One more point of much importance ought to be mentioned. The belief that heresy is the result of wilful depravity is fast dying out. People no longer seriously think that speculative error is bound up with moral iniquity, or that mistaken thinking is either the result or the cause of wicked living. Even the official mouthpieces of established beliefs now usually represent a bad heart as only one among other possible causes of unbelief. It divides the curse with ignorance, intellectual shallowness, the unfortunate influence of plausible heresiarchs, and other alternative roots of evil. They thus leave a way of escape, by which the person who does not share their own convictions may still be credited with a good moral character. Some persons, it is true, 'cannot see how a man who deliberately rejects the Roman Catholic religion can, in the eyes of those who earnestly believe it, be other than a rebel against God.' They assure us that, 'as opinions become better marked and more distinctly connected with action, the truth that decided dissent from them implies more or less of a reproach upon those who hold them decidedly, becomes so obvious that every one perceives it.' No doubt a protestant or a sceptic regards the beliefs of a catholic as a reproach upon the believer's understanding. So the man whose whole faith rests on the miraculous and on acts of special intervention, regards the strictly positive and scientific thinker as the dupe of a crude and narrow logic. But this now carries with it no implication of moral obliquity. De Maistre's rather grotesque conviction that infidels always die of horrible diseases with special names, could now only be held among the very dregs of the ecclesiastical world.

Nor is it correct to say that 'when religious differences come to be, and are regarded as, mere differences of opinion, it is because the controversy is really decided in the sceptical sense.' Those who agree with the present writer, for example, are not sceptics. They positively, absolutely, and without reserve, reject as false the whole system of objective propositions which make up the popular belief of the day, in one and all of its theological expressions. They look upon that system as mischievous in its consequences to society, for many reasons,—among others because it tends to divert and misdirect the most energetic faculties of human nature. This, however, does not make them suspect the motives or the habitual morality of those who remain in the creed in which they were nurtured. The difference is a difference of opinion, as purely as if we refused to accept the undulatory theory of light; and we treat it as such. Then reverse this. Why is it any more impossible for those who remain in the theological stage, who are not in the smallest degree sceptical, who in their heart of hearts embrace without a shadow of misgiving all the mysteries of the faith, why is it any more impossible for them than for us, whose convictions are as strong as theirs, to treat the most radical dissidence as that and nothing other or worse? Logically, it perhaps might not be hard to convict them of inconsistency, but then, as has been so often said, inconsistency is a totally different thing from insincerity, or doubting adherence, or silent scepticism. The beliefs of an ordinary man are a complex structure of very subtle materials, all compacted into a whole, not by logic, but by lack of logic; not by syllogism or sorites, but by the vague.

As a plain matter of fact and observation, we may all perceive that dissent from religious opinion less and less implies reproach in any serious sense. We all of us know in the flesh liberal catholics and latitudinarian protestants, who hold the very considerable number of beliefs that remain to them, quite as firmly and undoubtingly as believers who are neither liberal nor latitudinarian. The compatibility of error in faith with virtue in conduct is to them only a mystery the more, a branch of the insoluble problem of Evil, permitted by a Being at once all-powerful and all-benevolent. Stringent logic may make short work of either fact,—a benevolent author of evil, or a virtuous despiser of divine truth. But in an atmosphere of mystery, logical contradictions melt away. Faith gives a sanction to that tolerant and charitable judgment of the character of heretics, which has its real springs partly in common human sympathy whereby we are all bound to one another, and partly in experience, which teaches us that practical righteousness and speculative orthodoxy do not always have their roots in the same soil. The world is every day growing larger. The range of the facts of the human race is being enormously extended by naturalists, by historians, by philologists, by travellers, by critics. The manifold past experiences of humanity are daily opening out to us in vaster and at the same time more ordered proportions. And so even those who hold fast to Christianity as the noblest, strongest, and only final conclusion of these experiences, are yet constrained to admit that it is no more than a single term in a very long and intricate series.

The object of the foregoing digression is to show some cause for thinking that dissent from the current beliefs is less and less likely to inflict upon those who retain them any very intolerable kind or degree of mental pain. Therefore it is in so far all the plainer, as well as easier, a duty not to conceal such dissent. What we have been saying comes to this. If a believer finds that his son, for instance, has ceased to believe, he no longer has this disbelief thrust upon him in gross and irreverent forms. Nor does he any longer suppose that the unbelieving son must necessarily be a profligate. And moreover, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he no longer supposes that infidels, of his own family or acquaintance at any rate, will consume for eternal ages in lakes of burning marl.

Let us add another consideration. One reason why so many persons are really shocked and pained by the avowal of heretical opinions is the very fact that such avowal is uncommon. If unbelievers and doubters were more courageous, believers would be less timorous. It is because they live in an enervating fool's paradise of seeming assent and conformity, that the breath of an honest and outspoken word strikes so eager and nipping on their sensibilities. If they were not encouraged to suppose that all the world is of their own mind, if they were forced out of that atmosphere of self-indulgent silences and hypocritical reserves, which is systematically poured round them, they would acquire a robuster mental habit. They would learn to take dissents for what they are worth. They would be led either to strengthen or to discard their own opinions, if the dissents happened to be weighty or instructive; either to refute or neglect such dissents as should be ill-founded or insignificant. They will remain valetudinarians, so long as a curtain of compromise shelters them from the real belief of those of their neighbours who have ventured to use their minds with some measure of independence. A very brief contact with people who, when the occasion comes, do not shrink from saying what they think, is enough to modify that excessive liability to be shocked at truth-speaking, which is only so common because truth-speaking itself is so unfamiliar.

Now, however great the pain inflicted by the avowal of unbelief, it seems to the present writer that one relationship in life, and one only, justifies us in being silent where otherwise it would be right to speak. This relationship is that between child and parents. Those parents are wisest who train their sons and daughters in the utmost liberty both of thought and speech; who do not instill dogmas into them, but inculcate upon them the sovereign importance of correct ways of forming opinions; who, while never dissembling the great fact that if one opinion is true, its contradictory cannot be true also, but must be a lie and must partake of all the evil qualities of a lie, yet always set them the example of listening to unwelcome opinions with patience and candour. Still all parents are not wise. They cannot all endure to hear of any religious opinions except their own. Where it would give them sincere and deep pain to hear a son or daughter avow disbelief in the inspiration of the Bible and so forth, then it seems that the younger person is warranted in refraining from saying that he or she does not accept such and such doctrines. This, of course, only where the son or daughter feels a tender and genuine attachment to the parent. Where the parent has not earned this attachment, has been selfish, indifferent, or cruel, the title to the special kind of forbearance of which we are speaking can hardly exist. In an ordinary way, however, a parent has a claim on us which no other person in the world can have, and a man's self-respect ought scarcely to be injured if he finds himself shrinking from playing the apostle to his own father and mother.

One can indeed imagine circumstances where this would not be true. If you are persuaded that you have had revealed to you a glorious gospel of light and blessedness, it is impossible not to thirst to impart such tidings most eagerly to those who are closest about your heart. We are not in that position. We have as yet no magnificent vision, so definite, so touching, so 'clothed with the beauty of a thousand stars,' as to make us eager, for the sake of it, to murder all the sweetnesses of filial piety in an aggressive eristic. This much one concedes. Yet let us ever remember that those elders are of nobler type who have kept their minds in a generous freedom, and have made themselves strong with that magnanimous confidence in truth, which the Hebrew expressed in old phrase, that if counsel or work be of men it will come to nought, but if it be of God ye cannot overthrow it.

