arful' agent in Shakespeare's
use is not one that shrinks in alarm from the act, but an agent that
causes others to shrink; not panic-struck, but panic-striking.

Miss Edgeworth, let me remark, commits trespasses on language that are
really past excusing. In one place she says that a man 'had a
_contemptible_ opinion' of some other man's understanding. Such a
blunder is not of that class which usage sanctions, and an accuracy not
much short of pedantry would be argued in noticing: it is at once
illiterate and vulgar in the very last degree. I mean that it is common
amongst vulgar people, and them only. It ranks, for instance, with the
common formula of '_I_ am agreeable, if you prefer it.'

Style is the disentangling of thoughts or ideas reciprocally involved in
each other.

4.--THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

Religion under any of its aspects, revealing or consoling--religion in
connection with any of its affinities, ethics or metaphysics, when
_self_-evoked by a person of earnest nature, not imposed from without by
the necessities of monastic life, not caught as a contagion from the
example of friends that surround you, argues some 'vast volcanic agency'
moving at subterraneous depths below the ordinary working mind of daily
life, and entitled by its own intrinsic grandeur to ennoble the
curiosity (else a petty passion) which may put questions as to its
origin. In any case of religion arising, as a spontaneous birth, in the
midst of alien forces, it is inevitable to ask for its _why_ and its
_whence_. Religion considered as a sentiment of devotion, as a yearning
after some dedication to an immeasurable principle of that noblest
temple among all temples--'the upright heart and pure,' or religion,
again, as the apprehension of some mighty synthesis amongst truths dimly
perceived heretofore amidst separating clouds, but now brought into
strict indissoluble connection, proclaims a revolution so great that it
is otherwise not to be accounted for than as the breaking out of a germ
of the supernatural in man as a seed from a hitherto barren soil.

Sin is that secret word, that dark _aporreton_ of the human race,
undiscoverable except by express revelation, which having once been laid
in the great things of God as a germinal principle, has since blossomed
into a vast growth of sublime ideas known only to those nations who have
lived under the moulding of Scriptural truth--and comprehending _all_
functions of the Infi