ulging them so long as he can do so with impunity?
Eccelino had a lust of cruelty. Was he wrong in indulging it, so long
as he had the power, which he might have had, with common prudence, to
the end of his life?

I speak, as I have always said, from the ranks; and I am not presuming
to criticise Darwin's theory as an explanation of the origin and nature
of the physical man. But if the theory is to be carried farther, and
we are to be told that man's higher attributes and his moral conscience
have no source or authority other than physical evolution, we may
fairly ask to see our way.

March 17th, 1907.

V.

EXPLANATIONS.

Interest is evidently felt in questions which I have been permitted to
treat in _The Sun_, and after the notices and the queries which I have
received there are points on which I should like, if you will allow me,
to set myself right.

I. The leaning to orthodoxy with which I am gently reproached goes not
beyond a conviction, drawn from the study not of theology but of
history, that of all the types of character hitherto produced the
Christian type, founded on a belief in the fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man, appears to be the happiest and the best. At its
birth it encountered alien and hostile influences; Alexandrian
theosophy, Oriental asceticism, Byzantine imperialism. Later it
encountered the worst influence of all, that of theocracy engendered by
the ambition of the monk Hildebrand. Theocracy, not Catholicism or
anything spiritual, has been the source of the crimes of the Papacy; of
the Norman raids upon England and Ireland; the civil wars kindled by
Papal intrigue in Germany; the extermination of the Albigenses; the
Inquisition; Alva's tribunal of blood in the Netherlands; the massacre
of St. Bartholomew; the persecution of the Huguenots; Jesuitism and the
evils, moral and political, as well as religious, which Jesuitism has
wrought. Through all this, and in spite of it all, Christian character
has preserved itself, and it is still the basis of the world's best
civilization. Much that is far outside the Christian creed is still
Christian in character and traceable to a Christian source.

II. I fully admit that society can be regulated by a law framed for
mutual protection and general well-being without the religious
conscience or other support than temporal interest. But if individual
interest or passion can break this law with impunity, as often they
can