s not far to look for. In the sciences there is no
temptation of self-interest to mislead. In matters which affect life and
conduct, the interests and prejudices of the cultivated classes are
enlisted on the side of the existing order of things, and their better
trained faculties and larger acquirements serve only to find them
arguments for believing what they wish to believe.

Simpler men have less to lose; they come more in contact with the
realities of life, and they learn wisdom in the experience of suffering.

Thus it was that when the learned and the wise turned away from
Christianity, the fishermen of the Galilean lake listened, and a new
life began for mankind. A miner's son converted Germany to the
Reformation. The London artisans and the peasants of Buckinghamshire
went to the stake for doctrines which were accepted afterwards as a
second revelation.

So it has been; so it will be to the end. When a great teacher comes
again upon the earth, he will find his first disciples where Christ
found them and Luther found them. Had Luther written for the learned,
the words which changed the face of Europe would have slumbered in
impotence on the bookshelves.

In appealing to the German nation, you will agree, I think, with me,
that he did well and not ill; you will not sacrifice his great name to
the disdain of a shallow philosophy, or to the grimacing of a dead
superstition, whose ghost is struggling out of its grave.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER:

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 1865.

I have undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the
Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to
have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject
is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great
national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose
disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that
only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen
once said to me of our own Reformation in England, that, for his part,
he could not conceive how we had managed to come by such a thing. We
seemed to him to be an obdurate, impenetrable, stupid people, hide-bound
by tradition and precedent, and too self-satisfied to be either willing
or able to take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever,
especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not ge