abhorrence as he used against the theologians of that day. He compares them to serpents, and poisonous adders, and concludes with the most dreadful denunciation he could possibly utter, he tells them that it is absolutely impossible for them to escape from the damnation of hell. And why? Because they were unwilling to acknowledge their own ignorance, or allow anyone to shew them their error, and refused to permit any enlightenment of the poor people, for fear of the destruction of their vested interest in timehonoured abuses, and tyrannical usurpations. The God of these elect Jews, by their teaching, was as narrow-minded a being as themselves; his ways and doings according to their catechism of theism was a caricature of justice, and to all intents and purposes, as far as the mass of men were concerned, they were better without any such Deity altogether.

The very same thing holds good in this day, and fully justifies the assevertions of those who contend that the current idea of God is misleading, irreverent, and utterly repugnant to all sound notions of absolute truth and justice.

The truth is, the entire scheme of theism is vitiated by the false position taken by man in the scale and order of nature. Let man descend from his pedestal of self-assumed immortality, let him understand the nature of his mind, that he is mortal, and that he must have a higher nature given him before he can really know God, and then the jarring and discordant noise of contending theists, will be regarded as a public nuisance.

The eternal problem of evil existing as absolute force in nature has bothered the wits, and deranged the minds of the millions of the human race. Upon this foundation-stone of fundamental antithesis of theological good and evil, all ancient and modern sacerdotal science has built its temples, churches, conventicles, and ranting chapels. And this is continued in christendom, in defiance of the warning in the opening scene in the great drama of life in the Bible, that with this asphyxiating compound, the serpent poisoned the first messengers of the true God, by pouring the leprous distilment into their ears by means of his lying tongue.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE BEAST OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT.

IN preceding chapters the proposition was attempted to be logically formulated, that nature is marsupial to the human race, and since man, as a mode of universal existence, is still in a fœtal condition of growth and life, in the great womb of cosmical gestation, it follows that he is yet unborn to the glorious fact of self-existent or immortal life. If this position has not been truly demonstrated, it must, in the present work at all events, pass for its worth as an hypothesis open to debate in the philosophy of logical probabilities. In the meanwhile, for a specimen of the absurd method of pleading which intuitionalists and others adopt, to prove their claim to immortal self-existence, I furnish an extract from the "Observations upon Religio Medici,'" written by Sir Thomas Browne, M.D., of Norwich, of Sir Kenelm Digby, published in the seventeenth century.

This erudite Digby protests against Dr. Browne's confession, that the immortality of the human soul is not capable of logical demonstration by any exact method of scientific proof, but must be assumed gratuitously, or "taken for "granted," without evidence, as a matter of faith, or intuitional consciousness. Sir K. Digby boldly asserts, that the immortality of the human disembodied soul is demonstrable by a man of science, and he offers for the reader's acceptance, the following sublimely ludicrous piece of shoddy" made logic, for genuine syllogistic argument. Digby says:

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"I assure you, my lord, the little philosophy that is allowed "me for my share, demonstrates this proposition to me, as "well as faith delivereth it, which our good physician will "not admit in his. To make good this assertion here were

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very unreasonable, since to do it exactly, (and without "exactness, it were not demonstration,) requires a total "survey of the whole science of bodies, and of all the opera"tions that we are conversant with, of a rational creature; "which I having done with all the succinctness I have been " able to explicate so knotty a subject with, hath taken me up in the first draught near two hundred sheets of paper (!) I shall, therefore, take leave of this point with "only this note, that I take the immortality of the soul, "under his favour, to be of that nature, that to them only "that are not versed in the ways of proving it by reason, it "is an article of faith, to others it is an evident conclusion of "demonstrative science."

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There is a practice known to schoolboys by the term fudging." It might, for the credit of schoolboy nature, be supposed that this unfair method of solving difficult problems would be confined to marbles. It is, however, sometimes resorted to in the case of arithmetical or mathematical perplexities.

