its crowded trials, its newspaper reports, and its money compensations, this institution in which the gross unregenerate British Philistine has indeed stamped an image of himself, —­one may be permitted to find the marriage theory of Catholicism refreshing and elevating.  Or when Protestantism, in virtue of its supposed rational and intellectual origin, gives the law to criticism too magisterially, criticism may and must remind it that its pretensions, in this respect, are illusive and do it harm; that the Reformation was a moral rather than an intellectual event; that Luther’s theory of grace[59] no more exactly reflects the mind of the spirit than Bossuet’s philosophy of history[60] reflects it; and that there is no more antecedent probability of the Bishop of Durham’s stock of ideas being agreeable to perfect reason than of Pope Pius the Ninth’s.  But criticism will not on that account forget the achievements of Protestantism in the practical and moral sphere; nor that, even in the intellectual sphere, Protestantism, though in a blind and stumbling manner, carried forward the Renascence, while Catholicism threw itself violently across its path.

I lately heard a man of thought and energy contrasting the want of ardor and movement which he now found amongst young men in this country with what he remembered in his own youth, twenty years ago.  “What reformers we were then!” he exclaimed; “What a zeal we had! how we canvassed every institution in Church and State, and were prepared to remodel them all on first principles!” He was inclined to regret, as a spiritual flagging, the lull which he saw.  I am disposed rather to regard it as a pause in which the turn to a new mode of spiritual progress is being accomplished.  Everything was long seen, by the young and ardent amongst us, in inseparable connection with politics and practical life.  We have pretty well exhausted the benefits of seeing things in this connection, we have got all that can be got by so seeing them.  Let us try a more disinterested mode of seeing them; let us betake ourselves more to the serener life of the mind and spirit.  This life, too, may have its excesses and dangers; but they are not for us at present.  Let us think of quietly enlarging our stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we get an idea or half an idea, be running out with it into the street, and trying to make it rule there.  Our ideas will, in the end, shape the world all the better for maturing a little.  Perhaps in fifty years’ time it will in the English House of Commons be an objection to an institution that it is an anomaly, and my friend the Member of Parliament will shudder in his grave.  But let us in the meanwhile rather endeavor that in twenty years’ time it may, in English literature, be an objection to a proposition that it is absurd.  That will be a change so vast, that the imagination almost fails to grasp it. Ab Integro soeclorum nascitur ordo.[61]