ground. A further help was given by a section of the "religious press," which always applauded the latest and most advanced criticism, and by a "mutual admiration society " of authors, which wrote encomiums on each other's books as soon as they appeared. Their motto was "Odi profanum vulgus et arceo." They extolled the books which flouted the convictions of the common people, and raised pæans of victory as each position of traditional faith was stormed and captured. And so the emancipating work of scholarship is well-nigh accomplished. Faith is now labelled credulity, and the men of understanding are few who believe in the legends either of sacred or profane history. The world is governed by reason, and our statues are raised to emancipators like Hume and Voltaire, Strauss and Renan.

The doctrine of Epicurus rules the word: "Pleasure is the chief good." The very language has changed. Meaningless words like "patriotism," "benevolence," "self-sacrifice," have disappeared from use; so have archaic terms like "sin" and "salvation," ""heaven" and " hell." We no longer waste our resources on building churches and hospitals, asylums and poorhouses. Reason is our deity, and it tells us that the "lethal chamber" is the easiest way of disposing of the sick and dying. Mothers no longer rear infirm infants to trouble the community. Every man does that which is right in his own eyes. Our motto is, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The Ten Commandments are obsolete, especially the Seventh, which is abolished by statute, and the sacred right of suicide is granted to all. It is true that some old fools still believe the words of St. Peter that "the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night," and that " the Earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up"; and sometimes we have a bad quarter of an hour when a thunderstorm darkens the sky; but we take comfort from the words spoken to our first parents by that great Iconoclast who restored to us the forbidden fruit: "God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil" !!!

EXPLANATORY NOTE

It seems superfluous to say to educated readers of the Exrcusus that the vein of irony adopted is on the lines of Pascal's Provençal Letters, or Archbishop Whately's Doubts of the Existence of Napoleon Buonaparte; but intimations have reached the writer that some readers who lack the sense of humour have missed the point, and are shocked at its impiety. For such I may say it was intended that they should be shocked at the awful consequences that flow from the rejection of the solemn testimony of Holy Scripture as set forth (for example) in 2 Peter chap. iii. verses 3-7 and 11-13 :—

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts.

And saying, Where is the promise of His coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the Creation.

For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the Word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water, and in the water:

Whereby the world than then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

But the heavens and the earth, which are now by the same Word, are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness.

Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?

Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

Appendix XVIII

LORD ROSEBERY'S Speech on MR. GLADSTONE

THE EARL OF ROSEBERY: My Lords, there would at first sight appear little left to be said after what has been so eloquently and feelingly put from both sides of the House; but as Mr. Gladstone's last successor in office, and as one who was associated with him in many of the most critical episodes of the last twenty years of his life, your Lordships will perhaps bear with me for a moment while I say what little I can say on such a subject and on such an occasion. My Lords, it has been said by the Prime Minister, and I think truly, that the time has not yet come to fix with any approach to accuracy the place that Mr. Gladstone will fill in history. We are too near him to do more than note the vast space that he filled in the world, the great influence that he exercised, his constant contact with all the great movements of his time. But the sense of proportion must necessarily be absent, and it must be left for a later time, and even, perhaps, for a later generation, accurately to appraise and appreciate the relation. My Lords, the same may also be said of his intellect and of his character. They are, at any rate, too vast a subject to be treated on such an occasion as this. But I may at least cite the words, which I shall never forget, which were used by the noble Marquess when Mr. Gladstone resigned the office of Prime Minister, that—

"His was the most brilliant intellect that had been applied to the service of the State since Parliamentary government began.'

That seems to me an adequate and a noble appreciation; but there is also this pitiful side, incident to all mortality, but which strikes one more strongly with regard to Mr. Gladstone than with regard to any one else, and it is this-that intellect, mighty by nature, was fashioned and prepared by the labour of every day and almost every hour until the last day of health-fashioned to be so perfect a machine, only to be stopped for ever by a single touch of the Angel of Death. My Lords, there are two features of Mr. Gladstone's intellect which I cannot help noting on this occasion, for they were so signal and so salient, and distinguished him so much, so far as I know, from all other minds that I have come into contact with, that it would be wanting to this occasion if they were not noted. The first was his enormous power of concentration. There never was a man, I believe, in this world who, at any given moment, on any given subject, could so devote every resource

