tilitarian doctrines, in short, though propagated by leaders of
high intellectual power, and inspired by a pure unselfish morality,
achieved little success in the enterprise of providing new and firmer
guidance and support to mankind in their troubles and perplexities.
But they were not content to look down from serene heights upon the
world, leaving the crowd

'Errare atque viam palantes quaerere vitae.'

They laboured devotedly to dispel ignorance and to advance knowledge;
they spared no pains to promote the material well-being of society.
They helped to raise the wind that filled the sails of practical
reform; they headed the attack upon legal and administrative abuses;
they stirred up the national conscience against social injustice; they
proclaimed a lofty standard of moral obligation. They laid down
principles that in the long run accord with human progress, yet in
their hopes of rapidly modifying society by the application of those
principles they were disappointed; for their systematic theories were
blocked by facts, feelings, and misunderstandings which had not been
taken into calculation. They were averse to coercion, as an evil in
itself; but though they would have agreed with Mr. Bright's dictum
that 'Force is no remedy,' they were latterly brought to perceive that
in another sense there is no remedy except force, and that the vested
interests and preconceptions of society make a stiff and prolonged
opposition to enlightened persuasion. They were disposed to rely too
confidently upon the spread of intelligence by general education for
preparing the minds of people to accept and act upon doctrines that
were logically demonstrable, and to reject what could not be proved.
Mr. Stephen has somewhere written that to support a religion by force
instead of by argument is to admit that argument condemns it. The
proposition is too absolutely stated even for the domain of spiritual
authority, since it might be replied that no great religion, certainly
no organised Church, has existed by argument alone, and it has usually
been supported by laws. But at any rate the temporal power subsists
and operates by coercion, and the sphere of the State's direct action,
instead of diminishing, as the earlier Utilitarians expected it to do,
with the spread of education and intelligence, is perceptibly
extending itself. The Utilitarians demurred to religion as an ultimate
authority in morals, and substituted the plain unvarnishe