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This is the proposition on which Janet founds his recent book on "Final Causes," a volume that I recommend to the attentive study of every one who thinks the argument of design is abandoned by scholars. It has been re-stated within ten years in such a form that I suppose materialism does not hope to undermine the new shape that it has. John Stuart Mill affirmed over and over that whoever would prove the personality of God should adhere to the argument from design. I am not ashamed to place Janet's work on "Final Causes". '—a book I have read through of late in the railway trains— side by side with any production of the anti-theistic school; and when the volumes are weighed in the balances of a nice logic, I believe the result will be that atheism will go up as far the lighter in the logical scale.

11. Certain combinations-as, for example, of the parts of the eyeare intelligible only on the supposition that millions of forces have combined so as to produce sight.

12. There is here a strange accord of the past with the future. 13. It is a fact of observation that this accord of the past with the future exists in Nature in cases innumerable.

14. It is to be false to the principle of causality to leave unexplained this accord of the past with the future.

15. As a cause must include all that is necessary to explain an effect, the convergence of causes must itself be explained in harmony with the principle that involution and evolution, under natural law, are an eternal equation.

16. But the strange accord of the past with the future in the growth of the eye will be fortuitous, or without adequate cause, if it is not granted that the combination of parts has taken place under control of a tendency that from the first has in view the sight, which springs up only at the last. The combination of millions of forces so as to produce sight is intelligible only on the principle that they have been combined in order to produce sight. "When the question is about an organic evolution which is in the future," says Claude Bernard, "we no longer comprehend the property of matter at long range. The egg is to become something; but how conceive that matter should have, as a property, to include operations of mechanism which do not yet exist?" John Stuart Mill, in a well-known passage of his essay on "Theism," admits that the argument just stated concerning the eye is in strict accordance with the principles of inductive logic.

17. This reasoning does not start from the hypothesis that sight is an end, nor that the eye is an adaptation of means to an end; for either of these pre-suppositions would involve a vicious circle.

18. The reasoning starts from effects, and from the observation that they are possible only because a certain strange accord exists between the past and the future, and this in the action of millions of forces.

19. The observation of facts, therefore, gives us as a criterion of final cause the agreement of the present and past with the future, and the determination of the former by the foresight of the latter.

20. The demonstrated accord of the past and the future in the growth of the eye, and the innumerable similar examples, transforms the effects into ends, the causes into means, and the combination of the two into an adjustment of means to ends, or design.

21. Omnipresent design can proceed only from an omnipresent, personal intelligence.

FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD IN NATURE.

THE PRELUDE.-ROMANISTS AND THE COMMON SCHOOLS.

Is it safe to allow the Pope to govern primary schools in a free nation? Ask Spain. Ask Mexico. Ask the limping republics of South America. Ask Lower Canada, where I have myself been threatened with personal violence on the public highway for courteously asserting that I did not believe a priest could raise the dead. Ask the provinces of Southern Italy. Ask Ireland and her hedge schools. Ask Gladstone, as he bends over the work of writing the learned pages of his pamphlet on Vaticanism, and summons all history to testify that the education, to say nothing of the liberty of a people, is not safe under exclusively Romish auspices. Ask Prince Bismarck. At his fireside, in his palace at Varzin, he has a costly tapestry representing King Henry IV., in smock and barefoot, kneeling three days in the snow at the door of the palace of Pope Hildebrand, imploring absolution in vain, until his humiliation had been so protracted as to become what the Roman pontiff thought to be the proper symbol of the lowness of the civil power when set up over against the ecclesiastical. Ask Sicily and Sardinia whether it is safe to allow Jesuit control of popular education to run through many generations? Ask Pope Clement XIV., who in 1773 did his utmost to abolish the Jesuit order. Ask the long line of statesmen and rulers who expelled the Jesuits in 1507 from Venice, in 1708 from Holland, in 1764 from France, in 1767 from Spain, in 1820 from Russia, in 1829 from England, in 1872 from Germany, in 1873 from Italy. Ask the States of the Church under the shadow of St. Peter's, where at the time when Victor Emmanuel took possession of Rome only five per cent. of the population could read and write. What is the reply?

1. It is a stern historical truth that the Romish priests, when they have had their own way, never yet gave, in their parochial primary schools, instruction enough to fit a population for the duties and responsibilities of a free government.

Romish parochial schools, as tested by five centuries of their history, make no adequate provision for that public intelligence which is necessary to the permanence of republican institutions. Here is the fundamental indictment which history brings against exclusively Romish parochial schools for any people,whether under republican, monarchical or mixed institutions. The result has been to plunge the masses of the population into prolonged childhood, when the Romish ecclesiastical power has been set up over the civil. I might cite here documents to show what the theory of the Romish hierarchy is as to education. I might quote the Syllabus

of the Pope, of which all the clamour of ecclesiastics in every part of the world is only an echo. But I prefer higher evidence than official documents. I open the pages of the continents. I point to the spot where Romanism has had undisturbed power for centuries, and in the darkness which gathers upon them I find the proper warning for any republic which, like ours, has in it 6,000,000 or 8,000,000 of Romanists, over whom a forcigu hierarchy asserts power. "What have you done?" I say to this hierarchy. I am not assailing the laity of the Romish Church; for I have great sympathy with their efforts to escape from the clutches of that historic power which has eclipsed the sun itself in the human soul, and the sun of modern civilization in so many fair portions of the globe. But I say to this hierarchy that they must stand before the bar of public opinion, and be judged by the outcome of their prolonged endeavours in Canada, in Mexico, in Ireland, in the States of the Church. A most careful statistician told me at Rome that when Victor Emmanuel took possession of the Seven Hills, the darkness of the population of the States of the Church in the matter of illiteracy was greater than the darkness of the population of Spain.