Even in the case of parents, and even though our new creed is but rudimentary, there can be no good reason why we should go further in the way of economy than mere silence. Neither they nor any other human being can possibly have a right to expect us, not merely to abstain from the open expression of dissents, but positively to profess unreal and feigned assents. No fear of giving pain, no wish to soothe the alarms of those to whom we owe much, no respect for the natural clinging of the old to the faith which has accompanied them through honourable lives, can warrant us in saying that we believe to be true what we are convinced is false. The most lax moralist counts a lie wrong, even when the motive is unselfish, and springs from the desire to give pleasure to those whom it is our duty to please. A deliberate lie avowedly does not cease to be one because it concerns spiritual things. Nor is it the less wrong because it is uttered by one to whom all spiritual things have become indifferent. Filial affection is a motive which would, if any motive could, remove some of the taint of meanness with which pious lying, like every other kind of lying, tends to infect character. The motive may no doubt ennoble the act, though the act remains in the category of forbidden things. But the motive of these complaisant assents and false affirmations, taken at their very best, is still comparatively a poor motive. No real elevation of spirit is possible for a man who is willing to subordinate his convictions to his domestic affections, and to bring himself to a habit of viewing falsehood lightly, lest the truth should shock the illegitimate and over-exacting sensibilities either of his parents or any one else. We may understand what is meant by the logic of the feelings, and accept it as the proper corrective for a too intense egoism. But when the logic of the feelings is invoked to substitute the egoism of the family for the slightly narrower egoism of the individual, it can hardly be more than a fine name for self-indulgence and a callous indifference to all the largest human interests.

This brings us to consider the case of another no less momentous relationship, and the kind of compromise in the matter of religious conformity which it justifies or imposes. It constantly happens that the husband has wholly ceased to believe the religion to which his wife clings with unshaken faith. We need not enter into the causes why women remain in bondage to opinions which so many cultivated men either reject or else hold in a transcendental and non-natural sense. The only question with which we are concerned is the amount of free assertion of his own convictions which a man should claim and practise, when he knows that such convictions are distasteful to his wife. Is it lawful, as it seems to be in dealing with parents, to hold his conviction silently? Is it lawful either positively or by implication to lead his wife to suppose that he shares her opinions, when in truth he rejects them?

If it were not for the maxims and practice in daily use among men otherwise honourable, one would not suppose it possible that two answers could be given to these questions by any one with the smallest pretence of principle or self-respect. As it is, we all of us know men who deliberately reject the entire Christian system, and still think it compatible with uprightness to summon their whole establishments round them at morning and evening, and on their knees to offer up elaborately formulated prayers, which have just as much meaning to them as the entrails of the sacrificial victim had to an infidel haruspex. We see the same men diligently attending religious services; uttering assents to confessions of which they really reject every syllable; kneeling, rising, bowing, with deceptive solemnity; even partaking of the sacrament with a consummate devoutness that is very edifying to all who are not in the secret, and who do not know that they are acting a part, and making a mock both of their own reason and their own probity, merely to please persons whose delusions they pity and despise from the bottom of their hearts.

On the surface there is certainly nothing to distinguish this kind of conduct from the grossest hypocrisy. Is there anything under the surface to relieve it from this complexion? Is there any weight in the sort of answer which such men make to the accusation that their conformity is a very degrading form of deceit, and a singularly mischievous kind of treachery? Is the plea of a wish to spare mental discomfort to others an admissible and valid plea? It seems to us to be none of these things, and for the following among other reasons.

If a man drew his wife by lot, or by any other method over which neither he nor she has any control, as in the case of parents, perhaps he might with some plausibleness contend that he owed her certain limited deferences and reserves, just as we admit that he may owe them to his parents. But this is not the case. Marriage, in this country at least, is the result of mutual choice. If men and women do as a matter of fact usually make this choice hastily and on wofully imperfect information of one another's characters, that is no warrant for a resort to unlawful expedients to remedy the blunder. If a woman cares ardently enough about religion to feel keen distress at the idea of dissent from it on the part of those closely connected with her, she surely may be expected to take reasonable pains to ascertain beforehand the religious attitude of one with whom she is about to unite herself for life. On the other hand, if a man sets any value on his own opinions, if they are in any real sense a part of himself, he must be guilty of something like deliberate and systematic duplicity during the acquaintance preceding marriage, if his dissent has remained unsuspected. Certainly if men go through society before marriage under false colours, and feign beliefs which they do not hold, they have only themselves to thank for the degradation of having to keep up the imposture afterwards. Suppose a protestant were to pass himself off for a catholic because he happened to meet a catholic lady whom he desired to marry. Everybody would agree in calling such a man by a very harsh name. It is hard to see why a freethinker, who by reticence and conformity passes himself off for a believer, should be more leniently judged. The differences between a catholic and a protestant are assuredly not any greater than those between a believer and an unbeliever. We all admit the baseness of dissimulation in the former case. Why is it any less base in the latter?

Marriages, however, are often made in haste, or heedlessly, or early in life, before either man or woman has come to feel very deeply about religion either one way or another. The woman does not know how much she will need religion, nor what comfort it may bring to her. The man does not know all the objections to it which may disclose themselves to his understanding as the years ripen. There is always at work that most unfortunate maxim, tacitly held and acted upon in ninety-nine marriages out of a hundred, that money is of importance, and social position is of importance, and good connections are of importance, and health and manners and comely looks, and that the only thing which is of no importance whatever is opinion and intellectual quality and temper. Now granting that both man and woman are indifferent at the time of their union, is that any reason why upon either of them acquiring serious convictions, the other should be expected, out of mere complaisance, to make a false and hypocritical pretence of sharing them? To see how flimsy is this plea of fearing to give pain to the religious sensitiveness of women, we have only to imagine one or two cases which go beyond the common experience, yet which ought not to strain the plea, if it be valid.

Thus, if my wife turns catholic, am I to pretend to turn catholic too, to save her the horrible distress of thinking that I am doomed to eternal perdition? Or if she chooses to embrace the doctrine of direct illumination from heaven, and to hear voices bidding her to go or come, to do or abstain from doing, am I too to shape my conduct after these fancied monitions? Or if it comes into her mind to serve tables, and to listen in all faith to the miracles of spiritualism, am I, lest I should pain her, to feign a surrender of all my notions of evidence, to pretend a transformation of all my ideas of worthiness in life and beyond life, and to go to seances with the same regularity and seriousness with which you go to church? Of course in each of these cases everybody who does not happen to share the given peculiarity of belief, will agree that however severely a husband's dissent might pain the wife, whatever distress and discomfort it might inflict upon her, yet he would be bound to let her suffer, rather than sacrifice his veracity and self-respect. Why then is it any less discreditable to practise an insincere conformity in more ordinary circumstances? If the principle of such conformity is good for anything at all, it ought to cover these less usual cases as completely as the others which are more usual. Indeed there would be more to be said on behalf of conformity for politeness' sake, where the woman had gone through some great process of change, for then one might suppose that her heart was deeply set on the matter. Even then the plea would be worthless, but it is more indisputably worthless still where the sentiment which we are bidden to respect at the cost of our own freedom of speech is nothing more laudable than a fear of moving out of the common groove of religious opinion, or an intolerant and unreasoned bigotry, or mere stupidity and silliness of the vulgarest type.[23]

Ah, it is said, you forget that women cannot live without religion. The present writer is equally of this opinion that women cannot be happy without a religion, nor men either. That is not the question. It does not follow because a woman cannot be happy without a religion, that therefore she cannot be happy unless her husband is of the same religion. Still less, that she would be made happy by his insincerely pretending to be of the same religion. And least of all is it true, if both these propositions were credible, that even then for the sake of her happiness he is bound not merely to live a life of imposture, but in so doing to augment the general forces of imposture in the world, and to make the chances of truth, light, and human improvement more and more unfavourable. Women are at present far less likely than men to possess a sound intelligence and a habit of correct judgment. They will remain so, while they have less ready access than men to the best kinds of literary and scientific training, and—what is far more important—while social arrangements exclude them from all those kinds of public activity, which are such powerful agents both in fitting men to judge soundly, and in forming in them the sense of responsibility for their judgments being sound.

