Their King has become a King Popinjay; with his Maurepas Government, gyrating as the weather-cock does, blown about by every wind.  Above them they see no God; or they even do not look above, except with astronomical glasses.  The Church indeed still is; but in the most submissive state; quite tamed by Philosophism; in a singularly short time; for the hour was come.  Some twenty years ago, your Archbishop Beaumont would not even let the poor Jansenists get buried:  your Lomenie Brienne (a rising man, whom we shall meet with yet) could, in the name of the Clergy, insist on having the Anti-protestant laws, which condemn to death for preaching, ‘put in execution.’ (Boissy d’Anglas, Vie de Malesherbes, i. 15-22.) And, alas, now not so much as Baron Holbach’s Atheism can be burnt,—­except as pipe-matches by the private speculative individual.  Our Church stands haltered, dumb, like a dumb ox; lowing only for provender (of tithes); content if it can have that; or, dumbly, dully expecting its further doom.  And the Twenty Millions of ’haggard faces;’ and, as finger-post and guidance to them in their dark struggle, ‘a gallows forty feet high’!  Certainly a singular Golden Age; with its Feasts of Morals, its ‘sweet manners,’ its sweet institutions (institutions douces); betokening nothing but peace among men!—­Peace?  O Philosophe-Sentimentalism, what hast thou to do with peace, when thy mother’s name is Jezebel?  Foul Product of still fouler Corruption, thou with the corruption art doomed!

Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.  For whole generations it continues standing, ‘with a ghastly affectation of life,’ after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new.  Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work and live, or once did so.  Widely shall men cleave to that, while it will endure; and quit it with regret, when it gives way under them.  Rash enthusiast of Change, beware!  Hast thou well considered all that Habit does in this life of ours; how all Knowledge and all Practice hang wondrous over infinite abysses of the Unknown, Impracticable; and our whole being is an infinite abyss, over-arched by Habit, as by a thin Earth-rind, laboriously built together?

But if ‘every man,’ as it has been written, ’holds confined within him a mad-man,’ what must every Society do;—­Society, which in its commonest state is called ‘the standing miracle of this world’!  ’Without such Earth-rind of Habit,’ continues our author, ’call it System of Habits, in a word, fixed ways of acting and of believing,—­Society would not exist at all.  With such it exists, better or worse.  Herein too, in this its System of Habits, acquired, retained how you will, lies the true Law-Code and