less adventurers of all kinds. From across the sea came the ships of Tarshish bringing gold, and silver, and ivory, and apes, and peacocks, and a thousand tales of El Dorado. Londoners were mad with the lust of gain in the spirit of Cain.' Muggleton the prophet, with that long black hair of his and the sly grey eye and the resolute lips, waited unmoved. Pleasure? If he wondered at anything it was to know what meaning there could be in the world. Riches? What purpose could they serve? To him it seemed that the Decalogue contained one wholly superfluous enactment: why should men covet? There would have been some reason in limiting the number of the commandments to nine; nine is the product of three times three. Think of that! This man in that wicked age must have appeared to many a standing miracle, if only for this reason, that he was the one man in London who was content, passing his days in a stubborn rapture, as little inclined for play or laughter as the sphinx in the desert, which the sand storms can beat against but never stir.

So far from Muggleton's influence and authority growing less as he grew older, it went on steadily increasing; there was a mystery and an awe that gathered round him, and latterly he was regarded rather as an inspired oracle than as a seer. The voice of prophecy ceased; he had left his words on record for all future ages, but from day to day his advice was asked, and people soon found it was worth listening to. In the latter years of his life his letters dealt with the ordinary affairs of men. People wrote to inquire about their matrimonial affairs, their quarrels, their business difficulties, whether they must conform to this or that enactment of the State, how they might outwit the persecutors and skulk behind the law. Muggleton replies with surprising shrewdness and good sense, and now and then exhibits a familiarity with the quips and quirks of the law that he can only have acquired by the necessity which suffering had laid upon him. His language is always rugged, for he had received little or no educacation; he is very unsafe in his grammar, but he has a plain, homely vocabulary, forcible and copious, which, like most mystics, he was compelled to enrich on occasion, and which he does not scruple to enrich in his own way. His style certainly improves as he gets older, and in these letters one meets now and then with passages that are almost melodious, the sentences following one another in a kind of plaintive rhythm, and sounding as you read them aloud like a Gregorian chant. He died of natural decay, the machine worn out. His last words were, 'Now hath God sent death unto me.' They laid him on his bed, and he slept and woke not. Nearly two hundred and fifty of the faithful followed him to his grave. It is clear that the sect had not lost ground as time moved on.

Not the least feature in this curious chapter of religious history is that the Muggletonians should have survived as a sect to our own days. As late as 1846 an elaborate index to the Muggletonian

writings was issued, and the Divine Songs of the Muggletonians, written exclusively by believers, show that there has been a strange continuity of composition among them, and that, too, such composition as ordinary mortals have never known the like of. Yet Muggleton never broke forth into verse. Joanna Southcott could not keep down her impulse to pour forth her soul in metre; Muggleton is never excited the emotional had no charm for him. So, too, he never cared for music, he makes no allusion to it. Nay, he speaks slightingly of worship, of prayer and praise, especially of congregational worship. It was allowable in little men, a concession to the weak which the strong in the faith might be expected to dispense with sooner or later. For himself, isolated and self-contained, he could do without the aids to faith which the multitude ask for and find support in. He held himself aloof; he had no sympathy to offer, he asked for none; nay, he did not even need his followers, he could do without them. The question for them was, could they do without him? For more than two centuries they have kept on vehemently answering No!

Of late years a class of specialists has risen up among us who have treated us to quite a new philosophy-to wit, the philosophy of religion. To these thinkers I leave the construction of theories on Muggleton's place in the history of religion or philosophy; to them, too, I leave the question of what was the secret of his success and power. Much more interesting to me is the problem how the sect has gone on retaining its vitality. Perhaps the great secret of that permanence has been that Muggleton did not give his followers too much to believe or too much to do. He disdained details, he was never precise and meddlesome. If the Muggletonians wished to pray, let them; to sing, there was no objection; to meet together in their conventicles, it was a harmless diversion. But they must manage these things themselves, and provide for difficulties as they arose. It was no part of the prophet's office to make by-laws which might require to be altered any day. Thus it came about that the sect was left at Muggleton's death absolutely unfettered by any petty restraints upon its freedom of development. The believers must manage their own affairs. There is one God and Muggleton is his prophet-that was really the sum and substance of their creed. That followed on a small scale which is observable on a large scale among the Moslems: the prophet's followers found themselves more and more thrown back upon their prophet till he became almost an object of adoration. The creed of Islam without Mahomet would be to millions almost inconceivable; the Muggletonian God without Muggleton would not be known.

Says her Royal Highness, looking over my shoulder, 'You have written quite enough about those crazy, vulgar people. It's all oldworld talk. There are no prophets now; there never will be any more.'

