in its place was an essentially irrational proceeding. Whether Evangelical or Positivist, she remained in some real sense religious and was always the apostle of some gospel or other. The distinctively Christian note is often in abeyance, as she held it honestly in abeyance in her experience; but none the less it remains the subject of a sort of wistful concern to her and to her characters, as though it were meant for life and only the disjointed times kept life from claiming it.

Dolly Winthrop and Silas sum the matter up their last conversation.

in

"I shall never know [says the latter, referring to the false accusation brought against him many years before] whether they got at the truth o' the robbery. It's dark to me, Mrs. Winthrop, that is; I doubt it'll be dark to the last.'

"Well, yes, Master Marner,' said Dolly, who sat with a placid listening face, now bordered by grey hairs; I doubt it may. It's the will o' Them above as a many things should be dark to us; but there's some things as I've never felt i' the dark about, and they're mostly what comes i' the day's work. You were hard done by that once, Master Marner, and it seems as you'll never know the rights of it; but that does n't hinder there being a rights, Master Marner, for all it's dark to you and me.'

"No,' said Silas, 'no; that does n't hinder. Since the time the child was sent to me and I've come to love her as myself, I've had light enough to trusten by; and now she says she 'll never leave me. I think I shall trusten till I die.""

CHAPTER X

THE NEW RADICALISM

"SOME day," wrote Sir Leslie Stephen to Mr. C. E. Norton, in 1889, "I shall remark upon the extraordinary phenomenon that Mill and Newman and Carlyle all lived in the same century." It is a tribute to the intellectual wealth of the early Victorian decades, which might have been enhanced by the inclusion of Ruskin in the group; since in spite of his relation to Carlyle he represents a fourth line of influence. The connection of Newman and Ruskin with the Evangelicals has already been noted, together with Carlyle's temporary purpose to prepare himself for the Presbyterian ministry. James Mill not only entertained such a purpose but accomplished it. Though a shoemaker's son, he became an excellent scholar, entered the pulpit, and maintained himself as a minister for several years. He seems, however, never to have had much heart for his profession, and by the time of his settlement in London in 1802 had already developed violent anti-religious prejudices which were destined to play a large part in the education Life and Letters of Sir Leslie Stephen, p. 397.

of his famous son. How much of James Mill's hostility to religion was due to the influence of Bentham may not now be determined. Bentham himself presents a figure full of self-contradiction, with his genuinely humane instincts, his just discontent with the shape of British jurisprudence,

If shape it might be called, that shape had none,

ap

and his untiring efforts to give it form and real plication to the people's needs; efforts which, as Mill said, "found the philosophy of law a chaos, and left it a science"; and at the same time his violent prejudices, his capacity for a sort of learned Billingsgate, his intolerance of all difference from his opinions, and his dogmatic denial of many things apparently upon the sole ground that they had not chanced to fall within the limits of his own experience. His Biblical criticism, though incompetent enough in other respects, has at least the merit of being humourous, since he numbers St. Luke among the twelve Apostles, and refers to Priscilla and Aquila as two female disciples of St. Paul.'

Beside him among the radical influences of the early century must be set Priestley and William Godwin. The former was a Presbyterian-Unitarian minister who suffered many things at the hands of the Birmingham mob, for the sake of what he believed to be his faith and what his enemies thought to be

1 Benn, History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, vol. i, p. 302.

his lack of it. A consistent and valiant champion of the French Revolution, he was even elected a deputy to the National Convention; though he has become better known to later generations for his distinguished achievements as a chemist. A friend of Franklin, moreover, to whom he was indebted for aid in the preparation of his "History of Electricity," he carried all of Franklin's enlightened curiosity and impatience of mere tradition into chemical speculation and experiment. He has a good claim to first place in the new science which displaced the old phlogiston theories, and he disputes with Lavoisier the discovery of oxygen, while the Utilitarians are no less under obligation to him for their watchword, "The greatest happiness of the greatest number." He died in America in 1804, roundly denounced as an infidel by many of the orthodox, but "believing himself to hold the doctrines of the Primitive Christians, and looking for the second coming of Christ."

Godwin was a man of different type: one of those anarchists in theory who live an ill-ordered and halfparasitical, yet upon the whole a laborious and humdrum life; a radical of radicals, who would submit to the form of marriage with his first wife only for the sake of legitimizing their child, but who was mightily perturbed when the child herself a few years later ran away with Shelley, to make practical application of her father's theories. It is a question whether he ever quite forgave this evidence of dis

cipleship, though some solace was to be found in the very considerable sums which he extracted from Shelley's complaisant purse. The pointing of a moral is no part of my purpose in this brief reference to Godwin's career; but a tale might be highly adorned by the lives and adventures of the group who made up his family after the second marriage. There were Fanny Imlay, the illegitimate child of his first wife, destined to die by her own hand some fifteen years later, and a month to the day after the suicide of Shelley's first wife; the daughter Mary, who, having been legitimized by the tardy marriage of her parents as above related, was herself by a yet tardier ceremony to become the second Mrs. Shelley; a daughter of Godwin's second wife by a former marriage, who in her turn, as Lord Byron's mistress and the mother of "Allegra," was to illustrate the family emancipation from conventionality; and William Godwin, Junior, the son of this second marriage and a youth of promise which was blighted by his death at the age of twenty-nine.'

Godwin has been characterized as "largely a blend of Micawber and Pecksniff," and there is some ground for the charge. Yet he had a kind of genius, as he showed a species of industry, and has entered into a sort of fame. Whether or not honesty

1 The extraordinary composition of this group is noted by the writer of an excellent sketch of Godwin in Chambers' Encyclopedia of English Literature, vol. ii, p. 703. Cf. also, the rather dreary Life by Kegan Paul.