It may be contended that this alleged stronger religiosity of women, however coarse and poor in its formulae, is yet of constant value as a protest in favour of the maintenance of the religious element in human character and life, and that this is a far more important thing for us all than the greater or less truth of the dogmas with which such religiosity happens to be associated. In reply to this, without tediously labouring the argument, I venture to make the following observations. In the first place, it is an untenable idea that religiosity or devoutness of spirit is valuable in itself, without reference to the goodness or badness of the dogmatic forms and the practices in which it clothes itself. A fakir would hardly be an estimable figure in our society, merely because his way of living happens to be a manifestation of the religious spirit. If the religious spirit leads to a worthy and beautiful life, if it shows itself in cheerfulness, in pity, in charity and tolerance, in forgiveness, in a sense of the largeness and the mystery of things, in a lifting up of the soul in gratitude and awe to some supreme power and sovereign force, then whatever drawback there may be in the way of superstitious dogma, still such a spirit is on the whole a good thing. If not, not. It would be better without the superstition: even with the superstition it is good. But if the religious spirit is only a fine name for narrowness of understanding, for stubborn intolerance, for mere social formality, for a dread of losing that poor respectability which means thinking and doing exactly as the people around us think and do, then the religious spirit is not a good thing, but a thoroughly bad and hateful thing. To that we owe no management of any kind. Any one who suppresses his real opinions, and feigns others, out of deference to such a spirit as this in his household, ought to say plainly both to himself and to us that he cares more for his own ease and undisturbed comfort than he cares for truth and uprightness. For it is that, and not any tenderness for holy things, which is the real ground of his hypocrisy.

Now with reference to the religious spirit in its nobler form, it is difficult to believe that any one genuinely animated by it would be soothed by the knowledge that her dearest companion is going through life with a mask on, quietly playing a part, uttering untrue professions, doing his best to cheat her and the rest of the world by a monstrous spiritual make-believe. One would suppose that instead of having her religious feeling gratified by conformity on these terms, nothing could wound it so bitterly nor outrage it so unpardonably. To know that her sensibility is destroying the entireness of the man's nature, its loyalty alike to herself and to truth, its freedom and singleness and courage—surely this can hardly be less distressing to a fine spirit than the suspicion that his heresies may bring him to the pit, or than the void of going through life without even the semblance of religious sympathy between them. If it be urged that the woman would never discover the piety of the man to be a counterfeit, we reply that unless her own piety were of the merely formal kind, she would be sure to make the discovery. The congregation in the old story were untouched by the disguised devil's eloquence on behalf of religion: it lacked unction. The verbal conformity of the unbeliever lacks unction, and its hollowness is speedily revealed to the quick apprehension of true faith.[24]

Let us not be supposed to be arguing in favour of incessant battle of high dialectic in the household. Nothing could be more destructive of the gracious composure and mental harmony, of which household life ought to be, but perhaps seldom is, the great organ and instrument. Still less are we pleading for the freethinker's right at every hour of day or night to mock, sneer, and gibe at the sincere beliefs and conscientiously performed rites of those, whether men or women, whether strangers or kinsfolk, from whose religion he disagrees. 'It is not ancient impressions only,' said Pascal, 'which are capable of abusing us. The charm of novelty has the same power.' The prate of new-born scepticism may be as tiresome and as odious as the cant of gray orthodoxy. Religious discussion is not to be foisted upon us at every turn either by defenders or assailants. All we plead for is that when the opportunity meets the freethinker full in front, he is called upon to speak as freely as he thinks. Not more than this. A plain man has no trouble in acquiring this tact of reasonableness. We may all write what we please, because it is in the discretion of the rest of the world whether they will hearken or not. But in the family this is not so. If a man systematically intrudes disrespectful and unwelcome criticism upon a woman who retains the ancient belief, he is only showing that freethinker may be no more than bigot differently writ. It ought to be essential to no one's self-respect that he cannot consent to live with people who do not think as he thinks. We may be sure that there is something shallow and convulsive about the beliefs of a man who cannot allow his house-mates to possess their own beliefs in peace.

On the other hand, it is essential to the self-respect of every one with the least love of truth that he should be free to express his opinions on every occasion, where silence would be taken for an assent which he does not really give. Still more unquestionably, he should be free from any obligation to forswear himself either directly, as by false professions, or by implication, as when he attend services, public or private, which are to him the symbol of superstition and mere spiritual phantasmagoria. The vindication of this simple right of living one's life honestly can hardly demand any heroic virtue. A little of the straightforwardness which men are accustomed to call manly, is the only quality that is needed; a little of that frank courage and determination in spiritual things, which men are usually so ready to practise towards their wives in temporal things. It must be a keen delight to a cynic to see a man who owns that he cannot bear to pain his wife by not going to church and saying prayers, yet insisting on having his own way, fearlessly thwarting her wishes, and contradicting her opinions, in every other detail, small and great, of the domestic economy.

The truth of the matter is that the painful element in companionship is not difference of opinion, but discord of temperament. The important thing is not that two people should be inspired by the same convictions, but rather that each of them should hold his and her own convictions in a high and worthy spirit. Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of the sympathetic life; to stand on the same moral plane, and that, if possible, a high one; to find satisfaction in different explanations of the purpose and significance of life and the universe, and yet the same satisfaction. It is certainly not less possible to disbelieve religiously than to believe religiously. This accord of mind, this emulation in freedom and loftiness of soul, this kindred sense of the awful depth of the enigma which the one believes to be answered, and the other suspects to be for ever unanswerable—here, and not in a degrading and hypocritical conformity, is the true gratification of those spiritual sensibilities which are alleged to be so much higher in women than in men. Where such an accord exists, there may still be solicitude left in the mind of either at the superstition or the incredulity of the other, but it will be solicitude of that magnanimous sort which is in some shape or other the inevitable and not unfruitful portion of every better nature.

If there are women who petulantly or sourly insist on more than this kind of harmony, it is probable that their system of divinity is little better than a special manifestation of shrewishness. The man is as much bound to resist that, as he is bound to resist extravagance in spending money, or any other vice of character. If he does not resist it, if he suppresses his opinions, and practices a hypocritical conformity, it must be from weakness of will and principle. Against this we have nothing to say. A considerable proportion of people, men no less than women, are born invertebrate, and they must got on as they best can. But let us at least bargain that they shall not erect the maxims of their own feebleness into a rule for those who are braver and of stronger principle than themselves. And do not let the accidental exigencies of a personal mistake be made the foundation of a general doctrine. It is a poor saying, that the world is to become void of spiritual sincerity, because Xanthippe has a turn for respectable theology.

One or two words should perhaps be said in this place as to conformity to common religious belief in the education of children. Where the parents differ, the one being an unbeliever, the other a believer, it is almost impossible for anybody to lay down a general rule. The present writer certainly has no ambition to attempt the thorny task of compiling a manual for mixed marriages. It is perhaps enough to say that all would depend upon the nature of the beliefs which the religious person wished to inculcate. Considering that the woman has an absolutely equal moral right with the man to decide in what faith the child shall be brought up, and considering how important it is that the mother should take an active part in the development of the child's affections and impulses, the most resolute of deniers may perhaps think that the advantages of leaving the matter to her, outweigh the disadvantages of having a superstitious bias given to the young mind. In these complex cases an honest and fair-minded man's own instincts are more likely to lead him right than any hard and fast rule. Two reserves in assenting to the wife's control of early teaching will probably suggest themselves to everybody who is in earnest about religion. First, if the theology which the woman desires to instill contains any of those wicked and depraving doctrines which neither Catholicism nor Calvinism is without, in the hands of some professors, the husband is as much justified in pressing his legal rights over the child to the uttermost, as he would be if the proposed religion demanded physical mutilation. Secondly, he will not himself take part in baptismal or other ceremonies which are to him no better than mere mummeries, nor will he ever do anything to lead his children at any age to suppose that he believes what he does not believe. Such limitations as these are commanded by all considerations alike of morality and good sense.

