there was a talk some little while ago about the state of middle-class education, Mr. Bazley, as the representative of that class, spoke some memorable words:—­“There had been a cry that middle-class education ought to receive more attention.  He confessed himself very much surprised by the clamour that was raised.  He did not think that class need excite the sympathy either of the legislature or the public.”  Now this satisfaction of Mr. Bazley with the mental state of the middle-class [81] was truly representative, and enhances his claim (if that were necessary) to stand as the beautiful and virtuous mean of that class.  But it is obviously at variance with our definition of culture, or the pursuit of light and perfection, which made light and perfection consist, not in resting and being, but in growing and becoming, in a perpetual advance in beauty and wisdom.  So the middle-class is by its essence, as one may say, by its incomparable self-satisfaction decisively expressed through its beautiful and virtuous mean, self-excluded from wielding an authority of which light is to be the very soul.

Clear as this is, it will be made clearer still if we take some representative man as the excess of the middle-class, and remember that the middle-class, in general, is to be conceived as a body swaying between the qualities of its mean and of its excess, and on the whole, of course, as human nature is constituted, inclining rather towards the excess than the mean.  Of its excess no better representative can possibly be imagined than the Rev. W. Cattle, a Dissenting minister from Walsall, who came before the public in connection with the proceedings at [82] Birmingham of Mr. Murphy, already mentioned.  Speaking in the midst of an irritated population of Catholics, the Rev. W. Cattle exclaimed:—­“I say, then, away with the mass!  It is from the bottomless pit; and in the bottomless pit shall all liars have their part, in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.”  And again:  “When all the praties were black in Ireland, why didn’t the priests say the hocus-pocus over them, and make them all good again?” He shared, too, Mr. Murphy’s fears of some invasion of his domestic happiness:  “What I wish to say to you as Protestant husbands is, Take care of your wives!” And, finally, in the true vein of an Englishman doing as he likes, a vein of which I have at some length pointed out the present dangers, he recommended for imitation the example of some churchwardens at Dublin, among whom, said he, “there was a Luther and also a Melancthon,” who had made very short work with some ritualist or other, handed him down from his pulpit, and kicked him out of church.  Now it is manifest, as I said in the case of Sir Thomas Bateson, that if we let this excess of the sturdy English middle-class, this conscientious Protestant Dissenter, so strong, so self- [83] reliant, so fully persuaded in his own mind, have his way, he would be capable, with his want of light—­or, to use the language of the religious world, with his zeal without knowledge—­of stirring up strife which neither he nor any one else could easily compose.