troduction of any instruction, but more especially of strong religious instruction, among their men. May not questions be raised by this instruction, which would greatly interfere with their military obedience?

Mr. Froude's own words force these "Wicked" and

thoughts upon us.

"impious" are religious epithets. They presume a man to be recognising some religious authority or principle. On the other hand the corresponding phrase is ambiguous. What is meant by being free in our obligations as citizens? Before a citizen is at liberty to make his own judgment the rule of his actions he must be free from his obligations as a citizen. Introduce that slight and necessary emendation, and the whole argument, as Mr. Froude has stated it, becomes a reductio ad absurdum. A man freeing himself from the obligations of a citizen is, ipso facto, an impious and wicked man. A man who will acknowledge no authority but his own is an enemy of the human race; and he is no greater enemy of any man than of himself. Is, then, the condition to which we have "now" come, in respect of our religious profession, one which becomes utterly ridiculous and monstrous when it is applied to any subject except that? Does the freedom which we have acquired in our religious profession render that profession utterly inoperative upon any moral acts except to confuse them and make them utterly inconsistent?

Mr. Froude has done us an immense service in leading us to face this difficulty. We have been tampering with it and playing with it, and the effect upon our conduct and character has been most disastrous.

If we

begin from the case of the soldier, I think we shall find that the first conclusion of the simplest man accords with the last conclusion of the most thoughtful and reflecting man. The soldier enlists in the service of his country, believing it to be a good service; not doubting that he ought to fight for his country; leaving to wiser men the decision of what the country

He ac

should do or should not do. quires more light; doubts are excited in his mind which were not there before. "Governments do very wrong "things sometimes. Will his conscience let him do what Governments "prescribe? Must he not resolve for "himself whether we are right in hold

ing India or attacking China?" This is an unhappy condition of mind. I do not wonder that that those who observe all the mawkishness and uncertainty which accompany it,—who see the worse than weakness which may follow from it should dread any influences that may possibly lead to it. But let them be sure that it is a transitional state of mind; that only hasty measures for crushing it can fix it into a permanent one; that the dangers of it will always be counteracted by the very causes which have excited them; that the true remedy for it lies in a more enlarged education and a stronger faith. There is always bewilderment in the awakening of any man's conscience. The visions of the night mingle with the voice which announces that it is morning. The half-sleeper fancies that all are sleeping and dreaming except himself. Conscience becomes strangely mingled with conceit; his judgments are infallible. When his conscience speaks more distinctly, it rebukes nothing so much as this very conceit. It whispers no lesson to him so certainly as that he is a fool. It tells him that, till he has risen out of his own private separate judgment, he can do nothing that is right, think nothing that is right. It reminds him of his relation to other beings; of his dependence upon them. It tells him of a truth which is theirs as well as his; which is infinitely precious to all men ; for the sake of which each man must be content to sacrifice himself.

How do these lessons present themselves to the mind of the soldier? You fancy he must make some fine metaphysical division of himself; that he must say, "As soldier I think and act "so and so; as a man I think and act "quite differently." No such miserable

refinement will enter into his mind unless you put it there. His work as a soldier is his work as a man. It is the work which he is called to do. If he were a legislator, he must do the work of legislation. He must shrink from no toil to find out what the duty of England is to China or India; he must be drawn aside from the task of resolving by no traditions, party feelings, personal feelings, by no engagement in tasks which are not his. He who would desert his post as a soldier to speculate about India or China would desert his post as a legislator, to perform some freak in India or China. In each case the deserter from his rank is a deserter from the cause of truth. In each case he who serves his country most zealously in his vocation, serves Truth best. He has faith in a true God. He can commit his judgments to Him. If they are right, He will give effect to them. Nothing can be done to establish them by neglecting a plain obvious duty. He cannot change his country's mind, if it is a wrong mind; he will only make it worse by doing wrong himself. On then, with a clear heart, for life or death. The origin of the battle is not his; the result is not his. All he can do is to fulfil his trust, and throw himself

away.

These are no fancies or refinements. This is the process by which the plain brave citizen and soldier is led out of fancies and refinements into the honest performance of his task. He does not perform it better because he is a machine, he performs it worse. There is nothing to rouse the energy of a machine. He must pass into something else before he can respond to any true war-cry. An appeal to his hearth and home would be utterly lost upon him, if it did not rouse him to know that he is not a machine. Whilst he still halfsuspects himself to be one, he is liable to all those sudden and bewildering impressions to which I have alluded; those from which he only escapes when he begins to forget himself in the belief and worship of the God of his fathers.

