of Christianity in the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Albigensian massacres, the conquests of Mexico and Peru, the Anabaptist movement at the outset of the Reformation, or the massacre of St. Bartholomew, to say nothing of the death-roll of the Inquisition and the mania against witchcraft. Even the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, wrought under peculiar political perturbation, was under the auspices not of atheists but of theists. If it be asked wherein lies the specific value of dogma as a moral restraint, in terms of actual observation, there are to be found no facts that can induce a scientific inquirer to struggle for the maintenance of a creed believed to be untrue in the hope that it will prove morally useful. Moral evils may for the purposes of such an inquiry be broadly classed under the heads of vice, crime, poverty, and war; and only in regard to the first is there even a plausible pretence that supernaturalist belief is a preventive. It might indeed seem likely, on first thought, that a cancelling of supernaturalist vetoes on the pleasures of the senses may lead to increased indulgence; but those vetoes apply to all sensual indulgence alike, and no one now pretends that unbelievers are more given to gluttony and drunkenness than believers; though the latter may doubtless claim, in respect of the Catholic Church, to include a larger number of extreme ascetics, as do the votaries of faiths pronounced by Catholics to be false. While, then, there may and do arise modifications of the religious formulas of ethics, there is absolutely no reason to apprehend that any form of conduct will be less considerate on naturalist than on supernaturalist principles. The Christian doctrine of forgiveness for sins must do more to encourage licence than can be done by any rationalistic ethic. Even where naturalism might give a sanction which Christian dogma withholds, as in the case of suicides, it is not found that any statistical change is set up by unbelief. Poverty, again, has probably been normally worse in Christian Europe throughout the whole Christian era than in any previous or non-Christian civilization; and the most systematic schemes for its extinction in recent times are of non-Christian origin, though a personal and habitual effort to modify the stress of poverty is one of the more creditable features of organized Christian work. As regards crime, the case is much the same. The vast majority of criminals hold supernaturalist beliefs, atheism being extremely rare among them; and while many Christians have in the past done good and zealous work towards a humane and rational treatment of criminals, the only scientific and comprehensive schemes now on foot are framed on naturalist lines, and are denounced by professed Christians on theological lines, either as being sinfully lenient to wrongdoing or as being "cold-blooded." Thus supernaturalism remains prone to