luther had in the ignorance and superstitious credulity of the times in which he lived. The manner in which Luther himself speaks of his temptations is interesting, for it resembles the way in which he speaks of insanity. "I think," he says, "that all fools, and such as have not the use of reason, are vexed or led aside by Satan; not that they are therefore condemned, but because Satan doth diversely tempt men, some greviously, some easily; some a longer, some a shorter time. And whereas physicians attribute much to natural means sometimes, this cometh to pass because they know not how great the power and the strength of the devils are." This, though it lack form a little, according to modern scientific ideas of insanity, is "not like madness."

But let us go on to hear how he speaks of his conversations with the devil, whose persecutions cost him many a bitter night - multus noctes mihi satis amarulentas et acerbas reddere ille novit. "The devil," he says, "knows how to invent, and to urge his arguments with great force. He also speaks in a deep and loud-toned voice. Nor are these disputes carried on in a long course of various argumentations; but the question is put and the answer given in a moment. I am sensible, and have sufficiently experienced, how it sometimes happersons are found dead in their beds in a morning. He is not only able to kill or strangle the body, but knows how to urge and close in the soul with his disputations, that it is obliged to quit the body in

pens

that

If these earnest men were mad, then how far gone in madness must the Psalmist have been when he cried out, "Many oxen are come about me; fat bulls of Bashan close me in on every side." Hallucinations these, surely, of an extreme kind. Which of the great prophetic writers of the Bible will escape the suspicion of insanity, if a vehement sincerity of nature, an exalted imagination, and burning words of passionate earnestness, taking a figurative expression, are to be deemed indications of mental unsoundness?

"

It cannot be questioned that Luther was of a vehement nature, intensely earnest, ardently imaginative, obstinate even to rashness, as a man fighting the battle which he fought had need to be. By an incessant application to study, and by a sedentary life, he had greatly injured his health, so that he actually heard the noise "which the devil made to torment him; and on one occasion he was certainly cured by exercise and medicines sent him by Spalatinus. Notwithstanding these, we are of opinion that any one who engages to prove him insane, wrongly measuring the style and habit of thought of one age by those of another age, will have to make use of arguments which, if they are worth anything, would prove most of the great and earnest reformers whom the world has seen to have been insane also.

From Blackwood's Magazine.

THE REIGN OF LAW.

THE main object of this able and very interesting treatise is to show that the Reign of Law. meaning thereby that invariable order, or those persistent forces, which science delights to contemplate is by no means incompatible with the belief in an overruling and creative Intelligence. In this its main purpose it is what, a few years ago, would have been called a Bridgewater Treatise, and it would have deserved to take its place amongst the instructive series which bore that title. But whereas the Bridgewater Treatises in general abounded with illustrations of the great argument of design, the present volume is chiefly occupied with discussions that bear upon the nature of the argument itself. It is not, however, without due share of illustration; and the description given of the contrivance, or adaptation of the laws or forces of nature, displayed in the mechanism of a bird's wing-or say in the general purpose of enabling a vertebrate animal to fly through the air is amongst the happiest

of the kind we have ever met with. We

shall henceforth watch the flight of the seagull, a bird which the author especially selects for his illustration, with additional interest. The Duke of Argyll has evidently looked on birds with far other than the sportsman's eye with something of the poet's eye, as well as that of the man of science. Not that the sportsman is altogether destitute of admiration for the bird ne kills; we have known him discourse eloquently on the beauty of the creature soaring above him, in an element he cannot inhabit, and the next moment glory in bringing it down.*

'The Reign of Law.' By the Duke of Argyll. Alexander Strahan, publisher, 56 Ludgate Hill.

The Reign of Law' is in all respects a remarkable book. Where it does not command assent, it stimulates inquiry. Nor is it any ill compliment to a work of this description to say of it that it sometimes provokes, in a very mild degree, the spirit of controversy; seeing that it leads us back, with a certain freshness of mind, into old questions of a still unsettled nature.

In

We need hardly say that we cordially agree in the main conclusions to which the author would conduct us. No proposition appears to carry a stronger conviction with it than this that mind, not matter, or the forces called material, should be considered as the primal power in the universe. the order of science, we commence with the simple and lead onwards to the complex; but when, at any epoch, science presents to us such whole, such Cosmos, as it has been able to conceive, the conviction immediately follows that this whole existed as Thought or Idea before it was developed as a reality of space and time. The great conclusion, therefore, which the Duke of Argyll, in common with all our theologians, would enforce, is one which we, too, would maintain with whatever energy we possess. We are not in the least disposed to relinquish what is familiarly known as the argument from design in favour of any high a priori road " to the first great truth in theology. But there be methods of stating this argument from which we should dissent. There may also be a tendency to implicate the argument with philosophical opinions which, whether correct or not, are still under discussion, and which, in fact, are the opinions only of one section of the speculative world. Such a tendency (we do not say that it is manifested in an unusual manner in the present writer) we should venture to protest against.

may

66

The press has lately teemed with producWe suspect that our momentary digression to tions which must have manifested to most the sportsman is owing to the following circumstance: -Our eye has just fallen on a letter in the readers how utterly unsatisfactory are those Times,' protesting against the crael and purpose- metaphysical or ontological reasonings which less slaughter of the beautiful sea-birds that fre quent our cliffs. Hundreds of these exquisite crea are supposed to conduct us more directly to tures, whom every one with a park of tenderness the knowledge of the absolute and infinite or intelligence in his nature has delighted to watch as they hover over the sea, are killed every summer Being. Rejecting, as anthropomorphic, the for no object except the pleasure of killing, and such persuasion felt by reflective men in every poor skill as may be displayed in shooting amongst generation that the world is full of a crowd of birds. The cliffs between Scarborough purpose, and Burlington one of the great breeding-places or rather say of intermingled and insepof our sea-fowi-are mentioned as the scene of this arable purposes, and may therefore be callbattue. Parties go in boats, and station themselves ed one great purpose, under the flock of birds flying to and fro, feeding many profound their young. Boats have been seen " literally laden reasoners have preferred to found their thewith birds, the boatmen sitting on them." But ology on certain abstractions of the intellect, or the land, and die wretchedly of their wounds such as pure Being, Substance, Cause, aud

many that are shot fall at a distance on the water

or hunger." If the young men who indulge in this sport had read the Duke of Argyll's book, had followed him in his admiring explanation of the flight of the sea-gull, we think, perhaps, they would hardFOURTH SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. VI.

ly have consented to this wanton slaughter-to this
extermination of a creature probably happier than
themselves, and certainly more beautiful.
164.