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PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS OF THOMAS CARLYLE and ALFRED TENNYSON; from Medallions by T. Woolner; mounted so as to bind with the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.

London:—Bell and Daldy, 186, Fleet Street.

To the profound and eloquent remarks of M. Montégut, quoted in the last article on the Scepticism of Lassitude, it may be objected by some persons that faith, of its nature, should be fixed. But the question is, whether the faith of finite beings ever has been, or ever can be, fixed. The man who paces a deck may think that he walks straight and upright, when he really follows every oscillation of the deck he paces. So if a man lives, as he must live, on the billows of the age, his faith must partake of the mobility of the flood on which he steers his course. Those who plead for the immutability of truth forget, that the truth is not, but we are, mutable, and in this the whole question lies. Are not the Heavens one? Their constitution who can date? Since man first raised his eyes they have enthralled, consoled, terrified, or delighted the human race. Such as they were 6000 years ago so in the main are they now. But we have changed. For who will say that Moses or Homer saw the Heavens as Herschel sees? The Heavens, indeed, are one and the same,



but our apprehensions concerning them often contradictory in every particular to those of the ancient, including the inspired, writers.

The anonymous writer of the “Restoration of Belief” proposes “Christianity or Atheism as the only alternative now in front of the cultured branches of the human family.” He grounds his argument on the very partial assumption, “that the Atheism, partly, and the Theism, entirely, of the present time is full of Christian sap.” But an author apparently so well read should not omit to state that Christian theology has been inoculated by almost every successive doctrine of philosophy, from Plato downwards. Theism was long antecedent to Christianity, and if, with the author, we should suppose “the Gospel” (for argument’s sake) “to have breathed its last,” the alternative would still remain between Atheism and Theism to the end of time, Theism being the natural belief of mankind, and Atheism but the temporary malady of a certain small class of minds, since so long as the idea of cause and effect forms the groundwork of the human intellect, the bulk of men will believe in a prime cause, and endow it with attributes, sound in proportion to their general progress. And if, as he says, no one scheme of “philosophic Theism can maintain its ground,” it is simply because the attributes given to the Godhead in one age will vary according to the amount of light acquired in another. The dark, though un-sensual and legal, Jehovah of Moses, is altogether a different being from the God of the later Jews, or of Mr. Kingsley, for instance, in his sermon on the “Divine Life:” and the progress is inevitable. None but an idiot ever grew up to consider his father in manhood what he did as a child. If then theisms are subject to those periods of “fermentation” which our author very properly ascribes to and defends in the case of Christianity, the argument is exactly equal for and against both. Nay, it is no trifle whether Theism can keep its ground; for Christianity did not usher in, but only developed, the belief in one God; and if that constitution of men’s minds should cease, which after a proper amount of experience recognises, with whatever attributes, one prime and sole cause, the fate of Christianity will have become a matter of very small moment indeed, and thus much perhaps the author allows, with apparent inconsistency, elsewhere. Again he says, “Natural theology cannot lay the foundation for a worship, nor give fixed support to an ethical doctrine.”

The stress here lies on the word “fixed;” and fixity of worship, judging by the diversity of Christian worships, Christianity has failed to give. Moreover, whatever is common to all the various Christian worships is really common to mankind, and, therefore, as mankind, shifting. And as for the ethical doctrines founded on Christianity they too are diverse, and not only so, but in many cases that diversity has actually been accepted and derived from Grecian, purely natural, sources, unaided by divine revelation, except



so much of revelation as people may be disposed to imagine implanted in man’s original constitution. If, therefore, the absence of fixed support given to worships and moral systems be any argument against Natural Theology, it would avail equally against Christianity also.

But the truth appears to be that no worship, and no ethical doctrine, ever can be fixed, so long as humanity is not fixed, but progressive; for even such as it is, the fixity of any worship is only apparent; if, instead of judging by the letter of creeds and formularies, we judge by the spirit of the men who own them. For in their hearts probably no two individuals ever did worship in the same way, though they uttered the same words with their lips. And to express the difference which Omniscience beholds between their prayers in spite of the common form, would actually require a different form of words. And this is true of the purely intellectual part of a creed or prayer. But it is still more true, when applied to the emotional part of worship, that namely which regards the feelings, such as love, devotion, adoration, sincerity, and the like. For as no two children award exactly the same feelings to one parent, neither do two men to God. And as the reverence of the child differs from that of the matured man, so will the inner worship of even one and the same individual vary at two different periods. Thus, however durable liturgies and doxologies may be, when once established, yet the spirit breathed into the words by succeeding tides of worshippers, not to say by each individual at different periods—the spirit, I say, gives the real meaning to the form. The same chalice will hold holy water and Lacryma Christi. The form indeed may remain, but those who watch human progress know that the essence and spirit below the form not only will, but must change. The infidel and the scholar both acknowledge this change; but, while the former attributes it to blind chance, the latter believes in certain laws of transition, even when he is unable to trace them.

But when, in a period of intellectual “ferment,” the author of the “Restoration of Belief” expresses a fervent desire to go back to “that Christianity, whole and entire, which, filling as it did the mind and the heart of the early Church, carried it through its day of trial,” that seems no better than if a man cutting his wisdom tooth should wish himself back in his mother’s womb.

So much for the impossibility of having fixed worships. And as for ethical systems they are subject to every kind of “fermentations,” to use the author’s own word, incident to religious schemes. They are not, and so long as human morality is not, never can be fixed. Are the ten commandments fixed? In themselves no doubt as fast as the Heavens. But the Commandments themselves, ipsissimæ leges, have no influence on men. It is the interpretation for the time being of each commandment that really sways them, and this fluctuates, or rather systematically progresses with the whole tide of hermeneutics, with the whole history of a country’s laws, and with the whole stream of its literature.

And should this be used as an argument against all reforms and all changes, since “any form may do for any spirit,” that is more than the scholar affirms. He advocates the doctrine, that all outward forms and institutions are but the incrustations and exponents of an organic life within; that they grew out of that life originally, and in course of time will begin to hang on more and more loosely as a new shell, so to speak, grows hidden by the old one from the



outward eye, until this older and outer covering, effete and worn out, finally drops off. This is pretty well acknowledged by all but the most violent and antiquated Tories for all human institutions. It only remains to apply the same principle to all matters of opinion in religion. But, unfortunately, though change does gradually and daily take place before men’s eyes in matters of religion, they fear to allow it, and disclaim what they see, ceasing, in fact, to see it, because they are haunted by the fallacy that a religion, as to be true, it must be divine, so to be divine must be immutable. But in that case humanity ought to be an immutable thing, because that also is divine, being created of God; whereas, by his very creation, humanity is mutable, and, being mutable, everything, including religion, adapted to its mutable nature, must partake of a mutability, not indeed subject to chance, but, whether or not they are known, to fixed laws.* The temper of the constitutional sceptic, while it leads him to suspect in general, will, in the case of his neighbours, often lead him to be confiding in particular. His general suspicion often arises from an excess of confidence having been early deceived and abused; but, in particular things and men he is still too often trusting, loving, and sincere, and in himself trustworthy. The man who, against the tide of the world’s contempt, speaks out his doubts, must have, unless he be a cynic, a singular fund of trustworthiness. And experience shows, that few men have been more blameless and trustworthy in their privacy than the avowed greater sceptics. Thence, too, the sceptic is often severe in general, lenient in particular; a general accuser, a particular excuser. And this of itself might go a long way to account for the general hostility awarded to him on the part of the world and the devoted friendship of his more intimate acquaintances.

