level of a multitude of other victims of a barbarous superstition, and will see in him no more than a moral teacher whom the fortunate accident of his execution invested with the crown, not merely of a martyr, but of a god. The divergence between these views is wide and deep. Which of them is the truer and will in the end prevail? Time will decide the question of prevalence, if not of truth. Yet we would fain believe that in this and in all things the old maxim will hold good--_Magna est veritas et prævalebit_." The sceptics of the last Victorian decade left school as agnostics; of their number, the more reflective set themselves to fill the vacuum. As a boy, with a prospect of life too long to measure, has an equal distaste for the sentimentality of heaven and for the melodrama of hell, he probably concerned himself little with the condition that he could only attain eternal life by believing in the divinity of Christ. Scepticism may have forced him to doubt whether eternity was intelligible and to be certain that it was undesirable; but his knowledge of history and his taste for speculative enquiry suggested that eternity in another existence might be less important than the conditions on which his present existence was carried on: the ethics of Christianity were more valuable, in his eyes, than its dogma. It is here that the reconstruction commonly began, with the question: "If there be no God, no eternal life, no reward for virtue, nor punishment for evil, why should any one strive after godliness? The policeman, indeed, watches for a breach of the civil law, but only a fool would clothe the naked or feed the hungry without thought of reward. Hitherto this was said to be 'right', 'charitable', 'kind'; but why _should_ any one be kind or charitable?" The answer of history was that every member of every community gained in security and comfort by the comfort and security of the community and that none was tolerable in which fear and injustice, want and cruelty were permitted; in his own interest every man must strive to eradicate them, for the other members were his daily neighbours. Side by side with the teaching of the biologists, who destroyed with their theory of evolution the belief in a special creation, there came into the common stock of ideas the teaching of the utilitarians, who offered a new criterion for private and public conduct. While Christian dogma might be an obsolete shortcut to an eternity which few desired and fewer still could contemplate, Christian ethics remained the noblest and gentlest counsel to perfection. At length reconstruction found itself back at the injunction that a man should love his neighbour as himself.