Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/324

318 some miracle might take place to avenge her, sent the jailers to take everything that had been used by the queen; and they wrapped them all up in the sheets of her bed and carried them off, no one knows whither. You know how the executioner tied brutally together the queen's small hands, how he cut her cap which she had taken such pains to mend, and then her beautiful hair, which when cut he put in his pocket — to burn afterward. And you know about the little child who held out its hands to the august victim as she mounted the scaffold, so that for an instant she thought it was her son, the martyred child whom she would only see again in heaven!

You know that she wrote her will secretly, while lying in her bed, and that it was found and given to Fouquier-Tinville. And, finally, you know all about her death, and you do not ask me to tell it you; for, see, I can no more!

 

 From The Spectator.

can be no doubt that it is even more incumbent on people who profess a strong religious conviction to realize what they believe, and not to use vague and unmeaning language, than it is incumbent on those who declare that on all these subjects their judgment is suspended — that they see the weakness of every form of dogmatism, positive and negative — to avoid phrases which imply their concurrence in either the faith or the dogmatic disbelief of other men. To use hollow words concerning subjects on which we profess deep and solemn convictions is clearly less excusable than to use hollow words on subjects on which we profess to be in a state of complete uncertainty, just as it is less excusable to use hollow words with intimate friends, with whom every expression should be trustworthy, than it is with mere acquaintances, with whom phrases are usually interpreted as carrying more superficial and less seriously weighed meaning. It is more excusable to trifle with a suspended judgment, than it is to trifle with religious convictions. Even if one whose judgment is suspended does seem sometimes to assume a belief he has not, or a disbelief he has not, there is less of treason to the truth in it than there is when one whose judgment is deeply convinced on subjects of the highest moment uses, in a thoroughly unreal sense, words which ought to mark the focus of his highest feelings, the springs of all his hopes or all his fears. But then this applies rather to the school of true sceptics, than to the school of enthusiasts in positivism or humanism, or any of the new "isms" whose exponents offer us a substitute for Christianity that is to rise above Christianity, to dispel all its narrow and selfish dreams, and to provide in its place the fullest life and the noblest aims possible to men on earth. Bishop Ellicott, in the thoughtful and interesting, if not always very thorough-going addresses on "Modern Unbelief" which he has recently delivered in the diocese of Gloucester and Bristol, has drawn attention to the Christian tone of sentiment so often now adopted by those who repudiate earnestly the Christian and even the theistic faith, and he has rightly classed it as one of the peculiar dangers of the present time — though it is also, we think, quite as much a danger to the rationalists who encourage such a tone of sentiment amongst their followers, as it is to the loose-minded Christians who are attracted by it — that you see such an astonishing affinity for the moods and emotions appropriate to the Christian faith under cover of a creed which rejects and despises that faith. For instance, the bishop quotes from Mr. Fiske's "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy" the following passage: "Every temptation that is resisted, every sympathetic impulse that is discreetly yielded to, every noble aspiration that is encouraged, every sinful thought that is repressed, every bitter word that is withheld, adds its little item to the impetus of the great movement which is bearing humanity onwards towards a richer life and higher character. Out of individual rectitude come the rectitude and happiness of the community; so that the ultimate salvation of mankind is to be wrought out solely by that obedience to the religious instinct which urges the individual, irrespective of utilitarian considerations, to live in conformity with nature's requirements. 'Nearer, my God, to thee,' is the prayer dictated by the religious faith of past ages, to which the deepest scientific analysis of the future may add new meanings, but of which it can never impair the primary significance." What a writer who, according to Bishop Ellicott, "distinctly opposes and condemns the Christian conception of a personal God," means by "Nearer, my God to thee," unless, perhaps, it be in the sense of one of the dramatis personæ of