before Hobbes issued the "Leviathan." His prose treatises on these themes followed that of Hobbes. They should be revived in this day of the revival of his faith.

Thomas Hobbes was the son of a minister, and is one of many such, down to Holmes and Emerson, who have forgotten their father's house, and turned the weapons wherewith they were trained upon the sacred Source of both their life and culture.

He located all ideas in sensation. "Concerning the thoughts of man," he says, "they are every one a representation or appearance of some quality or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object, which object worketh on the eyes, ears, and other parts of man's body, and by diversity of working produceth diversity of appearance. The original of them all is that which we call sense; for there is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original."

This is the purest materialism, and from this is naturally deduced a scheme of religion, if such it can be called, equally material. He, as properly as Stuart Mill, his last and ablest pupil, may well declare that there is no good or evil, except in relation to the person affected; "there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves, but from the person of man, where there is no commonwealth, or, in the commonwealth, from the person that representeth it, or person, or arbitrator, or judge, whom men, disagreeing, shall by consent set up and make his sentence the rule thereof."

This is precisely Stuart Mill's position in his "Liberty," where every man is a law unto himself absolutely, and is only required not to injure others physically by his own indulgences. The family tie is under no moral restraints. Parents, however, would do well to regard the health of their offspring, but not any nuptial ties. Houses of prostitution or dram shops should not be forbidden, only riot or other tumult that might disturb neighborhoods, and psalm-singing might do that to such a degree that churches should be suppressed before brothels.

Hobbes was succeeded by Locke, who was the ruler of English philosophy when Wesley arose. His essay on the Human

Understanding was published in 1690. Hobbes published his Leviathan in 1651. Hobbes was sixty-three years old when his great work appeared, Locke fifty-eight when his was published. He sought to branch the river of Hobbes' thoughts, rather than to discover a new fountain higher up. Hobbes was to him sacræ fontis caput, not Plato, nor Christ. He attributed all sensation to outward objects, but discerned also a faculty that could combine these under new forms that had in themselves seemingly no relation to external things. This faculty he called Reflection. But he does not deny that all the ideas derived from Reflection came originally from Sensation, and that but for Sensation there would be no Reflection; so that he is usually classed in the category of materialists, and justly, especially as he gives the original, and, therefore, the highest, place to Sensation.

The Life of Locke, lately published, acknowledges his relation to Hobbes in his essay, as well as its materialistic character. It shows that when in college he was attracted to Descartes, who was then, first in modern philosophy, advocating the doctrine of "innate ideas." Locke wavered between the magnets of Hobbes and Descartes, but settled at last on the, to him, stronger attraction of the older and the English philosopher. His biographer quotes from a commonplace-book of his, dated 1761, nearly twenty years before his work was published, in which he says, "I imagine that all knowledge is founded on and ultimately derives itself from sense, or something analogous to it, and may be called sensation." He also adds that "long before 1671, from the time when as an Oxford undergraduate he began to study Descartes, it is clear that he had thought much de intellectu humano, and had gradually arrived at very distinct opinions of his own, altogether opposed to the doctrine of innate ideas which Descartes had reinforced with so many new and powerful arguments.' He also acknowledges Locke's indebtedness to Hobbes, of whom "he had become a diligent and wise student," from whose writings he quotes to show how closely Locke follows him, though he sought to separate himself from Hobbes' "atheism, which was always revolting to him." But he could not

*"Life of John Locke," vol. ii, p. 89. Harpers' edition.
Ibid, p. 90.

emancipate himself from this atheism unless he first liberated himself from its philosophy, and that he would not do. It is curious to observe that this biographer, who commends Locke and Hobbes, also puts James Mill in the same category, (and thus John Stuart Mill,) and puts him as claiming, after the fashion of all materialists and skeptics, the highest names of reason and faith. He says that that which Hobbes develops from his "bald and bold theory of sensation," a theory of imagination, or "remains of past sense," James Mills calls ideation, that is, an imagination or ideality, which is only a decaying or vanishing sensation, the decaying part being called by him Memory. How different Descartes' definition of memory: "The pores of the brain, through which the spirits before took their entrance, are more easily opened to the spirits which demand re-entrance, so that, finding those pores, they make their way sooner through them than through others."

Fanciful,

but less false than Hobbes and Mill's complete annihilation of soul and spirit. In the same style of his father's appropriating "ideation" to a material memory, John Stuart Mill in his autobiography claims to be a Platonist.

