than was ever Bentham's own head, and till even his heart appears to have lost all its native appreciation of right and wrong. There evidently can be no morality without a moral law; no moral law without a moral lawgiver, nor without a moral lawgiver who has the sovereign right to impose the law, that is, to command; whose word is a command, whose will is law. All morality, then, has necessarily its foundation in theology; and no man who denies the existence of God can recognize, consistently, any moral obligation whatever. The attempt to separate between religion and morals, and to obtain a solid foundation, independent of religious faith, for our moral superstructure, has always proved, and must always prove, no less disastrous to morals than to religion. Atheism, or even Pantheism, is incompatible with the recognition of moral distinctions. The foundation of all moral conception is the conception of God, and of God as Sovereign Lawgiver.

Now, Mr. Hildreth sneers, from the beginning of his book to the end, at those who, as he expresses it, believe "in a personal God. " We are aware that we have had some few transcendental philosophers, if philosophers they are, who have really fancied, that, in denying the personality of God, they were not making a profession of Atheism; but because these men and women, or rather, boys and girls, have dreamed silly dreams, and talked nonsense while seriously believing themselves to be speaking as oracles of wisdom, we know not that we should be debarred from calling men and notions by their right names. Doctrines pass current among us, are even entertained by many of whom we should have a right to expect better things, which, if not disguised by a peculiar terminology, which, if called right out, in good, plain English, by their proper names, would be regarded with all but universal horror, and recoiled from as from the Evil One himself. The transcendental dishonesty of dressing out infidel notions in the language of piety and faith, imported from Germany and propagated among us by the Dial-istic philosophers and poets, or rather philosopherlings and poetasters, has caused infinite con

fusion in the minds of good, plain, honest people, and cannot be condemned in terms too pointed or too severe. We call the man who denies the personality of God an Atheist, and we can rank him nowhere but with "the fool" of the Psalmist, who says "there is no God"; only he is rather an exaggeration of the Psalmist's fool, for he not only says there is no God, but has also the folly to try to persuade himself and others, that in denying God he does not deny him.

Mr. Hildreth assumes every where throughout his book, that to believe in a personal God- that is, in a God at all, a God who is, and knows that he is, and who doeth according to his will in the armies above and among the inhabitants of this lower world, and whose providence extends to all events, from the rearing of the infant colony, the overwhelming of the empire, to the consoling of the humble and contrite heart, and the falling of the feeble sparrow is the very height of absurdity, worthy only of a sneer, too egregious a folly to be seriously refuted. And yet, Mr. Hildreth has been brought up in a professedly Christian community, received an education from professedly Christian parents, at a professedly Christian university, and we should not be surprised, if he should even fancy himself a Christian, and take the charge of Atheism, which we bring against his doctrine, as a foul misrepresentation! But will he tell us what he means by an impersonal God? In what sense can his impersonal God be distinguished from Nature? And has he the effrontery to maintain, in open day, that a doctrine which identifies God and Nature is compatible with a belief in God at all? In this case, the radical conception of God as creator is rejected, and replaced, at best, only by the natura naturans of Spinoza, which no possible ingenuity can make the equivalent of God creating. Spinoza admits but one only substance with its infinite modes; and according to him, what we call the universe, and which is resolvable into thought and extension, is nothing but these two modes of the infinite Substance, which, according to him, it matters not whether called God or Nature.

Here you have merely substance and mode, where you should have cause and effect, creator and creation. The difference between the two is immense. The mode is a mere distinction in the substance itself, not a somewhat to be distinguished from the substance. Consequently, it is identically the substance itself, under a special aspect. Hence, God and the universe, conceived as substance and mode, are conceived to be identical; and therefore we may say, indifferently, the universe is God, or God is the universe. But the distinction of cause and effect, of creator and creation, is of an altogether different nature; it is a distinction, not in God, but between God and his creation, whereby the one is distinguished from the other, as a man's thought is distinguished from himself, or he himself from his volition. If we deny this distinction, if we deny that God exists independently of his works, that he works freely, sovereignly, from will, purpose, intention, design, we deny the fundamental conception of God, and are virtually Atheists. Now, in denying the personality of God, and identifying God and Nature, we do deny all this.

