at his main position is
abundantly clear.

Fitzjames--as all that I have written may go to prove--was at once a
Puritan and a Utilitarian. His strongest sympathies and antipathies were
those which had grown up in the atmosphere of the old evangelical
circle. On this side, too, he had many sympathies with the teaching of
Carlyle, himself a spiritual descendant of the old Covenanters. But his
intellect, as I have also remarked, unlike Carlyle's, was of the
thoroughly utilitarian type. Respect for hard fact, contempt for the
mystical and the dreamy; resolute defiance of the _a priori_ school who
propose to override experience by calling their prejudices intuitions,
were the qualities of mind which led him to sympathise so unreservedly
with Bentham's legislative theories and with Mill's 'Logic.' Let us,
before all things, be sure that our feet are planted on the solid earth
and our reason guided by verifiable experience. All his studies, his
legal speculations, and his application of them to practice, had
strengthened and confirmed these tendencies. How were they to be
combined with his earlier prepossessions?

The alliance of Puritan with utilitarian is not in itself strange or
unusual. Dissenters and freethinkers have found themselves side by side
in many struggles. They were allied in the attack upon slavery, in the
advocacy of educational reforms, and in many philanthropic movements of
the early part of this century. James Mill and Francis Place, for
example, were regarded as atheists, and were yet adopted as close
philanthropic allies by Zachary Macaulay and by the quaker William
Allen. A common antipathy to sacerdotalism brought the two parties
together in some directions, and the Protestant theory of the right of
private judgment was in substance a narrower version of the rationalist
demand for freedom of thought. Protestantism in one aspect is simply
rationalism still running about with the shell on its head. This gives
no doubt one secret of the decay of the evangelical party. The
Protestant demand for a rational basis of faith widened among men of any
intellectual force into an inquiry about the authority of the Bible or
of Christianity. Fitzjames had moved, reluctantly and almost in spite of
himself, very far from the creed of his fathers. He could not take
things for granted or suppress doubts by ingenious subterfuges. And yet,
he was so thoroughly imbued with the old spirit that he could not go
over completel