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306 it is made to be constantly assimilating such sustenance from the universe; this is its food: not by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, doth man live. What, then, must be the moral starvation of the man who, from an excess of caution, turns away from every thing of the kind, until from want of habit he can no longer see such things, and forgets their very existence; so that for him there is no longer any glory in the universe! For all beauty or glory is but the presence of law; and the universe to him has ceased to be a scene of law, and has become an infinite litter of detail, a rubbish-heap of confused particulars, a mere worry and weariness to the imagination. I have been describing the Philistine, the miserable slave of details, who worships a humiliated, dissected and abject deity, a mere Dagon, "fallen flat upon the grundsel-edge, and shaming his worshipers."

There is a particular form of conventionalism which all men who see it instinctively call by the name of atheism. By conventionalism generally, I understand the mistaking of institutions, usages, forms of society, which essentially are temporary and transitory, for normal and permanent forms. It is conventionalism, for example, when hereditary royalty or aristocracy are supposed to be not merely good institutions in particular cases but necessary in all countries and times. There is nothing at all atheistic in such a mistake; it is rather a superstition—that is, it is a false belief, but still a belief. The temporary arrangements are honestly confused with eternal laws, the feelings and views which in course of time have grown up around them are honestly mistaken for essential morality. The devoted adherents of the exiled Stuarts and Bourbons, the early Jesuits and the other champions of the counter-reformation, seem to me to have been such conventionalists. I think they confounded a transitory state of things with the sacred and eternal laws of human society. But for a long time their faith was genuine though mistaken. They had a God, and therefore they had vigor, and occasionally victory. But at the same time their belief was an ebbing tide. The movement of the age was, on the whole, against it; their successes always bore the marks of being accidental, and were followed in no long time by more than equivalent reverses. They could never give a character of reality to what they created; they could seldom feel quite easy and happy in their party strife. Their eloquence was copious and sonorous, but not often quite natural, and seldom convincing or overwhelming. And with such conventionalists, when the age puts them on their defense, these misgivings, this uneasiness, this constraint and depression go on increasing. Doubt penetrates them in spite of all their resistance, in spite of all the chivalrous devotion to their cause upon which they pride themselves. In the ardor of conflict they have pushed into the foreground all the weakest parts of their creed, and have got into the habit of asserting most vehemently just what they doubt most,