think that I have tried to unsettle no man's faith, to corrupt no man's principles, and that I have written nothing which on my deathbed I should wish blotted out."

But it must not be supposed that the public are altogether innocent of the frequent abuse of literature by novelists. Did readers refuse to open the book that was not fit to pass the censorship of a moralist, writers would have little inducement to abuse their art. Yet how many reasons have not readers to maintain the purity of fiction. It is this class of literature which is widest spread and most perused, and as such is one of the most powerful formatives of society. Both young and old are readers of fiction: no age, no position, is so reduced or so elevated as not to owe its highest pleasures to the sentiments of the heart and the conceptions of the mind, nor is there any character which is impervious to the influence of novels.

Speaking of the moral power of a single book, Benjamin Franklin has said: "When I was a boy, I met with this book.* . . . It gave me such a turn of thinking as to have an influence on my conduct through life; for I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good than any other kind of reputation; and if I have been a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book." Franklin has but expressed what with still greater truth applies to the influence of novels on novel-readers.

C. C. LONGRIDGE.

ART. II. THE PROGRESS OF NIHILISM.

VARI

ARIOUS observers, not given as a rule to admiring the works and ways of the Catholic Church, have begun to wonder why the French Republic persecutes it with such deadly and increasing violence. A notable answer has been suggested in the columns of the Spectator. It is there said that this new fanaticism springs from a new religion; that Republicans look on the Church as thwarting their religious even more than their political propaganda, and hinc illa lacrymæ; that is why Christianity, as represented in the universal and living system which has its centre at Rome, must be destroyed root and branch. A new religion, not a sect of the old, which might arise to-day only to come to an end

Essays to do Good."

to-morrow; a religion as dogmatic, peremptory, exclusive in its claims, as full of promises and threatenings as Christianity itself, and much more level to the capacity of the multitude which both address. If, on the negative or protesting side, we term the French Republican system Atheism, we shall go not a step beyond its adherents, whose boast it long has been that in their discerning eyes every belief which transcends the earthly and the visible is superstition. To what lengths their impatient zeal has carried them against all that is worshipped or called God the public journals bear witness; nor is it a part of my undertaking just now to dwell on it. For I would rather call attention to the human, ethical, and social aspect of that most portentous movement of our time, which would effect little and last but a moment, did it not substitute its own beatitudes for those of the Sermon on the Mount. Denying God, it affirms the rights of man; it aims at a present heaven; and its official name is the Religion of Humanity. It cannot rest within the borders of France. It has spread East and West, creating Socialism beyond the Rhine and the Alps, and in Russia making of the young, the enthusiastic, the better educated, that forlorn hope of this new crusade which fought under the banner of Nihilism, and hurled the lightning upon its adversaries till itself also was utterly consumed. What else has it wrought? It has broken down the party walls between nation and nation, outstripped the wings of culture, discovered or made its own the most formidable agencies of science, swept away local associations, traditions, and rivalries, absorbed or compelled to serve its designs the older societies, such as Freemasonry, which arose in the Deistic stage of the movement, and, as a token of all this, has ranged side by side on the Paris barricades in 1871 men of every nation under heaven. Its disciples are Poles and Italians, Germans and Russians and Irishmen, whose sole bond, they tell us, is that all alike have been trodden under foot by the mighty world-rulers. And it is found everywhere.

Here, then, are signs of a false religion coming to the birth, surrounded and followed by its diabolic martyrs, confessors, workers of lying marvels and prodigies, to whom no enterprise seems impossible, and the round world is a field for their sowing and reaping. Of what kind the harvest shall be, whether of life or death, is indeed the question. But they do not falter. A type of them is that insignificant mortal (his name history has already forgotten) who, when his comrade cast the horrible fire between the feet of Alexander II. of Russia, stepped forward, and, to make all sure, flung a second phial, which as it burst shattered the Emperor and killed himself. A belief that kindles such enthusiasm

Atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum

Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari

may well be deemed the instrument of boundless good or ill, according to its nature. This creed, which I propose to consider in its origin and prospects, is not good but evil; a doctrine of anarchy, and a spectre menacing civilization with a bloody hand. But it fascinates men and women alike. The revolutionary frenzy has its Mænads, its Furies, its loathsome Harpies, unfeminine bearers of the dagger and flaming torch, to whom murder, fire, and rapine appear the natural means of inaugurating a golden era. Protestantism, as we know it, is a weak reminiscence of the faith from which it revolted, a negation for the most part, or, in the words of Dr. Fairbairn, a method rather than a religion. But anarchy is positive, rests on its own foundation, and appeals to facts. We may grasp the meaning of it, if we lay to heart such words as the following, written by Thomas Carlyle, forty-three years ago, of England, but now too sadly applicable to most European countries:

With

The condition of England [he says] is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows, waving with yellow harvests, thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, the willingest our earth ever had; these men are here; the work they have done, the fruit they have realized, is here; abundant, exuberant on every hand of us and behold, some baleful fiat as of enchantment, has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit."*

