gods, are extinct. Priests are not a caste, as they are under spiritualism, springing from the head of Brahma and claiming superior sanctity and power as their birth-right, but simple police officers. Religion is merely a function of the state. Socrates dies because he breaks the laws of Athensnot, as Jesus did-for blaspheming the gods. Numa introduces or organizes polytheism at Rome for the purpose of governing the people by means of appeals to their sentiment of the holy; and the Roman pontifex maximus was never any thing more than a master of police.

This in its generality is equally a description of Protestantism, as might indeed have been asserted beforehand." The epoch of the revival of classical literature must have been predisposed to materialism or else it could not have been pleased with the classics, and the influence of the classics must have been to increase that predisposition, and as Protestantism was a result of both, it could be nothing but materialism.

In classical antiquity religion is a function of the state. It is the same under Protestantism. Henry VIII. of England declares himself supreme head of the church, not by virtue of his spiritual character, but by virtue of his character as a temporal prince. The Protestant princes of Germany are protectors of the church; and all over Europe, there is an implied contract between the state and the ecclesiastical authorities. The state pledges itself to support the church on condition that the church support the state. Ask the kings, nobility, or even church dignitaries, why they support religion, and they will answer with one voice, "Because the people cannot be preserved in order, cannot. be made to submit to their rulers, and because civil society cannot exist without it." The same or a similar answer will be returned by almost every political man in this country; and truly may it be said that religion is valued by the Protestant world as a subsidiary to the state, as a mere matter of police.

Under the reign of spiritualism all questions are decided by authority. The church prohibited reasoning. It commanded, and men were to obey or be counted rebels against God. Materialism, by raising up man and the state, makes the reason of man, or the reason of the state, paramount to the commands of the church. Under Protestantism, the state in most cases, the individual reason in a few, imposes the creed upon the church. The king and parliament in

England determine the faith which the clergy must profess and maintain; the Protestant princes in Germany have the supreme control of the symbols of the church, the right to enact what creed they please.

Indeed the authority of the church in matters of belief was regarded by the reformers as one of the greatest evils, against which they had to contend. It was particularly against this authority that Luther protested. What he and his coadjutors demanded, was the right to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. This was the right they wrested from the church. To have been consequent they should have retained it in their hands as individuals; it would then have been the right of private judgment and, if it meant any thing, the right of reason to sit in judgment on all propositions to be believed. To this extent, however, they were not prepared to go. Between the absolute authority of the church, and the absolute authority of the individual reason, intervened the authority of the state. But as the state was material, the substitution of its authority for the authority of the church was still to substitute the material for the spiritual.

But the tendency, however arrested by the state, has been steadily toward the most unlimited freedom of thought and conscience. Our fathers rebelled against the authority of the state in religious matters as well as against the authority of the pope. In political and industrial speculations, the English and Americans give the fullest freedom to the individual reason; Germany has done it to the greatest extent in historical, literary and philosophical, and to a very great extent, in theological matters, and France does it in every thing. All modern philosophy is built on the absolute freedom and independence of the individual reason; that is, the reason of humanity, in opposition to the reason of the church or the state. Descartes refused to believe in his own existence but upon the authority of his reason; Bacon allows no authority but observation and induction; Berkeley finds no ground for admitting an external world, and therefore denies it; and Hume finding no certain evidence of any thing outward or inward, doubted—philosophically-of all things.

Philosophy is a human creation; it is the product of man, as the universe is of God. Under spiritualism, then, which in theory-demolishes man, there can be no philosophy; yet as man, though denied, exists, there is a

philosophical tendency. But this philosophical tendency is always either to scepticism, mysticism, or idealism. Scepticism, that philosophy which denies all certainty, made its first appearance in modern times in the church. The church declared reason unworthy of confidence, and in doing that gave birth to the whole sceptical philosophy. When the authority of the church was questioned and she was compelled to defend it, she did it on the ground that reason could not be trusted as a criterion of truth, and that there could be no certainty for man, if he did not admit an authority independent of his reason,—not perceiving that if reason were struck with impotence there would be no means of substantiating the legitimacy of the authority.

On the other hand, the church having its point of view in spirit, consulted the soul before the body, became introspective, fixed on the inward to the exclusion of the outward. It overlooked the outward; and when that is overlooked it is hardly possible that it should not be denied. Hence idealism or mysticism.

