We know that Duration tells the whole difference between lampblack and diamond, gun-flint and opal. The tower which would rise high must begin deep down. Our question is only one of classification, and asks, Which is higher, which lower?

Ishmael is not so easy to answer as he seems to be. He claims that there is some merit in believing where belief is hard, none where it is easy. Jesus said, "If ye love them that love you, what reward have ye?" If you accept only the doctrines which suit you, if you adopt the burthens which are easy to the shoulders, do not even the publicans the same? So Ishmael labels his own belief, Credo quia impossibile, and Isaac's, Salvation made easy.*

Now, when we come to examine this satire of the religion which binds upon that which makes free, we find in it a radical error. We do not question that religion is a good thing; we do not doubt that, humanly speaking, it is a more meritorious thing to fulfil a disagreeable duty than an agreeable one, there being no heroism where there is no difficulty. But, thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me. To bear a burthen, feeling it to be a burthen, is noble; but to bear a burthen as real, and utterly forget yourself and your suffering under it, is nobler. To be wise and strong is much, but they are not the spirit's glory: this is reserved for that Love which finds in its service such joy that the yoke is easy and the burthen light. As for that sarcasm, "Salvation made easy," it sounds almost like the curse of Caliban, which Ariel might answer with a tear welling up from the memory of his frightful servitude and imprisonment, ere Prospero led him forth to the freedom of the air. Ere a man can find his delight in the Law of the Lord, ere he can cry, "Oh, how I love thy Law," how many a hard battle must he have fought! So strong is selflove, so overbearing the will, that Christian must surmount the Hill Difficulty before he can climb the Hills of Delight. It need not be feared that the human spirit will not have encounters enough; there is no royal road to renunciation; he will know well the drill of the Law but when the time has come for religion to blossom

*These words were written on a bundle of Unitarian Tracts in Coleridge's study: "Salvation made easy; or, Every man his own Redeemer."

into love, to bind the green sheath over the bud, is to be, in Paul's phrase, too religious. Religion is not Christianity: it is the chrysolid of Christianity. Ah! what if the beautiful wings instead of coming forth to pass freely from flower to flower, should fold, and the fly say, "No, this shell in which I was born I will not break nor leave,"-lo, it is not even a caterpillar, it is a sepulchred butterfly! Even so it is when the soul clings to that which yields no thrill of ineffable bliss at every point of contact. That is but a thorny sheath of good which must look outside of itself for its joy, which must comfort sacrifice with hope, which must mitigate sufferance with contrast of a fearful alternative, and eke out a present barrenness with promise of future blessedness. Madam Guion rose higher when she wished that she had a fountain to quench Hell, and a furnace to burn up Paradise, that God might be loved in and for Himself without fear or hope.

The fatal defect of Religion, which must make it forever only the scaffolding around the forming shrine within where God shall be met, is that it excludes the idea of Love. It is an old saying, "Whoso loveth, knoweth God;" but the very nature of Religion implies obligations, bonds, demands, which Love most of all hates. Love has no tie but its own attractions; and can not be purchased at any price. The old legends say that Satan makes contracts with the Soul; but Love must be a free-gift. The heart is that Cordelia whose filial love can not come forth by threats or rewards, but, knowing its sacred laws, responds, as she to Lear,

"I can not heave

My heart into my mouth."

A Court may order that a man and wife shall live together as wedded, but it can not make them love each other; or it may give the parent a right to the service of a child, but it can not create, by any enactment, the filial heart. And thus, though the human spirit may go on, bearing its cross, doing its duty, from a sense of duty, and be thus religious, yet can it never be really satisfied thereby it will yearn for the Love which changes the cross to a prop, and touches the thorns in its crown to roses of joy. Swedenborg saw that the angels held in their hands twigs, and that whenever any one of them announced a truth, the twig which he held blossomed; if the angel uttered an error, the twig did not blossom. The test is perfect. Each truth must be one under which the heart blossoms: the spirit cowers at the foot of Sinai,

it leaps to leaf and flower on Olivet. We have no hope that any one will gain a true perception of Christianity as a development of the moral nature of man, until he sees that it is Religion bursting out into poetry and song. Religion walks, Christianity is rather the sacred dance to a divine strain; Religion talks, Christianity sings; Religion is prose, Christianity is poetry. The one finds its oracle in the Conscience, the other knows no such lash: it lives only in its Love. How well has it been named the GOSPEL ! It is God's-spell. Socrates said that the Soul could only be healed of its maladies by certain magic charms; and these were beautiful reasons lo, the spell of God, the divine fascination thrown on man, till he plight his troth to the Perfect Truth and Beauty; the Orphic strain has bound the powers of Hell; he sings at the stake; he can look down upon Paradise.

THE LECTURERS AT THE MERCANTILE ON STATISTICS.

