Lest our readers should feel a not wholly unnatural anxiety, founded on the admitted increase of the lesser crimes to which we have adverted, we wish to remind them that such an occurrence was inevitable on the final collapse of Religion, and that we must be content to wait till Science shall have had time to substitute some more effectual checks on human passions than it has yet been in our power to apply. It is too obvious to need remark that since men have learned that Death is the end of their existence, they must be expected to seize more hastily and resolutely every pleasure which life may offer, nay, that it would be absurd and unscientific to expect them to do otherwise. Let us do justice to the old effete superstition, and admit that the delusive notion that an invisible Being watched human actions, loved good men, and would punish bad ones in another world, if not in the present, was calculated to exercise considerable influence of a beneficial sort on ordinary minds. Certain types of character (not now, of course, to be found in the world) seem to have flourished under the fictitious charm of these antique ideas—characters exhibiting a certain courage and unselfishness, of which it is scarcely possible to read without some little regret that they are not conformable with sounder philosophic views of the nature and destiny of man. People had, we must remember, in former days, four distinct motives for doing good instead of evil. First, they believed in an omnipotent Lord and Master whom they called “God.” 2nd, they believed in a sacred internal Guide whom they called Conscience; and 3rd, they believed in a peculiar principle of action which they called Honour. After all these came the Criminal Law, ready to punish those who neglected what were deemed to be loftier motives. Now we, in this glorious _Age of Science_, must remember that of all these four incentives to virtue only one remains. We know there is no God, or, at least, that, if there be, he is Unknown and Unknowable; and we are persuaded that Conscience is merely the inherited prejudice of our barbarous ancestors in favour of the class of actions which were found conducive to the welfare of the tribe. As to the Law of Honour, men had already begun to forget what it signified a hundred years ago, when the Age of SCIENCE was just dawning, for we find at that epoch a writer of considerable pretensions, in a periodical called the _Fortnightly Review_, actually asserting that its standard “is submission not to Law but to Opinion ... deference to the opinion of a particular class.” Up to that period we think it was universally understood by “honourable” persons to signify, quite on the contrary, Reverence for an inward standard of rectitude, truth, and generosity; for a man’s own private sense of Honour and self-respect, which he would not forfeit to gain the applause of a world. In our time, of