humbler ministerial offices-those of clerks, book-keepers, apprentices. The law acts through these offices, for the unconfirmed conscience, as leading-strings to an infant in its earliest efforts at walking. It forces to go right, until the choice may be supposed trained and fully developed. That is the great function of the law; a function which it will perform with more or less success, as it is more or less fitted to win the cordial support of masters.

CASE V.-VERACITY.

Here is a special "title" (to speak with the civil lawyers), under that general claim put in for England with respect to a moral pre-eminence amongst the nations. Many are they who, in regions widely apart, have noticed with honour the English superiority in the article of veneration for truth. Not many years ago, two Englishmen, on their road overland to India, fell in with a royal cortége, and soon after with the prime minister and the crown prince of Persia. The prince honoured them with an interview: both parties being on horseback, the conversation was therefore reduced to the points of nearest interest. Amongst these was the English character. Upon this the prince's remark was-that what had most impressed him with respect for England and her institutions was, the remarkable spirit of truth-speaking which distinguished her sons; as supposing her institutions to grow out of her sons, and her sons out of her institutions. And, indeed, well he might have this feeling by comparison with his own countrymen: Persians have no principles apparently on this point-all is impulse and accident of feeling. Thus the journal of the two Persian princes in London, as lately reported in the newspapers, is one tissue of falsehoods: not, most undoubtedly, from any purpose of deceiving,

but from the overmastering habit (cherished by their whole training and experience) of repeating everything in a spirit of amplification, with a view to the wonder only of the hearer. The Persians are notoriously the Frenchmen of the East; the same gaiety, the same levity, the same want of depth both as to feeling and principle. The Turks are supposed to be much nearer to the English: the same gravity of temperament, the same meditativeness, the same sternness of principle. Of all European nations, the French is that which least regards truth. The whole spirit of their private memoirs and their anecdotes illustrates this. To point an anecdote or a repartee, there is no extravagance of falsehood that the French will not endure. What nation but the French would have tolerated that monstrous fiction about La Fontaine, by way of illustrating his supposed absence of mind-viz., that, on meeting his own son in a friend's house, he expressed his admiration of the young man, and begged to know his name. fact probably may have been that La Fontaine was not liable to any absence at all: apparently this "distraction" was assumed, as a means of making a poor sort of sport for his friends. Like many another man in such circumstances, he saw with half an eye, and entered into the fun which his own imaginary forgetfulness produced. But, were it otherwise, who can believe so outrageous a selfforgetfulness as that which would darken his eyes to the very pictures of his own hearth? Were such a thing possible, were it even real, it would still be liable to the just objection of the critics-that, being incredible in appearance, even as a fact it ought not to be brought forward for any purpose of wit, but only as a truth of physiology, or as a fact from the records of a surgeon. The "incredulus adi" is too strong in such cases, and it adheres to three

The

out of every four French anecdotes. The French taste is, indeed, anything but good in all that department of wit and humour. And the ground lies in their national want of veracity. To return to England and having cited an oriental witness to the English character on this point, let me now cite a most observing one in the West. Kant, in Königsberg, was surrounded by Englishmen and by foreigners of all nations-foreign and English students, foreign and English merchants; and he pronounced the main characteristic feature of the English as a nation to lie in their severe reverence for truth. This from him was no slight praise; for such was the stress he laid upon veracity, that upon this one quality he planted the whole edifice of moral excellence. General integrity could not exist, he held, without veracity as its basis; nor that basis exist without superinducing general integrity.

This opinion, perhaps, many beside Kant will see cause to approve. For myself I can truly say, never did I know a human being, boy or girl, who began life as a habitual undervaluer of truth, that did not afterwards exhibit a character conformable to that beginning; such a character as, however superficially correct under the steadying hand of self-interest, was not in a lower key of moral feeling as well as of principle.

But out of this honourable regard to veracity in Immanuel Kant branched out a principle in casuistry which most people will pronounce monstrous. It has occasioned much disputing backwards and forwards. But, as a practical principle of conduct (for which Kant meant it), inevitably it must be rejected, if for no other reason than because it is at open war with the laws and jurisprudence of all Christian Europe. Kant's doctrine was this; and the illustrative case in which it is involved, let it be re

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membered, is his own:-So sacred a thing, said he, is truth, that if a murderer, pursuing another with avowed purpose of killing him, were to ask of a third person by what road the fugitive had fled, that person is bound to give him true information. And you are at liberty to suppose this third person a wife, a daughter, or under any conceivable obligations of love and duty to the fugitive. Now this is monstrous; and Kant himself, with all his parental fondness for the doctrine, would certainly have been recalled to sounder thoughts by these two considerations

1. That by all the codes of law received throughout Europe, he who acted upon Kant's principle would be held a particeps criminis-an accomplice before the fact.

2. That, in reality, a just principle is lurking under Kant's paradox; but a principle translated from its proper ground. Not truth, individual or personal—not truth of mere facts, but truth doctrinal—the truth which teaches, the truth which changes men and nations—this is the truth concerned in Kant's meaning, had he explained his own meaning to himself more distinctly. With respect to that truth, wheresoever it lies, Kant's doctrine applies; that all men have a right to it; that perhaps you have no right to suppose of any race or nation that it is not capable of receiving it; and, at any rate, that no circumstances of expedience can justify you in keeping it back.*

*It is remarkable enough that Kant was once nearly illustrating his own imaginary case. A murderer pursued him for three miles on the high-road with the design of operating; but, being a very religious man, on second thoughts, and in deference to a point of casuistry, he preferred murdering a little girl; and thus it happened that the transcendental philosopher escaperl.

CASE VI.-THE CASE OF CHARLES I.

Many cases arise from the life and political difficulties of Charles I. But there is one so peculiarly pertinent to an essay which entertains the general question of casuistry, its legitimacy, and its value, that with this, although not properly a domestic case, or only such in a mixed sense, I shall conclude.

No person has been so much attacked for his scruples of conscience as this prince; and what seems odd enough, no person has been so much attacked for resorting to books of casuistry, and for encouraging literary men to write books of casuistry. Under his suggestion and sanction, Saunderson wrote his book on the obligation of an oath (for which there was surely reason enough in days when the democratic tribunals were forcing men to swear* to an etcetera); and, by an impulse originally derived from him, Jeremy Taylor wrote his "Ductor Dubitantium" (i. e., "Guide to the Scrupulous"), Bishop Barlow his "Cases of Conscience," &c.

For this dedication of his studies Charles has been plentifully blamed in after times. He was seeking evasions for plain duties, say his enemies. He was arming himself for intrigue in the spirit of Machiavel. But now turn to his history, and ask in what way any man could have extricated himself from that labyrinth which invested his path but by casuistry. Cases the most difficult are offered for his decision; peace for a distracted nation in 1647, on terms which seemed fatal to the monarchy; peace for the same nation under the prospect of war rising up again during the Isle of Wight treaty in 1648, but also under

* Which, however, is untruly stated by all historians.