A thrice-glorious arrangement,when I reflect on it;most salutary to all high and low interests;a truly human arrangement.You made the born le yours,welcoming him as what he was,the Sent of Heaven:you did force him either to die or become your enemy;idly neglecting or suppressing him as what he was ,a thing of worth.You accepted the blessed light ;and in the shape of infernal lightning it needed to visit you.How,like an immense mine-shaft through the dim oppressed strata of society,this Institution of the Priesthood ran;opening,from the lowest depths towards all heights and towards Heaven itself,a free road of egress and emergence towards virtuous leness,heroism and well-doing,for every born man.This we may call the living lungs and blood-circulation of those old Feudalisms.When I think of that immeasurable all-pervading lungs;present in every corner of human society,every meanest hut a cell of said lungs;inviting whatsoever le pious soul was born there to the path that was le for him;and leading thereby sometimes,if he were worthy,to be the Papa of Christendom,and Commander of all Kings,--Iperceive how the old Christian society continued healthy,vital,and was strong and heroic.When I contrast this with the le aims held out to le souls born in remote huts,or beyond the verge of Palace-Yard;and think of what your Lordship has done in the way of making priests and papas,--I see a society without lungs,fast wheezing itself to death,in horrid convulsions;and deserving to die.
Over Europe generally in these years,I consider that the State has died,has fairly coughed its last in street musketry,and fallen down dead,incapable of any but galvanic life henceforth,--owing to this same fatal want of lungs ,which includes all other wants for a State.And furthermore that it will never come alive again,till it contrive to get such indispensable vital apparatus;the outlook toward which consummation is very distant in most communities of Europe.If you let it come to death or suspended animation in States,the case is very bad!Vain to call in universal-suffrage parliaments at that stage:the universal-suffrage parliaments can give you any breath of life,can find any wisdom for you;by long impiety,you have let the supply of le human wisdom die out;and the wisdom that courts your universal suffrages is beggarly human attorneyism or sham-wisdom,which is an insight into the Laws of God's Universe,but into the laws of hungry Egoism and the Devil's Chicane,and can in the end profit community or man the kind of heroes that come mounted on the shoulders of the universal suffrage,and install themselves as Prime Ministers and healing Statesmen by force of able editorship,do bid very fair to bring Nations back to the ways of God.Eloquent high-lacquered pinchbeck specimens these,expert in the arts of Belial mainly;--fitter to be markers at some exceedingly expensive billiard-table than sacred chief-priests of men!
"Greeks of the Lower Empire;"with a varnish of parliamentary rhetoric;and,I suppose,this other great gift,toughness of character,--proof that they have persevered in their Master's service.Poor wretches,their industry is mob-worship,place-worship,parliamentary intrigue,and the multiplex art of tongue-fence:flung into that bad element,there they swim for decades long,throttling and wrestling one aher according to their strength,--and the toughest or luckiest gets to land,and becomes Premier.A more entirely unbeautiful class of Premiers was never raked out of the ooze,and set on high places,by any ingenuity of man.Dame Dubarry's petticoat was a better seine-net for fishing out Premiers than that.Let all Nations whom necessity is driving towards that method,take warning in time!
Alas,there is,in a manner,but one Nation that can still take warning!In England alone of European Countries the State yet survives;and might help itself by better methods.In England heroic wisdom is yet dead,and quite replaced by attorneyism:the honest beaver faculty yet abounds with us,the heroic manful faculty shows itself also to the observant eye,dead but dangerously sleeping.I said there were many kings in England:if these can yet be rallied into strenuous activity,and set to govern England in Downing Street and elsewhere,which their function always is,--then England can be saved from anarchies and universal suffrages;and that Apotheosis of Attorneyism,blackest of terrestrial curses,may be spared us.If these can,the other issue,in such forms as may be appropriate to us,is inevitable.What escape is there?England must conform to the eternal laws of life,or England too must die!
England with the largest mass of real living interests ever intrusted to a Nation;and with a mass of extinct imaginary and quite dead interests piled upon it to the very Heavens,and encumbering it from shore to shore,--does reel and stagger omisly in these years;urged by the Divine Silences and the Eternal Laws to take practical hold of its living interests and manage them:and clutching blindly into its venerable extinct and imaginary interests,as if that were still the way to do it.