lover. But love is the parent of fear, and none knew better than Burke
how thin is the lava layer between the costly fabric of society and the
volcanic heats and destroying flames of anarchy. He trembled for the
fair frame of all established things, and to his horror saw men, instead
of covering the thin surface with the concrete, digging in it for
abstractions, and asking fundamental questions about the origin of
society, and why one man should be born rich and another poor. Burke was
no prating optimist: it was his very knowledge how much could be said
against society that quickened his fears for it. There is no shallower
criticism than that which accuses Burke in his later years of apostasy
from so-called Liberal opinions. Burke was all his life through a
passionate maintainer of the established order of things, and a ferocious
hater of abstractions and metaphysical politics. The same ideas that
explode like bombs through his diatribes against the French Revolution
are to be found shining with a mild effulgence in the comparative calm of
his earlier writings. I have often been struck with a resemblance, which
I hope is not wholly fanciful, between the attitude of Burke's mind
towards government and that of Cardinal Newman towards religion. Both
these great men belong, by virtue of their imaginations, to the poetic
order, and they both are to be found dwelling with amazing eloquence,
detail, and wealth of illustration on the varied elements of society.
Both seem as they write to have one hand on the pulse of the world, and
to be for ever alive to the throb of its action; and Burke, as he
regarded humanity swarming like bees into and out of their hives of
industry, is ever asking himself, How are these men to be saved from
anarchy? whilst Newman puts to himself the question, How are these men to
be saved from atheism? Both saw the perils of free inquiry divorced from
practical affairs.

'Civil freedom,' says Burke, 'is not, as many have endeavoured to
persuade you, a thing that lies hid in the depth of abstruse science. It
is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation, and all the
just reasoning that can be upon it is of so coarse a texture as perfectly
to suit the ordinary capacities of those who are to enjoy and of those
who are to defend it.'

'Tell men,' says Cardinal Newman, 'to gain notions of a Creator from His
works, and if they were to set about it (which nobody does), they would
be jade