rent
rightness of the existing order. Certainly he throws a cloak of
religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property;
and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely
part of the same attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect this
background with his antagonism to the French Revolution. What there was
most distressing to him was the overthrowal of the Church, and he did
not hesitate, in very striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion
with infidelity. Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced
that a social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his _Letters on a
Regicide Peace_ have a good deal of that relentless illogic which made
de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from ultramontanism with
the road to a denial of all faith. Nothing is more difficult than to
deal with a thinker who has had a revelation; and this sense that the
universe was a divine mystery not to be too nearly scrutinized by man
grew greatly upon Burke in his later years. It was not an attitude which
reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the
presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.

There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like
later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with
something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him was the
idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it,
was not of the essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that
the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the
purpose itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the
deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of
the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it
should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper. It
never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic
purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur.
We do not come to grips with the facts. What we are bidden to remember
is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be. The existing order
is beatified as a necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to
separate out the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts
in time and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do
not at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.

Yet it is surely evident that i