of the violent, ecstatic, sensational character which is inherent in monotheism. Positivism is an adult and mature phase of religion, primarily addressed to adults, to men and women of formed character and trained understanding. It is a manly and womanly religion, full of manly and womanly associations and duties. Hence, it must grow gradually, work equally, and be marked by endurance, reserve, good sense, completeness, more than by passion, fanaticism, and ecstatic selfabandonment. When they ask us, Where are the tremendous sanctions, spasmodic beatitudes, penances, raptures, beatific visions, and transcendent mysteries of Christianity? we can only smile. These things belong to the childhood of man, the fairy tale of religion. The "customs of Dahomey, the sacrifices of polytheism and Mosaism disgust the maturity of man. And so Christianity will never satisfy the later ages of civilization, until it is rational from top to bottom, co-extensive with human life, and in close touch with our latest culture and all forms of healthy manliness and womanliness. Religion is not to be forever nourished by mere hysterical emotions and vague yearnings for what we cannot rationally conceive. Religion, so reconstituted, will lose much of its rapturous and ecstatic character. It will gain in solidity, constancy, and breadth. Instead of being a thing of transcendental hopes and fears, stimulated on Sundays and occasional moments, but laid aside, if not doubted, for the rest of man's active time, religion will be a body of scientific convictions, poetic emotions, and moral habits, in close relation with all our thoughts, acts, and feelings, and naturally applying to everything we do or desire or think. It will be part of the citizen's daily life: more social than personal, more civic than domestic, more practical than mystical. It will give ample scope to the personal, the domestic, even the mystical side of human nature, within the control of reason and the claims of active duty. Religion will thus mean the guidance of right living by the light of personal and social duty as taught by a systematic sociology. Its creed will be a synthetic philosophy, resting on the general body of positive science. And its worship will be the expression of loyalty to Humanity in all its phases, as manifested in its true servants, the known or the unknown, the living or the dead, of all ages and of every race. FREDERIC HARRISON. BĀBISM THE general reader's knowledge of Persia and things Persian is usually limited to the bare facts that the country is ruled by a Shah, and that in times past it has produced one or two poets. Some know that Mohammedanism is there the prevalent religion; but beyond such knowledge few have penetrated. Considering, then, the limitations of our general knowledge on the subject of Persia, it is a matter of small wonder that a religious movement in that country, however great its magnitude, and however far-reaching its consequences, should escape the attention of the Western world. In the present article we have to deal with no mere religious reformation, but with the foundation and rise, in the middle of the nineteenth century, of a new faith. In its early history, as we shall see, it has much in common with Christianity, as also in the matter of doctrine, emphasizing, as it does, the brotherhood of man, and aspiring to a universal reign of peace, love, freedom, and unity of belief. In tracing the origin and rise of any religion whatsoever, it is, where possible, fitting to examine |