To turn to the more normal case where either the man has had the wise forethought not to yoke himself unequally with a person of ardent belief which he does not share, or where both parents dissent from the popular creed. Here, whatever difficulties may attend its application, the principle is surely as clear as the sun at noonday. There can be no good plea for the deliberate and formal inculcation upon the young of a number of propositions which you believe to be false. To do this is to sow tares not in your enemy's field, but in the very ground which is most precious of all others to you and most full of hope for the future. To allow it to be done merely that children may grow up in the stereotyped mould, is simply to perpetuate in new generations the present thick-sighted and dead-heavy state of our spirits. It is to do one's best to keep society for an indefinite time sapped by hollow and void professions, instead of being nourished by sincerity and whole-heartedness.[25]

Nor here, more than elsewhere in this chapter, are we trying to turn the family into a field of ceaseless polemic. No one who knows the stuff of which life is made, the pressure of material cares, the play of passion, the busy energising of the affections, the anxieties of health, and all the other solicitudes, generous or ignoble, which naturally absorb the days of the common multitude of men—is likely to think such an ideal either desirable or attainable. Least of all is it desirable to give character a strong set in this polemical direction in its most plastic days. The controversial and denying humour is a different thing from the habit of being careful to know what we mean by the words we use, and what evidence there is for the beliefs we hold. It is possible to foster the latter habit without creating the former. And it is possible to bring up the young in dissent from the common beliefs around them, or in indifference to them, without engendering any of that pride in eccentricity for its own sake, which is so little likeable a quality in either young or old. There is, however, little risk of an excess in this direction. The young tremble even more than the old at the penalties of nonconformity. There is more excuse for them in this. Such penalties in their case usually come closer and in more stringent forms. Neither have they had time to find out, as their elders have or ought to have found out, what a very moderate degree of fortitude enables us to bear up against social disapproval, when we know that it is nothing more than the common form of convention.

The great object is to keep the minds of the young as open as possible in the matter of religion; to breed in them a certain simplicity and freedom from self-consciousness, in finding themselves without the religious beliefs and customs of those around them; to make them regard differences in these respects as very natural and ordinary matters, susceptible of an easy explanation. It is of course inevitable, unless they are brought up in cloistered seclusion, that they should hear much of the various articles of belief which we are anxious that they should not share. They will ask you whether the story of the creation of the universe is true; whether such and such miracles really happened; whether this person or that actually lived, and actually did all that he is said to have done. Plainly the right course is to tell them, without any agitation or excess or vehemence or too much elaboration, the simple truth in such matters exactly as it appears to one's own mind. There is no reason why they should not know the best parts of the Bible as well as they know the Iliad or Herodotus. There are many reasons why they should know them better. But one most important condition of this is constantly overlooked by people, who like to satisfy their intellectual vanity by scepticism, and at the same time to make their comfort safe by external conformity. If the Bible is to be taught only because it is a noble and most majestic monument of literature, it should be taught as that and no more. That a man who regards it solely us supreme literature, should impress it upon the young as the supernaturally inspired word of God and the accurate record of objective occurrences, is a piece of the plainest and most shocking dishonesty. Let a youth be trained in simple and straightforward recognition of the truth that we can know, and can conjecture, nothing with any assurance as to the ultimate mysteries of things. Let his imagination and his sense of awe be fed from those springs, which are none the less bounteous because they flow in natural rather than supernatural channels. Let him be taught the historic place and source of the religions which he is not bound to accept, unless the evidence for their authority by and by brings him to another mind. A boy or girl trained in this way has an infinitely better chance of growing up with the true spirit and leanings of religion implanted in the character, than if they had been educated in formulae which they could not understand, by people who do not believe them.

The most common illustration of a personal mistake being made the base of a general doctrine, is found in the case of those who, after committing themselves for life to the profession of a given creed, awake to the shocking discovery that the creed has ceased to be true for them. The action of a popular modern story, Mrs. Gaskell's North and South, turns upon the case of a clergyman whoso faith is overthrown, and who in consequence abandons his calling, to his own serious material detriment and under circumstances of severe suffering to his family. I am afraid that current opinion, especially among the cultivated class, would condemn such a sacrifice as a piece of misplaced scrupulosity. No man, it would be said, is called upon to proclaim his opinions, when to do so will cost him the means of subsistence. This will depend upon the value which he sets upon the opinions that be has to proclaim. If such a proposition is true, the world must efface its habit of admiration for the martyrs and heroes of the past, who embraced violent death rather than defile themselves by a lying confession. Or is present heroism ridiculous, and only past heroism admirable? However, nobody has a right to demand the heroic from all the world; and if to publish his dissent from the opinions which he nominally holds would reduce a man to beggary, human charity bids us say as little as may be. We may leave such men to their unfortunate destiny, hoping that they will make what good use of it may be possible. Non ragioniam di lor. These cases only show the essential and profound immorality of the priestly profession—in all its forms, and no matter in connection with what church or what dogma—which makes a man's living depend on his abstaining from using his mind, or concealing the conclusions to which use of his mind has brought him. The time will come when society will look back on the doctrine, that they who serve the altar should live by the altar, as a doctrine of barbarism and degradation.

But if one, by refusing to offer a pinch of incense to the elder gods, should thus strip himself of a marked opportunity of exerting an undoubtedly useful influence over public opinion, or over a certain section of society, is he not justified in compromising to the extent necessary to preserve this influence? Instead of answering this directly, we would make the following remarks. First, it can seldom be clear in times like our own that religious heterodoxy must involve the loss of influence in other than religious spheres. The apprehension that it will do so is due rather to timorousness and a desire to find a fair reason for the comforts of silence and reserve. If a teacher has anything to tell the world in science, philosophy, history, the world will not be deterred from listening to him by knowing that he does not walk in the paths of conventional theology. Second, what influence can a man exert, that should seem to him more useful than that of a protester against what he counts false opinions, in the most decisive and important of all regions of thought? Surely if any one is persuaded, whether rightly or wrongly, that his fellows are expending the best part of their imaginations and feelings on a dream and a delusion, and that by so doing moreover they are retarding to an indefinite degree the wider spread of light and happiness, then nothing that he can tell them about chemistry or psychology or history can in his eyes be comparable in importance to the duty of telling them this. There is no advantage nor honest delight in influence, if it is only to be exerted in the sphere of secondary objects, and at the cost of the objects which ought to be foremost in the eyes of serious people. In truth the men who have done most for the world have taken very little heed of influence. They have sought light, and left their influence to fare as it might list. Can we not imagine the mingled mystification and disdain with which a Spinosa or a Descartes, a Luther or a Pascal, would have listened to an exhortation in our persuasive modern manner on the niceties of the politic and the social obligation of pious fraud? It is not given to many to perform the achievements of such giants as these, but every one may help to keep the standard of intellectual honesty at a lofty pitch, and what better service can a man render than to furnish the world with an example of faithful dealing with his own conscience and with his fellows? This at least is the one talent that is placed in the hands of the obscurest of us all.[26]

And what is this smile of the world, to win which we are bidden to sacrifice our moral manhood; this frown of the world, whose terrors are more awful than the withering up of truth and the slow going out of light within the souls of us? Consider the triviality of life and conversation and purpose, in the bulk of those whose approval is held out for our prize and the mark of our high calling. Measure, if you can, the empire over them of prejudice unadulterated by a single element of rationality, and weigh, if you can, the huge burden of custom, unrelieved by a single leavening particle of fresh thought. Ponder the share which selfishness and love of ease have in the vitality and the maintenance of the opinions that we are forbidden to dispute. Then how pitiful a thing seems the approval or disapproval of these creatures of the conventions of the hour, as one figures the merciless vastness of the universe of matter sweeping us headlong through viewless space; as one hears the wail of misery that is for ever ascending to the deaf gods; as one counts the little tale of the years that separate us from eternal silence. In the light of these things, a man should surely dare to live his small span of life with little heed of the common speech upon him or his life, only caring that his days may be full of reality, and his conversation of truth-speaking and wholeness.

