'a notable construction of a noble labour." As a philosopher remarks, in accordance with what we have already observed, "One of the most favourite and customary tricks of tonguefence among these persons is this-to give to the thing which is hateful only to them, a name which is hateful to all men, in order thereby to decry it and render it suspected. The existing store of which tricks and nicknames becomes inexhaustible, being constantly enriched by fresh additions." Then morbidly mistrustful men go about suspiciously prying into churches, gloomily peeping into schools and colleges, and scrutinizing even private houses in search for the dreadful ominous thing-they know not what-that their imagination conjures up and ascribes to others; like "the person of considerable property and influence in his parish, of whose great wish Dawes tells the amusing instance, that on visiting a school lately set up where there had not been one before, he wanted particularly to see what he heard called a black board, but of the nature of which he had not the slightest idea."

In short, the results of flying to extraordinary thoughts in this sphere are a breaking up of the religious peace and unity of a nation, and sometimes even of the social and political order; they prove to be only dissolutions of ancient amities, divisions in state, menaces and maledictions against king and noblesneedless diffidences; so that, upon the whole, all such intellectual wanderings might dictate such a confession as is contained in the old lines,

"Disorder is the masque we bring;

And discords are the tunes we sing;

No sound in our harsh ears can find a place,
But highest trebles, or the lowest base."

In the second place, a departure from common thoughts, on such subjects, is often attended, in the end, either by a restless and unhappy scepticism, or by a recurrence to fanaticism of the worst kind, under the mask of transcendental, supernatural wisdom.

To understand better the cause of all this, let us go back a little, and inquire what are uncommon thoughts within this order, though, of course, we need not specify the hundredth part of them. To begin with the beginning, one of them,

undoubtedly, is, that religious truth is a novelty in the Christian world, so far as relates to its common and general recognition; that such men as King Alfred and Charlemagne either knew it not themselves, or winked at their contemporaries, when outraging it; that our neighbours, including, perhaps, most eminently intellectual nations and individuals, whom it is very pleasant to know, are still choked with the common maze of idiots, credulity. Men inclined to these singular ways of thinking, will deny every thing that other men have ever so long held for certain, and verify the axiom of the jurisconsults, who say, "Negativa plus negat quam affirmativa affirmet." Their manners and habits will correspond with the singularity of their thoughts. No more showing respect to the most solemn and generally approved rites for them! As Phænixella says to Francisco Colonnia,

"These ceremonies are too common, signior,

For your uncommon gravity and judgment.”

They are equally prompted to discard the commonest thoughts, however well supported by every kind of solid motive and attestation. All that we observed, in the last chapter, as in harmony with ordinary trains of thinking on such subjects, these persons reject. It is an uncommon thought to withhold reverence, while believing in the incarnation, from the mother of our Redeemer; an uncommon thought to malign persons that had always been venerated as holy, as friends of God, of justice, of the people, of the poor; an uncommon thought to hold that an artistic representation of them, by means of painting or sculpture, can lead men to commit idolatry. Let us stop here, a moment, not as artists, but as common observers from among the people, who have not been taught, by professors of the extraordinary, to mistake windmills for giants. I say it is an uncommon thought which leads men to be premeditatedly capricious and inconsistent in the use of common things, as if smitten with a certain mistrust or suspicion amounting to monomania-a horror of what ordinary good sense pronounces inoffensive, as when a person confines the use of things within limits that are purely arbitrary; for example, it is an uncommon thought, when a rich man resolves to have, on the walls of his dwelling, pictures of his father and mother, as a good son, pictures of his sove

reign and of his country's victories, as a loyal subject, and to exclude from them, from principle, with scrupulous care, lest he or some one else should fall down and worship them as gods, pictures of the historical characters that relate to his religion, as a good Christian. Every one, of course, is free to have, in respect to art, his tastes and preferences, and when a result can be ascribed to them, there is nothing more to be said, but when a stranger visits a house, or even a nation, in which there is a great deal of religion and no peculiar artistic tastes or preferences, and when every place is so arranged and decorated that, for any thing attested by the walls, he might suppose, notwithstanding endless provision for hero-worship, the family or the nation to have no spiritual parentage, country, or belief, but to be pure avтóxloves, sprung from the earth, he may be sure that there is or was a screw loose some where in the upper works, something hereditary, in the blood, or the result of an accident; that there is a something wrong; that a touch of you know what, as belonging to all worshippers of the extraordinary, has visited them, either in some former, or in the present, generation. But to proceed to glance at other instances. It is an uncommon thought, then, to maintain that there can be no such thing as an occasional providential departure from the ordinary laws of nature; an uncommon thought to discard the efficacy of faith in obtaining such a departure; an uncommon thought to suppose that the wonderful and unaccountable stops suddenly with the phenomenon of our life and with what we see. All these, and other thoughts like them, would be now uncommon, under all possible circumstances of the world, if we understood by common what is calculated to be popular, and, what is incontestably logical, in harmony with common sense, and with instinctive ways of thinking and acting. In fact, again, my fair companion, I appeal to you, and you shall stand for the whole herd of us, as when Dickens, describing an office in Doctors' Commons, says, that the public was represented there by a boy with a comforter. Is there, then, any one of these opinions that you would ever have been led to out of your own head? Certainly not. I should like to see you concocting them. You may never have thought about refuting them. But you would never have started them. If persons influenced by these extraordinary thoughts are asked,

