And the rest of the civilised world is to look on at this, and not to raise a word of protest, but to shrug its shoulders and echo the parrot-cry of the writer I have before quoted:-'the Russian Jew is like no other Jew.' If the native of the gloomiest slum of Bethnal Green were pointed out to the world as the type of John Bull, would any one accept it? Let '0. K.' build a high wall round a certain portion of Whitechapel; let her be enabled to enforce that no Jew in the home counties shall be allowed to reside anywhere but within that wall; that no Jew shall follow any trade or any profession requiring a legal apprenticeship; that only a percentage of the children shall be taught in the schools, the rest depending on any training their toiling parents can find time to give them, and I will undertake in twenty years' time to turn out from within that limit as perfect a specimen of the Russian Jew as can be found at the present day in the Pale of Settlement.

Let the Russian authorities say to the Jews, 'We do not want you; we will give you so much time in which to realise your assets, and shake the dust of our country off your feet: here are your passports; whoever remains beyond the stipulated period, or ever returns, does so at his peril.' Provided the given time be ample, though people may differ as to the wisdom of the step, no one will be able to blame the Government that chooses to think it will prosper more without a certain fragment of its population, or find fault with it for acting up to its lights.

But as long as a Government heaps cruelty and outrage on a helpless crowd of people, and only lets them go in such guise as to force other nations either in genuine self-defence to shut them out, or else allow them to flood their markets-as they have done those of England-with masses of unskilled labour and absolute poverty which reduce the rate of wages and increase the misery of the poor native population, it becomes not only the right but the duty of those other nations to lift up their voices in indignant protest; to try and shame authorities that call themselves civilised from pursuing the path of barbarism they have marked out for themselves; to bring to the knowledge of the Tsar laments that, for humanity's sake if for no other, the Englishman trusts can never have reached that august ear before.

It has been said that England should abolish the opium trade and put an end to the trading companies of Africa before remonstrating about the treatment of Russian Jews. What similarity is there between the cases? Because no English ministry has brought in or passed a law to prevent the growing or selling of opium, but says 'no one but the Government shall grow it,' 2 can England be

2 Since this was written the House of Commons has passed a resolution vindicating its own virtue in the matter of opium at the expense (should the resolution pass into anything more important) of the Indian taxpayer.

likened to a country which proclaims 'A certain number of Jews own distilleries, and the country is flooded with poisoned spirits-therefore we will exterminate all the Jews'? Or, because England does not prevent any trading company from exploring and settling Africa, and since in all companies there are certain numbers of men who do not know how to manage uncivilised natures without ill-treating, is she to have no right to remonstrate against a Government that commands its subordinates to treat a section of its subjects with as much cruelty as can be found by oppressive ingenuity within the four corners of a cruel and unjust law?

In the name of civilisation and justice I claim the right—a right shared by all honest men and women-to appeal to public opinion on behalf of the victims of a relentless persecution, alien alike to Christian precept and modern morality. England, that ruined the slave trade, sheltered the Huguenots, and raved at Bulgarian atrocities -remembering her Disraelis, Jessels, Montefiores, Herschells, and many others-surely has some claim to make the voice of her citizens heard in protest against a revival of medieval barbarism directed against the more helpless menbers of a race which has giv en her many worthy and useful sons.

ELLEN DESART.

WITNESSES TO THE UNSEEN.

It has lately been said by Mr. Pater that we have all lost our faith.' This remark, however little we may consider it true, is felt by most thinking men to represent a truth. And the truth it represents was more exactly expressed to the present writer by a veteran and very acute observer of our times, who was commenting on the change which the last fifty years have brought about in public opinion. When I was young,' he remarked, 'a man who advocated agnosticism or negation in matters of religion had to veil his full meaning, and to assume an apologetic tone; now precisely the same holds of the man who defends religious certainty. Cultivated public opinion was then in favour at all events of theism as unquestionable; now it is equally pronounced against all religious certainty as certainty.' Mr. Leslie Stephen has recently been maintaining that even Cardinal Newman shared in the fundamental uncertainty, which is so widespread, as to the reasonableness of religious faith-a contention which, as I shall presently explain, seems to me to be based on an extraordinary misapprehension. But the Cardinal certainly understood this new development of the Zeitgeist and foresaw it thirty-five years ago. He expressed the incoming phase, with characteristic point and force, as follows:

It is absurd for men in our present state to teach anything positively about the next world, that there is a heaven or a hell, or a last judgment, or that the soul is immortal, or that there is a God. It is not that you have not a right to your own opinion, as you have a right to place implicit trust in your physician, or in your banker; but undeniably such persuasions are not knowledge, they are not scientific." This, I say, is the true account of the new phase of public opinion to which Mr. Pater refers. No religious truth is admitted as acknowledged; and those who hold to dogmatic Christianity or even definite Theism and they are not a few in spite of Mr. Pater's statement to the contrary—are deprived of the support to the imagination which an age of faith afforded. Further, as the effect of public opinion cannot be neutral, as absence of confidence means presence of doubt,

'Fundamental belief,' says Mr. Pater in the Fortnightly Review for last December, is gone in almost all of us.'