It may be interesting to consider how it should so often happen that those who are in reality above their age, not only fail of the sympathies of their fellows, incurring even their positive hatred, but should themselves, which is more extraordinary, look coldly on the general tide of progress. The first efforts of superior minds are generally directed to earn a certain independence of ideas, more or less adapted to the state of things around them, a principality of thought, which they may still consider more especially their own.

Of the original systems, which have startled or delighted mankind, perhaps most may be traced to the early discomforts of men, whose tender or proud consciences, rudely jostled in the crowd of conflicting ideas, have led them to yearn for a vista of their own, and to strive after some commanding peak, whence to overlook in peace the turmoil below.

But, as every age is in travail of the next, thousands remain striving and fighting along the valleys, up the hills in which, the efforts of the few have enabled them to escape. The consequences of the separation are often as deplorable as they might have been foretold. Looking down, those who have crowned the heights behold aghast the tide of battle at their feet. So long as they were in the press themselves, elbowing and panting, they had neither power nor time to survey the rolling flood. But the confusion from which they have fled they now see thrice confounded. At rest themselves they forget their recent plight, and exaggerating the efforts of each unit by the agitation of the sum total, they are smitten with the panic and dread of universal anarchy. With angry pity they retort upon the reproaches of apathy and selfishness or godless pride



hurled at them from beneath, and from the height of their elevation, as they see far ahead how the path of progress must lie, they cannot understand the restless impatience of those below, and view with melancholy disgust the desperate contortions of men striving in vain to look beyond their neighbour. Hence it so often happens that they to whom the many might reasonably have looked for guidance and encouragement throw ice on burning zeal, and reap unexpected hatred, suspicion, or contempt, instead of the honour due to their loftier position.

Such among other men is the fate of eminent sceptics. And yet, in the words of Emerson,

“The right ground of the Sceptic is not at all of unbelief, not at all of universal denying; nor of universal doubting; least of all, of scoffing, and profligate jeering at all that is stable and good. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man has too many enemies than that he can afford to be his own…. . It is a position taken up for better defence, as of more safety, and one that can be maintained, and it is one of more opportunity and range; as when we build a house the rule is to set it not too high nor too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt .”

Again he says,

“Though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, the sceptical class have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. Every superior mind will pass through this domain of equilibration—I should rather say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in Nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of bigots and blockheads .

“Scepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverend only in their tendency and spirit. Society does not like to have any breath of question blown upon the existing order. But the interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception of the flowing power which remains itself in all changes. The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society and with the projects that are offered

to relieve them. The wise sceptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties wish every one implicated, and he penetrates the popular egotism. His politics are those of the ‘Soul’s Errand’ of Sir Walter Raleigh; or of Krishna in the Bhagavat;—‘There is none who is worthy of my love or hatred;’ whilst he sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce, and custom. He is a reformer; yet he is no better member of the philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion of the operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind that our life in this world is not of quite so easy interpretation as churches and school-books say. He does not wish to play the part of Devil’s attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for him: but he says, ‘ there are doubts.’ ”

This picture of the Constitutional Sceptic of all times, the type of minor modifications, or exaggerations, vigorously drawn by an eminent American pen, is rendered still more interesting, perhaps, coming after the more abstract and refined description of general phases quoted from the distinguished French Publicist. Surely a little scepticism would be a vast blessing to those, who, in Jeremy Taylor’s words,

“read, study, pray, search records, and use all the means of art and industry, in the pursuit of truth,—not with a resolution to follow that which shall seem truth to them, but to confirm what before they did believe: and if any arguments shall seem unanswerable against any article of their Church, they are to take it for a temptation, not for an illumination, and they are to use it accordingly; which makes them make the devil to be the author of that which God’s Spirit hath assisted them to find in the use of lawful means and search of truth.”

Much is said of the tendency of the positive sciences to disturb religious truth; and it is indeed curious to observe the bye-play which accompanies the progress of absolute knowledge. “What is sure” says the author of Restoration of Belief, in a very remarkable passage,

“What is sure will be pressing upon what is uncertain, whether or not the two be brought designedly into collision or comparison. What is well defined weighs upon, and against, what is ill defined. Nothing stops the continuous involuntary operation of science, in dislodging opinion from the minds of those who are conversant with both.”

And so true does this appear, that every orthodoxy, from the time of those who impeached Anaxagoras for being guilty of the “re-ification of the sun,” down to our own people, who thought to stay the strides of geology,—every orthodoxy bristles all over at the birth of a new fact, as if it never knew exactly what was going to happen to it next. But against this nameless jealousy, the latent axiom of the unity of truth is perpetually obtruding itself. Under a polytheism twenty contradictory truths might have co-existed, all equally true, as emanating from distinct divinities; but as emanating from one sole prime and perfect cause they are not conceivable. Thus the unity, coherence, and harmony of truth is forced upon its often most unwilling champions, who are reduced to lament in secret that they have no corner of their own secure from intrusion, and that some unlucky discovery in chymistry or the stars may penetrate into the darkest corner of divinity, because, forsooth, all truth hangs together, and man, having but one mind, is subject to the same laws of thought in religion as in science. And thus it comes that the positive sciences have often been spoken of with but cold consideration, if not open abuse.

But it required little sagacity to discover that the language of the Bible being the natural and idiomatic language of a section of mankind, would yield with the elasticity of every untechnical tongue to the progressive requirements of science, as indeed it actually turned out. For at first it was denied that the earth turned round the sun, because the Bible said the sun turned round the earth. But when it became certain that the earth actually did turn round the sun, it was discovered that the Bible had never meant to say whether it did or not, but had merely adopted the daily language of the Jews for the time being. To this method of interpretation, with good will, patience, and very moderate ingenuity, there is hardly any limit, and thus the more sagacious party have ceased to fear any danger from that quarter. What they fear and dislike are the stubborn, patient, and conscientious habits of thought and enquiry fostered by scientific pursuits.

There is hope of an enthusiast, for any vagary: but experience shows how little of the experimentalist. They confine themselves, therefore, in a general way to calling independence of thought towards man hostility towards God; and, in a word, adopt the very Christian warfare of giving a dog a bad name. The Churches, we may be thankful, have many nobler spirits: but they belong to those whose faith rises beyond the fictions of a day,—less defined, perhaps, but more palpitating,—less precise, but more kind; who penetrate beyond the husk of institutions to the diviner essence of life and charity, the true bond of human brotherhood; who care for universal truth more than for their own; whose hearts, not centred in one spot, embrace both earth and heaven: the Gamaliels of a land. And they would be more numerous in every church, if the insane notion of the essential criminality of religious heterodoxy, dogging their every thought, did not warp so many of their best sons into silent bitterness or loud hostility.

