ty are arousable,
even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and
admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still
respond to fit appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is something
that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no
'Substance' or 'Spirit' is behind them, are finite, and we can deal
with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that
sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life;
they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The
sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are
what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the
void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of
Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our
Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of
Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and
idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French
'milliards' were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the
country in the shape in which we see it there to-day. The history of
our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with
fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been
reading, as examples of what strong men will endure. In 1483 a papal
bull of Innocent VIII. enjoined their extermination. It absolved those
who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical
pains and penalties, released them from {48} any oath, legitimized
their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired,
and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics.

"There is no town in Piedmont," says a Vaudois writer, "where some of
our brethren have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was burnt
alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin, Michael Goneto, an
octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Meano;
Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living
body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his
entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place
to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia;
Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna
Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and
hunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabre