indeed, motives are appealed to which spring forward to meet the call, and chords are struck in our hearts which respond in music to the touch.”  It was to the establishment of this secure basis that I bent my energies, this that was to me of supreme moment.  “Amid the fervid movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms, with its righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered notions of wider freedom and gladder life, it is of vital importance that morality should stand on a foundation unshakable; that so through all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink downwards into anarchy.  Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student and hard-headed artisan.  Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in action motives which are found equally in every human heart.  Well shall it be for humanity that creeds and dogmas pass away, that superstition vanishes, and the clear light of freedom and science dawns on a regenerated earth—­but well only if men draw tighter and closer the links of trustworthiness, of honour, and of truth.  Equality before the law is necessary and just; liberty is the birthright of every man and woman; free individual development will elevate and glorify the race.  But little worth these priceless jewels, little worth liberty and equality with all their promise for mankind, little worth even wider happiness, if that happiness be selfish, if true fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to man, and heart to heart, in loyal service to the common need, and generous self-sacrifice to the common good."[15]

To the forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me necessary—­an Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to action, and a clear understanding of the sources of evil and of the methods by which they might be drained.  Into the drawing of the first I threw all the passion of my nature, striving to paint the Ideal in colours which should enthral and fascinate, so that love and desire to realise might stir man to effort.  If “morality touched by emotion” be religion, then truly was I the most religious of Atheists, finding in this dwelling on and glorifying of the Ideal full satisfaction for the loftiest emotions.  To meet the fascination exercised over men’s hearts by the Man of Sorrows, I raised the image of man triumphant, man perfected.  “Rightly is the ideal Christian type of humanity a Man of Sorrows.  Jesus, with worn and wasted body; with sad, thin lips, curved into a mournful droop of penitence for human sin; with weary eyes gazing up to heaven because despairing of earth; bowed down and aged with grief and pain, broken-hearted with long anguish, broken-spirited with unresisted ill-usage—­such is the ideal man of the Christian creed.  Beautiful with a certain pathetic beauty, telling of the long travail of earth, eloquent of the sufferings of humanity, but