friend-I have never sought counsel yet from mortal man. I ask it now in my present strait, in the agony of my doubts. Are ye not too rash-too violent? Is there no possibility of saving our country, aye, and our religion, without bloodshed? Must we be all at each other's throats, in the name of peace and goodwill? Counsel me, I pray, for I am sorely distracted even to the very harrowing of my soul.'

The stranger looked at him with a satisfied air. The seed has fallen on good ground,' he muttered; 'let it remain there and fructify.' Then added aloud, 'I will talk with you again on these matters. The night is now far advanced. To-morrow I will seek you at your own quarters. I know where you lie; fear not, George Effingham, I will be with you in secret and unobserved.'

With these words, he turned up a bye-street, and was soon out of sight, leaving Effingham a few paces in advance of the preacher, who now walked quietly up to him, laid his hand on the young man's shoulder, and looking into his face once more with the same wild, imploring, mournful glance, whispered in his ear, 'He that is not with me is against me. Turn ye, turn ye: why will ye die?' And he, too, disappeared like some unearthly vision that leaves behind it only a feeling of dread uncertainty and supernatural fear.

Effingham paced on, absorbed in meditation. With a strong sense of religion, that wanted but the stimulus of suffering and a consciousness of oppression to be fanned into the flame of fanaticism, he likewise entertained the feelings of a soldier on the point of honour and the sacred duty of remaining stanch to the banner under which he had once enlisted. It was a conflict that tore and vexed the strong man's mind to the verge of madness. Combining a wild and dreamy enthusiasm with keen reasoning powers, the imagination of a poet with the acute perspicuity of a logician, his was a nature above all others calculated to suffer from religious doubts, appreciating as it did, on the one hand, the importance of the subject, and on the other,

the probability of error, where error was fatal and irremediable. He longed for the solitude of his own chamber, there to compose his powerful mind, and draw his own conclusions, uninterrupted and alone; and he never greeted his friend Bosville with so inhospitable a welcome, as when he found him installed in that bare apartment which he had hoped was to afford him a refuge for the solitary meditation he required.

6

'What have you been doing?' exclaimed Humphrey, grasping his friend's hand with a cordiality which had in it something ominously sug gestive of a desire for advice or assistance. Where have you been spending the livelong night? I trust you have employed it better than I have. I have been waiting here for hours to see you; and have read through the whole of that blundering tactician's work without understanding a word of it. George, I'm in a devil of a scrape, and I want you to see me through it!'

'A woman, of course,' answered Effingham, jumping at once, like the rest of mankind, to the most charitable conclusion. Oh, Humphrey! I thought you knew better. I thought that even in Oxford you were too good to be lured like a kestrel by the flutter of a petticoat or the flirt of a fan. Young one, I'm ashamed of you!'

Nay,' replied Humphrey, 'it's not so bad as that. Hear me. I've got into a quarrel, and we must fight it out according to the laws of the duello, and I want you to be one of my witnesses on the occasion. The worst of it is, it's with Goring, and you see he is the general of our division.'

Effingham drew a long breath, as • With if inexpressibly relieved. Goring! said he, and you know he's the best swordsman in the Royal army. Must you always fly at the highest game on the wing? Well, well, go thy ways, Humphrey; for a quiet amiable lad with far too much mother's milk still left in his constitution, thou certainly hast an inordinate liking for the whistle of hot lead, and the clink of cold steel. Nevertheless, if we must fight him, we must; and though it's contrary to my principles, and I had rather

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you had picked a quarrel with any one of them except Lunsford, who has brought back a curious thrust in tierce from amongst the Puritans, that they boast no Royalist can parry, yet I cannot leave thee, lad, in the lurch. So open that cupboard, where you will find a flask of mine host's canary, and a couple of tall glasses; and let me know all about it. In the first place, hast got the length of his weapon? Truly, the human mind, like the chameleon, takes its colour

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ing from surrounding objects. A few minutes ago, and George Effingham was pondering deeply upon no less important a subject than his soul's salvation; behold him now, at the spell of a few words, busily engaged in planning a combat à l'outrance between his dearest friend and his superior officer. So the young men filled their glasses and measured off the length of their weapons, and sat till day-break arranging the preliminaries of the duel.

