with an appearance of greater liberality.

Public opinion

may be really liberal enough to tolerate many different forms of religion, but if it does not tolerate abstinence from public services, the Dissenter has to conform to the dominant worship in places where there is no other. In England it may seem that there is not very much hardship in this, as the Church is not extreme in doctrine and is remarkably tolerant of variety; yet, even in England, a conscientious Unitarian might feel some difficulty about creeds and prayers which were never intended for him. There are, however, harder cases than those of a Dissenter forced to conform to the Church of England. The Church of Rome is far more extreme and authoritative, far more sternly repressive of human reason; yet, there are thousands of rural places on the continent where religious toleration is supposed to exist, and where, nevertheless, the inhabitants are compelled to hear mass to avoid the imputation of absolute irreligion. A man like Wesley or Bunyan would, in such a position, have to choose between apparent Romanism and apparent Atheism, if indeed the village opinion did not take good care that he should have no choice in the matter.

It may be said that people should live in places where their own form of worship is publicly practised. No doubt many do so. I remember an Englishman belonging to a Roman Catholic family who would not spend a Sunday in an out-of-the-way place in Scotland because he could not hear mass. Such a person, having the means to choose his place of residence, and a faith so strong that religious considerations always came first with him, would compel everything to give way to the

M

necessity for having mass every Sunday, but this is a very exceptional case. Ordinary people are the victims of circumstances and not their masters.

If a villager has little religious freedom he does not greatly enlarge it when he becomes a soldier. He has the choice between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. In some countries, even this very moderate degree of liberty is denied. Within the present century Roman Catholic soldiers were compelled to attend Protestant services in Prussia. The truth is that the genuine military spirit is strongly opposed to individual opinion in matters of religion. Its ideal is that every detail in a soldier's existence should be settled by the military authorities, his religious belief amongst the rest.

What may be truly said about military authority in religious matters is that, as the force employed is perfectly well known-as it is perfectly well known that soldiers take part in religious services under compulsion -there is no hypocrisy in their case, especially where the conscription exists, and therefore but slight moral hardship. Certainly the greatest hardship of all is to be compelled to perform acts of conformity with all the appearance of free choice. The tradesman who must go to mass to have customers, is in a harder position than the soldier. For this reason it is better for the moral health of a nation when there is to be compulsion of some kind, that it should be boldly and openly tyrannical, that its work should be done in the face of day, that it should be outspoken, uncompromising, complete. To tyranny of that kind a man may give way without any loss of self-respect, he yields to force

majeure; but to that viler and meaner kind of tyranny which keeps a man in constant alarm about the means of earning his living, about the maintenance of some wretched little peddling position in society, he yields. with a sense of far deeper humiliation, with a feeling of contempt for the social power that uses such miserable means, and of contempt for himself also.

ESSAY XIII.

PRIESTS AND WOMEN.

PART I.-SYMPATHY.

WOMEN hate the inexorable. They like a condition of things in which nothing is so surely fixed but that the rule may be broken in their favour, or the hard decision reversed. They like concession for concession's sake, even when the matter is of slight importance. A woman will ask a favour from a person in authority when a man will shrink from the attempt, and if the woman gains her point by entreaty she will have a keen and peculiar feminine satisfaction in having successfully exercised what she feels to be her own especial power, to which the strong rough creature, man, may often be made to yield. A woman will go forth on the most hopeless errands of intercession and persuasion, and, in spite of the most adverse circumstances, will not unfrequently succeed. Scott made admirable use of this feminine tendency in the Heart of Mid-Lothian; Jeannie Deans, with a woman's feelings and perseverance, had a woman's reliance on her own persuasive powers, and the result proved that she was right. All things in a woman combine to make her mighty in persuasion. Her very weakness aids her, she can assume a pitiful, child-like tender

ness.

Her ignorance aids her, as she seems never to know that a decision can be fixed and final; then she has tears, and besides these pathetic influences she has generally some magnetism of sex, some charm or attraction, at least, in voice or manner, and sometimes she has that marvellous, that all but irresistible gift of beauty which has ruled and ruined the masters of the world.

Having constantly used these powers of persuasion with the strongest being on this planet, and used them with such wonderful success that it is even now doubtful whether the occult feminine government is not mightier than the open masculine government, whilst it is not a matter of doubt at all, but of assured fact, that society is ruled by queens and ladies, and not by kings and lords; with all these evidences of their influence in this world, it is intelligible that women should willingly listen to those who tell them that they have similar influence over supernatural powers, and, through them, on the destinies of the universe. Far less willingly would they listen to some hard scientific teacher who should say, "No, you have no influence beyond this planet, and that which you exercise upon its surface is limited by the force that you are able to set in motion. The Empress Eugénie had no supernatural influence through the Virgin Mary, but she had great and dangerous natural influence through her husband, and it may be true, what is asserted, that she caused in this way a disastrous war An exclusively originating Intelligence, acting at the beginning of evolution-a setter-in-motion of a prodigious self-acting machinery of cause producing effect, and effects in their turn becoming a new complexity of causes -an Intelligence that we cannot persuade because we