is better, we feel inwardly that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort.'1 'On that religion,' he declares elsewhere, referring to Christianity, according to our mode, all our laws and institutions stand as upon their base.' 2

Hence we may expect to find, and indeed it would be wonderful were it otherwise, that this theistic faith not only colours but saturates his political doctrine through and through. Far more, indeed, than a reader might gather from the many wise and charming pages by which Lord Morley has earned the gratitude of every student of Burke-if one may venture thus to suggest what savours of criticism of a conscript father of literature. This brings me,' says Lord Morley, ' to remark a really singular trait. In spite of the predominance of practical sagacity, of the habits and spirit of public business, of vigorous actuality in Burke's character, yet at the bottom of all his thoughts about communities and governments there lay a certain mysticism. . . . He was using no otiose epithet, when he described the disposition of a stupendous wisdom "moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race. To him there actually was an element of mystery in the cohesion of men in societies, in political obedience, in the sanctity of contract; in all that fabric of law and charter and obligation, whether

1 Reflections.

2 Regicide Peace, Letter IV.

written or unwritten, which is the sheltering bulwark between civilisation and barbarism. When reason and history had contributed all that they could to the explanation, it seemed to him as if the vital force, the secret of organisation, the binding framework, must still come from the impenetrable regions beyond reasoning and beyond history.' 1

In one particular this passage is unimpeachable. It recognises explicitly enough the theistic metaphysic that lies behind Burke's politics. But why should this be regarded as a really singular trait?' Practicality and religious faith are not necessarily divorced. Grant that to many minds theism and politics lie far apart, and that from some minds the theism has vanished. Yet these two classes do not exhaust the universe of political discourse. Certainly the philosophers of history, both in France and Germany, have for the most part regarded it as neither singular nor impossible to find a place for Divine agency in human affairs.

And, apart from Coleridge, Hegel,

them, what are we to say of Plato, Carlyle, Mazzini, and T. H. Green? They are diverse enough, and their diversity makes it all the more striking that they are at one in being constrained, by such light of reason as was in them, to discern in the political life of nations the action of more than merely secular forces. None of these, hardly even Carlyle, was much in love with the impenetrable 1 Burke in English Men of Letters,' p. 165.

regions beyond reasoning,' if there be such. None of them ever doubted that Reason assured him that society rests on spiritual foundations. To ignore this would be to dismiss spiritual idealism without a hearing.

Similarly with Burke. The vision of God, the faith in ' stupendous wisdom,' the belief in a 'Divine tactic'in history were inwoven with his whole interpretation of experience and outlook on the world. And though, being neither theologian nor metaphysician, he never dreamed of proving these convictions (therein, no doubt, disclosing his limits as a thinker), this does not touch the fact that he carried them with him, with a passionate insistence, into his politics. Apart from them his thought and his utterance are in large measure unintelligible.

This becomes evident when we recall the intensity of his antipathy to radical reform. For his contention here is not merely that reformers can do little to construct, however easy they may find it to destroy, but that, beyond comparatively narrow limits, they ought not to try. The limitations he would lay upon them are more than those imposed by the practical difficulties and dangers of their attempts. They are moral and religious. They arise from the fact that the place of every man determines his duty,' and that these duties of one's station are to be accepted, not because we cannot, if we will, revolt against them, but because in respect

" . 1

of the fundamental relationships at any rate, we have been 'disposed and marshalled by a Divine tactic,' and thereby 'virtually subjected to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us.' Few writers have gone further than Burke in this direction. Almost, at times, he would persuade us that it is a sin to lay a finger on the ark of the constitution. He tells us that 'duties are not voluntary': he adds that' duty and will are even contradictory terms and though we may quarrel with the ethical terminology, it is none the less well fitted to emphasise the rigour of the restraints of moral and political, which are also for him those of religious, obligation. Nor is this a merely general attitude. On the contrary it determines his position in respect of specific questions of the first magnitude. We may take these, briefly, in turn, and first that reverence for the past which is perhaps the characteristic of Burke's writings best known to the general reader.

1 Appeal.

CHAPTER VI

THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS

6

In nothing is Burke more pre-eminently in harmony with the spirit of the nineteenth century than in that reverence for the past, for lack of which the writers of the eighteenth have been severely handled even by latter-day radicals. No one,' says Mill, in his great essay on Coleridge, can calculate what struggles, which the cause of improvement has yet to undergo, might have been spared, if the philosophers of the eighteenth century had done anything like justice to the past.' Burke at any rate did justice to it. His very name is a symbol for reverence towards all that is old and venerable. Who has not met the familiar words that 'people will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors'? Who fails to recognise the almost equally familiar declaration: 'We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility'? And what reader can forget the passages which come crowding on the memory in defence and laudation of