method of treatment is, that it may be turned against the inventors. A German writer, for instance, might compose in this fashion an entirely new version of Marengo. He might begin by asserting that, if the peasant who conducted Napoleon over the St Bernard had only pushed him into a crevasse of the mountain, there would have been no battle at all, which would be indisputable; and not only no battle, but no Consulate, no Empire, no Austerlitz, no Waterloo, and the history of the century would have been quite different. He might then state that Destiny was getting alarmed at the progress of the Austrians in Italy, and had therefore decreed the downfall of Melas who commanded them; and might represent the hostile power as giving signs of displeasure, varied, of course, for the sake of avoiding too close imitation: thus, instead of rain and mud, there might be a hailstorm and a sharp frost; instead of muttering thunder, we might have the whistling of an easterly wind; and a derisive wink might be substituted for the frown that was seen in the depths of heaven. Next the features of the battle-field might be brought into play a great many of the Austrians were actually checked and destroyed by a rivulet, the Fontanone: the singular phenomenon of a rivulet existing on a battlefield might be descanted on, and,

to increase the ominous effect of the circumstance, it might be mentioned that an old woman had been drowned in it one dark night in the year 1637. Bonaparte might be slightly alluded to as a second-rate general, the real antagonist being Destiny; and it might be shown how, by pushing him into the Po and Suchet into the Gulf of Genoa, nobody knows what might have happened; but that certainly Lonato, Castiglione, and Arcola would have been avenged, and the man of Marengo would have blotted out Rivoli. Lastly, to complete the details of the picture, some thrilling incidents might be introduced: Desaix might be killed in single combat by an Austrian fifer, and a Parisian musician might be represented as seated amidst the melée, with something corresponding to a pibroch under his arm (say the Marseillaise), his melancholy eye full of the reflection of the Place de Grêve and the ruins of the Bastille, and thinking in his dying moments of the Lac de Boulogne, or the Champ de Venus. Such a course is manifestly open to the opposite party; but the execution of the idea would create a terrible commotion in France; besides, impartial people might prefer the real facts; and on many accounts we think it will be better to let the French enjoy the distinction of being the only nation that write their history in this way.

IF the New Testament were divested of its sacred character, what depths of wisdom thinkers would still discover in the spirit of its precepts! That insistance upon Faith as an all-important element of man's spiritual nature, to which some philosophers have directed their assaults, philosophers more noble and profound would then recognise as essential, not more to the religion that claims it, than to the unfolding and uplifting of all our noblest faculties and powers. For when we come to consider our intellectual organisation, we find that, for all our achievements, there is an absolute necessity of faith in something not yet actually proved by our experience, and that something involves an archetype of grandeur, or nobleness, or beauty, towards which each thought that leads on to a higher thought insensibly as pires. Before even a mechanician, proceeding step by step through the linked problems of mathematical science, can arrive at a new invention, he must have faith in a truth not yet proved; for that which has already been proved cannot be an invention. It is the same with every original poet and artist-he must have faith in a possible beauty not yet made visible on earth, before that beauty for the first time dawns on his verse or blooms on his canvass. It is the same, perhaps yet more remarkably, with every great man of action-with the hero, the statesman, the patriot, the reformer. "Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo aflatu divino unquam." I may add, that no one whom that divine

afflatus inspired ever failed to believe in it. Thus faith, which is demanded for a religion, and without which, indeed, a religion could not exist, is but the kindling of that sacred particle of fire which does not confine its light and its warmth to the altar on which it glows. And where that faith is first, as it were, pledged to the sublimest and loveliest ideals which man's imagination can conceive—viz., the omnipresence of a Creator who permits us to call him Father, and the assurance of an immortality more confirmed by our own capacities to comprehend and aspire to it, than it would be if, without such capacities, a ghost appeared at our bedside every night to proclaim it; for would a ghost make a dog believe he was immortal ?—where, I say, faith is first pledged to those beliefs which, with few exceptions, the highest orders of human intellect have embraced, it is the property of that faith, if it be not corrupted into superstition nor incensed into fanaticism, to communicate a kindred nobleness to all other ideals conceived in the quickened heart and approached by the soaring genius. Nay, even where men of considerable mental powers have entirely rejected all religious belief, and, so far as a soul and a Deity are concerned, refused to suffer a thought to escape from the leading-strings of that over - timorous Reason which, if alone consulted, would keep us babies to our grave-those men have invariably been compelled, by the instincts of their intellect, to

