by a vast mass of human tradition, which he is compelled to treat more or less as divine revelation.  The whole religious position has been metamorphosed by scientific discovery; and what theologian or philosopher has ever come near to solving the incompatibility of the apparent inflexibility of natural law with the no less apparent liberty of moral choice?  Theologians and philosophers may, if they choose, attempt to crush the speculations of an experimentalist in life, though I think they would be better employed in welcoming them as an instance of how theological and metaphysical conceptions strike upon the ordinary mind; but they shall not prevent one who, like myself, has observed life closely under aspects which the technical student has had no opportunity of observing it, from making my comment upon what I see.  It is possible that such comments may appeal to ordinary people with even more force than technical considerations are likely to appeal.  We have all to sin and to suffer, to enjoy and to fear; we find our instinct at variance with our reason and our moral sense alike.  We have in our souls conceptions of justice, truth, purity, generosity, and we find the natural law, which we would fain believe is the law of God, constantly thwarting and even insulting these conceptions; and yet these conceptions are as real and vivid to us as the law which takes no account of them.  We find theologians basing their faith on documents which every day appear to be less and less historical, and on deductions drawn from these documents by men who believed them to be historical.  I have the utmost sympathy with the position in which theologians find themselves; but they have mostly their own prudence to thank for it; they are so cautious about sifting the chaff from the grain, that they will not throw away the chaff for fear of casting away a single grain.  They are so averse to unsettling the faith of the weak, that the vitality has ebbed away from the faith of the strong; they have clung so hard to tradition, that they have obscured fact; they would confine the limbs of manhood in the garb of childhood; and thus they have forfeited the confidence of intelligent men, and ranged themselves with the credulous, the comfortable, and the unenterprising.  Intolerant persecution is out of date, and the question will be solved by the stranding of the theological hull, owing to the quiet withdrawal of the vital tide.

XXXIII

My way this afternoon lay through a succession of old hamlets, one closely bordering on another, that lie all along the base of the wold.  I have no doubt that the reason for their position is simply that it is just along the base of the hills that the springs break out, and a village near a perennial and pure spring generally represents a very old human settlement indeed.  Sometimes the wold drew near the road, sometimes lay more remote; its pale fallows, its faintly-tinted pastures, seemed to lie very quietly