ern Covenanters of Scotland so heroic in our sight. It is the fact
that they sought truth and ensued it, not thinking of the practicable
nor cautiously counting majorities and minorities, but each man
pondering and searching so 'as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.'

It is no adequate answer to urge that this awful consciousness of a
divine presence and supervision has ceased to be the living fact it once
was. That partly explains, but it certainly does not justify, our
present lassitude. For the ever-wakeful eye of celestial power is not
the only conceivable stimulus to responsibility. To pass from those grim
heroes of protestantism to the French philosophers of the last century
is a wide leap in a hundred respects, yet they too were pricked by the
oestrus of intellectual responsibility. Their doctrine was dismally
insufficient, and sometimes, as the present writer has often pointed
out, it was directly vicious. Their daily lives were surrounded by much
shabbiness and many meannesses. But, after all, no temptation and no
menace, no pains or penalties for thinking about certain subjects, and
no rewards for turning to think about something else, could divert such
men as Voltaire and Diderot from their alert and strenuous search after
such truth as could be vouchsafed to their imperfect lights. A
catastrophe followed, it is true, but the misfortunes which attended it
were due more to the champions of tradition and authority than to the
soldiers of emancipation. Even in the case of the latter, they were due
to an inadequate doctrine, and not at all either to their sense of the
necessity of free speculation and inquiry, or to the intrepidity with
which they obeyed the promptings of that ennobling sense.

Perhaps the latest attempt of a considerable kind to suppress the
political spirit in non-political concerns was the famous movement which
had its birth a generation ago among the gray quadrangles and ancient
gardens of Oxford, 'the sweet city with her dreaming spires,' where
there has ever been so much detachment from the world, alongside of the
coarsest and fiercest hunt after the grosser prizes of the world. No one
has much less sympathy with the direction of the tractarian revival than
the present writer, in whose Oxford days the star of Newman had set, and
the sun of Mill had risen in its stead. And it is needful to distinguish
the fervid and strong spirits with whom the revival began from the
mimics of our later day