have faith in something else not proven, not provable, much more hard to believe than the wonders they put aside as incredible. Lucretius has faith in the fortuitous concurrence of his atoms, and Laplace in his crotchet of Nebulosity. Neither those theories, nor any theory which the mind of man can devise, could start fully into day without faith in some truths that lie yet among shadows unpierced by experience; and therefore, to all philosophy as to all fancy, to all art, to all civilisation, faith in that which, if divined by the imagination, is not among the facts to which the reason confines its scope, is the restless, productive, vivifying, indispensable principle. And there would be an unspeakable wisdom in writings, even were they not inspired, which lend to this principle of faith a definite guidance towards certain simple propositions, easily comprehended by an infant or a letterless peasant; and which, if argued against, certainly cannot be disproved, by the ablest casuists; -propositions which tend to give a sense of support and consolation under grief, hope amidst the terrors of despair, and place before the mind, in all conceivable situations, an image of ineffable patience, fortitude, self-sacrificewhich, in commanding our reverence, still enthralls our love and invites our imitation. Thus Faith, steadied and converged towards distinct objects beyond the realm of the senses, loses itself no more among the phantom shadows of the Unknown and Unconjecturable, but is left free to its worldly uses in this positive world-believing always in some truth for the morrow beyond the truth of the day, and thus advancing the gradual march of science; believing in types of beauty not yet reduced to form, and thus winning out of nature new creations of art; believing in the utility of virtues for which there is no earthly reward in the grandeur of duties which are not enforced by the law-in the

impulse to deeds which annihilate even the care for self-preservation, and conduct to noble, and yet, perhaps, to fameless graves, and thus invigorating and recruiting the life of races by millions of crownless martyrs and unrecorded heroes. Strike from Mankind the Principle of Faith, and Man would have no more history than a sheep.

But it is the common perversion of faith, if left unchastised, uncounterbalanced, to embitter itself into intolerance. This is not fairly to be alleged against religion alone, as many satirical writers have done; it is the same with faith in all other varieties of form. Nay, the most intolerant men I have ever known in my life have been men of no religion whatsoever; who, having an intense faith in the sincerity and wisdom of their own irreligion, treat those who dissent from their conclusions as simpletons or impostors. "One would fancy," says Addison, with elegant irony," that the zealots in atheism would be exempt from the single fault which seems to grow out of the imprudent fervour of religion. But so it is, that irreligion is propagated with as much fierceness and contention, wrath and indignation, as if the safety of mankind depended upon it."

In politics, what can be so intolerant as party-spirit when it runs high? But when it runs high, it is sincere. Faith has entered into the conflict: the combatants have quite forgotten that the object clear to the cooler bystanders, is to put some men out of office and others into it; they have conscientiously convinced themselves of the worthiness of their own cause, and the infamy of their opponents'. Regarded on one side, antagonists are bigots and tyrants; on the other side, antagonists are cheats or incendiaries.

Art and science have also their intolerance. Hear the orthodox physician talk of his innovating brother! No coarser libels have

been written than those in scientific journals against a professor of science. In art, an artist forms his theories and his school, and has an enthusiast's faith in their indubitable superiority: the artist of a different school he regards as a Goth. One of the mildest poets I ever knew, who had nurtured his own harmless muse in the meek Helicon of Wordsworth, never could hear Lord Byron praised, nor even quoted, without transports of anger. I once nearly lost one of the dearest friends I possess, by indiscreetly observing that the delineation of passion was essential to the highest order of poets, simply because he had formed a notion, in the rectitude of which he had the strongest good faith, that perfect poetry should be perfectly passionless. I am not sure, indeed, whether there be not, nowadays, a more vehement bigotry in matters of taste than in those of opinion. For so much has been said and written about toleration as regards opinion, that in that respect the fear of not seeming enlightened preserves many from being uncharitable. But, on the contrary, so much is every day said and written which favours intolerance in matters of taste, that it seems enlightened to libel the whole mental and moral composition of the man whose taste is opposed to your own. I have known language applied to a difference of taste on the merits of a poet, a novelist, nay, even an actor, which the Bishop of Exeter would not venture to apply to Tom Paine.

In a word, there is scarcely anything in which a min has a deep and conscientious faith, but what he is liable to be very intolerant to the man who shocks that faith by an antagonistic faith of his own. And if this general truth be more flagrantly noticeable in religious beliefs than in any other, it is not only because a man who believes in his religion holds it the most valuable of all his intellectual titledeeds, but also because a larger number of men concur in a religious

belief than they do upon any other debatable point.

