intellectual conscience they had to pronounce the sentence of death. The penal statutes of medieval England made sheep stealing a capital offense, and the mulish conservatism of British legislators refused to abolish that relic of the Dark Ages till the common sense of the lower classes found means to redress the abuse in a way of their own. Juries agreed to acquit sheep-stealers altogether, rather than vote away their lives for that of a quadruped. It was in vain that the prosecuting attorney established the fact of the offense beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt. It was in vain that the charge of the judge emphatically indorsed the indictment. It was in vain that the defendants themselves completed the evidence of their guilt by a frank confession; they were acquitted amidst the wrathful protests of the court and the plaudits of the audience, till sheep-owners themselves were obliged to petition for the repeal of the time-dishonored law. The idea that the mere antiquity of a legal custom is an argument in its favor is a twin sister of the superstitious veneration of antiquated dogmas. E.—REFORM. The superstitious dread of innovation, rather than the want of natural intelligence, has for ages thwarted the hopes of rationalism, and the renunciation of that prejudice promises to rival the blessing of Secular education in promoting the advance of social reforms. Orthodox restiveness, rather than any conceivable degree of ignorance, has, for instance, prevented the repeal of the Religious Disability laws which still disgrace the statutes of so many civilized nations. A chemical inventor would be suspected of insanity for trying to demonstrate his theories by quoting the Bible in preference to a scientific text-book, yet on questions as open to investigation and proof as any problem of chemistry, the courts of numerous intelligent nations still refuse to accept the testimony of a witness who happens to prefer the philosophy of Humboldt and Spencer to the rant of an oriental spook-monger. The proposition to oblige a water-drinker to defray the expense of his neighbor’s passion for intoxicating beverages would justly land the proposer in the next lunatic asylum, yet millions upon millions of our Caucasian fellow-men are still taxed to enable their neighbors to enjoy the luxuries of a creed which the conscience of the unwilling tithe-payer rejects as a degrading superstition. In Europe countless Nonconformists have to contribute to the support of a parish-priest or village-rector on pain of having a sheriff sell their household goods at public auction. In America farmers and mechanics have to pay double taxes in order to enable an association of mythology-mongers to hold their property tax-free. Because the pantheon of the Ammonites included a god with cannibal propensities, helpless infants were for centuries roasted on the consecrated gridiron of that god; and because eighteen