it will continue Catholics in any real sense is another question. Ecclesiasticism is a vanishing, if a slowly vanishing, quantity in religion; and ecclesiasticism is, or seems to be, co-extensive with Catholicism. As the one declines the other loses its significance: organisation becomes, as in the Reformed Churches, matter of expediency and arrangement rather than of divine right. It is possible that this account of the matter is not exhaustive; but Huxley's question, What would become of things supposing them to lose their qualities? suggests itself. The process of defecation may be continued till nothing of the original substance remains. Catholicism, as a distinctive form of Christianity, is capable of a sufficiently plausible natural explanation; it is very much what we should expect it to be from its history. Are we to interpret its claims by its history, or its history by its claims? The latter alternative is no longer open to us; if the former be adopted, how much, it may be asked-and this perhaps is the unconscious explanation of the non possumus-is left of the claims? The framework, in other words, is too small for the facts; it is impossible to get them into it. Yet this framework is so much of a piece that the attempt to enlarge it is dangerous; the house, if we touch it, threatens to come down about our ears. The instinct of the Church divines the danger, a danger which does not affect her alone. Admit the conception of Christianity which embodies the Christian idea, as such, in an external form, whether that form be an institution or a book, a priesthood or a dogma, and you have the Medieval Papacy; the logical process of construction is inevitable. Question the Mediæval Papacy, and the process of dissolution is equally inevitable. The conception of an embodied Christianity falls to pieces: you are thrown back on a radically different conception of Christianity, in which it appears not as letter but as spirit, not as institution but as idea. These, however, are secondary matters: Ecce labora, et noli contristari is the note of confidence with which Harnack concludes. Those who look at religion from without, from the standpoint of institutions and formulas, may despair of the future; for, whether these institutions and z 2 formulas survive or perish, the future is not theirs. There are more important questions than whether a man belongs to this or that Church, or holds this or that theological opinion; the kingdom of God does not consist in these things. But while women are loved, and men achieve, and children link heart to heart as they pass the lamp of life with increase from generation to generation, its interests are secure. To idealise is the one thing needful: what we idealise is of less consequence, for in the idea all things are one Wherefore, thou, Worship the Power-in this all creeds agree- That this sense of the ideal is being developed among us, that the horizons of life are becoming more luminous, that the field of moral effort is enlarging its borders, that we are coming to think more worthily and therefore more truly of God and man-this may inspire us with courage and hope--Historia non facit saltum: darum Geduld. XII. THE AGE OF REASON THE mixed life, theologians tell us-the life, that is to say, which is at once contemplative and active--is to be preferred to that which is either purely contemplative or purely active. This is so in other provinces than that of religion. The philosopher who has a practical knowledge of affairs is a safer guide than the mere thinker or the mere man of action. The former is apt to degenerate into a theorist, the latter into a framer of expedients. A Herbert Spencer lacks something which the India House gave to Mill; the name of Gladstone, judge his career as we will, fills a greater place than that of Beaconsfield in English history. At once a thinker and a man of affairs, Mr. Morley represents the mixed life in politics; and to this twofold qualification for dealing with wide and complex subject-matter he unites a certain largeness of mind and loftiness of temper peculiarly his own. He possesses the rare gift of raising the questions, whether of the past or the present, upon which he touches from the level of controversy to that of principle; the analysis of the ideas underlying Conservatism and Liberalism respectively given in 'Compromise '1 may be referred to as an illustration. He retains his grasp on the whole while dealing with its parts, not losing sight of the idea in its necessarily imperfect embodiments; he has an eye for the proportion of things. History and literature have been with him, what they will always be with wise and understanding minds of creative and even of the higher critical faculty, only embodiments, illustrations, experiments, for ideas about religion, conduct, society, history, government, and all other great heads and departments of a complete social doctrine.2 1 1 Morley, Compromise, p. 123. 2 Morley, Critical Miscellanies, i. 141. A generation has passed since these studies of the eighteenth century were first published. Their object was to rehabilitate an age which had suffered many things from critics writing from many standpoints, from the paradox of De Maistre and the rhetoric of Chateaubriand to the ' ingenious and one-sided exaggerations of that brilliant man of letters M. Taine.' M. Taine was this, and a good deal more but not even M. Taine has said the last word on the eighteenth century. By temperament and attainments Mr. Morley was qualified for the work of revision to which he addressed himself. The disciple and panegyrist of Burke, he is unlikely to leave the solid ground of the concrete for the uncertain realm of abstractions; the author of that somewhat uncompromising work 'Compromise,' he is far removed from that listless folding of the hands for which 'the existing order of facts, whatever it may be, takes a hardly disputed precedence over ideas, and the coarsest political standard is undoubtedly and finally applied over the whole realm of human thought.' The latter, it must be admitted, is the special danger of our country and of our time. It is not necessary to endorse the indictment of England, even in 1870, as— 1 a community where political forms, from the monarchy down to the popular chamber, are mainly hollow shams disguising the coarse supremacy of wealth, where religion is mainly official and political, and is ever too ready to dissever itself from the spirit of justice, the spirit of charity, and the spirit of truth, and where literature does not as a rule permit itself to discuss serious subjects frankly and worthily-a community, in short, where the great aim of all classes and orders with power is by dint of rigorous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and stern stopping of the ears, somehow to keep the social pyramid on its apex. Such an indictment, if a paradox which makes for righteousness, is still a paradox. What is true is that both in our national character and in the temper of the age in which we live there is a distrust of abstract reasoning; a disposition to regard questions which affect society from the 1 Morley, Compromise, p. 14. 2 Morley, Critical Miscellanies, i. 152. standpoint of expediency, to insist upon continuity both in ideas and institutions, to qualify the conception of what it is desirable to do by the admission of the limits of the possible. This disposition may be a good or a bad thing. We believe it to be a good thing. But, good or bad, it is open to certain dangers; and Mr. Morley's warning against these dangers, seasonable as it was for the generation to which it was addressed, is neither inopportune nor superfluous for our own. Artificial as the divisions of time are, they have their character to every age its own note. The eighteenth century was the Age of Reason, abstract and individual; the understanding of the individual, it was believed, could solve the great questions of political and economical science, like so many geometrical problems. There was neither doubt nor hesitation: the tunto molis erat of the poet found no echo in the mind of the time. Zealous without knowledge, it underestimated the gravity of the issues set before it. Had it been otherwise it might not-who knows ?-have had the courage to face them. It is possible to see too many sides of the question to take up any one with decision it is the fanatics, the men of one idea, who act. Generous, youthful, self-confident age! Producing, unconsciously enough, its facts as it went along, it construed past and future alike in the terms of the present; magnificently optimistic and audacious with the audacity of ignorance, it had no conception of the multitude, the vastness or the complexity of the phenomena with which it had to deal. When we consider how radically false were the premisses from which the Illumination and the Revolution started, the wonder is not that these movements were accompanied by so much but by so little evil, that they were on the whole beneficent and successful; that their misdirected energy did not breathe new life into the moribund tyrannies which they proposed to, and did in fact, destroy. Burke's passionate denunciation of sophists and demagogues had this much justification, that the diagnosis of the French philosophes was inadequate and misleading, and that the men who came to the front in the Revolution were for the most part small men. But there is an intrinsic movement |