EASTERN LIFE, PAST AND PRESENT. By Harriet Martineau.

(Continued from last Number.)

THE large-minded candour and real philosophy with which Miss Martineau speaks of the Priests of old Nile should be imbibed by all thinking workingmen. The following passage is of very high value:

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They explored many regions of natural science, giving the people the results in the form of divination and magic. They held among themselves the doctrines of the unity of God, and of a divine moral government, and lowered their doctrine to meet the comprehension of the people, by deifying the attributes of God, and making local rulers of them. The testimony of ages has proved the vice of this method of proceeding: but we must remember that the Egyptian priesthood had not this testimony of ages. We must remember how they stood, a little band of observers, among the wonders and mysteries of the universe; and that, as yet, they had to collect the facts of external nature to a great extent before they could look far into causes (so-called); and that these facts were not regarded by them with the calm eye of knowledge, but the bashful glance of new and awe-struck perception. They could hardly receive such knowledge as they had otherwise than as a special gift and revelation to themselves, as students of the universe. It was not known then, not dreamed of by any one, that knowledge is the equal birthright of all, and that truth is of the last importance to every human being. We are not therefore to reprobate in the Egyptian priesthood what is worthy of reprobation now in any man or body of men;-a distrust of the general understanding, as compared with our own; a keeping back of the knowledge which is the birthright of all; an offer, under veils and disguises, of that truth which every man has an equal right to see in his native purity and nobleness. The Egyptian priesthood tried the experiment of a civil government which was probably the fittest at the time for its purposes-those purposes being, we may hope, centered in the good of the people :-Pythagoras, at least, thus understood the matter. The experiment, which lay within the terms of natural laws, appears to have succeeded; the Egyptian mode of governing society by a council of the wisest and best having lasted longer than perhaps any other government that nations have experienced. The Egyptian priesthood tried another experiment, which failed, because it violated the terms of natural laws. They tried the experiment of making themselves gods to the people in regard to the administration of knowledge and natural benefits. They took upon themselves to measure and to manage the minds of men in regard to matters which in fact they held only in common with all men. They did this, I doubt not, in all sincerity, fidelity, and benevolence; but it was a mistake of ignorance; and it was followed by its natural retribution. Ignorance, whether guilty or unavoidable, is always presumptuous. These priests were ignorant and presumptuous, while most earnestly intent on doing good with such knowledge as they had. They assumed the exclusive possession of that to which all had a right and they corrupted themselves and their charge together. The philosophy they held languished and nearly died out. Their own order deteriorated in power, knowledge, and character; and the people became idolaters, sinking into that weakness and under that doom which superstition brings on as surely as the pollution of the atmosphere causes lassitude and lingering death. The experiment of spiritual government failed; but we are not to deal with the priests for it as if they had had our thousands of years of added experience.

"I never believed during my school days, and I am sure I never shall now, that any order of men ever carried on a wilful and deliberate fraud, from generation to generation, for any purpose whatever. I used to suspect in my school days, as I believe now, that all the heathen priesthoods which were held up for my scorn as bands of impostors, had faith, one way or another, in what they taught. And there seems every reason to believe this now of the Egyptian priesthood, who taught more extraordinary things perhaps than any other. If we do but put ourselves in their places for an instant, we may perhaps see how many things may have been venerable and true to them, which we, with our knowledge and our ignorance, our experience and our prejudices, do not know how to treat seriously at all.

"To them nothing was so wonderful, so mysterious, so important as Life and Organization. Their purity of life and habits,--their taking but one wife, and banishing all indecency from their temple rites, enlightens us as to much that we might reprobate otherwise in the illustrations of some of their festivals, and a few of their doctrines.

Perhaps they were wiser than we are in their reverence for natural instincts; and they were certainly not wrong in thinking life and its production the most sacred and the most real, and therefore the most important fact with which the human race can have concern. When they by degrees led the people down into gross brute-worship (if indeed it is true that they did so) they certainly misapplied or ill-conveyed their reverent appreciation of the great fact of life; but the fault was in the misapplication, and not in the philosophy which recognised in life, wherever found, something altogether sacred, before which the human intellect must bow down, as an insoluble mystery. I am sure that we are wrong in the other extreme, in the levity or utter thoughtlessness with which we regard the races of inferior animals, which have shared with ours, for thousands of years, the yet unsolved mystery of sentient existence, without sharing with us anything else than what is necessary for the support of that existence. We know no more of the experience, one may say, the mind, of the cattle, the swallows, the butterflies, and worms about us, than if they lived in another planet. They and man have met hourly for all these thousands of years without having found any means of communication; without having done anything to bridge over the gulf which so separates them that they appear mere phantoms to each other. The old Egyptian priests recognised the difficulty, and made a mistake upon it;-disastrous enough. We, for the most part, commit the other great mistake of not recognising the mystery. We are not likely ever to embody our consciousness of it in any form of brute-worship; but we are hardly qualified to criticise those who fell into that perhaps sublime error in the early days of human speculation."

