their cheek or through a generous impulsiveness, tell them their
natural taste for the bathos is a relish for the sublime, there is
the more need for culture to tell them the contrary. It is delusion
on this point which is fatal, and against delusion on this point
culture works. It is not fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for
free trade, extension of the suffrage, and abolition of church-rates,
instead of graver social ends; but it is fatal to them to be told by
their flatterers, and to believe, with our pauperism increasing more
rapidly than our population, that they have performed a great, an
heroic work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last thirty
years, with these Liberal nostrums, and that the right and good
course for them now is to go on occupying themselves with the like
for the future. It is not fatal to Americans to have no religious
establishments and no effective centres of high culture; but it is
fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that
they are the most intelligent people in the whole world, when of
intelligence, in the true and fruitful sense of the word, they even
singularly, as we have seen, come short. It is not [lvii] fatal to
the Nonconformists to remain with their separated churches; but it is
fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that
theirs is the one pure and Christ-ordained way of worshipping God,
that provincialism and loss of totality have not come to them from
following it, or that provincialism and loss of totality are not
evils. It is not fatal to the English nation to abolish the Irish
Church by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to
establishments; but it is fatal to it to be told by its flatterers,
and to believe, that it is abolishing it through reason and justice,
when it is really abolishing it through this power; or to expect the
fruits of reason and justice from anything but the spirit of reason
and justice themselves.