Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation. A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were, with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the harmony of Nature. C.—PERVERSION. The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to their afflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice of altruism (i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids him hate his father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.