violated, when it has become the property of the government of another state? No principle of the law of nations is more firmly settled or universally acknowledged than that an independent sovereign or government is not amenable to the municipal law of another country. All rights, all obligations, all duties, all liabilities, as between sovereign and sovereign, state and state, government and government, depend wholly and solely either on express convention or on the principles and rules of the common law of nations. How, then, in the matter of an infraction of the municipal law only, could a neutral state have recourse, as against a belligerent government, to the powers which that law gave it against its own subjects alone?"* * In cases other than those affected by their neutrality laws, the United States have had occasion to consider the immunity from local jurisdiction of persons acting under the authority of a foreign sovereign or state. So early as 1794, the AttorneyGeneral gave an opinion that it is a sufficient answer to a suit brought against a foreign functionary for seizing a vessel, as such functionary, that it was done by virtue of the powers vested in him by his government ("Opinions of Attorneys-General," vol. i., page 46, Collot's case). And in a subsequent case he held that "it is as well settled in the United States as in Great Britain, that a person acting under a commission from the sovereign of a foreign state is not amenable for what he does in pursuance of his commission to any judicial tribunal in the United States " (ibid., page 81). Another instance, which excited great attention at the time, was the case, in 1840, of McLeod. He was charged with arson and murder, in connection with the capture and destruction of a steamboat employed by the Canadian insurgents, and for which, notwithstanding the act was avowed by the British Government, he was indicted in a New York court. The case occasioned not only a conflict between England and the United States, but one between the Federal and State governments, Mr. Seward, then Governor of New York, refusing to interfere. The acquittal by the jury ended that difficulty, against the return of which an act of Congress, transferring all such cases to the United States courts, was intended to guard in future. WILLIAM BEACH LAWRENCE. III. AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR A NEW RELIGION. AMONG Our advanced thinkers two points are now happily settled beyond the need of further inquiry and the propriety of reconsideration. One is, that all the old religions, including Christianity, in one sense the best and in another the worst of them, are waxing old, and must soon die. Each of the creeds has had "its little day," as our Broad Church poet sings-little compared with the many and prolonged geological ages, or even with the myriads of years which have elapsed since the man-apes began to stand upright, and try to look up to heaven; but the ages of the past are merging into the future, as the dawn brightens into the day. First, fetichism had its day, probably a very long, prehistoric one, when men, just risen above monkeys, struggled to speak, and had an awe of earth-powers; then came the worship of the higher works of Nature sun, moon, stars, and animals; then polytheism, which divided the complex one into many to give a power to each agent of Nature; next, or at the same time, hero-worship, with idolatry and carved images; then a pantheism on the rise of philosophy, and among the Hebrews the exaltation through national pride of a tribal god into a One God, supposed to rule over all the world; and finally an incarnate God, at once divine and human in Christianity. We now know that all these have been developed out of the rude ideas and wants of the human heart, and had their shape given them by the environment. Monotheism, too, has had varied forms, retaining so much of polytheism in its Virgin and angels and saints in the Romish Church, and military hero-worship in the faith which shouts every morning, "Allah! Allah! there is one God, and Mohammed is his prophet!" We can now thoroughly understand and explain all this on the grand new scientific principles of "natural selection" and "the struggle for existence." Lecky has shown very skillfully, in his work on "Rationalism," that antiquated systems pass away-like old men-not because they have been attacked by argument, but simply because, like the races which have perished slowly in the geological ages, they are not fitted to the new circumstances, and cannot survive among the new ideas which have sprung up by spontaneous generation. In the struggle for existence, certain beliefs are cast off, and only those continue which can stand the new conditions. The Reformers undermined the faith of the Catholic Church, and Mr. Leslie Stephen has shown how the deistical writers of last century successfully undermined the strangely-mixed and incongruous faiths of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Rationalism and Unitarianism have exposed so much of the weakness of the infallible Bible that shrewd men now see that all must go. The great thinkers of the last century and a half have been against the Bible :-Hume and Gibbon, and we may add Froude, among historians, fitted to examine evidence; Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, Saint-Beuve, and Matthew Arnold, among men of literary genius; while philosophers like Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, have looked coldly on inspiration; and Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann have shown how wretched a world this is; and our great savants, Laplace, Humboldt, Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, have set the Bible aside as not worthy of being