Page:The English Peasant.djvu/296

 "  God's Vengeance against Public Robbers;" 10. "The Unnatural Mother;" 11. "The Sin of forbidding Marriage;" 12. "Parsons and Tithes."

These twelve sermons—for so he called them—were published in 1823, and sufficiently prove that his sudden esteem for Paine had nothing to do with that writer's sceptical opinions. Not to have reverenced and believed in the Bible would have required Cobbett to do positive violence to his deepest convictions, and perhaps we may add to his very nature. For though it may seem to the superficial observer a strange thing to say, William Cobbett was, in the strictly literal meaning of the term, a very religious man. No one could entertain a more intense belief than he did in the laws which God has written in the course and constitution of nature, and of the paramount duty of every man to obey those laws. As far as he had light, he sought sincerely to regulate his own life by them, and made it the task of his existence to assert, maintain, and render them dominant over the lives of his fellow-men. William Cobbett was always and everywhere a preacher of righteousness. He had, as we have seen, a natural piety. Old age, helpless infancy, suffering poverty, always commanded his ready and reverential sympathy. In all the domestic relations he was admirable—he was a dutiful son, a loving husband, and a tender father both from choice and conviction. Of his devotion to his country we cannot speak too highly; to it he sacrificed everything.

Such a man could not help seeing that the Bible was the chief exponent and witness of those great primal laws by which he felt himself and all men bound, and in the fulfilment of which he was convinced men, families, and nations could alone find happiness and true prosperity.

Yet his contemporaries might have said concerning him, "The least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." For he was not permitted to see beyond the confines of the visible; the spiritual was a sphere of which he had no conception. Cobbett was well-nigh a perfect instance of the mens sanum in corpore sano. Yet "the open eye" possessed by many more or less suffering in body and mind was not vouchsafed to him.

Yet this very limitation of the range of his vision probably gave a force and concentration to his intellect which it would not other-