modern minds is that, doubtless, the moral instruction was bad, as being heathen; but that still it was as good as heathen opportunities allowed to be. No mistake can be greater. Moral instruction had no existence even in the plan or intention of the religious service. The Pagan priest, or flamen, never dreamed of any function like that of teaching as in any way connected with his office. He no more undertook to teach morals than to teach geography or cookery. He taught nothing. What he undertook was simply to do, viz.: to present authoritatively (that is, authorized and supported by some civil community, Corinth, or Athens, or Rome, which he represented,) the homage and gratitude of that community to the particular deity adored. As to morals, or just opinions upon the relations to man of the several divinities, all this was resigned to the teaching of nature, and for any polemic functions the teaching was resigned to the professional philosophers, academic, peripatetic, stoic, &c. By religion it was utterly ignored."-Autobiographic Sketches, Works, vol. xiv., p. 413. "The reader must understand, upon our authority, nostro periculo, and in defiance of all the false translations spread through books, that the ancients (meaning the Greeks and Romans, before the time of Christianity) had no idea, not by the faintest vestige, of what, in the Scriptural system, is called sin; that neither one word nor the other has any such meaning in writers belonging to the pure classical period. When baptized into new meanings through their adoption by Christianity, these words, in common with many others, transmigrated into new and philosophic functions. But originally they tended towards no such acceptations, nor could have done so, seing that the ancients had no avenue opened to them through which the profound idea of sin would have been even dimly intelligible. Plato, 400 years before Christ, or Cicero, more than 300 years later, was fully equal to the idea of guilt through all its gamut; but no more equal to the idea of sin than a sagacious hound to the idea of gravitation, or of central forces. It is the tremendous postulate upon which this idea reposes that constitutes the initial moment of that revelation which is common to Judaism and to Christianity. We have no intention of wandering into any discussion upon this question. It will suffice for the service of the occa. sion if we say that guilt, in all its modifications, implies only a defect or a wound in the individual. Sin, on the other hand, the most mysterious and the most sorrowful of all ideas, implies a taint, not in the individual but in the race-that is the distinction; or a taint in the individual, not through any local disease of his own, but through a scrofula equally dif fused through the infinite family of man. We are not speaking controversially, either as teachers of theology or of philosophy; and we are careless of the particular construction by which the reader interprets to himself this profound idea. What we affirm is, that this idea was utterly and exquisitely inappreciable by Pagan Greece and Rome; that various translations from Pindar, from Aristophanes, and from the Greek tragedians, embodying at intervals this word sin, are more extravagant than would be the word category, or the synthetic unity of consciousness, intro duced into the harangue of an Indian sachem amongst the Cherokees; and finally, that the very nearest approach to the abysmal idea which we Christians attach to the word sin (an approach but to that which never can be touched, a writing as of palmistry upon each man's hand, but a writing which "no man can read,") lies in the Pagan idea of piacularity, which is an idea thus far like hereditary sin, that it expresses an evil to which the

party affected has not consciously concurred; which is thus far not like hereditary sin, that it expresses an evil personal to the individual, and not extending itself to the race."-The Theban Sphinx, Works, vol. ix., p. 239.

Copernicus, finding that he could not read the heavens upon the time-honoured assumption of a firmament of stars revolving around a stationary earth, tried what would come of assuming the earth to be itself revolving in a firmament at rest. This happy expedient was imitated by Kant in the world of philosophy, and he tried the experiment of reversing Locke's hypothesis, and assuming that the phenomena revealed to the senses were conformed to the perceptive faculty of the observer. De Quincey was profoundly struck by the success of both experiments, and (perhaps without any conscious intention of doing so) applied the Copernican expedient to theology; and this he did in two ways, and for these two purposes: to explain the prerequisite of Christian regeneration, as embodied in the command metanoeite; and to explain the apparently irregular or retrograde movements of Christianity in generations long after the preaching of the Baptist.

