with a drawn sword on the threshold of the inquiry, and tells us that it is impious.  The law has been fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness, and our business is to appropriate another’s righteousness, and not, like Titans, to be scaling Heaven by profane efforts of our own.  Protestants, we know very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a representation of their doctrines.  But we know also, that unless men may feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try, that they can purify themselves, can live noble and worthy lives, unless this is set before them as the thing which they are to do, and can succeed in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they know beforehand will end in failure, and if they may not live for God they will live for themselves.

And all this while the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is, that every thread of it of its own free energy shall do what it ought.  The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those of sins committed; more terrible perhaps, because more palpable and sure.  A lord of the land, or an employer of labour, supposes that he has no duty except to keep what he calls the commandments in his own person, to go to church, and to do what he will with his own,—­and Irish famines follow, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions.  We look for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and there is but one remedy which will avail, that the thing which we call public opinion learn something of the meaning of human nobleness, and demand some approximation to it.  As things are we have no idea of what a human being ought to be.  After the first rudimental conditions we pass at once into meaningless generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles; we respect money, we respect rank, we respect ability—­ character is as if it had no existence.

In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in which so many of us at present are agreed to believe, which is, indeed, the common meeting point of all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in so large a matter.  Progress there is in knowledge; and science has enabled the number of human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely multiplied.  But this is but a small triumph if the ratio of the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, the full and the hungry remains unaffected.  And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude out of our material splendour an advance of the race.  One fruit only our mother earth offers up with pride to her maker—­her human children made noble by their life upon her; and how wildly on such matters we now are wandering let this one instance serve to show.  At the moment at which we write, a series of letters are appearing in the Times newspaper, letters