'manded it not, neither came it into my mind'!* Under the third head the advance is still more perceptible. The question, Who is my neighbour ? put in every generation more anxiously, receives in every generation a more comprehensive answer; the number and extent of our obligations increase upon us; new duties and new ramifications of old duties come into view. Social ethics, the science which deals with the relation of individuals to classes and groups of men, and with the relation of those classes and groups to one another, is yet in its infancy; and in the province of individual morality such virtues as justice, humanity, truthfulness seem capable of indefinite extension. To take the age which we have been considering, the most eminent Christians of the old régime, men of the type of Bossuet and Fénelon, were conscious of no injustice or moral wrong of any sort in the system of privilege which was eating out the life of the society in which they flourished; a little earlier saintly bishops like Charles Borromeo or Lancelot Andrewes saw nothing shocking in religious persecution; slavery was defended almost in our own time by good men. Grave magistrates were conscious of no inhumanity in the tortures and barbarous punishments inflicted, till the comparatively recent reform of the criminal code, by the courts over which they presided; the value set on human life and human suffering is a thing of late growth. On such points as these the progress of the world is manifest; a bad man to-day would not do what good men then did without scruple. But how much remains to be done! Truth for its own sake is in small esteem; the controversialist repeats the stalest and most discredited fiction without a blush: economically the weak are the prey of the strong; the speculator gambles on the market and is held blameless; the investor, as long as he receives his dividends, is careless from what source or under what conditions they are derived. Man for man these persons are probably as estimable as their critics; but they represent a low moral stage, a stage from which the best conscience of the time is moving away. That we should distrust our conscience if it tells us that we cannot do what is done by good people about us is a truth open to misconception; the appeal to common sense is too often a thinly disguised appeal to common ignorance and indifference. Progressive moral ideas present themselves at times in grotesque shapes. This, however, is no argument against their validity. Let us fix our eye in each case on the essential. The simple life remains a good, though the forms under which

*Jeremiah vii. 31.

it has been sought are inadequate; human brotherhood remains an ideal, though the Utopias in which reformers from Plato to Lassalle have sought to realise it be banished to the limbo of forgotten dreams.

Each of these two movements of thought, it will be noticed, springs directly from the eighteenth century. There is a close kinship between the Revolution, which emphasised the rights of nations as such, and the doctrine of nationalities; and between the social theories of Rousseau, suffused as they were with the glow of passion, and modern Socialism in the larger as well as in the narrower sense; while, to pass to the province in which it might seem we stand furthest from his methods and temper, what schoolman or Father of the Church has left his mark more powerfully or more permanently on religion than Voltaire? Think of it as we will, the eighteenth century is the rock out of which we are hewn; the points on which our own time differs from it are fewer and less essential than those on which they are agreed. 'La Révolution française a formé audessus 'de toutes les nationalités particulières une patrie intellectuelle 'dont les hommes de toutes les nations ont pu devenir citoyens.' If this be so how are we to explain the lowering of the temperature since the close of this great century? On the higher levels of thought, it is said with truth, there is no such thing as reaction; and since in society as a whole the forces that make for progress work without cessation, if with unequal velocity, how, except by the swing of the pendulum-itself an effect rather than a cause-must we account for the flat temper, the absence of enthusiasm, which have replaced the fervour of the revolutionary age? It may be answered that we have learned by experience that there are limits to the power of legislation. You cannot transform society by a stroke of the pen; you cannot make men virtuous and intelligent by Act of Parliament. The evils from which the community suffers to-day-and they are sufficiently patent-are to be met not by frontal attack but by a flank movement-by education, by improvement of environment, by raising men's standards and ideas. And this takes time. Much good work is being done, but it is being done imperceptibly; we can no more see its results at this stage of the process than we can hear the grass grow. This is true; but it is not the whole truth: there are other causes which have contributed to bring about a certain lassitude, an indisposition to interfere with the course of events. In the first place the preponderating influence in most modern communities is that of the middle class, a class which by its training and pursuits is averse from extremes and wanting in that fighting instinct

which comes to the people by nature and to aristocracies by tradition. It has done much for liberty; its achievements in science, literature, and art have been of the highest order. But those excellencies have been crowded out by sheer numbers with all its great names an impression of mediocrity and flatness attaches to the periods of its predominance. The July Monarchy is a case in point: nor are parallels wanting in our own history. Its characteristic defects its inexperience of affairs, its self-satisfaction, its lack of dignity and breeding attached themselves to the period now called the Early Victorian, to its politics, its literature, its art. With all its real merits they gave the note that distinguished the Manchester School of English Liberalism. To this school we owe the cheap loaf and Free Trade; it encouraged manufactures and organised industry; it carried British goods over every sea and into every quarter of the globe. But material issues meant much to it, ideal little; it was deficient in culture, inherited or acquired. To the humanitarian legislation which trade competition had made imperative it was indifferent or hostile; it opposed the Factory and Adulteration Acts; to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market was its first aim. Hence the antipathy with which it inspired idealists of every sort and kind from Carlyle to Newman. They did not, indeed, do justice to its good points, which were many; but they discerned its shortcomings. To those who saw life sub specie æternitatis it seemed a mockery; they asked for bread and received a stone. To this radical weakness on the side of feeling was added the sense of an equally radical intellectual inadequacy. To educate the people is a benefit rather to those educated than to education. What is gained in extension is lost in intension: it was a two-edged saying of Newman's that a popular religion 'will always be corrupt.' The diffusion of ideas means their admixture with alloy. The prerogative of the few, they retain, relatively at least, their purity: the property of the many, they are coloured by the prejudice, the passion, the vulgarity of the crowd. To take a prominent instance: the historical method, fitting in with certain dominant conceptions in the region of natural science, has brought about a way of looking at society more akin to that of Burke than to that of the eighteenth-century reformers. To Burke, indeed, the modern spirit of investigation would have been distasteful. He'distrusted those who enquired into the origins of religion and government too curiously'; a sacred veil, he thought, should be thrown over these things. But such enquiry loses much of its danger-and, it may be added, much of its utility-if it be

