invented or stated definitely and accepted as rational by any but some trumpery and temporary school or party till some other has come in. If the common history is true, as it must be unless a better is established as more probable, the doctrine of responsibility is true in just the same degree.

It is no longer an isolated theory or creed depending only on its intrinsic probability, great as that is, but an essential part of a structure that has stood for ages, and grows stronger and larger every day, and of which, until some other architect is found and proved to be more probable, we are bound to say that "the builder and maker is God." That is the practical difficulty which deniers of future life and responsibility have to face and answer, before they can expect any man capable of reasoning to accept their denial as worth anything. Those who have their own reasons for wishing the denial to be true will probably succeed in persuading themselves that it is, or that professing ignorance about it is sufficient excuse for ignoring it. But nothing can be more certain than that, if they are wrong on the main question of the truth of the system of which this is a fundamental part, they have not the smallest chance of their agnosticism being accepted as an excuse. Agnosticism is ipso facto unbelief, and if the Bible is true we know what that involves.

Here I might well stop, and indeed I have no more to say on the bare question of whether it is rational to believe or to act as if we believed in no future responsibility. For it is quite a different question how that responsibility is likely to be administered, as we say of earthly justice. Some persons fancy that they have done all that need be done to make unbelievers easy by declaiming on the injustice of holding honestly ignorant or unwilling offenders guilty of death. That might be worth something if it were any part of our doctrine that no allowance will be made for such difficulties by the righteous Judge, though we have no means of knowing what that allowance will be in each case. All that I have to say on that point is that an excuse is only a demand for mitigation of punishment, not a plea of not guilty, and still less a proof of it. As for the plea of ignorance, nothing is more certain than that it is very often wilful. We hear men boasting of their desire to read both sides, while they practically mean that they read all that they get hold of against the accepted faith, and fancy they know all the reasons for it, and probably soon find objections to it which they cannot answer, and therefore yield to them. How few do we meet with who even try to balance the probabilities of

the only two possible alternatives which I have pointed out, or seriously reflect that there are only those two; and yet no axiom of Euclid is clearer than that, and those who reason in that way are mostly persons of quite intelligence enough to know better, and would be indignant if they were told that they do not know the elements of reasoning. If such people come to the wrong conclusion, even honestly upon the books they read, it was neither rational nor honest upon the whole transaction of choosing the books and reading them, and the plea of ignorance would not avail them in any earthly court. Why should it in the other? When a trustee, or any one accused of fraud, defends himself by the plea that he was ignorantly misled, the immediate question of the Judge is, Did he take all possible means of avoiding it by making all the proper inquiries, and not some inquiry only? If he did not, he is at once declared responsible for all the consequences. Even if he did make them and yet acted ast a prudent man would not, he does not escape. Such cases are called hard, and in a sense they often are, when the person has derived and sought no benefit to himself. And yet it would be harder if those who have been ruined by his laziness or imprudence had to suffer instead. The case of rejecters of the doctrine of responsibility, because they prefer pleasing themselves, is evidently worse; for their professed inquiry has been biassed by their wishes as much as that of a trustee who had some indirect object, if only good-nature to somebody, in consenting to a breach of trust. However liberally we may interpret "He that knew not his Lord's will," we must feel sure that the alternative is to be read, "He that had the means of knowing his Lord's will and did it

not."

The other suggestion, that it is unjust to punish involuntary offenders, and therefore incredible that they will be punished, requires much the same answer. We have no reason to doubt that the degree of genuine compulsion on which any one acts wrongly will be taken into account, as well as his amount of genuine and involuntary ignorance. All such difficulties as those, amounting sometimes to impossibility for us who do not know men's hearts, to say on which side of the line they really stand, do not affect the main question the least, and our business is not to speculate on the fate of individuals, but to see whether there is any rational ground for expecting that they will all have no fate at all, except annihilation. That is the question I have tried to throw some little light on by the only kind of reasoning which

seems to me worth anything in these matters which admit of no absolute determination.

The inquiry has run, of necessity, more into the nature of a sermon than of what is called a philosophical essay. But that is from the very cause just mentioned, that no reasoning which does not take the existence of the world, and of Christianity, now all over the civilised parts of it, as the phenomena to be accounted for can advance a step beyond the uncertain and shifting position in which the old philosophers were obliged to leave it in the most highly educated city in the world, with its "altar to the unknown God." For they knew better than to believe seriously in the impossible monsters of the Pantheon. They saw the world as it is, and generally assumed that it had some kind of a creator, and could perhaps say as strongly as we can that every other way of accounting for it that had been suggested was a transparent absurdity or begged the whole question. That was a great deal to say, and perhaps enough to say negatively: for unfortunately they had no positive information about a Creator which they could rationally accept. Their divine cosmogonies were not much better than our materialistic or atheistic ones. One nation alone had that positive information and believed it, and very likely its early revelation to their ancestors had somehow got diffused among others, though incurably corrupted by the want of a written record. We have abundant proof now that even civilised people have a tendency to run into ever-increasing superstition, or else into its opposite, as soon as they begin to depend on any pretended spiritual information beyond our original records of the creation of the world and its present religious condition, while no other rational explanation can be given of either of them. "Development" has invariably meant development of error, to which there is no assignable limit.

