Mr. Arnold says in praise of Falkland that "he was profoundly serious." We presume he means not only that Falkland treated great questions in a serious way, without unseasonable quizzing, but that he was, in the words quoted from Clarendon in the next sentence, "a precise lover of truth, and superior to all possible temptations for its violation." The temptations, we presume, would have included those of taste or fancy, as well as those of the more obvious kind; and Falkland's paramount regard for truth would have extended to all his fellow-men as well as to himself and his own intellectual circle. He would never, we are confident, have advised any human being to separate religion from truth, he would never have suffered himself to intimate that truth was the property of a select circle, while "poetry" was good enough for the common people, he would never have encouraged thousands of clergymen, educated men with sensitive consciences, to go on preaching to their flocks from the pulpit, on grounds of social convenience, doctrines which they repudiated in the study, and derided in the company of cultivated men, he would never have exhorted people to enter from aesthetic considerations a spiritual society of which, in the same breath, he proclaimed the creeds to be figments, the priesthood to be an illusion, the sacred narratives to be myths, and the Triune God to be a caricature of Lord Shaftesbury multiplied by three. If he had done so, and if his propagandism had been successful, we suspect he would soon have produced an anarchy, not only religious but social, compared with which the most chaotic periods of the Revolution would have been harmony and order. In the days of the Antonines, to which Gibbon looks back so wistfully, opinion had little influence; the organic forces of society were of a more primitive and a coarser kind. In modern times if a writer could succeed in separating truth from religion, he would shake the pillars of the moral and social as well as the intellectual world.