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say yes to that,' she answered; 'and you, son, how do you feel yourself?' 'Why, not amiss as times go,' he cried; and then patting his stomach, added with a loud laugh, but I daresay better soon.' 'You have had no supper?' asked his mother. Then come and sit down here;' she made room for him by her side at the table, and turning to his wife said, 'Come, daughter-in-law, get your husband's supper.' The young woman did as she was bid, and fetched a large loaf of brown bread, and a basonful of soup with vegetables. Unfortunately, the soup was cold, which made the abbat cross and the widow angry. 'My gracious!' she exclaimed; 'what have you been about? It really is enough to make one laugh to see a person of your age who cannot learn to keep a pot boiling on the fire. It is lucky that everybody here is not so helpless as you,' she added, glancing approvingly at her favourite daughter-in-law. When my eldest son comes home, he always finds his wife hard at work, and something hot and snug by the fire for his supper. If you want to be a good housewife, you had better learn a lesson from your sister-in-law.'

"As long as François does not complain, you have no business to find fault with me,' she answered in an arrogant tone. I hastened to say that it was my fault if the abbat's supper was cold; that I had meddled with the saucepan. François will excuse it,' I added; ‘I shall not be so stupid another time.' 'There is nothing to be angry about,' he said to the two women; 'the soup is very well as it is. So all is for the best; let us hear no more about it. Do you know that the affair turned out a poor concern after all? There were neither buyers nor sellers, and not a creature with so much as a piece of five francs in his pocket. And then the weather turned cold yesterday. Snow fell on the Luberon, and I had to come back through roads where a dog would not like to travel. I was ancle deep in mud all the time, and my feet are like icicles.' 'Make haste then and put some hot ashes in your shoes,' the widow Pinatel cried; ‘there is nothing like it to prevent a chill.'

"Here, wife,' the abbat said, taking off his thick hob-nailed shoes, the leather of which was covered with a thick coating of frozen mud; 'take my shoes and manage it for me.' She scraped off the mud without saying a word, put in each shoe a shovelful of ashes, and brought them back to her husband.

"Seeing her so humbled and so cruelly punished for her fault, I could not but hope that she would have recourse to those religious consolations which alone could support and strengthen her amidst the many trials which must necessarily await her, and I went away praying and trusting that her soul would turn to God, and seek peace in His love and service.

Modern Ethics.

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IT is commonly said that Englishmen do not care much for philosophy. They break away impatiently from abstract investigations as dry, unpractical, unreal. Mr. Mill, who has done much to redeem our country from this reproach, has not been slow to recognise its truth. His words are :—

The celebrity of England, in the present day, rests upon her docks, her canals, her railroads. In intellect she is distinguished only for a kind of sober good sense, free from extravagance, but also void of lofty aspirations. . Out of the narrow bounds

of mathematical and physical science, we find not a vestige of a reading and thinking public engaged in the investigation of truth as truth, in the prosecution of thought for the sake of thought.

What was true four-and-thirty years ago, when these words were written, of the mass of Englishmen, is in great measure true of them still. There are now, as there were then, voices heard crying in the philosophic wilderness, earnestly protesting against the neglect of speculative studies, and doing their best to revive public interest in them, but they have not succeeded to any great extent in creating schools of philosophy or in stimulating the sluggish intellect of their countrymen to think for themselves. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that they have not exercised a very potent influence on popular beliefs. Distasteful as the processes of abstract thinking may be to the generality of men, they are not slow to receive passively the impress of philosophical doctrines. The conclusions of the thinking few are caught up by a multitude of smart writers, illustrated, repeated, inculcated in a thousand different ways, and duly echoed by the myriad readers of our newspapers and magazines. Philosophy in solution is imbibed by the million, passes. insensibly into the tissues of society, is cherished with

egotistic enthusiasm, and fought for with as much undoubting energetic persuasion as if it had in each individual been the produce of deep reflection and the outcome of a severely logical train of thought. Even those who are ready with the sophists of ancient Greece to clamour that all philosophy is vanity and vexation, unconsciously retail at every hour of the day maxims which are the result of the prolonged meditations of the studious élite. You may despise them as empty-headed parrots, mimics who have merely caught a trick of speech or a peculiarity of gait, but not the less are they a tremendous power, if not to originate, at least to propagate and transmit. It becomes a duty then for those who would check the irreligious developments of their age to trace them to their germs and to show how much that the incautious and unthinking repeat and disseminate is in fact connected with errors which, if stated nakedly, would shock most minds and be instantly rejected.

