tellectual and moral force and trend, of the thinking and the life of a people. The institutions, the character, the civilization of any age or people, will not be superior to the actual and general character given to its literary development. It is not possible to think and act correctly--to give the right tone and direction to the human intellect-to subordinate the evil proclivities and passions of our fallen nature; to conserve liberty, social order, virtue, and truth, in the individual, the family, and the state-to make humanity true to itself and to the high end of its being, unless the principles of the Decalogue and the sublime precepts of the Sermon on the Mount are practically recognized as of universal and perpetual obligation in the entire realm of literature, as well as in the spiritual kingdom of Jesus Christ. All law, in heaven and on earth, is based on the ethical principle. Emerson, with all his bright sayings, never uttered a truer or more comprehensive truth than when he wrote this pregnant sentence: "Health of mind consists in the perception of law." Law is the essence of right embodied and formulated. Morality, in its widest scope and essential spirit, is obedience to that divine law which runs through all nature, physical, mental, and spiritual. Human nature, as well as the angelic nature, is based on moral foundations, deep laid in the conscience, and all-pervasive. In no sphere of thought or action, in no actual or conceivable condition of being or society, can a man absolve himself from allegiance to this high law. It is dominant every-where. The words of the psalmist are literally true, as well as poetically beautiful: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard."

The sentiment is creeping in among us that art and strict morals are incompatible, and if one or the other must be sacrificed the ethical must suffer. This false and atrocious sentiment has not as yet gained much headway in our literature. Even American fiction is but slightly tainted with it. But in art it has made fearful strides. Nude pictures, colored to the life, and the amatory passions depicted and spread out to the eye, both in painting and sculpture, are common sights in our art galleries and in the studios of artists, and on the walls of

many a palatial home. The London "Times" has recently contained several columns of sharp criticism on nude art in the Royal Academy exhibitions, of which there has been a great increase of late years. How long ere this pernicious sentiment will work its way into our literature, especially our fiction, to taint and blast the morals of the nation? If high art can thrive only at the expense of ethical purity and social virtue, then perish high art, and give us instead old-fashioned puritanical severity. We are on the downward grade when "technic is of more importance in any art than moral effect, and market price most important of all."

We do not urge the claims of religion, nor the dogmas of the Church, in thus insisting on the recognition of the moral code of the Bible as the basis and essential law of all literature, for that law is restricted to no creed, nor faith, nor religious belief, nor unbelief. It is alike binding on the Christian and the infidel, on the Jew and the Gentile, on the philosopher and the peasant. It belongs to man as man-to universal humanity; and applies in every relation and act and condition of life. The supreme obligation of this eternal and universal law is not abated one iota because a man rejects "the gospel of the grace of God" and lives in defiance of its teachings. The scholar, the writer, the critic, the publisher, the reader, are each and all amenable to this ethical law for every sentiment expressed, and for every book written, published, bought, and read. It is very responsible business, this putting on paper and in type, in permanent life, for the eye and mind of mankind during all the on-coming ages of time, the thoughts of one's mind, the passions of one's heart, the moods and habits of one's inner being, and the principles which govern and find expression in one's outward life. The man who deliberately assails the fundamental law of ethics—a law absolutely essential to the health and well-being of God's moral universe-by the improper, sinful use of pen and type and press, is the enemy of his race, and the deadly foe of society and of universal humanity, a thousand-fold more so than if he had simply broken a human statute. The writers and publishers of that fearful mass of vicious literature which so shocks the sensibilities of the better class in society, and is filling the land with vice and crime in every loathsome form and in startling proportions, are

infinitely more criminal than the pirates who plunder and murder upon the high seas; or than the gambler, the seducer, or the kidnapper, who ply their devilish arts on the land. They strike at a universal law; they assail virtue at its source, and society at its most vulnerable points, and taint, corrupt, and demoralize the entire race of man, as far as the poison of their writings is felt.

The French novel is to-day sapping the very foundations of moral virtue in the family and the state, and it tends with fearful certainty to subvert social order and civil liberty, and to bring on again in France the reign of communism, anarchy, and blood-thirsty passion. When the ethical principle is discarded by the popular writers of a people; when the "salt" of social virtue is perished out of its popular literature and the flood-gates of immoral sentiment and passion are opened, moral and social decadence, putrefaction, and ruin are the inevitable results. No power of genius, no brilliancy of intellect, no amount of scholarship among its savants, or of learning cloistered in universities, or of intelligence diffused among the people, and no passion for art or love of liberty, can then stay the tide of desolation. When moral restraints are gone, when marital ties are dissolved at will, when the integrity of virtue is sneered at, and the popular mind is flooded with the filth of lustful sentiment and passion, a people will surely ripen for the terrible visitations of divine righteousness.

