as too much darkness, and if necessary you should not open the shutter more than halfway; that war and the scaffold are detestable in theory, and practically serviceable that the shop must be set up against the temple, though the money-changers were once on a time driven. out of it-for the fault of Jesus was to be something too much a God; that in all things wisdom is moderation, and from its quiet corner can remark and reprehend the flaws and excesses of the universe; as for instance that though the sun be splendid and the spring be sweet, the one has too many beams and the other has too many roses; this is the inconvenience of all things of the kind, and God is by no means free from exaggeration; to imitate him is to fall into perfection-a grave risk; all work is done better after a lesser model, and God does not always set the best example to follow. What is the use of being inaccessible? Jesus goes too far in declining to take the offer of Beelzebub into consideration; not that I say he ought to close with it; but it is stupid for God to be rude when the devil is civil; it would have been better to say, "I'll think it over, my good friend." After all, man is man; he is not wicked, and he is not good; by no means white as snow, but by no means black as coal; black and white, piebald, striped, dubious, sceptical. Seeing that men are small and their conscience dwarfish, the statesman takes their measure before he ventures anything: he astonishes them, but without any thunderclaps of genius or daring which might make their heads giddy; he gets them up prodigies proportioned to their size. The voice of wisdom then proceeds to recapitulate all the troubles which a contrary line of conduct has brought on the

scorner who still turns a deaf ear to her counsel: he has got himself stoned out of Brussels; the rattlesnakes of the press shake their rattles at him, the clerical and imperial gazettes have brought to light all his secret sins, drunkenness, theft, avarice, inhospitality, the bad wine and lenten fare set before his guests, and so forth; M. Veuillot is so witty as to call him pumpkin-head; it is all his own fault; to resist evil is doubtless a good thing, but it is a bad thing to stand alone; to rate and rebuke success, to be rough with those who have the upper hand, is really a blockhead's trick; all conquerors are in the right, and all that glitters is gold: the god of the winds is God, and the weathercock is the symbol of his worship.—And then there is always some little admixture of positive right in actual fact, some little residue of good discoverable in all evil, which it should be your business to seek out. If Torquemada is in power you warm yourself at the stake.— It is better to look for the real than for the true; the reality will help you to live, the truth will be the ruin of you; the reality is afraid of the truth.—A man's duty is just to make use of facts; you (says the voice of good counsel) have read it wrong: you are like a man who should take a star out of heaven to light him when a candle would serve better to see the way by. To this sound advice we see too plainly that the hearer on whom it is wasted prefers the dictation of the voice which speaks in answer, admitting that this low sort of light may have its partisans, may be found excellent and may really be useful to avoid a shock, ward off a projectile, walk wellnigh straight by in the dark cross-roads, and find your whereabouts among small duties; it serves publicans very

well as a lamp for their counters; it has on its side, very naturally, the purblind, the clever, the cunning, the prudent, the discreet, those who can only see things close, those who scrutinize a spider's web. But there must be somebody on the side of the stars! somebody to stand up for brotherhood, for mercy, for honour, for right, for freedom, and for the solemn splendour of absolute truth. With all their sublimity and serenity, flowers as they are of summer everlasting, the shining constellations have need that the world they guide should bear them witness that they shine, and some man's voice be raised in every age to reassure his brothers by such cry of testimony uttered across the night; for nothing would be so terrible as an ultimate equality of good and evil, of light and darkness, in the sight of the supreme and infinite unknown world; nothing would bring so heavy an indictment against God as the mad and senseless waste of light unprofitably lost and scattered about the hollow deep of heaven without the direction of a will. This absence of will, this want of conscience in the world, the prophet of belief refuses to accept as possible. In the last poem of the book he rejects the conception of evil as triumphant in the end, of nature as a cheat so ghastly and so base that God ought to hide himself for shame, of a heaven which shelters from sight a divine malefactor, of some one hiding behind the starry veil of the abyss who premeditates a crime, of man as having given all, the days of his life, the tears of his eyes, the blood of his heart, only to be made the august plaything of treacherous omnipotence it would not be worth while for the winds to stir the stormy tide of our lives, for the morning to

come forth of the sea and dazzle the blinded flowers with broadcast seed of diamond, for the bird to sing, or for the world to be, if fate were but a hunter on the trail of his prey, if all man's efforts brought forth but vanity, if the darkness were his child and his mother were the dust, if he rowed on night and day, putting forth his will, pouring out his blood, discovering and creating, to no end but a frightful arrival nowhither; then might man, nothing as he is, rise up in judgment against God and take to witness the skies and stars on his behalf. But it is not so; whence morning rises, the future shall surely rise; the dawn is a plighted word of everlasting engagement; the visible firmament is as it were a divine promise to pay; and the eternal and infinite God is not bankrupt.

In the strength of this faith a man may well despise all insult and all falsehood thrown up at him, all railing and mockery of his country or his creed from the unclean lips of church pamphleteers and other such creatures of the darkness and the dirt as in all lands alike are bred from the obscurer and obscener parts of literature. These are to him no more than the foul bog-water at its foot is to the oak whose boughs are the whole forest's dome; than the unlovely insects of the dust that creep beneath it are to the marble giant, august in its mutilation—to the colossal Sphinx of rose-tinged granite, grim and great, that sits with hands on knees all through the night wherein the shaken palm-trees shiver, waiting for its moment to speak to the sunrise, and unconscious if any reptile beslaver its base. The god has never known that a toad was stirring; while a worm slides over him, he keeps in

sun.

silence his awful mystery of hidden sound and utterance withheld; and the swarming of centipedes without number cannot take from Memnon, suddenly struck radiant, the great and terrible voice that makes answer to the Those minute and multitudinous creatures who revile and defame the great-and thereby, says Blake, "blaspheme God, for there is no other God"-have no more power to disturb the man defamed than the judges who try the Revolution at their bar and give sentence against it have power to undo its work; their wrath and their mourning are in vain; the long festival of the ravenous night is over, the world of darkness is in the throes of death; the dreadful daylight has come; the flitter-mouse is blind, the polecat strays about squealing, the glowworm has lost his glory, the fox, alas, sheds tears; the beasts that used to go out hunting in the evening at the time when little birds go to sleep are at their last gasp; the desolation of the wolves fills the woods full of howling; the persecuted spectres know not what to do; if this goes on, if this light persists in dazzling and dismaying the night-hawk and the raven, the vampire will die of hunger in the grave; the pitiless sunbeam catches and consumes the dark. It is to judge the crimes of the sunrise that these judges sit in session.

Meantime, amid all the alternations of troubled hope with horror and the travail of an age in labour that has not strength to bring forth, there are present things of comfort and reassurance. "The children we have always with us;" they are no more troubled about what we do than the bird that twitters beneath the hornbeam, or the star that breaks into flower of light on the black sky