Those who think conformity in the matters of which we have been speaking harmless and unimportant, must do so either from indifference or else from despair. It is difficult to convince any one who is possessed by either one or other of these two evil spirits. Men who have once accepted them, do not easily relinquish philosophies that relieve their professors from disagreeable obligations of courage and endeavour. To the indifferent person one can say nothing. We can only acquiesce in that deep and terrible scripture, 'He that is filthy, let him be filthy still.' To those who despair of human improvement or the spread of light in the face of the huge mass of brute prejudice, we can only urge that the enormous weight and the firm hold of baseless prejudice and false commonplace are the very reasons which make it so important that those who are not of the night nor of the darkness should the more strenuously insist on living their own lives in the daylight. To those, finally, who do not despair, but think that the new faith will come so slowly that it is not worth while for the poor mortal of a day to make himself a martyr, we may suggest that the new faith when it comes will be of little worth, unless it has been shaped by generations of honest and fearless men, and unless it finds in those who are to receive it an honest and fearless temper. Our plea is not for a life of perverse disputings or busy proselytising, but only that we should learn to look at one another with a clear and steadfast eye, and march forward along the paths we choose with firm step and erect front. The first advance towards either the renovation of one faith or the growth of another, must be the abandonment of those habits of hypocritical conformity and compliance which have filled the air of the England of to-day with gross and obscuring mists.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: It may be said that Hume meant no more than this: that of two equally oppressed nations, the one which had been taught to assent to the doctrine of resistance would be more likely to practise 'the sacred duty of insurrection' than the other, from whom the doctrine had been concealed. Or, in other words, that the first would rise against oppression, when the oppression had reached a pitch which to the second would still seem bearable. The answer to Hume's proposition, interpreted in this way, would be that if the doctrine of resistance be presented to the populace in its true shape,—if it be 'truth,' as he admits,—then the application of it in practice should be as little likely to prove mischievous as that of any other truth. If the gist of the remark be that this is a truth which the populace is especially likely to apply wrongly, in consequence of its ignorance, passion, and heedlessness, we may answer by appealing to history, which is rather a record of excessive patience in the various nations of the earth than of excessive petulance.]

[Footnote 19: There is another ground for the distinction between the conditions of holding and those of expressing opinion. This depends upon the psychological proposition that belief is independent of the will. Though this or any other state of the understanding may be involuntary, the manifestation of such a state is not so, but is a voluntary act, and, 'being neutral in itself, may be commendable or reprehensible according to the circumstances in which it takes place.' (Bailey's Essay on Formation of Opinion, Sec. 7).]

[Footnote 20: The following words, illustrating the continuity between the Christian and Jewish churches, are not without instruction to those who meditate on the possible continuity between the Christian church and that which is one day to grow into the place of it:—'Not only do forms and ordinances remain under the Gospel equally as before; but, what was in use before is not so much superseded by the Gospel ordinances as changed into them. What took place under the Law is a pattern, what was commanded is a rule, under the Gospel. The substance remains, the use, the meaning, the circumstances, the benefit is changed; grace is added, life is infused: "the body is of Christ;" but it is in great measure that same body which was in being before He came. The Gospel has not put aside, it has incorporated into itself the revelation which went before it. It avails itself of the Old Testament, as a great gift to Christian as well as to Jew. It does not dispense with it, but it dispenses it. Persons sometimes urge that there is no code of duty in the New Testament, no ceremonial, no rules for Church polity. Certainly not; they are unnecessary; they are already given in the Old. Why should the Old Testament remain in the Christian church but to be used? There we are to look for our forms, our rites, our polity; only illustrated, tempered, spiritualised by the Gospel. The preempts remain, the observance of them is changed,'—Dr. J.H. Newman; Sermon on Subjects of the Day, p. 205.]

[Footnote 21: There is a set of most acute and searching criticisms on this matter in Mr. Leslie Stephen's Essays on Free-Thinking and Plain-Speaking (Longmans, 1873). The last essay in the volume, An Apology for Plain-Speaking, is a decisive and remarkable exposition of the treacherous playing with words, which underlies even the most vigorous efforts to make the phrases and formula of the old creed hold the reality of new faith.]

[Footnote 22: Upon this sentence the following criticism has been made:—'Surely both of these so-called contradictions are deliberately affirmed by the vast majority of all thinkers upon the subject. What orthodox asserter of the omnipresence of a "Creator with intelligible attributes" ever maintained that these attributes could be "grasped by men"?'—The orthodox asserter, no doubt, says that he does not maintain that the divine attributes can be grasped by men; but his habitual treatment of them as intelligible, and as the subjects of propositions made in languages that is designed to be intelligible, shows that his first reservation is merely nominal, as it is certainly inconsistent with his general position. Religious people who warn you most solemnly that man who is a worm and the son of a worm cannot possibly compass in his puny understanding the attributes of the Divine Being, will yet—as an eminent divine not in holy orders has truly said—tell you all about him, as if he were the man who lives in the next street.]

[Footnote 23: That able man, the late J.E. Cairnes, suggested the following objection to this paragraph. When two persons marry, there is a reasonable expectation, almost amounting to an understanding, that they will both of them adhere to their religion, just as both of them tacitly agree to follow the ways of the world in the host of minor social matters. If, therefore, either of them turns to some other creed, the person so turning has, so to speak, broken the contract. The utmost he or she can contend for is forbearance. If a woman embraces catholicism, she may seek tolerance, but she has no right to exact conformity. If the man becomes an unbeliever, he in like manner breaks the bargain, and may be justly asked not to flaunt his misdemeanour.

My answer to this would turn upon the absolute inexpediency of such silent bargains being assumed by public opinion. In the present state of opinion, where the whole air is alive with the spirit of change, nobody who takes his life or her life seriously, could allow an assumption which means reduction of one of the most important parts of character, the love of truth, to a nullity.]

[Footnote 24: The reader remembers how Wolmar, the atheistic husband of Julie in Rousseau's New Heloisa, is distressed by the chagrin which his unbelief inflicts on the piety of his wife. 'He told me that he had been frequently tempted to make a feint of yielding to her arguments, and to pretend, for the sake of calming her sentiments that he did not really hold. But such baseness of soul is too far from him. Without for a moment imposing on Julie, such dissimulation would only have been a new torment to her. The good faith, the frankness, the union of heart, that console for so many troubles, would have been eclipsed between them. Was it by lessening his wife's esteem for him that he could reassure her? Instead of using any disguise, he tells her sincerely what he thinks, but he says it in so simple a tone, etc.—V. v. 126.]

[Footnote 25: The common reason alleged by freethinkers for having their children brought up in the orthodox ways is that, if they were not so brought up, they would be looked on as contaminating agents whom other parents would take care to keep away from the companionship of their children. This excuse may have had some force at another time. At the present day, when belief is so weak, we doubt whether the young would be excluded from the companionship of their equals in age, merely because they had not been trained in some of the conventional shibboleths. Even if it were so, there are certainly some ways of compensating for the disadvantages of exclusion from orthodox circles.

