to the higher life; and for this evolution there is, I believe, divine provision made in those balanced variations of the ways of thought which give rise to our controversies in the search for truth. There may be some man with a mind wholly unbiassed, and, as the shot would stay wherever it is placed upon a level sheet of paper, so on his mind a thought might move in no direction. If there be men subject to this accident of birth, it is to be hoped that they are all well cared for in asylums for the imbeciles and idiots.

A stagnant mind is as a stagnant pool. For the social and spiritual growth of man, our conflicts of opinion provide means as sure as any that help on to the material advancement of our power. We might conceive the minds of men classified into natural orders, genera, and species, and all that produce blossom and fruit ranged under two great families like those of plants which the botanists call exogens and endogens. The exogens grow, like the oak, by additions on their outside; endogens, like the palm, grow by additions within. They differ altogether in that matter of the way of growth, yet they are both right trees. The characteristic difference that would establish two such families for all the thousand thousand forms of thought would lie, I believe, in the degree of bias towards or from Authority.

We agree in thinking that we owe our whole present civilisation to the wisdom of all generations of the past, against which we have now to set only the wisdom and the yet unwinnowed follies of that one generation to which we belong. We all agree also that progress has been due to changes made in each generation for adaptation to the growth of new conditions. We differ only in the degree of stress laid by each one of us on either half of this whole truth.

To some of us Nature has given the stronger bias towards Authority. We hold by the old ways until those eager for change can make their reason for it clear, and overcome our logical— sometimes, while civilisation is yet low, our forcible-resistance. With this bias is associated strong fidelity not only to the Authority of the Past, as an abstraction, but to individual

authority established in the Church and in the State, with loyal maintenance of all existing institutions. In all relations of life this bias shows itself—in the home, the place of business, the Church, the State. Our name in the State is rightly chosen from a word of Burke's, that represents our necessary healthy part in the great argument of life-we are Conservative.

To some of us Nature has given the stronger bias towards search for some direction in which to make that beneficial change which is contributed by each generation to the advancement of mankind. We are so many men with so many opinions, each of us most believing in his own ideas, but not all of us urging ideas that would benefit the world. We make our suggestions for the re-shaping of old institutions that have become more or less unsuited to the new conditions of life, and it is well for us that we have to bring all our opinions out into the open ground and meet the serried ranks of men who require proof, and much proof. Only that project of reform which conquers opposition is allowed to pass from theory to practice. If our suggestion prove right in the trial, it is added to the institutions of the country, which the whole body of those who had been our opponents will now join us in preserving. With this bias we associate a strong fidelity to the spirit of individual freedom, and our tendency being towards the questioning and testing of authority, we are apt to consider, as well of the positions of single men as of established institutions, whether, and if so where and how, they can be advantageously reformed. In all relations of life this bias shows itself. In our homes we are given to the readjustment of tables and chairs which conservative wives, brothers, or sisters are anxious to put back in their established places. We often thrive by it in business, and often ruin ourselves by it. We are active for the reformation of the Church and of the State, and in the State we call ourselves, from the spirit of liberty that we cherish, Liberals. But the word liberal has in its common use another sense equally applicable to the right-minded men of all forms of opinion. The correlative word to Conservative would be Reformer.

Lord Brougham, an ardent Reformer, thought it matter of lament that it takes about thirty years to get a reform of any kind accepted and established in this country. I think that matter of rejoicing. Thirty years are but one generation in the story of collective man, and if all the good ideas started at the beginning of one generation could be reasoned out, carefully winnowed from the bad, established and accepted, by the time that generation passed, we should come perhaps too soon into the New Jerusalem.

If these things be so, then it is very clear that the rate of advance in any nation will be in proportion to the freedom given to the working of this great machinery of Nature in the minds of men. If England has made more progress than her neighbours, it may be chiefly because in this country we have taken, when it has not been allowed to us; we have battled for throughout, as for a cardinal principle; the free right of saying what we think. We have given freer play than any other people to those forces of our nature through which alone collective man can go on with slow growth towards the ideal of what Tennyson has called "the crowning race

"Of those that, eye to eye, shall look

On knowledge; under whose command
Is Farth and Earth's, and in their hand

Is Nature like an open book.

