Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/641

Rh with it. ... And, as I sate still under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and a true voice arose in me which said. There is a living God who made all things. And immediately the cloud and the temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all, and my heart was glad and I praised the Living God" (p. 13).

If George Fox could speak as he proves in this and some other passages he could write, his astounding influence on the contemporaries of Milton and of Cromwell is no mystery. But this modern reproduction of the ancient prophet, with his "Thus saith the Lord," "This is the work of the Lord," steeped in supernaturalism and glorying in blind faith, is the mental antipodes of the philosopher, founded in naturalism and a fanatic for evidence, to whom these affirmations inevitably suggest the previous question: "How do you know that the Lord saith it?" "How do you know that the Lord doeth it?" and who is compelled to demand that rational ground for belief without which, to the man of science, assent is merely an immoral pretense.

And it is this rational ground of belief which the writers of the Gospels, no less than Paul, and Eginhard, and Fox, so little dream of offering that they would regard the demand for it as a kind of blasphemy.—Nineteenth Century.



HE publication of a plan for establishing, in the capital of the German Empire, a “Museum of Popular Costumes and Products of Home Industry,” has aroused so earnest and general an interest that the realization of the thought may be regarded as assured. It may, it is true, be possible to carry it out at first only to a very limited extent, for neither sufficient means nor space can be secured at once for setting up a comprehensive institution. But the initial purpose of the authors of the enterprise will have been accomplished when they have exhibited a series of objects illustrative of their plan. They confidently hope that these examples will satisfy their fellow-citizens of the usefulness and even the need of such, a museum; and that the Government will assist it as it has assisted the technical museum, and will eventually take it under official care.

Herr von Gossler, the Prussian Minister of Worship, has already given the costume museum free temporary quarters in the old Industrial Academy, the present Hygienic Institute, in the Kloster-Strasse. The first acquisitions, which were made in the peninsula of Monkgut, in Rügen, satifiedsatisfied [sic] him that profitable 