I have heard of a more interesting reason; namely, that the historic position of the young, relatively to the time in which they are placed, is in some sort falsified, unless they have gone through a training in the current beliefs of their age: unless they have undergone that, they miss, as it were, some of the normal antecedents. I do not think this plea will hold good. However desirable it may be that the young should know all sorts of erroneous beliefs and opinions as products of the past, it can hardly be in any degree desirable that they should take them for truths. If there were no other objection, there would be this, that the disturbance and waste of force involved in shaking off in their riper years the erroneous opinions which had been instilled into them in childhood, would more than counter-balance any advantages, whatever their precise nature may be, to be derived from having shared in their own proper persons the ungrounded notions of others.]

[Footnote 26: Miss Martineau has an excellent protest against 'the dereliction of principle shown in supposing that any "Cause" can be of so much importance as fidelity to truth, or can be important at all otherwise than in its relation to truth which wants vindicating. It reminds me of an incident which happened when I was in America, at the time of the severest trials of the Abolitionists. A pastor from the southern States lamented to a brother clergyman in the North the introduction of the Anti-slavery question, because the views of their sect were "getting on so well before!" "Getting on!" cried the northern minister. "What is the use of getting your vessel on when you have thrown both captain and cargo overboard?" Thus, what signifies the pursuit of any one reform, like those specified,—Anti-slavery and the Woman question,—when the freedom which is the very soul of the controversy, the very principle of the movement,—is mourned over in any other of its many manifestations? The only effectual advocates of such reforms as those are people who follow truth wherever it leads.'—Autobiography, ii. 442.]



CHAPTER V.

THE REALISATION OF OPINION.

A person who takes the trouble to form his own opinions and beliefs will feel that he owes no responsibility to the majority for his conclusions. If he is a genuine lover of truth, if he is inspired by the divine passion for seeing things as they are, and a divine abhorrence of holding ideas which do not conform to the facts, he will be wholly independent of the approval or assent of the persons around him. When he proceeds to apply his beliefs in the practical conduct of life, the position is different. There are now good reasons why his attitude should be in some ways less inflexible. The society in which he is placed is a very ancient and composite growth. The people from whom he dissents have not come by their opinions, customs, and institutions by a process of mere haphazard. These opinions and customs all had their origin in a certain real or supposed fitness. They have a certain depth of root in the lives of a proportion of the existing generation. Their fitness for satisfying human needs may have vanished, and their congruity with one another may have come to an end. That is only one side of the truth. The most zealous propagandism cannot penetrate to them. The quality of bearing to be transplanted from one kind of soil and climate to another is not very common, and it is far from being inexhaustible even where it exists.

In common language we speak of a generation as something possessed of a kind of exact unity, with all its parts and members one and homogeneous. Yet very plainly it is not this. It is a whole, but a whole in a state of constant flux. Its factors and elements are eternally shifting. It is not one, but many generations. Each of the seven ages of man is neighbour to all the rest. The column of the veterans is already staggering over into the last abyss, while the column of the newest recruits is forming with all its nameless and uncounted hopes. To each its tradition, its tendency, its possibilities. Only a proportion of each in one society can have nerve enough to grasp the banner of a new truth, and endurance enough to bear it along rugged and untrodden ways.

And then, as we have said, one must remember the stuff of which life is made. One must consider what an overwhelming preponderance of the most tenacious energies and most concentrated interests of a society must be absorbed between material cares and the solicitude of the affections. It is obviously unreasonable to lose patience and quarrel with one's time, because it is tardy in throwing off its institutions and beliefs, and slow to achieve the transformation which is the problem in front of it. Men and women have to live. The task for most of them is arduous enough to make them well pleased with even such imperfect shelter as they find in the use and wont of daily existence. To insist on a whole community being made at once to submit to the reign of new practices and new ideas, which have just begun to commend themselves to the most advanced speculative intelligence of the time,—this, even if it were a possible process, would do much to make life impracticable and to hurry on social dissolution.

'It cannot be too emphatically asserted,' as has been said by one of the most influential of modern thinkers, 'that this policy of compromise, alike in institutions, in actions, and in beliefs, which especially characterises English life, is a policy essential to a society going through the transitions caused by continued growth and development. Ideas and institutions proper to a past social state, but incongruous with the new social state that has grown out of it, surviving into this new social state they have made possible, and disappearing only as this new social state establishes its own ideas and institutions, are necessarily, during their survival, in conflict with these new ideas and institutions—necessarily furnish elements of contradiction in men's thoughts and deeds. And yet, as for the carrying on of social life, the old must continue so long as the new is not ready, this perpetual compromise is an indispensable accompaniment of a normal development.'[27]

Yet we must not press this argument, and the state of feeling that belongs to it, further than they may be fairly made to go. The danger in most natures lies on this side, for on this side our love of ease works, and our prejudices. The writer in the passage we have just quoted is describing compromise as a natural state of things, the resultant of divergent forces. He is not professing to define its conditions or limits as a practical duty. Nor is there anything in his words, or in the doctrine of social evolution of which he is the most elaborate and systematic expounder, to favour that deliberate sacrifice of truth, either in search or in expression, against which our two previous chapters were meant to protest.[28] When Mr. Spencer talks of a new social state establishing its own ideas, of course he means, and can only mean, that men and women establish their own ideas, and to do that, it is obvious that they must at one time or another have conceived them without any special friendliness of reference to the old ideas, which they were in the fulness of time to supersede. Still less, of course, can a new social state ever establish its ideas, unless the persons who hold them confess them openly, and give to them an honest and effective adherence.

Every discussion of the more fundamental principles of conduct must contain, expressly or by implication, some general theory of the nature and constitution of the social union. Let us state in a few words that which seems to command the greatest amount both of direct and analogical evidence in our time. It is perhaps all the more important to discuss our subject with immediate and express reference to this theory, because it has become in some minds a plea for a kind of philosophic indifference towards any policy of Thorough, as well as an excuse for systematic abstention from vigorous and downright courses of action.

A progressive society is now constantly and justly compared to a growing organism. Its vitality in this aspect consists of a series of changes in ideas and institutions. These changes arise spontaneously from the operation of the whole body of social conditions, external and internal. The understanding and the affections and desires are always acting on the domestic, political, and economic ordering. They influence the religious sentiment. They touch relations with societies outside. In turn they are constantly being acted on by all these elements. In a society progressing in a normal and uninterrupted course, this play and interaction is the sign and essence of life. It is, as we are so often told, a long process of new adaptations and re-adaptations; of the modification of tradition and usage by truer ideas and improved institutions. There may be, and there are, epochs of rest, when this modification in its active and demonstrative shape slackens or ceases to be visible. But even then the modifying forces are only latent. Further progress depends on the revival of their energy, before there has been time for the social structure to become ossified and inelastic. The history of civilisation is the history of the displacement of old conceptions by new ones more conformable to the facts. It is the record of the removal of old institutions and ways of living, in favour of others of greater convenience and ampler capacity, at once multiplying and satisfying human requirements.

Now compromise, in view of the foregoing theory of social advance, may be of two kinds, and of these two kinds one is legitimate and the other not. It may stand for two distinct attitudes of mind, one of them obstructive and the other not. It may mean the deliberate suppression or mutilation of an idea, in order to make it congruous with the traditional idea or the current prejudice on the given subject, whatever that may be. Or else it may mean a rational acquiescence in the fact that the bulk of your contemporaries are not yet prepared either to embrace the new idea, or to change their ways of living in conformity to it. In the one case, the compromiser rejects the highest truth, or dissembles his own acceptance of it. In the other, he holds it courageously for his ensign and device, but neither forces nor expects the whole world straightway to follow. The first prolongs the duration of the empire of prejudice, and retards the arrival of improvement. The second does his best to abbreviate the one, and to hasten and make definite the other, yet he does not insist on hurrying changes which, to be effective, would require the active support of numbers of persons not yet ripe for them. It is legitimate compromise to say:—'I do not expect you to execute this improvement, or to surrender that prejudice, in my time. But at any rate it shall not be my fault if the improvement remains unknown or rejected. There shall be one man at least who has surrendered the prejudice, and who does not hide that fact.' It is illegitimate compromise to say:—'I cannot persuade you to accept my truth; therefore I will pretend to accept your falsehood.'