The CHAIRMAN (Sir J. RISDON BENNETT, M.D., F.R.S.).-I will first ask you to present your thanks to Lord Grimthorpe for this valuable paper.

Mr. W. GRIFFITH, B.A.-Lord Grimthorpe's paper is so lucid and consistent that one feels regret that it is so short, and wishes it had extended to the length of the three papers he mentions. I regret that his lordship has not only not touched on the

ground of responsibility, but that he has not also discussed the question for what actions we are responsible, and what are the duties we have to perform, as well as the reasons why we should perform them. With regard to what has been said about Paley. Dr. Paley has been very much criticised because he has made expediency the rule of conduct, and some have gone even so far as to say, like the Dean of a certain college at Cambridge at the present day, that he was not a Christian. Unfortunately, Paley adopts a tenet which I think is not based on responsibility or on Christianity; it is that a person is to obey the law because it is expedient that he should; and that is far inferior to the teuet of Bishop Butler, that right and wrong are independent of the individual, and the individual is to obey the dictates of his conscience. Paley's mistake was in making what may be the measure of legislation for any State the measure by which an individual might act, now expediency is not the proper motive of conduct in an individual.

Rev. Prebendary WACE, D.D.-I think Lord Grimthorpe has said all that is necessary on this occasion; the last speaker seemed to make some complaint that his Lordship had not discussed the whole moral law-as I understood him to say; but I fear that could hardly be done in an evening:-but, perhaps you will allow me to offer one or two short observations on the general spirit of what his lordship has advanced. I am disposed to put rather higher than Lord Grimthorpe put it in one or two places, the general conviction of mankind respecting permanent responsibility both here and hereafter. The most extraordinary phenomenon in that respect is, perhaps, the ancient Egyptian religion. We have old documents, particularly the "Ritual of the Dead," which contain the most minute descriptions of the judgment passed on all souls. in the other world, a complete account of a sort of judicial tribunal to which they were all subject. Whether these were partly, as the late Canon Cook used to think, the remains of primeval revelation or not, it is certainly a very striking phenomenon. There can be again no question at all that the very motive, so to say, of some of the most interesting and most momentous of the writings of the Greek poets, for example, is the sense of responsibility hereafter the very reason that Antigone gives, for instance, for burying her brother against the express law of Creon is that she will have to live with the members of her family and

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be subject to all the great principles of right and justice always, whereas she will only have to live with Creon and those she is dealing with now for a short time. It is impossible for a play of that sort to be acted before an Athenian audience without a sense of responsibility lying very deep indeed in their hearts, and there are many signs of its existing similarly in that nation which had even a still stronger sense of righteousness than the Greeks, I mean the Romans; and I am not aware, I confess, of any early civilized nation or any nation that had the germ of civilization existing without a very strong apprehension in their minds, amounting to an abiding conviction, of a judgment in the next world, and of actions and conduct being rewarded or punished according to their virtue or vice.

That is a consideration which, of course, only strengthens Lord Grimthorpe's general arguments; and it is desirable to recognize that these great principles are, practically, human principles-you may find exceptions to them, but take human nature as a whole and you get a wonderful sense of responsibility hereafter as well as here. As to responsibility here it is well observed by Dr. Row, that everybody thinks everybody else responsible. There is a very good epilogue that I remember reading in a Hindoostanee book. A sceptical Hindoo went to the Dervish and asked him to solve him three questions:-"First of all," he said, "why should I believe in God? I cannot see Him-why should I believe in what I cannot see? You teach me as part of your religion in respect of a future world, that the evil spirit is tormented by fire, and you tell me, at the same time, that he is made of fire. How can he be tormented by that of which he is made? Thirdly, why should a man be punished for his actions when he is not responsible for them ?" The Dervish, instead of giving him an answer to his questions, took up a clod of mud and shied it at his head, which made the sceptic extremely angry, and he summoned the Dervish before the Cadi, who asked the Dervish what it meant. He said, “This man said he could not believe in what he could not see; let him show you the pain in his head before you take notice of it. He asked also how the evil spirit could be hurt by that of which he was made. He is made of mud, and I shied mud at him. Then he said men were not to be punished for their actions. Why does he want to punish me?” (Laughter and applause,)

No doubt, as the last speaker has said, perhaps next to the fact