these endowments might be properly laid out. They ought not to go in remission of rates, the manner in which much of them is presently spent. The money thus goes, not for the benefit of the poor, but of those whose local burdens are in that way lightened. Nor can a satisfactory plea be found for "doles." All evidence shows that this method of giving charity, whether in food, money, or clothes, does far more harm than good. It is fertile in making paupers, and arose under a condition of things quite different from the habits of modern times. It would be also difficult to find justification for the application of these funds in payment of tithes, for which, in one parish at least, strenuous efforts are being made. What is chiefly needed is that each parish should be united to some populous metropolitan district in which there are not twos and threes of poor residents, but countless swarms, and where, without pauperizing them by ill-distributed gifts, there is no lack of benevolent institutions in need of assistance. Look at the state of many of the metropolitan hospitals—the London Hospital, the Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and many others far too numerous to mention. It is only necessary to look over The Times advertisement columns to see that many of these institutions have to close their doors to those who come to seek aid from them. Even if hospitals are maintained, as it is said, for the use of doctors and medical students, there are convalescent hospitals, for which, with few exceptions, the public have done next to nothing, and the importance of which only those acquainted with sickness can adequately realize. A claim might be preferred in favour of public libraries, and, if recognized, might appease the wrath of the Philistine ratepayers, who have lately in some parts of London poured out their fury against these useful institutions. There is also the question of open spaces, and, if not of improved dwellings, of improved sites for the dwellings of the working classes, selected with the object of uniting rather than separating various classes. Again, there are homes and penitentiaries. Can any one. who walks through our great thoroughfares not feel that we are afflicted with a deep social wound? and do we ever ask whether it is not our duty to do at least something for those who have been more sinned against than sinning? There is no lack of useful objects; it only needs a concurrent effort by the trustees and the public to turn this stream into a proper channel from the divided course in which it flows at present.

Till then it is useless to expect much to be achieved, for too violent or sudden a change might arouse interests not easily appeased, and, so far from stimulating to reform, might give a fresh lease of life to already too long standing abuses. It may perhaps be asked, Why should these charities be dealt with apart from the rest of England? It is to be hoped that the approaching Commission may forestall others on kindred subjects in the country, for which there is pressing need; but it must be remembered that the position of the City is

different from that of all others. Charities beyond this sacred "island" are in a position to a great extent, by the various Endowed Schools Acts, to help themselves. In many cases they will not do so, though they contain a living community and organization which ought to do it. In the case of the City it is not so: the parochial system has collapsed in many parishes there are no inhabitants, and even with the most ample guarantee for the preservation and compensation of vested interests, it is expecting too much of human nature to suppose that the paid officials will propose to abolish themselves. In fact, the life-blood is gone and the bones only remain, and it seems absolutely necessary to furnish by discussion, inquiry, and legislation the elements necessary for a change and reform in the greatlychanged community of the City.

WALTER H. JAMES.

ON EVOLUTION AND PANTHEISM.

TH

bear on it.

HE present condition of our higher literature is like a state of civil war, in a race alike intelligent and determined. All are drawn to the main question, and nothing is really attended to which does not Every man feels that he has a deep personal stake of his own in it; and lawyers, merchants, philosophers, artists, and clergy, all have to fall in somewhere. It seems that artists, or all who pursue the ideal in any way, are forced into line much in the same way as clergy; and, indeed, that all laity who think they have souls are called on to consider whether, on the most Protestant principles, they are not priests of their own souls. For if soul is not, there is none in art, and art must stop. This is, in fact, the view of many followers of the Renaissance, as is so amusingly pointed out in "The New Republic." This age can admit no more originality and allow no style in particular. A learned generation is to adopt and adapt, to reproduce, copy, and comment. It cannot invent, its art must become scientific, or eclectic, according to authority, precedent, and the recorded rules of the periods it likes to imitate. There is no freshness or natural delight left; earth, sea, and sky have been looked at enough, and we have more patterns and copies from them already than we know how to choose. Our art is all repetition, analysis, and registration. It may or may not be pure; and if it is so, its purity is to be that of dead, clean, dry sand.

As a student of nature, then, if he will be one, the artist will have to contend for a soul to study with. He thinks his work will be the better for having spirit in it, and science will not allow him any. He remembers that clergy and strict people have often been hard upon him, but at least they allowed him a soul to be saved (or the contrary, as they sometimes hinted); and he begins to suspect that the

professor's little finger is as thick as the parson's loins. The latter wanted art to be as didactic or, perhaps, as ecclesiastical as possible; but he often thought a great deal of its professors, while he anathematized its dubious forms.