In the paragraphs immediately succeeding these, Miss Martineau thus reasons on the magical tendencies of the Egyptian priesthood; and, in conclusion, points out the fact that they practised what is now called Mesmerism :

“Then again; about their Oracles, Magic, and Medicine:—it is needless and therefore unjust, to attribute to them any artifice or insincerity. All who have duly inquired into that class of natural facts know that among human faculties exist those of perception or apprehension of distant and of future events; and some powers of sympathetic operation, whose nature and limits are as yet but little understood. Those powers are as yet but too little inquired into, notwithstanding the example and exhortations of Bacon, Cuvier, Laplace and other philosophers who were rendered by their philosophy meek enough to learn from nature. Finding, as we do, indisputable proofs that at present the human being is capable of various states of consciousness, and of knowing events which are happening afar, and of fore-knowing events which are future,-sometimes spontaneously, and sometimes by means of an agency purposely employed;-knowing, on the other hand, that history abounds with records which everybody believes more or less, of prophecy, of preternatural (so-called) knowledge, of witchcraft, unaccountable sympathies, and miraculous cures; we have every reason to suppose that the Egyptian priesthood encountered and held the facts which some of us encounter and hold, and employed them as sincerely and devoutly as they employed other facts in natural philosophy. It is probable that the oracles were true; and we have no right to doubt that the priests believed them true, as earnestly as they believed that they could cure the sick whom they carried into their temples, and on whose heads they religiously laid their hands, with invocations to the gods. The faculties which drew the attention of Bacon and others are found more vigorous, more spontaneous, and more easily excitable among orientals than among ourselves. If we find, by the half-dozen, merely by opening our minds to the fact, cases of far-seeing and fore-seeing, and curative power, it is probable that such cases were familiar to the heathen priesthoods of old; and that they sincerely believed that persons so gifted held a revealing commission from the gods. While fully aware of the means necessary for eliciting the faculty, and using those means, the priest might wait on the speech of the oracular somnambule, believing it to proceed from the veritable inspiration of the god. This is not the place for bringing together the evidence that exists about the dealings of the Egyptian priests with the sick and infirm: but it is curious; and it shews no cause for the assumption that they were jugglers, or in any way insincere in their practice. They probably believed that they should give relief by the "touching with the hands" which as Solon tells us, "will immediately restore to health" when soothing medicines are of no avail; and by that "stroking with gentle hands" which Eschylus says was to be had on the Nile:* and they were probably justified in their belief by the results. Nothing but a very large proportion of cures will account for the continued celebrity of any seat of health during a sequence of many centuries."

* Prometheus to Io: "There Zeus will render you sane, stroking you with gentle hand and simply touching you." This sanctuary at Canopus was celebrated for the cures wrought by the god.

ETERNITY.-Eternal existence, the existence of that which never had a beginning, must always be beyond our distinct comprehension, whatever the eternal object may be material or mental; and as much beyond our comprehension in the one case as in the other, though it is impossible for us to doubt that some being, material or mental, must have been eternal, if anything exist.-Dr. Thos. Brown.

PERSEVERANCE.-He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces, as to idle spectators who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.-John Foster.

BAD LAWS.-How ineffectual are all our efforts to preserve the morals of a people, if the laws which regulate the political order doom the one half of mankind to indigence, to fraud, to servility, to ignorance, to superstition; and the other half to be the slaves of all the follies and vices which result from the insolence of rank and the selfishness of opulence.-Dugald Stewart.

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"AND though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple! Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"-Milton's Areopagitica.

