conception of man is common to many philosophies and many religions. It characterises such systems as those of Spinosa or Shelley or Fichte as much as those of Confucius or Bouddha. In a word, the reality and the supremacy of the spiritual life have never been carried further than by men who have departed most widely from the popular hypotheses of the immaterial entity. Many of these men, no doubt, have indulged in hypotheses of their own quite as arbitrary as those of theology. It is characteristic of the positive thought of our age that it stands upon a firmer basis. Though not confounding the moral facts with the physical, it will never lose sight of the correspondence and consensus between all sides of human life. Led by an enormous and complete array of evidences, it associates every fact of thought or of emotion with a fact of physiology, with molecular change in the body. Without pretending to explain the first by the second, it denies that the first can be explained without the second. But with this solid basis of reality to work on, it gives their place of supremacy to the highest sensibilities of man, through the heights and depths of the spiritual life. Nothing is more idle than a discussion about words. But when some deny the use of the word 'soul' to those who mean by it this consensus, and not any immaterial entity, we may remind them that our use of the word agrees with its etymology and its history. It is the mode in which it is used in the Bible, the well-spring of our true English speech. It may, indeed, be contended that there is no instance in the Bible in which Soul does mean an immaterial entity, the idea not having been familiar to any of the writers, with the doubtful exception of St. Paul. But without entering upon Biblical philology, it may be said that for one passage in the Bible in which the word 'soul' can be forced to bear the meaning of immaterial entity, there are ten texts in which it cannot possibly refer to anything but breath, life, moral sense, or spiritual emotion. When the Psalmist says, 'Deliver my soul from death,' 'Heal my soul, for I have sinned,''My soul is cast down within me,' 'Return unto my rest, O my soul,' he means by 'soul' what we mean, the conscious unity of our being culminating in its religious emotions; and until we find some English word that better expresses this idea, we shall continue to use the phraseology of David. It is not merely that we are denied the language of religion, but we sometimes find attempts to exclude us from the thing. There are some who say that worship, spiritual life, and that exaltation of the sentiments which we call devotion, have no possible meaning unless applied to the special theology of the particular speaker. A little attention to history, a single reflection on religion as a whole, suffice to show the hollowness of this assumption. If devotion mean the surrender of self to an adored Power, there has been devotion in creeds with many gods, with one God, with no gods; if spiritual life mean the cultivation of this temper towards moral purification, there was spiritual life long before the notion of an immaterial entity inside the human being was excogitated; and as to worship, men have worshipped, with intense and overwhelming passion, all kinds of objects, organic and inorganic, material and spiritual, abstract ideas as well as visible forces. Is it implied that Confucius, and the countless millions who have followed him, had no idea of religion, as it is certain that they had none of theology; that Bouddha and the Bouddhists were incapable of spiritual emotion; that the Fire-worshippers and the Sun-worshippers never practised worship; that the pantheists and the humanists, from Marcus Aurelius to Fichte, had the springs of spiritual life dried up in them for want of an Old or New Testament? If this is intended, one can only wonder at the power of a self-complacent conformity to close men's eyes to the native dignity of man. Religion, and its elements in emotion-attachment, veneration, love-are as old exactly as human nature. They moved the first men, and the first women. They have found a hundred objects to inspire them, and have bowed to a great variety of powers. They were in full force long before Theology was, and before the rise of Christianity; and it would be strange indeed if they should cease with the decline of either. It is not the emotional elements of Religion which fail us. For these, with the growing goodness of mankind, are gaining in purity and strength. Rather, it is the intellectual elements of religion which are conspicuously at fault. We need to-day, not the faculty of worship (that is ever fresh in the heart), but a clearer vision of the power we should worship. Nay, it is not we who are borrowing the privileges of theology: rather it is theology which seeks to appropriate to itself the most universal privilege of man. FREDERIC HARRISON. TEACHING TO READ. THE late discussions at the London School Board on the best method of simplifying and shortening the process of teaching children to read, raised as they have been in the way of business by those who have the thing to do, can hardly fail to produce some good effect, unless the movers defeat their object by trying to do too much. If an attempt be made to introduce any change which would cause inconvenience, trouble, or offence to the multitudes who can read and write already, it will certainly fail. Old fashions go out and new come in-convenient or inconvenient as it may happen--but not upon the recommendation of royal commissions, or because they are likely to benefit another generation. In the mean time reading and writing are accomplishments too hardly acquired and too constantly in demand to be interfered with. All eyes, ears, fingers, and vocal organs would unite in indignant protest against any change of fashion which would make them less automatic, though it were but for a little while. To make the Times a little more difficult to read for a single day would be to raise a storm which the Times itself would hardly survive. If, on the other hand, an attempt be made to teach reading too curiously,-to distinguish by letters all the minuter differences of speech, and require them to be learned, the lesson will be too hard for the learner. He will have too many things to remember; he will learn it imperfectly; a habit of reading without regard to the rules will soon destroy the connection in his mind between the rule and the practice; and in a short time he will be in as bad a condition as he is now; when, however perfect he may be in his alphabet, he has still to learn the relation between the letters and the spoken word by a separate act of memory in each case,—each word being possibly, and not improbably, an exception to the rule which ought apparently