for others recantation. "The French Revolution" as Hazlitt put it, "was the only match that ever took place between philosophy and experience; and waking from the trance of theory we hear the words Truth, Reason, Virtue, Liberty, with the same indifference or contempt that a cynic who has married a jilt or a termagant listens to the rhapsodies of lovers." Godwin found his own alluring by-way, and turning away at once from political repression and political agitation, became the pioneer of philosophic anarchism. To Shelley at the end of this marvellous thirty years of ardour, speculation, and despair, the hope became winged. She had her place no longer in "the very world which is the world of all of us." She had moved to

It requires no inordinate effort for us who live in an equable political climate to realise the atmosphere of Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. The lapse of a century indeed has made him a more intelligible figure than he could have seemed to the generation which immediately followed him. He was temperate in his rationalism and thrifty in his philanthropy. He tended to Unitarianism in his theology, but was a sturdy defender of Free Will. He had written a widely-read apology for the Colonial side in the American Civil War. A stout individualist in his political theory, inspired, as were nearly all the English progressive thinkers of his day, by an extreme jealousy of State action, he yet guarded himself carefully against anarchical conclusions, and followed Saint Paul in teaching obedience to magistrates. He had written a treatise on ethics which on some points anticipated Kant. But his most characteristic pre-occupation was a study of finance in the interests of national thrift and social benevolence. This cold moralist, who despised the emotional aspects of human nature and found no place for the affections in his scheme of the virtues, lapsed into passion when he attacked the National Debt, and developed an arithmetical enthusiasm when he explained his plan for providing through voluntary insurance for the old age of the worthy poor. He was not quite the first of the philosophers to dream of the abolition of war, and to plan an international tribunal for the settlement of disputes between nations. In that he followed Leibnitz, as he anticipated Kant.

It was such an essentially cold and calculating intellect as this which in that age of ferment could launch the new doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Modern readers know the Rev. Dr. Price only from the fulminations of Burke, in whose pages he figures now as an incendiary and again as a fool. He was in point of fact the soul of sobriety and the mirror of all the respectabilities in his serious dissenting world. It is worth while to note that he was also, with his friend Priestley, perhaps the only English Nonconformist preacher who has ever enjoyed a European reputation. No less a man than Condorcet refers to him as one of the formative minds of the century.

Dr. Price's sermon is worth a glance, not merely because it was the goad which provoked Burke to eloquent fury, but still more because it is a document which records for us the mood in which even the older and graver progressives of his generation greeted the French Revolution. It was an official discourse delivered before the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. This typically English club claimed to have met annually since 1688 for a dinner and a sermon. The centenary of our own Revolution and the events in France gave it for a moment a central place on the political stage. It was an eminently respectable society, mainly composed of middle-class Nonconformists, with four Doctors of Divinity on its Committee, an entrance fee of half-a-guinea, and a radical peer, Earl Stanhope, for its Chairman. At its annual meeting in November, 1789, Dr. Price "disdaining national partialities and rejoicing in every triumph of liberty and justice over arbitrary power," had moved an address congratulating the French National Assembly on "the Revolution in that country and on the prospect it gives to the two first kingdoms in the world of a common participation in the blessings of civil and religious liberty." The sermon was an eloquent expansion of this address.

It opens with a defence of the cosmopolitan attitude which could rejoice at an improvement in the prospects of our hereditary rival. Christ taught not patriotism, but universal benevolence, as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows. "My neighbour" is he to whom I can do most good, whether foreigner or fellow-citizen. We should love our country "ardently but not exclusively," considering ourselves "citizens of the world," and taking care "to maintain a just regard to the rights of other countries." Patriotism had been in history a scourge of mankind. It was among the Romans no better than "a principle holding together a band of robbers in their attempts to crush all liberty but their own." The aim of those who love their kind can be only to spread Truth, Virtue and Liberty. To make mankind happy and free, it should suffice to instruct them. "Ignorance is the parent of bigotry, intolerance, persecution and slavery. Inform and instruct mankind and these evils will be excluded." There follow some rambling remarks on the need for a revisal of the Liturgy and the Articles, a complaint of the servility shown in a recent address to King George, who ought to consider himself rather the servant than the sovereign of his people, and a prediction that France and England, each delivered from despotism by a happy revolution, will now "not merely refrain from engaging in wars with one another, but unite in preventing wars everywhere." As for our own Revolution of 1688, it was a great but not a perfect work. It had left religious toleration incomplete and the Parliamentary franchise unequal. We must continue to enforce its principles, especially in the matter of removing the disabilities that still weigh upon dissenters. Those principles are briefly (1) Liberty of Conscience, (2) The right to resist power when it is abused, and (3) The right to choose our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct and to frame a government for ourselves. There follows a curious little moral exhortation which shows how far the good Dr. Price was from forgetting his duties as a preacher. He had been distressed by the lax morals of some of his colleagues in the agitation for Reform, and he pauses to deplore that "not all who are zealous in this cause are as conspicuous for purity of morals as for ability." He cannot reconcile himself to the idea of an immoral patriot, and begs that they will at least hide their vices. The old man finds his peroration in Simeon's prayer. He had seen the great salvation. "I have lived to see thirty millions of people indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice, their king led in triumph and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects. And now methinks I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience."

The world remembers the scholar Salmasius only because he provoked Milton to a learned outbreak of bad manners. There is something immortal even in the ill-temper of great men, and Dr. Price lives in modern memory chiefly because he moved Burke to declamatory rage. His Reflections on the French Revolution