(To TRH EDITOR. OF TIM "Srsatiroit."]
do not know that a word can be usefully added to the excellent article on the " Orientalizing Party on Woman Ques- tions" in your last number, except inasmuch as every separate voice counts for something at this time,1V-011 h the VOX pOindi re- echoes back upon itself so curiously. The best service that could just now be rendered to English controversy would be to press home the connection between dogma and morals, taking the word H dogma" in its largest sense as dealing with the belief in a God and immortality. But no such argument is possible unless a pre- liminary basis be established in men's minds of the connection between truth and morals. Once allow that true thinking and un- right acting, or uutrue thinking and right acting, may go together as cause and effect, and we are lost as a race in a mental maze.
If any creed be useful, it is in virtue of the truth that is in it. If it exaggerates, or debases, or clips the truth, by so much it fails in moral use. To doubt this is to give up the special excellence of the common English intellect, and destroys one of our most reasonable chances of finding out truth. Let us all, men and women, have the double courage not only to reject bad actions, but to accept good theories. The human intellect appears to me to possess, in seeking a creed, no sureness surer than the testimony of the conscience. The writers in the Saturday Review and Pall Mall Gazette do not appear to dispute the validity of its decisions on cardinal points, such as that of the observance of the marriage law, obedience to the law of the land, peouuiary honesty, the forbidding of murder, and the like.
If we can lay hold of ever so small a fragment of a creed which we can satisfy our minds to be the real root of right and wrong in these matters, let us go further, and confess it as the truth, good for mon and women. alike, and fatal equally if disregarded by
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