revolutionists, who, as Burke thought, supposed that the happiness of a people could never be secure save where there is no government, but only anarchy. Perceiving that the belief in a future life with changed conditions adds dignity to mortals in their hours of happiness, and brings comfort in their hours of anguish, and that the belief in a divine mediator may be in the same way a source of elevation and solace, he burned with a holy rage against men who seemed to him as thieves wantonly robbing humanity of its most precious treasures. Provided that there was peace, that is to say, general happiness and content, Burke felt that a too great inquisitiveness as to its foundations was not only idle, but mischievous and cruel. We have already seen how he considered the comparative strength of the claims upon us of truth and peace to be an open question. "As, we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one as we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace." In another place, he exclaims in precisely the same spirit, "The bulk of mankind, on their part, are not exceedingly curious concerning any theories, whilst they are really happy; and one sure symptom of an ill-conducted state is the 2 "1 propensity of the people to resort to them." And Burke thought the bulk of mankind in the right. Even in a state of things which the most eager of optimists would have hesitated to look on as a state of peace, Burke was always careful to approach the ailing organ, whether ecclesiastical or political, with that awe and reverence, as he expressed it, with which a young physician approaches to the cure of the disorders of his aged parent. Every institution or idea under which any mass of men found shelter or comfort, he regarded with this filial awe and affectionate reverence. I feel an insuperable reluctance, he said in one place, in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of Government upon a theory, however plausible it may be.3 Rightly conceiving that a stable equilibrium in society, or peace, as he always called it, is the aim and standard of all things, he was willing to believe in some mysterious finality of Nature, whom he supposed to have established once for all in 1688 the entire conditions of our national health. He habitually confounded existing usage and traditions, to be gently modified and tenderly repaired, if unfortunate occasion 1 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, Works, i. 218, a. E should require, with a moral and just equilibrium. The philosophic partisan of Order, who entreats men to be sure they get the best out of the systems under which the time constrains them to live, before casting recklessly about for new things, commonly receives something less than justice from the anxious and ardent partisans of Progress. And this has perhaps been Burke's lot. Men constitutionally, or by habit, unable to realise the pleasures conferred by a reverent love of political, social, and moral order, have dealt little sympathy to one who threw himself so consistently and vehemently as Burke did athwart the revolutionary or critical movement of his time. But those of us, who are not estopped by vain shibboleths from protesting that living, after all, must be the end of life, and that stable peace must be the end of society, may see that Burke's horror of the critical spirit in all its various manifestations, was the intelligible pain of one in the ghastly presence of dissolution, not knowing that the angel of a new life is already at his side. Bishop Watson was probably only one of many who observed very early that this was the unmistakeable temper of Burke's mind. "I admired, as everybody did," he says, "the talents, but not the principles of Mr. Burke; his opposition to the Clerical Petition. first excited my suspicion of his being a High Churchman in religion, and a Tory, perhaps an aristocratic Tory, in the State."1 Watson, under the singularly grotesque name of a Christian Whig, had written in defence of the petition against Subscription (1772), and may therefore be supposed to have been more acute than his neighbours in detecting the latent tendencies of a conspicuous opponent. It may also be worth noticing, that the person who thus early found out the consistency and coherence of Burke's political system, was destined himself to become a remarkable type of that very inconsistency of which Burke is so constantly and so wrongly accused. After having been all his life one of the most violent and intemperate enemies of things established, alike in Church and State, and even having so late as 1791 delivered a charge to the clergy of his diocese, denouncing the Corporation and Test Acts, and eulogising the French Revolution, Watson suddenly turned right round, and in 1793 published a hateful sermon under the hateful title of The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor, in which he denounced Prior's Life of Burke, i. 388. democratic principles, and bewailed the turn of events that had obliged him to change his mind. Nobody can truly understand Burke's character, or his place among statesmen, without seeing that his apparent alienation from popular principles was not in any way due to that turn of events which proved so fatal to such persons as Watson. He was always a lover of order in his most enlarged and liberal moods. He was never more than a lover of order when his deference to the wishes of the people was at its lowest. The institutions to which he was attached during the eight-and-twenty years of his life in the House of Commons, passed through two phases of peril. First, they were oppressed and undermined by the acts of the court, and the resurrection of prerogative in the guise of privilege. Then they were menaced by the democratic flood which overtook England after the furious rising of the popular tide in France. We at this distance of time may see that in neither case was the danger so serious and so real as it appeared in the eyes of contemporaries. But in both cases Burke was filled with an alarm that may serve as a measure of the depth and sincerity of his reverence for the fabric whose overthrow, as he thought, was gravely threatened. In both cases he |