is, but I think one of the principles of the Victoria Institute is to endeavour to understand one another and to use plain speech and not to be terrified by particularly long words, even if their energy is enhanced by capital letters. Just one hundred years ago Lamarck published his Philosophie Zoologique, and since his time the theory which he propounded with additions and variations has occupied learned persons ever since. Biologie der Natur, Principles of Biology, by Herbert Spencer, Man's Place in Nature, and the Evolution of Matter, have given rise to controversies of inordinate length, but except so far as they touch the foundations of religious belief I do not propose to deal with any part of them.

So far as the question of ideas and sensations go I am not very much interested in the dispute. I suspect in this case as in so many others the disputants are disputing about words and do not always use words in the same sense. Indeed, Darwinism, as the Germans call it, though I think Dr. Packard has proved that it would be more appropriately called Lamarckism, is an interesting study, but what it has to do with a revelation which we believe to be divine is a greater puzzle than any metaphysician has ever invented.

To be sure, I saw quoted the other day the profound remark of a gentleman who has determined to be up-to-date in science, who informed us that modern chemistry had found that transubstantiation was chemically impossible.

It may well be that those who would raise a laugh at such an argument, nevertheless, themselves fall into the same error when assuming analogies that have no real relation to each other. Lamarck says that he could pass in review all classes, all orders, all the genus and species of animals that exist, and that he could prove that the conformation of individuals and of their parts, their organs and faculties is entirely the result of circumstances to which each species has been subjected by Nature.

It is to my mind beyond the power of human language to express the wonderful adaptation of the merely animal part of creation to the part they are intended to fill; this is true of each creature from the highest to the lowest, but to most minds this would suggest a Creator incomprehensible and Almighty in power, and that inference would not be got rid of by using the word Nature instead of the word God.

That God's creation should be gradual or progressive or evolutionary and that his creatures should be endowed with a faculty of development is no more inconsistent with His power

and eternity than the fact that he has given certain qualities to certain portions of matter that they retain as long as they exist at all, and to others the quality of being changed by time or other agents and different circumstances, and becoming apparently different things according to our limited views and feeble nomenclature. Of course, the effort of those whose idea is the deification of man and his self-creation will point to analogies from non-vital things and bring in Man as only a self-superior creation as a deduction from their theories, but this is only one of the many phases of unbelief which from time to time has grown up and which has its day until some more popular notion takes hold of the imagination and succeeds in an everrecurring cycle in capturing a body of adherents. Indeed, we are now assured "that Primitive Credulity is dead and Intellectual Belief is dying, and that the fate of Christianity rests in the hands of emotional belief."

Unfortunately, emotional belief leads too often to delusion. Joanna Southcott and, in his latter days, Mr. Irving, a preacher of rare eloquence, took to the belief that he had the power of communicating his thoughts in an unknown tongue, and few here can remember the distress which was felt at the injury to the religious belief of many who had been delighted with his eloquence and undoubted piety.

In our own day Professor James finds it to be the worship of material luxury and wealth which constitutes so large a portion of the spirit of our age-that which produces effeminacy and unmanliness.

It is no new experience that emotional and highly sensitive persons should suppose themselves endowed with what for want of a better word I will call supernatural power. I believe there exists among us a fancy that people are distinguished by colours floating round their heads. It is called an aura." The good are blue, the bad are red, and only people who are enlightened are accommodated with an aura of their own, but, if Mr. James is right in his view of what "the great age produces," it is no wonder that delusions should flourish and that the halo of the mediæval painters should present themselves to weak and hysterical persons as something that they imagine round their own heads, and think they see on their neighbours. Mr. Ladd in his Philosophy of Religion says, "In the United States to-day Christian Science is forming a grotesque mixture of crude Pantheism, misunderstood psychological and philosophical truth, and truly Christian beliefs and conceptions." Whether the great prophet of Christian Science is still alive or

not is, I believe, being still angrily debated in her own country, and I read in a newspaper that the unbelieving have gone so far as to suggest that somebody or something has been dressed up to represent the lady who has for some considerable period been in her grave. Whatever may be the truth about the lady herself there can be no doubt that the statement of Mr. Ladd is borne out by much testimony.

It would be too long a task to go through all the catalogue of cant phrases which represents the barren nonsense of this new phase of human folly, but the recollection of table turning is still too recent to allow us to forget that form of error. A number of distinguished men were invited by the Royal Institution to contribute certain essays. They were not asked to write against table turning, but their essays collected were fitly described as a treatise on education, and they were directed. to the discipline of the Mind.