6

antiquarian only; if, that is to say, its practical bearings be set aside and the interests of progress left to shift for themselves, the playthings of time, circumstance, and the thousand and one accidents that make life what it is. Such an employment of the historical method, needless to say, is a perversion; but it is a perversion to which this method is exposed in the hands of men of more subtlety than force of character. The method in question may be described as 'the comparison of the forms of an idea, or a usage, or a belief, at any given time with the 'earlier forms from which they were evolved and the later forms ' into which they were developed, and the establishment from 'such a comparison of an ascending and descending order among 'the facts.' Hence a tendency rather to classify than to estimate; to regard the objects of an investigation rather as antiquities than as living mental and moral forces.

'Character is considered less with reference to its absolute qualities than as an interesting scene strewn with scattered rudiments, survivals, inherited predispositions. Opinions are counted rather as phenomena to be explained than as matters of truth or falsehood. Of usages we are beginning first of all to think where they come from, and secondarily whether they are the most fitting and convenient that men could be got to accept. In the last century men asked of a belief or a story, Is it true? We now ask, How did men come to take it for true?

Facilis descensus; the standpoint is one on which it is easy to slip. In a world in which law rules, why take trouble? In a society in which good and evil are so inextricably mingled, why take a side? To do so is superfluous and may easily be harmful. Let things take their course: everything is much the same, and nothing much matters; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Those who postulate the unity of life, and the coincidence of intellectual and moral virtue, will not be duped by the sophism. But it is one thing to detect it in words, another to escape its influence; to be able, while seeing round and behind the question at issue, to act with decision and vigour when the time for action comes. To retain at once insight and energy, the consciousness of the complexity of life and the readiness to grapple with its problems-this is the difficulty, and will, we doubt not, be the achievement of our age. Neither side of the equation can be dropped. We cannot go back to what would now be an affected and unreal ignorance; we cannot rest satisfied to be spectators only of a conflict in which the future of mankind is at stake. And it is in action that the solution is to be found.

'It would be odd if the theory which makes progress dependent on modification forbade us to attempt to modify. When it is

VOL. CCV. NO. CCCCXIX.

C

said that the various successive changes in thought and institutions present and consummate themselves spontaneously no one means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human effort and volition. Progress is not automatic, in the sense that if we were all cast into a deep slumber for the space of a generation we should awake and find ourselves in a greatly improved social state. The world only grows better, even in the moderate degree in which it does grow better, because people wish that it should, and take the right steps to make it better. Evolution is not a force, but a process; not a cause, but a law. It explains the source, and marks the immovable limitations, of social energy. But social energy itself can never be superseded either by evolution or by anything else' *

At the root of the questions, varying in every generation, which society is called upon to solve lies the more general problem of the relation of man to his surroundings. What is his chief end? What has he to hope, to expect, to fear? Hence the impossibility of getting rid of what is called, with unconscious cynicism, the religious difficulty. Religion is the groundproblem; it meets us turn which way we will. The Revolution is a case in point. This great event, though not directly religious in character, would have been impossible had not a transformation of religion preceded it; a survey of the eighteenth century would be incomplete without an account of this transformation and of its bearing on the religious conceptions of to-day. The often quoted saying of Voltaire, 'Ecrasez l'infâme,' has drawn down unmeasured denunciation on its author. To admire 'Voltaire is a sign of a corrupt soul,' said De Maistre : ' if any one is drawn to his writings it is a sign that God does not love such an one.' The perspective of to-day is more accurate; before we echo these pious transports let us consider what this Infamous was. Voltaire, whose name may stand as representing the philosophy of which he was the foremost exponent, was animated not by antipathy to a creed but by hatred of a Church. That this Church professed to be Christian was beside the question; it was not its Christianity that he attacked. It was its working as an institution, not its teaching that he detested; this only came in for criticism in so far as it was identified with the institution and with the intolerable evils which the institution produced. The religion against which he set his face was not the Christianity of the New Testament; this had disappeared centuries back nor was it a theology, Catholic or Protestant; with this he did not concern himself: nor was it the allegorising of historical creeds into psychological symbolism, so common Compromise, pp. 28 ff., 210.

*