Under the reign of materialism all this is changed. There is full confidence in reason. The method of philosophizing is the experimental. But as the point of view is the outward-matter-spirit is overlooked; matter alone admitted. Hence philosophical materialism. And philosophical materialism, in germ or developed, has been commensurate with Protestantism. When the mind becomes fixed on the external world, inasmuch as we become acquainted with that world only by means of our senses, we naturally conclude that our senses are our only source of knowledge. Hence sensism, the philosophy supported by Locke, Condillac, and even by Bacon, so far as it concerns his own application of his method. And from the hypothesis that our senses are our only inlets of knowledge, we are compelled to admit that nothing can be known which is not cognizable by some one or all of them. Our senses take cognizance only of matter; then we can know nothing but matter. We can know nothing of the spirit or soul. The body is all that we know of man. That dies, and there ends man-at least all we know of him. Hence no immortality, no future state. If nothing can be known but by means of our senses, God, then, inasmuch as we do not see him, hear him, taste him, smell him, touch him, cannot be known; then he does not exist for us. Hence

atheism. Hence modern infidelity, in all its forms, so prevalent in the last century, and so far from being extinct even in this.

The same tendency to exalt the terms depressed by the church is to be observed in the religious aspect of Protestantism. Properly speaking, Protestantism has no religious character. As Protestants, people are not religious, but co-existing with their Protestantism, they may indeed retain something of religion. Men often act from mixed motives. They bear in their bosoms sometimes two antagonist principles, now obeying the one, and now the other, without being aware that both are not one and the same principle. With Protestants, religion has existed; but as a reminis cence, a tradition. Sometimes, indeed, the remembrance has been very lively, and seemed very much like reality. The old soldier warms up with the recollections of his early feats, and lives over his life as he relates its events to his grandchild,

"" 'Shoulders his crutch and shows how fields are won."

If the religion of the Protestant world be a reminiscence, it must be the religion of the church. It is, in fact, only Catholicism continued. The same principle lies at the bottom of all Protestant churches, in so far as they are churches, which was at the bottom of the church of the middle ages. But materialism modifies their rites and dogmas. In the practice of all, there is an effort to make them appear reasonable. Hence commentaries, expositions, and defences without number. Even where the authority of reason is denied, there is an instinctive sense of its authority and a desire to enlist it. In mere forms, pomp and splendor have gradually disappeared, and dry utility and even baldness have been consulted. In doctrines, those which exalt man and give him some share in the work of salvation have gained in credit and influence. Pelagianism, under some thin disguises or undisguised, has become almost universal. The doctrine of man's inherent total depravity, in the few cases in which it is asserted, is asserted more as a matter of duty than of conviction. Nobody, who can help it, preaches the old-fashioned doctrine of God's sovereignty, expressed in the dogma of unconditional election and reprobation. The vicarious Atonement has hardly a friend left. The Deity of Jesus is questioned, his simple humanity is asserted and is gaining credence. Orthodox is a term which implies as much

reproach as commendation; people are beginning to laugh at the claims of councils and synods, and to be quite merry at the idea of excommunication.

In literature and art there is the same tendency. Poetry in the last century hardly existed, and was, so far as it did exist, mainly ethical or descriptive. It had no revelations of the Infinite. Prose writers under Protestantisin have been historians, critics, essayists, or controversalists; they have aimed almost exclusively at the elevation or adornment of the material order, and in scarcely an instance has a widely popular writer exalted God at the expense of man, the church at the expense of the state, faith at the expense of reason, or eternity at the expense of time. Art is finite, and gives us busts and portraits, or copies of Greek and Roman models. The physical sciences take precedence of the metaphysical, and faith in rail-roads and steam-boats is much stronger than in ideas.

In governments, the tendency is the same. Nothing is more characteristic of Protestantism, than its influence in promoting civil and political liberty. Under its reign all forms of governments verge towards the democratic. The king and the church" are exchanged for the "constitution and the people." Liberty, not order, is the word that wakes the dead, and electrifies the masses. A social science is created, and the physical well-being of the humblest laborer is cared for, and made a subject of deliberation in the councils of nations.

Industry has received in Protestant countries its grandest developments. Since the time of Luther, it has been performing one continued series of miracles. Every corner of the globe is explored; the most distant and perilous seas are navigated; the most miserly soil is laid under contribution; manufactures, villages and cities spring up and increase as by enchantment; canals and rail-roads are crossing the country in every direction; the means of production, the comforts, conveniences, and luxuries of life are multiplied to an extent hardly safe to relate.

Such, in its most general aspect, in its dominant tendency, is Protestantism. It is a new and much improved. edition of the classics. Its civilization belongs to the same order as that of Greece and Rome. It is in advance, greatly in advance, of Greece and Rome, but it is the same in its ground-work. The material predominates over the spiritual. Men labor six days for this world and at most but one for