disturb the mental comfort of the most sluggish of his contemporaries, or to throw all society into agitation and confusion, merely for the sake of showing that Moses, for example, was not the author of the Pentateuch, or that there are discrepancies in the Evangelists' accounts of a given transaction, or that the voice of science gives forth oracles that do not harmonize with the voice of revelation. Such a class is a heavy burden on the mind of a country. They may stimulate and irritate some in the pursuit of a kind of truth, which is not capable of being quoted like bank stock, but they discourage more. They cannot sympathise ever so remotely with that temper which seeks truth for its own sake, apart from its consequences, and apart from its agreement or disagreement with reigning convictions. This is the natural tendency of men concerned exclusively with practical affairs; and even Burke's powerful intellect did not escape it. For instance, he always expressed the utmost contempt for those writers who are summarily classed in modern phrase as the Eighteenth Century Deists. It was not merely that he felt pain at their conclusions, nor dislike of their method. That they should have ventured into this particular ground at all, fretted him and filled him with uncontrollable

D

anger. Talking of the "philosophic cabal" in the Reflections, he asks, "It is not with you, composed of those men, is it? whom the vulgar, in their blunt, homely style, commonly call atheists and infidels? If it be, I admit that. we too have had writers of that description, who made some noise in their day. At present they repose in everlasting oblivion. Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins and Toland and Tindal? and that whole race who call themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through ?"1 This may remind us very strikingly in its tone and substance of an eminent statesman's contemptuous refutation of the doctrines of a batch of heretical books, by the statement that they were all stolen from Germany. As if the fact either that a doctrine had first been promulgated in Germany, or that people no longer read the book in which it appeared, were a conclusive proof of its falsity and hollowness. Nothing can be more unworthy, more intensely and shamefully disrespectful to truth, than to fall back as Burke does upon the vulgar and their blunt and homely style. As if the vulgar would not, in their blunt and homely style, call everybody an atheist and an Works, i. 414, b.

infidel, and any number of other ugly names, who should venture to hold opinions that fall outside the limits of their own unexamined traditions; and as if the questions which these men raised could be settled by a simple appeal to the sale of their books. "Ask the London booksellers," cried Burke, "what is become of all these lights of the world." Just as if, because a book had run its course and accomplished its task, therefore it must have been a bad book, and the questions which it opened must have been closed again, and left on their old footing. Do we say that the subsistence which supported bodily strength twenty years ago, or last week, must be pronounced bad and a failure because it is no more to be seen? Do we call a cannon-ball a failure, because, after its force is spent, it lies rusting and inert on the field?

Burke's abhorrence and contempt of the philosophic cabal was not, as is often said, the result of the Revolution. Among the host of distinct passages in his writings, or in his conduct, which show that Burke's later history is no more than the development of the principles of his early history, and not separated, as Mr. Buckle, Lord Brougham, and so many others maintain, by a deep chasm-the work of age, toil, disappointment, and the anguish of his beloved son's

death — let me not forget to point out that only three years after the publication of his Thoughts on the Present Discontents, and seventeen years before the composition of the ever-memorable Reflections, he denounced the philosophers with a fervour and a vehemence which he never after surpassed. He had just returned from France, where he had been brought into contact with some of the conspicuous Freethinkers of that momentous epoch. He had occasion to speak in favour of a Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters, and he made it an opportunity for denouncing all those whom, somewhat after the blunt and homely style of the vulgar, he summarily classified as Atheists. "Have as many sorts of religion as you find in your country, there is a reasonable worship in them all," he said; "the others, the infidels, are outlaws of the constitution-not of this country, but of the human

race.

They are never, never to be supported, never to be tolerated." "These," again he says, "are the wicked dissenters you ought to fear; these are the people against whom you ought to aim the shafts of law; these are the men to whom, arrayed in all the terrors of government, I would say, 'You shall not degrade us into brutes;' these men, these factious men, are the just objects of vengeance, not the conscientious Dis

senter; these men who would take away whatever ennobles the rank or consoles the misfortunes of human nature, by breaking off that connexion of observances, of affections, of hopes and fears which bind us to the Divinity, and constitute the glorious and distinguishing prerogative of humanity- that of being a religious creature; against these I would have the laws rise in all their majesty of terrors to fulminate such vain and impious wretches, and to awe them into impotence by the only dread they can fear or believe, to learn that awful lesson, Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere divos." 1 This tremendous onslaught on people who ventured to use their understandings, and arrived at conclusions which did not happen to be those of Burke himself, shows that he had, even in his earlier days— for this was spoken in 1773-not gone much further into the true grounds and propriety of toleration than ecclesiastical dignitaries in our own day.2

A year before this Burke had in the same way assumed an attitude identical with that of the least liberal and enlightened people among ourselves. A hundred years ago there was the same ferment about Subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles as prevails at

1 Works, ii. 473.

2 See Appeal from New to Old Whigs, Works, 502, a.