in the choice of his political company if he does not agree with them at least nine times in ten.”  The doctrine that was good enough for Burke in this matter may be counted good enough for most of us.  Some of the current talk about political independence is mere hypocrisy; some of it is mere vanity.  For the new priest of Literature is quite as liable to the defects of spiritual pride and ambition as the old priest of the Church, and it is quite as well for him that he should be on his guard against these scarlet and high-crested sins.

The success of Reviews, of which our own was the first English type, marks a very considerable revolution in the intellectual habits of the time.  They have brought abstract discussion from the library down to the parlour, and from the serious student down to the first man in the street.  We have passed through a perfect cyclone of religious polemics.  The popularity of such Reviews means that really large audiences, le gros public, are eagerly interested In the radical discussion of propositions which twenty years ago were only publicly maintained, and then in their crudest, least true, and most repulsive form, in obscure debating societies and little secularist clubs.  Everybody, male or female, who reads anything serious at all, now reads a dozen essays a year to show, with infinite varieties of approach and of demonstration, that we can never know whether there be a Supreme Being or not, whether the soul survives the body, or whether mind is more and other than a mere function of matter.  No article that has appeared in any periodical for a generation back excited so profound a sensation as Mr. Huxley’s memorable paper On the Physical Basis of Life, published in this Review in February 1869.  It created just the same kind of stir that, in a political epoch, was made by such a pamphlet as the Conduct of the Allies or the Reflections on the French Revolution.  This excitement was a sign that controversies which had hitherto been confined to books and treatises were now to be admitted to popular periodicals, and that the common man of the world would now listen and have an opinion of his own on the bases of belief, just as he listens and judges in politics or art, or letters.  The clergy no longer have the pulpit to themselves, for the new Reviews became more powerful pulpits, in which heretics were at least as welcome as orthodox.  Speculation has become entirely democratised.  This is a tremendous change to have come about in little more than a dozen years.  How far it goes, let us not be too sure.  It is no new discovery that what looks like complete tolerance may be in reality only complete indifference.  Intellectual fairness is often only another name for indolence and inconclusiveness of mind, just as love of truth is sometimes a fine phrase for temper.  To be piquant counts for much, and the interest of seeing on the drawing-room tables of devout Catholics and high-flying Anglicans article after article, sending divinities, creeds, and Churches all headlong into limbo, was indeed piquant.  Much of all this elegant dabbling in infidelity has been a caprice of fashion.  The Agnostic has had his day with the fine ladies, like the black footboy of other times, or the spirit-rapper and table-turner of our own.  What we have been watching, after all, was perhaps a tournament, not a battle.