dant rather
than anything worse. His "Dreams" and superstitions, at which they laugh
so, have an affectionate, lovable kind of character. He is like a
College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose notion
is that these are the life and safety of the world. He is placed
suddenly, with that unalterable, luckless notion of his, at the head not
of a College but of a Nation, to regulate the most complex,
deep-reaching interests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the old
decent regulations; nay, that their salvation will lie in extending and
improving these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemence
toward his purpose; cramps himself to it, heeding no voice of prudence,
no cry of pity: He will have his College-rules obeyed by his Collegians;
that first; and till that, nothing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I
said. He would have it the world was a College of that kind, and the
world _was not_ that. Alas! was not his doom stern enough? Whatever
wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully avenged on him?

It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturally
clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the _formed_ world is the only
habitable one. The naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the thing I
praise in the Puritans; it is the thing I pity--praising only the spirit
which had rendered that inevitable! All substances clothe themselves in
forms: but there are suitable true forms, and then there are untrue
unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, Forms which
_grow_ round a substance, if we rightly understand that, will correspond
to the real nature and purport of it, will be true, good; forms which
are consciously _put_ round a substance, bad. I invite you to reflect on
this. It distinguishes true from false in Ceremonial Form, earnest
solemnity from empty pageant, in all human things.

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In the
commonest meeting of men, a person making what we call "set speeches,"
is not he an offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies
you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality within, are a
thing you wish to get away from. But suppose now it were some matter of
vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine Worship is),
about which your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess of feeling,
knew not how to _form_ itself into utterance at all, and preferred
formless silence to any utterance there