retained a keen appreciation of all its best elements. But as her intellect expanded and her knowledge widened, she too found it impossible to rest in the old belief, and, with a painful wrench from a revered father and loving friends, she also passed over from the ranks of orthodoxy. She also, after a life of profound and earnest thought, came to the conclusion recorded of her by an intimate friend and admirer, Mr. Myers:

"I remember how at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men-the words God, Immortality, Duty-pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates."

Such instances as these can not be the result of mere accident. As long as skepticism was confined to a limited number of scientific men, it might be possible to think that it was merely the exaggeration of a particular train of thought pursued too exclusively. But when science has become the prevailing mode of thought, and has been brought home to the minds of all educated persons, it is no longer possible to represent it as an exceptional aberration. And where the bell-wethers of thought lead the way, the flock will follow. What the greatest thinkers think to-day, the mass of thinkers will think to-morrow, and the great army of non-thinkers will assume to be self-evident the day after. This is very nearly the case at the present day; the great thinkers have gone before, the mass of thinkers have followed, and the still greater mass of non-thinkers are wavering and about to follow. It is no longer, with those who think at all, a question of absolute faith against absolute disbelief, but of the more or less shade of "faintness" with which they cling to the "larger hope."

This is nowhere more apparent than in the writings of those who attempt to stem the tide which sets so strongly against orthodoxy. They resolve themselves mainly into one long wail of "oh the pity of it, the pity of it!" if the simple faith of olden times should disappear from the world. They show eloquently and conclusively that science and philosophy can not satisfy the aspirations or afford the consolations of religion. They expose the hollowness of the substitutes which have been proposed, such as the worship of the unknowable, or the cult of humanity. They win an easy triumph over the exaggerations of those who resolve all the historical records of Christianity into

myths or fabulous fulfillment of prophecies, and they wage fierce battles over minor points, as whether the first quotations from the Gospels are met with in the first or second half of the second century. But they nowhere attempt to grapple with the real difficulties, and show that the facts and arguments which converted men like Carlyle and Renan are mistaken facts and unsound arguments. Attempts to harmonize the Gospels, and to prove the inspiration of writings which contain manifest errors and contradictions, have gone the way of Buckland's proof of a universal deluge, and of Hugh Miller's attempt to reconcile Noah's ark and the Genesis account of creation with the facts of geology and astronomy. Not an inch of ground that has been conquered by science has ever been reconquered in fair fight by theology.

This great scientific movement is of comparatively recent date. Darwin's "Origin of Species" was only published in 1859, and his views as to evolution, development, natural selection, and the prevalence of universal law, have already annexed nearly the whole world of modern thought, and become the foundation of all philosophical speculation and scientific inquiry.

Not only has faith been shaken in the supernatural as a direct and immediate agent in the phenomena of the worlds of matter and of life, but the demonstration of the "struggle for life" and "survival of the fittest" has raised anew, and with vastly augmented force, those questions as to the moral constitution of the universe and the origin of evil, which have so long exercised the highest minds. Is it true that "love" is "Creation's final law," when we find this enormous and apparently prodigal waste of life going on; these cruel internecine battles between individuals and species in the struggle for existence; this cynical indifference of Nature to suffering? There are, approximately, 3,600,000,000 of deaths of human beings in every century, of whom at least twenty per cent, or 720,000,000, die before they have attained to clear self-consciousness and conscience. What becomes of them? Why were they born? Are they Nature's failures, and "cast as rubbish to the heap"?

To such questions there is no answer. We are obliged to admit. that as the material universe is not, as we once fancied, measured by our standards and regulated at every turn by an intelligence resembling ours; so neither is the moral universe to be explained by simply magnifying our own moral ideas, and explaining everything by the action of a Being who does what we should have done in his place. If we insist on this anthropomorphic conception, we are driven to this dilemma. Carlyle bases his belief in a God, "the infinite Good One," on this argument: "All that is good, generous, wise, right-whatever I deliberately and forever love in others and myself, who or what could by any possibility have given it to me, but One who first had it to give? This is not logic; this is axiom."

But how of the evil? No sincere man looking into the depths of his own soul, or at the facts of the world around, can doubt that along with much that is good, generous, wise, and right, there is much that is bad, base, foolish, and wrong. If logic compels us to receive as an axiom a good author for the former, does not the same logic equally compel us to accept the axiom that the author of the latter must have been one who "first had it in himself to give"? That is, we must accept the theory of a God who is half good, half evil; or adopt the Zoroastrian conception of a universe contested by an Ormuzd and Ahriman, a good and evil principle, whose power is, for the present at any rate, equally balanced.

From this dilemma there is no escape, unless we give up altogether the idea of an anthropomorphic deity, and adopt frankly the scientific idea of a First Cause, inscrutable and past finding out; and of a universe whose laws we can trace, but of whose real essence we know nothing, and can only suspect or faintly discern a fundamental law which may make the polarity of good and evil a necessary condition of existence. This is a more sublime as well as more rational belief than the old orthodox conception; but there is no doubt that it requires more strength of mind to embrace it, and that it appears cold and cheerless to those who have been accustomed to see special providences in every ordinary occurrence, and to fancy themselves the special objects of supernatural supervision in all the details of daily life. Hopes and fancies, however, are powerless against facts; and the world is as surely passing from the phase of orthodox into that of scientific belief as youth is passing into manhood, and the planet which we inhabit from the fluid and fiery state into that of temperate heat, progressive cooling, and final extinction as the abode of life. In the mean time, what can we do but possess our souls in patience, follow truth wherever it leads us, and trust, as Tennyson advises, that in the long run everything will be for the best, and "every winter turn to spring"?

