Mill, who
showed it to be based on a total misconception of the nature of cause
and effect, which apply only to phaenomenal changes and not to the
apparently unchangeable matter and force of which the universe is
composed.

But the overwhelming last argument is that "man has something in him
which speaks of God, of something above this fleeting world, and
rules of right and wrong have their foundation elsewhere than in man's
opinion.... that there is an immutable, eternal distinction between
right and wrong--that there is a God who is on the side of right." Again
we must complain of unbounded assertion. Every point of this rhetorical
flourish is disputed by "infidels" who are not likely to yield to
anything short of proof. If God is on the side of right he is singularly
incapable of maintaining it; for, in this world at least, according to
some penetrating minds, the devil has hitherto had it pretty much his
own way, and good men have had to struggle very hard to make things even
as equitable as we find them. But after all, says his Grace, the supreme
defence of the Church against the assaults of infidelity is Christ
himself. Weak in argument, the clergy must throw themselves behind his
shield and trust in him. Before his brightness "the mists which rise
from a gross materialistic Atheism evaporate, and are scattered like the
clouds of night before the dawn." It is useless to oppose reason to such
preaching as this. We shall therefore simply retort the Archbishop's
epithets. Gross and materialistic are just the terms to describe a
religion which traffics in blood and declares that without the shedding
of it there is no remission of sin; whose ascetic doctrines malign our
purest affections and defile the sweetest fountains of our spiritual
health; whose heaven is nothing but an exaggerated jeweller's shop, and
its hell a den of torture in which God punishes his children for the
consequences of his own ignorance, incapacity or crime.

BAITING A BISHOP.

(February, 1880.)

Bishops should speak as men having authority, and not as the Scribes
and Pharisees. Even the smallest of them should be a great man.
An archbishop, with fifteen thousand a year, ought to possess a
transcendent intellect, almost beyond comprehension; while the worst
paid of all the reverend fathers of the Church, with less than a fifth
of that salary, ought to possess no common powers of mind. The Bishop
of Carlisle is not rich as bishops