A completely non-sentimental religion was a trying spectacle, even to the most religious among Early Victorian readers. A young man ever accusing himself, a young man waiving his own profit, and doing these monstrous things by force of will and habit, all his life, was simply an offence to common morals. Natural virtues are well enough: truth, industry, ambition, family affection, are at least legal: they are not a slap in the face to what is called a Christian community. But a temper fed from hidden springs, and full of austerity and detachment, must ever look to the mass of men like an alien thing, the outcome of hypocrisy or sheer foolishness. Nothing but an outward and visible career passed in nursing the sick in hospitals can, to this day, redeem it. ‘The public,’ says a sociologist,[280] with charming scorn, ‘are acquainted with the nature of their own passions, and the point of their own calamities; can laugh at the weakness they feel, and weep at the miseries they have experienced: but all the sagacity they possess, be it how great soever, will not enable them to judge of likeness to that which they have never seen, nor to acknowledge principles on which they have never reflected. Of a comedy or a drama, an epigram or a ballad, they are judges from whom there is no appeal; but not of the representation of facts which they have never examined, of beauty which they have never loved.’ The good public and anything which savours of the merely supernatural, the good public and the Kingdom of Heaven, in short, are incongruous. But it is only fair to them to quote, again, the word of a far more practical observer, which had, from the first, a bearing on those whom the writer calls ‘the firebrands of the Movement’: ‘I do not say the English are a people of good sense, but I say they abhor extremes, and always fly off from those who carry things too far.’[281] They do indeed. But every conclusion becomes an extreme, and a thing carried too far, where they are concerned.