We have not wholly escaped the vile contagion in this land where Puritan morals have been so long dominant. The tendency among us is in the same direction. The same exciting causes exist here as on the other side of the great sea. Already agencies and forces are at work to demoralize the public conscience and debauch the morals of the people, particularly of our children and youth, by obscene pictures and by the vilest kinds of reading. We have writers, too, in any number, who are ready to sell their brains and pens (morals they have none) to this iniquitous trade. They are constantly on the outlook for opportunities. And we have publishers who have grown rich by printing and circulating cheap novels and story papers by the million which are a disgrace to our Christian name and civilization-a mass of literature which, like the frogs of Egypt, is every-where where there is a boy

or a girl to be decoyed to ruin, or an evil heart to be inflamed with lust a literature without one redeeming trait, either in a literary or moral sense, and which only panders to vice, idleness, immorality, and crime, and which, on the Sabbath and on every day of the week, is educating millions of the children and youth of this land for the brothel, the penitentiary, and the gallows.

The newspaper press of this country, while we heartily recognize its ability and enterprise, and appreciate its general excellence, is nevertheless a source of imminent danger to our morals. The greater its excellence in other respects and the more potent its influence, the greater the danger if that danger really exists. And this peril is seen in two potent facts: the first is, that the ethical principle has come to be quite generally set at naught, even by our leading journals, in their anxiety to furnish "newsy," exciting, popular reading. And hence scandals, intrigues, "interviews," real or imaginary, marital infelicities, divorce and seduction suits, murders, robberies, hangings, suicides, etc., are spread out in their columns under startling headings and sub-headings in all their disgusting details, and with all their demoralizing suggestions and concomitants. It would be an insult to common sense to attempt to justify this course on moral grounds, or as a necessity in journalism. The other fact is the "Sunday" newspaper. It dates back only a few years, and already it is an established institution in the land, and a factor of tremendous influence for harm. How is it possible to preserve intact our American Sabbath, when more than five hundred leading journals of the country on that day are scattering their millions of papers, by means of Sunday trains and expresses and carriers through all our cities and country districts, tempting multitudes to buy and read and join them in secularizing the Sabbath. Their example and influence are doing more to demoralize our Sunday and turn it into a day of recreation, pleasure, and dissipation than all other agencies put together. With this example and influence operating in full force, it is morally impossible to stay the demand and tendency to open our parks and museums and libraries and theaters on the Sabbath, and thus make that day, hitherto the glory of English-speaking Christendom, what it is in Continental Europe.

There is one historical fact, expressed in the annexed paragraph, that affords some comfort:

The literature of the two great Anglo-Saxon peoples has always had a tolerably clear idea that there is a necessary connection between art and ethics. It has contained many mischievous or frivolous books; it has wavered between the austerity of Bunyan and the license of the dramatists of the Restoration; it has been successively influenced by Norman-French, Italian, Latin, and Greek culture; but it has never lost sight of certain principles peculiarly its own. One of these principles is, that a book should have a definite purpose, a real reason for being, if it expects a long life. This principle has not been lost even in the imaginative literature of England and America.

And as the Anglo-Saxon race seems destined to be the dominant race of the future, we may hope that Anglo-Saxon literature, freed from its incidental impurities, will dominate also in the world of letters.

ART. III.-THE RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

THE eighteenth may be regarded as an epochal century in England's long and celebrated history. Its fluctuating and unpromising civilization—the degeneracy and corruption of its political institutions—the variableness and uncertainty of its social tendencies-and both the insipidity and animation, the decline and restoration, of religious ideas among the people— attract the attention of the student of the period.

In its activities, aims, and achievements, it is a century of marked contrasts, the extremes of which are moral disorganization and religious revival. Vices flourish as luxuriantly as virtues; business stagnation balances commercial enterprise; select learning is outwitted by the common ignorance; theological independence is matched by universal depravity.

Great names adorn the records of the one hundred years. Steele, Addison, Pope, Sir Isaac Newton, Blackstone, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Paley, Burke, Swift, Bolingbroke, Hume, Chesterfield, and Gibbon appear, constituting an array of brilliant thinkers and writers not eclipsed by the intellectual