press truth is to suggest falsehood; that it is to foster a malarious atmosphere which brings forth not only pretty superstitions but ugly ones, and leaves the mind. to be overgrown not only with gay weeds but rank poisons; that where a pleasant fiction finds shelter a dangerous error may nestle at its side; and that if the great souls of history had smoothed over falsehood because it was agreeable, and remained silent before the pet prejudices of weak minds, we should all be worshipping to-day the painted fetish dolls of the world's infancy.

But I propose at present to look at the matter from another and somewhat lower point of view. This theory of suppression is not only immoral, but rests upon an essential delusion. That delusion is that truth is hard, cold, unlovely, and that all the beauty rests with the illusions. The prevalence of this notion is easily explained. It is the natural tendency of an existing dogmatic system, when it finds some of its points coming into collision with common sentiment, to smooth and explain them away, cover them with velvet, so as to make itself as attractive as possible; and one of the oldest tricks of dogmatic art is to paint the opposing view in as dark colours as possible to make itself more pleasing by the contrast. The early Christians painted their own saints with beautiful tints on church windows, but the saints of other religions they painted as demons with terrible horns and flaming eyes; and the descendants of those early Christians have not lost their art. We know their skill in theologic gargoyles,-the infidel on his deathbed surrounded by horrors, the materialist given up to

sensuality, the man of science living in an Arctic sea of negation, perishing without hope. It is no wonder that with these forbidding chimæras in the distance so many are frightened back from the search for truth, and beg that the realm of delusions may be spared.

But there is one suspicious circumstance about all these pictures of the results of beliefs so invested with horrors; they are depicted by those who have never held those beliefs, who have no experience of their real bearings, and who must therefore have drawn upon their imagination for their facts. We do not hear the actual materialist complaining that his belief is hopeless, nor the real heretic crying out that he is in icy despair. They seem about as hearty and cheerful as other people. In one of our popular dramas, a rigidly righteous old lady is troubled because a certain blind youth is constantly cheerful; regarding blindness as sent by an afflicting providence she shakes her head at the young man's happiness, and says that when tribulation is sent to us we ought to tribulate. This old lady, who, never having been blind, knew nothing of its resources, seems to have written a good deal of modern theology. I do not deny that there is a certain naturalness about her inferences concerning things she knows nothing about. When she appears in the guise of a popular preacher or a doctor of divinity, he sits down to consider what he would be and do if he (otherwise, of course, retaining his present views) were a materialist, or a sceptic, and how Paine and Voltaire must have died-if they died logically. But having never tried it, he is compelled to evolve each result out of his

inner consciousness.

The image so evolved must sooner

Let

or later be brought face to face with the fact, and the contrast between the two is sometimes astonishing. us review a few examples.

In former times, theologians could not imagine that any man could have an actual and conscientious disbelief of their dogmas. They attributed all scepticism to an evil heart, or to a desire to forget and hide the truth lest it might check their evil propensities. This being their premiss, it was but a natural inference that all sceptics must be wicked men. Thus Thomas Paine was branded as a drunkard—a pure fabrication-and Voltaire stigmatised for immoralities of which he was innocent. But there was another inference. These men being only pretended unbelievers, it was but natural that when the hour of death arrived, the disguise should fall, the truth come out, and the terrors it was impossible really to disbelieve then come so close that they would cry for mercy and die in the agonies of remorse. To suit that theory fictitious scenes were invented for the deathbed of Paine, who died most peacefully, and that of Voltaire, whose only trouble in his closing hours was that the priests hung about him like vultures.

But that old theory broke down. The upright lives of such men as Hume, and Herbert of Cherbury, and Bolingbroke, and their peaceful deaths, reduced it to absurdity. There has succeeded to it another-that unless a man believe in immortality, his life must be selfish, and he must have an excessive horror of death; while, on the other hand, the believer in heaven sacrifices

present for future happiness, and dies with joyful hope. But this theory breaks down under the facts just like the other. The sceptical philosophers around us are apparently no more selfish than other people. If they were devoted to self, they would take care first of all not to express their scepticism. There are eminent men of science around us, unbelievers in Animism, whose abilities might have made them bishops, but whose self-sacrificing devotion to what they believe true, causes them to live in poverty, and under the denunciation of the comfortable souls who find godliness to be great gain. Nor do we find that heretics have any greater dread of death than believers in a future life. The orthodox man for whom the grave is a gate to Paradise, sends for the doctor just as fast as the sceptic, and never seems in any hurry to enjoy his future bliss. On the other hand, no martyrs have ever marched more fearlessly to death than the revolutionists of France and Germany, who, in nine cases out of ten, were unbelievers in any future life. The unbeliever in a future life has not, indeed, much reason for the gloom commonly ascribed to him. If he has lost expectation of future joys, he has equally lost all apprehension of future woes; and, so far as the natural desire for continued existence is concerned, he knows that, if it is to be, he will attain it just as much as any believer in it with the advantage that it will not have for a part of it the torture of some of his friends.

Let us take another case,—the common idea of what it is to be a fatalist or necessitarian. The believer in Freewill sits down and evolves from his inner consciousness,

the typical believer in Necessity. As the fatalist believes that what will be will be; that nothing can be altered by the will of man; so, he must assuredly be a man who sits passive and allows things to take their own course. But when our speculative believer in Free-will comes to examine the facts, he finds that the most active figures in history have been those same believers in fate. They are such men as the heroes of Greece; as Paul and Mahomet ; Luther, Calvin, and John Knox; as Cromwell and his soldiers; s; as the Puritans who founded the American Commonwealth; men, aggressive, powerful, irresistible, who have left their impress on the world in epochs ; men, too, who, instead of finding in their election to divine favour, a reason for self-indulgence, felt in it an inspiration to surrender their every power to what they conceived to be the will of God.

As a final example, we have before us the ordinary conception of a materialist. Very few people are competent to pursue those philosophical studies which underlie the various conclusions called nominalism, realism, intuitionalism, utilitarianism, idealism, materialism. But the latter word has a familiar sound: materialism is related to matter, and matter plainly means the earth, and flesh and blood, food and drink; consequently a materialist must mean a gross, fleshly character, a man who believes in nothing he cannot bite, and, as opposed to the idealist, he must be a man without ideas. This popular notion of a materialist recalls the sad fate of one of our artists, who made a sea-side picture, and among the common objects of the sea-side which he