2 See Idea of a University, p. 387.

VOL. XXIX.-No. 172.

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the conditions of our time render faith especially liable to trial in a sensitive and receptive mind. What is widely questioned seems thereby to be questionable. That support which individuals have a right to look for from healthy public opinion in a healthy society is taken away; and each one is thrown on his own resources in a degree which actually lessens the proofs available for religious belief. Corporate action, mutual confirmation and support, are a usual and natural condition of trust and knowledge in religion as in other things, and doubt in the air renders them to a great extent impossible. A panic will cause a run on a bank, which in ordinary circumstances would be felt to be, and would actually be, safe enough. The fever of doubt makes each man want greater tangible security than is needful or attainable in the ordinary course of life. Each client wants to count his gold, each believer wants to realise all his reasons-to have them in his hand and before his eyes. The tacit compact of mutual trust and forbearance is broken; and disorganisation and ruin are the consequence.

There was another time, often compared both by believers and doubters to the present: the time when the old Roman virtue and religion-noble in part as things then were-had given way to dissoluteness of life and scepticism of intellect. Open the pages of Sextus Empiricus, and you find a startling anticipation of the state of things which Mr. Pater observes among us. We are accustomed to look on the subjectivity of our own time as peculiar, the outcome in the popular mind of the movement inaugurated by Descartes; the extension of the principle of self-scrutiny, and of the critical examination of our faculty of knowing, its limitations and its analysis. The relativity of knowledge, again, is regarded as an outcome of this inquiry-indicated by Kant among others, and popularised for Englishmen by Herbert Spencer. Locke's incisive criticism on the arbitrary assumptions of dogmatic schoolmen is an inheritance of which we are proud. That the syllogism is a petitio principii—and hence that deductive reasoning is sterile-is a view which we gain from J. S. Mill. The existence of evil is held by us to be a fact which the modern mind has for the first time realised in its bearing on Theism. Yet the third century of the Christian era was acquainted in detail with each of these questions, and applied them to a root and branch destruction of religious faith, from traditional Paganism, to the purer and higher Theism of the Stoics.3 And over and above these definite points of attack there was then, as now, that vague but supremely paralysing thought to one whose introspection is sensitive and realhow can anything be certain in these difficult matters when the wisest men disagree? 4

• The τρόπους τῆς σκέψεως of the later sceptics of the Empire include each of the points here specified. Cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos, ix. 207.

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• Enesidemus gives as his tenth reason for doubt' the 'opposition prevailing

It was from a civilisation which was haunted by these thoughts that Christianity emerged; and that wonderful transformation from helpless doubt and paralysed moral impulses to deep and unwavering trust, and a fixed ideal of action, clearly realised and hopefully followed, has been the marvel of succeeding ages, and the witness to the divinity of the Christian religion; until, perhaps, by sheer force of repetition the story has lost its natural vividness.

What was it that transformed passive spectators of the drama of life into energetic actors? What turned the stream from delicate intellectual criticism, and refined sensuality, and absorption in the art of living and the interest of life, and the placid and self-indulgent routine of Roman villa, and baths, and banquets, and splendid equipages, and lazy pride, to the narrow, intense, exclusive, resolute, austere, self-effacing, and resistless torrent of Christian faith and enthusiasm? The story has, as I have said, often been told; and to Christians its bare outline speaks of forces which unaided human nature could never approach to supplying. But this is not what I wish for the moment to insist upon.

The question here asked is how-in the order of providence-a public opinion, characterised by intellectual scepticism and individualism, and moral paralysis, was changed; and what lesson the past may teach the present? I do not ask if the change proves the truth of Christianity, I only ask how it came about. How did individualism in religious opinion pass into a corporate enthusiasm in which doubt was as abnormal as undoubting faith had been in the earlier conditions? St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century saw, as clearly as Sextus Empiricus in the third, the difficulties attending on proof by the individual mind of even the first truths of natural religion. He points out as clearly as the pagan sceptic that men with a reputation for wisdom teach contrary things on these matters. He speaks of this as often an insuperable obstacle to the knowledge of the truths in question through the unaided light of reason. Yet the teaching of the corporate Church remains to him a living fact, and he states the difficulty, which to Sextus Empiricus in his isolation was overwhelming, with the greatest force and without the smallest dismay. How came the change from the public opinion which unnerved Sextus to that which strengthened and supported Thomas?

The 'constancy of the martyrs' is a phrase which has for so many centuries been a common-place in theological and evidential text

among human opinions as to justice and injustice, good and evil, religion and law,' and 'the opposition between philosophers in their opinions.' Cf. Stoekl's History of Philosophy, Finlay's translation, p. 155.

'Remaneret igitur humanum genus, si sola rationis via ad Deum cognoscendum pateret, in maximis ignorantiæ tenebris; cum Dei cognitio, quæ homines maxime perfectos et bonos facit, non nisi quibusdam paucis, et his post temporis longitudinem proveniret.'-Contra Gentiles, I. c. 4.