This indebtedness to Hobbes has one peculiar variation. His work was encouraged, and a syllabus of it first published, by Le Clerc, the editor of the Remonstrants' magazine, Bibliotheque Universelle, the first religious magazine ever published. This was the organ of the Arminians of Holland. Locke and they were led together by their common views on toleration, and not by any especial sympathy in philosophy. Their relations were curious, since he who first introduced Locke to the philosophic world was the disciple of Arminius, while he who did more than all others to displace Locke from the philosophic throne was also an acceptor of the same teacher, and honored him by giving his name to his own theological monthly, the "Arminian Magazine."

Hobbes carried his ideas of government into his religion, and though he never formally denied Christianity, but the rather affirmed it, he still put such fatalism and sensuousism into it as denied its spiritual origin and real authority. Locke plead for toleration, and avowed himself a Christian, but refused to claim for Christianity the supreme and all-authoritative seat.

These were the philosophers who ruled England when John Wesley, a youth of nineteen, went from Charter House to Oxford. Locke had then been dead eighteen years, he having died on October 28 of the year (1704) after Wesley was born, (June 17, 1703.) They were thus sixteen months on the earth together.

Berkeley had put forth his treatise, (1709,) which carried Locke yet one step farther back; for as Locke had declared that sensation was nothing, so Berkeley declared that the substance from which they drew their sensation was naught. "The only thing whose existence I deny is that which philosophers call matter, or corporeal substance." Still he argued that he did not deny the existence of things seen, but that they existed only in the seeing. Such super-Hobbesism could not affect weightily the public thought. It still clung with British tenacity to Locke, as its best interpreter. Until long after Wesley left college Locke reigned alone.

Nor was his first real successor of a different school. Hume, born eight years after Wesley, (1711,) sprang early into the front rank of metaphysicians. At twenty-eight his first treatise, that on Human Nature, appeared. Wesley that same year was founding his Church in London, and framing into. reality his own views of metaphysics and theology. In 1741 Hume's first essays appeared, and with their baneful influence, purely material, commenced their career with that of their great counterpart. Voltaire and Wesley are contrasted by Southey. Much more truly were Hume and Wesley the antagonists who fought all over England, and have since fought all over the world for the soul of man. Hume puts his philosophy into religion, Wesley his religion into philosophy. Ingersoll, a pupil of Huine, is striking at experimental Faith, the child of Wesley. Faith and Reason struggle for the mastership, but Faith springs from the higher reason, and shall conquer.

II. A true exhibit of the status of that age, in its philosophic aspects, requires a glimpse also of its theologic conditions.

Much has been written on the decay of religion at the coming in of Methodism. Not sufficiently has the cause of that decay been noted. It has been charged to worldliness. It should be charged to fatalism and materialism. It was the dogma of fatalism and sensuousism that possessed the school

which also possessed and paralyzed the Church. Locke had followed Hobbes in denying the supremacy of moral standards, high and immutable. "I think," he says, "it will be hard to instance any one moral rule which can pretend to so general and ready an assent as 'What is, is,' or to so manifest a truth as this, that 'It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be;' whereby it is evident that they are farther removed from a title to be innate, and the doubt of their being native impressions on the mind is stronger against these moral principles than the other." He seeks to avoid belittling them by adding: "Not that it brings their truth at all in question. They are equally true, though not equally evident." But it is not far to go to lop off this excrescence, and to affirm on his postulate of the inferiority of moral ideas, the dogma of Hobbes, that good and evil exist only in the feeling of the recipient, like tobacco and tomatoes, which one esteems good, and another evil.

The theology had gone down to the same level. There had been resistance, but it had not been effectual. The devout men were Calvinists, and, therefore, fatalists. The nondevout were philosophers of the materialistic, or popular school of Hobbes and Locke, and, therefore, also fatalists. John Owen and John Howe, the great lights of the Cromwellian age, were the highest type of fatalists. And when persecution arose, and penury and martyrdom followed, their followers clung the closer to their ruling dogma. As persecution abated and the floods of ungodly men that had made them afraid dried up, the Church lapsed into the arms of this most powerless of stimulants. Baxter and Watts, and Henry and Doddridge, good men and faithful, of the preceding and contemporaneous age, were filled with this heresy, while the prelates and inferior clergy of the Established Church were possessed with the same death in the popular philosophy.

III. How Wesley wrestled with and overcame this false philosophy has never been told. His biographers give but little light on his earlier studies at Oxford, Tyerman telling even less than Southey. This is to be regretted. Students of his life, disciples of his faith, are anxious to know how he wrestled himself out of the ruling philosophy and theology into that freer and higher type with which his name is identified. That