It is not, then, by tightening the bonds of mutual toleration between churchmen only, that infidelity seems likely to be checked, but by establishing the true, proper, and lawful foundation of human forbearance. Chickens are not made for egg-shells; but eggshells for chickens. Men are not made



for churches; but churches for men. We seem perpetually in danger of mistaking the fly for the coach—the effect of an institution for the great tide and temper of the times, on which the institution is afloat. Church discipline is improved, says Mr. Conybeare. But if Church discipline is improved, is it not because the temper of the times is improved? If the “tribe of Hoadlies” has vanished, is it not because even doubt has learnt to respect itself, and to know its own place and value in the economy of truth? And is not this, perhaps, as it ought to be? For since the present generation has had such triumphant and multifarious proof and experience of the power of true knowledge, and so many more students, jostled much against their will into independence of thought, on looking back have seen how often honestly to doubt once was to believe for ever; being no other, in fact, than the evidence of that spirit of childlike humility, necessary to enter into the kingdom of truth; no wonder if even Doubt should have learnt to esteem itself, and refuse to accept a portion with infidels and dogs.

There is a class of men not easy to describe, whom possibly Mr. Conybeare would include in the Broad Church,—a class of men who, if sifted by a higher power, might, for ought we know, be found to have no opinions at all, only the knack of believing that they do believe; but what, they will not tell, and of course nobody else can.

“They are Anglican.” But if asked what Anglican is, they look at you with dignity and calm politeness, and (for your sake, no doubt) change the subject. If you are of a gentle turn, you immediately suspect yourself of being guilty of some shocking enormity—of having forgotten your Catechism or the ten Commandments, God knows, of never having learnt them at all; you feel humble and repentant; you are dumb-stricken by the silent reproof of an all but august self-possession. If you are of a hot and generous nature, you curse yourself for your own imprudence, and them for their coldness and unkindness. But if you pique yourself on sagacity, and are sufficiently ill-natured, you feel quite sure, somehow, that they are infidels in disguise, and you are half consoled by the discovery for their impudence. You are mistaken, however. They are not infidels. They do not belong to the chosen band of “twenty” in the Church, who, “under the mask of impenetrable hypocrisy,” escape even Mr. Conybeare’s practised eye. They really do believe that they believe. Their lot is indeed most fortunate. They live in the happy consciousness of faith. They occupy the loftiest ground. They are unassailable. They are not, like the miser, for ever counting their articles. Their bags are sealed, labelled, duly shelved, properly aired and dusted, and never opened. To the wealth of such men there is really no limit. It is untold, fabulous. Their credit is unbounded. Of their neighbours’ affairs they can afford to talk. They do not live in glass houses. Hence they are not the shallow, illiterate pedants of any school. They look at everything, scan everything. They are familiar with every system, every creed, with every virtue and every enormity. At college they discussed them hotly or cynically. Perhaps some were not without the hearty and specific convictions of youth. But youth grows into manhood. What they discussed hotly, they now discuss calmly. The absence of all inconvenient personal allusions or reference to past times has become a tacit freemasonry. They look at opinions in general with godlike dispassion, each man living in a circle of his own, a circle magic and unseen, from which all particular opinion provokingly and pertinaciously recoils. Does not every one of my readers know ten such men? Now all this is



very well. In daily life they are often most useful and exemplary men—often excellent friends, most charming companions. But why confine the freemasonry of opinion to a personal clique? If they look so calmly on systems, why not a little more kindly on the authors of systems? if merciful to abstractions, why not to living life? “Honeymans” and Hoadlies, Recordites and Mark-of-the-Beast men, with the whole tribe of quacks, I give up to their withering contempt; but why are they more Anglican than human, more Christian than Christ? Whether or not Mr. Conybeare himself belongs to this party, I do not for a moment decide. But while on the one hand he would, I think, have us understand that he, for his part, does not answer for the salvation of the un-Anglican “thinker,” on the other hand he has pointedly attacked Carlyle and Miss Martineau; the latter, perhaps, in some sense inhumanly. The sincerity, the long labours, the deep philanthropy, whatever the temper and the faults, of this extraordinary woman, are well known. Have Christians no tempers, no faults? Are they always sincere, laborious, and humane? She is now on her deathbed, and, after a long life spent as a Unitarian, she has, it appears, made in her last days a formal profession of Atheism. Now Atheism is a very revolting thing, if it proceeds from the hostility of vice: a very melancholy state of mind, if, in the inscrutable designs of Providence, it should proceed from lengthened labours and lassitude of thought, as we may charitably suppose. But if a daughter should have spent a long and lonely life in search of her father, and worn out in body and soul, should breathe her last by the way, exclaiming in the madness of her heart, “I have no father!”—would such an exclamation, such a delusion, alter the bowels of parental compassion, and would a father sympathize with him, who, on passing by and hearing the agonizing words of a death-swoon, could point the finger of scorn and cry “ha, ha! you could not find him?” With Mr. Kingsley may we not ask, if we shall attribute to God in heaven less mercy than to fathers on Earth?

With regard to Carlyle, whom Mr. Conybeare accuses of designing tactics in the conduct of his writings, of having first veiled his tendencies under scriptural phraseology, and then unmasked his batteries against the truth, I need only give M. Montégut’s masterly and charitable explanation. He remarks, that

“The Anglican church would see far smaller inroads into the ranks of her faithful, if she possessed the gifts by which Carlyle has moved so many minds, that is, his warmth and sympathy, and above all his marvellous faculty of expressing the secret thought and hidden travail of the generations whom he addresses. If the young men, and the women themselves have read with so much enthusiasm the writings of Carlyle, it is because he has called the loudest sursum corda that England has heard in this century. Those dithyrambics of a living and impassioned heart have acted on new generations like a religious note. And what indeed are the active forces of religion, if not impassioned feeling and life? Carlyle happened to possess precisely those gifts of proselytism which are necessary to the chiefs of churches, and there lies the principal cause of his success. The moral consequences which may flow from the writings of the man, whom it is impossible to read without esteem and to know without respect, are not such as Mr. Conybeare would insinuate. Mr. Charles Bampton could never find in them any theories of sentimental indulgence, nor could the odious Archer ever find any arguments in them to warrant his crimes. If, with respect to systems, Carlyle may be looked upon as a pantheist (which is disputed; for pantheism was never with him a profession of faith, but only a note of interrogation, if we may call it so), on the other hand, with respect to morality, he has remained an intractable dualist. Instead of identifying in one single and suspected unity the two principles of good and of evil, he has never failed to mark the impassable gulf between them. As a moralist he remains as austere as ever, and condemns as irrevocably the vicious and guilty as ever Calvin or John Knox.

Nor is he in the habit of trifling with the deleterious influences that slowly enervate the mind. No one has more energetically denounced, than he has, the sentimentality of the eighteenth century, the modern indulge genio, and the religions of sensuality which he has had the honest cynicism to call by their true name: “phallus worship.” But above all, in subjects of practical morality, the solid good sense of the man breaks out, who, while he admires Goethe and opposes Bentham, is not the more disposed, on that account, to admit the poetry of vice, than its utility.”

