ons, and not in any propositions which can be addressed to the
understanding.

For that other question--how rightly to estimate a human being; what
constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish,
without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be
just to the popular theories, and yet not to blind ourselves to their
shallowness and injustice--that is a problem for us, for the solution of
which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any
recognised guidance whatsoever.

Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situation. There can
scarcely be a more startling contrast between fact and theory than the
conditions under which, practically, positions of power and influence
are distributed among us--between the theory of human worth which the
necessities of life oblige us to act upon, and the theory which we
believe that we believe. As we look around among our leading men, our
statesmen, our legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of
our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of
its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the
principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie beside
and beyond the negative tests! and how little respect do we pay to the
breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability! So wholly
impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to
practice--to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls deadly
sins, as really guilty of them, that it would almost seem we had fallen
into a moral anarchy; that ability _alone_ is what we regard, without
any reference at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral
disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living men; it is
worse than invidious to drag out of their graves men who have gone down
into them with honour, to make a point for an argument. But we know, all
of us, that among the best servants of our country there have been, and
there are, many whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative
tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have
repented, of their sins according to recognised methods.

Once more: among our daily or weekly confessions, which we are supposed
to repeat as if we were all of us at all times in precisely the same
moral condition, we are made to say that we have done those things which
we ought not to have done, and to have left un