from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points.  Instead of our ‘one thing needful’ justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence—­our vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence are really so many touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves have it, it is not all we want.  And, as the force which encourages us to stand staunch and fast by the rule and ground we have is Hebraism, so the force which encourages us to go back upon this rule, and to try the very ground on which we appear to stand, is Hellenism—­a term for giving our consciousness free play, and enlarging its range.”

In his Sixth Chapter—­headed “Our Liberal Practitioners”—­he applies his general doctrine to persons and performances of the year 1869.  The Liberal Party was just then busy disestablishing and disendowing the Irish Church.  He was in favour of Established Churches, and of Concurrent Endowment.  He realized the absurdity of the Irish Church as it then stood; but, true to his critical character, he rebuked the “Liberal Practitioners” for the spirit in which they were disestablishing and disendowing it.  They did not approach the subject in the spirit of Hellenism:  they did not appeal to Right Reason:  they did not attempt to see the problem of religious establishment as it really was.  But they Hebraized about it—­that is, they took an uncritical interpretation of biblical words as their absolute rule of conduct.  “It may,” he said, “be all very well for born Hebraizers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraize; but for Liberal statesmen to Hebraize is surely unsafe, and to see poor old Liberal hacks Hebraizing, whose real self belongs to a kind of negative Hellenism—­a state of moral indifference, without intellectual ardour—­is even painful.”  In the same manner he dealt with the movement to abolish Primogeniture, strongly urged by John Bright; the movement to legalize marriage with a wife’s sister—­“the craving for forbidden fruit” joined with “the craving for legality”; and the doctrine, then supposed to be incontrovertible, of Free Trade.  In all these cases, he proposed to “Hellenize a little,” to “turn the free stream of our thought” on the Liberal policy of the moment; and to “see how this is related to the intelligible law of human life, and to national well-being and happiness.”

And so we were brought to the conclusion of the whole matter.  The stock-beliefs and stock-performances of Liberalism were exhausted, uninteresting, in some grave respects mischievous.  Seekers after truth, disciples of culture, men bent on trying to see things as they really are, should lend no hand to these labours of the Philistines.  Their right course was to stand absolutely aloof from the political work which was going on round them; and to pursue, with undeviating consistency, “increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy.”