We could wish to leave off anathema, which our opponents say is empty; if they will give up blasphemy, which we say proves nothing. To persist in it is as decidedly an act of persecution as to pinch your interlocutor with hot tongs. To go on repeating sacred names in the style of Hébert and Marat for page after page of a review does undoubtedly give severe pain to any unfortunate Christian who has to read the stuff. But it is stuff to us; because we think verbal defiance of God is unmeaning; as it would be to call for a miracle in the name of Beelzebub or the Spirit of Denial. We know that miracles have ceased, and can expect no visible interference on our side, and an essayist does nothing by challenging God to stop his mouth. The courses of Nature are in God's hand, and He is no more likely to interrupt them because a man says his prayers backwards than when he says them forwards. This kind of thing was common in the first French Revolution, now in course of rehabilitation, with all its heroes, for public and private emulation. At that time comedians, poissardes, and, very likely, professors, used to call on God to launch His thunders on their important heads, or to pass for nothing if He did not make them a sign or example then and there. None came; they were left to themselves and to each other, and to the laws of the Nature they worshipped. And Vergniaud, shortly before they guillotined him for shortcoming, uttered a classical epitaph on their end and his own, which accurately expressed the working of the revolutionary Nature; -which certainly in her time took rather a penal form: "The Revolution," he said, " is like Saturn-it will devour all its children."

Modern science is at present by way of providing for her children, in a more motherly and comfortable way, and looks forward to still more ample arrangements, on the disendowment of the English Church. Nevertheless, she seems at present unable to account for life, for morality, for the imagination, and for other spiritual phenomena. These are in more general and continual contact with the human consciousness than the doctrines of evolution and natural selection; and they inconvenience the atheistic argument quite as much as Evolution can confound the orthodox. They are ignored in consequence, and then modern Philistinism makes its easy logical descent into Pessimism. It is sure to do so when it has seen the ways of this strange world, and then it finds such relics or phantoms of good as still present themselves just as logically unaccountable as the work of evil is to us. Meanwhile, infidelity makes art and poetry as false and worthless as theology. In short, art, and craft, and poetry, and education in its relations with them, must be affected vitally by the standing controversy between physical and spiritual science. (We use the word spiritual here

as inclusive of mental, moral, and psychological thought.) All roads lead to Rome, and all studies lead to man, and, through him, to the search after God. Man is either the universal subject of interest and study, or he is as repulsive as unaccountable. Love of your neighbour, or your capacity of enduring him, depend on what you think of him. If there is still in every person, however in our sight degraded or horrible, a yet-flickering reflection of hope, that is an image of God, all that is left of it; and we Christians think it the chief and best fact about the man. By parity of reasoning, we think man the chief fact in all the cycles of Creation, and therefore that he has some duties in relation to the rest: so that he ought not to vivisect lower creatures without anæsthetics. Our opponents say simply, whatever man is, they find themselves in a position to do as they like in the matter, and mean to do so with the more relish because they agonize human morality as well as brute dogs and rabbits. But we think man chief, in duties and responsibility, and that, further and especially, because Christ died to save all men. We are bound to hold that fact (a) as the chief truth about every individual man; and (b) a truth which makes hope and charity for all the world binding on us as a part of our faith. We are no better than our fathers or neighbours, and often forget this: still it is our duty to remember it, and it does us no harm to be reminded of it, however ironically, from the other side. We are here, anyhow; and now, is it against our faith to allow the doctrine of Evolution as a "factor" of our existence here?

The words Evolution and Pantheism appear to be like other words; in having been variously applied-not so much as their inventors understood them, but as society in general misunderstood their inventors. Evolution is connected with the name of Mr. Darwin, and he is accused of Pantheism in one sense, and we hear of the Pantheism of Wordsworth in another sense.

We are here aware that we are exposing the present essay to chances of comparison with a very celebrated one on Chinese metaphysics, which is said, in the "Pickwick Papers," to have been produced by an ingenious combination of readings under the letters C and M. If the reader will have patience, and let us shuffle the cards, we will observe that Evolution is the familiar expression for a hypothesis of the gradual development of the present state of Creation by means of the competitive struggle for life, of natural selection dependent on that, of social interaction, and other laws, which presuppose as laws a providential order and lawgiver. A law or system of Evolution implies a reasoning mind, by whatever attempts at impersonal nomenclature, as factor, agent, and so on, we may express it. The lacuna of Professor Tyndall's Birmingham address is as evident in the whole macrocosm of matter in action, as it is in individual action of the living man, or microcosm. There is a factor of will and personal choice when the merchant gets up and acts on information by telegram. There was a Personal order,