f spiritual progress is being accomplished.
Everything was long seen, by the young and ardent amongst us, in
inseparable connection with politics and practical life. We have pretty
well exhausted the benefits of seeing things in this connection; we have
got all that can be got by so seeing them. Let us try a more disinterested
mode of seeing them; let us betake ourselves more to the serener life of
the mind and spirit. This life, too, may have its excesses and dangers;
but they are not for us at present. Let us think of quietly enlarging our
stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we get an idea or half
an idea, be running out with it into the street, and trying to make it
rule there. Our ideas will, in the end, shape the world all the better for
maturing a little. Perhaps in fifty years' time it will in the English
House of Commons be an objection to an institution that it is an anomaly,
and my friend the Member of Parliament will shudder in his grave. But let
us in the meanwhile rather endeavor that in twenty years' time it may, in
English literature, be an objection to a proposition that it is absurd.
That will be a change so vast, that the imagination almost fails to grasp
it. _Ab integro saeculorum nascitur ordo._

If I have insisted so much on the course which criticism must take where
politics and religion are concerned, it is because, where these burning
matters are in question, it is most likely to go astray. In general, its
course is determined for it by the idea which is the law of its being: the
idea of a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is
known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh
and true ideas. By the very nature of things, as England is not all the
world, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be
of English growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is
just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought is
streaming in upon us from all sides, and takes excellent care that we
shall not be ignorant of its existence; the English critic, therefore,
must dwell much on foreign thought, and with particular heed on any part
of it which, while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason
specially likely to escape him. Judging is often spoken of as the critic's
one business, and so in some sense it is; but the judgment which almost
insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, alo