It has been impossible to speak fully of this subject without intruding upon the other; so artificial is the barrier which Mr. Froude has raised between the man in his two characters of a citizen and a worshipper; so obvious would that impossibility be if for worshipper he had not substituted the phrase of one who professes a religion.

The confusion between the conceits of our own mind and the conscience which bears witness for an immutable law that governs them, has become very serious in our Protestant community. That so clear-sighted a man as Mr. Froude should have yielded to it is a great proof of its power and prevalency. But it is beginning to be shaken in those who have entertained it most. Protestants are discovering that very inconvenient private judgments may be exercised in favour of the vestments and practices of the Scarlet Lady as well as against them. They are appealing impatiently to State authority, to ecclesiastical authority, to mob authority, against those private judgments. Bystanders who do not concur in these appeals-who adhere strictly to the maxim that private opinions, however much they may interfere with public peace can never be reached by the public sword-feel, nevertheless, that the man of any school who habitually confounds his own opinions with truth will cease to believe in truth, will lose all power of distinguishing between the accidental and the essential, the temporary and the permanent; will become the slave of trifles, and if opportunity enables him, a persecutor on behalf of them; will indemnify himself for the insecurity of his conclusions, by injuring, so far as in him lies, those who do not adopt them. In fact, the noble assertion of a right to think, the right to be human, which our ancestors made, is rapidly passing into the right not to think, but simply to hold an opinion, because it is ours, against all invasions of thought, against all communion with other minds. no doubt belongs to the Englishman; but, as was

That right free-born

once re

marked in reference to the kindred and equally inalienable right of talking nonsense, the seldomer he exercises it the better.

That apparent opposition between the strongest convictions of the statesman and the strongest convictions of the Churchman, upon which I have dwelt in this article, is leading our minds in the same direction as these observations. Mr. Froude, considering that opposition as belonging peculiarly to the sixteenth century, takes Cecil as adopt ing "the view of common sense," Latimer as following "the counsels of perfection." I believe that this language is very misleading, and that it is not in harmony with the facts from which it is deduced. I should say that just so far as the statesman of either period understood his own position, he was bearing witness for plain morality and political order against all which seemed to him to stand in the way of either, whether that proceeded from mere animal lawlessness or from spiritual subtleties. If he sees almost nothing beyond the law and the customs of the State in which he is living, these he is determined at any price, against any persons whatsoever, to uphold. This may be called the view of common sense. I do not object to the phrase. Common sense is the opposite of private sense, of idiotic sense, which some will affirm is no sense at all. But then I say that Latimer and such as he were the asserters of this common sense more perfectly than the statesman was. I say that they perceived a point at which the common sense of the statesman became a partial and narrow sense; and that they appealed to something more common, more universal, less capable of being limited by private tastes and judgments. I say that they did this because they followed no counsels of perfection, aspired to be no saints; but, seeing that the question before them was whether they should worship God or the devil, swore in God's strength that they would worship Him

and not the devil, whichever way their private judgment might incline.

If this be so, the man who takes Latimer's course and the best English statesman, whether they understand one another or not, are working for the same end, and each is necessary for the support and correction of the other. If the William Cecil of Queen Elizabeth's reign was nobler in his policy, nobler even as a man than the same Cecil in Queen Mary's reign, he had Latimer and the martyrs to thank for his elevation. They had taught him that there is such a thing as truth, and that whatever were his temptations as a politician and a diplomatist to lie, he must in some sort in his own vocation aim at truth and try to be true. The Robert Cecil whom he begat had been brought up amid no such lessons. Therefore he became a cleverer and a poorer statesman than his father, fit to aid the statecraft of a Stuart king, totally unfit to cope with the earnest convictions of the Stuart period. In our day, I believe, the other side of the truth comes out. The maxims of the statesman may degrade the Churchman, may lead him to think that there is nothing better for him than to become a tool of the State, and to receive its hire. But they may cure him of some of his own delusions, they may break in pieces some of his peculiar idols. The common sense of such a man as the Duke of Wellington may teach us that if we have not common sensethat if we are only pursuing some partial technical sense-we are worthy of his scorn, even if we dignify that partial technical sense as a counsel of perfection. It may teach us that there is need in this day, as much as there was in Mary's days, of men who look to a higher judgment than their own, or than all the judgments upon earth. we have not such men, I believe that statesmanship will wither, almost rapidly as churchmanship; that Protestantism and Catholicism will alike terminate in Atheism.

If