by one of the majority, "What good man, that is a friend to truth, dares to make this doubtful?" they will often think it quite enough, in reply, to say of their admonisher, "Have not to do with him, for he is a fellow of most arrogant and invincible dulness." In other words, he is one of the common sort, not one of the privileged literary and thinking few; by that distinction they divide humanity into the two classes of which no one with common thoughts has any idea. In consequence, of this proud distinction they begin to slight every thing that common persons believe, and finally grow hardened in a general incredulity, and become either the chiefs or the partisans of sceptics. Our common humanity is inquisitive and amorous about truth; but here we are met by a thought most strange to it, when told that nothing is to be admitted excepting what is perfectly understood. That such a principle is as erroneous as it is extraordinary, appears from the fact, that the supporters of it are in contradiction, as a philosopher remarks, with their own practice; for they constantly accept many things which neither they nor their opponents can ever understand, and so is this extraordinary principle practically given up even by its champions. However, they shelter themselves by recurring to the extraordinary notion, as we have just remarked, that there are two classes of mankind wholly distinct,-the thinkers and the non-thinkers, the learned and the unlearned; and this classification, as they apply it with the relation which it involves as subsisting between the two divisions, is no less uncommon than it is false and in contradiction with facts and nature.

But uncommon thoughts conduct those who entertain them, as often, to the opposite results of a blind and pernicious fanaticism. We have no design to leave our professed immediate subject; but it is not departing from it to observe, that certainly it was a strange and gratuitous presumption on the part of extraordinary thinkers, when in a royal book of obligatory formulas, care was taken to inculcate, not only that no heathen, how virtuous soever, could have escaped an endless state of the most exquisite misery, but also that every one who dared to maintain that any pagan could possibly have been saved, was himself exposed to the penalty of eternal perdition. Such simple people as ourselves are not here to flout any other common people on account of their opinions; but it will strike us as

very strange, if not even funny, to hear men who give up ordinary ways of thinking, affirm that Christian antiquity was nothing but Paganism; that all our forefathers were Pagans, and that the French and Italians who walk in our streets are still idolaters. This appears to us as a very uncommon thought. But the fact is, that once emancipated from the restraints of common sense and common ways of thinking, these lovers of singularity stop at no absurdity. Like Busy rushing into the puppetshow at Bartholomew fair, they will exclaim at every turn, "Down with Dagon! Down with Dagon! 'Tis I will no longer endure your profanations. I will remove Dagon there, I say; that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam,-not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of the balance, neither a house beam, nor a weaver's beam,-but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the brethren; a very great beam, an exceeding great beam; such as your stage-players, rimers, and dancers, who have walked hand in hand in contempt of the brethren and the cause;" and when told that these things are licensed by authority, they will reply, Thou art all license, even licentiousness itself, Shimei! Hold thy peace, thy scurrility; shut up thy mouth! Thy profession is damnable, and in pleading for it thou dost plead for Baal. I have long opened my mouth wide and gaped; I have gaped, as an oyster for the tide, after thy destruction, but cannot compass it by suit or dispute.'

Then again, it is an uncommon thought to abandon, through fanaticism, a belief in things proved experimentally to be true; as when man's freedom of will is sacrificed to God's foreknowledge and sovereignty,-thus virtually subverting all religion in accordance with reason, as well as all duty and responsibility; making man a mere machine, and destroying the great distinction between him and the brute. Then are wisest men set down as impious, for having said, like Racine, "la raison dans mes vers conduit l'homme à la fois," and what the intelligent common sense of the greatest ages professed unanimously, sacrificed to the visions of a passionate theology.

Again, humanity, as we experience and comprehend it at the Lover's Seat, has very little confidence in its own merits, as the phrase is,‚—or rather, what is nearer the truth, it has none at all. If it had no expectations respecting another life but