re rushing on below us. Even while the
present organisation remains--but, alas! no--it is no use to urge a
Church bound hand and foot in State shackles to stretch its limbs in any
wholesome activity. If the teachers of the people really were the wisest
and best and noblest men among us, this and a thousand other blessed
things would follow from it; till then let us be content to work and
pray, and lay our hand to the wheel wherever we can find a spoke to
grasp. _Corruptio optimi est pessima_; the national Church as it ought
to be is the soul and conscience of the body politic, but a man whose
body has the direction of his conscience we do not commonly consider in
the most hopeful moral condition.

FOOTNOTES:

[AA] Written 1850.

REYNARD THE FOX.[AB]

Lord Macaulay, in his Essay on Machiavelli, propounds a singular theory.
Declining the various solutions which have been offered to explain how a
man supposed to be so great could have lent his genius to the doctrine
of 'the Prince,' he has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or
may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's character, but
which, as an exposition of a universal ethical theory, is as
questionable as what it is brought forward to explain. We will not show
Lord Macaulay the disrespect of supposing that he has attempted an
elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that he may have been
exercising his genius with a paradox, but the subject is not of the sort
in which we can patiently permit such exercises. It is hard work with
all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see the road with all
plainness as it lies out before us; and clever men must be good enough
to find something else to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our
eyes with sophistry.

According to this conception of human nature, the basenesses and the
excellencies of mankind are no more than accidents of circumstance, the
results of national feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and
treachery, and lying, and such other 'natural defences of the weak
against the strong,' are in themselves neither good nor bad, except as
thinking makes them so. They are the virtues of a weak people, and they
will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable; they are to the
full as compatible with the highest graces and most lofty features of
the heart and intellect as any of those opposite so called heroisms
which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to mono