med into a yet more devout
obligation and service towards creatures that have only their own
fellowship and mutual ministry to lean upon; and if we miss something of
the ancient solace of special and personal protection, the loss is not
unworthily made good by the growth of an imperial sense of participation
in the common movement and equal destination of eternal forces.

To have a mind penetrated with this spiritual persuasion, is to be in
full possession of the highest strength that man can attain. It springs
from a scientific and rounded interpretation of the facts of life, and
is in a harmony, which freshly found truths only make more ample and
elaborate, with all the conclusions of the intellect in every order. The
active energies are not paralysed by the possibilities of enfeebling
doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stultified by apprehension lest its
methods should discredit a document, or its inferences clash with a
dogma, or its light flash unseasonably on a mystery. There is none of
the baleful distortion of hate, because evil and wrong-doing and
darkness are acknowledged to be effects of causes, sums of conditions,
terms in a series; they are to be brought to their end, or weakened and
narrowed, by right action and endeavour, and this endeavour does not
stagnate in antipathy, but concentrates itself in transfixing a cause.
In no other condition of the spirit than this, in which firm
acquiescence mingles with valorous effort, can a man be so sure of
raising a calm gaze and an enduring brow to the cruelty of circumstance.
The last appalling stroke of annihilation itself is measured with purest
fortitude by one, whose religious contemplation dwells most habitually
upon the sovereignty of obdurate laws in the vast revolving circle of
physical forces, on the one hand, and, on the other, upon that moral
order which the vision and pity of good men for their fellows, guiding
the spontaneous energy of all men in strife with circumstance, have
raised into a structure sublimer and more amazing than all the majesty
of outer nature.

In Byron's time the pretensions of the two possible answers to the great
and eternally open questions of God, Immortality, and the like, were
independent of that powerful host of inferences and analogies which the
advance of physical discovery, and the establishment of a historical
order, have since then brought into men's minds. The direct aggressions
of old are for the most part abandone