injunction to keep the information to himself! Yet John Stuart Mill, if he had lived much longer, was apparently bidding fair to take a high place, not, certainly, among orthodox believers, but among the worthies of the Unitarian calendar. Most powerful intellects are either religious or religiously anti-religious, superstitious or superstitiously anti-superstitious. Mr. Morley belongs to the latter category, and the fact is not inexplicable. At a certain period of youth, when the passions are strong and reflection is weak, religious emotions very frequently come in—and come in opportunely—to supply the restraining influence of reason. When they are no longer needed, they die out; and, if they have been very fervid, the more ingenuous order of minds is but too apt to resent them as idle delusions, and to rush into opposite extremes. Weaker and less ingenuous natures profess to feel them after they have ceased to influence, and so become religious hypocrites. The transition is not easy to make, and I am not sure that Mr. Morley has been quite successful in the operation. Throughout his writings, with all their patient truthfulness and candor, I think I can discern a certain undercurrent of unconscious bias on the question of religion, as if the pendulum of reason had swung back with such violence as to become slightly overbalanced. Unlike Mill, who approached the subject from a unique stand-point of impartiality, he makes at once too much and too little of the theme. But, of this, more anon.
In 1860 Mr. Morley commenced his career as a journalist and man of letters, and from the first he laid the hand of a master on whatever he touched. His earliest contributions were to "The Leader," then an organ of advanced Liberalism, of which George Henry Lewes
