Or they may answer them—­they will be more likely to answer them in England just now, because there are those who will teach them so to answer—­in another, but a scarcely less terrible tone.  ’Yes, there is a God; and he is angry with us.  And why?  Because there is something, or some one, in the nation which he abhors—­heretics, papists’—­what not—­any man, or class of men, on whom cowardly and terrified ignorance may happen to fix as a scapegoat, and cry, ’These are the guilty!  We have allowed these men, indulged them; the accursed thing is among us, therefore the face of the Lord is turned from us.  We will serve him truly henceforth—­and hate those whom he hates.  We will be orthodox henceforth—­and prove our orthodoxy by persecuting the heretic.’

Does this seem to you extravagant, impossible?  Remember, my friends, that within the last century Lord George Gordon’s riots convulsed London.  Can you give me any reason why Lord George Gordon’s riots cannot occur again?  Believe me, the more you study history, the more you study human nature, the more possible it will seem to you.  It is not, I believe, infidelity, but fanaticism, which England has to fear just now.  The infidelity of England is one of mere doubt and denial, a scepticism; which is in itself weak and self-destructive.  The infidelity of France in 1793 was strong enough, but just because it was no scepticism, but a faith; a positive creed concerning human reason, and the rights of man, which men could formulize, and believe in, and fight for, and persecute for, and, if need was, die for.  But no such exists in England now.  And what we have most to fear in England under the pressure of some sudden distress, is a superstitious panic, and the wickedness which is certain to accompany that panic; mean and unjust, cruel and abominable things, done in the name of orthodoxy:  though meanwhile, whether what the masses and their spiritual demagogues will mean by orthodoxy, will be the same that we and the Church of England mean thereby, is a question which I leave for your most solemn consideration.  That, however, rather than any proclamation of the abstract rights of man, or installations of a goddess of Reason, is the form which spiritual hunger is most likely to take in England now.  Alas! are there not tokens enough around us now, whereby we may discern the signs of this time?

I say, the spiritual hunger will reawaken; and woe to us who really understand and love the Church of England; woe to us who are really true to her principles, honestly subscribe her formulas, if we cannot appease it in that day.

But wherewith?  We may look, my friends, appalled at the danger and the need.  We may cry to our Lord, ’From whence can a man satisfy these men with bread in the wilderness?’ But his answer will be, as far as I dare to predict it, the same as to his apostles of old on another and a similar occasion, ’Give ye them to eat.  They need not depart.’