to govern it. Fortunately it is not necessary to encounter either of these difficulties; for it is certainly possible, by a simple change in the method of instruction, which nobody who can read already need trouble himself with, which will task the learner's memory much less severely than the present method,—and which anybody can easily try,-to teach children to read books printed in the ordinary way both faster and more pleasantly and more perfectly than they are now taught. I assume, of course, that the object is not to make them either etymologists or mimics, but only to teach them to read and write modern English as it is now spoken and written by educated people. Now, though the sounds which good speakers actually utter in speaking are innumerable, the sounds which they intend to utter are limited in number and definite in form. They correspond to certain definable positions of the vocal organs of which the number (for English) is not more than forty-two. That with an alphabet containing forty-two letters, each letter being understood to represent only one sound, and each sound to be represented by only one letter, the proper pronunciation of any English word may be indicated intelligibly and with sufficient accuracy for all the ordinary purposes of speech, has been amply proved by practical trial in the special work of which I speak, the teaching of children to read. Several such alphabets have been proposed; but the one which is readiest for English use, and has also been best tested by actual work, is Mr. A. J. Ellis's, in which, the letters of the orthodox alphabet being used as far as possible for the same sounds which in the ordinary orthography they most frequently represent, anyone who can read will find himself at home almost immediately,-there being in fact more friends than strangers in the company. For him, to understand the notation and its rules thoroughly is the work of a few hours; and with a few days' reading he will find it as familiar as the one he has been used to. Any man who has made himself master of this alphabet is qualified to take a pupil, and if he wishes to teach a child to read, he has only to show him the letters, tell him the sound which belongs to each, explain to him how to make it, and remind him that whenever he sees that letter he is to make that sound, whenever he hears that sound he is to think of that letter. So far all is as easy as A B C, and no easier. But when he has gone through the whole forty-two in this way, he will find himself in a very different condition from the boy we read of in Pickwick, who, having mastered the orthodox twenty-six, thought he had gone Though there is much difference of opinion as to the form in which these sounds may be most conveniently represented, there is room for little or none as to the sounds themselves which the representation of good modern English speech requires to be known and discriminated. There are indeed some obscure, uncertain, and almost indescribable modifications of these sounds which introduce themselves unintentionally and unconsciously, and of which I shall say more presently. But any alphabet which contains a distinct symbol for each sound in the following list will be found capable of spelling any modern English word so as to show how it ought to be spoken-in the opinion, of course, of the speller. 1. The long vowels heard in the words feel, fail, fah, fall, foal, fool. 4. The sounds of y in yea, w in way, wh in whey, and in hay; of the following consonants, as ordinarily pronounced, p, b, t, d, ch, j, k, g (hard as in go), f, v, 8, z, l, m, n, ng; of the two sounds of th as in thin and as in then, of sh as it rush and as in rouge, and of r as in ear and as in ring. through a great deal to learn very little. He will find that he has learned a great deal; no less, in fact, than all he need know in order to read correctly any word of one syllable. Take what monosyllable you please. Put the right letters in the right order, and tell him to make the sounds one after another, quickly, without pausing between. He will at once pronounce the word; he will not be able to help it. Before he advances to polysyllables he must learn one thing more, for the mark of accent must be introduced. He must be told that whenever he sees that particular mark over a letter, he must pronounce that syllable more strongly than the others; and he will then be able to pronounce correctly any word which may be shown to him, if it is correctly printed or written in those characters. same. All this, however, is only by way of preparation; for we do not propose to alter our alphabet or our orthography for him, and we must teach him to read our books. As soon, therefore, as he is perfect in the new (which I shall make bold to call the rational) alphabet—which, having no exceptions or irregularities to perplex his mind and burden his memory, he will not find difficult-he must be confronted with the orthodox or irrational alphabet, which he will have to work with in his generation. Then it will be found that the judicious arrangement of Mr. Ellis's notation, which made the transition from the old style to the new so easy for his master, will for the like reason make the transition from the new to the old easy for him. Take a list of words from any common spelling-book; opposite to each in another column place the same word spelt according to the rational system; tell him that the word which is pronounced as in the second column is to be written as in the first. He will find the two so much alike that, in spite of the differences, he will easily recognise them as the He will see, almost without the help of the key, what the spelling-book words are meant for, and will be able to read them almost at once. But then will come the really hard part of his task; for he must still learn to spell them as they are spelt in the book; and, having no principle to guide him, while such rules as he is troubled with are subject to so many exceptions that they give him no real help, he must do it by simple memory. He must endeavour to remember the letters which compose each word, and the order of them, and he must fix the impression in his mind by continually renewing it. In this respect, however, if he is no better off than the rest of us, neither is he worse off. It is by reading that we all learn to spell, and having once learned to read spelling-book English he will learn to spell by the same process, even without help, as fast as another; while under a judicious master his progress will be quickened by a simple exercise, the benefit of which will also be felt in other ways. If it be made one of his regular tasks to translate into the phonetic character sentences printed in the received orthography and (inversely) to translate into the received orthography sentences |