Mercy Justified of her Children.

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Mr. Carlyle will have it that intellectual stupidity is equivalent to moral delinquency. "The one always means the other." But this, with the utmost deference consistent with absolute disagreement, I hold to be one of the worst of those errors which flaw the rock of Carlyle's mountainranges. I cannot imagine any one who has seen the tear gather in the eye of an honest, ingenuous, good child, while it resolutely but vainly attempted to remember the stanza or to do the sum which, to the brighter sister or brother, presented no difficulty whatever, continuing to doubt that a golden heart may beat below a brain of lead. Here again, strangely but indubitably, amid his Draconian utterances, crops out Mr. Carlyle's optimistic vein. He cannot bring himself to believe that nature could ever treat weakness as vice, unless weakness were necessarily vicious; but those who believe that, at this point precisely, the universal imperfection of created things reaches its climax of imperfection, are under no temptation to paint the shadows out of nature's landscape. It is because nature's justice is blind and hard, and because man is weak, that the religion of Divine Pity was taught at Bethlehem and on Calvary.

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Mercy, at all events, has been justified of her children. While the Draconian method was pursued with criminalsbefore the reforms instituted by Howard, and carried out by a large succession of men worthy to walk in his steps, were dreamed of-while little boys were hanged with stones in their pockets to make them heavy enough, and criminals of all ages were treated as a diabolic canaille"-the criminal classes did not diminish, and society was warred upon with a defiant ruthlessness correspondent to its own. But the tempering of justice with mercy, the mingling of hope with the anguish of criminal suffering, the consideration of all those circumstances which mitigate the guilt of convicts, the persevering attempt to awaken within them the reminiscence of a nobler manhood, have proved their efficacy

by the gradual but sure curtailment of the criminal class. Crime being found to be, in very many cases, the offspring as well as the parent of misery and misfortune, some progress has been made towards the application to the criminal problem, on a far wider scale than had been attempted previously, of the hygienic method. What, to the eye of God, reveals itself as guilt-i.e., wilful and chosen badness, deliberate cruelty, inhuman selfishness— will never, I believe, be identified with disease; but in a vast proportion of cases, the patient investigation of science, Christian and kind, discovers that what seemed guilt has been rooted in disease; and my own profound conviction, fixed in me now for a good many years, is that, in a society approximately Christian and scientific, the prison would, to a very great extent, be turned into an asylum. Entire provisional forfeiture of freedom, with subjection to hygienic treatment, physical and moral, would practically have all the severity required, for purposes of punishment, except in extreme cases. And for extreme cases, the kindest as well as the justest treatment would be death.

THE

CHAPTER XI.

ON CANT AND SHAM-RELIGION.

HE Latter-Day Pamphlets, issued singly in the second half of 1849, appeared collectively in 1850, and in the year following-the year of the first International Exhibition -we find Carlyle employed in writing the biography of John Sterling. The interest of that book lies chiefly, in fact almost solely, in this, that in it we learn what is Carlyle's practical solution of the religious problem of his time. That problem comes up in the Latter-Day Pamphlets, and no criticism of the Pamphlets can have a pretence to completeness if it omits consideration of the views therein presented on the religious question; but the Life of Sterling is an illustrative comment of the most pertinent and instructive kind on the religious principles advocated in the Pamphlets, enabling us to translate the abstract into the concrete, to mate principles with facts, to say specifically how, in a given example, Carlyle proposed that religious doubts and difficulties should be dealt with. What, then, are the religious principles enunciated in the Latter-Day Pamphlets?

The type and embodiment of what, in connection with religion, he regards as supremely wrong, Carlyle finds in Ignatius Loyola. Let no Protestant, however, lay the flattering unction to his soul that it is on Jesuits and Roman Catholics alone that Carlyle pours his fiery indignation. "For some two centuries," he says, "the genius of

mankind has been dominated by the Gospel of Ignatius, perhaps the strangest and certainly among the fatallest ever preached hitherto under the sun." Two centuries ago, when Oliver Cromwell sank, and Charles II. rose, we Protestants of Great Britain, "deeply detesting the name of Saint Ignatius, did nevertheless gradually adopt his Gospel as the real revelation of God's will, and the solid rule of living in this world." The essential purport of this Gospel he sums up in two sentences. "That to please the supreme Fountain of Truth your readiest method, now and then, was to persist in believing what your whole soul found to be doubtful or incredible. That poor human symbols were higher than the God Almighty's facts they symbolised; that formulas, with or without the facts symbolised by them, were sacred and salutary; that formulas, well persisted in, could still save us when the facts were all fled."

Two heads and fronts of offending are to be distinguished here. Our first offence is that we do not dare to disbelieve what is incredible. We think it prudent and virtuous to shilly-shally between truth and falsehood; we try to hush up inquiry; we strangle our doubts, and seek to persuade ourselves that reverence and piety are our motives for so doing. "Be careful how you believe truth,'" cries the good man everywhere: "composure and a whole skin are very valuable. Truth-who knows?-many things are not true; most things are uncertainties, very prosperous things are even open falsities that have been agreed upon. There is little certain truth going. If it isn't orthodox truth, it will play the very devil with you.' The principle on which these pseudo-virtuous persons proceed is "that God can be served by believing what is not true;" that it is a duty" to put out the sacred lamp of intellect within you; to decide on maiming yourself of that higher God-like gift, which God Himself has given you with a silent but awful

charge in regard to it." This cowardly prudence, this willingness to make shift with half-truths, or even to make believe that incredibilities are truths, this distrust and suspicion of the aggressive intellect, associated with a mawkish and maudlin sanctimoniousness of phrase, go to form what Carlyle names cant. Against cant he has always inveighed with a vehemence that would have been frantic, if any degree of vehemence in adjuring your friends not to drink what you believe to be deadliest poison could deserve the term.

The second point in Carlyle's general accusation is that we cling to symbols after they have become obsolete, that we make more of the symbols than of "the God Almighty's facts they symbolised." In Sartor Resartus, he teaches that political institutions are but the form and embodiment of truths, ideas, spiritual facts, and that, when the spirit has departed, the material form ought to disappear. All religions, in like manner, are represented by symbols, and it is the inevitable and universal law that the symbols grow old and perish. To try to perpetuate them when they have lost vitality is a criminal error, fraught with baleful consequences. These two charges-sham-belief and worship of dead symbols-are intimately connected with each other, and both may be included in the central, all comprehending iniquity of cant.

The symbols must go. They wax old as doth a garment, and it becomes an imperative duty to fold them up and change them. The truth embodied in the symbols, if really true, is, he admits, imperishable; he grants, also, that man must have his symbols, that the soul cannot feed on abstractions, that religion in the sense of felt and owned relationship to the Infinite is essential to national health. To the knowing sceptics of an irreverent age he frankly announces that their reduction of man to a mere intellectual animal or a machine is preposterous. "My enlightened friends of this