ans of man's fancy," and with them forged the grand
illusion that equality alone is freedom.

For even sinless, happy Eve was made to feel herself oppressed, until,
with keen desire of equality with gods, "forth reaching to the fruit,
she plucked, she ate:"--

"Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of wo,
That all was lost."

How much easier, then, to effect the ruin of poor, fallen man, by
stirring up this fierce desire of equality with discontented thoughts
and vain hopes of unattainable good! It is this dark desire, and not
liberty, which, in its rage, becomes the "poisonous snake;" and, though
decked in fine, allegoric, glowing garb, it is still the loathsome
thing, the "false worm," that turned God's Paradise itself into a
blighted world.

If Mr. Macaulay had only distinguished between liberty and license,
than which no two things in the universe are more diametrically opposed
to each other, his passion for fine rhetoric would not have betrayed him
into so absurd a conceit respecting the diverse forms of freedom.
Liberty is--as we have seen--the bright emanation of reason in the form
of law; license is the triumph of blind passion over all law and order.
Hence, if we would have liberty, the great deep of human passion must be
restrained. For this purpose, as Mr. Burke has said, there must be power
somewhere; and if there be not moral power within, there must be
physical power without. Otherwise, the restraints will be too weak; the
safeguards of liberty will give way, and the passions of men will burst
into anarchy, the most frightful of all the forms of tyranny. Shall we
call this liberty? Shall we seek the secure enjoyment of natural rights
in a wild reign of lawless terror? As well might we seek the pure light
of heaven in the bottomless pit. It is, indeed, a most horrible
desecration of the sacred name of liberty, to apply it either to the
butcheries and brutalities of the French Revolution, or to the more
diabolical massacres of St. Domingo. If such were freedom, it would, in
sober truth, be more fitly symbolized by ten thousand hissing serpents
than by a single poisonous snake; and by all on earth, as in heaven, it
should be abhorred. Hence, those pretended friends and advocates of
freedom, who would thus fain transmute her form divine into such
horribly distorted shapes, are with her enemies confederate in dark,
misguide