Now obviously there is a peril for poor human nature in words and thoughts of such exuberant self-satisfaction, until we find ourselves safe in the streets of the Celestial City.

  “Das wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blicke
  Der vorwaerts sieht, wie viel noch uebrig bleibt—­“[39]

says Goethe; “the little that is done seems nothing when we look forward and see how much we have yet to do.”  Clearly this is a better line of reflection for weak humanity, so long as it remains on this earthly field of labor and trial.

But neither Sir Charles Adderley nor Mr. Roebuck is by nature inaccessible to considerations of this sort.  They only lose sight of them owing to the controversial life we all lead, and the practical form which all speculation takes with us.  They have in view opponents whose aim is not ideal, but practical; and in their zeal to uphold their own practice against these innovators, they go so far as even to attribute to this practice an ideal perfection.  Somebody has been wanting to introduce a six-pound franchise, or to abolish church-rates, or to collect agricultural statistics by force, or to diminish local self-government.  How natural, in reply to such proposals, very likely improper or ill-timed, to go a little beyond the mark and to say stoutly, “Such a race of people as we stand, so superior to all the world!  The old Anglo-Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world!  I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last!  I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it?” And so long as criticism answers this dithyramb by insisting that the old Anglo-Saxon race would be still more superior to all others if it had no church-rates, or that our unrivalled happiness would last yet longer with a six-pound franchise, so long will the strain, “The best breed in the whole world!” swell louder and louder, everything ideal and refining will be lost out of sight, and both the assailed and their critics will remain in a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly unvital, a sphere in which spiritual progression is impossible.  But let criticism leave church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit, without a single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper immediately after reading Mr. Roebuck:—­

“A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham.  A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child.  The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled.  Wragg is in custody.”