the old-fashioned appeal to patriotic spirit, is it not true that, in every department of life, it is more congenial to our generous feelings to remember the existence and the importance of those who have never won a general reputation? This has come to be a commonplace in the sphere of scientific discovery. We find, over and over again, that the great discoverer has been all but anticipated by his rivals; that his fame, if not his real greatness, depends upon the circumstance that he has just anticipated by a year, or, perhaps, in extreme cases, by a generation, results to which a comparatively second-rate thinker would have been competent a few years later. The winner of the race is apt to monopolise the glory, though he wins only by a hair's breadth. The familiar instance of Darwin and Mr. Wallace is remarkable, not because the relation of the two thinkers was unique, but because, unfortunately, the generosity with which each acknowledged the merit of the other was exceptional. A great discovery is made when the fertile thought is already going through the process of incubation in a whole circle of intelligent minds; and that in which it first comes to the birth, claims, or, at least, receives, the whole merit, by a right of intellectual primogeniture not much more justifiable than the legal right. Admitting, again, in the fullest sense, the value and the difficulty of that last step which has to be made in order to reach the crowning triumph, it would surely be ungenerous to forget the long series of previous explorations by which alone it was made possible. There must have been countless forgotten Newtons and Descartes', who, in their day, had to exert equal powers in order to discover what are now the most familiar truths; to invent the simplest systems of arithmetical notation, or solve the earliest geometrical problems, without which neither a Newton nor a Descartes would have been possible. And what is true in science is, surely, equally true of activities which touch most of us more nearly. Of all undeniable claims to greatness I suppose the most undeniable to be the claim of the founders of religions. Their disciples are so much impressed by their greatness that they regard them as supernatural beings, or, in other words, as beings who are the sole and indispensable causes of all the consequences attributed to the prevalence of their doctrines. We are told, constantly, and often as though it were too obvious to need proof, that every moral improvement which has taken place in the world since the origin of Christianity, is due to Christianity, and that Christianity itself is entirely due to its founder. Human nature was utterly corrupt until the Deity became incarnate in the form of a Jewish peasant; and every social or moral step which has since been made in advance--and not one of the unfortunate backslidings by which the advance has since been trammelled--is a direct consequence of that stupendous event. This is