No longer half akin to brute,

For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped and suffered, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit."

It was the sense that this right of free speech, for the full and thorough scrutiny of all forms of opinion, the complete deliberation that should precede all action, is the cardinal principle in our whole social system, the very eye by which we see, or say, the air we need to breathe, that caused Milton to put his utmost energy into the writing of his "Areopagitica, or Defence of the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing."

But if we are to see God's work in the diversity of minds and thank God for our conflicts of opinions; if we are only to see Nature working in the storms and eddies of our thought; shall we fight our battles still as heretofore? Not quite as heretofore, for infirmities of passion will be less liable to make our reasonings infirm. But Nature will not work in us the less for our knowing the fact. Hearts do not cease to beat in men who study their anatomy. Each of us who is worth anything to his neighbour would labour still for what he holds to be the highest right. The difference would all be in the better temper. Men would not then be drawn aside by passion from a clear view of the case they had to meet; reason would try fair issues with reason. Each side would work steadily at the shaking of the sieve that parts wheat from the chaff, and we might get a controversy settled in ten years instead of thirty. There is large scope for feeling, within bounds of reason. Logic has double force when its quick wit is warm with healthy generous emotion. But envy, hatred, malice are diseases of the mind; they cannot help to set a man's life or the world, or any part, however small, of the world's work to rights.

We see Milton in his prose writings an absolute type of the Reformer. He finds man enslaved to Custom and determines to think for himself. He will test all other authority by Scripture and Reason. In the Church he demands Liberty of Conscience, and by direct reference to Scripture and Reason he strives for the reform of the Reformation. In the Home he boldly faces custom in his pleading for higher regard to the spiritual end of marriage, and a consequent reform of marriage laws. For the School he boldly sketches a plan of reform regardless of tradition. In the State he argues for the development and the protection of the individual; and this volume closes with his outline of a plan of his own for the reconstitution of the Commonwealth. Everywhere he respects individual opinion that does not seek to force itself on others. He is intolerant only of intolerance.

Milton aimed at highest truth and highest purity through the conditions in Church and State by which he thought there would

be nearest approach to these among the people. He set forth his views with the enthusiasm of a poet and a zealous patriotism. Laud was a type of the other bias of opinion as to the best way of attaining highest truth and highest purity, the aim of both. Instead of claiming for each man a right to form his own opinions from the reading of the Bible, Laud limited the right to points on which the Church had left opinion free. He saw in a claim for complete individual freedom the danger of confusion in the Church, indefinite encouragement to heresy and schism. He looked, as Churchmen had been looking through centuries, for Christian unity in uniformity of doctrine and of ceremonial, although he was ready to allow a wider range for freedom of opinion than had been allowed by Rome or by Geneva. Laud saw in the scrupulous regard for ceremonial, that Milton disdained, a visible sign of respect for public worship which would help the thoughtless into at least decent habits of religion, that would make the people bow as with one act of worship, breathe its prayers as from one soul before the throne of God. To secure this end Authority must be maintained; men, for their own good, must be compelled to worship with their fellow-men in the great congregation, and this good could not be obtained without strictness in enforcing general obedience. So came, especially with Laud, that stricter rule over the Church which interfered, as Milton thought, with liberty of conscience, and made it impossible for him, after he had taken his M.A. degree, to carry out his own former intention and that of his friends for him by taking orders in the Church of England.

When Charles the First became King and Milton went to college, negotiations for the marriage of Charles with the Spanish Infanta had come to an end, and he was pledged to marry Henrietta Maria, then a girl of fifteen, sister to the King of France. There went with the arrangement a secret writing, signed by King James and his son, promising relief to the Catholics in England, although an opposite promise had been made to the English Parliament. The reign began with the bringing home of the bride, with great preparations for war with Spain, and with vague