No more prophets! The prophetical succession never stops, never will stop. When Muggleton died Emanuel Swedenborg was a boy of ten; twenty years afterwards the new prophet was walking about London just as the old one had done, living the same lonely life, conversing with the angels and writing of heaven and hell and conjugal love, and-well, a great deal else besides; and, odd coincidence, it was in that same Eastcheap where Muggleton had damned the Quakers in 1653 that the Swedenborgians held their first assembly in 1788, ten or twelve years before Joanna Southcott came to London, and less than twenty years before Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were born or thought of. No, no. The prophets are not improved off the face of the earth. They never will be. They will turn up again and again. You can no more hope to exterminate them by culture than you can hope to produce them by machinery. Propheta nascitur non fit. For once her Royal Highness was wrong.

AUGUSTUS JESSOPP.

TECHNICAL EDUCATION.

REPORT OF THE ROYAL COMMISSIONERS.

A GREAT deal of interest has been taken during the last eight or ten years in the subject of Technical Education, and a proportionate impulse has been given to its promotion. Influential people, especially manufacturers, and the great City Guilds, have suddenly awaked to the fact that other nations were rapidly rivalling us in the markets of the world, nay, even in our own markets, and that one main cause was their superior means and appliances for training apprentices and workmen in the manipulation of material used in their respective trades. The discovery has not been made too soon; in some respects a good deal too late.

Two steps, however, of great value have been recently taken whereby there is every prospect of lost ground being regained, so far as that may be possible, and of the subject being thoroughly well attended to for the future-viz. 1st, the establishment of the City and Guilds' Institute for the Advancement of Technical Education'; 2nd, the fact that artisans themselves are also waking up to understand something of the need which exists for largely increased taste and skill in their respective trades. For it is of little use, on the one hand, if public-spirited individuals or corporations devote time and money to promote schools and classes for workmen and apprentices, if there be no willingness to receive, or even a disposition to reject, the education thus offered them; neither will it much avail on the other, if artisans are ready to be taught, but do not find suitable instruction provided.

It scarcely needs urging that this instruction cannot in the present state of things be provided by the workmen themselves. Either the State, local or central public bodies, or private individuals must establish technical schools, and bear the difference of expense between the annual cost and the students' fees. This of course is needful in almost all educational enterprises, as well for much of the higher class education as for that which is elementary. But what does require to be impressed on all friends of technical education is that the workmen themselves must not only be enlisted as active agents in the work of inducing their mates and requiring their children

to profit by the classes opened for their benefit, but must be invited, nay besought, to give their counsel as to the kind and methods of technical training required. For they alone know where the shoe pinches; and while men of learning and taste must always be needful as leaders and guides in the work of systematic technical training, there is a danger that both they and benevolent individuals or state officials will ignore the still greater necessity of associating skilled and intelligent workmen with themselves both in devising, arranging, and practically conducting the classes and methods by which the instruction is to be given.

Hence, while we hail with delight and thankfulness the liberal and even munificent spirit in which the City Guilds during the last few years have been devoting large sums to the promotion of this movement, we feel it to be a matter of even greater moment that various highly intelligent artisans have been actively engaged since 1873-4 alike in contributing the benefit of their views and experience to those who lead that movement, and have been themselves engaged in teaching their fellow-workmen, both journeymen and apprentices, how to apply science and art to the manufacturing articles in their respective trades. In the classes of the Artisans' Institute formerly held in St. Martin's Lane, now transferred to the City and Guilds' Institute, Cowper Street, Finsbury; in the School of Art conducted by that Institute in Lambeth; more recently still in Leeds, Nottingham, and other prominent centres, but especially in the Polytechnic Young Men's Christian Institute, Regent Street, London, we find just the kind of instruction being given which, to a certain extent, has for many years been imparted on the Continent, which meets the actual wants of the English workman more thoroughly than any that had previously been offered him, and without which no amount of theoretical teaching will ever make him a really efficient workman. Lastly, we find an increasing number of London artisans forming an organisation among themselves for the threefold purpose of promoting the formation of such classes in the neighbourhood of the workmen's homes; of collecting, formulating, and communicating the views and experience of skilled workmen in every trade in regard to the right views and methods of technical instruction and training; and of arousing the attention of the Trades' unions of the country to the duty and need of helping on the movement, thus obtaining their valuable assistance in securing the attendance both of journeymen and apprentices at such centres of instruction as may be most available for the purpose.

And now at this critical period in the career of our manufacturing industry, and just when both wealthy friends of technical education and intelligent artisans are beginning to be deeply impressed with a sense of its importance, the results of nearly three years' strenuous labour on the part of a few public-spirited gentlemen,