Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/183

 the best thing. His alliance is so precious against the mailed and gowned array of the Philistines, that the least defection, the least error of movement, imperils more than his own position; a whole regiment may be misled into ruin by the general, while the heat and burden of the day lie before us yet. No man has done so much to exalt and to correct men's view of the higher criticism and its office. Wherever therefore in things great or small he outruns or falls short of the immediate goal of a just judgment, the instant aim of a pure argument, it is worth while to take note of the slippery or oblique reasoning, or at least to sift and strain it, on the chance that here may be some error. "The light of the body is the eye;" he is the eye of English criticism; and if ever for some passing purblind minute the light that is in that body be darkness, how great indeed is that darkness! Dark however he properly never is, but I think at times oblique or drowsy. He has smitten the Janus of Philistine worship on one face; under the other, if he has not himself burnt a pinch or two of adulterate incense, he has encouraged or allowed others to burn. At the portal by which English devotees press thickest into the temple of Dagon he has stood firm as in a breach, and done good service; but he has left unguarded other points of entrance. All that is said in his essays on the religious tradition and the religious idea, as opposed to Philistine demolition or to Philistine edification, I accept and admire as truth, excellent if not absolute, and suggestive if not final; but from his own vantage ground of meditation and idea I start my objection to this inference and that. Protestantism, conservative and destructive,