TWENTY YEARS OF NEGRO EDUCATION.

By J. M. KEATING.

THE negro is no longer a problem. He is part of the body politic

and the body social of the republic. He is firmly rooted and can not be moved. He is here to stay; and any attempt to disturb him, or to excite his fears as to his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is nothing less than a crime.

A question touching the negro, like any other, must be considered. from this common-sense stand-point, and every suggestion for its solution must be subjected to the probing and searching "What good?"

Prejudice must not be allowed a voice in its solution, and passion must be excluded from counsel. The negro will not consent to his own deportation. The Southern planters, too, would not, if they could, consent to it, nor to any agitation of it, because it unsettles and unhinges the labor that is more profitable free than it ever was or could be in the days of slavery. The negro is more intelligent now than then, and therefore more valuable because a better, a closer, and more skillful worker. Deportation is not, for these reasons, to be considered. We must, therefore, deal with the negro and treat of him with the full understanding that we can not get rid of him. His commercial value, supplementing his rights under the Federal and State Constitutions, says we can not.

What, then, is to be done with the negro? Nothing but increase the number of schools and schoolmasters, make education compulsory, and make technical education easily available to him in all parts of the South. The negro must be taught the virtue of self-reliance, and the value of the courts as his safeguard and defense under the Constitution and laws of the nation and of the States. Agitation exalts the negro to a degree of imaginary importance that people at the North can not understand. He is a sensible man within his limits of mind and comprehension, so long as he feels that he is not the center of a pet anxiety. Agitation has retarded and interfered with his growth in the past; it has proved exceedingly mischievous, and is not to be thought of in the future. It breeds dissatisfaction, raises hopes that can never be fulfilled, and tends to widen the breach between the races. For these reasons Mr. Cable's suggestion of opening the schools of the South in common to blacks and whites is not to be entertained.* The race-feeling and race-prejudice that everywhere, wherever the Anglo-Saxons come in contact with the negro, keep them apart, will not brook it, nor will it permit the acceptance of the opening of concert halls, theatres, or lecture halls indiscriminately to both races. The same may be said of hotels and steamboats. It will not do to arouse prejudices-we must allay them. But even if the race-instinct theory be wrong, and it is found that there is nothing more serious than a prejudice that may disappear before the sun of truth, of justice, and of right, it is not policy to arouse it by fixed or a purposed antagonism. It will disappear in time; it will be swept away by the uplifting of the negro to a plane whence he can prove his title to as high consideration in all respects as his white brother. The education of the negro has uplifted and will uplift him, and will prove the solid and enduring cause for the effect desired, if anything can. A soft an

* The evil effect of an attempt at mixed schools was felt in Louisiana; the superintendent of which State, in 1871, complained that the act forbidding the establishment of public schools from which colored children should be rejected excited determined opposition on the part of many who would otherwise co-operate in the opening of schools, and in the raising of funds for their support.

swer turneth away wrath. What is most needed, then, is not an aggressive agitation for social recognition in public places and conveyances, and in schools and churches, but education. Educate the negro, that he may be really free. The whole power of public opinion should be brought to the enlargement of the means of educating the negro, giving him a practical training that will fit him for daily practical life, and enable him to compete successfully with his white brother in useful vocations. Elevation of character comes with education, pride with elevation of character, and uprightness, integrity, thrift, and decency are the sure products of pride. The homes of the educated and skilled labor of our country tell the whole story of the difference between that and unskilled and ignorant labor. Let us look at what has been accomplished by education. Let us review the past, year by year, as we find the figures and facts in Commissioner Eaton's reports, and see what has been done-see if we are justified in thus insisting that education is the sure hope of the negro; and while we look, let us keep constantly in view all the difficulties through which so much has been accomplished-the civil war; the period of political reconstruction, during which all passions and prejudices were allowed the freest play; the utter dejection and poverty of the white people; the extraordinary social upheaval, unequaled in any period of the world's history save during the French Revolution; the mastery of the negro in the political misrule of the Southern States, and the fears of utter ruin beyond recovery by the white people as a result of that mastery in misrule. Let us keep all this steadily in view, and the work of breaking so great a block of black ignorance will seem like a miracle indeed.

In 1860 there were 244,492 adult free colored people in the whole Union, and of that number 95,265 were illiterate, a fact to be accounted for by the laws in force in the Southern States against the education of the negro. In the same year there were out of 4,000,000 of slaves 1,734,000 adults, all of them of course illiterates. The average increase of this 4,000,000 is given by the census of 1860 as 80,000 per year, so that in 1867, when colored school reports became accessible, the total colored population would be, for the eight years including 1860, 4,640,000. Of this number in 1867, according to the Freedman's Bureau statistics, 111,442 were enrolled in the day and night schools throughout the South, and in 1869 this number had increased to 114,522. Very slow progress, in part due to the indifference and opposition of the whites, who about that time were the victims of the reconstruction system, and in greater part to the reckless indifference of a majority of the negroes, who had been plunged in the excesses of political Saturnalias, and were helping the carpet-baggers to rob the States and burden posterity with bonded debts. Chaos and confusion, disappointment and despair prevailed in all the Southern States, and all classes were unsettled. It was no wonder, then, that with this at