It is no adequate answer to urge that this awful consciousness of a divine presence and supervision has ceased to be the living fact it once was.  That partly explains, but it certainly does not justify, our present lassitude.  For the ever-wakeful eye of celestial power is not the only conceivable stimulus to responsibility.  To pass from those grim heroes of protestantism to the French philosophers of the last century is a wide leap in a hundred respects, yet they too were pricked by the oestrus of intellectual responsibility.  Their doctrine was dismally insufficient, and sometimes, as the present writer has often pointed out, it was directly vicious.  Their daily lives were surrounded by much shabbiness and many meannesses.  But, after all, no temptation and no menace, no pains or penalties for thinking about certain subjects, and no rewards for turning to think about something else, could divert such men as Voltaire and Diderot from their alert and strenuous search after such truth as could be vouchsafed to their imperfect lights.  A catastrophe followed, it is true, but the misfortunes which attended it were due more to the champions of tradition and authority than to the soldiers of emancipation.  Even in the case of the latter, they were due to an inadequate doctrine, and not at all either to their sense of the necessity of free speculation and inquiry, or to the intrepidity with which they obeyed the promptings of that ennobling sense.

Perhaps the latest attempt of a considerable kind to suppress the political spirit in non-political concerns was the famous movement which had its birth a generation ago among the gray quadrangles and ancient gardens of Oxford, ‘the sweet city with her dreaming spires,’ where there has ever been so much detachment from the world, alongside of the coarsest and fiercest hunt after the grosser prizes of the world.  No one has much less sympathy with the direction of the tractarian revival than the present writer, in whose Oxford days the star of Newman had set, and the sun of Mill had risen in its stead.  And it is needful to distinguish the fervid and strong spirits with whom the revival began from the mimics of our later day.  No doubt the mere occasion of tractarianism was political.  Its leaders were alarmed at the designs imputed to the newly reformed parliament of disestablishing the Anglican Church.  They asked themselves the question, which I will put in their own words (Tract i.)—­’Should the government of the country so far forget their God as to cut off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claims to respect and attention which you make upon your flock?  In answering this question they speedily found themselves, as might have been expected, at the opposite pole of thought from things political.  The whole strength of their appeal to members of the Church lay in men’s weariness of the high and dry optimism, which presents the existing order of things as the noblest possible, and the undisturbed way of the majority as the way of salvation.  Apostolical succession and Sacramentalism may not have been in themselves progressive ideas.  The spirit which welcomed them had at least the virtue of taking away from Caesar the things that are not Caesar’s.