M. Montégut then proceeds to observe, that

“Mr. Conybeare embodies an accusation against Carlyle, which the most superficial knowledge of his writings refutes: he accuses him of tactics and strategy. According to him, he first insinuated himself into public notice in sheep’s clothing to deceive the flock better, and once in threw off the mask, and appeared in his true character of a wolf. He made use of Christian phraseology to express philosophical ideas, and affected a mystical gait to play the part of a rationalist; then, having made his way under ground, and sheltered from attack secured a strong position, he then unmasked all his batteries. The difference, it is true, between his earlier and later writings is, as every one knows, sufficiently palpable; but this difference is explained by age and common life. In his youth he was more of a mystic. As he grew older, the religious ideal held less place in his mind, until at length he was seized with that fury of terrestrial justice, practical and political, which in his later years has become his war-cry. Give him justice; he will have it at any price; impose it by whatever means, and force men to be just by the sword! He who shall accomplish this revolution will be sure of his obedience, and do not talk to him of scruples of conscience, of evangelical mildness, of moral persuasion, &c.! Bottled Moonshine all that! A good government, strenuous and just, that is now his ideal. Where is there a shadow of tactics in all this? To him who can read, the metamorphosis was preparing long ago, and the work on Cromwell forms the appropriate transition between Carlyle the mystic, the believer in a supernal ideal as a means of action on man, and Carlyle the worshipper of Frederic the Second, the king practical, atheistic, and just.”

A very common method of argument is to assume that, because one set of objections to orthodoxy have been triumphantly disposed of, we are at liberty to take one victory gained as a general answer to all objections for ever. But this would have held equally good in favour of any of the errors in science, which in spite of almost preternatural longevity have given way at last, and the assumption is so injurious in the minds of many men to the cause of the Christian Religion that it may be worth while to dwell on its futility.

If every religion must have its phases and crises, it will of course have to combat corresponding phases and crises of objection. And this would suffice in a general way.

But it may be thought of greater moment to enumerate particularly some of the principal theological problems of the day, more especially as they are too often buried in foolish silence, while mock elephants of infidelity are elegantly trumped up to be elegantly demolished. It will thus appear how grave and reasonable the doubts of honest men may be. Those who advocate fearless discussion, and who believe that truth will prevail, will find no fault with me for calling attention to difficulties which must be answered sooner or later.

When Hume propounded his argument against miracles, he inferred that Christ and his Apostles were impostors. Divers scientific answers, with various success, were returned to the general argument; but his inference fell to the ground before the overwhelming conviction of most reasonable men, that the New Testament writers and early Christians were sincere, and had in many cases sealed their sincerity with their lives. But the study of history, aided by the immense increase of European discussion, the fruits of which in this country have been far more generally felt during the last ten years, owing to the causes already suggested, has disposed men to be more sparing of the hypothesis of “impostorship.” The



belief, that Cromwell was a genuine Puritan and a sincere man has gained ground. It is no longer the fashion among scholars to speak of Mahomet as an impostor. He was mistaken perhaps; but sincere. He was the “representative man,” to use Emerson’s language, of an Oriental phase. Further, the whole downward stream of Grecian and Roman history has been set forth in a blaze of light, explored by all the scholars and philosophers of the Continent, and arranged in order by distinguished countrymen of our own more fitted for the latter task by the practical habits derived from a more advanced national and political experience. It used to be thought indeed, however vaguely, that the heathens had no religion, or no religion worthy of much consideration. Despising their errors, we neglected to enquire into their frames of mind, or how their religious beliefs had arisen. But recent historical labours have done much to dispel such indifference. To take Greece, we are compelled to abandon the opinion too commonly received at one time, and even now lingering, that the works of Homer were the mere pleasing fictions of an idle and imaginative race. We now see that the early books of the Jews were not held in higher religious reverence by the Hebrews than were the books of Homer by the Greeks. Homer, we now know, was the Bible of the Greeks. We never loved ours more than they did theirs, and when Socrates was put to death for canvassing the Gods, his doom was but the index of the struggle between the orthodox and critical parties, to the latter of which we even owe the germs of almost every modern science, and of ethics so called Christian. The Athenians, who voted the death of the philosopher, were not perverse or inhuman; they were orthodox, and convinced of the truth and importance of their faith. Now the evidence, the direct evidence, in favour of the inspiration of the early books of the Jews is not one whit greater than that in favour of the early books and oracles of the Greeks; both resting on the affirmation of the respective nations, or of individuals of those nations. The faith of each was equally undoubting, no “undesigned coincidences” are required to prove it, and the earnest student may be excused for asking in what respect, taken all in all, the Jews had greater antecedent claims on posterity than the Greeks. If later miracles are appealed to, we know now that men may believe in fictitious miracles without a grain of insincerity or imposition. If the superior morality of the Gospel is pleaded, we know that, as a science, ethics were founded in Greece, and that too by the sceptical party of their day. And those who have read Plato’s Dialogues know that Socrates went the length of inculcating forgiveness of our enemies in the midst of the most cruel and vindictive of peoples, and that to have proceeded one step farther to the love of our enemies, judging from the whole tenour of his views, would have been a very easy transition.

But moreover, there are more obscurities in Jewish history than in Grecian, and the doubts they occasion are not removed by the knowledge on the part of the scholar of the paucity of materials, which, he knows, has lent too great a handle to party feelings, for violent distortion or enforced conventional silence. When a few years ago Dr. Milman published a History of the Jews, written in a manly, universal spirit, he was immediately taxed with latitudinarianism and neology. Owing to such jealousies, and to the fact, that Hebrew is not generally studied at school like Greek and Latin, while immense strides have been made in the history of the Greeks and Romans, and the minds of educated men prepared for the results, the history of the Jews has hardly received any critical treatment at all, and any attempts at it in England are viewed



with distrust and ill will, and easily misrepresented by fanatics and hypocrites.

The enlightened sceptic pleads, that if the Jews believed in one God, and that be urged in favour of their antecedent superiority, that very superiority should not be set aside on the question of their trustworthiness, when they rejected the claims of the Christ. On purely historical grounds, which it must be remembered, he says, are the proper and primary grounds of evidence, it does not easily appear that the career of the Saviour on earth differed more from that of Socrates than might have been expected from national differences. Socrates resisted the Aristophanites, or old orthodox party on one side, and the infidel sophists on the other. He too had his demon; his heavenly inspiration. The Saviour, on the other hand, resisted the Pharisees or orthodox party on the one hand, and the infidels or Sadducees on the other. And when it is remembered how vast a difference there is between the mystic depth and oriental fervour of the Jews and the cold, bright intellect of the Greeks, if many a man, accustomed to weigh delicate evidences, is loth after the history of human delusions to do unnecessary violence to those universal and primary laws of nature, which to the scientific student are the highest glory of the Creator, it need not be wondered at that he should hesitate in attributing supernatural agency to an historical phase, the counterpart of which he thinks he sees clearly in the life of other nations.

The onus probandi here really lies with the orthodox party, for they, not the sceptics, are the innovators, since the latter appeal to the antecedent and primary principle of “greater simplicity,” which is, that of two or more possible suppositions the simplest in order should be taken until it can be shown not to be the true one. Now, à priori, it is the simplest hypothesis to suppose Jewish history to have been amenable to the same or similar phases, the same or similar “fermentations,” as other nations have been found to be subject to. And when on actual trial it seems likely to turn out that not only are the various phases highly analogous, but even the very differences such as might have been expected, the sceptic is only more philosophical in assuming one comprehensive law to include both nations, until churchmen of the old school can prove the hypothesis insufficient.

Such an argument and assumption is not of an infidel hostile to religion, but of a sincere and highly cultivated man, who is more devoted to truth than to opinion. It is not the argument of the eighteenth century, neither of Hume nor yet of the more recent and more visionary Strauss. So far from being elated by the pride of knowledge, as he is malignantly represented, his doubts proceed from very humility and fidelity to the Creator whom he reveres.