looked at. Christianity, both in the form of Popery and Protestantism, has still roots fixed in the soil; but they are like those of the old oaks which I have seen in England, condemned as useless for ship-lumber in the days of Cromwell, with the top-branches dying and ready to be blown away by the first tempest moving on irresistibly to fill up the vacuum created by the burning up of old faiths. A new era has dawned, more important than the ternary, when mammals appeared; or the quaternary, when man appeared. Great typical men have come forth, undermining not only revealed but natural religion,-it is now acknowledged that, when the Bible is gone, no rational religion can remain. Hume showed at one and the same time that there is no valid proof for the existence of God, as worlds may have come into being without a cause; and that a miracle cannot be proved, men being so liable to delusion in such matters. Kant confuted all the old and venerable arguments for the Divine existence, and was not very successful in building up a new one by means of the practical reason; for, if the speculative reason may deceive in holding that every effect has a cause, why may not the practical reason also be delusive? Indeed, the practical reason, or conscience, is now shown by Bain and Darwin to be simply the product of circumstances and heredity. Comte has demonstrated that we cannot discover either first or final causes-the two dark caves from which all religions have issued, like wild beasts, and into which they retreat when pursued. Mr. J. S. Mill has admitted that, on the principle (which, however, has no evidence in its favor) of causation being universal, there may be some presumption in favor of the existence of a God; but then he proves that this God cannot be an omnipotent God, otherwise he would prevent the evil. Darwin has plucked from man's brow his claim that he was specially created by God and in God's image, and has demonstrated his derivation from the ascidian through the catarrhine monkey. Huxley, the great physiologist, has satisfied naturalists that man does not differ so much from the lower animals as they do from one another, or as one portion of mankind differs from another, and has found a physical basis of mind, in which latter point he has been followed by Lewes. Last of all, there has risen up in these times the highest development of all in one who combines in himself Locke, with his experience, and Kant, with his forms, and has explained all physical Nature by the persistence of force, and all life and mind by the interaction of internal and external relations. I need not say that I refer to Herbert Spencer. But there is a second truth admitted with nearly equal unanimity-indeed, by all but a few conceited youths who have lately been talking very loudly. It is that man has religious instincts-is, in short, a religious animal, and must have some sort of worship. Hume used to go at times to church in Scotland, and labored to make the moderate ministers there, corresponding to the Unitarian ministers here, adopt a rational religion. Kant, the intellectual Samson, who brought down the temple upon others, but also on himself, left us no God speculatively, but then he called in the practical reason, with its corollaries, a conscience, a day of judgment, an immortality, and a God, and thus restored what he had taken away. We have all seen "Deo erexit Voltaire" on the temple at Ferney, where nobody worships, plainly because the age is beyond deism, but has not yet reached the true religion. Rousseau is full of pious sentiment, and has pronounced the most beautiful eulogium ever uttered on Jesus of Nazareth, declaring that, while Socrates died as a man, Jesus died as a god. Comte had no god, but he had a Grand Etre in collective humanity, and he had a priesthood and nine sacraments, and enjoined public honors to be paid to his deity, allowing no liberty of conscience or of education to any one. Huxley, as a member of the School Board in London, insists that the Bible be introduced into every school, as knowing that science does not tend to make men moral, and that the Bible, though full of error, is the only book fitted to form the character of the young. Tyndall is exceedingly indignant at those who would charge him with doing away with religion. "No atheistic reasoning," he says, "can, I hold, dislodge religion from the heart of man. Logic cannot deprive us of life, and religion is life to the religious. As an experience of consciousness, it is perfectly beyond the assaults of logic." Herbert Spencer has allotted a very spacious region. to God and to religion, the Unknown and Unknowable, and commends the Athenians for erecting an altar to the unknown God. It is a very interesting circumstance that there are little groups of advanced, truth-loving men and women, who meet for conference on the Sundays in London, and in New York, Chicago, and other enlightened cities. I have at times attended their meetings. At one of them, which I remember particularly, we had a very burning address from a man of genius, who had started as a Scotch Calvinist, and run through all modern forms of faith, and now believes in the ETERNITIES, of whom, or of which, he discoursed in a glow surpassing that of the setting sun. He had evidently taken his faith and his language from Thomas Carlyle, who is one of the prophets of our own, and who believes in Force as a god, and gives him or it sufficient omnipotence, and ever flares up into the "immensities," and the "realities," and the "moralities," as does also our own Emerson. M. Renan, after showing that Jesus was tempted by the necessity of upholding his mission into imposture at the grave of Lazarus, tells us in the very strongest language that he has not cast |