it leaps to leaf and flower on Olivet. We have no hope that any one will gain a true perception of Christianity as a development of the moral nature of man, until he sees that it is Religion bursting out into poetry and song. Religion walks, Christianity is rather the sacred dance to a divine strain; Religion talks, Christianity sings; Religion is prose, Christianity is poetry. The one finds its oracle in the Conscience, the other knows no such lash: it lives only in its Love. How well has it been named the GOSPEL ! It is God's-spell. Socrates said that the Soul could only be healed of its maladies by certain magic charms; and these were beautiful reasons lo, the spell of God, the divine fascination thrown on man, till he plight his troth to the Perfect Truth and Beauty; the Orphic strain has bound the powers of Hell; he sings at the stake; he can look down upon Paradise.

THE LECTURERS AT THE MERCANTILE ON STATISTICS.

WHEN Aristotle declared that Virtue was exact equilibrium, and that our qualities deviating from the mean produced vices only, he gave the embryo-statement of all the moral and political bearings of Statistical Science. Since then, the human mind has been feeling in this direction for the continent of knowledge needed to balance that which it had attained, until, at last, at a gaming table was invented the Theory of Probabilities. The Chevalier de Méré, a great gambler, proposed to Pascal two problems first, to find in how many throws of dice it might be expected to obtain two sixes with two dice; second, to determine the lot of two players after a certain number of throws,-that is to say, to fix the proportion in which they should divide the stake, supposing they consented to separate without finishing the game. Pascal soon solved these questions. But when the Chevalier de Méré was satisfied, his own mind was not; he began a series of curious analyses, which he communicated to Fermát, and furnished a basis for the subsequent speculations of Leibnitz, Huygens, Buffon, Condorcet, Laplace, and Fourier.

With Fourier the speculative view was carried as far as it was needed: the Theory stood a Soul awaiting its body. As the Soul had been maturing in these great brains, the body had been maturing in the unconscious and official routine of Governments. It

had been the habit of the European Governments to preserve, without reference to the use which was to be made of them, the statistics of their nations and cities: the number of murders, thefts and other crimes; the number of prostitutes and houses of prostitution; of suicides, and the methods of suicide; of the insane: these were all carefully recorded. For a long time such statistics remained raw material, because the man had not come who knew how to use them. But as the old geometer cried, "Geometry is the praise of God," so did there come a statist who read off the dry rows of figures as the score of a divine music; one who should marry the Soul of Theory to the Body of Fact.

This man was M. A. Quetelet, who, under the patronage of Prince Albert and the Grand Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, has published several important works, chief of which are those entitled, Man and the Development of his Faculties, or an Essay on Social Physics, and Letters on the Theory of Probabilities as applied to the Moral and Political Sciences. The latter is a really great work, and at once began its revolution of all the Moral and Social Sciences. It was the embryo in which were folded the Positive Philosophy of Comté, and the Philosophy of Civilization taught by Buckle. Its translation into English by Olinthus Gregory Downes was the first great impulse given to the Life-Assurance Societies, which were found to rest on no accidents, but on unvarying laws.

But it may be asked, what was there in this innocent-sounding Theory of Probabilities to work such revolutions? Simply this: that in it was proved, by those proverbially stubborn things, Facts, that all the events and actions of Human Society, hitherto regarded as mere chance-work, or the result of human will, were strung on a thread of immutable Law. There were found to be relentless averages governing social deeds and misdeeds; each year and each nation bearing their crop of crimes of all descriptions, and their deaths and births, with a precision equal, in the long run, to the regularity of seasons and tides. We need only make a few extracts from M. Quetelet's various writings to give the reader a distinct impression of his meaning and the extent of its bearing.

"The word chance serves conveniently to veil our ignorance; we employ it to explain effects of whose causes we are ignorant. To one who knew how to foresee all things there would be no

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chance; and the events which now appear to us most extrac nary would have their natural and necessary causes in the Le manner as do the events which seem most common with us."

In everything which concerns crime, the same numbers recur with a constancy which can not be mistaken; and this is the case even with the crimes which seem independent of human foresight-such, for instance, as murders, which are generally committed after quarrels arising from circumstances apparently casual. Nevertheless we know from experience that every year there not only take place nearly the same number of murders, but that even the instruments by which they are committed are employed in the same proportion."

We need only say here, that the statistics of all nations bore out these statements, without exception. It was shown that not only were there immutable averages governing crimes, and great social events, but that the number of marriages were predictable, and that there was a definite number of persons who forgot to prepay letters, or who misdirected them. These became universally known and admitted facts.

M. Quetelet verified his principle of the pervading presence of fixed laws, by discovering them in the very regions which symbolized chance. The games of chance were shown to be games of certainty. For instance, in throwing dice it was proved that in 5000 throws the various sides of the die had come uppermost in about equal numbers; an average was kept up and as more and more throws were made, it was shown that at last unity itself would be reached. So a.so in the drawing of white and black balls from a bag, they came out at first in irregular proportions, —i. e., a black ball might be drawn out six times to a white; but Quetelet caused 4096 drawings to be made, and the mean appeared.

Had he lived in the days of Faust, he would have been inevitably burnt as one familiar with the black art; for, starting out with his principle, he made several predictions which were verified. One example will suffice. When, in 1827, the statistics of the tribunals of France and Belgium appeared, this great statist wrote as follows: "In 1826 our (Belgium) tribunals condemned 84 individuals out of 100 accused; and the French tribunals 65; the English tribunals have also condemned 65 per cent. during the last twenty years. Thus, out of 100 accused, 16 only have been acquitted with us, and 35 in France, as in England. These

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, s0 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?