The Portland daily press., 1877-07-07
Recent Publications.


Armstrong & Co.; Portland: Loring, Short &
HARMONY which engages Mr.. Froude's atten-
ton in the present volume is the "Annals of
an English Abbey"-the abbey of St. Albans,
which was founded in the town of the same
name, twenty miles from London on the great
North Road, in the year 793, and was suppressed
with the other sconventual houses in Great
Britain, BY Henry the Eighth. The history OF
tne monastery is given with much detail and
occupies nearly 100 pages. He i, unflinching in
MS exposure OF the corruptons which prevailed
during the later years of the institution, and
closesIwith the pungent remark that-"There
is talk now of restoring St. Alhans. We
are affecting Ipenitence for the vandalism of
our Puritan forefathers, sand are anxious to
atone for it. Cursed is he that rebuldeth
Jericho. Never were any institutions brought
to more deserved judgment than the
monastic orders of England; and deeper
irreverence than the Puritan lies in the
spurious devof ,nalism of an age which has
lost its fsit., and with its faith has lost the
power to recognize the visible workings of the
ineffable Being by whose breath we are allowed
to exist"
The second topic discussed is the "Revival of
Romanism;'' after which come ''Sea-Studies"
of the dramas of Euripides essays on ''Luciap,"
"Divus Cesar" 'Society in the Last Days of
tne lRoman Republic" son the Uses of a
Landed Gentry" and "Party-Poltics." The
whole concludes with "Leaves from South
African Journal" In the summer of 1874
Mr.. Froude made visit to South Africa for
the purpose of studying the working of an
English colony. He speut few days at Cape
Town; traversed Natal from Durham, the chief
seaport, by way of Maritzburg, the Capital, to
the Drachenberg Mountains, on the frontier.
and thence through the Orange Free State to
the Diamond-Fields. Mr.. Froude regards the
seizure of the latter territory by the British
Government as measure of great injustice'
and freely expresses his condemnation of it.
The most remarkable of the 'Studies," and
the one which attracts widest attention is that
entitled "Divus Cesar 1t will command
perusal not so much because of its main theme
as for its incidental bearing on the question
which is now agitating thinking minds, the
influence upon morality of decline in
religious belief The history of Rome is the
most notable Illustration in point as
MIR. Froude shows. In speaking of the
incredible depravity of the manners of Italian
society in the last days of the republic, when
piety and belief in the gods had disappeared,
and of the comparative purity and virtue of soci
ETY. during the half century of the reign of Au-
gustus, when the emperor himself was the sub
ject of singular idolatry, he says: 'sThe Ro-
mans, like all great peoples, were. in the earlier
stages OF their history, eminently religious.
Their habits were frugal. their private lives
were austerely moral, and wherever conduct is
pure piety springs up by an unvarying law of
nature, as grass and flowers grow from a whole
some soil. Reverence for God, or the Gods,
was interviewer with domestic habits and with
public laws. The fact of the Gods existence
and of their sovereign rule over all things was
accepted with the faith which had never heard
OF skepticism. The whole duty of man
lay in 0irtas-virtue, manliness; and unbelief i s
an infection which manly minds are the last to
CATCH" But change was inevitable with the
expansion of the republic and the contact with
other gods of other nations. "With the new
names came the impure mythology of the Hell
lenes and the Latin morality which was found
ed in religion, dissolved and disappeared in the
presence of Deties whom it was no longer DOS
sible to respect. The cultivated Athenians
could resolve their legends into alegory. The
practical Romans took the letter of the mythol.
ogy as they found it, and discovered that it was
no longer credible. Those beings could not be
gods in any true or real sense who lived in ths
practice of the worst vices which theif ancestors
had taught them to abhor. The public ceremo-
nial survived, but the heart had gone out of it.
The fear of God departed, and morality and Jus-
tice departed with it; and the ancient Latin
creed underwent the fate to which all religions
are condemned which are connected with par.
tial sympathies or have risen out of imperfect
knowledge"
Mr.. Froude further dwells upon the process Of
disintegration: Religions which have exerted
real influence over mankind have always be-
gun in genuine conviction. They have contain
ed an answer to questions which men were anx-
iously asking at the time they originated, and
to which they appeare to give credible reply
Once accepted, they petrify into unchangng
FORMS knowledge increases; religion remains
stationary. Fresh problems rise, for which
they provide no solution, or a solution trans
parently false; and then follow the familiar
phenomena of disintegraton and failing sane
tions and relaxed rules of action, and, along
with these, the efforts of well-meaning men to
resist the NEUTRALITY-SUSPICIOUS. of religion
and science, natural theoogies reconstructed on
philosOphic bases, with at intervals unavailing
efforts to conceal the cracks in the theory by
elaborate restoratons of ritual,-or again, on
the other side, the firm avowal of disbelief from
the more sincere and resolute minds, such as
rings out in the lines of Lucretius -
In the time of Cicero religion was at its last
gasp; tradition had utterly broken down. Men
were looking facts in the face. If there was an
overruling Providence what was the evidence
of it? Nature is Indifferent to good and evil;
and submits to mans control not as he is Just
or unjust, but as he understands her laws.
"The piety of the captain does not save his
ship from the reefs. He depends upon his
knowledge of navigation. Prayer does not
avert pestilence; but an understanding of the
conditions of health" Why are the wicked
prospered and the good afflicted? ''The mani
fest disregard of moral distinctions discredits
their (men's) confidence in Providence, and
sends shudderiug misglving through them
that no such power as moral Providence ex.
lists anywhere beyond themselves"
The unwilling recognition of this truth, says
Mr.. Froude, has always produced a painful
crisis in human society. $50 long as religion
is fully believed, the inattention of nature to
impiety aud immortality is compensated by the
increased energy of government and by the
higher aspirations of individual men. Implety
does not escape unpunished when it is treat ed
by the magistrate as a crime. In society
which is penetrated by a consciousness of re-
sponsbility to God, morality is rewarded as
such, and vice and impurity are punished as
such by temporal inconvenience. When re-
ligion no longer guides the intellect or controls
the conduct, society confines itself to the pun
ishment of offenses against ITSELF Having no
longer any high consciousness of duty, society
is tolerant of profigacy which avoids the crosses
forms of crime"
In his "Life of Scotch Naturalist" (pub-
lshed by Harpers, New York, and sold by Lor-
ing, Short s. Harmony Samuel Smiles gives an
interesting memoir of a poor shoemaker, Thom-
as Edward, who without education, and without
helm brouoht mn a family of eleven children