twenty-four days of great rainfall every year to receive a volume of diluted sewage, which in the case of a rainfall of two inches in ar hour-about the heaviest fall on record-would be a flood such as no sewers of practicable dimensions could contain, and including so small a proportion of sewage as to be virtually innoxious.

In giving much attention to this subject I have occasionally indulged in visions of a perfectly pure river,with an embankment beset with happy anglers and never showing any but perfectly translucent ripples in repugnant protest upon the bows of grimy barges. It is not difficult to master the facts of the case, and the public can judge fairly how far it is possible to approach this ideal in that which we all desire to make a model city. For myself, I have abandoned those ideas, and am convinced that, in regard to the pollution of the river, all evidences of population cannot be entirely suppressed. I believe that working upon the valuable lines of the engineers' report we shall, by the end of 1894, the term of the second Council and the knell of the six years' aldermen-of whom I am one by the quite undeserved favour of my elected colleagues-have carried the system of London drainage to a tolerable condition.

But in that

great and most useful work the Council will be constantly surrounded by all the fast rising lights or invention, and by the progress of chemical science, considerations which forbid the assertion that this plan or that will be the ultimate form of the dealing by local authority with matters of such vital importance to the health and welfare of the population.

ARTHUR ARNOLD.

RELIGION AND PERSONAL INSIGHT,

T often happens in controversy, as well as in other things, that lookers-on see most of the game; and this is specially true of much controversy about religion. The men who make it their particular business to argue are apt to become so occupied with certain details of the question that they lose all grasp, in the end, of its essential character; and in this condition people who are not professional arguers may be better critics of them than those who are. If religion is important to us at all it is important to us not as philosophers but as human beings; and the man or woman who will describe man's common experience has a right to raise a voice and let the philosophers hear it.

To persons, then, of this class, or at all events to a number of them, nothing can seem more strange than the evident good faith in which young thinkers eager for the fray, and intellectual veterans famous in other fields, are now attempting to prove one or other of these two things either that, apart from Revelation, we can by seeking find out God in nature; or that, apart from Revelation, there is in nature no God to be found, because some of the greatest scientific minds of to-day cannot find Him either by the strongest microscope or the most profound natural philosophy. And these attempts, to the class of persons I speak of, seem more than strange; they seem mischievous-not, however, on those grounds of reverence or spiritual expediency which make some people deprecate all discussion of fundamentals, and which in many cases may be summed up in the saying that it is well to let sleeping dogs lie; but because the whole argument, as conducted on both sides, often seems to be as wide of the question at issue as it would be to discuss the conformation of the mountains in the moon in order to find a cause for agricultural distress.

Let us put the matter in this way. We all of us admit that such a thing as beauty exists; we admit, too, that flowers are beautiful. Now we may divide and sub-divide the stalk of a flower, and discover that the thing called beauty forms none of its component parts. Hence, if we follow the methods of our modern disputants, we may argue that beauty, though we admit it to be instinctively knowable, is nothing and does not exist. It is precisely in this way that men pull to pieces nature and natural law, and, finding no God there, say He does not exist. And yet the existence of God, like the existence of beauty, is discoverable by a different faculty and by widely different means.

Indirectly, and by the evidence and the teaching of others, God may be found by all men. But to find Him directly, so as to reveal or bear witness of Him to others, is given to the few only. God, in fact, is to be found in this sense, just as beauty and music are to be found, only by the temperament that responds to the secret voices not heard by all men. The musical and the artistic temperament, we are told by school-inspectors and others, are hardly to be found amongst more than three children in each hundred. The temperament that gives rise to natural religion is probably just as rare. This is the temperament that was described by Wordsworth, when he said:

The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her, and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place,

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And Beauty born of murmuring sound.
Shall pass into her face.

This temperament-let us call it what we will-imaginative, creative or inspired. It is enough here to describe it as the temperament which, wherever it may be born, however it may be educated, will yet have the finer ear to discern the still small voice, as in widely different circumstances did Socrates and Elijah. By its own intuition or instinct it will perceive God in nature, and in the significance of every science. It is something which reason does not give and reason cannot take away; and in everything the man endowed with it will be on the side of the angels.

But this temperament is not given to all. There are others, just as much inborn or given to men, which produce results very different. There is the temperament which renders its possessor conscious of material facts only; which makes him reduce all things in Heaven and earth to atoms and germs, which allows him to believe, indeed to know, nothing which he cannot weigh or measure; and whilst "all creation cannot pierce beyond the bottom of his eye," makes him cling to sight as the final test of truth. A man like this is as if he were born deaf, and, having no perception of music, should prove conclusively by his reason that the music of the spheres was a delusion, and should dismiss as too foolish for argument those whom he could not convince because they were not so deaf as he was.

Again, there are the temperaments, which are now, I suppose, called Agnostic, whose possessors almost perceive, but yet cannot affirm. Some of these are people who do believe, but believe indefinitely, vaguely, and who are quite sincere when they say " they do not know," and are too honest to take upon themselves a responsibility which they feel they have not earned. They are, perhaps, secretly conscious of a faith in "they know not what, that comes they know not whence." But they do know that whatever such faith comes from, it does not come from the sources which alone they think legitimate-logic or authority. Again, there are others, also calling themselves Agnostics, to whom the idea of God does not seem an unreasonable one. On the contrary, they realise with bitter intensity that all is chaos without Him. But they see that Nature is governed by physical law, and that the rising up of the sun and its going down can be explained without need of a fresh miracle every morning. They see no logical necessity for a Divine Intelligence; and relying absolutely on their logical faculties, they are despairingly Atheists in all except the name. Depending upon analysis for proof, they seek after a sign, and find none. And yet, conscious, perhaps, of reasoning powers at least above the average, they feel, in spite of their own unhappiness, a pitying contempt for those who still hope and believe, when they themselves see ground for neither belief nor hope. They find a new kind of superiority in the profession of ignorance; having known that belief for them

selves is at best but a Penelope's web, which though it were set up every night afresh would be again unravelled by the morning.

I am mentioning merely a few well-known types. We may all of us add others. The differences between them are explicable by one fact only-the fact that they are caused by difference of individual temperament. Nor in this view is there anything that should be really shocking to even the most devout. We know that the Sciences exist, and we know that the Arts exist, and any man may be taught something of any one of them. But we do not expect every man to be his own Newton, and to rediscover for himself the laws of gravity; or to be his own Titian or his own Beethoven, and rediscover for himself the laws of Beauty. Why, then, need we expect men in general to rediscover God by any conscious process of their individual intellects? And yet this is what our modern controversialists seem to expect us to do; or eise, if we fail to do it, to admit that there is no God to discover.

Experience, which is stronger than all controversy, shows us that these men are wrong. It shows us that we do not reach God by arguing, any more than we reach Beauty. Men reach both by perception, by a peculiar insight, by being in the literal sense seers. It is not everyone who has this perception-who is a seer, but those who are seers may be the guides of those who are not. The few have the vision; the many must see through the eyes of the few. They do not see the glory of God itself, but they may see it on the faces of the prophets, when they come down from the mountain.

It is, however, of the few that we are now talking. The religion of these men, however much they reason about it and endeavour by reason to vindicate it in the face of their opponents, does not depend on the reason which they thus employ. It depends on their own gift of insight. All men reason alike, but all men do not see alike; and the difference between the believers and the unbelievers is, that they are not in possession of a common subject. The mind's eye of each has a different range of vision, just as the bodily eyes may be of different colours. The feud is a feud not of wits but of temperaments. The modern relaxation of the penalties once attached to vagaries of religious conviction shows all unconsciously the growing appreciation of this fact. We are