suits which may be started against him; or if unstolen, the inventor requires to sell, so as to keep himself able to meet an unscrupulous imitator from the market.

Roebuck and Watt were hindered at every step of their progress regarding the steam-engine by this difficulty of getting the full reward out of their patents; and it was not till the wealthy Boulton took the matter in hand, that the results could be guaranteed. Even then they had intense fighting for years to keep plagiarists and imitators from interfering with their rights, and the public had to pay all these law costs on their engines, and that on the manufacture of which they were used. That Watt ultimately succeeded in amassing a fortune was due not so much to the patent laws as to his partnership with such a capitalist as Boulton. Hargrave died in obscurity and distress. Arkwright required to fight hard against malicious and greedy appropriators. But it was not till his patents expired that the full benefit of his ingenuity was gained by the public. Dr. Cartwright, notwithstanding his numerous patents, required a parliamentary grant of £10,000 to reward him for his public benefactions as an inventor. Compton and Cort are acknowledged (p. 257) by the advocate of the affirmative to have been unrewarded. We cannot avoid concluding that our modern patent laws, however beneficial they may be intended to be, are not productive of benefit to the public, inasmuch as they fail to protect the inventor, and hence operate against the expenditure of genius in that direction; burden the goods produced with the costs of lawsuits and encourage dishonest competition and fraudulent imitation. Again, the public benefit is very much impeded by the accumulation of patents and specifications for patents, which either the patentees or the specificators cannot carry out. This prevents the incorporation of the said improvements in larger inventions, in which they form but minor and accessory parts. Whenever a notable invention has been brought to the working point, there arises around it a host of claimants to the several minute and individual parts of it who must either be bought off or fought off. These costs, together with a sum proportioned to the risks arising from such a possibility, must be paid for by the public. These laws are ineffective, and therefore inexpedient.

The value of a thought can never be lost to the world when once published. Every facility for the publication of such thoughts as may be beneficial ought to be given. To lay upon the inventor of some useful agency the burden of opposing the whole force of interests averse to changes in the manufacture, or of greed for gain by any means, is too much. A queen's commission for testing the value and utility of inventions, and of taxing their special worth to the parties who employ or adopt any one or more, and allocating a royalty upon it for one or more lives might operate beneficially. It does not fall to us, however, to suggest any amendment. We have done our part if we have shown good reason for concluding that our existing patent laws are not productive of public benefit.

T

So far, indeed, as the terms of this question go, we might join issue upon the very prime fact of the debate, viz., What is a patent? A patent confers the sole right of making any certain material; of putting together, in any proportion or form for the effecting of any given result, any specified material; or generally a monopoly of the manufacture and sale of the article so invented or improved as to effect new results in a new way. Every monopoly acts to the disadvantage of the public by making things scarcer, and therefore dearer, than if they were freely manufactured and commonly sold. But we do not apply to the question the hackneyed philosophy of free trade; because we recognize thought as a property as real, more real, in fact, than houses or lands, or mer chandize. It is the express new product of a mind. It is therefore a new acquisition for the world. But property is a sacred thing,more especially property which is indeed proper to the person whose it is and incommunicable, unless he wills it. We think the public is bound to buy at a fair valuation each such addition to the world's property; and that the introducer is fairly entitled to con sideration for his acquisition, an acquisition gained not by con quest or taking it from others, nor by purchase, unless it be the purchase of mental toil, but an actual increase of the blessings of life to the world. We yield this point willingly, though it is a stronghold on which a mere debater would seize greedily if not a lover of truth and honesty.

Patents create thoughts into personal property. But they do. not make provision for the actual proof that they are real; nor do they sufficiently secure that they are not already appropriated and possessed. If either of these matters were rightly attended to, and accomplished by the patent laws, there would be fewer lawsuits and disputed patents. Compare patents with copyrights. How frequently are the former infringed compared with the latter. If the patent laws were as simple and readily applied as the copy-right laws, perhaps they would work more beneficially. But we contend that the patent laws do not produce benefit to the public, inasmuch as they-1. Discourage invention and improvements; 2. Afford no true security to the striving inventor; 3. Supply no real guarantee of the usefulness or beneficiality of the article patented to the public; 4. Expose the public to the costs of the lawsuits which are occasioned by the competitions between honest industry and unscrupulous greed against which they fail to afford protection.

On many other points they might be assailed, but we think the foregoing may be thought to be enough for the present; and these objections we commend to the thoughtful readers of the British Controversialist. PUBLICOLA.

Religion.

IS A BELIEF IN THE MIRACULOUS ESSENTIAL TO PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY?

AFFIRMATIVE ARTICLE.-I.

66

INFIDELITY and scepticism are ever changing. The assaults made upon Christianity have never been the same in two consecutive ages. What one generation of doubters has considered an impregnable position whence to annoy the enemy, the next has condemned as a crumbling ruin, totally unfit for the purposes to which it has been devoted. But these, again, are succeeded by others who, scorning the rudeness and audacity of their mode of attack, prefer to work less roughly and less boldly than their predecessors. The one employs the battering-ram, the others are sappers and miners. It would be beside the purpose of this debate to give a detailed account of the various attacks made upon Christianity, yet we cannot refrain from noticing one very remarkable and insidious phase thereof which has arisen within the last few years, and which has received its culmination in Renan's "Vie de Jesus." We believe it is mainly owing to this recent development of the philosophic school that the discussion of the question which heads this article has been rendered possible.. Religious life" and "religious feeling" are phrases very common in the present day, and it seems to be assumed that they may exist in the mind and influence the conduct as mythical realities, if we may be excused for using the contradictory phrase myths, that is, so far as there is any substance in them, but realities in the estimation of men of this school. They will not allow themselves to be considered as atheists · or deists; nothing so open is heard of in our days; they are honest, doubters, or profound and discriminating philosophers, and they are, in their own estimation, Christians. They do not deny the facts of the Gospel history, upon which Christianity is founded, but, while imputing no false intentions to the writers of that history, they reserve to themselves the right of determining the method in which it is to be understood. Seated on the lofty though sterile heights of philosophic speculation, they gaze with something of selfcomplacency and pity upon the simple and confiding crowds at their feet. This is rationalism, or, as its latest development has been termed, spiritualism.