Again, another question of great import, hinging on to the former, is that of the inherent natural depravity of man. The philosophical moralist argues, that men are observed, until perverted by habit, to do some good actions for the sake only of doing good actions, whereas they do no bad actions for the sake only of doing bad actions, but in reality only to compass some imaginary good. That it should be an imaginary good argues no natural depravity, only frailty and ignorance.

Appealing to “Bishop Butler’s Sermons on Human Nature,” he maintains that no crime, much less a minor fault, can be pointed out, into which frail and ignorant men might not have fallen without any inherent natural depravity; and that since, on the natural hypothesis of the frailty of mankind it can be shown, by the easiest steps, that the gold of civilization would have been accompanied by all the dross which has actually accompanied



it, the artificial hypothesis is unnecessary, savouring too much of the dark fears of a fervid people in its infancy, analogous to the feelings which gave rise to the Promethean myths of other countries, myths which only represent the craving of all tribes to explain the apparent hostility between the heavenly powers and man in tribulation.

According to Emerson,

“The word Fate or Destiny expresses the sense of mankind in all ages that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or Nature, grows over us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune blind; and Destiny deaf. We have too little power of resistance against this ferocity, which champs us up.”

This feeling decreases with the growth of light; yet Mr. Kingsley, in his Sermons for the Times, still finds it necessary to combat it in his most forcible language. Eclipses are taken by rude tribes as marks of divine wrath, and the same spirit will seek to exculpate itself from sin by the legend, sincerely believed, of an original fall. Fichte observes, that there is a universal tendency in mankind to place the golden age behind them, which in reality is the ideal of a golden age to come. From such a golden age the whole apparent tendency of history, past and cotemporary, goes, he thinks, to prove that no nation ever did start; while, if the whole known cycle of nations be taken in, humanity seems plainly to tend to it, Christianity being only the most perfect hitherto of moral evolutions of the world. “They have not understood me,” said the noble old man, when he was banished from Saxony on the charge of atheism: “they have not understood me.” The sceptic who entertains, and whose attainments warrant such doubts, by his devoted love of truth, and by his impartiality above all bribe from hope or fear, is not the least sincere friend of true religion and civilization; and to class him with the enemies of God and the Church, is either childish injustice or conscious weakness, or else the most fiendish iniquity. Such a man has no notion of overturning the Church and unsettling the weak. He views infidelity (truly, not vulgarly so called) with pity and almost divine compassion. He would rather a millstone were hung about his own neck, than that he should tamper with the faith of the simplest “little one.” He does not wish, he would be grieved, that any one should entertain his doubts, who has not also trodden his most laborious grounds. He believes in and patiently contributes his mite towards the gradual unfolding, the final ascendancy, of truth, be that what it may.

On the other hand, it too often happens

“that the people’s questions are not his; their methods are not his.” … “Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man—of divine Providence, and of the immortality of the soul,—his neighbours cannot put the statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith, not less: he denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged with the imbecility of scepticism than with untruth. I believe, he says, in the moral design of the universe: it exists hospitably for the weal of souls: but your dogmas seem to me caricatures. Why should I make-believe them? Will any say, this is cold and infidel? The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his farsighted goodwill, which can abandon to the adversary all the ground of tradition and common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It sees to the end of transgression … Now shall he, because a good nature inclines him to virtue’s side, say, There are no doubts, and lie for the right? Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue?”

These words, put into the mouth of the sceptic in Emerson’s Lecture on Montaigne, express the feelings of many men who may be pardoned a feeling of indignation and bitterness, when foolishly reviled with infidelity, and secretly looked upon as the enemies of truth.

Any criticism of ordinary novels written to adorn a text must be a secondary consideration. It may not, therefore, perhaps be deemed necessary to review the story before us in the character of a novel. As a novelist, the author of “Perversion” is what might have been expected from his other writings: sharp, shrewd, dextrous and observant; accurate, but in haste; without hurry, but lacking the first requisite of art, repose. The impression left is of the well-trained Senate-house writer, who, even should he fail of great excellence in any, is sure of moderate success in every task to which he may turn his hand.

Such passages as the following, though certainly not of frequent occurrence throughout the one thousand odd pages with which we are favoured, may not betoken any very high artistic power.

A poor old clergyman is represented as receiving his younger friends in the following style:

“Young gentlemen,” he said, “I am obliged to you by the honour you have done myself and my family, I am. It is very good of you to come and meet us in this unceremonious manner, it is. I have the honour of introducing to you my son Thomas, I have; and I hope he will do his duty as a member of the illustrious college to which you belong, I do.”

But Mr. Conybeare’s essays will probably be thought, generally speaking, very far superior to his novel, Cambridge honours being now, perhaps, more conducive to criticism than to works of fiction. But considering the apparent hostility of Mr. Conybeare to originality and independence of thought, out of a certain limited sphere, he would hardly be expected to attain to the ethereal touches of a Thackeray or Lesage, a Dickens or Cervantes. He would probably deprecate the world-wide impartiality necessary for such eminence, content to ruin those of whom he would be rid. To kindle the flame of sympathy in that world, whose great heart “knows no long injustice,” and burns from age to age with love of all things true, holy, excellent and great, requires a spark more catholic than he can give, in whom the Church has swallowed up the man. On the other hand, the cleverness, the information, the keen perception, the apparent candour and admirable suppression of everything calculated to injure the text of his sermon, are subjects of praise to which the author of “Perversion” is clearly well entitled.

Mr. Conybeare, who seems to agree with Arnold, that the Visible Church, though one universal commonwealth, is not restricted to any single form of outward government, naturally thinks, therefore, that the dissenters may as well stay at home, and seems displeased that the sons of dissenting ministers should consent to adorn and encumber the livings of the Establishment. There is much that is natural and reasonable in this. But he reserves all his severity for the religious Irish fortune-hunter. Perhaps the following passage is in his best style:

“When the ladies withdrew this exhibition terminated, and was followed by a languid interval of dulness in the dining-room. Mr. Moony had no longer the same stimulus from the rapt attention of his audience; Charles and the Admiral conversed apart, and the other gentlemen drank their wine in silence. At last the quantity which he had imbibed began to tell on Murphy,”

an Irish travelling representative of the Millenarian Society,

“who waxed loquacious in his native brogue, which grew thicker and thicker as the wine mounted to his head. He edified the company by an account of a clever exploit he had performed in the last railway journey he undertook on behalf of the society he represented. He found his carpet-bag missing (he said) at the terminus; and where he expected it to be, saw a leathern portmanteau which seemed without an owner.

“And said I to myself, sure then exchange is no robbery: most likely the man who lost this leathern convanience has got me carpet-bag, bad luck to him; so I took the trunk home with me instead, and it has never been claimed since.”

“And did you open it, sir?” asked Charles. “Open, is it,” said Murphy, “and what for should’nt I? Indeed but I did open it, and have worn the clothes in it ever since; and mighty convanient I have found them, for the man that lost them must have been just me own size, barring that he was a thought bigger: and with the fault of the tailor that fault is aisy cured.”

Presently they adjourn to the drawing-room, on reaching which they find a precocious young Recordite, petted by the ladies.

“Clara was asking him whether he knew little Rubric, the son of another clergyman in Summerham?”

