came his contemporary Pelagius with the masculine heresy of freewill and the liberty of man to work out his own salvation. It was precisely the doctrine that one would expect from this freedom-loving, optimistic island; but, unfortunately, Pelagius was the lesser man, and he and his theory paid the penalty of condemnation. That forgotten heretic has had his revenge. Under the influence of Geneva, he was dutifully repudiated as a 'vain talker' by the Anglican Church a thousand years later, but every Englishman to-day is an obstinate Pelagian at heart. Our stiff-necked race would rather go to hell of its own free will than to heaven by predestination.

Various by-products of these disputes had important social consequences. The Gnostic and Manichean theories naturally led to a low opinion of woman; for, if man was evil from his very conception, how much more must the mother of man be evil? Some trace of this idea certainly transferred itself to Christianity as the ascetic movement gained in strength; but it was counteracted by the growing cult of the Virgin Mary, which added enormously to the dignity of woman as it gained full weight and consistency. If Eve had been the mother of man in the Jewish creed, Mary was the mother of God in the Catholic faith; the mother, too, without the interposition of man. (The Christian doctrine, it may be noted, was the exact opposite of the Greek legend; the goddess of wisdom was the daughter of a male without a mother.) The cult of the Virgin, apart from the mystic element with which it surrounded woman, gave her a spiritual exaltation against which all the strange excesses of the ascetic, whether male or female, in the long run beat in vain.

The feminist question is not new; nothing is. (It is the pessimist Ecclesiastes who laments the monotony of history.) The most superficial study of early Christianity shows that the problem of sex was as formidable, possibly even as attractive, to the austere fathers of the Church as to the lady novelist of yesterday; a great silent battle was fought over women's rights in those early times, in which on the whole women won. Their place in the Christian system has never been successfully challenged :

it is the great heathens of the modern world, like Schopenhauer, who regard woman as essentially evil, but in this matter centuries of Christians have accepted the sturdy common sense of St. Paul that woman is good but inferior to man, and it has yet to be demonstrated that Mrs. Pankhurst will depose the Apostle. He wrote without a trace of mystical feeling in his message, as one who was not greatly interested in the relations of the sexes; but the by no means enthusiastic manner in which he spoke of matrimony certainly gave some countenance to the monastic movement. The ascetic tendency undoubtedly had a pessimistic aspect, inasmuch as every devotee who withdrew himself from the world of action tacitly admitted the impossibility of bettering that world. Unhappily, there must have been many periods when this standpoint was merely a recognition of the obvious. It must be admitted, however, that the monastic attitude, which sprang from the arid cult of virginity, developed a strong spiritual aspect not without its compensations for the evils that incidentally arose from its impossible standard -evils remarked by Dante and every medieval writer. The beautiful legends of Percival and Galahad were fathered in the cloisters, and the Sangreal is the one epic of virginity.

Christianity as a whole, however, was neither pessimistic nor optimistic. It accepted things as they were, good and evil as substantial realities; it loved its saints and hated its devils with a very human passion; it became a practical system of living which few indeed could aspire to fulfil, but which all could imitate or attempt to imitate. From this attitude of tacit or reverential acquiescence towards life and the unseen powers, developed another with more sinister consequences-the doctrine that it is not for man to inquire too closely into the mysteries which surround him and which must ever be impenetrable to his inferior senses. The theory that there are set limits to human knowledge which cannot be surmountedprobably the original form of conservative thought on this planet-emerged very early; it can at least claim respectable antiquity on its behalf, and its supporters have been able to invoke the most august authority for their views. VOL. 228. NO. 466.

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The tree of knowledge was forbidden to Adam. builders of Babel were scattered, not because they adopt a primitive form of life assurance, as the popular theo holds, but because they attempted to pass the limits human achievement: This is what they have begun 'do, and now nothing will be withholden from them whi they purpose to do,' are the precise words which t author of the Pentateuch puts into the mouth of G Himself. The Greeks admitted the same idea: Promethe was bound as the dispenser of those forbidden gifts man, which would have given a purpose to

'The blind and aimless strivings,

The barren blank endeavours,

The pithless deeds of the fleeting, dreamlike race.'

