texes, is there not, silent, eternal, an All-just, an Allbeautiful; sole Reality and ultimate controlling Power of the whole? This is not a figure of speech; this is a fact. The Fact of Gravitation known to all animals, is not surer than this inner Fact, which may be known to all men. He who knows this, it will sink, silent, awful, unspeakable, into his heart. He will say with Faust: "Who dare name HIM?" Most rituals or namings' he will fall in with at present, are like to be 'namings' -which shall be nameless! In silence, in the Eternal Temple, let him worship, if there be no fit word. Such knowledge, the crown of his whole spiritual being, the life of his life, let him keep and sacredly walk by. He has a religion. Hourly and daily, for himself and for the whole world, a faithful, unspoken, but not ineffectual prayer rises, "Thy will be done." His whole work on Earth is an emblematic spoken or acted prayer, Be the will of God done on Earth,-not the Devil's will, or any of the Devil's servants' wills! He has a religion, this man; an everlasting Load-star that beams the brighter in the Heavens, the darker here on Earth grows the night around him. Thou, if thou know not this, what are all rituals, liturgies, mythologies, mass-chantings, turnings of the rotatory calabash? They are as nothing; in a good many respects they are as less. Divorced from this, getting half-divorced from this, they are a thing to fill one with a kind of horror; with a sacred inexpressible pity and fear. The most tragical thing a human eye can look on. It was said to the Prophet, "Behold, I will show thee worse things than these: women weeping to Thammuz." That was the acme of the Prophet's vision,-then as now,

III. 15.

ROMAN AUGURS OUTDONE,

-P. & P.

WE have Puseyisms, black-and-white surplice controversies: do not, officially and otherwise, the select of the longest heads in England sit with intense application

and iron gravity, in open forum, judging of 'prevenient grace'? Not a head of them suspects that it can be improper so to sit, or of the nature of treason against the Power who gave an Intellect to man;—that it can be other than the duty of a good citizen to use his Godgiven intellect in investigating prevenient grace, supervenient moonshine, or the colour of the Bishop's nightmare, if that happened to turn up. I consider them far ahead of Cicero's Roman Augurs with their chicken-bowels : "Behold these divine chicken-bowels, O Senate and Roman People; the midriff has fallen eastward!" solemnly intimates one Augur. "By Proserpina and the triple Hecate!" exclaims the other, "I say the midriff has fallen to the west!" And they look at one another with the seriousness of men prepared to die in their opinion,-the authentic seriousness of men betting at Tattersall's, or about to receive judgment in Chancery. There is in the Englishman something great, beyond all Roman greatness, in whatever line you meet him; even as a Latter-Day Augur he seeks his fellow! -Poor devil, I believe it is his intense love of peace, and hatred of breeding discussions which lead nowhither, that has led him into this sad practice of amalgamating true and false. -L. D. P. IV.

GOSPEL OF MAMMONISM.

THE ENGlish hell.

THE word Hell (says Sauerteig,) is still frequently in use among the English People: but I could not without difficulty ascertain what they meant by it. Hell generally signifies the Infinite Terror, the thing a man is infinitely afraid of, and shudders and shrinks from, struggling with his whole soul to escape from it. There is a Hell therefore, if you will consider, which accompanies man, in all stages of his history, and religious and other development; but the Hells of man and Peoples differ notably. With Christians it is the infinite terror of being found guilty before the Just Judge. With old Romans, I con

jecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for whom probably they cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing unvirtuously, which was their word for unmanfully. And now what is it, if you pierce through his Cants, his oft repeated Hearsays, what he calls his Worships and so forth, what is it that the modern English soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and contemplate with entire despair? What is his Hell, after all these reputable, oft repeated Hearsays, what is it? With hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The terror of "Not succeeding;" of not making money, fame, or some other figure in the world,-chiefly of not making money! Is not that a somewhat singular Hell?

-P. & P. III. 2.

THE GOSPEL OF DILLETTANTISM. THE DEAD-SEA

APES.

BUT after all the Gospel of Dillettantism is still mournfuller than that of Mammonism. Mammonism, at least works; this goes idle. Mammonism has seized some portion of the message of Nature to man; and seizing that, and following it, will seize and appropriate more and more of Nature's message: but Dillettantism has missed it wholly. Make money': that will mean withal, 'Do work in order to make money.' But 'Go gracefully idle in May fair,' what does or can that mean?

Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Red Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and outer substances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,-verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures' not a few.

But no the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore.

Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all 'changed into Apes'; sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner; gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a most indisputable Humbug! The Universe has become a Humbug to the Apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I be lieve, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit, with their wizzened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfullest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it; and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew:―truest, tragicallest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls.

Didst thou never, O Traveller, fall in with parties of this tribe? Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day. -P. & P. III. 3.

* Sale's Koran (Introduction).

SOUL.

A CERTAIN degree of soul, as Ben Jonson reminds us, is indispensable to keep the very body from destruction of the frightfullest sort; to 'save us,' says he, 'the expense of salt. -P. & P. II. 2.

My brother, thou must pray for a soul; struggle, as with life-and-death energy, to get back thy soul.

He that has a soul unasphyxied will never want a religion; he that has a soul asphyxied, reduced to a succedaneum for salt, will never find any religion, though you rose from the dead to preach him one. -P. & P.

III. 15.

MORRISON'S PILL.

BUT indeed when men and reformers ask for 'a religion,' it is analogous to their asking, 'What would you have us to do?' and such like. They fancy that their religion too shall be a kind of Morrison's Pill, which they have only to swallow once, and all will be well. Resolutely once gulp down your Religion, your Morrison's Pill, you have it all plain sailing now: you can follow your affairs, your no-affairs, go along money-hunting, pleasure-hunting, dillettantling, dangling, and miming and chattering like a Dead-Sea Ape: your Morrison will do your business for you. Men's notions are very strange!-Brother, I say there is not, was not, nor will ever be, in the wide circle of Nature, any Pill or Religion of that character. Man cannot afford thee such; for the very gods it is impossible. I advise thee to renounce Morrison; once for all, quit hope of the Universal Pill. For body, for soul, for individual or society, there has not any such article been made. Non extat. In Created Nature it is not, was not, will not be. In the void imbroglios of Chaos only, and realms of Bedlam, does some shadow of it hover, to bewilder and bemock the poor inhabitants there. -P. & P. III. 15.