and power of his intellect, without the restriction of a single nerve within him, to the immediate purpose of that subject and that object. And the second feature is one which is also rare, but which, I think, has never been united so much with the faculty of concentration, and it is this: the infinite variety and multiplicity of his intellect. There was no man, I suspect, in the history of England--no man, at any rate, in recent centuries-who touched the intellectual life of the country at so many points, and over so great a range of years. But that, in reality, was not merely a part of his intellect, but of his character, for the first and most obvious feature of Mr: Gladstone's character was the universality and the humanity of his sympathy. I do not now mean, as we all know, that he sympathized with great causes and with oppressed nations, and with what he believed to be the cause of liberty all over the world; but I do mean his sympathy with all classes of human beings, from the highest to the lowest. That, I believe, was one of the secrets of his almost unparalleled power over his fellow men. May I give two instances of what I mean? The first time he visited Midlothian we were driving away from, I think, his first meeting, and we were followed by a shouting crowd as long as their strength would permit; but there was one man who held on much longer than any of them, who ran, I should think, for two miles, with evidently some word he was anxious to say, and when he dropped away we listened for what it might be. It was this: "I wished to thank you, Sir, for the speech you made to the workhouse people." I dare say not many of your Lordships recollect that speech; for my purpose, it does not particularly matter what its terms may have been. We should think it, however, an almost overwhelming task to speak to a workhouse audience, and to administer words of consolation and sympathy to a mass who, after all, represent in the main exhaustion, and failure and destitution. That was the lowest class. Let me take another instance-from the highest. I believe that the last note Mr. Gladstone wrote with his own hand was written to Lady Salisbury, to ask her about a carriage accident in which the noble Marquess had been involved. I think it is pathetic, and characteristic of the man, that in the hour of his sore distress, when he could hardly put pen to paper, he should have written that note of sympathy to the wife of the most prominent, and not the least generous, of his political opponents. My Lords, sympathy was one great feature of Mr. Gladstone's character. There was another with which the noble Marquess has dealt, which I will only touch on in a single word, for it is a subject not for this moment or for this purpose. I mean the depth of his Christian faith. I have heard, not often, and have seen it made a subject for cavil, for sarcasm, for scoffing remarks. Those remarks were the offspring of ignorance, and not of knowledge. The faith of Mr. Gladstone, obviously to all who knew him, pervaded every act and every part of his life. It was the faith, the pure faith, of a child, confirmed by the experience and the conviction of a man. And that last word brings me to the other, and the only other point of his character, on which I would say a word. There was no expression so frequently on Mr. Gladstone's lips as the word "manhood." Speak

ing of any one-I can appeal to his friends behind me he would say, with an accent that no one who heard him could ever forget, "So-andso had the manhood to do this": "So-and-so had the manhood to do that "; and no one, I think, will in the converse ever forget the extremity of scorn which he could put into the negative phrase, “Soand-so had not the manhood to do this": "So-and-so had not the manhood to say that." It was obvious, from all he said and from all he did, that that virile virtue of manhood, in which he comprehended courage, righteous daring, the disdain of odds against him—that virile virtue of manhood, was perhaps, the one that he put the highest. This country, this nation, loves brave men. Mr. Gladstone was the bravest of the brave. There was no cause so hopeless that he was afraid to undertake it; there was no amount of opposition that would cow him when once he had undertaken it. It was then faith, manhood and sympathy that formed the triple base of Mr. Gladstone's character. My Lords, this is, as has been pointed out, a unique occasion. Mr. Gladstone always expressed the hope that there might be an interval left to him between the end of his political and of his natural life. That period was given to him, for it is more than four years since he quitted the sphere of politics. Those four years have been with him a special preparation for his death; but have they not also been a preparation for his death with the nation at large? Had he died in the plenitude of his power as Prime Minister, would it have been possible for a vigorous and convinced opposition to allow to pass to him, without a word of dissent, the honours which are now universally conceded? My Lords, that has all changed now. Hushed is the voice of criticism, hushed are the controversies in which he took part, hushed for the moment is the very sound of party conflict. I venture to think that this is a notable fact in our history. It was not so with the elder Pitt. It was not so with the younger Pitt. It was not so with the elder Pitt, in spite of his tragic end, of his unrivalled services, and of his feeble old age. It was not so with the younger Pitt, in spite of his long control of the country and his absolute and absorbed devotion to the State. I think that we should remember this as creditable, not merely to the man, but to the nation. My Lords, there is one deeply melancholy feature of Mr. Gladstone's death, by far the most melancholy, to which, I think, none of my noble Friends have adverted. I think that all our thoughts must be turned, now that he has gone, to that solitary and pathetic figure, who for sixty years shared all the sorrows and all the joys of Mr. Gladstone's life; who received his every confidence and every aspiration; who shared his triumphs with him, and cheered him under his defeats; who, by her tender vigilance, I firmly believe, sustained and prolonged his years. I think that the occasion ought not to pass without letting Mrs. Gladstone know that she is in all our thoughts to-day. And yet, my Lords, putting that one figure aside, to me, at any rate, this is not an occasion for absolute and entire and unreserved lamentation. Were it, indeed, possible so to protract the inexorable limits of human life, that we might have hoped that future years, and even future generations, might see Mr. Gladstone's face and hear his