invention of Voltaireanism. The happiness of some souls appears to consist in a sense of vigour and self-reliance, a power of censuring one's self and one's neighbours; and Protestantism, as austere and Calvinistic and democratic as possible, is the right religion for them. But there are others whose highest spiritual bien être consists in a complete stripping off of all personality, a complete letting themselves passively be swung up and down by a force greater than themselves; and such people ought, I think, to turn Catholic."

Rheinhardt looked at Vere with a droll expression of semi-paternal contempt. "My dear Vere," he asked, "is it possible that you, at your age, can still believe in such nonsense? Ladies, I admit, may require for their complete happiness to abandon their conscience occasionally into the hands of some saintly person; but do you mean to say that a man in the possession of all his faculties, with plenty to do in the world, with a library of good books, some intelligent friends, a good digestion, and a good theatre when he has a mind to go there, do you mean to tell me that such a man can ever be troubled by the wants of his soul?"

"Such a man as that certainly would not," answered Vere, "because the name of such a man would be Hans Rheinhardt."

"It is very odd," remarked Baldwin, "that neither of you seem to consider that the lady's conversion can concern anybody except herself; Rheinhardt looks upon it as a mere piece of juggling; you, Vere, seem to regard it in a kind of æsthetic light, as if the woman ought to choose a religion upon the same principle upon which she would choose a bonnet-namely, to get something comfortable and becoming."

"Surely," interrupted Vere," the individual soul may be permitted to seek for peace wherever there is most chance of finding it?"

"I don't see at all why the individual soul should have a right to seek for peace regardless of the interests of society at large, any more than why the individual body should have a right to satisfy its cravings regardless of the effect on the rest of mankind," retorted Baldwin. "You cry out against this latter theory as the height of immorality, because it strikes at the root of all respect for mine and thine; but don't you see that your assumed right to gratify your soul undermines, what is quite as important, all feeling of true and false? The soul is a nobler thing than the body, you will answer. But why is it nobler? Merely because it has greater powers for good and evil, greater duties and responsibilities; and for that very reason it ought to have less right to indulge itself at the expense of what belongs not to it, but to mankind. Truth-—”

Upon my word," put in Rheinhardt, "I don't know which is the greater plague, the old-fashioned nuisance called a soul, or the newfangled bore called mankind." And he pushed open the gate of

the farm-garden, where the cats rolled lazily in the neatly gravelled paths, and the hens ran cackling among the lettuces and the screens of red-flowered beans. When they entered the little farm-parlour, with its deep chimney recess, curtained with faded chintz, and its bright array of geraniums and fuchsias on the window-ledge, they found that their landlady had prepared their tea, and covered the table with all manner of home-baked cakes and fruit, jugs of freshly cut roses and sweet peas.

"It is quite extraordinary," remarked Rheinhardt, as he poured out the tea," that a man of your intelligence, Baldwin, should go on obstinately supposing that it can matter a jot what opinions are held by people to whom opinions can never be anything vital, but are merely so many half-understood formula; much less that it can matter whether such people believe in one kind of myth rather than in another. Of course it matters to a man like Monsignore, who, quite apart from any material advantage which every additional believer brings to the Church of which he is a dignitary, is fully persuaded that the probable reward for Protestants are brimstone and flames, which his Evangelical opponents doubtless consider as the special lot of Papists. But what advantage is it to us if this particular mediocrity of a great lady refuses to be couverted to the belief in a rather greater number of unintelligible dogmas? Science and philosophy can only gain infinitely by being limited strictly to the really intelligent classes; the less all others presume to think, the better"

"Come now," objected Vere, "you are not going to tell me that thought is the privilege of a class, my dear Rheinhardt."

Thought," answered Rheinhardt, "is the privilege of those who are capable of thinking."

