A Deceased Philosopher.—On Monday, December 7th, Herbert Spencer, the great philosopher of the Evolution Theory, died at Brighton, aged 83 years. As long as the present agnostic scheme of the universe is in fashion Spencer will be regarded as a great master of knowledge. Nevertheless, considering that his philosophy is based on a frank contempt of the facts of revelation, it may well be asserted that he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. His father, George Spencer, was a school teacher at Derby, and by religious profession was a Wesleyan Methodist, and latterly a Quaker. The son was thus, from the first, within the sphere of the reflex influences of Christianity, but he seems to have travelled up from childhood to manhood without acquiring the least tincture of the religious spirit. Not that he was at war with good manners or morals, but the whole supernatural order of things was to him superfluous and offensive. His master literary effort, the “System of Synthetic Philosophy,” is a gigantic attempt to explain the phenomena of heaven and earth, of mind and matter, without God. As complicated and subtle a scheme of second causes as you please will be allowed by him, but no great first cause. In one view this conspiracy against the doctrine of an Almighty Creator is a thing very trivial and transient, considering the short work that a little efficacious shining of the glory of the God of the Bible before the eyes of the nations would make of it; in another view the conspiracy is a matter weighty and terrible. For the God of Heaven is keeping silence while shoals of the wise and prudent are going down to darkness well pleased with this fallacious doctrine of the self-sufficiency of nature to develope and perfect herself. The deceased philosopher, though quite unvisited through his long life by any rays of the true light, had yet some strong commonsense views on matters of public conduct, and he was not, in all respects, an idolater of the spirit of the age. Thus in one of his books he asserts that “most of those who now pass as Liberals are Tories of a new type.” This witness is true. The present regime of lawless freedom in politics and essays towards a social millenium by the methods of the trade union and the co-operative store is about to bring forth a despotism of the biggest size, beneath whose iron hoof all the generation of meek, fair-minded people will find themselves crushed. However, it is not the leaven of Herbert Spencer that shall avail to counterwork these devouring principles of the modern world, but the leaven of that kingdom, despised by Herbert Spencer, whose features are righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.