ideal; and the experiments of his ignorant days will not have disturbed the practical work of the Church among the masses who have no means of recreating the past from books in the domain of ideas; and for whom therefore the destruction of consecrated habits means too often spiritual death.
The sentence which condemns Reformers to comparative isolation acts like Gideon's test, in securing that the work of Reform shall be left in the right hands. He who has seen the Law of reaction vibrating down the ages, lives henceforth under a spell; for him, fate has no terrors, solitude no loneliness, and curses no meaning; he can go on his way notwithstanding any antagonism; he knows that, whatever may happen during his life, he will rule posterity from his grave. Those who can be stopped had better be stopped; they have not seen God. One who knows so little about the ways of the Creator that he cares what contemporaries think, had better work on lines laid down beforehand; he should not go wandering off into the Infinite to seek new Truth.
Tegner[1] (whose conception of the value of ecclesiastical outlawry I am here following) represents the young champion of Reform and of Liberty outlawed, not because of any of the things which he wished or intended to do, but for accidentally setting fire to an old temple. He is then subjected to a variety of tests, and gives such proofs of fidelity under difficult circumstances that at last he is elected king of a country adjoining the one from which he was banished. But the spirit of his father reveals to him in a dream that he must not
- ↑ Frithiof's Saga.
