nearer a certain ideal centre of correct information, taste, and intelligence, or farther away from it.  I have said that within certain limits, which any one who is likely to read this will have no difficulty in drawing for himself, my old adversary, the Saturday Review, may, on matters of literature and taste, be fairly enough regarded, relatively to a great number of newspapers which treat these matters, as a kind of organ of reason.  But I remember once conversing with a company of Nonconformist admirers of some lecturer who had let off a great fire-work, which the Saturday Review said was all noise and false lights, and feeling my way as tenderly as I could about the effect of this unfavourable judgment upon those with whom I was conversing.  “Oh,” said one who was their spokesman, with the most tranquil air of conviction, “it is true the Saturday Review abuses the lecture, but the British Banner” (I am not quite sure it was the British Banner, but it was some newspaper of that stamp) “says that the Saturday Review is quite wrong.”  The speaker had evidently no notion that there was a scale of value for judgments on these topics, and that the judgments of the [114] Saturday Review ranked high on this scale, and those of the British Banner low; the taste of the bathos implanted by nature in the literary judgments of man had never, in my friend’s case, encountered any let or hindrance.

Just the same in religion as in literature.  We have most of us little idea of a high standard to choose our guides by, of a great and profound spirit, which is an authority, while inferior spirits are none; it is enough to give importance to things that this or that person says them decisively, and has a large following of some strong kind when he says them.  This habit of ours is very well shown in that able and interesting work of Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s, which we were all reading lately, The Mormons, by One of Themselves.  Here, again, I am not quite sure that my memory serves me as to the exact title, but I mean the well-known book in which Mr. Hepworth Dixon described the Mormons, and other similar religious bodies in America, with so much detail and such warm sympathy.  In this work it seems enough for Mr. Dixon that this or that doctrine has its Rabbi, who talks big to him, has a staunch body of disciples, and, above all, has plenty [115] of rifles.  That there are any further stricter tests to be applied to a doctrine, before it is pronounced important, never seems to occur to him.  “It is easy to say,” he writes of the Mormons, “that these saints are dupes and fanatics, to laugh at Joe Smith and his church, but what then?  The great facts remain.  Young and his people are at Utah; a church of 200,000 souls; an army of 20,000 rifles.”  But if the followers of a doctrine are really dupes, or worse, and its promulgators are really fanatics, or worse, it gives the doctrine no seriousness or authority the more that there should be found 200,000