That this distinction is as sound on the evolutional theory of society as on any other is quite evident. It would be odd if the theory which makes progress depend on modification forbade us to attempt to modify. When it is said that the various successive changes in thought and institution present and consummate themselves spontaneously, no one means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human effort and volition. On the contrary, this energy of the members of the society is one of the spontaneous elements. It is quite as indispensable as any other of them, if indeed it be not more so. Progress depends upon tendencies and forces in a community. But of these tendencies and forces, the organs and representatives must plainly be found among the men and women of the community, and cannot possibly be found anywhere else. Progress is not automatic, in the sense that if we were all to be cast into a deep slumber for the space of a generation, we should awake to find ourselves in a greatly improved social state. The world only grows better, even in the moderate degree in which it does grow better, because people wish that it should, and take the right steps to make it better. Evolution is not a force, but a process; not a cause, but a law. It explains the source, and marks the immovable limitations, of social energy. But social energy itself can never be superseded either by evolution or by anything else.

The reproach of being impracticable and artificial attaches by rights not to those who insist on resolute, persistent, and uncompromising efforts to remove abuses, but to a very different class—to those, namely, who are credulous enough to suppose that abuses and bad customs and wasteful ways of doing things will remove themselves. This credulity, which is a cloak for indolence or ignorance or stupidity, overlooks the fact that there are bodies of men, more or less numerous, attached by every selfish interest they have to the maintenance of these abusive customs. 'A plan,' says Bentham, 'may be said to be too good to be practicable, where, without adequate inducement in the shape of personal interest, it requires for its accomplishment that some individual or class of individuals shall have made a sacrifice of his or their personal interest to the interest of the whole. When it is on the part of a body of men or a multitude of individuals taken at random that any such sacrifice is reckoned upon, then it is that in speaking of the plan the term Utopian may without impropriety be applied.' And this is the very kind of sacrifice which must be anticipated by those who so misunderstand the doctrine of evolution as to believe that the world is improved by some mystic and self-acting social discipline, which dispenses with the necessity of pertinacious attack upon institutions that have outlived their time, and interests that have lost their justification.

We are thus brought to the position—to which, indeed, bare observation of actual occurrences might well bring us, if it were not for the clouding disturbances of selfishness, or of a true philosophy of society wrongly applied—that a society can only pursue its normal course by means of a certain progression of changes, and that these changes can only be initiated by individuals or very small groups of individuals. The progressive tendency can only be a tendency, it can only work its way through the inevitable obstructions around it, by means of persons who are possessed by the special progressive idea. Such ideas do not spring up uncaused and unconditioned in vacant space. They have had a definite origin and ordered antecedents. They are in direct relation with the past. They present themselves to one person or little group of persons rather than to another, because circumstances, or the accident of a superior faculty of penetration, have placed the person or group in the way of such ideas. In matters of social improvement the most common reason why one hits upon a point of progress and not another, is that the one happens to be more directly touched than the other by the unimproved practice. Or he is one of those rare intelligences, active, alert, inventive, which by constitution or training find their chief happiness in thinking in a disciplined and serious manner how things can be better done. In all cases the possession of a new idea, whether practical or speculative, only raises into definite speech what others have needed without being able to make their need articulate. This is the principle on which experience shows us that fame and popularity are distributed. A man does not become celebrated in proportion to his general capacity, but because he does or says something which happened to need doing or saying at the moment.

This brings us directly to our immediate subject. For such a man is the holder of a trust It is upon him and those who are like him that the advance of a community depends. If he is silent, then repair is checked, and the hurtful elements of worn-out beliefs and waste institutions remain to enfeeble the society, just as the retention of waste products enfeebles or poisons the body. If in a spirit of modesty which is often genuine, though it is often only a veil for love of ease, he asks why he rather than another should speak, why he before others should refuse compliance and abstain from conformity, the answer is that though the many are ultimately moved, it is always one who is first to leave the old encampment. If the maxim of the compromiser were sound, it ought to be capable of universal application. Nobody has a right to make an apology for himself in this matter, which he will not allow to be valid for others. If one has a right to conceal his true opinions, and to practice equivocal conformities, then all have a right. One plea for exemption is in this case as good as another, and no better. That he has married a wife, that he has bought a yoke of oxen and must prove them, that he has bidden guests to a feast—one excuse lies on the same level as the rest. All are equally worthless as answers to the generous solicitation of enlightened conscience. Suppose, then, that each man on whom in turn the new ideas dawned wore to borrow the compromiser's plea and imitate his example. We know what would happen. The exploit in which no one will consent to go first, remains unachieved. You wait until there are persons enough agreeing with you to form an effective party? But how are the members of the band to know one another, if all are to keep their dissent from the old, and their adherence to the new, rigorously private? And how many members constitute the innovating band an effective force! When one-half of the attendants at a church are unbelievers, will that warrant us in ceasing to attend, or shall we tarry until the dissemblers number two-thirds? Conceive the additions which your caution has made to the moral integrity of the community in the meantime. Measure the enormous hindrances that will have been placed in the way of truth and improvement, when the day at last arrives on which you and your two-thirds take heart to say that falsehood and abuse have now reached their final term, and must at length be swept away into the outer darkness. Consider how much more terrible the shock of change will be when it does come, and how much less able will men be to meet it, and to emerge successfully from it.

Perhaps the compromiser shrinks, not because he fears to march alone, but because he thinks that the time has not yet come for the progressive idea which he has made his own, and for whose triumph one day he confidently hopes. This plea may mean two wholly different states of the case. The time has not yet come for what? For making those positive changes in life or institution, which the change in idea must ultimately involve? That is one thing. Or for propagating, elaborating, enforcing the new idea, and strenuously doing all that one can to bring as many people as possible to a state of theory, which will at last permit the requisite change in practice to be made with safety and success? This is another and entirely different thing. The time may not have come for the first of these two courses. The season may not be advanced enough for us to push on to active conquest. But the time has always come, and the season is never unripe, for the announcement of the fruitful idea.

We must go further than that. In so far as it can be done by one man without harming his neighbours, the time has always come for the realisation of an idea. When the change in way of living or in institution is one which requires the assent and co-operation of numbers of people, it may clearly be a matter for question whether men enough are ready to yield assent and co-operation. But the expression of the necessity of the change and the grounds of it, though it may not always be appropriate, can never be premature, and for these reasons. The fact of a new idea having come to one man is a sign that it is in the air. The innovator is as much the son of his generation as the conservative. Heretics have as direct a relation to antecedent conditions as the orthodox. Truth, said Bacon, has been rightly named the daughter of Time. The new idea does not spring up uncaused and by miracle. If it has come to me, there must be others to whom it has only just missed coming. If I have found my way to the light, there must be others groping after it very close in my neighbourhood. My discovery is their goal. They are prepared to receive the new truth, which they were not prepared to find for themselves. The fact that the mass are not yet ready to receive, any more than to find, is no reason why the possessor of the new truth should run to hide under a bushel the candle which has been lighted for him. If the time has not come for them, at least it has come for him. No man can ever know whether his neighbours are ready for change or not. He has all the following certainties, at least:—that he himself is ready for the change; that he believes it would be a good and beneficent one; that unless some one begins the work of preparation, assuredly there will be no consummation; and that if he declines to take a part in the matter, there can be no reason why every one else in turn should not decline in like manner, and so the work remain for ever unperformed. The compromiser who blinds himself to all those points, and acts just as if the truth were not in him, does for ideas with which he agrees, the very thing which the acute persecutor does for ideas which he dislikes—he extinguishes beginnings and kills the germs.

