ce, something shifty, and for the moment only;
that, like many men, and many Scotsmen, he saw the world and his own
heart, not so much under any very steady, equable light, as by extreme
flashes of passion, true for the moment, but not true in the long-run.
There does seem to me to be something of this traceable in the
Reformer's utterances: precipitation and repentance, hardy speech and
action somewhat circumspect, a strong tendency to see himself in a
heroic light and to place a ready belief in the disposition of the
moment. Withal he had considerable confidence in himself, and in the
uprightness of his own disciplined emotions, underlying much sincere
aspiration after spiritual humility. And it is this confidence that
makes his intercourse with women so interesting to a modern. It would be
easy, of course, to make fun of the whole affair, to picture him
strutting vaingloriously among these inferior creatures, or compare a
religious friendship in the sixteenth century with what was called, I
think, a literary friendship in the eighteenth. But it is more just and
profitable to recognise what there is sterling and human underneath all
his theoretical affectations of superiority. Women, he has said in his
"First Blast," are "weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish"; and
yet it does not appear that he was himself any less dependent than other
men upon the sympathy and affection of these weak, frail, impatient,
feeble, and foolish creatures; it seems even as if he had been rather
more dependent than most.

Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we should expect
always something large and public in their way of life, something more
or less urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We
should not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however
beautiful. We should not seek them among those who, if they have but a
wife to their bosom, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no more
of their own sex, if they can find a friend or two for their immediate
need. They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our
association--not the great ones alone, but all. They will know not love
only, but all those other ways in which man and woman mutually make each
other happy--by sympathy, by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear
about them--down to the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces
in the street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of sex
makes itself pleasurab