which jealously shuns the contagion of piety, and scarcely with a cold and distant reverence recognises God. But this manifest hostility to religion which so characteristically separates the modern Utilitarian writers from Locke and Hartley will in all probability be the first thing that shall cause a salutary reaction against them. For religion is as essential to human nature as poetry; and however violent men may attempt to stamp it out, or supercilious men to overlook it, or meagre men to deny it, it will always know to assert its own place, and ever the more powerfully from the void which {336} its absence has occasioned. With democracy, presenting as it does, from every point, the most flattering appeals to individual self-importance, the masses of men readily become intoxicated; but from absolute irreligion, except in fits of social madness, they revolt, and stagger back from the brink of the black abyss which it reveals. The difficulties of the Church Articles may be removed by judicious pruning or happy inoculation; but in Atheism there dwells no healing; it is sheer emptiness and despair. [The End] FOOTNOTES. [1.1] See the splendid eulogy of the philosopher in J. S. Mill’s essay “On Liberty.” [1.2] See the famous sentence in the Deontology (vol. i.), which a man to believe must have seen,--so gross is the amount of ignorance, conceit, and dogmatism that it parades without a mask. [26.1] The reader will not suppose that we have penned the above sentences about the position and character of the Sophists without having seriously weighed the evidence on the subject, and especially without having taken into account the very able chapter on Socrates and the Sophists in Grote’s History of Greece. On the contrary, we have read that chapter carefully over several times, and have on each occasion returned from the perusal with the confirmed conviction that the learned author wrote it as a special pleader rather than as an impartial historian, and that the light in which he presents this important subject is essentially false, and distorts, or rather inverts, the real position of the principal figures in the picture. The main features in Grote’s account of the matter are that the Sophists are a much calumniated class of men; that Socrates was the head of that class, rather than their antagonist; and that not the real facts of the case, but the imagination of the transcendental Plato, and the caricatures of Aristophanes, carelessly accepted as true history, have been the sources of modern ideas on the subject. In all this we think Mr. Grote is decidedly wrong, running counter at once to the inherent probabilities of the case, and to the unhesitating and concurrent testimony of all antiquity. The hollowness of the case of Mr. Grote has been shown in detail by Mr. Cope in the Cambridge Philological Journal and by myself in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; so that