Then again, how is conscience “God’s law?” Conscience is not the law, but the interpreter of the law; it does not teach the difference between right and wrong, it only impels us to do what we believe to be right, and smites us when we _think_ we have been wrong. How is it that many have done wrong, and every day do wrong for conscience’ sake?—and does that sanctify the wrong in the eyes of God, as well as in those of John Huss?[1] 12. “Prayer,” he says, “and kindly intercourse with the poor, are the two great safeguards of spiritual life—its more than food and raiment.” True; but there is something higher than this fed and clothed spiritual life; something more difficult, yet less conscious. 13. In allusion to Coleridge, he says very truly, that the power of contemplation becomes diseased and perverted when it is the main employment of life. But to the same great intellect he does beautiful justice in another passage. “Coleridge seemed to me to love truth really, and, therefore, truth presented herself to him, not negatively, as she does to many minds, who can see that the objections against her are unfounded, and therefore that she is to be received; but she filled him, as it were, heart and mind, imbuing him with her very self, so that all his being comprehended her fully, and loved her ardently; and that seems to me to be true wisdom.” 14. Very fine is a passage wherein he speaks against meeting what is wrong and bad with negatives, with merely proving the wrong to be wrong, and the false to be false, without substituting for either the positively good and true. 15. He contrasts as the two forms of the present danger to the Church and to society, the prevalent epicurean atheism, and the lying and formal spirit of priestcraft. He seems to have had an impression that the Church of God may be “utterly destroyed”(?), or, he asks, “must we look forward for centuries to come to the mere alternations of infidelity and superstition, scepticism, and Newmanism?” It is very curious to see two such men as Arnold and Carlyle both overwhelmed with a terror of the magnitude of the mischiefs they see impending over us. They are oppressed with the anticipation of evil as with a sense of personal calamity. Something alike, perhaps, in the temperaments of these two extraordinary men;—large conscientiousness, large destructiveness, and small hope: there was great mutual sympathy and admiration. 16. Very admirable what he says in favour of comprehensive reading, against exclusive reading in one line of study. He says, “Preserve proportion in your reading, keep your view of men and things extensive, and depend upon it a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one; as far as it goes the views that it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one class of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and which are not only _narrow but false_.” [Illustration] 17.