an idea. The men of the Commune may have been
mistaken, but their motives were lofty; and Milliere, falling dead on
the Church steps before the Versailles bullets, with the cry of _Vive
l'Humanite_ on his lips, was as noble a hero as any crucified Galilean
who questioned why his God had forsaken him.

That intellectual and moral progress naturally go together, the
Archbishop calls "an absurd and insane doctrine," and he couples with
these epithets the honored names of Buckle and Spencer. Now it will
be well to have a clear understanding on this point. Are intellectual
causes dominant or subordinate? Even so intensely religious a man as
Lamennais unhesitatingly answers that they are dominant. He affirms, in
his _Du Passe et de l'Avenir du, Peuple_, that "intellectual development
has produced all other developments," and he adds:--

"It is represented that evil, as it appears in history, springs entirely
from the passions. This is quite false. The passions disturb the
existing order, whatever it may be, but they do not constitute it. They
have not that power. It is the necessary result of the received ideas
and beliefs. Thus the passions show themselves the same in all epochs,
and yet, in different epochs, the established order changes, and
sometimes fundamentally."

The truth is that the great moral conceptions are securely established,
and the only possible improvement in them must come from the increased
fineness and subtlety of our mental powers.

Civilisation and progress are, according to Archbishop Thomson, nothing
but "cobwebs and terms." He besought the working men of Sheffield not to
go for information to a big book written in some garret in London.
His Grace, who lives in a palace at other people's expense, has a very
natural dislike of any man of genius who may live in a garret at his
own. What has the place in which a book is written to do with its value?
"Don Quixote" and the "Pilgrim's Progress" were written in gaol; and for
all Archbishop Thomson knows to the contrary every gospel and epistle of
the New Testament may have been written in an attic or a cellar.

The Archbishop seems to hate the very idea of Progress. What has it
done, he asks, to abolish drunkenness and gambling? To which we reply
by asking what Christianity has done. Those vices are unmistakably here,
and on the face of it any objection they may furnish against Progress
must equally apply to Christianity. Nay more; for Christianity has