creative periods when forces, at other times wasted in endless wrangling, have been available for a common co-operation. Philosophers can at times combine to work out new truth instead of attacking each other's principles; preachers can speak boldly and eloquently, delivered from the bondage of paralysing doubts, and animated by an uninterrupted circuit of sympathy; artists can work effectively, for the common faith generates a symbolism universally understood, and appealing to genuine beliefs; leaders of men can advance without needing at every step to entrench themselves against open enemies and insidious friends. But, it is to be feared that equilibrium generally implies, not harmony, but stagnation. Improvement first shows itself by introducing discord; and periods of comparative repose are interrupted by confused epochs of jarring chaos, in which the noblest imaginative work reflects the passions of the sincerest combatant, not the combined impulse of a united people.

4. The beginning of the eighteenth century was a period of comparative quiescence. Society was not in a state of furious ebullition, and the conflict of ideas was not manifestly internecine. There existed, therefore, a kind of relative harmony. It was a harmony of compromise rather than reconciliation; a truce, not a definite peace. The deist controversy scarcely led more than two or three daring thinkers to question ultimate assumptions. And a common theological philosophy was very widely accepted by men who denounced each other heartily for comparatively trivial differences of opinion. In politics, Whiggism and Toryism were little more than names, and both parties agreed to accept, with little modification, that body of doctrine which afterwards came to be known as Revolution principles. In literature and art we

agree upon certain ac

shall find an analogous disposition to cepted canons. An academy of the reign of Queen Anne might have laid down a code upon such matters which would have been accepted with little disagreement, and which would have corresponded to what is called the classical theory. We shall have to consider some of its principles in greater detail.

5. Starting from the theological doctrine, we may say that dominant creed was either the pure or the Christian Deism

worked out by the rationalism of the day. As we have seen, the philosophy tended to identify God with nature, though with a reserve and hesitation which stopped short of thoroughness. By nature was meant a metaphysical entity, whose ex+ istence was to be proved by mathematical reasonings; and yet not proved too clearly lest it should lapse into Pantheism or become independent of Christianity. This intellectual attitude corresponds to an imaginative difficulty. The old vivid mythology was rapidly fading. The distinct realisation of a supernatural Being constantly intervening in the actual affairs of life was no longer possible. Nor, on the other hand, could the pantheist adopt the more genial conception of a later philosophy, and frankly regard nature as animated by an allpervading force, breathing in every plant and moving the whole choir of heaven, and bringing the whole universe into a loving unity. A greater scientific development and a livelier realisation of the continuity and order of the world are required to give force to such a conception. The metaphysics of the day placed all reality in certain abstract substances, and empty forces, and the whole phenomenal world was made up of independent fragments which were yet in some sense illusory. So frigid and mechanical a conception could scarcely afford a point of support for the imagination. Laboriously as philosophers might establish the divine attributes, the deity remained obstinately lifeless. He was but an idol made of heterogeneous fragments of the old traditions, and of half-hearted and chilling metaphysics. The difficulty of reconciling such a conception to admitted facts was, as we have seen, met in two ways. One set of thinkers retained theological language, but made it studiously vague. They found God in nature, but they found an impalpable essence. They clung to a vague optimism, generated by the attempt to transfer to this abstract being the creations associated with the vivid because anthropomorphic type, and talked vaguely of harmony and unity, without caring to translate phrases into facts. Their morality tended to degenerate into vague sentimentalism, or mere prudence thinly varnished over with traditional grandiloquence.