2. What Romanism has done abroad it wishes to do in the United States. Incredible as it may appear, the assertions of Roman ecclesiastics to the effect that all authority in matters of education should be derived from the Pope, are not loose and idle phrases. They mean something in Spain; they mean something in Mexico. It is very hard for us to believe that they are anything more than the toothless bark of a dragon not invited as yet to our shores, and pushed away from the continent by the sharp weapons of all our patriotic and religious and educational associations. But this power is a unit in all the zones. It has but one head and one heart, and when the Papal Syllabus speaks every Roman ecclesiastic on the planet is bound to echo the doctrine of the Vatican.

3. What is the educational theory of the Romish Church on both sides of the sea ?

(1.) That the Romish Church must take care of the children of Romish priests -parents I mean. (A silent pause followed this slip, and then an outburst of applause, twice repeated.) Bachelors are, indeed, dangerous men in the world. If celibate priests who clamour concerning the education of children were at the heads of families themselves, there would naturally be more sympathy on the part of the hierarchy, when it is honest, with the claim of parents that they be allowed the right of private judgment as to perhaps the most important thing that can concern the future of their children. Edmund Burke once said of an opponent in Parliament, "He has no child ;" and so I, taking the hint from your acuteness, am glad to emphasize the searching inculcation of history that the rights of children are safe only in the hands of those who have families.

(2.) It is the European and also the American Romish theory that parochial schools should be established for every parish, and that when they are established parents have no right to send their children to other schools.

(3.) That, no matter how inferior the Romish parochial schools may be to their rivals, Roman parents have no right of private judgment as to which they shall patronize.

(4) That Romish parents who refuse to send their children to Romish schools, and send them to the public schools, may be denied the sacraments-such as the rite of baptism, of marriage, and of burial according to the Romish forms.

Pardon me if I pause here to emphasize the terrific power of the confessional in the Romish Church over women, and over men of little education, brought up from their youth to believe that the Romish is the only infallible church, and

'that out of it there is no salvation for the soul. There is a custom among the robbers of Italy requiring that when a new confederate is brought into a gang of thieves he shall load a pistol, hold it before a crucifix, and fire it at the figure of our Lord. It is supposed that whoever has the audacity to do that will not hesitate to take the life of child, spouse, or parent. Now, when education and a deep religious temperament, and much intercourse with ecclesiastics and none at all with their critics, fill a woman's soul with that beautiful flame of Catholic devotion which we revere so much in many Catholic works*-when a woman with a heart like that of the author of that famous volume is asked to send her child to the parochial school, or else incur the anathemas of the priest whom she regards as the representative of a power at Rome really standing in God's place on earth, we find the woman's soul tested as that of the Italian thief is tested by the requisition to fire at the crucifix. Rather than do that, woman's heart will often flame up here in the United States and defend even a narrow Vatican hierarchy; and I shall not think less of the Romish laity if vast masses of them, with their past education, stand by the extreme doctrines of their priests. Those who have just been imported to our shores are under the control of the hierarchy. You are asking that all women shall have a vote on matters of education; and, for one, I endorse your earnestness in that particular, and am glad that Massachusetts has given to all women the right to vote on questions concerning education. But here are the multitudes of Sisters in the Romish Church. They are under the control of the hierarchy, and the question is whether we can safely widen female suffrage as long as the broadening of it in Roman Catholic female circles means little more than the enlargement of the power of the foreign priesthood. I think I am not altogether wild in standing on Edmund Burke's doctrine that wisdom can be attained only by experience in these large, novel matters, and that we cannot very accurately theorize in advance concerning the results of so radical a change as female suffrage. I am ready to try the experiment of woman's suffrage as to education and temperance. God speed all enterprises that seek for freedom to any woman to express herself as to the education of her children and the protection of her home; but I expect some difficulties that we do not now foresee, and one of them may burst out of the confessional. One of them may come up from the very depths of woman's soul, and show us how, under what she thinks a divine sanction, she can vote unflinchingly for the divine rights of the hierarchy.

(5.) It is a part of the doctrine of Rome, on both sides of the sea, that social ostracism may be inflicted on those who do not patronize the parochial schools and do patronize the public ones.

(6.) That the customers of such offenders may be advised, under penalty of church censure, not to patronize them in business.

(7.) That it is unjust for Romanists to be taxed for the support of public schools when they send no children to them.

(8.) That Romanists should have their pro rata part of the public school fund. (9.) That the toleration of schools not under the control of the Romish Church is a sin on the part of civil government.

(10.) That it is a deadly error to deny that the Catholic religion should be the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other modes of worship.

That deadly error is recited here in the Syllabus of the Pope, a copy of which I hold in my hand. Abundance of evidence on that point can be had by any one

"The Imitation of Christ" is a Catholic book read by all Protestants.

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