Carlyle compares our civilization to Midas, whose touch, turning all things to gold, left the too covetous rich man to die of hunger. For he could not eat gold. As I think of another characteristic of our age-of the blatant rhetoric which finds acceptance with so many-I am tempted to say that it resembles Midas, not only in his power of creating the precious metal, but in the pair of asses' ears with which mythology has garnished him. As much talk as gold, and little wisdom with either. Franchise, free trade, compulsory education, whatever be the worth of these things, it remains true that, in a world teeming with resources, endlessly fruitful, with a blue sky over it, and the

*"Past and Present," introduction.

great ocean ways bringing wealth to every land, the multitudes must not only work, but too often must work and starve. Or say merely-for my argument requires no more-that the relations between work and wealth on one side, and work and want on the other, appear at first blush to many in the highest degree anomalous and unjust. It is this feeling which has called up from the deep the red spectre of Nihilism.

Political economists talk, in their easy way, of the accumulation and distribution of wealth, assigning its laws to each. But they are not alive as yet to the great fundamental difficulty of their science, or rather of human society, which they disguise and turn to an abstraction by their terms of art. Here is the problem. One set of men accumulate wealth by their hard labour, and another, much smaller set, distribute it more or less according to their good pleasure. The new religion-call it anti-religion if you please begins by asking, "Why should I toil that thou mayest eat? Is it not fairer that both thou and I toil, and then we may both eat the fruit of our labours? "Paucis vivit humanum genus," it has been said, either as a cynical piece of philosophy or the statement of an undeniable fact. Whichever way we take it, I cannot think that reason will approve. Each man should live for himself and for his fellows; and no man simply for another who happens to have chained him up in a mill and bidden him grind. Liberty! That is the first word of the Revolution: the right to live for oneself. We may ask how far we, as Christian men, can allow such a right, how it is to be distinguished from selfishness. But at present what we shall do wisely to observe is the striving in every land for a liberty which shall go beyond the too often ridiculous power of voting at a Parliamentary election. Men having tasted of that so-called franchise, begin to ask, as the philosopher does of a new system when he comes upon it, "In what can you help me?" Nor will the satisfaction of reading your member's speeches in St. Stephen's make up for an empty cupboard, want of work, a cold hearthstone in winter, and tools in pawn to furnish the children with a morsel of bread. Dives has long gone clad in purple and fine linen, while Lazarus lies, full of sores, at his gate. True; but Lazarus during many, many ages could only lie at the gate: he was helpless, ignorant, isolated. A mighty change has come over the world. There is a social organism forming in the depths, with its own laws, instincts, powers, and sentiments. We may, if we will, see these new barbarians-for so they have been called-rising up towards the light, armed and confederated, aware that they have been nothing, and convinced that when they choose they can be everything. It is a part of their creed that the aristocracy overturned the

throne, the middle classes the aristocracy, and that fate has chosen them to overturn the middle classes. They believe in reading and writing, in science, in a social philosophy of which the outlines, to their thinking, may be clearly sketched; and they do not believe in religion, art, culture, refinement, manners, marriage, political forms, inequality of birth, poetry, or anything whatsoever of the ideal order. The things they do not understand they despise. Long acquaintance with misery in its acutest forms has made them impatient of the delicate observances with which we veil over our common infirmities; and they are gross, cynical, violent, and unclean. It is their delight to know only so much of history as will warrant them in pulling down the Tuileries and turning its site into a potato garden. The chivalries and courtesies of medieval usage are to them more than suspect; they irritate and madden like beauty when it disdains an illfavoured suitor. The French proverb says, "Les absents ont toujours tort." Revolutionists say, "Les riches ont toujours tort." They quarrel as vehemently with capital in the stocks as with property in land; both are in their moral teaching, robbery, sins against mankind such as shall never be forgiven. They look down upon a soldier as the vile creature who forgets that he is a man, and suffers himself to be made a machine and a weapon in the hands of injustice. And a priest is to them only a baser species of soldier, wanting in the courage to face artillery, but seduced by the prospect of an easy life to become the defender on the altar-steps of institutions which perpetuate slavery. The Pontiff and the King-whoever cares to know what the new religion has to say of them, how it compares and how it condemns both, let him read a book which prophesied half a century ago of what has since become an international propaganda throughout Europe-let him read, "Les Paroles d'un Croyant," by the unhappy Abbé de Lamennais.

For these men are not only the new barbarians; they are the new Mahometans, warring against established religions as being a part of the doomed régime. A logic as clear as it is pitiless compels them to recognize in the preachers of any and every supernatural doctrine their resolved opponents. Priests, they say, offer the people Heaven as a bribe to be quiet and submissive; the churches take this world to themselves and leave the next to any one who can get thither. It is no part of the revolutionary tactics to treat hoar antiquity with reverence, to distinguish between the teaching of Christianity and its corruptions, to be just, or discriminating, or generous in assailing social order. The very name Nihilism, which truly expresses the genius of the whole movement, is a fiery sign, threatening to burn up good and bad alike. Its power is intensified by the melancholy which