De Quincey's remarkable speculations on this subject will be found in four volumes of his collected works, viz., vol. xiv., pp. 410-418; vol. xi., p. 234 et seq.; vol. vii., p. 165 et seq.; and vol. ix., pp. 339-341, from which last I have given one quotation. In the

first of these four references we have his exposition of μerávola (alluded to in a footnote to vol. vi., p. 310, and vol. xi., p. 247). He says:

"Metanoeite was the cry from the wilderness: wheel into a new centre your moral system; geocentric has that system been up to this hour-that is, having earth and the earthly for its starting point; henceforth make it beliocentric, i. e., with the sun, or the heavenly, for its principle of motion." And this exposition is followed by a statement of the distinction between the ritual worship of Paganism and that of Christianity. At the second of those four references he essays the application of the Copernican expedient to defend Christianity from the assaults or objections of men like the poet Shelley and General Jacob; "minds of the highest order," who, not referring the movements of Christianity to its true centre, "have arraigned it as a curse to man, and have fought against it, even upon Christian impulses, impulses of benignity that could not have had a birth except in Christianity:" and he says at length that, though we may discern the fact that its apparently irregular or retrograde motions are really regular and progressive, yet that "no finite intellect will ever retrace the total curve upon which Christianity has moved, any more than eyes that are incarnate will ever see God."

The key to this position is the distinction between Paganism and
Christianity, in their nature, their ends, and their effects.

De Quincey enforces the position, that Paganism was a mere
cultus, or ritual worship, teaching nothing, and accomplishing (posi-
tively) nothing for the advance of man. This cultus was founded

*

on the assumption that man, as a person, was not in any reciprocal relation to the gods; that he was not in any sense the object of their solicitude; and that he could not by any means make them actively or positively friendly to him. The utmost that was proposed by this cultus was, by costly sacrifices, to propitiate the gods, and, so far, to protect defenceless man from the selfish or passionate ravages of malignant beings invested with irresponsible power.

Christianity, on the contrary, afforded a ritual worship, which was in close connection with a system of ethics and philosophy. It was founded on the enlightened assumption that God was not only friendly to man, but had Himself incurred the most costly sacrifice for man's regeneration and promotion. Accordingly, the end of the Christian cultus was to bring him within a positive spiritual influence for his own good, making him better, wiser, and happier, both in fruition and in expectancy; making possible for him the possession of good, though also as a result of self-denial in this world, and the reversion of eternal good after death.

The elements of Christianity are stated by De Quincey to be1. A cultus. 2. A new idea of God. 3. An idea of the relation of man to God, "breathing household laws." 4. A doctrinal part, ethical and mystical. Of these elements, Paganism had but the first. It was a cultus. Now a cultus, in the Christian system, has four parts: (a) an act of praise, (b) an act of thanksgiving, (c) an act of confession, (d) an act of prayer. Of these the first and the last appear present in Paganism. Pagans glorified and invoked their deities. But how? You read of preces, of apai, &c., and you are desirous to believe the Pagan supplications were not always corrupt." But, "vainly you come before the altars with empty hands. But my hands are pure.' Pure, indeed! would reply the scoffing god; let me see what they contain." Do ut des (i.e., I give thee that thou mayest give me), or quid pro quo, was the maxim. Do or quo was either a costly gift or a banquet (cona) dedicated to the god to the oracle it was a gift; to the altar it was a feast. But neither advice nor aid (even from a tutelary deity) could be had gratis. Even the magnificent choric prayer to Onca and the rest, in the Seven against Thebes, is backed up by reminding them that the sacrifices had been paid. Such was Pagan prayer; and Pagan praise was often the exaggerated imputation of the grossest vices. But from this cultus thanksgiving and confession were absent by the nature of the case; for thanks could not be due where every advance was paid for beforehand; and what were the poor Pagans to confess? Their sins? How could that be? for, first, they did not regard their vices as sinful, else were their gods the gravest of sinners; and, not regarding them as sinful, how could they feel remorse for them. Penitence they had none. Pænitentia meant regret, vexation. Merávala meant either second thoughts, or afterthought, as being too late to be of any avail. Neither aμapria nor peccatum meant sin; the nearest approach to sin was piacularity. No personal transgression was contemplated, but simply an offence

against the idiosyncrasy of the god, and in such an offence the devo tee was as often as not involved by the act of others, while he himself was wholly innocent of it. But not the less did the vengeance of the god fasten on him unless he could propitiate him; and such was precisely the case of Edipus. On his devoted head were poured the vials of wrath for the committal of three unconscious crimesregicide, parricide, and incest; not for slaying a man on the king's highway; not for marrying the king's widow; acts which he had done with his eyes open; but for crimes involved in these acts, but which were wholly hidden from his knowledge, he met with that pariah fate, which in its mysteriousness and its pathos is a likeness, and for its despair and misery is a contrast, to the fabled doom of our King Arthur. For this reason it is that De Quincey takes Edipus as the type of the child of truth according to the Pagan scheme.

