ferent thesis to maintain. Draw your picture of the physical woes of mankind in the very darkest hues that truth will warrant. Count up the diseases which prey upon health and life. How vast and fearful the array! Number up the political evils that oppress the groaning earth: war, slavery, poverty, each with its dismal train of woes. Paint the social evils that prey on the human race: class-jealousies, intemperance, and prostitution. How endless and various the mischiefs which they inflict on mortals! Look at the intellectual errors of humanity: false ideas in politics, like the divine right of kings to rule the earth, or the duty of the temporal sovereign to enforce obedience to the State religion with the sword, or the right to enslave captives, from which nearly all systems of serfdom have arisen. Look at the false religions, with their awful trains of attendant curses; at true religion, with the corruptions into which it has fallen, and the errors with which it has been mixed up. The Christian doctrine is that these evils all flow from human sinfulness and error; that had man been ever obedient to God he would never have known such burdens, and that if he returns to obedience he will ultimately escape from these unspeakable sorrows. But Mr. Parker was compelled by his theological position to reckon all such things blessings. His logic was very briefly and sharply put. He said, "God is infinite goodness and infinite power. Infinite goodness must desire only a perfectly good creation, and infinite power must be able to produce the perfect world desired by infinite goodness." When a thinker goes so far as this, he ought to draw his conclusion in fair and plain terms. That conclusion must be that, since God has created this world, it must be a perfect world. To state such a result coolly would be its refutation to all unbiased and thoughtful minds. But Parker does not meet the question frankly; he feels that the . inquiry whether pain and sin can have existence in a perfect world is sure to confront him. Hence he divides the question, and, overlooking sin as far as possible, supposes one to ask, "Is it possible that there shall be pain in the animal world, which the infinite God has created from perfect motives, of perfect material, for a perfect purpose, and as a perfect means thereto?" Parker answers, "Yes. I cannot clear up all difficulties. . . . I shall be obliged to refer to the idea of God as FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXV.-26

infinite, and from that deduce the value of the function of the special forms of sin and misery. . . . When I know that there is an infinite God I am sure that his purpose is good and his means adequate. I spontaneously trust therein. This instinctive trust outruns the reflective demonstrations of science." Really, Mr. Parker has nothing further to say on this matter. His entire belief may be summed up in a few words: "I believe that pain, sin, misery, and death, may all exist in a perfect world." There he should have left the matter. But there he was not content to leave it, and from this point forth all that he writes is pure sophistry. Parker proceeds to say, "It is both pleasant and instructive to learn the use and function of things by themselves, by an inductive study of the facts, and not be obliged to deduce the conclusion merely from the idea of God." Indeed, it would be, Mr. Parker.

To help him through his perilous task, a distinction is drawn between absolute and partial evil: absolute evil is uncompensated evil; partial evil is compensated evil. Parker's aim is to show that most of the evil known to us has its compensations; and where he cannot do this he resorts to the infinite goodness to supplement all logical deficiencies. Poisonous plants have a disgusting odor and are unpleasant to the eye. The lobelia which would sicken the animals that might eat it reads nature's riot-act to them all in its evil scent. Such pain is benevolent. The rabbit tears his skin in the brambles, and would wear his life away but for the benevolent pain which warns him. The dog would soon wear off his feet on the sharp stones, but pain ensuing makes him careful, and he goes four-legged all his days. Lobsters and crabs lose their legs quite often, but it is of no consequence, since new ones will grow; but their sensitiveness to heat and cold keeps them in just those positions where it is best for them to live. This sensitiveness in dogs and lobsters is benevolent. So is the uneasiness of birds of passage as the time of migration draws nigh. The fear which wings the flight of the hare is a protection to his weakness. The pain of animals on the loss of their young has a like beneficent design. Under its impulse the timid partridge and the cowardly hen grow very courageous in defense of their offspring. When its work is accomplished the benevolent pain

ceases.

