I shall be delighted to dine in bad company on Thursday. Goschen will speak against Government to-morrow, but will vote for them. I dined there yesterday with Morier, Milner,[[252]] and Albert Grey;[[253]] and the same party dines with Morier this evening as soon as the P.M. sits down. Several Ministers (Hartington, Spencer, and others) have said too much that they wish to be beaten.
A very strong speech to-night would retrieve the position. If the enemy came in now, England would soon become no better than the Continental powers, and our true greatness and prosperity would depart from us.
Athenæum March 3
I am so glad to know that he is getting better.
If you will burn my letters there will be less difficulty in voting for Government. Certainly a peer cannot vote absolutely only as he approves or disapproves—or I must have voted on the other side. I shall be delighted to call at 12, and also to be your escort.
*****
La Madeleine April 9, 1885
The book[[254]] reveals a mental flaw I had not suspected. Because Newman, or some of Newman's set, Faber, Ward, Morris, were narrow and fanatical, he concludes that their doctrine is that of narrow-minded fanatics. This is stumbling at the Ass's bridge. Scientific thought begins with the separation between the idea and its exponent, just as much as religious thought; and our peculiar difficulty in keeping them apart is notoriously the great elementary defect of the English—not the Scottish—mind.
Pattison himself suffers from the extreme narrowness of the Oxford horizon in his time. He knows nothing about the other side of the hill; and when he came to know, in later years, his religious spirit was extinct. Newman had unfitted him for Rothe. A strong mind cannot rest without thinking out its thoughts. But Pattison rests without caring to explain which of the several systems which exist outside of the churches satisfied his conscience. He grew impatient of theology. He does not recognise the great importance of Casaubon in religious history, or of Milton's theological treatise on the progress of his mind. Once, having reviewed Pascal, he said to me that he thought, after all, the Jesuits were in the right. I disagreed, but I remember that I was delighted at the openness of his mind. But now I again find him hooded with prejudice. He rightly discerned that the French Protestants created independent scientific learning, and glorifies Scaliger as the type of them: and then he treats Petavius as an impostor, got up by the Jesuits in defiance of Scaliger. Whereas the Jesuit was one of the most deeply learned men that ever lived, by no means inferior to Grotius or Ussher or Selden.
Every year some zealous Frenchman exposes the iniquities of the Tudors, hoping to discredit the Church of England; and Taine fancies that to show the horrors of the Revolution is a good argument against democracy. Pattison must have stood, as to his inner man, nearly on the same level of logic.