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two latter countries, so different in manners and in laws, pronounced, however, in the same manner on the fate of the unfortunate submitted to their judgments; whilst our kingdom, so similar to France by its institutions, acquits a half less of the accused. Should the cause of this difference be sought in the fact that we have not the institution of the jury which our neighbors have? We think it is so." "The preceding, then, will lead us to the conclusion, that when 100 accused come before the tribunals, whether criminal or correctional, or simple police, 16 will be acquitted if they have to be dealt with by judges, and 35 if they have to be dealt with by a jury."

The very next year after Quetelet had announced this, the revolution came which detached Belgium from the kingdom of the Netherlands, and gave it the institution of trial by jury. Immediately the acquittals coincided with the averages of France and England!

The tremendous bearing of such facts as these on the Problem of Evil, and the moral ability of man, are perfectly obvious. The general fact that each year inexorably claimed and received its quantum of sinners, seemed to place the individuals whose crimes made up the average in a condition of helplessness before the Law. They seemed impressed to the behest of an irresistible average. The Parcæ seemed about to revive, and again, with distaff, twist and shears, to preside over the destinies of man.

We must turn now to another part of the subject indicated in the heading of this article. The Mercantile Library Association of Cincinnati is like similar associations throughout the country, only better it has a Library quite large and useful, if not very select; it has the very best reading-room in the States (we speak advisedly); it has pretty fair lecturers during the winter season, perhaps above the average, who give the usual amount of interesting and spicy matter to the public. During the present season the association aforesaid has been the means of giving us one lecture from the Rev. T. S. King, of Boston, and three from the Rev. Dr. Bellows, of New York.

The Rev. Mr. King is a man prone to the funny side of things. He is a very Lutheran for laughter. When his interesting facts and stories are about to launch on the great deep of philosophical conclusion, presto! instead of a head-splitting theorem, you have a side-splitting joke. In the lecture referred to, Mr. King brought

before us, under the fine title of the "Laws of Disorder," the striking statistics to which we have alluded, as arranged by Quetelet, Buckle and the Life-Assurance Magazines. He had the good sense not to evade the results of his statements: he did not try and show us that when one was said, it meant three; neither did he affirm. However, if the doctrine began to look perilous, he relieved it with a joke; telling us that a lady of his acquaintance interpreted the proportion of 106 males to 100 females to mean that a hundred women were as good as a hundred and six men,—and so forth. But Mr. King's statements made their mark when the laugh died away, the people began to think; and articles appeared in two of our daily journals, indicating that the public mind had labeled these facts, Whatever is, is right.

The Rev. Dr. Bellows is not a funny man: he is a talker, a very fine talker. He is the Don Quixote of Theorists; the Rufus Choate of theologic pleading. He knows very well that any fool may prove black black, and white white; but that it takes a clever fellow to show that black is white, and that sea-green is yellow." Give him opportunity, and he will equally deny or affirm you any proposition whatever. We do not mean that he will affirm anything that he does not believe; but that he will convince himself of it, and then plead for it eloquently and strongly.

In the second of his three Lectures on Social Diseases, this gentleman repeated the statistics which Mr. King gave us ; and which, because our readers are not likely to be ignorant of them, we will not repeat here. He referred to the conclusions which had been drawn from these statistics in our vicinity, which he was pleased to call misinterpretations. "These facts (said Dr. Bellows) do not at all implicate the free-will of man; they only show the direction which man's free-will has taken, and attest the uniformity of its results! No individual will is bound by these results." Of course, not. Neither did Galileo's "results" make the Earth go round the Sun.

The argument of the Necessarian is this: If it is shown and admitted that human free-action produces such and such uniform results from year to year, only varied by ascertainable causes; if this is so regular that not only the averages of birth and death, but of the projects of love and the impulses of passion, may be predicted-can free-agency in any philosophical sense be predicated of men?

Dr. Bellows evades the question with a trick of words as Mr. King does with a jest. We are reminded of Göthe's lines

"For just where ideas fail us

A word enters in the nick o' time:
With words we can glibly fence,
With words build up a system :

In words we can have all trust,

From a word no iota can be robbed."