All this is perfectly irrelevant. The question is not whether certain compensations attend most of the pain, sorrow, misery, and sins with which the world swarms, and whether we may not reasonably conjecture that, with a complete acquaintance with all the facts involved, we should find this hold true of all misery and sin. Could this be demonstrated in every particular, it would merely show that there is a providential care that soothes our woes, not that the woes are unreal. I can hardly think that Parker could have been unconscious of the sophistry of his procedure. When a man lies at the last gasp it may be a comfort that tender hands perform the last offices of friendship about his bed, but the presence of death is not the less significant or appalling. The plain issue is this: "Is our world perfect, or a perfect part of a perfect whole?" Parker replies dubiously: "The Creator is infinitely powerful and infinitely good. Infinite goodness could have acted only on the impulse of love in the act of creation, only with the intent of securing the highest welfare of each and all; and infinite power must have been able to execute these plans of the supreme benevolence, and so..." Here Mr. Parker hesitates. Logically he ought to declare the actual world he had been trying so hard to reform a perfect world, and he knew it too well to affirm that. "I cannot explain every thing," he says deprecatingly, as if he could explain nearly every thing, and were only protesting against too severe handling for failure in a trifle or two. "There are compensations to much of our pain," he mildly suggests. But the compensation is fugitive, incomplete, and immensely out of proportion to the evil. It has not the least tendency to prove that the world is perfect; at best it is a mere hint, a wavering suggestion, of an intervening Providence. Then, too, there are evils for which even Mr. Parker can detect no compensation. But he insinuates that this doubtless proceeds from the narrowness of our range of vision. And the conclusion is hinted that, if we could only obtain this larger view of compensation, every thing would stand forth free from all difficulty. In all this Mr. Parker is even painfully and pitifully off the track. The question, we repeat, is not whether there be more or less compensation for ills undergone here, but how there comes to be such measureless mischiefs and wickedness to compensate. Confronted with this question, Parker

confesses the existence and magnitude of existing evils, and refers us to his notion of an infinitely perfect God as the only solution. Yet this is a solution which does not solve the difficulty; not only does not solve it, but the argument is left in such a position that a Pessimist might easily retort it on the stump-orator of Music Hall. He might say, "I entirely agree with you; there has been no supernatural revelation, and I think there will be none. We must gather our notions of God painfully, as we can, from such evidence as we may attain. You deduce from your philosophy the notion of a perfect God, who must have created the world perfect. I do not see that your idea of him is really based on intuition, and I know by intuition the existence of unspeakable evils in the existing world. From these evils, attested by intuition, I infer that the Supreme either is weak, and cannot hinder evil, or careless, and suffers it through negligence, or angry and malignant, so as to delight in it, or just, and therefore inflicts it on the disobedient." The Pessimist would be far more logical than Parker. So we reach the result that the skeptic of Music Hall was totally unable to set up any coherent or tenable scheme of religion in place of that he sought to destroy. We find him claiming the sanction of intuition for great religious truths which the intuitions do not warrant, speaking of facts of consciousness as if they all had intuitional value, pretending an analysis of the religious history of our race which he never really made, denying intuitive convictions which would put his religious system in peril, and deducing from an arbitrary conception of God the perfection of the creation, while admitting the awful presence of evil in the material and spiritual realm. We pronounce his speculations crude, incoherent, and contradictory. They make measureless demands upon our faith at the very moment that we see them to be untenable in philosophy. We take leave of his theology, sure that it can never exert any great control over those who are careful students of its fundamental principles.

ART. III.-THE TEMPERANCE REFORM.

THE use of intoxicants for the sake of the pleasurable effect, the methods whereby the brain and the whole nervous system may be drugged into artificial repose, and the mind exalted into an artificial sense of happiness, seem to have been known from the earliest ages. In the twenty-fourth century before Christ Noah "planted a vineyard, and he drank of the wine, and was drunken." Homer, who lived eight or nine hundred years before Christ, often speaks of wine, and also describes Helen, the wife of Menelaus, as preparing for her guests a nepenthe, a mystic beverage, the effects of which, as set forth by the poet, are recognized as simply intoxication.

Doubtless, even in those early times, various kinds of intoxicants were employed. The East addicted itself chiefly to opium and hemp, while the Western nations had recourse mostly to alcoholic beverages. For many centuries none but those which are now classified as ferinented drinks were known. Intoxicating wine or beer was obtained from the juice of the grape, the apple, the pear, from honey and milk, and from preparations of wheat, barley, and the various cereals. These beverages were sometimes made still more intoxicating by the addition of powerful drugs of various kinds.

In their simplest forms, however, these alcoholic drinks were regarded as liable to be used to the injury of the consumer. The Hebrew Scriptures abound in warnings. The Chinese historians claim that one of their emperors, eleven centuries before the Christian era, prohibited the use of wine because of the innumerable evils which it produces. The Carthagenians by law forbade the use of wine in the camps of their armies, and also commanded every magistrate to abstain totally during the term of his public service. Draco punished drunkenness with death. Lycurgus, King of Thrace, alarmed by the effects of wine among his subjects, commanded all the vines in his kingdom to be destroyed; and centuries later Terbaldus, a Bulgarian prince, enforced the same stern but effectual measure among his people.

The invention of the process of distillation increased the