despised; and despised they will be, if the Sovereign gives scandal by ignoring them in his own practice. Therefore the Sovereign, be he King, Council, or Assembly, is bound in conscience and before God, though not legally of his own jurisdiction, so far himself to stand to the observance of the law as not to render it nugatory in the eyes and practice of others. 6. Law and liberty are like the strings and meshes of a net. In the one limit of minimum of mesh, the net passes into sack-cloth, where nothing could get through. In the other limit of maximum of mesh, the net vanishes, and everything would get through. We cannot praise in the abstract either a large mesh or a small one: the right size is according to the purpose for which the net is to be used in each particular case. So neither can law nor liberty be praised, as Burke says, "on a simple view of the subject, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction." We can only praise either as it is "clothed in circumstances." Commonly we are led to praise the one by getting too much of the other. Confounded in a tangle of fussy, vexatious, perhaps malicious restrictions, men cry loudly for liberty. When people all about us are doing things by their own sweet will, we are converted to praise of regulation and discipline and the wholesome restraint of law. _Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 96, art. 5, ad 3; Suarez, _De Legibus_, III., xxxv.; _ib_., V., iv.; Ruskin, _Seven Lamps of Architecture_, c. vii., §§ I, 2. SECTION XII.--_Of Liberty of Opinion_. 1. We are here dealing with liberty only so far as it means exemption from State control. So far as the State is concerned, a man has the fullest liberty to hold in his heart the most seditious opinions, and to think the foulest thoughts, so long as they do not appear in his public language and conduct. The heart is free from all mere human law, resting in subjection to His law alone, and in responsibility to His judgment, who is the Searcher of Hearts. 2. We are dealing then not properly with opinion, but with the public expression of opinion. We are dealing with that expression as controllable by the State, not acting in deference to the invitation of any religious power, but of its own initiative and proper authority, in view of its own end, scope and aim, which is social order and public prosperity for this life. (s. x., nn. 2, 3, p. 355.)