“No,” cried the child, “I hate him; he is a nasty Tractarian.”

“Why, my dear boy,” said Charles, “what do you know about Tractarians? Do you know what the word Tractarian means?”

“Oh yes,” said the precocious controversialist, “I pick up little things from what papa says at luncheon. I know very well. Tractarian means the same as an infidel.”

“Quite right, you darling!” cried Miss Hawser; “how delightful to see clear views firmly impressed on the mind of such a suckling!”

One feels quite unexpectedly indebted to Mr. Conybeare for giving society such an excellent lesson on the common use of the word infidel.

If one should attempt to conceive Mr. Conybeare’s sentiments from his writings, however erroneous I hope the impression to be, he would appear either to love nothing and nobody, or to disguise that he loves anything and anybody, save, perhaps, under the limited idea of churchmanship. And, therefore, while I think his photographical exhibitions of many absurdities and vices—Tractarian, Recordite, and Infidel—will be as useful in their way as they are often highly finished and amusing, I feel convinced that he will convert few, call forth sympathy from few, living the life of him in whom the man does not also contain the critic by the way, but in whom the critic, keen, clear, and deft, embodies the whole man. What men want now-a-days is love, that devotion of man to man, which in the pacific calm consequent on many convulsions, seems to droop, and in the iron tread of business, dies within itself, ashamed to show its own face, when, with all the high and most substantial blessings of greater freedom and equality, we still must feel, that men are now so much alike—with agreements and disagreements so minutely subdivided and interwoven, that it is toss up, whom we may like and dislike, and from whom, being bound to-day, to-morrow we may drift. But that love they will not purchase at the expense of their freedom, dearly bought, their principles, and understandings. Such is the hidden sore of the present time, a sore which Mr. Conybeare’s writings are not calculated to heal over.

He speaks, indeed, with respect of Arnold and Dr. Hare, of Maurice, Wilson, Dawes and Perry. He patronises and reclaims his own weak and amiable creation, Charles Bampton, and seems to admit, that even unbelievers, like Socrates, may be good. But even Socrates he thinks will be admitted into heaven, not to glorified humanity, but the church. Whence it may be inferred, that man is for the church; not the church for man.

He walks with neat and businesslike step down the opposing ranks, marshalled for his criticism, and plunges the probing knife unflinchingly in all. But when a victim is not backed by a powerful party to support him, he is not prone to stop with the kind word and look to raise some little gem of truth out of the dust at his victim’s feet, and console him with an acknowledgment of it; there it is, there let it lie; it is covered with dust, something dirty.

A highly tempting opportunity occurs, for instance, in his Essay on Mormonism, of insinuating that Mormonism seems exactly to realize the ideal of a distinguished controversialist, because in stating it as his chief objection



to the Christian system, that it discourages the love of earthly things, he proposed to amend the precept of St. John—“Love not the world and the things of the world: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life,”—by simply leaving out the word not. Who this distinguished controversialist may be is little to the purpose. But so bold an insinuation, without note or comment, highly clever on the part of a determined partizan, would seem foolish from one who has really truth at heart. Mr. Conybeare need not be told that no doctrine has been and is more perverted by Christian preachers than that of “not loving the world.” Historical critics like Arnold, Hare, and Stanley,—and with these champions of the Broad Church Mr. Conybeare does not forbid his readers to rank him,—men of such learning, good faith, and temper, would be the last to deny, what any school-boy now knows, that the New Testament writers were influenced not more by their own individual characters and antecedents than by the various tendencies of their time. Now, the essential sin of matter is an opinion at all times highly characteristic of eastern creeds, and one which has filtered down in different proportions through all the successive Christian orthodoxies to our own time, where it forms the often obscure root of those inconsistent and visionary Philippics against the flesh, (meaning everything or nothing according to the ignorance or design of the preachers,) which are thundered or sighed from so many of the pulpits, stigmatised by Mr. Conybeare himself. Perhaps four-fifths of the religious extravagances of the day are either caused in the origin or aggravated in the end by confused notions on what ought and what ought not to be condemned as love of the world. And it will generally be found, that so many people have no connected ideas of morality, save what they are taught by daily life and by a jumble of texts, that when anything disturbs the even tenour of their lives, they fall a prey to the first sonorous voice they may hear declaiming against “the love of the world.”

But the precept “love not the world” must receive a vast amount of qualification indeed before students of nature will prefer a doubtful text to certain truth, while the world appears every day a more glorious confirmation of the greatness and wisdom of the Creator, and they lament the poverty of their faculties to fathom, and of their senses to relish, its most ineffable marvels. There is, in fact, a constant antagonism on this subject between the practical sense of straightforward men and these essential sin-of-matter-ite declaimers—an antagonism which has risen until the common sense of the former became so fully established that they could afford to put up with the latter as a mastiff will bear with the yelping of curs. On the other hand, we can scarcely hope for a complete cessation of hostilities so long as weak minds are, like strong minds, subject to disappointments, and, unlike strong minds, subject to turn round and kick a chair because they ran up against it. True love of the world is but the manifestation of all those rational excellences which make a civilized man what he ought to be, and what eastern asceticism, too capable of conceiving, and too hopeless of realizing, finally condemned. When Macduff breaks into that wonderful paroxysm of grief over the fate of his family, he displays no more than that “love of the world” which every good Englishman would only think himself and others too honoured in feeling as the most dignified expression of the might of family affection, the most elementary bond of Christian civilization.

But all this in favour of an antagonist seems not in Mr. Conybeare’s temper to have said. With Roman



fortitude he combats a host, and crushes a handful.

Thus, in dealing with the Recordites and Tractarians, he begins by doing full justice to their normal types, for two reasons, perhaps. Firstly, because as he says himself, the triple cord of the three church parties cannot well be unbound; but, secondly, also, as he does not say, because those parties are powerful enough, in spite of him, to do justice to themselves. But in the case of sceptics, (whom by the way he is careful to confound with infidels, actual or potential,) and against whom he is secure of the support of Recordite, Tractarian, and Broad Churchman, of Roman Catholic and Dissenter, knowing as he does, “the power of names over things,” he seems to think himself absolved from doing them any justice at all, and thus his account of scepticism and infidelity is but a caricature; and, to use his own expression, one perversion throughout.

Infidelity and vice, which, as every one knows, are possible “exaggerations” of scepticism, he has very cleverly described. But why not also the normal types of scepticism?

In the persons of the Oxonian Jones and Brown, Mr. Conybeare cleverly ridicules the use which dilettante sceptics make of flimsy scientific and historical attainments. So far good. But it is as well to add, that natural philosophy and critical history in those who really study them do generally lay the foundation for a delicate love of speculative truth in its minutest points, sought in vain from other pursuits: and to such persons the amount of insincerity and the greedy haste of assumption displayed in all dogmatic disputes, would appear ludicrous, were they not so often shocking and disgusting on the part of men, with whom truth ought to be not only the sine quâ non, but the ne plus ultra, the alpha and omega, of religion.

It is quite painful to such persons, and, in their opinion, does the champions of orthodoxy more damage than anything, to see how often people otherwise high-minded, generous, and just, think nothing at all, apparently, of evading the laws of truth and morality to serve an opinion, (which, ought, if true, to serve itself,) or to save a soul, as they think, from perdition, thereby sacrificing virtue to its shadow, and falling into one ditch, while busy cudgelling their neighbour out of another.

