in his theory any causes possible to justify any surprising transformation in the character of the Fiji people. Yet such transformation has really taken place, which is certainly bad for the theory, but is very wholesome to the people, and encouraging to lovers of humanity everywhere. It is pertinent to put the real facts alongside of the social hypothesis. July 30, 1849, two English ladies having heard that the father of the late King of Fiji was ill at Bau, the site of the great heathen temple, and that fourteen women taken from a neighboring island were to be killed and eaten, put off in a canoe with the forlorn hope of saving them. On landing at the wharf, they learned that ten had already been served up; the shrieks of the last two greeted them as they came to shore. The ladies gained their point and the scenes of festivity for that day closed. An English visitor thirty years after looked at the stone in front of the temple on which the victims used to be dashed to pieces, and into the large oven where hundreds and perhaps thousands had been cooked,then turned to different scenes, to the native preacher's house, the comfortable huts of the natives, and paid respects to the princess, granddaughter of the king whose feast has just been described. The princess had gone to class-meeting, of which she was leader, and the voice of Christian song filled the air which had been filled with shrieks thirty years before. Even as late as 1854, this princess's father was found, in honor of the old king's death, assisting in strangling the royal widows. Two were already strangled, and he was proceeding to dispatch the three others. Yet three years later this man was baptized, and has continued to honor the Christian name. Fourteen hundred schools, nine hundred native preachers, and hundreds of Christian families with the arts and industries of our nineteenth century attest the truth that social transformations may be wrought by Christianity, even on the very islands and in the very generation in which an inadequate sociological theory had declared it improbable, if not impossible.

Another case may be cited. Its facts belong among, per

haps, the very lowest of the aboriginal populations of the globe, the Papuans of Australia. They have either never developed above the lowest religious and social conditions, or else have fallen, as Mr. Spencer allows many tribes have, from some higher point in the social scale. The ordinary civilization which commerce and mining carry, had only corrupted them still more, introducing licentiousness and drunkenness. After thirty-six years' labor, one man was baptized, in 1860. Since then a marked change has begun, and been carried forward. The wild people have been gathered into villages, and have adopted the usages and habits of civilized life. "When I looked," says the Moravian bishop Schweinitz, "at the photograph of Philip Pepper, a brother of the first convert, and heard his teacher's account of the impressive warmth with which he publicly proclaims the gospel and prays to God, I could hardly believe that this man had been a naked savage, squatting in the sand and roasting lizards for his food, joining his countrymen in the vilest abominations, and living for years in a state as near to that of the irrational creation as it is possible for human beings to reach."

Such illustrations as these are, indeed, but samples of a kind of influence which has been going out into the ruder nations of the earth from the beginning of the Christian church until now. In our own generation this influence has become greatly expanded. For there are now engaged in Protestant missions alone an army of four thousand eight hundred and seventy-one men and women of consecrated spirit who have gone to other lands than their own, having 28,574 native helpers, and the annual income of $7,500,000. And our thesis is not that the sociologists have not accumulated important facts, nor that they have not got on the track of some valid generalizations, but that Christian missions disclose significant facts and forces which have not received due recognition.

ARTICLE III.

THEISM AND ETHICS.

BY REV. THOMAS HILL, D.D., LL.D., FORMERLY PRESIDENT OF HARVARD COLLEGE.

THE question has been recently debated with much interest whether any form of ethics is possible under an atheistic philosophy. Of course it is granted that atheistic philosophy does not immediately destroy ethical instincts in the man who adopts it; the question in debate is, whether his philosophy can justify and explain those instincts so as to build a science upon them. By an atheistic philosophy is meant that view of the universe which makes it consist wholly of matter in motion, so that our thought is but a vibration of the brain, and consciousness is simply the highest result of the movement of matter; while theism declares that conscious thought antedates the very existence of matter and motion.

The great difficulty in discussing the relation between theism and ethics arise from the difficulty of defining the terms. Under whatever aspect we look toward God we must acknowledge his infinite greatness, and it is impossible to comprehend his attributes; but it is impossible to define sharply our apprehension of that which we cannot comprehend. Ethics also is a broad science, covering many of the relations of personal beings to each other; but we cannot define sharply what a personal being is, nor what relations of personal beings are included in the sphere of ethics. The difficulty is therefore apparent, it amounts to an impossibility of arriving at conclusions which will be universally admitted in regard to the connection between ethics and theism.

It is also not to be forgotten that theology and ethics may

be, at least in imagination, connected in a variety of ways; so that their mutual independence in one way may not be inconsistent with their interdependence in another. It was, forty years ago, the fashion to speak frequently of the distinction between logical and chronological dependence; and that distinction is important here. We may inquire whether the sense of obligation and the existence of duty logically imply the existence of God, or of a belief in God; and we may inquire whether the sense of obligation, the acknowledgment of duty, have historically been actually produced by a belief in God. The two inquiries are very distinct. It is generally admitted, in regard to the second inquiry, that there is a historical connection between theology and ethics; that among all nations moral duties have been enforced, to a greater or less extent, by religious sanctions. In the corrupt state of the Roman empire, it is true, the connection between religion and morality was exceedingly slight, as is strikingly set forth by Huidecoper, so that monotheism was practically necessary to give vigor and efficiency to conscience. Yet both Grecian and Roman literature give us abundant testimony that in the earlier days the gods were supposed to be the avengers of the injured, and to punish at least certain kinds of crime. Among my classmates at Leicester Academy was a Chinese youth who in boyhood had thrown off the idolatrous polytheistic fables held for truth by illiterate neighbors, and he was very emphatic in affirming that the first effect of this religious scepticism upon his mind was to destroy, for many months, all sense of the obligation to filial obedience or any other duty.

But although the historical connection between ethics and theology has been so constant, and the chronological dependence of morality upon religion is well nigh universal, it does not follow that there is a logical dependence. The logical connection can be discovered only by psychological and metaphysical analysis of the problem, not by mere historical induction. There are many who at the present day seem to deny that there is any logical connection; but, in

order to make this denial, they first eviscerate both sciences. It is easy to make any relation, or no relation, hold between ethics and theology, if you are permitted first to mutilate the two sciences at your pleasure. A little ingenuity in adding to either, or taking away from either, will enable one to bring them into such relation to each other as may have been determined beforehand. If our philosophy has first declared that the only knowledge possible to man is the knowledge of his own sensations; that he cannot know his own existence, but only his feelings; that the existence of other men, of matter, of force, of motion, of time, of space, or of God, are all unsupported hypotheses; the only facts known to man being the feeling of his own sensations; it is evident that ethics and theology have both become to us the merest shadows of what they are to our fellow-men.

Ethics, as it is generally understood, is a science dealing with certain relations of persons to persons; namely, with those relations that involve reciprocal rights and duties. It is therefore manifest that the denial of personality to the human being the reduction of the man to a series of motions, wholly determined by mechanical contact; the denial of any power in him of self-determination, of freedom - takes away the possibility of reality in ethics. A science dealing with rights and with duties implies the perception of obligation, and the simultaneous perception of free, self-determined personality in ourselves and in others. It imperatively demands the recognition of moral freedom; it necessarily deals with man as with an entelechy of high order, containing in himself the power of originating action and of determining its end.

But this admission that the human being has a self-determining power-this admission of the veracity of the delivery of conscience and consciousness that we are independent persons-leads at once to the truth that, in a still higher sense, the whole universe, in its totality, is still more completely under control of a Being, free, self-originating, and selfdetermining in his action. The logical necessity of this con