No one was more interested in the project of Asylums for the Inebriate, than Dr. Bellows. An Asylum, in its essential idea, supposes external evils, or evils outside the moral ability. Criminals, we put in jails and penitentiaries; the diseased in mind or body, we place in Asylums: the former are punitive, the latter curative. Now if it be decided that the passion for strong drink is a disease, and is to be cured as insanity, why may the same rule not apply to any overpowering passion? How many crimes are made as necessary as the physical complexion or stature of men, when the parent of vices, Drunkenness, is decided to be heriditary or beyond volition? We name this feature of the times because it is significant of the progress of intelligence among the people it marks where the tide of popular knowledge (which is simply a perception of Law) has reached. The Indian who was accused of murder, pleaded Not Guilty, "for," he said, "the whiskey did it." The people have come up to his thought and set there the Asylum for the Inebriate. And from the vantageground so attained, they will see that there are other kinds of whiskey than the alcholic; they will see that deadly intoxications are distilled out of past generations into men who know not what they do in their crimes, but who are really casting off their blood's infection in the only possible way. For eruption is the health of a disease, and not the disease itself. The plea of insanity is so often made, and so successfully, that it has become a subject of ridicule with the superficial. But man walks by the laws of equilibrum long before he discovers them; and so our juries have an instinct that frequently guides to the place where physiology, and the study of temperaments and nerves, will inevitably set the normal precedent in the future.

To this it is replied that our consciousness contradicts it. Dr. Johnson to Boswell is quoted: "Sir, we know that our will is free, and that's an end on't." We know no such thing; we

know only that we think we know it.

Consciousness is only

what we think we know. But the consciousness of Saul the persecutor gives way to the subsequent consciousness of Paul the apostle. There are wise reasons why the earth should seem flat when it is round; or why a stick thrust into the water should seem broken at the point of contact. Nature teaches laws by illusions. Nothing but the quasi-freedom of the human will could have begun the work which a realization of God working within could perfect. But, it is said, this makes man irresponsible, taking away guilt and remorse. As well talk of taking away the pain of a gash in the flesh. Evil is a disease, and guilt is its attendant pain.

As for the effect of this on the moral character and purity, or on human activity, the charge that it is hostile to these only shows that the blind men are still given to judging colors. They are deciding what effect they imagine it would have on themselves if they believed it; they do not believe it nor see it. With such no a priori reasoning can be had. But we can point to the facts of experience which set aside their superficial conclusions. The Greeks were fatalists, and did the most enduring work. Did the doctrine of Decrees paralyze the moral sense and power of the Puritans? Or, to come to individuals, did it make Mohammed less active that he made Destiny his central idea? Was Calvin less energetic than Wesley? Is Carlyle, an earnest believer in Necessity, less of a reformer than Dr. Bellows with his free-will fancies?

Experience has shown exactly the opposite of all the results. which Arminianism had so eagerly prophesied as to come of the emasculating tendencies of believing in Destiny. It has shown that the great actors in history have felt themselves to be Scourges of God-Men of Destiny. They say, with Luther, In the moment of great

"Here I stand; I can not otherwise." est power they cry, "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory." The men to whom, taught by history, we look for revolutions and new influxes of life, are those who feel their heart-throbbings to be of the pulses of God, who feel the eternal dignity of their inspirations. These rise to be more than mere men; they become the hand of God shaping the world to his thought. Of such it is said in the ancient proverb, Equally tremble before God, and a man dear to God.

MY SCULPTURED PALACE WALLS.

"I love my Love,

And my Love loves me."

THIS iterative phrase sums up as well, perhaps, as any other that which is at once the great mystery and the great simplicity of Life. For if there be anything which baffles philosophic analysis and mental research, it is LOVE. As well might the chemist attempt to analyze the odor of musk-persistent, intangible, pervading. And yet there is nothing so simple as Love. It is to the soul what Light is to the world: so common that we do not regard it as strange; so vivifying that he has not lived who has not loved, any more than the plant has lived which has vegetated into a white, fibreless stem in a dark cellar. So fructifying is it, that they only bear fruit who have been steeped in Love. So universal and patent is it, that there is no action, be it never so common and menial and mechanical, which is not prompted, directly or indirectly, by Love: as some philosophers tell us that the sun is the cause of all material life and motion. One day, Stephenson, the elder, saw a locomotive whisking over the iron road a heavily loaded train; he declared that sun-light moved that train sun-light shed down in the geologic ages on tree and plant, gradually becoming incorporated with them, to change in time into the coal which Stephenson had made the world's Common Carrier. And so Love is gathered up and garnered into our very being. Are we not all the children of Love? Love was at our generation, our conception, and our birth. Love fed us from the breast in infancy; Love guarded us in childhood, and guided us in youth. When the dear mother went to her home, and the aged father soon joined her, was there not Love for us still? Brothers, sisters, friends - all shed Love upon us, some more, some less. As one star shines with a greater or lesser brilliancy than another, so with all who have preceded us. They were the children of Love.

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Love made the Greek strong, the Roman brave, the Medieval man gallant. Whatever, therefore, there is in our civilizationthe coal that supplies the motive power to most of us,― of bravery and chivalry, aye, and of learning, too,-is the result of Love.

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