ONE who will deprive him of it.  This, as has often been pointed out, is the source of the bloody rites of heathendom.  You are going to battle, you are going out in the bright sun with dancing plumes and glittering spear; your shield shines, and your feathers wave, and your limbs are glad with the consciousness of strength, and your mind is warm with glory and renown; with coming glory and unobtained renown:  for who are you to hope for these; who are you to go forth proudly against the pride of the sun, with your secret sin and your haunting shame and your real fear?  First lie down and abase yourself; strike your back with hard stripes; cut deep with a sharp knife, as if you would eradicate the consciousness; cry aloud; put ashes on your head; bruise yourself with stones,—­then perhaps God may pardon you.  Or, better still (so runs the incoherent feeling), give him something—­your ox, your ass, whole hecatombs if you are rich enough; anything, it is but a chance,—­you do not know what will please him; at any rate, what you love best yourself,—­that is, most likely, your first-born son.  Then, after such gifts and such humiliation, he may be appeased, he may let you off; he may without anger let you go forth, Achilles-like, in the glory of your shield; he may not send you home as he would else, the victim of rout and treachery, with broken arms and foul limbs, in weariness and humiliation.  Of course, it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute to a prelate of the English Church; human sacrifices are not respectable, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope.  But though the costume and circumstances of life change, the human heart does not; its feelings remain.  The same anxiety, the same consciousness of personal sin which led in barbarous times to what has been described, show themselves in civilized life as well.  In this quieter period, their great manifestation is scrupulosity:  a care about the ritual of life; an attention to meats and drinks, and “cups and washings.”  Being so unworthy as we are, feeling what we feel, abased as we are abased, who shall say that those are beneath us?  In ardent, imaginative youth they may seem so; but let a few years come, let them dull the will or contract the heart or stain the mind; then the consequent feeling will be, as all experience shows, not that a ritual is too mean, too low, too degrading for human nature, but that it is a mercy we have to do no more,—­that we have only to wash in Jordan, that we have not even to go out into the unknown distance to seek for Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus.  We have no right to judge; we cannot decide; we must do what is laid down for us,—­we fail daily even in this; we must never cease for a moment in our scrupulous anxiety to omit by no tittle and to exceed by no iota.

THE TYRANNY OF CONVENTION

From ‘Sir Robert Peel’