MR.

PROFESSIONAL

R. BRIGHT often reminds us of the plucky but peculiarly grave Skye' described by Dr. Brown. Oh, sir,' its proprietor, a Highland gamekeeper, exclaimed, life's full o' sariousness to him; he just never can get enuff o' fechtin.' The Member for Birmingham manifests, we think, this canine seriousness and limitation of view. He is a man of one idea, and the idea which subjugates him is that the franchise is unequally distributed. He cannot get beyond this first step. He does not ask what is to be the fruit of change; whether the new franchise will kill or cure. All that he requires is arithmetical adjustment. Give him this (with an occasional right and left' at a spiritual peer), and his soul is satisfied. To tell the honest truth, we are sick unto death of the interminable twaddle about electoral districts,' manhood suffrage, vote by ballot,' and the relative statistics of Manchester, Birmingham, and the dukes' rotten boroughs. The nation is entitled to expect that its social teachers will go a little deeper. It is impertinent at this time of day in a political leader to dwell exclusively upon these rudimentary aspects of the debate. The elevation of social and political life is not a question of arithmetic only. Will a rating franchise heal the sores of our society; set the something in the

world amiss' to rights; or of inward slaves make outward free?" Ay or no?-that is the question; and until we are assured that political change brings with it personal and domestic amelioration, the fading politics of mortal Rome' will not command from us a vehement or exclusive regard.

Were we to embark on a new Crusade, it would be to promote a very different cause. No one can doubt that in this country_the citizen is politically free. The State does not persecute; the State does not come between a man and his conscience; the State does not come between a man and his industry. There are no vexatious restrictions on commerce; no tyrannical limitations on honest thought or honest speech; nor are any political incapacities now attached to race or creed. All these the formal and administrative expressions of the spirit of intolerance-belong to the past. The Papist and the Protestant, the Jew and the Gentile, sit side by side on the opposition benches. But though as citizens we enjoy the most perfect freedom, as Englishmen we are still in too many cases the veriest slaves. Religious 'disabilities' are not abolished among us except by statute. The dead and buried Protection' of finance is yet alive and virulent in social life. Those who war against

the infinitesimal particles of persecution which adhere to the constitution, war against a phantom and expend their energies on a shadow those who fight against the persecution of sect and the limitation of caste, fight against very real and potent influences,-influences which embitter domestic intercourse, and narrow and pollute our social activities. It is not a political but a moral and spiritual renovation that we need.

The spirit of persecution is just the spirit of exclusiveness under another and more aggressive aspect. The inquisitor is the man who believes that he alone has arrived at the truth, and that his church has obtained a 'monopoly' of religiona man, we understand, found in many other communions besides the Pope's. But this disposition is not confined to the churches; most people have a tendency to become professionally sectarian. We are all apt to get absorbed in and mastered by the vocation to which we belong, to make it the one thing needful, to depreciate and underrate the pursuits that are not directly pertinent to its issues. But we can only do this at our peril. Unless we preserve the tone of the system by the cultivation of wide sympathies and general tastes, we must inevitably become fanatical and intolerant,-as practically intolerant as a Calvin, a Loyola, or a Ferdinand. The sectarianism of a religious clique is no doubt the most obnoxious, in so far as religious culture is, or ought to be," the broadest, deepest, and most embracing in its relations; but the sectarianism of a literary clique or of a political clique is quite as detrimental to freedom of heart and breadth of intellect. And perhaps at the present day we suffer upon the whole less from spiritual than from secular sectarianism. To make the inner life of every man and every class freer, more genial, and more sympathetic, is the object of the crusade we are disposed to preach; and if Mr. Bright can show us that a rating franchise and electoral districts are calculated to promote this end, we are willing to accord him a cordial co-operation. But, as we have hinted, we enter

tain grave doubts whether this be the goal to which he tends. To perfect political freedom, he proposes to vest political power in a class whose culture is narrow, whose judgments are arbitrary and fanati cal; and the barren uniformity of his arithmetical constitution seems to us scarcely more fatal to the chequered influences which the historic monarchy of England has gradually appropriated and presently represents, than to the fertile sympathies out of which rational toleration naturally arises.