If Mr. Conybeare had only meant to ridicule infidelity in its absurdities, and to brand it in its wickedness, every good and decent man, orthodox, and heterodox, would have been on his side. But he has done more. Instead of making infidelity the exaggeration of legitimate doubt, he has made it the normal type. And he has adroitly thrown discredit on every kind of scepticism by representing scepticism mainly not as the growth of honest enquiry, “of the degrees of light and degrees of understanding,” but as the tool of designing wickedness. All this is very clever; but, like all sleight-of-hand, it will die its own death, or return on the perpetrator.

Of course there is some faint and contemptuous allowance made “for the doubts of a sceptical understanding, and the difficulties inherent in the substance or the documents of the Christian Religion.” We are then told “that the consequences which result from infidelity are, moral deterioration and the loss of happiness and peace.”

But then we ask ourselves, what infidelity is? What does Mr. Conybeare mean by infidelity? Does he mean doubts about any of the cardinal doctrines of the Christian Religion? Does he mean doubts about its evidences? Does he mean honest or dishonest doubt of any kind, or both?

On turning to his story we find a powerful delineation of sheer wickedness making a tool of doubts in general, and of friends in particular, and a few



weak characters only fit to be made tools and fools of.

The moral of which story is simply this: “that the consequences, which result from wickedness on the one hand, and weakness on the other, are moral deterioration and the loss of happiness and peace,” which is very true, and not new, leaving all the real problems of the day unsolved, and, save for the infusion of another grain or two of polemical venom, untouched.

“Out of the Church, no salvation,” is a very old maxim; older than the Inquisition, being the spirit of the first inarticulate note of human intolerance from the beginning.

But, “out of the Church, no morality,” is an implied doctrine of Mr. Conybeare, which, in the light of history, both sacred and profane, will, I trust, satisfy the largest appetite for novelty.

“Indifference to truth naturally leads to sensualism,” he says; “and the sensualist is naturally indifferent to truth.”

Both equally true, and equally false. For the gross belief in pleasure of the sensualist often prevents him from being indifferent to dogmatic truths, and he loves absolution even more than other men. If there is no priest to bestow it, he will divide himself into two, and is too much in want of a deus ex machinâ to be a sceptic at all. The most fervent sensualist is often also the most fervent believer, in the vulgar sense of the word.

On the other hand, the sceptic—that is, the honest and calm doubter and enquirer—is not “indifferent to truth;” only more faithful, and, strange though it may seem, only less firm, because more faithful. Moreover it is notorious, that real scepticism has the effect of diminishing a man’s faith in and capacity for “pleasure” more perhaps than anything else, because it inclines to consider the cost and vanity of all things; more certainly than religious restraints, if we may judge by the mortifications and penances submitted to by such men as Pascal. It is a mere random shot, then, to say “the idolater of pleasure has no faith in God;” while the assertion that “the most universal sceptic believes in pleasure” is contrary to experience, unless we define pleasure in such a way as to leave no importance to the statement.

In point of “morality, peace and happiness,” David Hume lived a happy, a contented, an independent, a pure, a most honourable life, and died with a serenity which many most excellent and most troubled Christians might well applaud and envy.

If however Mr. Conybeare has in his eye the malady which accompanies almost any change of opinions,—that moulting of the soul, which for a time leaves the moral sense weak, vacillating and erratic, exposed to every wind,—a blight and stagnation, or an excess of feeling, which often in a high degree will accompany even the passage from one locality to another, from one set of friends to another,—what then? It proves absolutely nothing.

“That is only another manœuvre” (says M. Montégut) “of all religious polemical writers, which consists in the undue generalization of certain details and certain moral phenomena, which accompany this or that phase of unbelief. The experience both of history and common life teaches, for instance, that, when a man passes from faith to doubt, or, when he simply passes from one religious creed to another, his morality for a time runs very great perils. Nothing is more easy to explain than this fact, which is, so to speak, a phenomenon of natural morality. When a man passes from one conviction to another, there is a moment when his moral health is impaired; his soul loses its equilibrium, his principles are relaxed, his mental eyesight is obscured. Like the nervous system, when the blood no longer regulates it, his moral nature falls a prey to contractions and involuntary movements. A certain time must elapse before the equilibrium is re-established, and before the natural strength is restored.

“This passing malady, experienced by many a man, often in history follows in the wake of great revolutions. The most

austere reform is always accompanied by the most shameful excesses. Thus companies of flagellators and Jumpers will bring up the rear-guard of Waldensian Protestantism; a sect of Adamites accompany the reforms of John Huss, and Anabaptist excesses follow closely on the labours of Luther. The departure then from orthodoxy, whatever it may be, entails a dangerous disease—nothing more true, or better proved;—what is false, is to represent this disease as mortal, or incurable, or even as constant, and above all, to assimilate a phenomenon, purely transient, with unbelief itself.”

As for all that Mr. Conybeare gravely relates of modern life and youthful scepticism in Oxford, M. Montégut sees in it but the pranks of emancipated boyhood rather than any positive tendencies to immorality. They are the freaks of young blood, philosophical buffooneries, in which more than half is drollery and fun.

But however unfairly the author of Perversion may be thought to have dealt with the true philosophy of scepticism, in one respect it is highly indebted to him. Although he has recognized no good in it, the keen contempt with which he has deservedly stamped some of the possible exaggerations of scepticism, cannot but tend to keep honest doubt and enquiry (σκέψις) to their true foundations, cleared of vanity, frivolity and wickedness. In which, let me attempt to do him the justice of observing, that he would, I trust, sympathize more openly in “the doubts of a sceptical understanding” could he but realize, or cease, in fact, to be an infidel on the proper sphere and virtues of doubt as the prime lever in enquiry.

I fear I have already trespassed too long on my reader’s patience. But let me venture to observe, in drawing to a close, how hardly it can be an accidental circumstance, that all the good people in Perversion have weak lungs. Or if a casual exception occurs, it may be to save those who are afflicted with sounder organs from absolute despair. Mr. Williamson has weak lungs. Mrs.Williamson has weak lungs. Charles Bampton has weak lungs, and who can tell, that Hawkins would not have had weak lungs, but for the timely loss of his fortune. Even Hawkins, however, had the cholera before it could be safely pronounced, that “henceforward Charles Bampton was a Christian.” What delicate speculations generations yet unborn may raise upon this, we can only guess at; but one thing is clear, that the first step in the overthrow of infidelity, and the progress of sound religion, will be to get rid of cod-liver oil.

Clara (not her letters) is a delightful creation, with just that soupçon of a manly devil (a female devil is something too awful) in the gentlest soul to make her truly dear. I love and pity her with all my heart. It is grievous to think she fell into Archer’s hands, but still more painful that she should have fallen under Mr. Conybeare’s ruthless pen. I can conceive no greater cruelty, than to make a sweet creature put an end to herself because you have made her unhappy. Mrs. Williamson is a very noble character. As Charles says, “I am sure Mrs. Williamson’s kindness is the natural growth of her loving heart.” Thank God, there are a few such in England.

