so simple a matter to frame religions stuffed with perplexities, the reasoner must instantly go about to show that after all Nature is not perplexing, and neither is Christianity. There is "not too much difficulty, but just difficulty enough" in Christianity; whereas in other religions the quantity of difficulty is either too small or too large. Christianity alone is so carefully flavored with difficulties that they end by being proofs that the "Author of Nature" measured them out on his own peculiar principles. To this queer proposition the answer of reason to-day, if any answer be necessary, is very simple. It is that the "difficulties" of Nature are difficulties in an absolutely different sense from that which holds of those of the Christian sacred books. To the eye of the true student, the difficulties of Nature are solely those of tracing causation beyond a certain point. Apart from that, Nature sets up no perplexity, its laws being found, where known, to be absolutely uniform. Of course, if the onlooker chooses to impute moral (that is, human) purpose and a Personal (that is, human) Ruler to Nature, he lands himself at once in difficulties without end; but the rational onlooker to-day is not going to make an absurd assumption in order to give Christians an excuse for affirming further absurdities. He takes Nature as he finds it, and seeks for its laws; and he does the same thing with Christianity. And it cannot be too plainly declared that for the rational student to-day Christianity has no special difficulties whatever. That is to say, he sees in it a perfectly intelligible process of hierological growth, on the bases of previous creeds. There is no "difficulty" for him in a preposterous doctrine or an incredible story: he knows historically and psychologically how stories to him incredible could come to be told and believed; and how preposterous doctrines could come to be formed and accepted in a given culture-stage, and thrust by the spirit of tradition and priestism on later ages. He understands Christian history, as revised, in the light of the history of other religions. There is still some "difficulty" in settling the nature of the authorship of certain portions of the documents, by reason of the peculiar untruthfulness of the primitive religious tem

perament; but that is merely a difficulty of scholarship, not a moral perplexity. So the whole problem and the whole apparatus of the "Analogy" are thus, for the instructed modern intelligence, entirely irrelevant. The very principle of common-sense "probability" to which it appealed, and to which Mr. Gladstone appeals in a redundantly nugatory essay, is now seen to dismiss the whole discussion to the limbo of delusions.

As for Mr. Gladstone's strenuous effort to revivify it, he incidentally gives us the formula which, howbeit theological in savour, serves scientifically to classify him. It is not imperfection of intelligence, he tells us, that causes difficulty about religious matters, but Corruption of the Will. It is exactly so. His "Will", his prejudice, his rooted habit of sentiment, overrules and perverts all his thinking; and leaves him once more revealed for us as an energetic personality bent on proving that what he has always believed must be true, let reason and history say what they will. In Butler's day that argument was turned, perhaps sometimes with justice, against the fashionable Freethinking. In the corrupt and frivolous society which followed on the Restoration, there may very well have been a number of men who wanted to believe Christianity untrue in order that they might have clear consciences in practising the forms of immorality which other men, believing Christianity true, habitually practised without misgiving, having the doctrine of final forgiveness to sustain them. Among the former class, and perhaps even among the latter, Butler might make converts, as much by his terse and weighted style as by his reasoning. His style, though often awkward, is indeed signally impressive, having that air of being solidly freighted with sagacity and conviction, which in other matters gave such impetus to the teaching of Hobbes. Hobbes is of course by far the greater writer, as he is by far the greater thinker; but Butler is of his literary school, being indeed almost the only religious writer who recalls him.

For us to-day, however, the moral spell is gone. We can see with perfect clearness that for the devout Berkeley and the austere Butler, as for Mr. Gladstone, the motive to belief is as completely outside of logic and

veracity as the motive of the rakish young aristocrats who followed Bolingbroke. All alike begin in carnal inclination. Berkeley does not disguise the fact that he clings passionately to his evangelicalism as to a thing delicious and beloved; and he hotly appeals to the men of science to accept the arbitrary assumptions of the faith as they make arbitrary assumptions in mathematics -thus arguing on the same strategic line as Butler; who in his turn clung to the creed, in his more sombre way, not so much for any neurotic joy it gave him as for its apparent social and economic convenience, public and private. Only in general moral bias had he any real moral superiority over any of the light wits against whom he schemed: from the spirit of truth and the dry light of reason he was practically as far as they. When you foreordain your conclusions, it really makes no difference in the fact of your moral and logical perversity whether you do it because you love Jesus Christ or because you love Mary Magdalene. And it is easy to see how the stronger readers, men as moral as Butler in general, and much more so on the particular point of argumentation, found his book to be what it really is for such minds-a lead to Atheism.

