Turn to his essays on style and order entitled _For Lancelot Andrewes_. They are the work of a fine judicial temperament, but not, not at all, the work of a general in the warfare of the mind. The distinction is worth making much of. I have elsewhere[73] analysed the structure and procedures of Mr. Eliot’s prose to show its thoroughly judicial characteristics: its calmness and gravity, its balance and discriminatory powers among precedents, its fulfilment in a final elucidation arrived at by comparisons and analyses. It is not a full-bodied prose, the weight of the whole man concentrated on the pen, but the prose of a judge conscious of the weight of authority _behind_, not in, him. Now observe that in _For Lancelot Andrewes_ Mr. Eliot, like a learned judge and with an air of profundity, is continually pointing to the tradition of a Church, set up as an authority external to himself. He is at his best when he presents comparatively narrow ideas, ideas about literary style for the most part, as in his exposition of the relevant intensity of Andrewes’ prose. At his most disappointing, he ventures upon a safe common-place generality, as when he remarks, “The greatest tragedies are occupied with great and permanent moral conflicts.” The last is true enough, but Mr. Eliot never talks very much or directly about this occupation, about the stuff itself of moral conflicts. Likewise Mr. Eliot, apologist for religion, does not write about religion: he points to _a_ Church and the intellectual riches of its history. “For us,” he declares, “religion is of course Christianity; and Christianity implies, I think, the conception of a Church.” And again, “And the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life”--but we need both the letter and the spirit! Stress on the letter gives us legalism in religious thinking, and on the spirit gives us what Mr. Eliot calls “_Ersatz_-religion”: the two, spirit and letter, must correspond. There we are! the last critical “leader” in this examination turns out to be merely sitting on a judge’s bench and therefore necessarily inactive: he points out where Authority may be found, but one may doubt from the evidence of his writing whether Authority resides in him. IV