not the same thing as repentance, serves no purpose that I have ever
been able to discover. What one has done, one has done, and there's an
end of it. As a great prelate unforgettably said, "Things are what
they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why,
then, attempt to deceive ourselves"--that remorse for wickedness is a
useful and praiseworthy exercise? Much better to forget. As a matter
of fact, people "indulge" in remorse; it is a somewhat vicious form of
spiritual pleasure. Grief, of course, is different, and it must be
handled with delicate consideration. Nevertheless, when I see, as one
does see, a man or a woman dedicating existence to sorrow for the loss
of a beloved creature, and the world tacitly applauding, my feeling is
certainly inimical. To my idea, that man or woman is not honouring,
but dishonouring, the memory of the departed; society suffers, the
individual suffers, and no earthly or heavenly good is achieved. Grief
is of the past; it mars the present; it is a form of indulgence, and
it ought to be bridled much more than it often is. The human heart is
so large that mere remembrance should not be allowed to tyrannize over
every part of it.

But cases of remorse and absorbing grief are comparatively rare. What
is not rare is that misguided loyalty to the past which dominates the
lives of so many of us. I do not speak of leading principles, which
are not likely to incommode us by changing; I speak of secondary yet
still important things. We will not do so-and-so because we have never
done it--as if that was a reason! Or we have always done so-and-so,
therefore we must always do it--as if _that_ was logic! This
disposition to an irrational Toryism is curiously discoverable in
advanced Radicals, and it will show itself in the veriest trifles. I
remember such a man whose wife objected to his form of hat (not that I
would call so crowning an affair as a hat a trifle!). "My dear," he
protested, "I have always worn this sort of hat. It may not suit me,
but it is absolutely impossible for me to alter it now." However, she
took him by means of an omnibus to a hat shop and bought him another
hat and put it on his head, and made a present of the old one to the
shop assistant, and marched him out of the shop. "There!" she said,
"you see how impossible it is." This is a parable. And I will not
insult your intelligence by applying it.

The faculty that we chiefly need when we are in the reso