6. Others still retained the old conception, but reconciled the imaginative difficulty by remembering that God had

shown himself a long time ago, and in a very different country. He became the almost grotesque deity of Warburton-the supernatural chief justice whose sentences were carried out in a non-natural world-the constitutional monarch who had signed a social compact, and retired from active government. These thinkers would join with the sceptics in contemptuously assailing deistical rationalism as too flimsy for actual life. To the optimism of their rivals, they opposed a vigorous assertion that vice, misery, and corruption still existed in the world. The sentimental morality was met by a downright statement of the tangible motives of a selfish prudence. And, even in artistic questions, the correct and classical school was encountered by an unflinching realism which showed things as they are in their whole deformity. The two tendencies are intricately blended. Appeals to experience mingle with appeals to a priori demonstration. Common sense, in the vulgar acceptation of the world, is confused with the philosophical appeal to innate ideas and universal intuitions. The imagination confounds the two really distinct deities, and, indeed, is shocked at a plain statement of the inconsistencies involved. Men, who are really working with the forces of disintegration, believe in the most entire good faith that they are supporting the established order. It is not an easy task to unravel these opposing currents of thought and feeling, or to discover the logic implied in unreasoning impulses, and the unconscious tendencies which would have been disavowed if plainly brought before the consciousness. Heterogeneous elements are so united, that it is not only difficult to discover their existence, but almost impossible to indicate it plainly in a continuous narrative. I propose, however, to describe the most obvious phenomena as well as I am able, by first considering that series of writers who seem to represent what may be called the most characteristic product of the eighteenth century; and then, to trace the second series, who represent the growing clement of reaction or development. But though the line may be thus drawn for the present purpose, it does not correspond to an equally marked division in reality. We shall find, for example, amongst the religious writers, the poets, the novelists, and the essayists, tendencies analogous to those which are represented in specu

mon sense.

lation by the ontologists, the sceptics, and the school of comBut amongst men who felt rather than reasoned, or who reasoned by feeling, the logical divisions will be less distinctly marked, and one man may often represent the resultant of various forces, rather than the impulse of a single force. The poet may naturally seek to bring into unity all the strongest impulses of his time, and sometimes he fuses into a whole very inconsistent materials.

II. THE PREACHERS.

7. I will begin with that system of practical theology which corresponds more or less distinctly to the speculative theory of Clarke. How could the theistic doctrine, vague, frigid, and artificial as we have seen it to be, be applied to influence human conduct? That was the problem presented to the dominant theological school. They should, therefore, give us the best clue to the solution of the problem which we have to consider. Two things, it may be said, were conspicuously absent from that form of religious doctrine-faith and poetry. What remains when they are taken away? Common sense and candour. Without a distinct doctrine and without any warmth of feeling, what guides are to be found? Substantially those empirical guesses which provide for the ordinary affairs of life, although there must be an ostensible connection of such guesses with a foundation of demonstrated truth. An alternation, then, of high-sounding appeals to reason with dexterous appeals to obvious motives must be the general tendency of such theology. Sometimes the preacher will lose himself in abstract reasoning, and sometimes descend to the full level of homely common sense. Rhetoric, in its full sense, becomes almost impossible. The first condition of effective oratory is given in the words 'this man speaketh with authority.' English preachers, since the seventeenth century, have never possessed this secret, and have, therefore, never commanded their hearers. The demonstrations which are so frequent in the sermons of the eighteenth century are obviously not demonstrative, or they would not be used. The preacher can take nothing for granted. He is always bound to

encourage himself and his hearers by once more repeating a series of proofs which he knows to generate at most probabilities, though he is forced to give them the air of certainties. He can never advance, because his base is never beyond the reach of attack. It would be well, it is sometimes said, if every preacher felt that there was an opponent in his congregation. It might be well for his logic, though it would be of doubtful benefit to his rhetoric. But in these sermons we often feel that the opponent must not only be present as the butt of the preacher's arguments, but that he has got into the pulpit, for we feel that the preacher is too often arguing with himself.

8. And, again, the preacher, uncertain of his position, is obliged to be arguing as much against the extremes of his own party as against his avowed antagonists. He is in constant fear lest he should be thought to believe too much or too little. The aim of every orthodox or rationalist preacher is to keep to the via media between superstition and fanaticism. Superstition is the belief that God ever reveals himself to external experience in the modern world; and fanaticism the belief that he reveals himself by internal experience. The preacher, in denouncing these extremes, shows himself as much afraid that we should believe in God too much as that we should believe in him too little. The deity whose existence is established by abstract reasoning must never be allowed to place himself in contact with the concrete facts. He appears, at most, under the colourless shape of Providence—a word which may be taken to imply a remote divine superintendence, without admitting an actual divine interference.

9. Thus the preacher, uncertain, as it were, of his equilibrium, and with his hands tied by a strict bondage, is unable to give way to any spontaneous bursts of emotion. We have none of Taylor's flashes of fancy; or of Barrow's masculine reasoning; or of South's wit, or of Baxter's earnestness. The positive element, which replaces all these, is good commonplace morality, defended by ordinary common sense, and supported by appeals to the ordinary facts of daily life. Don't get drunk, or you will ruin your health; nor commit murder, for you will come to the gallows; every man should seek to happy, and the way to be happy is to be thoroughly reble. That is the main substance of such preaching as