Mr. Gladstone will not allow that it could ever be this, save in a transient and exceptional way.' But I have heard Christian advocates as strenuous as he admit in discussion the historical fact that the "Analogy" had a nearly equal influence for deeper doubt and for reasoning credence. Mr. Gladstone's denials on these points, in fact, as on others, are but fresh illustrations of his maxim about the corruption of the Will: he will never admit what he does not like to think true if there be any possibility of talking round it. Hence the "Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler ".

MACROBIUS.

1In dealing with the statement that it had such an influence on James Mill, Mr. Gladstone entirely confuses the testimony in J. S. Mill's Autobiography. The confusion lies on the face of his text.

2 Mr. Gladstone seems to know of no hostile criticism of Butler before those of Dr. Martineau and Miss Hennell. But Hazlitt had strongly impeached the Analogy" long before, while giving high praise to the Sermons-which to some extent they really deserve.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT.

WHEN reading the brief memorials of Guy de Maupassant, which were published in English journals within a few hours of the novelist's death, I was not surprised at finding more censure for his frank treatment of what he himself termed "the illusion of sex" than just praise for his genius. In a few instances the writers alluded to "M. de Maupassant's undoubted talent", or to his "fine style"; but the notices seemed to show plainly that the author of Pierre et Jean has not a large number of readers on this side of the Channel. Now, it is a doubtful point whether average English people will ever read Guy de Maupassant's studies, for the obvious reason that the system of the locked bookcase will be applied to such unmutilated translations as may be issued in the future. Moreover, apart from the obstacle of the proscribed subject, the phrases and incidents are transcribed with such dispassion and impersonality of method that the ordinary readers of fiction in England are either vaguely worried by the artist's absolute refusal to appraise his characters, or made to positively writhe with anger against a man who tells all he knows about their hidden vices and secret desires, and deliberately photographs the viscera and very bones of humanity with unerring faithfulness, and apparently without compunction for his victims. No, an author who spies and peeps round the dimity, who discloses the existence of "sly settees" in respectable middle class homes, who shatters with a bomb one's preconceptions and pleasant hallucinations, and who doesn't lash himself into white wrath about the wickedness of the world, nor sentimentalise concerning its goodness, is scarcely one to be called "popular" in this, and perhaps any other nation. And there is yet another probable reason why Guy de Maupassant has not a wider repute in England. His masterpieces are in the episodic, concentrated form, and publishers and booksellers, who ought to know, tell us that volumes of collected short ( 157 )

stories are not in much demand in this country. "Good plain food, and plenty of it," say John Bull and his family. "None of your spicy little foreign kickshaws for our palates!"

In France, and in England also, though here only from "advanced readers", Guy de Maupassant has won an immense success of esteem for his incomparable dramatic manner of narration and unique delicacy of style. With the exception of his master, Gustave Flaubert, no French writer of short tales has attained the consummate skill of Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev is probably the only other European novelist whom a consensus of critical judgment would compare with Flaubert and De Maupassant as a master of the art of the short story. Tolstoi has given his opinion that his French contemporary was a great writer, a pronouncement that will be more generally accepted in the future; for Guy de Maupassant's novels will assuredly live.

It is seven years ago since I began to read Guy de Maupassant. I well remember the mingled horror, fascination, and wonder inspired by La Petite Roque, the first tale in the volume of the series that came into my hands. I read on, story after story, mostly grim and generally sordid, but written with a strong, enticing flow of words in the very perfection of phrasing. Many of the tales are "slight", as we express it in England; they relate a commonplace incident of daily life, and the reader who merely reads fiction to be amused, or as a kill-time, shrugs his shoulders, and mutters: "What good?" Nevertheless, to a more discriminative reader there is philosophic meat and drink in these finished little sketches of small shopkeepers and peasants. Whether we like or dislike the company into which we are introduced, we are never bored by a sense of flagrant unreality in the characters. No doubt if anyone had complained to the novelist, "How very unlovable are the majority of these people", he would have probably replied, "Perhaps so. I do not 'create' characters for you to gush about as ideal human beings. That is not my business as an artist. I portray men and women as I find them in the flesh, and because you do not meet those folk does not prove that the types