the civilisation of the earth is the history of the civilisation of Olympus.'

The second and third questions of the essay are both answered by Mr. Mill affirmatively. Religion is of value to the individual, improving and satisfying man's nature, apart from its influence on society as a whole. And, secondly, these benefits of religion may be attained without travelling beyond the boundaries of human existence. The general conclusion of the second essay is that the sense of unity with mankind, and a deep feeling for the general good, may be cultivated into a sentiment and a principle which would fulfil the functions of religion better than any form whatever of supernaturalism. It is not only entitled to be called a religion; it is a better religion than any of those which are ordinarily called by that title' (p. 110). The reasons given for the latter proposition are, first, that such a sentiment would be disinterested, whereas supernatural religion is bound up with interested fears and hopes. Second, that it involves no torpidity nor twist in either intellectual or moral faculties, such as is inseparable from the acceptance of any known form of supernatural religion.

A serious drawback to the value of this otherwise most weighty essay is that we are unable to find in it a true or even a consistent account of what Religion is. Mr. Mill considers religion to be the expression of the same cravings as those which inspire Poetry: the cravings for 'ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realised in the prose of human life.' The distinction between poetry and religion is that religion is the product of a yearning to know whether these imaginative conceptions have realities answering to them in some other world than ours.' Now I find myself unable to derive from the pages in which these remarks occur, taken in

conjunction with the remainder of the essay, a clear and firm idea of what the writer took to be the essence of religion. Here, as we have seen, he apparently mentions it as an essential and permanent element in religion as distinct from poetry, that it is concerned with actual or supposed realities in some other world than ours.' This qualification is obviously of vital moment. Yet at p. 109 it disappears, and we are only told that 'the essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognised as of the highest excellence, and rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of desire.' But is this ideal object to be looked for in other worlds than ours? It would seem not, because the very gist of all this part of the essay is that 'the idealisation of our earthly life is capable of supplying a poetry, and, in the best sense of the word, a religion, equally fitted to exalt the feelings, and still better calculated to ennoble the conduct, than any belief respecting the unseen powers.' To this we utter a fervent Amen; but then what has become of that definition of religion which marked its scope in some other world than ours'? Another striking passage in the same way places the region of the religious imagination in the land of the unseen and unknowable:

Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea, which at once awes our feelings and stimulates our imagination by its vastness and its obscurity. To add to the mystery, the domain of our earthly existence is not only an island in infinite space, but also in infinite time. The past and the future are alike shrouded from us: we neither know the origin of anything which is, nor its final destination. If we feel deeply interested in knowing that there are myriads of worlds at an immeasurable, and to our faculties inconceivable, distance from us in space; if we are eager

to discover what little we can about these worlds, and when we cannot know what they are, can never satiate ourselves with specu lating on what they may be; is it not a matter of far deeper interest to us to learn, or even to conjecture, from whence came this nearer world which we inhabit; what cause or agency made it what it is, and on what powers depend its future fate? Who would not desire this more ardently than any other conceivable knowledge, so long as there appeared the slightest hope of attaining it? What would not one give for any credible tidings from that mysterious region, any glimpse into it, which might enable us to see the smallest light through its darkness, especially any theory of it which we could believe, and which represented it as tenanted by a benignant and not a hostile influence? But since we are able to penetrate into that region with the imagination only, assisted by specious but inconclusive analogies derived from human agency and design, imagination is free to fill up the vacancy with the imagery most congenial to itself; sublime and elevating if it be a lofty imagination, low and mean if it be a grovelling one' (pp. 102, 103).

In view of such a conception as this, whether right or not, the Religion of Duty lacks a vital mark of religion, and cannot be regarded as more than a highly poetised morality.

Whatever the explanation may be, it is surely in the worst degree inconvenient and confusing to pass from one sense of the word to another, and silently to relegate what was first declared to be of the essence, to the region of the separable accident. To speak a little more at large-is it clear that we can extract from the sentences of Mr. Mill such a comprehensive and penetrating notion of religion as shall at once take in these two states of mind-one of them yearning after knowledge of some other world than ours, the other satisfied with some ideal object, of which we only may ask that it shall be of the highest excellence and paramount over all selfish objects of desire?

In what he says of the essence of religion being the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an object of that kind, is he not being drawn by that passion of his for seizing above all else the ethical aspects of things human or divine, into leaving out those vital elements of religion which are not and never can be reducible to ethical expression? In the Autobiography (p. 46) he declares the principal worth of all religions whatever to be constituted by their possession of an ideal conception of a Perfect Being, to which men habitually refer as the guide of their conscience.' Undoubtedly this is the principal worth of religion, from the point of view of the moralist, that it should guide conscience, that it should direct emotions and desires towards highly excellent ends, that it should tend to subordinate egoism to altruism. Religion, like everything else, may be moral or immoral. But morality is not of the essence of religion; is not its vital or constitutive element; does not give us the secret of its deep attachments in the human heart. Religion is not in any way the outcome of the moral part of us; it is at its root wholly unconnected with principles of conduct; it has its rise in a sphere of feeling as absolutely independent of all our moral relations, as a poem like Shelley's Skylark is independent of them, or a piece of ineffable heart-searching melody by Beethoven or Handel. Why is it that in reading the religious compositions of the eighteenth century, always excepting certain pages of Rousseau, we all feel that the breath of religious sentiment has never passed over them? In all these books the morality of religion seems to quench that spirituality which is its true essence. The characteristic deliverances of the religious emotions are not to be described in terms of ethics. Take the Imitatio, and read that in the light of a guide to conscience, or a direction to an object of the

highest excellence, or an exaltation of altruism over egoism. Is not to do this to lose the whole soul of those divine musings, that ethereal meditation, those soft-glowing ecstasies, that passion of contemplation by the inmost eye? To put the matter shortly, what are we to say is the note of Holiness as something beyond and apart from Virtue ?

Before leaving the second essay, I should like to make some observations on a rather remarkable parenthesis which it contains. After expanding the proposition that there never can be any conflict between truth and utility, Mr. Mill proceeds to assert a very important qualification of this proposition.

'It is not enough,' he says, 'to aver, in general terms, that there never can be any conflict between truth and utility; that if religion be false, nothing but good can be the consequence of rejecting it. For, though the knowledge of every positive truth is a useful acquisition, this doctrine cannot without reservation be applied to negative truth. When the only truth ascertainable is that nothing can be known, we do not, by this knowledge, gain any new fact by which to guide ourselves; we are, at best, only disabused of our trust in some former guide-mark, which, though itself fallacious, may have pointed in the same direction with the best indications we have, and if it happens to be more conspicuous and legible, may have kept us right when they might have been overlooked' (p. 73).

The distinction between positive and negative truths, although a real and important one, is surely here pressed too hard. If it be true that nothing can be known in a given direction in which men have been accustomed both to search for knowledge, and to persuade themselves that they have found it, then to ascertain that is a new fact by which to guide ourselves. To become 'disabused of our trust in some former guide-mark' is the first condition of curiosity and energy in