"There is thinking and thinking," corrected Baldwin; "every man is neither able nor required to think out new truths; but every man is required, at least once in his life, to take some decision which depends upon his having at least understood some of the truths which have been discovered by his betters; and every man is required, and that constantly, to think out individual problems of conduct, for which he will be fit just in proportion as he is in the habit of seeing and striving to see things in their true light. The problems which he has before him may be trifling and may require only a trifling amount of intellect; but of such problems consists the vast bulk of the world's life, and upon their correct decision depends much of the world's improvement."

"The world's improvement," answered Rheinhardt, "depends upon everything being done by the person best fitted to do it; the material roads and material machinery being made by the men who have the strongest physical muscles and the best physical eyes, and the intel

lectual roads being cut, and the intellectual machinery constructed, by the men who have the best intellectual muscle and sight. Therefore, with reference to conversions (for I see Baldwin can't get over the possible conversion of that particular lady), it appears to me that the only thing that can possibly concern us in them is, that these conversions should not endanger the liberty of thought of those who can think; and this being gained (which it is, thoroughly, nowadays), that they should not interfere with the limitation of thought to those whose it is by rights. That religious belief is the best which is most conducive to complete intellectual emancipation."

"But that is exactly why I am sorry that Monsignore should make any converts!" cried Baldwin.

"And for that reason," continued Rheinhardt, fixing his eyes on Baldwin with obvious enjoyment of the paradox, "I think that we ought to hope that Monsignore may succeed in converting not only this great lady, but as many ladies, great and small, as the world contains. I beg, therefore, to drink to the success of Monsignore, and of all his accomplished, zealous, and fascinating fellow-workers!" And Rheinhardt drank off his cup of tea with mock solemnity.

"Paradoxical as usual, our eighteenth-century philosopher," laughed Vere, lighting his pipe.

"Not paradoxical in the very least, my dear Vere. Look around you, and compare the degree of emancipation of really thinking minds in Catholic and in Protestant countries: in the first it is complete-confession, celibacy of clergy, monasticism, transubstantiation, Papal infallibility, Lourdes water, and bits of semi-saintly bones in glass jars, as I have seen them in Paris convents, being too much for the patience of an honest and intelligent man who reads his Voltaire and his Renan. With your Protestant your case is different, be he German or English: the Reformation has got rid of all the things which would stink too manifestly in his nostrils; and he is just able to swallow (in an intellectual wafer which prevents his tasting it) the amount of nonsense the absorption of which is rewarded by a decent social position, or perhaps by a good living or a professorship; meanwhile he may nibble at Darwinism, Positivism, materialism, be quite the man of advanced thought; for, even if he be fully persuaded that the world was not created in six days, and consider Buddha and Socrates quite as divine as Christ, he will yet allow that the lower classes must not be too rudely disturbed in their belief of the story of the apple and its fatal consequences. And this merely because a parcel of men of the sixteenth century, without any scientific reasons for doubt and up to the ears in theology, chose to find that certain Romish dogmas and practices were intolerable to their reason and conscience; and therefore invented that disastrous modus vivendi with Semitic and medieval notions which we VOL. XLIII. 3 A

call Protestantism. And then we men of the nineteenth century are expected to hold Luther and Calvin centenaries, to make fine speeches and write enthusiastic passages about them, and cry 'Long live religious toleration.' No, no; give me the Council of Trent, the Bull Unigenitus, Loyola, Lainez, and Pascal's Jesuits; give me Lourdes water and silver ex-votos, and slices of the Pope's slipper, and Capuchins and Trappistes; give me Monsignor Russell, because in so doing you are giving me Voltaire and Diderot, and Michelet and Auguste Comte !"

"But," put in Vere, "you seem, by your own account (for you know I don't regard Catholicism as you do, and I don't think it matters what a man believes as long as his belief suffices to his soul), to be buying the total emancipation of a few minds at the expense of the slavery and degradation of an enormous number of men. If Catholicism is so bad that no one who has the option will compromise with it, have you a right to prescribe it to the majority of mankind?"