It must be allowed that, even if De Quincey's theory is a little too prononcé, it is pregnant with a truth which is of great value to the Christianity of our own day. It is incident to any religious development from a new centre that it should adopt and resuscitate the words that did duty for the religious system which it supplanted; and thus it must happen that in after ages a grave risk will be run of reflecting back on the words of ancient usage a sense and power which they did not then have. If this danger be not avoided, there is the consequent risk of mistaking the actual freshness and origi nality of the religious ideas of the latest development, and of arguing that all its peculiar doctrines are borrowed from the supplanted system. In this way it is that many are now, let us hope in ignorance, assailing the originality of the special characteristics of Christianity; and it was against this stupendous blunder that De Quincey devoted his best powers and his ripest learning.

But it must be confessed that these views as a whole are chargeable with inconsistency. The Baptist's Metanoeite was addressed to Jews: the mainstay of the theory that the Jewish sect of the Essenes was a secret society of early Christians is, that on any other assumption there must have been a Christianity before Christ. The drift of De Quincey's remarks on these questions seems to be that Judaism, in a less degree than Paganism, but still in a great degree, had a distinct centre of evolution, and that a change in the point of reference, and an intellectual and moral revolution, were demanded in the one as in the other. But when brought face to face with this fact, De Quincey wards off the inevitable conclusion by the following note:-"Once for all, to save the trouble of continual repetitions, understand Judaism to be commemorated jointly with Christianity-the dark root together with the golden fruitage-whenever the nature of the case does not presume a contradistinction of the one to the other" (vol. xi., p. 241). But the only question between Judaism aud Christianity is just this-in what respect are they to be contradistinguished? in what respect was the "New Commandment" opposed to the old? And

MANY-SIDED MINDS.

the answer to this, if searching and true, must go far to reduce Judaism to a rank with which Christianity had nothing in common save the doctrines of monotheism and original sin.*

In the course of De Quincey's works mention is occasionally made of other of his writings, which are not known to have been published. Such as "Suspiria de Profundis " (twenty to twenty-five sketches, of which “The Daughter of Lebanon" and (a) one other piece are all that have been published), mentioned in vol. i., preface, xiv. "De Emendatione Humani Intellectûs," mentioned in vol. i., p. 254. "Prolegomena to all Future Systems of Political Economy" (possibly the same as "The Logic of Poli tical Economy"), mentioned in vol. i., p. 256. "Reveries on the Evolution of Pagan and Christian Literatures," mentioned in vol. xiii., p. 60. And a work citing the "Antigone," mentioned in vol. xiii., p. 204.

Besides these, there are various papers by De Quincey scattered about our periodical literature, which have never yet been gathered in. Foremost is the admirable article on "Kant in his Miscellaneous Essays," published in Blackwood's Magazine, August, 1830, included, I believe, with some other papers unknown in England, in Messrs. Ticknor and Field's American edition of De Quincey's works. There is also the paper above mentioned to which (a) is prefixed, which I read in some English periodical circa 1850-1855. De Quincey mentions (vol. vi., p. 267) a paper by himself on "Freemasonry," published in a London journal about 1823 or 1824; and (vol. xiv., p. 71, note) another on "The Prevalence of Danish Names of Places in England," published in a provincial newspaper. These are possibly only a few of the monographs of this gifted and voluminous writer yet to be garnered. One is loath to lose a line which fell from that inspired penman. These references are to Black's reissue of Hogg's edition. Neither of the English editions, nor the American edition, nor the combina tion of all these, includes those of his works which had been published separately, viz., "The Logic of Political Economy," 1844; "Walladmor," &c. I believe I am guilty of no breach of confidence if I add that Mr. T. Emley Young, of Falloden House, Clapton, has long been engaged on a "Life of De Quincey." I know of no one fitter to execute this work.

CHRISTIANIZATION.-"The world for Christ,”—that is our motto. The world is Christ; He reared its lofty mountains, scooped out its beautiful valleys, gathered its world of waters into their place, and for ages He has been watching over it with the tenderness of a father over a child. He has dwelt upon it, sanctified it with deeds of holiest love, set up in it His cross. of redemption, baptized it with His blood, and will have it again for His own, when the miseries and the woes of centuries shall be shaken off the bosom of the earth, and the light, lighting up the sky, shall fill all lands. The world seeking the cross, like a prodigal his home, shall come forth to the glories of eternal life, and shall rejoice with exceeding great joy in God's richest benedictions; then, like a prodigal, long wandering but come home at last, God shall take it to His bosom once more. -W.Jones, Birmingham.