I ask would it not be possible to ask for aid to the Victoria Institute to deal with the same simplicity and terseness in respect of some of the problems which appear to have misled and to be still further misleading the nations. Of this last phase of popular delusion Mr. George B. Cutler, of Yale, treats at page 220 of his treatise, A Copy of a Monthly Publication of what is called the Society of Silent Unity. He tells us that a certain leaf is of red paper, and in addition to elaborate instructions for its use given by the editor, the sheet has printed on it the following:-" This sheet has been treated by the Society of Silent Unity after the manner mentioned in Acts xix, 11 and 12.

"Disease will depart from those who repeat silently while holding this in hand the words printed herein: Affirmation for Strength and Power, February 20th to March 20th. Held daily at 9 p.m.

"The Strength and Power of the Divine Mind is now established in me and will go out no more. Affirmation for Prosperity, held daily at 12 noon. The Riches of the Lord Christ are now poured out upon me and I am supplied with everything."

Then follow some testimonials such as one sees following the advertisements of quack medicines.

One of them runs thus: "While holding the red eaf in my hands it caused vibration through my whole system and rheumatic pains that I was troubled with disappeared as if by magic."

Another : "Your treatments for prosperity have done us

much good, and we are feeling more prosperous, which will open the way to our receiving more. Since the treatments our chickens have laid better, the food goes farther and our whole living seems easier."

I rather think Professor Lionel Beale more than once suggested that some of the metaphysical questions should be made the subject of discussion among us, and I think we might follow the example of the Royal Institution in publishing in a small volume some of the addresses, and perhaps the discussions, which have been delivered here by our own distinguished members. I am sure it would be useful, as in the case of the Royal Institution their volume was useful in dissipating the fog of Science falsely so called, and we have not heard much of table turning since the little instrument Professor Faraday invented which put an end to the supposed communication of thought and replies from the dead by knocks on a table. This invention was not so much to prevent intentional fraud as to prevent the unconscious movement of the table by persons who were sincerely under the impression that the table itself moved while without meaning it they were themselves responsible for the movement.

Now there is much need for careful investigation and clear thought at the present time.

It will be observed that Mr. Ladd's description of Christian Science includes truly "Christian Beliefs and Conceptions."

If Mr. Ladd means, as he probably does, that in Mrs. Eddy's book there is a mixture of much silly and terribly profane sentences mixed up with Christian truth in words, one can heartily agree, but without this qualification it is hardly possible to say that there is any Christianity at all in it.

Some scriptural quotations and even the professed belief of the writer herself are so disfigured by what is added, that while one recognises from time to time a Christian truth there, it is followed by an addition or interpretation by the author which makes one shudder by the profanity with which sacred words are put together with such hideous nonsense.

This renders it difficult to give examples since one does not like to quote what one cannot read without pain, but one or two may suffice. At page 218 she says, "They that wait upon the Lord shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint." The writer seems to have had a dim suspicion of her own profaneness, for she says, "the meaning of that passage is not perverted by applying it literally to moments of fatigue, for the moral and physical are as one in their results.

"When we wake to the truth of being, all disease, weakness, sorrow, sin and death will be unknown and the mortal dream will for ever cease."

My method of treating of fatigue applies to all bodily ailments since mind should be, and is, supreme, absolute and final."

This is the supposed answer to a complaint that the individual is supposed to make-Toil fatigues me. Now comes the philosophy.

But what is this me? Is it muscle or is it mind?

Without mind would the muscles be tired? Do the muscles talk? Do you talk for them?

Matter is non-intelligent. Mortal mind does the false talking and that which appeared weariness made that weariness. Here is her own belief:-"Do not believe in any supposed necessity for sin, disease or death, knowing as you ought to know that God never requires obedience to a so-called natural law, for no such law exists. The belief in sin and death is destroyed by the law of God which is the law of life instead of death; of harmony instead of discord; of spirit instead of the flesh. Again as part of the same reasoning if you believe yourself diseased you can alter this wrong belief and action without hindrance from the body."

This is only one specimen of the sort of rhapsody which is the tone of the whole book, where Scripture is continually quoted and ridiculously applied.

At page 251 we learn that "Fright is so great at certain stages of mortal belief as to drive belief into new paths. In the illusion of death mortals wake to the knowledge of two facts. First, that they are not dead, and secondly, that they have but passed the portals of a new belief."

One does not get a much clearer idea of this by what we should call the interpretation clause, titled death, when we are told, "Any material evidence of death is false, for it contradicts the spiritual facts of being."

Although I have had considerable difficulty in quoting without appearing to deal lightly with sacred things, I have no such hesitation about the lady's philosophy, and this reminds me very much of a little professional anecdote which occurred to me when I was at the bar. A witness was being stiffly crossexamined about the absence of a particular person who was alleged to have been present at the transaction which was in dispute, and he accounted for the absence of the person in question by saying that he was dead. "How do you know he