doctrine of sin, from the ranks of the Howard Society,
established to promote such humane treatment. Rationalism can no other:
religion seems willing to leave it the credit. Above all, the great
cause of Peace on earth--the very motto (a mistranslation, as it
happens) cited as that of nascent Christianity--visibly depends more
and more on the spread of rational calculation, the spirit of reason,
rather than on that of faith, however faithfully many a good Christian
continues to plead for it. There is no Peace Church: even Quakerism has
latterly had its war-mongers; and there is no record in history that the
doctrine of the Fatherhood of God ever withheld men from fratricidal
war.

We shall still hear, it may be, that the intellectual pride of
rationalism is in tendency anti-democratic; Gibbon and Hume being cited
as cases in point. And the rationalist democrat, shunning the lead of
his antagonist to panacea-mongering, may here at once--or once
more--confess that the spirit of reason in things intellectual is no
guarantee for the immediate elimination of egoism in human relations.
Christianity has claimed to be such a guarantee--with the results we
know. But it is flatly inconceivable that the spirit which challenges
all authority and anomaly in doctrine can tend to conserve either
tyranny or social and political inequality. The very apologists who make
the charge are the successors and coadjutors of those who have charged
upon irreligious philosophy the generating of the French Revolution.
Anti-democratic rationalists there will be, as there have been; but for
every one such there are a hundred of the contrary ideal; and it is not
in conservative parties that they are found to avow themselves. For
rationalism, on the side of thought, must forever mean liberty,
equality, fraternity, 'the giving and receiving of reasons,' the
complete reciprocity of judgment. To all races, all castes, it makes the
same appeal, being as universalist as science, naming no master,
proffering no ritual, holding out no threat. The rationalist, as such,
can have no part in the errant Darwinism which would conserve struggle
because struggle _has_ yielded progress; much less in the
pseudo-Darwinism which would further degrade backward races because they
have been ill-placed. Of race-hatred he cannot be guilty without
infidelity to his first principles.

And if all this be termed vaunting, the objector may, perhaps, be
placated by the repeated