up to priggishness and the dry rot of sen
timent, so long as any considerable com-
pany in it are wont to hang upon Johnson's
lips, without being offended by his jocular
brutality, his strenuous piety, or his un-
flinching enmity to affectation. Of course
a class still exists, perhaps it never was
more numerous than it now is, whose
nerves and lungs can endure the strong
light and tonic air of Johnson's vigorous
genius, and who rejoice to think that no
one ever tamed their tiger-cat. To these
such an anniversary as the present, not
needed to remind them of one who is
almost as real to them as any of their own
relations, is yet valuable as giving them a
landmark from which they may look back
and judge the effect that distance has
upon the apparent and relative size of such
a figure. This can be the only excuse, in
a brief note such as this must be, for deal-" Douglas " Home, below the inventor of
ing with facts and personages which are
the absolute commonplaces of literary his-
tory. We may know our Boswell by heart,
and be prepared to pass a searching ex-
amination in "Rasselas" and in "The
Rambler," and yet be ready to listen for a
moment with surprise to the voice which
reminds us that a century has passed away
since the great pontiff of literature died.

a century, that it is practically impossible
to read him? Among the lesser men that
surrounded him, there are many who have
outstripped him in literary vitality. In
verse he lags far behind Gray and Collins,
Churchill and Chatterton; nay, if_the
"Wanderer ""
were by Johnson and "Lon-
don " by Savage, the former would pos-
sess more readers than the latter now
attracts. In prose, who shall venture to
say that Johnson is the equal of Fielding,
Smollett, Hume, Goldsmith, Gibbon, or
Burke? We know that he is far less en-
tertaining, far less versatile and brilliant,
than any one of these. The " Discourses"
of his direct disciple Reynolds are more
often read, and with more pleasure, than
those essays of "The Rambler" from.
which their style was taken. As a dram-
atist, as a novelist, Johnson ranks below

"Peter Wilkins." For years he labored upon what was not literature at all, for other years on literature which the world has been obliged, against its will, to allow to disappear. When all is winnowed away which has become, in itself, interesting only to scholars, there remains "The Vanity of Human Wishes," a gnomic poem of tedious morality, singularly feeHow then does the noble and familiar ble in the second joint of almost every figure strike us in looking backward from recurring distich; "Rasselas,” a conte in the year 1884? In " constant repercus- the French taste, insufferable in its lumsion from one coxcomb to another," have bering machinery and pedantic ethics; the sounds which he continued to make the "Lives of the Poets," in which prejuthrough a career of stormy talk ceased to dice, ignorance, and taste combine to irripreserve all their value and importance tate the connoisseur and bewilder the for us? How does he affect our critical student. Such, with obvious exaggeravision now that we observe in relief | tion, and with wilful suppression of excepagainst him such later talker-seers as tional facts, the surviving literary labors Coleridge, De Quincey, and Carlyle? To of Johnson may be broadly described to these questions it is temperament more than literary acumen which will suggest the replies; and the present writer has no intention at this particular moment of attempting to forestall the general opinion of the age. His only object in putting forth this brief note is to lay stress on the curious importance of temperament in dealing with what seems like a purely lit erary difficulty. The personality of all other English writers, in prose and verse, even of Pope, even of De Quincey, must eventually yield in interest to the qualities of their writing. In Dr. Johnson alone the writings yield to the personality, and in spite of the wonder of foreign critics such as M. Taine, he remains, and will remain, although practically unread, one of the most potent of English men of letters.

Must we not admit now, at the close of

be. The paradox is that a Johnsonian may admit all that, and yet hold to it that his hero is the principal Englishman of letters throughout the rich second half of the eighteenth century. In this Johnson is unique. Coleridge, for instance, was much more than a writer of readable works in prose and verse; but let an age arrive in which the "Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," and the "Biographia Literaria" are no longer read or admired, and Coleridge will scarcely be able, on the score of his personality alone, to retain his lofty position among men of letters. Yet this is what Johnson promises to succeed in continuing to do. No one will ever say again, with Byron, that the "Lives of the Poets "is "the finest critical work extant," but that does not make Johnson ever so little a less commanding figure to us than he was to Byron.