This established, we find our author talking of Morals, and undertaking to give us a Theory of Morals, after having denied the Lawgiver. God denied, where is the sovereign whose word is a command, whose will is law? You cannot have a law, unless you have a lawgiver. Well, where is your lawgiver? Nature? Do you know what you mean? What is Nature, but your own constitution? What are its laws, but your own natural tendencies, instincts, appetites, propensities, passions? What is it, then, to say that Nature imposes the law, but to say that man is bound to act out himself, follow his own inclinations, and live as he listeth; that is, but to say, that man is without law, is under no law, and may revel in the wildest license to which his nature prompts ? Is this your theory of morals? But even waiving this, we demand what right Nature has to impose the law, and whence the ground of my right or of my duty to obey Nature? What we demand, as the foundation of morals, is not only a lawgiver, but a lawgiver who has the right

to impose the law. Even admiting Nature could impose a law, whence would that which Nature imposes derive its strictly legal character? A man who knows so much as our author, who puts on such lofty airs, and with a mere puff demolishes all the great moralists, from Moses and Plato down to the author of " Archy Moore," ought not to have left so important a question unnoticed. Mr. Hildreth is, substantially, a Benthamite, for his slight modification of Benthamism amounts, practically, to nothing at all; and Jeremy Bentham was, as one of Dickens's characters says of another, "a humbug. There is no use in trying to smooth the matter over, or to invent fine phrases to cover up the intolerable stupidity, ignorance, and dogmatism of that prince of Útilitarians, a man innocent of all philosophical conceptions and of all philosophical tendency, wise in his own estimation only, because obstinately ignorant of the wisdom of others, an exaggeration of the very worst features of John Bull, crying out against cant and humbug, and all the time the very prince of canters and humbuggers, and the most egregious dupe of them both. We deny not that Jeremy Bentham may have had some good intentions. We deny not that the man even had a heart, for we are assured that he once actually loved, and continued to love to the day of his death, but all in his mind was a confused jumble, and he never succeeded in getting even one tolerably clear notion of the science of morals, either in its principle or in its details. The author of "Archy Moore," in the work before us, succeeds no better. He does not appear to want ability; he even gives evidence of having been originally endowed with talents of a very high order; and his capacity as a writer, when he chances to blunder on the right side, is more than respectable. But he has never clearly and distinctly grasped the real problems of the science he professes to treat; he has read some, thought some, but has never cleared up his thoughts, and determined their exact import and value.

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After rejecting what he calls the Platonic theory of morals, the Selfish, the Stoic, and the Epicurean sys

tems, our author proceeds to set forth his own, which is, That such actions as produce, or are supposed to produce, or tend to produce, immediately or ultimately, pleasure to sensitive beings other than the actor, are right actions; and that such as produce, are supposed to produce, or tend to produce, pain to sensitive beings other than the actor, are wrong actions. "The word good is employed," he says, " to describe any thing that gives us pleasure; the words bad and evil, any thing that gives us pain, whether a moral pleasure or a moral pain, or a pain or a pleasure of any other kind." So, then, when I perform an action which tends to the pleasure of others, I do good, and perform a right action; and, if I do it with the design or intention of giving pleasure, I am virtuous. On the other hand, when I perform an action which tends to give pain to others, I do evil, perform a wrong action, and I, if I have done it designedly, am vicious.

But will Mr. Hildreth inform us, whence he derives his proofs that good and evil are resolvable into simple pleasure and pain? If I ask him, What is good? He answers, Pleasure. Moral pleasure? Yes, or any other kind of pleasure. If I ask, What is evil? He answers, Pain. Moral pain? Yes, or any other kind of pain. Pleasure and pain are the exact synonymes of good and evil, with the single exception, that the pleasure be that of some being other than the actor, and also the pain. But whence this exception? If pleasure is good, why is not my pleasure as much a good as the pleasure of any other being? And what reason can be assigned why it is less right for me to promote my own pleasure than it is to promote the pleasure of others? If pain is evil, I would like to know why my pain is less an evil than another man's pain? And why it is not as wrong for me to pain myself as to pain another? Whence, then, we ask again, the ground of this exception? We do not deny, that an action, to be a right action, must possess the quality of contributing to the good of some other being or beings than the actor; but we say, if pleasure is good, no reason can be assigned why the pleasure of the actor should be excluded.