It cannot be said that this pessimistic theory find much support in the New Testament. There are, indee passages indicative of contempt for human learning comparison with omnipotent wisdom. These expressio have frequently been used by zealous bigots to justi their persecutions; but the main fault is with the bigo not the text, and the advocate of freedom of inqui could have found at least as good support for his vie Unfortunately the letter of a text has too often prevaile over the spirit of a whole Epistle, and there have bee long periods when official Christianity has steadily oppose any advancement of learning.

This prejudice was probably due in the earliest tim to the fact that the young religion found most of th intellectual men of the day outside its ranks, and mild contemptuous if not actually hostile; it opposed t learning of the pagan world, but that was practical all the learning there was at that time. A backwat left by this current, which regarded all pagan literatu and art as the creation of Satan, remained obstinate stagnant, and its pestilent vapours are still occasional visible; but it has seldom stirred the main stream life, and the classics have had an ample revenge. Dan indeed placed Virgil in hell as a concession to theology but he followed his master thither in proof of his devotio -surely the most flattering literary criticism on record

and Aristotle became the intellectual apostle of mediaval Christianity. It is the rare tribute of the victor to the vanquished.

Against new inquiries a more persistent warfare has been waged, as the names of Roger Bacon, Bruno, Galileo, and a hundred smaller men attest. Perhaps the enmity is instinctive, and its working is as visible in the records of Puritanism as of Catholicism. Every creed relies on authority, and must therefore distrust any system independent of that authority; if the two conflict it will naturally rely on its authority to chastise error.' But that is by no means a full statement of the case. It is the fact that in most of these conflicts the orthodox side is the popular side, and the authority which burnt the heretics probably knew that it was backed by the democratic public opinion of the day.

The tendency to persecute knowledge, or at least inquiry, is in itself a form of pessimism, for it assumes that man has reached his limits; even men of science have not always been exempt from the idea that the unknown may prove the unknowable. That there are limits to man's actual and present knowledge is of course a platitude, but that there are limits to his potential capacity is an entirely different assumption, and those who hold this view are not likely to add much to the stock of knowledge or human achievement. Fortunately, the insatiable curiosity of our race fights a slowly winning battle against an assumption which has been invoked in opposition to the experiments in medical and mechanical science that have given us chloroform, railways, and human flight. In this matter ignorance and superstition fight a constant rearguard action against knowledge. Their defeats have been many and cumulative; their rare victories have been disastrous, since each has checked or destroyed a civilization.

In our times these disputes on the origin of evil and the range of human knowledge have assumed other forms without finding a solution. Our science is speculative within the limits it has set itself, but beyond those limits it has not often strayed. Huxley, who was a philosopher as well as a man of science, could not get further than the statement that 'infinite benevolence need not have

invented pain and sorrow at all-infinite malevolence 'would very easily have deprived us of the large measure ' of content and happiness that fall to our lot. The 'wealth of superfluous loveliness in the world condemns pessimism. It is a hopeless riddle.' In one respect, however, science echoes the tacit pessimism of early Christianity, and contemplates the eventual destruction of the world, not indeed by some catastrophic agency or external interposition, but by the slow and imperceptible, but nevertheless cumulative and in the end decisive, loss of cosmic energy in the planet itself. If it be true, as Kelvin stated, that 'within a finite period 'of time past, and within a finite period of time future, 'the earth has been, and will again be, uninhabitable 'for man as at present constituted '-then all our efforts must at length be in vain, and man is doomed to destruction as surely as the mammoth which he has survived, or the fly whose evanescence he has turned into a proverb, but which may in the end survive him.

Fortunately most of us stop short of these ultimate considerations, and for the mass the choice between optimism and pessimism is determined by present conditions of life. The decision is partly a matter of experience and partly of temperament, and whole nations sway towards one view or the other it is not by accident that we find our pessimistic philosophers in Germany, our pessimistic novelists in Russia, our pessimistic dramatists in Scandinavia. These countries have no comedy; it is among the nations which have clung to the sunny side of the street, the Greeks, the Italians, and the French, that comedy and optimism keep company together. No pessimist can really enjoy the roaring fun of Aristophanes or Rabelais; his only solace in all Latin literature would be Don Quixote, which has the unique quality of being extraordinarily comic or the very reverse, according to one's humour. The optimist laughs consumedly over the perpetual blunders of the last of the knight-errants; but the pessimist sighs at the failure of the ideal in an eternally commonplace world.

Pessimism is emphatically not an English characteristic, because it is the outcome of the passive, contemplative