Let us consider for one moment the case of the unfortunate tragedy of "Irene." There are very few of us who are capable of placing our hands upon our bosoms in the open sight of heaven and swearing that we have ever read it quite through. "The Mourning Bride" still counts its admirers, and even Cato," but not "Irene." Who among the staunchest and strongest Johnsonians can tell what" hero it was that confessed, and upon what occasion,

The man who, with characteristic downrightness, has blurted out most openly this last doubt of all the doubt whether doubt be an evil-is, as my readers will have recognized, Mr. Justice Stephen. In the concluding pages of one of his sledge-hammerings on the heads of his adversaries, in the Nineteenth Century for last June, he rung the changes upon the idea (with some reservations, to be presently noted) as follows:

it scarcely worth while to discuss them. | be of trivial import, since things would By dint of rubbing against each other in go on with mankind almost as well withthe pages of the reviews, in the clubs, out a God as with one. and at dinner parties, the sharp angles of our opinions have been smoothed down. Ideas remain in a fluid state in this temperate season of sentiment, and do not, as in old days, crystallize into sects. We have become almost as conciliatory respecting our views as the Chinese whom Huc describes as carrying courtesy so far as to praise the religion of their neighbors and depreciate their own. "You, honored sir," they were wont to say, "are of the noble and lofty religion of Confucius. I am of the poor and insignificant religion of Lao-tze." Only now and then some fierce controversialist, hailing usually from India or the colonies where London amenities seem not yet to have penetrated, startles us by the desperate earnestness wherewith he disproves what we had almost forgotten that anybody seriously believes.

As a result of the general "laissez croire" of our day, it has come to pass that a question has been mooted which, to our fathers, would have seemed preposterous: "Is it of any consequence what we believe, or whether we believe anything? Suppose that by-and-by we all arrive at the conclusion that religion has been altogether a mistake, and renounce with one accord the ideas of God and heaven, having (as M. Comte assures us) outgrown the theological stage of human progress; what then? Will it make any serious difference to anybody?"

Hitherto, thinkers of Mr. Bradlaugh's type have sung pæans of welcome for the expected golden years of atheism, when "faiths and empires" will

gleam

If human life is in the course of being fully described by science, I do not see what matewould be the use of one, or why it is wanted. rials there are for any religion, or, indeed, what We can get on very well without one, for though the view of life which science is opening to us gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things to enjoy. The world seems to me a very good world, if it would only last. It is full of pleasant people and curious things, and I think that most men find no great difficulty in turning their minds Love, away from its transient character. politics, commerce, professions, trades, and a friendship, ambition, science, literature, art, thousand other matters, will go equally well, as far as I can see, whether there is, or is not, a God or a future state. (Nineteenth Century, No. 88, p. 917.)

Had these noteworthy words been written by an obscure individual, small weight would have attached to them. We might have observed on reading them that the

not wise person who three thousand years ago “said in his heart, there is no God," had in the interval plucked up courage to say in the magazines that it does not signify whether there be one or not. But the dictum comes to us from a Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. gentleman who happens to be the very antithesis of the object of Solomon's deChristians and theists of all schools, on testation,. a man of distinguished ability the other hand, have naturally deprecated and unsullied character, of great knowlwith horror and dread such a cataclysm edge of the world (as revealed to successof faith as sure to prove a veritable Rag-ful lawyers), of almost abnormal clearnarok of universal ruin. In either case headedness; and lastly, strangest anomaly it has been taken for granted that the change from a world of little faith, like that in which we live, to a world wholly destitute of faith, would be immensely great and far-reaching; and that at the downfall of religion not only would the thrones and temples of the earth, but every homestead in every land, be shaken to its foundation. It is certainly a step beyond any yet taken in the direction of scepticism to question this conclusion, and maintain that such a revolution would

of all! who is the representative of a family in which the tenderest and purest type of Protestant piety has long been hereditary. It is the last utterance of the devout "Clapham School," of Venn, Stephen, Hannah More, and Wilberforce, which we hear saying: "I think we could do very well without religion."

