r of
to-morrow's hunger--people for whom the crust is too uncertain for its
certainty to be questioned. We often ask why it is that the poor--the
working-people--endure their poverty and perpetual toil without
overwhelming revolt. The reason is that they have their eyes fixed on
the evening meal, and for the life of them they dare not lose sight of
it.

So the rebel need never be afraid of going too fast. The violence of
inertia--the suction of the stagnant bog--is almost invincible. Like
the horse, we are creatures of cast-iron habit. We abandon ourselves
easily to careless acquiescence. We make much of external laws, and,
like a mother bemused with torpid beer when she overlays her child, we
stifle the law of the soul because its crying is such a nuisance. Like a
new baby, a new thought is fractious, restless, and incalculable. It
saps our strength; it gives us no peace; it exposes a wider surface to
pain. There is something indecent, uncontrolled, and unconscionable
about it. Our friends like it best when it is asleep, and they like us
better when it is buried.

There is very little danger of rebellion going too far. The barriers
confronting it are too solid, and the Idol of the Herd is too carefully
enshrined. A perpetual rebellion of every one against everything would
give us an insecure, though exciting, existence, and we are protected by
man's disposition to obedience and his solid love of custom. Against the
first vedettes of rebellion the army of routine will always muster, and
it gathers to itself the indifferent, the startled cowards, the thinkers
whose thought is finished, the lawyers whose laws are fixed--an
innumerable host. They proceed to treat the rebels as we have seen. In
all ages, rebellion has been met by the standing armies of permanence.
If captured, it is put to the ordeal of fire and water, so as to try
what stuff it is made of. Faith is rebellion's only inspiration and
support, and a deal of faith is needed to resist the battle and the
test. It was in thinking of the faith of rebels that an early Christian
writer told of those who, having walked by faith, have in all ages been
tortured, not accepting deliverance; and others have had trial of
mockings and scourgings, and of bonds and imprisonment; they were
stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword;
they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute,
afflicted, tormented (of whom the world was not wo