But it may be said that we ex aggerate the extent of the evil, and the need for a remedy. Are not the influences, it may be asked, which at present most affect our society, adverse to the perpetuation of sectarian animosities? Is it not the tendency of the railway, of the telegraph, of modern centralization in general, to obliterate these, to bring the nation more together, into closer sympathy and more intimate union? We are by no means satisfied that it is. A system of external connexion may be at heart a system of exclusion and isolation. Our life is made uniform, monotonous, colourless; but monotony is not assimilation, uniformity is not union, and the woof loses its beauty when the dye is bleached out of it.

Some of our readers must have travelled from Scotland to the metropolis when the old mail coach was on the road, and may perhaps even yet be able to recall how they felt during those tedious six-andforty hours. Oppressively tedious they were, no doubt; still you saw the country through which you were passing; the grave cathedral towns, the wide meadow-lands, the quiet hawthorn lanes, the sleeping villages startled at dawn by the reveillée of the red-coated guard, the ancestral trees and homesteads of the gentry; you heard the different dialects, you watched the changes in the habits and physiognomies of the people, and you arrived in London with an idea of rural England in your head. None of this remains. Four hundred miles of human industry and ambi tion have been blotted out of the itinerary. The traveller falls asleep at Edinburgh; he wakens in London: the middle distance is annihilated.

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Any two of our towns are as like as two peas, and we have now cut away the country which used to separate them, and which gave to each (so far as it could, and as we were concerned) distinct individuality and character.

All of us feel most at home with certain associates, religious and professional. They speak the same language, they think the

same

thoughts, they own the same convictions that we do. When the machinery of social life was rude, disjointed, and inartificial, it was impracticable to keep these companions constantly about us. To live at all we were obliged to mix and scatter. But now (such is the perfection to which we have brought the new methods) it is not necessary that we should on any occasion quit our seat, nor mingle, even for a day, in the wide-world battle which storms angrily without. In the engaged compartment of a firstclass carriage, we may pass from end to end of England without speaking to a single living soul.

What we have done here, we have done, and are doing elsewhere. Every man is permitted to become more 'self-contained;' his prejudices, his antipathies, his sectarianisms never being brought into healthy collision with things outside, just because our social arrangements are more skilfully and methodically made. In the perfectly smooth and level world we have originated, there are no angles nor sharp corners, and human souls slip past each other like the oiled wheels of a machine.

Isolation fosters sectarianism. The nation was at one time forced to rough it, and it then got itself and its opinions well rubbed and jostled. A man with a peculiar tenacity of gripe contrived to hang on, even in those days, to a pet passion or prejudice, but the effect, in general, was to soften asperities, to warm hearts, to winnow opinions. We fought it out bitterly at the time, no doubt, but then we sat down when it was over, shook hands cordially, and loved each other none the worse for the tussle.

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Our new arrangements enable us to avoid the combat, and evade the combatants, if we choose-and we do choose. When not actually driven into the mêlée, we obey the natural instinct (for it is natural to dislike whatever disturbs our complacency and ruffles our vanity), and, like the Levite, intellectually indifferent, morally effeminate

pass by on the other side.' Thus the extension of the material means of social communion (that which we would look at first sight to work very different results), has been productive of isolation and narrowness. A man is often more alone in the solitude of a crowd than in the solitude of the desert, and a nation, we confidently believe, may become more sectarian, a clique more cliqueish, a profession more professional, when, nay, because, all the external impediments to union have been removed.

