subject seems bound in the last resort to submit to disqualification. The general rule of the State must be, to seek for the discharge of civil duties the most competent men. And yet this must be with relation to circumstances; for clearly it is not obliged to secure absolutely the ablest men for all public employments, or to claim the exercise of a pre-emptive right upon the services of every individual in the nation; that then to which it is bound really is, to prefer the more able to the less, when both can be had; to apply to candidates for office all the practicable criteria of competency. According to these principles, the question which we are now considering is not whether the State has any right to injure or punish for religious non-conformity, but simply in what manner it is to provide the fittest persons for the discharge of what we have ascertained by the previous inquiry to be its duties.

67. Now a certain grade of understanding, in a form of instruction more or less professional according to the particular case, is one of these criteria. Christian holiness and purity of life is another; for surely no man will dispute that cæteris paribus political duties would be better performed, if they were always intrusted to those who make it their first study in life to follow the Redeemer. Profession of the national faith is another of these criteria; lower than the last, yet naturally and obviously tending to realise the spiritual element in the national life, both externally, and as connected with the necessary inward dispositions. A morality reaching some standard of social decorum is the last criterion that I shall name; and is

requisite, according to the lowest theory of the obligations of the State, to guarantee the fidelity of the functionary himself, and to avoid public scandal.

68. Of these criteria the first and the last belong to the lower forms of nationality, the second and the third to the higher. The former pair are the most absolutely required, but also the least permanently beneficial. By them a State has material consistency and life; but with them it may sink into moral death. As, however, the second criterion of fitness is the one which ultimately would most conduce to the realisation of a perfect national life, so also it is the one which under the conditions of humanity the State can hardly ever ascertain and secure. Indeed, if this criterion were practicable, I know not whether there might not be an absolute and indefeasible obligation to apply it, and a positive sin in using any other without it. For it implies not a condition or presumption of moral excellence, but excellence itself. And as the third is, next to the second, most allied with the morality of the national life, so also it is one, the beneficial working of which absolutely presupposes a degree both of religious and also of national coherency, a moral freshness and youth, a love and a pursuit of truth among the people, keen as that of the morning hunter,* without which it can be no better than the very skeleton of a corpse long ago abandoned by its informing spirit.

69. No: God still in practice vindicates, sufficiently for full attestation, the law of national oneness,

* Coleridge.

by the experienced impossibility of reversing its conditions, by the essential parallelism of all the motions of life in the State and in the people. A people that morally lives, will naturally throw itself into aggregate and social forms that throb sympathetically and answer to its own impulses. A people morally dead will not create, nor long endure, institutions that are impregnated with moral life. The State must die also though the vital flame will flicker yet about the nobler region of the heart, though

The grudging ghost doth strive with the frail fleзh,*

yet, if the limbs be cold for ever, the struggle cannot long continue.

Vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras.†

Yet is it indeed a gallant and a stirring sight, when a ruler, whose soul is lighted with the flame of other days, battles painfully, unsuccessfully, hopelessly, against a degenerate time, like a lofty ship against the insuperable tempest. To see Clarendon and Southampton in the polluted court of Charles the Second; or, in ancient times, to see Phocion in Athens, the second Agis in Lacedæmon; Theodosius, Boniface, Belisarius, amidst the colossal ruins of the Roman empire; for these are husbandmen whose toil is spent freely through a faith in unseen good and surely somewhere in the future it shall grow into a golden harvest.

70. These therefore are the laws of reason and ex† Æn. xii. 952.

Spenser, i. ii. 19.

perience. Yet the State is an agent. It surely must not yield, before it has expended the resources of its agency. It has a power, a mighty power, to act upon. the people, as well as a liability to be acted upon by them. Inasmuch, therefore, as dissidence, taken in the whole, however the rule may be qualified or even reversed in particular cases, implies a failure in one of the conditions of full national life; it also implies a defect, be it more or be it less, of competency for public office, whose holders act on behalf of the nation. The State, therefore, in certain circumstances, may disqualify. It does not thereby persecute, because it inflicts a negative penalty, not for its own sake, but incidentally and by the way, while it is engaged in seeking the most competent men who are to be had for its instruments. It does not, under such a supposition, exclude a man with the intention that he may suffer, but because he wants one of the conditions of fitness which it has the power to secure elsewhere. Accordingly the State of England uses disqualification to a moderate, and (as I think) prudent and warrantable extent. It excludes on account of religion, not from the franchise, but from municipal and political office generally, those who decline to found their promise to fulfil its duties aright " upon the faith of a Christian." So runs the oath, or declaration, which political officers elect are bound to make.

71. I will not pursue far through the labyrinth of detail the intricate questions of political duty which arise in this portion of my subject. Let me, however, suppose a case, in which the friends of a national

religion hold the insignia of power; where its adversaries evidently preponderate in the possession of equally real though less recognised and determinate social forces, and evidently menace violence and convulsion. Now we are agreed, that religion as religion ought not to be upheld by physical power. But in the case supposed, religion is law. Shall it not be defended as law? If not, what means the omnipotence of a legislature, the supremacy of law? If one law may be disobeyed and remain without vindication, so may the rest; where, then, is public order? Or if the legislature hasten to repeal the law, is not the upshot practically the same? Upon the other hand, there is perhaps a point, at which force itself becomes not only inappropriate but ineffective for maintaining those elements of suasion, which may have found a place in public legislation, and which undoubtedly may imply coercion in a secondary sense; that is to say, the maintenance of actual law against violence, or the levy of funds to support establishments, as for art, learning, or religion. I am not able to define in terms the point at which the firm control of rebellious parts becomes perilous to the corporate existence of the whole, and at which therefore it must be abandoned. But in any view it is socially a most mischievous result, as well as one implying guilt in its wilful authors, when the fasces of public authority require to be lowered in deference to the exactions of the disorganising principle of partial and private will.

72. It may, however, possibly be said, that to admit that cases may arise in which deviation from the idea