he world. He is placed suddenly, with that unalterable luckless
notion of his, at the head not of a College but of a Nation, to regulate
the most complex deep-reaching interests of men. He thinks they ought to
go by the old decent regulations; nay that their salvation will lie in
extending and improving these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic
vehemence towards his purpose; cramps himself to it, heeding no voice of
prudence, no cry of pity: He will have his College-rules obeyed by his
Collegians; that first; and till that, nothing. He is an ill-starred
Pedant, as I said. He would have it the world was a College of that
kind, and the world was _not_ that. Alas, was not his doom stern enough?
Whatever wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully avenged on him?

It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturally
clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the _formed_ world is the only
habitable one. The naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the thing
I praise in the Puritans; it is the thing I pity,--praising only
the spirit which had rendered that inevitable! All substances clothe
themselves in forms: but there are suitable true forms, and then there
are untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, Forms
which _grow_ round a substance, if we rightly understand that, will
correspond to the real nature and purport of it, will be true, good;
forms which are consciously _put_ round a substance, bad. I invite you
to reflect on this. It distinguishes true from false in Ceremonial Form,
earnest solemnity from empty pageant, in all human things.

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In the
commonest meeting of men, a person making, what we call, "set speeches,"
is not he an offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies
you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality within, are a
thing you wish to get away from. But suppose now it were some matter
of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine Worship is),
about which your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess of feeling,
knew not how to _form_ itself into utterance at all, and preferred
formless silence to any utterance there possible,--what should we say
of a man coming forward to represent or utter it for you in the way of
upholsterer-mummery? Such a man,--let him depart swiftly, if he love
himself! You have lost your only son; are mute, struck down, without
even tears: an importuna