In the New Testament, however, Faith is not left without a softening adviser, and Charity is placed by her side-Charity, with which Intolerance is impossible. For while so

impressively insisting upon faith, our Saviour not less impressively reserves the right of judgment to Himself, the Unerring and Divine; and to man, whose faculty of judging must be, like man himself, erring and human, He says imperatively, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Now, of all our offences, it is clear that that offence of which man can be the least competent judge is an offence of defective faith. For faith belongs to our innermost hearts, and not to our overt actions. And religious faith is therefore that express tribute to the only Reader of all hearts, on the value of which man can never, without arrogant presumption, set himself up as judge.

And the whole spirit and letter of the Gospel so enforce the duty of brotherly love, that the harshness with which man is disposed to regard the fellow- man whose doctrine differs from his own, has in that commandment of love a perpetual mitigator and sweetener.

When the scribe asked our Lord, "What is the First Commandment of all?" our Lord was not contented with stating the First Commandment alone-viz. that which enjoins the love of God—but emphatically added a Second Commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The First Commandment includes religious faith; for who can love what he does not believe in? The Second Commandment includes all which can keep faith safe from bigotry; for what man, except a maniac, would torment and persecute himself for a difference of opinion from another?

It is thus that, by a benignant omniscience of the human heart in its strengh and its weakness, Faith is enjoined as a habit of mind essential to all mental achievement as to all moral grandeur, while the

asperities to which sincere faith, not in religion alone, but in all doctrines that the believer considers valuable, down to a dogma in politics or a canon in taste, are assuaged in him who has formed the habit of loving his neighbour as himself, and disciplining his whole conduct by the exquisite justice which grows out of the observance of that harmonising rule.

Now it is only with the worldly uses which are suggested by the divine Second Commandment-deduced from it as corollaries are from a problem, or as problems themselves are deduced from an axiomthat I have to deal in the remarks I submit to the reader on the Wisdom of Conciliation.

This wisdom, which is the one we appear the most to neglect, whether in public or private life, is nevertheless that which, where it is practised, is attended with the most auspicious results.

Take, first, the strife of parties. The men who admit into faith no soothing element of brotherly love, are, no matter how sincere or how eloquent, the worst enemies to the party they espouse, and in critical periods of history have been the destroyers of states, and the subverters of the causes they espouse. It is with truth that the philosophical apologists for the excesses of popular revolutions have contended that timely reforms, yielded to reason, would have prevented the revolutions subsequently made in wrath. But it is a truth quite as notable, yet far less frequently insisted upon, that revolutions made in wrath do not secure their object. There is a stage in all popular movements at which to stop short is the surest victory, and from which all advance forward is certain to create reaction. Like the bad poet ridiculed by Boileau, the fanatical reformer,

"En poursuivant Moise au travers des deserts,

Court avec Pharaon se noyer dans les

mers.

In all contests of party there are

many stages in which conciliation is obviously the wisest policy for both; and where that policy is rejected, sooner or later the conciliator appears, though in the form of a master. He conciliates the strife of parties by suppressing it. The fortunate dictator, under whatever name he may be called, is in fact always, to the bulk of the people the representative of compromise- a power grown out of the disorders of other powers-the supremacy of which preserves each faction from the domination of its rivals, and secures to the community that repose which the leaders of the factions had refused to effect by conciliations between themselves. Thus in truth rose Augustus, Cromwell, and either Napoleon, the First and Third. In the rise of each of these sovereign arbiters, there was, in fact, a compromise. The old system of authority was sacrificed to the passions begotten by opposition. to it. The system of freedom, to which the old authority had been obnoxious, was sacrificed to the fears which its violence had created. And if, on the whole, in this compromise, the abstract principle of liberty lost more than the abstract principle of authority, it is because, in all prolonged and embittered contests between liberty and order, order is sure ultimately to get the better; for liberty is indeed the noblest luxury of states, but order is the absolute necessity of their existence.

In the more peaceful and normal contests of party, a small minority of thoughtful men, who interpose between extremes, will generally contrive to possess themselves of power. This is remarkably the case in the British Parliament. For there is a strange peculiarity in English public life-the opinions most popular on the hustings are not those which the public, in its heart, desires to see carried into effect in administration. On the one side, the greater number of representatives consists of those who profess reforms which cannot