As it is a widely received idea just now that the evolution theory is destined to coil about religion till it strangle it, and as it has become the practice with the

scientific party to talk of religion as poli- | shall even permit myself generally to refer ticians twenty years ago talked of Turkey, to all such phases of non-belief as involve as a sick man destined to a speedy disso- denial of the dogmas of Theism abovelution, it seems every way desirable that stated as "Atheism; "" not from discour we should pay the opinion of Sir James tesy, but because it would be impossible Stephen on this head that careful atten- at every point to distinguish them, and tion to which, indeed, everything from his because, for the purposes of the present pen has a claim. Those amongst us who argument, they are tantamount to Athehave held that religion is of priceless value ism. should bring their prepossessions in its favor to the bar of sober judgment, and fairly face this novel view of it as neither precious truth nor yet disastrous error, but as an unimportant matter of opinion which science may be left to settle with out anxiety as to the issue. We ought to bring our treasure to assay, and satisfy ourselves once for all whether it be really pure gold or only a fairy substitute for gold, to be transformed some day into a handful of autumn leaves and scattered to the winds.

To estimate the part played by religion in the past history of the human race would be a gigantic undertaking immeasurably above my ambition.* A very much simpler inquiry is that which I propose to pursue: namely, one into the chief consequences which might be anticipated to follow the downfall of such religion, as at present prevails in civilized Europe and America. When these consequences have been, however imperfectly, set in array, we shall be in a position to form some opinion whether we "can do very well without religion." Let me premise: 1. That by the word religion I mean definite faith in a living and righteous God; and, as a corollary therefrom, in the survival of the human soul after death. In other words, I mean by "religion" that nucleus of simple Theism which is common to every form of natural religion, of Christianity and Judaism; and, of course, in a measure also to remoter creeds, which will not be included in the present purview. Further, I do not mean Positivism, or Agnosticism, or Buddhism, exoteric or esoteric; or the recognition of the "Unknown and Unknowable," or of a "power not ourselves which makes for righteousness." These may, or may not, be fitly termed "religions;" but it is not the results of their triumph or extinction which we are here concerned to estimate. I

2. That I absolve myself from weighing against the advantages of religion the evils which have followed its manifold corruptions. Those evils, in the case even of the Christian religion, I recognize to have been so great, so hideous, that during their prevalence it might have been plausibly - though even then, I think, not truly-contended that they outbalanced its benefits. But the days of the worst distortions of Christianity have long gone by. The Christianity of our day tends, as it appears to me, more and more to resume the character of the religion of Christ, i.e., the religion which Christ believed and lived; and to reject that other and very different religion which men have taught in Christ's name. As this deep and silent but vast change comes over the spirit of the Christianity of modern Europe, it becomes better and better qualified to meet fearlessly the challenge, Should we do well without religion in its Christian shape?" But it is not my task here to analyze the results of any one type of religion, Christian, Jewish, or simply Theistic; but only to register those of religion itself, as I have defined it above, namely, faith in God and in immortality.

I confess, at starting on this inquiry, that the problem "Is religion of use, or can we do as well without it?" seems to me almost as grotesque as the old story of the woman who said that we owe vast obligation to the moon, which affords us light on dark nights, whereas we are under no such debt to the sun, who only shines by day, when there is always light. Religion has been to us so diffused a light that it is quite possible to forget how we came by the general illumination, save when now and then it has blazed out with special brightness. On the other hand, all the moon-like things which are proposed to us as substitutes for religion, friendship, science, art, commerce, and The best summary of the benefits which the Chris-politics, have a very limited area wheretian religion has historically wrought for mankind is, I think, to be found in that eloquent book "Gesta Christi," by the great American philanthropist, Mr. Charles Brace. The author has made no attempt to delineate the shadowy side of the glowing picture, the eviis of superstition and persecution wherewith men have marred those benefits.