A STRUGGLE of far greater importance than that between the Protectionists and Free Traders, is in embryo, in the present Parliament. An enlightened few-and they are a very few-on the one side, are intent on freeing the People from the fetters of ignorance and formality in the name of religion, -while, on the other, are arrayed a host eager to stifle free thought, and to rivet about the multitude the chains of superstition. It is necessary that every thinking working-man should be alive to this. All education movements have hitherto been checked by sectarian jealousy and intolerance; and none ever took a more discreditable part in this obstructive course than Mr. Baines, of Leeds, who so recently set up the doctrine among Dissenters, and won their most fanatical adhesion to it-that it was no part of the duty of a Government to educate the People! The maintenance of this doctrine by such a party, was not only very astounding and unexpected, as being so contrary to all that had been maintained for years in this country, by the Reform party, one of whose unswerving and constant demands had, all along, been "National Education;" but it was opposed to all consistency, as might be shewn by numerous arguments-among which the position That it is unjust to punish crime without first instructing the people to shun it,' is not the least conclu. ive.

The repeated defeat of movements for National instruction has not, however, destroyed either hope or resolution in the enlightened few. W. J. Fox, a thinker and a master of eloquence, has obtained leave to bring in a new bill for educating the people; and little Lord John, whom one can so seldom praise, used all his influence to baffle the bigots while Mr. Fox was introducing his motion. The initiative step is thus secured; and so soon as the bill is printed, the country will be tested as to their zeal for the measure. In every locality, thoughtful working men should get up meetings and petition-being resolved not to have this measure also frustrated by all or any of the sects. Sir Robert Inglis, Mr. Plumptre, and all who are ready to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel,' in the House of Commons, will, doubtless, resist the measure vehemently, when it is again brought on, after Easter; and it will depend solely on the disposition shewn by the country, as to what part Lord John then takes. If there be numerous petitions in

its favour, he may aid it: if not, it will be easy for him to throw cold water upon it'-assuring Mr. Fox, meanwhile, in honied words, how much he admires it!

6

With the pharisaic cry of Sabbath observance' on their lips, a far more formidable party are using sly and unobtrusive means, in the outset, to bring about their repressive purposes. The Earl of Harrowby-one of the most estimable of men for private beneficence, but completely in the leading-strings of the High-Church bishops and parsons-has charge of a bill, in the House of Lords, for Suppressing Sunday Trading.' This bill has been urged on there with almost mute, and yet, rapid policy. The country at large knows little about it; and it is of great moment that it should be openly talked of, in order that the few who are to be depended on in the House of Commons should be prepared to deal with it, when it arrives there. It is said to be so stringent, as to make the sale of a newspaper, in church-service hours, an offence to be visited by fine and imprisonment. To put down thinking is thus its grand device. Who can doubt, but its clauses are so framed as to enable Government (should Stanley and his set succeed in gaining the power they are so fiercely desiring) to close our Lecture-rooms on Sunday evenings?

With consummate hypocrisy this party are loud in professions that they desire the suppression of Sunday trading, in order to secure 'the poor man's holiday! Away with their lying pretences! If they had any desire that the 'poor man' should have holidays, they know many ways to provide them for him. Holidays for the 'poor man'!-the canting knaves-they would sooner increase his daily burdens doubly, in order to swell their own enjoyments. This is wholly true of the majority of the 'Sabbath Observ. ance' party, in both Houses; and it is the more to be regretted that they should find an amiable, and really benevolent man, like Lord Har rowby, to act as porter for bringing their bundle of sickening pharisaism into the House of Lords. How the crafty Bishop of London, and bigotted Old Harry of Exeter, must snivel in their sleeves at his Lordship's earnest simplicity!

In the same spirit of hypocritical zeal, they are fomenting the fury about 'Sunday business in Post-offices;' and hundreds of unthinking religionists are signing petitions and sending them to Parliament, to stop the delivery of letters on Sundays. They affect pity for the over-workers in the Postoffices; as if it would not be easy to divide the work, and as if there were not thousands in the country who would be glad to be employed in the labour so divided.

As for the religious part of the question,' as it is called, it is high time that Sabbatarians were boldly met, and put to the proof upon it. Let them shew us where any Sabbath is ever said to have been commanded, except in the giving of the Mosaic Law. Let them shew us that Moses commanded its observance by any other people than the Jews,-when he says (Deut. 5 ch. 15 v.) "Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day." Let them shew us that any other day than the seventh day ever is said to have been commanded to be kept as a Sabbath. Let them shew us any one text in the New Testament in which Christ either speaks in favour of the old Sabbath, or institutes a new one. Let them shew us what authority they have to break the Sabbath (which the Jews still keep) if they believe it was given for all