But “Life in Barracks,” and “Prophets Unveiled” are chapters told with a zest and relish, a genuine gusto and smack of the lips, from which, once embarked, you may venture to defy any ordinary reader to escape. After ten o’clock, keep your hair down if you can. As for me, Pantheism pursued me to bed like a panther, and I never was more overjoyed, awaking next morning, than to discover I had actually slept. As I passed my hand over the cold dews of my brow, involuntarily my lips broke into the beautiful motto of our novel,

• “……Hail! holy light;
• …Escaped the Stygian pool
• Thee I revisit safe.”

I had almost forgotten Homer, and



Shakespeare, and last, not least, the Bible. But I recovered my memory and am alive again.

The heavens embrace me; the sun shines; the birds sing; the flowers smile; and so will come to-morrow’s da capo,—heavens the same, over different and differing eyes.

To quote another of Mr. Conybeare’s quotations, not perhaps without some trifling resentment, for having given me such a fright:

• “See the wretch, who long has toss’d
• On the thorny bed of pain,
• At length repair his vigour lost
• And, &c., &c., &c.”

To those who would look more particularly into what appear to be the true sceptical problems of the day, I venture to recommend neither Hume nor Strauss, but the Sixteenth Chapter of the first volume of Mr. Grote’s “History of Greece;” his account of the Sophists; the three first Sermons of Butler on “Human Nature;” the introduction in Plato’s “Phædrus;” and Samuel Bailey’s admirable treatise “On the Formation of Opinions.”

In conclusion, I will only ask permission to quote at length, a passage from Mr. Hallam’s “History of the Literature of Europe,” to which I have already referred, believing it to deserve a far wider publicity than, coming from so eminent a pen, it would seem to have obtained.

“ Mademoiselle de Duras, a Protestant lady, like most others of her rank at that time, was wavering about religion, and in her presence the dispute was carried on. It entirely turned on Church Authority. The arguments of Bossuet differ from those which have often been adduced only by the spirit and conciseness with which he pressed them. We have his own account, which of course gives himself the victory. It was almost as much of course that the lady was converted, for it is seldom that a woman can withstand the popular argument on that side, when she has once gone far enough to admit the possibility of its truth, by giving it a hearing. Yet Bossuet deals in sophisms, which though always in the mouths of those who call themselves orthodox are

contemptible to such as know facts or logic. ‘I urged,’ he says, ‘in a few words, what presumption it was to believe that we can better understand the Word of God than all the rest of the Church, and that nothing would thus prevent there being as many religions as persons.’ But there can be no presumption in supposing that we may understand anything better than one who has never examined at all; and if this rest of the Church, so magnificently brought forward, have commonly acted on Bossuet’s principle, and thought it presumptuous to judge for themselves; if out of many millions of persons, a few only have deliberately reasoned on religion and the rest have been, like true zeros, nothing in themselves and much in sequence ; .…we can only scorn the emptiness, as well as resent the effrontery, of this common-place that rings so often in our ears. Certainly, reason is so far from condemning a deference to the judgment of the wise and the good, that nothing is more irrational than to neglect it; but when this is claimed for those whom we need not believe to have been wiser and better than ourselves, nay, sometimes whom without vainglory we may esteem less, and that so as to set aside the real authority of the most philosophical, unbiassed and judicious of mankind, it is not pride or presumption, but a sober use of our faculties, that rejects the jurisdiction.”

Again he says:

“The main point, as Bossuet contends it to be, that the Protestant churches (for he does not confine this to persons) fluctuated much in the sixteenth century, is sufficiently proved; but it remained to show that it was a reproach. Those who have taken a different view from Bossuet, may perhaps think that a little more of this censure would have been well incurred; that they have varied too little rather than too much; and that it is far more difficult, even in controversy with the Church of Rome, to withstand the inference, which their long creeds and confessions, as well as the language too common with their theologians, have furnished to her more ancient and catholic claim of infallibility, than to vindicate those successive variations which are analogous to the necessary course of human reason on all other subjects . The essential fallacy of Romanism, that

truth must ever exist visibly on earth, is implied in the whole strain of Bossuet’s attack on the variances of Protestantism: it is evident that variance of opinion proves error somewhere; but unless it can be shown that we have any certain method of excluding it, this should only lead us to be more indulgent towards the judgment of others, and less confident of our own. The notion of an intrinsic moral criminality in religious error is at the root of the whole argument; and till Protestants are well rid of this, there seems no secure mode of withstanding the effect which the vast weight of authority asserted by the Latin Church, even where it has not the weight of the Eastern, must produce on timid and scrupulous minds.”

These noble sentiments of Mr. Hallam are capable of a far wider application than only to church authority. May they sink into thousands of hearts, and enshrine him there long after he has reaped the crown of his long, pure and most distinguished labours.

One word more.

It may be asked, “Why take so much pains to throw light on the position of the sceptic, unless you would advocate infidelity?” Any defence of infidelity, or unreasonable doubt, is very far from my thoughts; for if we believe truth to be the nature of things, so long as truth exists, infidelity can never be the normal nor durable condition of men’s minds. But true scepticism is not infidelity; and to consider and treat sceptics as infidels and wild beasts, rebels to God and us, is to invite them to behave as such; whereas, to recognise their just and lawful claims is to bind them over to keep the peace, and to reap for ourselves that legitimate fruit of their constitutional and honest peculiarities which Providence, we may believe, intended we should reap from every necessary ingredient of human life.

Cavalay promised Isabel to read hard for his University examinations; a promise which was little needed, for life, with Isabel Carlwood to love and be loved by, was very different from what it had been when he seemed to stand alone in the world. He took lodgings in the middle of London; a somewhat strange place, it may appear, for a man to study in, but he chose it for its very stir and bustle, that he might feel animated by the constant sight and sound of human labour around him. The time between his engagement and the end of the long vacation was two months, and this period, as my readers will easily believe, was perhaps the very happiest and most active in all his life. Never had his mind made so much progress in so short a space, never had the problem of life come so near solution. He now began to see life as it really is, that the ideal is founded upon the actual, or rather is only another side of the same thing. His University reading, to which he was now content, for the time, to devote himself exclusively, was exactly suited to draw out, strengthen, and expand his intellect; though of course it was his love for Isabel that, far more than all other things, made the world a happy reality to him. It was that which gave meaning and value to all other things: without love all things are as



nothing, philosophy a vain babbling, poetry a tinkling cymbal.

• “A web is woven across the sky,
• From out waste places comes a cry,
• And murmurs from the dying sun.
• And all the phantom, Nature, stands,

---

• A hollow form with empty hands.”

To say that his visits at Mr. Carlwood’s were happy, would be to speak of them most feebly; to both the lovers they were times of complete, unalloyed rapture;—there is such a thing even in this world, though, perhaps, to be felt only by two young hearts filled with mutual love. She was advancing in mind scarce less than he; every week he found her more beautiful, more glorious; more kind, too, and gentle and tender, growing in moral grace not less than in intellectual power. And thus their love reached that consummation, so rarely attained, except for a very short time, and even then, perhaps, only by a false process, through some illusive medium of idealization, which a little closer acquaintance easily undoes;—that highest form of love that each worshipped the other;—no idolatry:—ye that truly love, search your own hearts for answer:—each was to the other the impersonation of all that was noblest in humanity, she being to him what his man’s nature most craved, the ideal of woman; he to her what her womanhood most needed and desired, the ideal of man. And, deep and intense as this love was, it was no less calm and constant; without passion