ife, in which all emotions are less
allowed; and to which, most certainly, all human concerns ought in
reason to become more indifferent than to those who have work to do,
and a good deal of day and of inexhausted strength to do it in."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Correspondence_, iii. 89.]

The king's unexpected restoration to health two or three weeks
later brought to nought all the hope and ambition of the Whigs, and
confirmed Pitt in power for the rest of Burke's lifetime. But an event
now came to pass in the world's history, which transformed Burke in an
instant from a man decried, persecuted, proscribed, into an object of
exultant adoration all over Europe.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

We have now come to the second of the two momentous changes in the
world's affairs, in which Burke played an imposing and historic
part. His attitude in the first of them, the struggle for American
independence, commands almost without alloy the admiration and
reverence of posterity. His attitude in the second of them, the great
revolution in France, has raised controversies which can only be
compared in heat and duration to the master controversies of theology.
If the history of society were written as learned men write the
history of the Christian faith and its churches, Burke would figure in
the same strong prominence, whether deplorable or glorious, as Arius
and Athanasius, Augustine and Sabellius, Luther and Ignatius. If we
ask how it is that now, nearly a century after the event, men are
still discussing Burke's pamphlet on the Revolution as they are still
discussing Bishop Butler's _Analogy_, the answer is that in one case
as in the other the questions at issue are still unsettled, and that
Burke offers in their highest and most comprehensive form all the
considerations that belong to one side of the dispute. He was not of
those, of whom Coleridge said that they proceeded with much solemnity
to solve the riddle of the French Revolution by anecdotes. He
suspended it in the same light of great social ideas and wide
principles, in which its authors and champions professed to represent
it. Unhappily he advanced from criticism to practical exhortation, in
our opinion the most mischievous and indefensible that has ever been
pressed by any statesman on any nation. But the force of the criticism
remains, its foresight remains, its commemoration of valuable elements
of life which men were forgetting, its discernment of th