Rationalism is not systematic incredulity regarding the truths of religion; far from that; it has on the contrary the pretension, with so many others, to give to the religious sentiment the highest development, and it offers in many pages, to its most distinguished adepts, something to disturb the souls of the most torpid. But it is

the

far from attaining its aim, since, besides its constituting itself the supreme arbiter of Christianity, it dares not in reality appropriate to itself any of its lasting doctrines. It only takes those upon morals of man; his action, though they observe it well, ordinarily causes them to perceive only the sensitive part of man, it is far from penetrating to the depths of his being. Modern rationalism has done more than wishing to exercise the faculties of the reason; it has pretended that to it alone appertains the decision of that which it is expedient for man to believe or not to believe in matters of faith, to do, or not to do in matters of morality, and that if by custom we still owe due respect to revelation, it is only when this last agrees in commanding nothing which reason shall not judge it good to receive. But there is another method of arriving at the same end which finds acceptance in the present day. These men are not rationalists, they are so-called spiritualists. They do not deny the great truths which lie on the very surface of the sacred record, nor do they disavow the fact of a divine revelation. But their theory is this:There is, say they, a revelation made from God to man, but it is only subjective, inward, to the already existing spiritual life or religious consciousness of humanity; the inspiration by which this life or consciousness is awakened is common to every man who will wait and seek for it, and as to religious truth, it is simply that which individuals, or the mass of humanity, so far as their powers have been brightened by the divine afflatus, are able to apprehend. The prophets, apostles, and Christ himself, they admit to have been inspired, but only in a higher degree than Confucius or Plato, than Raphael or Columbus, or any other great teacher or benefactor of mankind.

This system can put on the semblance of christian truth; it can comply with any form of words, even the soundest forms, in creeds and confessions drawn up with the greatest fidelity and care. Christ is a Saviour, because He is a model of patient suffering, and of a blameless, well-regulated life; He taught much that, even in this enlightened age, we must still acknowledge to be wise, just, and good; He takes a high place among those heroic souls, those sages and men of noble mind, who have been from time to time the instructors, the benefactors, the saviours and redeemers of mankind. Christ is moreover divine, for so is every man, especially in proportion to the development of his spiritual life. And the Saviour made an atonement for sin, for He taught man how to overcome it. Prayer is right and good, because it is a tranquillizing and elevating exercise of our spiritual faculties. And as to the resurrection to eternal life, why should it be denied? There will assuredly be a spiritual resuscitation of the whole mass of humanity at some future day, when science and civilization and free institutions in church and state, in trade and commerce, shall have fulfilled their task, and when men of high intellect shall have accomplished their mission in the world.

We believe the above sketch, taken chiefly from Riddle's "Bamp

ton Lectures," 1852, to be a pretty accurate statement of the position taken by the philosophic doubters of the present day. They, of course, totally ignore what is generally termed the miraculous; not that they deny the miracle to be possible, but because they have, through their superior intellectuality, been able to discriminate between the original substance and the heavy drapery added in after ages, in which that substance is now enveloped. Acts of healing, and so forth, were performed, but only as a physician of the present day performs his operations, and as the operators were, as regards power and knowledge, very far in advance of their own age and nation, their cures were set down as miracles, to which believers in after ages have given full, but mistaken evidence.

It remains to be seen how far such a system is compatible with the term "Personal Christianity;"—whether its disciples can reasonably be called Christians. And first, What is a Christian ? A believer in Christ. Yes, but in what kind of a Christ? The Christ as set forth in the gospel, or the ideal hero of the philosopher. In what character is Christ presented to us by the writers of the gospel history, and how far is the position held by the philosophic Johannist, tenable in connection therewith. Let us examine the matter a little more closely. We think, that unless the whole of the gospel narrative be wrenched from its proper significance, and a precedent thus established for disbelief in any historical narrative whatever, the following facts are most strenuously insisted upon in the sacred history as realities, both by its writers and by the voice of Him of whom they wrote, and that a lively faith in these great facts, is essential to real personal Christianity; such faith denoting, as a necessary consequence, a belief in what is to man the miraculous.

1. That the Christ of the Gospel was either the Son of God, and coequal and coeval with him, or he was a most daring impostor and wicked man, who far from deserving our respect or our admiration as a benefactor of mankind, should be treated with scorn and derison by all honest minded persons. Again and again he inculcates the great fact of his divinity, of his co-existence with the Father from all eternity. "Before Abraham was, I am," (John viii. 58.) I and my Father are one." 66 "Say ye of him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world, thou blasphemest, because I said I am the Son of God. The Jews answer, for a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy, and because that, thou being a man, makest thyself God." In fact, from the very first verse of this, the most doctrinal, of all the gospel histories, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God;" to the very close, all is written to show that Christ was not a hero, or a philanthrophist, but that he was very God as well as very man. It was the confession he required of all who came as his disciples. Jesus asks Martha "Believest thou that I am the resurrection and the life? She saith unto him, Yea, Lord; I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world” (xi. 27). The whole of the things which were written, were written,