Thus we may imagine the case of a youth who has exhausted all his persuasive powers upon some refractory case in duodecimals, and is at length mentally prostrate under the combined influences of nervous irritability and impatience, bordering upon absolute despair, for what with his tears, and his frequent application of snuffling nose to coat cuffs, &c., wiping and rubbing his slate, it has become so impracticably greasy, as to be no longer a fitting instrument, obediently to the frantic efforts of his "grubby" fingers and pencil, to receive hieroglyphical numerals of mental efforts. The baffled student resorts in his distress to some school fellow who has "done" the sum before him, or perhaps finds a tutor's desk open, wherein chances to be a key; clutching the answer, he has only to make the two ends of his subject meet; and he is no school boy if he cannot achieve this feat.

ORDINARY MODE OF SOLVING DIFFICULT PROBLEMS.

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In a marvellously short period of time the whole working of his sum, beautifully drawn out with conscientious scrupulosity of detail, may be found in his ciphering book, but alas! it will not bear too rigid inspection, for it has been "fudged;" and there is a dreadful "wolf" concealed in the scales of the sweet looking arithmetical music, so that a few minutes. performance upon the ingeniously contrived instrument in question, would suffice to disclose the frightfully unsound foundation of the novel process resorted to to solve difficult problems. The youth, whose performance is now under rigid investigation, has worked up to a foregone conclusion, and made the answer shew itself just as it was wanted for the particular occasion. Just so it has been with this erudite philosopher, Sir Kenelm Digby. He admits having used two hundred sheets of paper in finding the answer which he had previously determined to be possessed of before he set out to seek it. And then, blinking the fact that he has not solved the riddle, propounded in the "Ecclesiastes," of numbering the thing that is wanting, Digby coolly wishes his reader to understand that he has actually squared the circle. He does not directly say as much, but he "fudges" his argument by shuffling away edgeways like a crab, and saying, "I shall "take leave of this point, &c.!"

Sir Thomas Browne, the worthy physician whom Digby criticises so freely, is a much fairer man than his assailant, but he is a jumble of paradoxes. He actually maintains that those people who deny the possibility of witchcraft are a sort of infidels and atheists; whilst he himself is, on the other hand, so amazingly superstitious as to believe that disembodied ghosts or spirits may hold sexual intercourse with either man or woman! Browne's definition of faith is eminently that conventional misapplication of metaphysical thought that has no many million followers in the world. Dr. Browne maintains that there are not impossibilities enough in his faith to please him, for to believe only possibilities is not faith but philosophy; and yet he does not scruple to condemn transubstantiation, on the ground of its repugnance to the deliverance of philosophic thought. He says, that to

believe in only one inhabited world is a conclusion of "faith!" He means of "ignorance," which, with many more of the genus homo besides himself, passes for faith.

In one place he maintains that God has not made a creature that can comprehend him, for such comprehension is a privilege of his own nature, and cannot see that if this is God's own privileged nature, so also is self-existence or immortal life, which he claims for man. The nature of the holy and eternal Spirit is unknown, he says, and admits, at page 143, that conventional theism has no truth in it for him. The precise words employed by him are:

"I do confess I am an atheist, I cannot persuade myself "to honour what the world adores." For he contends that the actual God of the world at large is "self-interest;" and that men have postulated their own deities to kotou to.

In another place he says:

"I perceive that the wisest heads prove, at last, almost all "sceptics, and stand Janus-like in the field of knowledge."

Dr. Browne's cosmical philosophy would surely satisfy the ostrich-like digestion of the most erudite among metaphysical pundits. He says at page 69:

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"God being all things is contrary unto nothing, out of which (sic) were made all things, and so nothing become something, and omneity informed nullity into an essence."

At page 171 we find the following exegesis of the dogmas of immaterialists:

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"In our study of anatomy, there is a mass of mysterious philosophy, and such as reduced the very heathens to "divinity; yet amongst all those rare discourses and curious pieces I find in the fabric of man, I do not so much con"tent myself, as in that I find not there is an organ or "instrument for the rational soul; for in the brain, which "we term the seat of reason, there is not anything of "moment more than I can discover in the cranium of a "beast, and this is a sensible and no inconsiderable argument "of the inorganity of the soul, at least in that sense we "usually so conceive it."

When Sir Thomas Browne leaves the studio of pains