The question, then, that we wish our practical reformers would try to settle is, how is this Social Sectarianism, which, from various symptoms, seems to be growing rather than diminishing, to be rooted out or controlled ?* We do not pretend to have examined very carefully the different remedies that may be tried, but there are two at least which lie on the surface. must, in the first place, extend the general culture; and in the second, remove the impression that we become better physicians, lawyers, politicians, or divines, when we become narrower and more incomplete

men.

We

In saying that the general culture requires extension, we do not mean that it is necessary to introduce novel branches of study into our educational institutions. We have no desire to see a German University planted in this country. Those who must have their sons taught the bewildering subdivisions of law and logic by a dozen rival professors, may send them to Bonn or Heidelberg; and if the young gentlemen come home with addled brains, they have only themselves to blame. What we wish is, that general culture

VOL. LIX. NO. CCCLII.

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should be extended into life, and not allowed to stop at college. We want to educate our professional men so that after the daily labour is done and done well-they may return to the great writers and the great thinkers who belong to no sect and no profession; take a course of Shakspeare when Blackstone and Sugden are put away; and, more than all, feel that this is needful to keep the system in order, and the faculties of the mind healthy and well-adjusted. The soul requires a constitutional' as well as the body. A bath in the pure well of English undefiled' is quite as purifying as a plunge into the German Ocean. The heated vapours of the Courts, or the foul intrigues of the Senate, are fatal to the wellbeing of the man, unless he can gain ever and again an ampler ether and diviner air,' and allow the untainted breeze to cleanse his head and his heart. How is this to be compassed? How are the engrossing interests of practical life to be prevented from taking soul and body captive? By a change, in the first instance, we answer, in our educational method. What we are taught at school and college is taught, in the slang of the current philosophy, to discipline' the mental powers. Now, that discipline' is a very good thing we do not mean to deny; it puts the faculties, no doubt, into working order. But culture is not, or ought not to be, synonymous with discipline. The weapons which we use for the purposes of drill, constitute, moreover, an end in themselves, and deserve to be cherished for their own intrinsic worth and excellence. The consequence of our present theory of education is, that the instruments, being used exclusively to drill, are put away when the drill is over. The mind is educated; and the machinery of education is then laid aside. We must change this. We must learn that art, science, and letters, are worthy of our love, not alone because they educate us, but because they are admirable and beautiful in themselves. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;' nor does it lose its excellence when any incidental purpose of utility which it may serve is accomplished. Implant a desire

that we cannot get rid of, and that must be satisfied, and then we will turn, as a necessity of our nature, to the more spiritual and less material interests of the intellect, to those interests which preserve from the selfishness of professions and the fanaticism of sects.

But it is not alone because our early educational training does not communicate a momentum sufficient to project the love of the arts as a permanent motive into and throughout our life, that the evil of which we complain exists; it is due also, as we have said, to the current impression that a man who continues to cultivate the liberal studies of his youth, and does not deliver him-. self over soul and body to his vocation, must be, as a professional man, indifferent or inefficient. This impression, we are convinced, is radically false. We are quite confident that no one will make a worse merchant, or lawyer, or doctor, or divine, because he does not cease, on entering the arena of practical life, to be a large-hearted and widelyeducated man. Every profession illustrates the position. We take the law, as that with which we happen to be familiar.

Most of us know that the bar is not what it was during the first twenty or thirty years of the century. It has deteriorated. It now comprises among its members few of the class from which at one time it mainly recruited its ranks; and the men themselves are not only inferior in social standing, but in general accomplishment. It used to be pre-eminently the profession of educated gentlemen: while so patent had the change latterly become, that only a year or two ago the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates found it necessary to require candidates to prove before admission that they were at least decently conversant with the rudiments of schoolboy culture. Now, we think that this deterioration is to be ascribed not remotely to the prejudice we speak of. A barrister who can write a leading article, who can construe a Greek play, who can read Cervantes or Boccaccio in the original, is regarded as unsafe and dangerous. Attorneys prefer to entrust their argument to men who, though