“Nothing will ever reconcile me to the Establishment of Christ’s Church on earth by Sovereigns or Parliaments.  It is established by God on Faith and the Sacraments, and so endowed, and all other pretended establishment and endowment to me is profane.”  And again: 

“Taking away endowments doesn’t affect me; but what does try me is the inheriting them, and denying the faith of the donors—­and then talking of sacrilege.  The only endowment of Christ’s Church comes from the Father and the Son, and is the Holy Ghost, Which no man can give and no man can take away.’”

Here, if you like, is the authentic voice of Life and Liberty.

V

LOVE AND PUNISHMENT

Lord Hugh Cecil is, I think, one of the most interesting figures in the public life of the time.  Ten years ago I regarded him as the future leader of the Tory party and a predestined Prime Minister.  Of late years he has seemed to turn away from the strifes and intrigues of ordinary politics, and to have resigned official ambition to his elder brother; but his figure has not lost—­rather has gained—­in interest by the change.  Almost alone among our public men, he seems to have “his eyes fixed on higher lodestars” than those which guide Parliamentary majorities.  He avows his allegiance to those moral laws of political action of which John Bright so memorably said that “though they were not given amid the thunders of Sinai, they are not less the commandments of God.”

Now, the fearless utterance of this ethical creed does not tend to popularity.  Englishmen will bear a good deal of preaching, so long as it is delivered from the pulpit; but when it is uttered by the lips of laymen, and deals with public problems, it arouses a curious irritation.  That jovial old heathen, Palmerston, once alluded to Bright as “the Honourable and Reverend Member”; Gladstone’s splendid appeals to faith and conscience were pronounced “d——­d copy-book-y”; and Lord Houghton, who knew the world as well as most men, said, “Does it ever strike you that nothing shocks people so much as any immediate and practical application of the character and life of Christ?”

Lord Hugh Cecil need not mind the slings and arrows of outrageous partisanship, so long as he shares them with Bright and Gladstone.  Just lately, his pronouncement that we ought to love the Germans, as our fellow-citizens in the Kingdom of God on earth, has provoked very acrid criticism from some who generally share his political beliefs; and in a Tory paper I noticed the singularly inept gibe that this doctrine was “medieval.”  For my own part I should scarcely have thought that an undue tendency to love one’s enemies was a characteristic trait of the Middle Age, or that Englishmen and Frenchmen, Guelphs and Ghibellines, were inclined to sink their racial differences in the unity of Christian citizenship.  Lord Hugh’s doctrine might be called by some modern and by others primitive; but medieval it can only be called on the principle that, in invective, a long word, is better than a short one.