and by all men"--has indeed a fine rolling sound, but where is the dogma that satisfies its requirements? Or is it, such and such really good and wise men with whom you are acquainted, and whom, it may be, you have the privilege of knowing, have lived consistent lives through the guidance of these dogmas, how can you who are many grades their inferior in good works, in capacity and in experience, presume to set up your opinion against theirs? The reply is, that it is a matter of history and notoriety that other very good, capable, and inexperienced men have led and are leading consistent lives under the guidance of totally different dogmas, and that some of them a few generations back would have probably burned your modern hero as a heretic if he had lived in their times and they could have got hold of him. Also, that men, however eminent in goodness, intellect, and experience, may be deeply prejudiced, and that their judgment in matters where their prejudices are involved cannot thenceforward be trusted. Watches, as electricians know to their cost, are liable to have their steel work accidentally magnetised, and the best chronometer under those conditions can never again be trusted to keep correct time. Lastly, we are told to have faith in our conscience? well we know now a great deal more about conscience than formerly. Ethnologists have studied the manifestations of conscience in different people, and do not find that they are consistent. Conscience is now known to be partly transmitted by inheritance in the way and under the conditions clearly explained by Mr. Darwin, and partly to be an unsuspected result of early education. The value of inherited conscience lies in its being the organised result of the social experiences of many generations, but it fails in so far as it expresses the experience of generations whose habits differed from our own. The doctrine of evolution shows that no race can be in perfect harmony with its surroundings; the latter are continually changing, while the organism of the race hobbles after, vainly trying to overtake them. Therefore the inherited part of conscience cannot be an infallible guide, and the acquired part of it may, under the influence of dogma, be a very bad one. The history of fanaticism shows too clearly that this is not only a theory but a fact. Happy the child, especially in these inquiring days, who has been taught a religion that mainly rests on the moral obligations between man and man in domestic and national life, and which, so far as it is necessarily dogmatic, rests chiefly upon the proper interpretation of facts about which there is no dispute,--namely, on those habitual occurrences which are always open to observation, and which form the basis of so-called natural religion.