gnized the problem of the conduct of life as
the one thing of supreme interest to a rational man, and recognized it
as above all things a moral problem. His treatment of it is usually
based on reason, not on mere authority or orthodoxy, or even on
Christianity at all. _Rasselas_, for instance, his most popular
ethical work, which was translated into most of the European languages,
does not contain a single allusion to Christianity. Its atmosphere is
neither Mahomedan nor Christian, but that of pure reason. And when
elsewhere he does discuss definitely Christian problems it is usually
in the light of free and unfettered reason. Reason by itself has
probably never made any one a Christian, and certainly Johnson's {29}
Christianity was not an affair of the reason alone, but he was seldom
afraid to test it by the touchstone of reason. That was not merely a
thing done in accordance with the fashion of his age; it was the
inevitable activity of an acute and powerful mind. But the fact that
he had in him this absorbing ethical interest, and that throughout his
life he was applying to it a rare intellectual energy, and what was
rarer still in those fields, a close and unfailing grip on life and
reality, gave him that peculiar position to which he came in his last
years; one of an authority which was probably not equalled by that of
any professed philosopher or divine.

Still, his seriousness could not by itself have given him this
position. The English people like their public men to be serious, but
they do not like them to be nothing else. The philosopher and the
saint, the merely intellectual man or the merely spiritual man, have
never been popular characters or become leaders of men, here any more
than elsewhere. The essential element in the confidence Johnson
inspired was not his seriousness: it was his sovereign sanity, the
unfailing common sense, to which allusion has already been made. He
was pre-eminently a bookish man, but he was conspicuously free from the
unreality that is so often felt {30} in the characters of such men. He
knew from the first how to strike a note which showed that he was well
aware of the difference between literature and life and their relative
importance.

"Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from Letters, to be wise."

So he said, as a young man, in his finest poem, and so he acted all
through the years. Scholar as he was, and very conscious of t