e inclined against that code and that all our
prejudices run against those who subscribe to it--which is to say, in
the direction of toleration, of open dealing, and even of a certain mild
snobbishness. We are both opposed to moral enthusiasm, and never drink
with a moral man if it can be avoided. The taboos that we personally
subscribe to are taboos upon the very things that Presbyterians hold
most dear--for example, moral certainty, the proselyting appetite, and
what may be described as the passion of the policeman. But we are
surely not fatuous enough to cherish our ideas to the point of fondness.
In the long run, we freely grant, it may turn out that the Presbyterians
are right and we are wrong--in brief, that God loves a moral man more
than he loves an amiable and honourable one. Stranger things, indeed,
have happened; one might even argue without absurdity that God is
actually a Presbyterian Himself. Whether He is or is not we do not
presume to say; we simply record the fact that it is our present
impression that He is not--and then straightway admit that our view is
worth no more than that of any other pair of men.

Meanwhile, however, it is certainly not going too far to notice the
circumstance that there is an irreconcilable antithesis between the two
sorts of men that we have described--that a great moral passion is fatal
to the gentler and more caressing amenities of life, and _vice versa_.
The man of morals has a certain character, and the man of honour has a
quite different character. No one not an idiot fails to differentiate
between the two, or to order his intercourse with them upon an
assumption of their disparity. What we know in the United States as a
Presbyterian is pre-eminently of the moral type. Perhaps more than any
other man among us he regulates his life, and the lives of all who fall
under his influence, upon a purely moral plan. In the main, he gets the
principles underlying that plan from the Old Testament; if he is to be
described succinctly, it is as one who carries over into modern life,
with its superior complexity of sin, the simple and rigid ethical
concepts of the ancient Jews. And in particular, he subscribes to their
theory that it is virtuous to make things hot for the sinner, by which
word he designates any person whose conduct violates the ordinances of
God as he himself is aware of them and interprets them. Sin is to the
Presbyterian the salient phenomenon of this wobbling and ne