plexities of the universe; it had no science, no physiology, no organic chemistry, no biology, no sociology; so that it was really incapable of exhibiting its case with any fulness. But, when it came to religion, it discarded all it knew, disowned its small modicum of fact, disavowed its very principle, and substituted, for impressions on the sensitive organization, a bit of record in a printed book. All ideas and beliefs have their origin in sensation: very good. But then, instead of appealing to sensation in a grand way, as Mr. Mill does, it accomplished the hideous non-sequitur of appealing to the miracle narratives of the New Testament. All fundamental religious ideas — God and immortality, chief of all—are authenticated by experiment in life? No: by certain texts in Matthew! A system that could be guilty of such blatant foolishness ought to be, as Rufus Choate would say, " ejaculated out of the window," with condign scorn. The nonsense passed current, so long as the critics slumbered and slept. But presently they woke, turned over the pages of the New Testament, vented certain rationalistic opinions, questioned the genuineness of the Gospels, doubted the received accounts of miracles, and excited sensations which were unfavorable to belief. The whole edifice of faith came tumbling down, or rather would have done so had it really rested on those paper foundations. It did come down, in fact, on the heads of those who fancied that it did so rest. The sensational philosophy stood chargeable with a vast amount of infidelity. At this juncture, the Transcendental Philosophy came to the rescue of religious credence. The fundamental beliefs of religion, it said, rest on the basis of human consciousness. Man is conscious of the absolute and infinite: he has an immediate perception of moral and spiritual entities: he has an organ which enables him to see facts in the spiritual order as distinctly as the eye perceives facts in the material order. No evidence is needed to establish the existence of God. The nature of man is so constituted, that his existence, under some form, cannot be doubted. Men may disbelieve the record of the New Testament, may discard every record of miracle, may hold the great central miracle of the resurrection to be VOL. LXXIX. — 5TH S. VOL. XVII. NO. III. 28 incredible. Man's soul will always give him assurance of immortality. The Sermon on the Mount may be apocryphal, the character of Jesus a fiction, the gospel narrative a romance; nevertheless the human conscience will recognize the authority of the golden rule, and the human will confess its allegiance to the holiest. The primeval facts of consciousness being indestructible, the faith which is grounded on those facts must be indestructible also. Before the soul's essential faith can be eradicated, the soul itself must be turned to ashes. By this bold position, the Transcendental Philosophy delivered spiritual truth from the dilemma into which it had been put, and saved the faith of thousands of people. The debt of humanity to Cousin and Kant and Schleiermacher, and the other masters of that school, cannot be overestimated. The memory of Theodore Parker, the popular and powerful expositor of the same system in America, is cherished fondly by vast numbers of men and women speaking the English tongue, as the memory of one who was their saviour from the abyss of utter unbelief. Now it looks as if the Transcendental Philosophy too were destined to pass away. Sir William Hamilton's critique of Cousin was powerful, and was felt to be formidable. But the assault of Sir William Hamilton was feeble as compared with the onset of a man like John Stuart Mill. We must concede the possible necessity of yielding the ground to such an opponent. No champion on the other side can claim to be his peer. What then? Is religious faith again imperilled by being put at the mercy of "sensation"? Must we tremble for the spiritual beliefs of mankind, because their origin is traceable, at last, to impressions on the muscular and nervous organization of mankind? Not so; for "sensation" now is so interpreted as to include an infinite number of impressions, infinite in variety, by which the very organization of man has been wrought into its present shape and educated to its present sensibility, the natural, spontaneous, instinctive beliefs of the mind; the beliefs which the mind recognizes as being its own. When the results of false teachings, the deposits of error, misjudgment, fallacy, and illusion, have been swept away, the faiths which cannot be got rid of, and which must be regarded as the final products of human thinking, feeling, suffering, and doing, will be found to repose on pillars as strong as human nature itself. Given not by inspiration from above, but by transpiration from below and behind; not dropped into the minds of a chosen few, but passed through the minds of all, though by a few only clearly perceived and interpreted; not implanted but inwrought, and manifest in the very texture of well-organized humanity, - they are safe from fatal denial or disabling doubt. What these ultimate beliefs will finally be allowed to be, by thinkers like Mill and Bain and Spencer, can of course only be conjectured. We venture the prediction, however, that they will be all that humanity requires for its strength and its consolation. ART. II.-PALGRAVE'S ARABIA. Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862-1863). By WILLIAM GIFFORD PALGRAVE. With Portrait and Map. 2 vols. 8vo. London. THE author of these volumes enables us, for the first time, to know Arabia as it is; the Arabia of the genuine Arab, in marked contrast with the Arab of the outskirts of the land. One of our most recent Encyclopædias tells us, that Arabia has for its seventh district" Nejed the central desert region;" and of the whole region through which our traveller passed, the same authority knows only" a vast tract of shifting sands, interspersed about the centre with various ranges of hills, generally barren and uninteresting." Mr. Palgrave has corrected all this, and reconstructed the map of Arabia. Of sands, indeed, there can be no doubt; but within them are locked islands of singular fruitfulness and interest. An empire is planted in Nejed, with 316 towns, and a population of some 1,200,000. Across a vast river of sand to the north west of Nejed is an outlying kingdom, with a population of 274,000, in 86 towns or villages. The empire is that of the Wahhabee monarch Feysul; the kingdom is that of Telal-ebuRasheed. No Bedouins are included in this enumeration. The Wahhabee Sultan holds in subjection 76,500 of these degraded Arabs of the desert, a much diminished element of central Arabia. King Telal holds in his firm sway 166,000. These are the careful estimates of Mr. Palgrave. The account given by our author of the Bedouins, their garb, character, worship, &c., is full of interest. We have gleaned a number of passages which we place before the reader in full as of much greater value than any sketch we could frame. It is thus he describes the appearance of the Bedouin: "A long and very dirty shirt, reaching nearly to the ankles, a black cotton handkerchief over the head, fastened on by a twist of camel's hair, a tattered cloak, striped white and brown, a leather girdle, much the worse for wear, from which dangled a rusty knife, a long-barrelled and cumbrous matchlock, a yet longer sharp-pointed spear, a powder-belt, broken and coarsely patched up with thread, such was the accoutrement of these worthies, and such, indeed, is the ordinary Bedouin guise on a journey." pp. 4, 5. Next, the Bedouin's beast: "The camel-in a word, he is from first to last an undomesticated and savage animal, rendered serviceable by stupidity alone, without much skill on his master's part or any co-operation on his own, save that of extreme passiveness. Neither attachment nor even habit impress him; never tame, though not wide awake enough to be exactly wild. One passion alone he possesses, namely, revenge, of which he furnishes many a hideous example; while, in carrying it out, he shows an unexpected degree of far-thoughted malice, united meanwhile with all the cold stupidity of his usual character. . . . Indeed, so marked is this unamiable propensity, that some philosophers, doubtless of Prof. Gorres's school, have ascribed the revengeful character of the Arabs to the great share which the flesh and milk of the camel have in their sustenance, and which are supposed to communicate to those who partake of them over-largely the moral or immoral qualities of the animal to which they belonged. . . . Thus much I ... can say, that the camel and his Bedouin master do afford so many and such obvious points of resemblance, that I did not think an Arab of Shomer far in the wrong when I once of a time heard him say, 'God created the Bedouin for the camel, and the camel for the Bedouin.'" pp. 40, 41. We copy the following picture of the Bedouin worship and faith: "The sun rose; and then, for the first time, I witnessed what afterwards became a daily spectacle, the main act of Bedouin worship in their own land. Hardly had the first clear rays struck level across the horizon, than our nomade companions, facing the rising disk, began to recite alternately, but without any previous ablution or even dismounting from their beasts, certain formulas of adoration and invocation, nor desisted till the entire orb rode clear above the desert edge. Sun-worshippers as they were before the days of Mahomet, they still remain such; and all that the Hejaz prophet could say, or the doctors of his law repeat, touching the Devil's horns between which the great day-star rises, as true Mahometans know or ought to know, and the consequently diabolical character of worship at such a time, and in a posture, too, which directs prayers and adorations then made exactly towards the Satanic head-gear, has been entirely thrown away on these obstinate adherents to ancient customs. The fact is, that, among the great mass of the nomade population, Mahometanism, during the course of twelve whole centuries, has made little or no impression either for good or ill: that it was equally ineffectual in this quarter at the period of its very first establishment, we learn from the Coran itself, and from early tradition of an authentic character. Not that the Bedouins on their part had any particular aversion from their inspired countryman or the Divine Unity, but simply because they were themselves, as they still are, incapable of receiving or retaining any of those serious influences and definite forms of thought and practice which then gave a permanent mould to the townsmen of Hejāz and many other provinces; just as the impress of a seal is lost in water, while retained in wax. Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,' is an imprecation which, if meant originally for Reuben, has descended in all its plenitude on the Bedouins of Arabia. At the same time, surrounded by, and often more or less dependent on, sincere and even bigoted followers of Islam, they have occasionally deemed it prudent to assume a kindred name and bearing, and |