A man of large intelligence holds desire in check by means of its natural and sole all-powerful antagonist—disdain. [Sidenote: Hellenism more just than justice.] To sum it all up, Ishmael is quite capable of regulating his own conduct without Jehovah’s help. Justice is salvation, said the Hebrew people; but science also is salvation, and justice too, and justice not infrequently more just and more certain than any other kind. If Ishmael sometimes strays into the desert, sometimes loses his way and falls, he knows how to get up again; he has strength enough in his own heart to help himself, and to make him independent of Jehovah, who left him alone in infinite space without even sending to his aid the angel mentioned in the Bible. If France has really, as Mr. Arnold says, formulated the new gospel of Ishmael, this profoundly human gospel is indubitably destined to outlive the other, for there is often nothing more provisional, more unlasting, more fragile, than what men have crowned with the adjective divine. The surest method of finding what is really eternal is to look for the best and most universal elements in the human character. But the gospel of the rights of man, Mr. Arnold objects, is the ideal of the average, sensual man only. One wonders what the meaning of the word “sensual” in this place can be, and what sensuality can have to do with an unwillingness to disregard the rights of other people or to have one’s own rights disregarded by other people. As if the rights of man had anything to do with sensuality! Mr. Arnold forgets that the word “right” always implies some measure of sacrifice. But the sacrifice is precisely proportionate—it is not the sacrifice of all for the benefit of one or of the few; it is not a sterile sacrifice, it is not a vain expense of force, it is the partial sacrifice of all for the benefit of all, it is the renunciation in our own conduct of everything which might interfere with like conduct on the part of other people; so that, instead of being a waste of social power, it is in the best sense an organization and an increase of social power. The people who first truly realize the gospel of the rights of man will not only be the most brilliant, the most enviable, the happiest of peoples, but also the justest of peoples, with a justice which will be not only national and passing, but, so to speak, universal and indestructible; not even the hand of Jehovah will be able to shiver its power, for what is really divine in power will dwell in its own heart. The French Revolution was not so purely sensual and earthly as Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms. It was an uprising not in the name of the senses but of the reason. The Declaration of Rights is a series of formulæ _a priori_, constituting a sort of metaphysics or religion of civil government, founded upon a revelation by the human conscience. It is easily comprehensible that positive and empirical thinkers, such as Bentham and John Stuart Mill and