"Progress, my dear Vere, exists only in the minority. The majority may receive an improved position, but it cannot improve itself; so secure the freedom of the minority before thinking of anything else."

"That is all very well," answered Baldwin, who had been leaning upon the table, eagerly following Rheinhardt's words, and watching for an opportunity of interrupting him; "that's all very well as long as you go upon the supposition that the only thing of value in this world is scientific truth, and the only improvement which can be wished is the increased destruction of error. But there is something more valuable than scientific truth, and that is, the temper which cannot abet falsehood; there is something which it is more urgent to demolish and cart off than mere error, and that is, all the bad moral habits, the habit of relying on other folks' judgment, the habit of not sifting the evil from the good, the habit of letting oneself be moved instead of moving oneself, the habit of sanctifying low things with high names; all the habits of spiritual sloth, spiritual sybaritism, spiritual irresponsibility. In this is the real degradation, the real danger. And Protestantism, which you call a modus vivendi with falsehood, merely because the men of the sixteenth century rose up against only as much error as they themselves could discern,Protestantism meant the refusal to abet falsehood and foulness, the effort to disentangle good from bad, to replace mysticism by morality; it meant moral and intellectual activity, and completeness and manliness. It meant that in the sixteenth century; and, say what you will, it means that still nowadays. The men who arose against the Papacy in the time of Luther are naturally not the men who would still be mere Protestants in the days of Comte, and

Darwin, and Spencer; as they preceded and dragged on their inferiors then, so they would seek to precede and drag on their inferiors now; they would be, what they were, pioneers of truth, clearers away of error. But those are Protestants nowadays-that is to say, possess a religion expunged of the more irrational notions and demoralizing institutions of the Middle Ages, a religion less mythological and more ethical-but for the Reformation, would still be morally starving, and from starvation contracting all the loathsome moral diseases and degrading moral palsies which we observe in their Catholic forefathers before Luther, in their Catholic contemporaries of Spain, and Italy, and France. The Reformation may have done nothing for the thinking minority, it may even, as Rheinhardt insists, have made that minority smaller, but to the small minority the Reformation gave a vast majority, which is not, as in Catholic countries, separated from it by an unbridgeable gulf. The number of completely emancipated minds may be less in Protestant countries; but behind them is a large number of minds which are yet far from being utterly cramped and maimed and impotent, which have not gone very far on the right road, but have not gone far on the wrong one; minds possessing at least rudimentary habits of inquiry, of discrimination, of secular morality, and which, little by little, may be influenced, improved, enfranchised, by those who are more fully developed and more completely free. This is what Protestantism has done for us; and the highest thing that we can do, is to follow in the steps of those first Protestants, to clear away what appears to be error in our eyes, as they cleared away what appeared to be error in theirs."

"The Reformation," persisted Rheinhardt calmly, "was a piece of intellectual socialism. It consisted in dividing truth so that each man might have a little scrap of it for himself, and in preventing all increase by abolishing all large intellectual capital."

"I have never doubted," remarked Vere, "that the Reformation was, for all the paradoxes of this Voltairean of ours, a most necessary and useful revolution. It swept away-and this is what I most regret the last shreds of Pagan purple, the last half-withered flowers of Pagan fancy, out of Christianity, and left it a whitewashed utilitarian thing-a Methodist chapel, well ventilated and well warmed, but singularly like a railway waiting-room or a warehouse. But of course such a consideration can have no weight. Protestantism (excuse my confusion of metaphors) may be called the spiritual enfranchisement of the servile classes; it turned, as Baldwin says, a herd of slaves and serfs into well-to-do artisans and shopkeepers. I think, therefore, that Protestantism was an unmitigated blessing for what Rheinhardt calls the intellectual proletariat, for the people who neither increase intellectual wealth nor enjoy intellectual luxury. There is something as beautiful in the rough cleanness of belief of a