also is not wholly without its Prophets.

Again, under another aspect, if Utilitarianism, or Radicalism, or the
Mechanical Philosophy, or by whatever name it is called, has still its
long task to do; nevertheless we can now see through it and beyond it:
in the better heads, even among us English, it has become obsolete; as
in other countries, it has been, in such heads, for some forty or even
fifty years. What sound mind among the French, for example, now
fancies that men can be governed by "Constitutions;" by the never so
cunning mechanising of Self-interests, and all conceivable adjustments
of checking and balancing; in a word, by the best possible solution of
this quite insoluble and impossible problem, _Given a world of Knaves,
to produce an Honesty from their united action_? Were not experiments
enough of this kind tried before all Europe, and found wanting, when,
in that doomsday of France, the infinite gulf of human Passion
shivered asunder the thin rinds of Habit; and burst forth
all-devouring as in seas of Nether Fire? Which cunningly-devised
"Constitution," constitutional, republican, democratic, sansculottic,
could bind that raging chasm together? Were they not all burnt up,
like paper as they were, in its molten eddies; and still the fire-sea
raged fiercer than before? It is not by Mechanism, but by Religion;
not by Self-interest, but by Loyalty, that men are governed or
governable.

Remarkable it is, truly, how everywhere the eternal fact begins again
to be recognised, that there is a Godlike in human affairs; that God
not only made us and beholds us, but is in us and around us; that the
Age of Miracles, as it ever was, now is. Such recognition we discern
on all hands and in all countries: in each country after its own
fashion. In France, among the younger nobler minds, strangely enough;
where, in their loud contention with the Actual and Conscious, the
Ideal or Unconscious is, for the time, without exponent; where
Religion means not the parent of Polity, as of all that is highest,
but Polity itself; and this and the other earnest man has not been
wanting, who could audibly whisper to himself: "Go to, I will make a
religion." In England still more strangely; as in all things, worthy
England will have its way: by the shrieking of hysterical women,
casting out of devils, and other "gifts of the Holy Ghost." Well might
Jean Paul say, in this his twelfth hour of the Night, "the living
dream"; well might he sa