was not understood in the sense which we understand it now. It is worth noticing how this controversy, like so many others, has thus moved from the grounds on which it was conducted in the last century. Burke himself accepted Locke's definition of the Church as a voluntary society, and argued justly on this definition that it is essential to exclude from such a voluntary society any member whom she thinks fit to exclude, or to resist the entrance of any upon such conditions as she thinks proper. Otherwise, "it would be a voluntary society acting contrary to her will, which is a contradiction in terms." By this time, however, we have found out that to call it a voluntary society, is not to give an entirely adequate account of a corporation to which we are compelled to contribute, or else have our goods distrained upon if we decline.

Perhaps this may seem already too long a digression, although it is always the most instructive of all processes for our own guidance to discover the different attitudes which are assumed in different generations towards the same question. There is one passage, however, in Burke's speech on the Acts of Uniformity, for the sake of which I digressed in the first instance, and which I must not omit. The spirit of religious

controversy, he was arguing, has slackened by the nature of things; by a deliberate act, such as relaxing Subscription, you will revive it. And then he says, "I will not enter into the question how much truth is preferable to peace. Perhaps truth may be far better. But as we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in his company charity, the highest of the virtues."1 His appreciation of the highest virtue was shown in the following year, as we have already seen, by his menaces against those just objects of vengeance, those wicked victims of the shafts of the law and the terrors of government. Apart from this, there is nothing more characteristic in all Burke's writings of his steadfast adherence to the principle of quieta non movere throughout his career, than this deliberate preference of peace over truth, unless the truth be evident indeed. As if every truth that is worth having had not been the source of strife and contest-as if every truth-seeker did not come, not to bring peace but a sword—and as if every belief to which at any given time we cling most firmly had not passed through

1 Works, ii. 468, a.

a stage when it was far from being evident indeed.
Burke was right in his conviction that we hold our
beliefs for their own sake, for the comfort and
enjoyment they contain, and not for the sake of
constantly examining them and proving them. But
his natural bent united with the circumstances in
which he was placed to make him blind to the fact
that what makes one generation better than another
is the fruit of examination, and of the greater and
deeper knowledge which results from examination.
I do not know of any passage in Burke's writings
which shows a philosophic estimation of the value
of absolutely unfettered inquiry.
He could say,
indeed, that "our antagonist is our helper," but only
within certain bounds. Beyond these the antagonist
was a just object of vengeance.

There is no part of Burke's career at which we may not find evidence of his instinctive and undying repugnance to the critical or revolutionary spirit and all its works. From the early days when he had parodied Bolingbroke, down to the later time when he denounced Condorcet as a "fanatic atheist," with "every disposition to the lowest as well as the highest and most determined villanies," he consistently detested and

1 Thoughts on French Affairs, Works, i. 574, b, and 579, b.

despised everybody, virtuous or vicious, high-minded or ignoble, who inquired with too keen a scrutiny into the foundations of morals, of religion, of social order. He never swerved in his antipathy to free thought, whether in politics, in theology, or in ethics. examine with a curious or unfavourable eye the bases of established opinions was to show a leaning to anarchy in one order, to atheism in another, to unbridled libertinism in the third.

To

In every man there is a certain inevitable connexion of opinion. We hold our views by sets and series. If we espouse one, we have unconsciously let in along with this a little, or it may be a long, train of others. A man comes to a certain conclusion upon some greatly controverted point of science. His eye has possibly never turned aside from the straitened bounds of scientific matter, and yet his single conclusion here leads him insensibly to a whole parcel of conclusions in religious matter or in ethical matter. We ought to remember this in the case of Burke. Few men's opinions hang together so closely and compactly as his did. The fiery glow of his nature fused all his ideas into a tenacious and homogeneous mass. What in more commonplace minds is effected by a process of bad logic, or by what seems to be hazard and caprice,

in him was wrought by an inborn ardour of character. His passionate enthusiasm for Order-and this is not a jot more strong in the Reflections, in 1790, than it was in the Thoughts on the Present Discontents twenty years before—subjugated him as profoundly in one field as in another, in theology as in philosophy, in speculation as in practical politics. In that restlessness to which the world is so deeply indebted in some respects, by which it has been so much injured in others, Burke could recognise but scanty merit, wherever it was exhibited. Himself the most industrious, the most active-minded of men, he was ever sober in fixing the limits, in cutting the channels of his activity, and he would fain have had others equally moderate. Abstract illimitable speculation had no attraction for him in any of its departments. Perceiving that plain and righteous conduct is the end of life in this world, he prayed men not to be over-curious in searching for, and handling, and again handling, the theoretic base on which the prerogatives of virtue repose. Perceiving that the happiness of a people is the end of its government, he abhorred equally the royal clique who took the end of government to be the gratification of the royal will, the old Whig clique who took it to be the enrichment of old Whigs, and the