haped by the generation of the dead who have
prepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and the
direction of our activity for the generations that are to fill the
future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to
the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who
are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in
the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a
positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening
of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it.
Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most
scientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment
expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious
a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous
mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with
the eternal chain of the destinies of man. "This contemplation," he
wrote and felt, "is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his
persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man
reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man
tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here
that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason
has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity
adorns with all purest delights."[349]

This, to the shame of those wavering souls who despair of progress at
the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have
marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days,
when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the
eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism.
But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous
natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the
dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards
good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is
lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out
by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry
indifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard
Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to
contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond
contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate these
fine