The consideration on which so many persons rely, that an existing institution, though destined to be replaced by a better, performs useful functions provisionally, is really not to the point. It is an excellent reason why the institution should not be removed or fundamentally modified, until public opinion is ripe for the given piece of improvement. But it is no reason at all why those who are anxious for the improvement, should speak and act just as they would do if they thought the change perfectly needless and undesirable. It is no reason why those who allow the provisional utility of a belief or an institution or a custom of living, should think solely of the utility and forget the equally important element of its provisionalness. For the fact of its being provisional is the very ground why every one who perceives this element, should set himself to act accordingly. It is the ground why he should set himself, in other words, to draw opinion in every way open to him—by speech, by voting, by manner of life and conduct—in the direction of new truth and the better practice. Let us not, because we deem a thing to be useful for the hour, act as if it were to be useful for ever. The people who selfishly seek to enjoy as much comfort and ease as they can in an existing state of things, with the desperate maxim, 'After us, the deluge,' are not any worse than those who cherish present comfort and case and take the world as it comes, in the fatuous and self-deluding hope, 'After us, the millennium.' Those who make no sacrifice to avert the deluge, and those who make none to hasten their millennium, are on the same moral level. And the former have at least the quality of being no worse than their avowed principle, while the latter nullify their pretended hopes by conformities which are only proper either to profound social contentment, or to profound social despair. Nay, they seem to think that there is some merit in this merely speculative hopefulness. They act as if they supposed that to be very sanguine about the general improvement of mankind, is a virtue that relieves them from taking trouble about any improvement in particular.

If those who defend a given institution are doing their work well, that furnishes the better reason why those who disapprove of it and disbelieve in its enduring efficacy, should do their work well also. Take the Christian churches, for instance. Assume, if you will, that they are serving a variety of useful functions. If that were all, it would be a reason for conforming. But we are speaking of those for whom the matter does not end here. If you are convinced that the dogma is not true; that a steadily increasing number of persons are becoming aware that it is not true; that its efficacy as a basis of spiritual life is being lowered in the same degree as its credibility; that both dogma and church must be slowly replaced by higher forms of faith, if not also by more effective organisations; then, all who hold such views as these have as distinctly a function in the community as the ministers and upholders of the churches, and the zeal of the latter is simply the most monstrously untenable apology that could be invented for dereliction of duty by the former.

If the orthodox to some extent satisfy certain of the necessities of the present, there are other necessities of the future which can only be satisfied by those who now pass for heretical. The plea which we are examining, if it is good for the purpose for which it is urged, would have to be expressed in this way:—The institution is working as perfectly as it can be made to do, or as any other in its place would be likely to do, and therefore I will do nothing by word or deed towards meddling with it. Those who think this, and act accordingly, are the consistent conservatives of the community. If a man takes up any position short of this, his conformity, acquiescence, and inertia at once become inconsistent and culpable. For unless the institution or belief is entirely adequate, it must be the duty of all who have satisfied themselves that it is not so, to recognise its deficiences, and at least to call attention to them, even if they lack opportunity or capacity to suggest remedies. Now we are dealing with persons who, from the hypothesis, do not admit that this or that factor in an existing social state secures all the advantages which might be secured if instead of that factor there were some other. We are speaking of all the various kinds of dissidents, who think that the current theology, or an established church, or a monarchy, or an oligarchic republic, is a bad thing and a lower form, even at the moment while they attribute provisional merit to it. They can mean nothing by classing each of these as bad things, except that they either bring with them certain serious drawbacks, or exclude certain valuable advantages. The fact that they perform their functions well, such as they are, leaves the fundamental vice or defect of these functions just where it was. If any one really thinks that the current theology involves depraved notions of the supreme impersonation of good, restricts and narrows the intelligence, misdirects the religious imagination, and has become powerless to guide conduct, then how does the circumstance that it happens not to be wholly and unredeemedly bad in its influence, relieve our dissident from all care or anxiety as to the points in which, as we have seen, he does count it inadequate and mischievous? Even if he thinks it does more good than harm—a position which must be very difficult for one who believes the common supernatural conception of it to be entirely false—even then, how is he discharged from the duty of stigmatising the harm which he admits that it does?

Again, take the case of the English monarchy. Grant, if you will, that this institution has a certain function, and that by the present chief magistrate this function is estimably performed. Yet if we are of those who believe that in the stage of civilisation which England has reached in other matters, the monarchy must be either obstructive and injurious, or else merely decorative; and that a merely decorative monarchy tends in divers ways to engender habits of abasement, to nourish lower social ideals, to lessen a high civil self-respect in the community; then it must surely be our duty not to lose any opportunity of pressing these convictions. To do this is not necessarily to act as if one were anxious for the immediate removal of the throne and the crown into the museum of political antiquities. We may have no urgent practical solicitude in this direction, on the intelligible principle that a free people always gets as good a kind of government as it deserves. Our conviction is not, on the present hypothesis, that monarchy ought to be swept away in England, but that monarchy produces certain mischievous consequences to the public spirit of the community. And so what we are bound to do is to take care not to conceal this conviction; to abstain scrupulously from all kinds of action and observance, public or private, which tend ever so remotely to foster the ignoble and degrading elements that exist in a court and spread from it outwards; and to use all the influence we have, however slight it may be, in loading public opinion to a right attitude of contempt and dislike for these ignoble and degrading elements, and the conduct engendered by them. A policy like this does not interfere with the advantages of the monarchy, such as they are asserted to be, and it has the effect of making what are supposed to be its disadvantages as little noxious as possible. The question whether we can get others to agree with us is not relevant. If we were eager for instant overthrow, it would be the most relevant of all questions. But we are in the preliminary stage, the stage for acting on opinion. The fact that others do not yet share our opinion, is the very reason for our action. We can only bring them to agree with us, if it be possible on any terms, by persistency in our principles. This persistency, in all but either very timid or very vulgar natures, always has been and always will be independent of external assent or co-operation. The history of success, as we can never too often repeat to ourselves, is the history of minorities. And what is more, it is for the most part the history of insurrection exactly against what the worldly spirits of the time, whenever it may have been, deemed mere trifles and accidents, with which sensible men should on no account dream of taking the trouble to quarrel.

'Halifax,' says Macaulay, 'was in speculation a strong republican and did not conceal it. He often made hereditary monarchy and aristocracy the subjects of his keen pleasantry, while he was fighting the battles of the court and obtaining for himself step after step in the peerage.' We are perfectly familiar with this type, both in men who have, and men who have not, such brilliant parts as Halifax. Such men profess to nourish high ideals of life, of character, of social institutions. Yet they never think of these ideals, when they are deciding what is practically attainable. One would like to ask them what purpose is served by an ideal, if it is not to make a guide for practice and a landmark in dealing with the real. A man's loftiest and most ideal notions must be of a singularly ethereal and, shall we not say, senseless kind, if he can never see how to take a single step that may tend in the slightest degree towards making them more real. If an ideal has no point of contact with what exists, it is probably not much more than the vapid outcome of intellectual or spiritual self-indulgence. If it has such a point of contact, then there is sure to be something which a man can do towards the fulfilment of his hopes. He cannot substitute a new national religion for the old, but he can at least do something to prevent people from supposing that the adherents of the old are more numerous than they really are, and something to show them that good ideas are not all exhausted by the ancient forms. He cannot transform a monarchy into a republic, but he can make sure that one citizen at least shall aim at republican virtues, and abstain from the debasing complaisance of the crowd.