.

II. The examination of the connexion between stupidity and crime, pp.
57-62, anticipated all that I have had to urge in Fors Clavigera against
the commonly alleged excuse for public wickedness,--"They don't mean
it--they don't know any better."

III. The examination of the roots of Moral Power, pp. 90-92, is a
summary of what is afterwards developed with utmost care in my inaugural
lecture at Oxford on the relation of Art to Morals; compare in that
lecture, Secs. 83-85, with the sentence in p. 91 of this book, "Nothing
is ever done so as really to please our Father, unless we would also have
done it, though we had had no Father to know of it."

This sentence, however, it must be observed, regards only the general
conditions of action in the children of God, in consequence of which it
is foretold of them by Christ that they will say at the Judgment, "When
saw we thee?" It does not refer to the distinct cases in which virtue
consists in faith given to command, appearing to foolish human judgment
inconsistent with the Moral Law, as in the sacrifice of Isaac; nor to
those in which any directly-given command requires nothing more of
virtue than obedience.

IV. The subsequent pages, 92-97, were written especially to check the
dangerous impulses natural to the minds of many amiable young women, in
the direction of narrow and selfish religious sentiment: and they
contain, therefore, nearly everything which I believe it necessary that
young people should be made to observe, respecting the errors of
monastic life. But they in nowise enter on the reverse, or favourable
side: of which indeed I did not, and as yet do not, feel myself able to
speak with any decisiveness; the evidence on that side, as stated in the
text, having "never yet been dispassionately examined."

V. The dialogue with Lucilla, beginning at p. 63, is, to my own fancy,
the best bit of conversation in the book, and the issue of it, at p. 67,
the most practically and immediately useful. For on the idea of the
inevitable weakness and corruption of human nature, has logically
followed, in our daily life, the horrible creed of modern "Social
science," that all social action must be scientifically founded on
vicious impulses. But on the habit of measuring and reverencing our
powers and talents that we may kindly use them, will be founded a true
Social science, developing, by the employment of them, all the real
powers and honourable feelings of the race.

VI.