Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 138.pdf/521

322  and longing for the new religion," and are sanguine enough to believe that "the longing will bring it:" —


 * Our youths remember the grave counsels of their fathers ever appealing to heaven, and the prayers of their mothers committing them with uplifted hands to God. They cannot forget that they used themselves to pray, and found comfort under bereavement when they could thus unbosom themselves, in the belief that there was an eye watching over them and a heart pitying them. They have a solemn memory of the parting with fathers and mothers and sisters, who assured those left behind that they were going to heaven, and wished those they loved - to follow them — all of which they are now obliged to regard as a delusion. Some of us have to look back on these days with a sigh.

But a religion without God, immortality, conscience, supernatural aims or hopes or fears, can hardly replace this discarded faith or fill the aching void it has left behind. The evolutionist would appear to be either very sarcastic or very simple. We remember not many years ago reading an announcement in the Times that the Japanese government had decided, after careful consultation with the leaders of every sect, on the introduction of "a new religion," to which everybody would be required to conform. The new creed was described as "enlightened, simple, and adapted to common sense, and likely to meet the approval of all classes." To be sure, a high standard of morality has not hitherto been the distinguishing characteristic of the natives of Japan, but it might be worth our inquirer's while to consult the mikado as to the details of this new religion, which is pretty sure not to be encumbered with a "conscience" and may very possibly also have risen above the "anthropomorphism of a living and personal God." If that does not answer his purpose, we have only one alternative suggestion to offer him, which we fear he is bound ex hypothesi to repudiate as irrelevant and effete. Seeing that the wise men and the fools, who according to Walpole make up the whole community, are agreed that religion is an imperative necessity, but the wise men are entirely at sea as to where they are to find a new religion, and even as to why they have rejected the old, might it not be worth a thought whether the initial assumption that all the old religions, including Christianity, are superseded is really so obvious a truism as to be "settled beyond the need and the propriety of reconsideration"? The same axiom has been quite as boldly proclaimed by "our advanced thinkers" in former ages also, but Christianity is living in spite of them. And there are thinkers of very respectable intelligence in our own day to whom it is not quite so clear as to the "Evolutionist," that Voltaire, or Rousseau, or Sainte-Beuve, or Schopenhauer, or even Messrs. Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer have spoken the last word on the subject now.

 

  — The horrible savagery of these poor wretches can hardly be wondered at; they live in a country where there is hardly a chance for them in any independent foraging expedition; they are half starved by their masters, being fed chiefly on frozen walrus hides in the winter, and allowed to shift for themselves in the summer when their services are not required, and are in so perennial and acute a state of hunger that they are ready at any time to eat their own harness if allowed to do so. It is generally stated that they are perfectly insensible to kindness, and only to be kept in order by a liberal application of the lash, or even of a more formidable weapon; for the Eskimo, if their dogs are refractory, do not scruple to beat them about the head with a hammer, or anything else of sufficient hardness which happens to be at hand. They will even beat the poor brutes in this horrible manner until they are actually stunned. Notwithstanding the absolute dependence of the Eskimo on their dogs, little or no care is taken of them; they receive nothing in any degree approaching petting, and spend all their time in the open air. The chief use of the Eskimo dog is to draw the sledges, which are the only possible conveyance in that frozen land. In all the Arctic expeditions which have been sent out at various times, a good supply of sledge dogs has been one of the greatest desiderata, as without them it would be absolutely impossible to proceed far. No other animal would answer the purpose, both horses and cattle being quite useless in journeys over ice and snow, amongst which the pack of light, active dogs make their way with wonderful ease and safety. 