odox henceforth--and prove our
orthodoxy by persecuting the heretic.'

Does this seem to you extravagant, impossible? Remember, my
friends, that within the last century Lord George Gordon's riots
convulsed London. Can you give me any reason why Lord George
Gordon's riots cannot occur again? Believe me, the more you study
history, the more you study human nature, the more possible it will
seem to you. It is not, I believe, infidelity, but fanaticism,
which England has to fear just now. The infidelity of England is
one of mere doubt and denial, a scepticism; which is in itself weak
and self-destructive. The infidelity of France in 1793 was strong
enough, but just because it was no scepticism, but a faith; a
positive creed concerning human reason, and the rights of man, which
men could formulize, and believe in, and fight for, and persecute
for, and, if need was, die for. But no such exists in England now.
And what we have most to fear in England under the pressure of some
sudden distress, is a superstitious panic, and the wickedness which
is certain to accompany that panic; mean and unjust, cruel and
abominable things, done in the name of orthodoxy: though meanwhile,
whether what the masses and their spiritual demagogues will mean by
orthodoxy, will be the same that we and the Church of England mean
thereby, is a question which I leave for your most solemn
consideration. That, however, rather than any proclamation of the
abstract rights of man, or installations of a goddess of Reason, is
the form which spiritual hunger is most likely to take in England
now. Alas! are there not tokens enough around us now, whereby we
may discern the signs of this time?

I say, the spiritual hunger will reawaken; and woe to us who really
understand and love the Church of England; woe to us who are really
true to her principles, honestly subscribe her formulas, if we
cannot appease it in that day.

But wherewith? We may look, my friends, appalled at the danger and
the need. We may cry to our Lord, 'From whence can a man satisfy
these men with bread in the wilderness?' But his answer will be, as
far as I dare to predict it, the same as to his apostles of old on
another and a similar occasion, 'Give ye them to eat. They need not
depart.'

I am not going to draw any far-fetched analogy between the miracle
recorded in the gospel, and the subject on which I am speaking. I
am not going to put any mystical and mediaeval interpr