in they shine at all, and leave the darkness around much as they found it. It is the special and unique character of religion to deal with the whole of human nature, all our pleasures and pains and duties

and affections and hopes and fears, here
and hereafter. It offers to the intellect
an explanation of the universe (true or
false we need not now consider); and,
pointing to heaven, it responds to the
most eager of its questions. It offers to
the conscience a law claiming authority
to regulate every act and every word.
And it offers to the heart an absolutely
love-worthy Being as the object of its
adoration. Whether these immense of
fers of religion are all genuine, or all
accepted by us individually, they are quite
unmatched by anything which science, or
art, or politics, or commerce, or even
friendship, has to bestow. The relation
of religion to us is not one-sided like
theirs, but universal, ubiquitous; not
moon-like, appearing at intervals, but sun-
like, forming the source, seen or unseen,
of all our light and heat, even of the
warmth of our household fires. Strong
or weak as may be its influence on us as
individuals, it is the greatest thing with
which we have to do, from the cradle to
the grave. And this holds good whetherness of that cave be fully revealed.
we give ourselves up to it or reject it. It
is the one great acceptance, or il gran
rifiuto. Nothing equally great can come
in our way again.

the ozone in the air, as to live in the intel-
lectual atmosphere of England and inhale
no Christianity.

As, then, it is impossible to forecast what would be the consequences of universal Atheism hereafter by observing the conduct of individual Atheists to-day, all that can be done is to study bit by bit the changes which must take place should this planet ever become, as is threatened, a faithless world. In pursuing this line of inquiry it will be well to remember that every ill result of loss of faith and hope which we may now observe will be cumulative as a larger and yet larger number of persons, and at last the whole commanity, reject religion altogether. Atheists have been hitherto like children playing at the mouth of a cavern of unknown depth. They have run in and out, and explored it a little way, but always within sight of the daylight outside, where have stood their parents and friends calling on them to return. Not till the way back to the sunshine has been lost will the dark

In an estimate of the consequences which would follow a general rejection of religion, we are bound to take into view the two classes of men - those who are devout and those who are not so who would, of course, be diversely affected by such a revolution of opinion. As regards the first, every one will concede that the loss of so important a factor in their lives would alter those lives radically. As regards the second, after noting the orderly and estimable conduct of many of them, the observer might, per contra, not unfairly surmise that they would continue to act just as they do at present were religion universally exploded. But ere such a conclusion could be legitimately drawn from the meritorious lives of non-religious men in the present order of society, we should be allowed (it is a familiar remark) to see the behavior of a whole nation of Atheists. Our contemporaries are no more fair samples of the outcome of Atheism than a little party of English youths who had lived for a few years in central Africa would be samples of negroes. It would take several thousand years to make a full-blooded Atheist out of the scion of forty genera tions of Christians. Our whole mental constitutions have been built up on food of religious ideas. A man on a mountaintop might as well resolve not to breathe

I shall now register very briefly the more obvious and tangible changes which would follow the downfall of religion in Europe and America, and then devote my available space to a rather closer examination of those which are less manifest; the drying up of those hidden rills which now irrigate the whole subsoil of our civilization.

The first visible change in the faithless world, of course, would be the suppression of public and private worship and of preaching; the secularization or destruction everywhere of cathedrals, churches, and chapels; and the extinction of the clerical profession. A considerable hiatus would undoubtedly be thus made in the present order of things. Public worship and preaching, however much weariness of the flesh has proverbially attended them, have, to say the least, done much to calm, to purify, and to elevate the minds of millions; nor does it seem that any multiplication of scientific lectures penny readings would form a substitute for them. The effacement from each landscape of the towers and spires of the churches would be a somewhat painful symbol of the simultaneous disappearance from human life of heavenly hope and aspiration. The extinction of the ministry of religion, though it would be hailed even now by many as a great reformation, would be found practically, I apprehend, to reduce by many perceptible degrees

or