brought about; and we can even see, too, where the absolute abrupt stoppage of feudal habits has worked harm.  And appealing to the sense of truth and reason, these considerations will, without doubt, touch and move all those of even the Barbarians themselves, who are (as are some of us Philistines also, and some of the Populace) beyond their fellows quick of feeling for truth and reason.  For indeed this is just one of the advantages of sweetness and light over fire and strength, that sweetness and light make a feudal class quietly and gradually drop its feudal habits because it sees them at variance with truth and reason, while fire and strength tear them passionately off it because it applauded Mr. Lowe when he called, or was supposed to call, the working-class drunken and venal.

[222] But when once we have begun to recount the practical operations by which our Liberal friends work for the removal of definite evils, and in which if we do not join them they are apt to grow impatient with us, how can we pass over that very interesting operation of this kind,—­the attempt to enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister?  This operation, too, like that for abating the feudal customs of succession in land, I have had the advantage of myself seeing and hearing my Liberal friends labour at.  I was lucky enough to be present when Mr. Chambers, I think, brought forward in the House of Commons his bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister, and I heard the speech which Mr. Chambers then made in support of his bill.  His first point was that God’s law,—­the name he always gave to the Book of Leviticus,—­did not really forbid a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister.  God’s law not forbidding it, the Liberal maxim that a man’s prime right and happiness is to do as he likes ought at once to come into force, and to annul any such check upon the assertion of personal liberty as the prohibition to marry one’s deceased wife’s sister.  A distinguished Liberal supporter of Mr. Chambers, in [223] the debate which followed the introduction of the bill, produced a formula of much beauty and neatness for conveying in brief the Liberal notions on this head:  “Liberty,” said he, “is the law of human life.”  And, therefore, the moment it is ascertained that God’s law, the Book of Leviticus, does not stop the way, man’s law, the law of liberty, asserts its right, and makes us free to marry our deceased wife’s sister.

And this exactly falls in with what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, who may almost be called the Colenso of love and marriage,—­such a revolution does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does in our ideas on religion,—­tells us of the notions and proceedings of our kinsmen in America.  With that affinity of genius to the Hebrew genius which we have already noticed, and with the strong belief of our race that liberty is the law of human life, so far as a fixed, perfect, and paramount rule of conscience, the Bible, does not