WHEN Aristotle declared that Virtue was exact equilibrium, and that our qualities deviating from the mean produced vices only, he gave the embryo-statement of all the moral and political bearings of Statistical Science. Since then, the human mind has been feeling in this direction for the continent of knowledge needed to balance that which it had attained, until, at last, at a gaming table was invented the Theory of Probabilities. The Chevalier de Méré, a great gambler, proposed to Pascal two problems first, to find in how many throws of dice it might be expected to obtain two sixes with two dice; second, to determine the lot of two players after a certain number of throws,-that is to say, to fix the proportion in which they should divide the stake, supposing they consented to separate without finishing the game. Pascal soon solved these questions. But when the Chevalier de Méré was satisfied, his own mind was not; he began a series of curious analyses, which he communicated to Fermát, and furnished a basis for the subsequent speculations of Leibnitz, Huygens, Buffon, Condorcet, Laplace, and Fourier.

With Fourier the speculative view was carried as far as it was needed the Theory stood a Soul awaiting its body. As the Soul had been maturing in these great brains, the body had been maturing in the unconscious and official routine of Governments. It

had been the habit of the European Governments to preserve, without reference to the use which was to be made of them, the statistics of their nations and cities: the number of murders, thefts and other crimes; the number of prostitutes and houses of prostitution; of suicides, and the methods of suicide; of the insane: these were all carefully recorded. For a long time such statistics remained raw material, because the man had not come who knew how to use them. But as the old geometer cried, "Geometry is the praise of God," so did there come a statist who read off the dry rows of figures as the score of a divine music; one who should marry the Soul of Theory to the Body of Fact.

This man was M. A. Quetelet, who, under the patronage of Prince Albert and the Grand Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, has published several important works, chief of which are those entitled, Man and the Development of his Faculties, or an Essay on Social Physics, and Letters on the Theory of Probabilities as applied to the Moral and Political Sciences. The latter is a really great work, and at once began its revolution of all the Moral and Social Sciences. It was the embryo in which were folded the Positive Philosophy of Comté, and the Philosophy of Civilization taught by Buckle. Its translation into English by Olinthus Gregory Downes was the first great impulse given to the Life-Assurance Societies, which were found to rest on no accidents, but on unvarying laws.

But it may be asked, what was there in this innocent-sounding Theory of Probabilities to work such revolutions? Simply this: that in it was proved, by those proverbially stubborn things, Facts, that all the events and actions of Human Society, hitherto regarded as mere chance-work, or the result of human will, were strung on a thread of immutable Law. There were found to be relentless averages governing social deeds and misdeeds; each year and each nation bearing their crop of crimes of all descriptions, and their deaths and births, with a precision equal, in the long run, to the regularity of seasons and tides. We need only make a few extracts from M. Quetelet's various writings to give the reader a distinct impression of his meaning and the extent of its bearing.

"The word chance serves conveniently to veil our ignorance; we employ it to explain effects of whose causes we are ignorant. To one who knew how to foresee all things there would be no

chance; and the events which now appear to us most extraordinary would have their natural and necessary causes in the same manner as do the events which seem most common with us."

"In everything which concerns crime, the same numbers recur with a constancy which can not be mistaken; and this is the case even with the crimes which seem independent of human foresight-such, for instance, as murders, which are generally committed after quarrels arising from circumstances apparently casual. Nevertheless we know from experience that every year there not only take place nearly the same number of murders, but that even the instruments by which they are committed are employed in the same proportion."

We need only say here, that the statistics of all nations bore out these statements, without exception. It was shown that not only were there immutable averages governing crimes, and great social events, but that the number of marriages were predictable, and that there was a definite number of persons who forgot to prepay letters, or who misdirected them. These became universally known and admitted facts.

M. Quetelet verified his principle of the pervading presence of fixed laws, by discovering them in the very regions which symbolized chance. The games of chance were shown to be games of certainty. For instance, in throwing dice it was proved that in 5000 throws the various sides of the die had come uppermost in about equal numbers; an average was kept up: and as more and more throws were made, it was shown that at last unity itself would be reached. So a'so in the drawing of white and black balls from a bag, they came out at first in irregular proportions, ―i. e., a black ball might be drawn out six times to a white; but. Quetelet caused 4096 drawings to be made, and the mean appeared.

Had he lived in the days of Faust, he would have been inevitably burnt as one familiar with the black art; for, starting out with his principle, he made several predictions which were verified. One example will suffice. When, in 1827, the statistics of the tribunals of France and Belgium appeared, this great statist wrote as follows: "In 1826 our (Belgium) tribunals condemned 84 individuals out of 100 accused; and the French tribunals 65; the English tribunals have also condemned 65 per cent. during the last twenty years. Thus, out of 100 accused, 16 only have been acquitted with us, and 35 in France, as in England. These