some extent the price we pay for strength; whether where
decision of judgment and energy of action is demanded, as in times of
persecution, width of view and multiplicity of sympathies may not be a
source of weakness. Contrast, for example, the character of Mark Fieldes
with that of Marmaduke Lemarchant, and it will be clear that the
strength and straightness of the latter is closely associated with the
absence of that versatility of intellect and affection which make the
former a more interesting but far less lovable and estimable
personality. To see all sides and issues of a question, is a
speculative, but not always a practical advantage; to have many
diversified tastes and affections helps to enlarge our sympathies, but
not to concentrate our energies.

Of course great minds and strong hearts can afford to be comprehensive
without loss of depth and intensity; but our present interest is with
ordinary mortals and average powers. A man who has all his life
unreflectingly adopted the traditional principle that death is
preferable to dishonour, that a lie is essentially dishonourable, will
be far more likely to die for the truth, than one who has philosophized
much about honour and veracity, and whose resolution is enfeebled by the
consciousness of the weak and flimsy support which theory lends to these
healthy and universally received maxims. And similarly those who have
received the faith by tradition, who for years have assumed it in their
daily conduct as a matter of course, in whom therefore it has become an
ingrained psychological habit, who hold it, in what might be condemned
as a narrow, unintellectual fashion, are just the very people who will
fight and die for it, when its more cultivated and reflective professors
waver, temporize, and fall away. Taking human nature as it is, who can
doubt but that this is the way in which the majority are intended to
hold their religious, moral, philosophical, and political convictions;
that reflex thought is, must, and ought to be confined to a small
minority whose function is slowly to shape and correct that great body
of public doctrine by which the beliefs of the multitude are ruled? We
do not mean to say that such prosaic "narrowness" as we speak of, is
essential to strength; but only that a habit of theoretical speculation
and a continual cultivation of delicate sensibility is a source of
enervation which needs some compensating corrective. This corrective is
found in t