Now it happens amongst us that the very same practical tendency of mind which indisposes men for metaphysical speculation leads those who do think at all to interest themselves chiefly in ethical philosophy. This at all events is not removed from the concerns of every-day life. It stands in the most evidently intimate relation to political and social systems; it addresses itself to the conscience and the feelings which are common to all men; it touches chords which vibrate in every bosom; it attempts to answer questions which force themselves upon all minds, and excite in all interest at once personal and important. In a country especially that has been distinguished for its respect for law and order, and the intense strength of its religious sentiments, the close connection between moral philosophy and the Christian religion ensures for the former a respectful hearing and a comparatively widespread interest.

But here, again, we might, from the mere consideration of the characteristics of the British mind, prophecy without much misgiving what experience testifies to be a fact, that, of the two contending schools of ethics, that one would number the most disciples and be popularly the most

influential which should seem the easiest, the most tangible, the most practical, and which should put the theoretic powers to the least strain and tension. Now there are two grand schools of philosophy which, at all times more or less, but especially since the days of Descartes and Locke, have divided Europe—the sensational or experimental, and the à priori or rational. In ethics, the former represents man as swayed exclusively by motives of pleasure and pain— and bases all morality on utility; and in religion, when it has any, it lays stress upon reassuring, mild, and comfortable doctrines rather than upon an austere, exacting, and high theology. And even when, as in Scotland, the prevalent religion has been most favourable to the rise and stability of the à priori school, still the ground taken up is not by any means so high as finds acceptance in France or Germany, when occupied by such men as Descartes and Cousin, or Kant and Hegel. British writers of this school commonly resolve the moral faculty into a native principle distinct from the reason, supreme indeed and imperative in its dictates, but rather of the nature of a sentiment than of an intellectual intuition. Whatever the modifications may be, however, which various authors have introduced into the rational theory, and whatever their success in the past or in particular circles at the present time, there can be little doubt that in England generally the utilitarian school has been steadily advancing in popular favour, and threatens ere long to become dominant. We say threatens ; for although adherence to the principal tenets of this school does not necessarily involve the assumption of a position hostile to Christianity any more than à priori views in ethics secure a belief in either revealed or natural religion, yet the tendencies of the former are as remarkably unfavourable to theology as those of the latter are favourable. If the one set of doctrines easily allies itself with rationalism or pantheism, yet handled by a man like Bishop Butler it promotes a deeply religious spirit. If the other does not directly attack religion, yet it certainly diverts the mind into other channels, and by fastening the thoughts upon material things produces a distaste for higher subjects. For half a century the best talents

have been studying matter and the affections of matter. There is no surer road to riches and renown than to find out some new means of bodily enjoyment, convenience, comfort. Along this road accordingly unprecedented progress is continually made. Utilitarianism springs out of this state of things. It is of modern British birth, and it makes no way beyond the limits of our island. It is the national spirit analysed, systematised, thrown into form.

It can be little matter for wonder that such a system should succeed. A seer who prophesies smooth things to his countrymen is likely to be well received. When men are eagerly devoted to temporal and material interests, the thought of God and the prospects of a future life are not only strange but irritating to them. A system of ethics which upholds a native and necessary perception of the distinction between good and evil, which traces the idea of obligation up to the essence and order of the universe, which appeals to sanctions flowing from the eternal justice of God, is an unpleasant intrusion upon the comfortable dreams of the worshippers of mammon. Progress fears to be arrested by prophets who direct the thoughts rather to the unseen world than to the seen, and who hold cheap what the multitude prize most highly. Their followers are few and their message unheeded or disliked. But let men of science, already highly esteemed for their acquaintance with subjects of general interest and their sympathy with national tendencies, excogitate a theory of morals which calms the conscience by representing God and the soul and its future destiny as unknown and unknowable, as possibly fictions of our semi-barbarous, rough, cultureless ancestors, as objects about which it is waste of time to speculate, seeing that the fact of their existence is wholly beyond our power to ascertain, and there will be no lack of willing auditors to receive such doctrines without inquiry. Let them throw into their dissertations a dash of elevated sentiments, and talk of being penetrated with a sense of duty, of "all knowledge as chiefly a means to worthiness of life, given for the double purpose of making each of us practically

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