No dread of enthusiasm, no shrinking from conviction, is found among the uneducated, and the semi-educated. Among them enthusiasm is the token of the divine afflatus, as madness is regarded among savages. They respect it, they bring fuel to feed it, they allow it to burst into extravagance, to riot over reason, and to consume every particle of common sense. The corrective, judicial faculty, the balance wheel is deficient; the strength, not the quality of a conviction gives it its command to the respect and adhesion of the many. If I were to break out of Bedlam with the one fixed idea in me that I had eyes at the ends of my ten toes, wherewith I saw everything that went on in the world, and with my big toes saw what was to be in the future; and if I went up and down England preaching this and declaring what I saw with my toes, and continued preaching it with the fire of perfect sincerity for a twelvemonth, I would shake the hold of the Established Church on the hearts of the people, and make the work of the Liberation Society easy. Half England would form the Church of the seeing toes, but in that Church I would not number any of the cultured. As for us, we get over our enthusiasms early, as we cut our teeth, and we lose them as rapidly. Primeval man wore his teeth till he died, so do savages of the present day; but the very milk teeth of our infants decay. We are so familiar with the fact that we assume that all good sets of teeth are false, that if we keep here and there a fang in our jaws, it is carious, and only preserved as a peg to which to wire our sham molars and front teeth. It is so unusual to find any one with a real set, that we look on such a person with suspicion as having in him a stain of barbarous blood. It is obvious that this defect of real teeth in our jaws has its advantages. It allows us to change our teeth when we find those we have hitherto worn inconvenient or out of fashion. It is the same with our convictions, we lose them early, all the inside disappears, leaving but the exterior enamel, and that breaks away finally. But then, we do not open our mouths to our friends and in society, exposing our deficiencies. We replace what is lost by what looks well, and hold them in position by the fragments of early belief that still project; and when these artificial articles prove irksome we change them. This is how it is that, for instance, in politics, a man may profess to day one thing, and something quite different to-morrow. No one is shocked, every one understands that this exhibition to-day is unreal, and that to-morrow also unreal. But, together with the advantage afforded by this power of altering our sets, there is a disadvantage which must not be left unnoticed, which is that the biting and holding power in them is not equal to that possessed by the natural articles.