d and wearied by the labyrinth they were tracing; their minds
would be gorged and surfeited by the logical operation. To most men
argument makes the point in hand more doubtful and considerably less
impressive. After all, man is not a reasoning animal, he is a seeing,
feeling, contemplating, actual animal.'

Burke is fond of telling us that he is no lawyer, no antiquarian, but a
plain, practical man; and the Cardinal, in like manner, is ever insisting
that he is no theologian--he leaves everything of that sort to the
schools, whatever they may be, and simply deals with religion on its
practical side as a benefit to mankind.

If either of these great men has been guilty of intellectual excesses,
those of Burke may be attributed to his dread of anarchy, those of Newman
to his dread of atheism. Neither of them was prepared to rest content
with a scientific frontier, an imaginary line. So much did they dread
their enemy, so alive were they to the terrible strength of some of his
positions, that they could not agree to dispense with the protection
afforded by the huge mountains of prejudice and the ancient rivers of
custom. The sincerity of either man can only be doubted by the bigot and
the fool.

But Burke, apart from his fears, had a constitutional love for old
things, simply because they were old. Anything mankind had ever
worshipped, or venerated, or obeyed, was dear to him. I have already
referred to his providing his Brahmins with a greenhouse for the purpose
of their rites, which he watched from outside with great interest. One
cannot fancy Cardinal Newman peeping through a window to see men
worshipping false though ancient gods. Warren Hastings' high-handed
dealings with the temples and time-honoured if scandalous customs of the
Hindoos filled Burke with horror. So, too, he respected Quakers,
Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and all those whom he called
Constitutional Dissenters. He has a fine passage somewhere about Rust,
for with all his passion for good government he dearly loved a little
rust. In this phase of character he reminds one not a little of another
great writer--whose death literature has still reason to deplore--George
Eliot; who, in her love for old hedgerows and barns and crumbling moss-
grown walls, was a writer after Burke's own heart, whose novels he would
have sat up all night to devour; for did he not deny with warmth Gibbon's
statement that he had read all five volumes of _