'An age when lustre too intense.'--I am much mistaken if Mr. Wordsworth is not deeply wrong here. Wrong he is beyond a doubt as to the _fact_; for there could have been no virtual intensity of lustre (unless merely as a tinsel toy) when it was contradicted by everything in the _manners_, _habits_, and situations of the Pagan Gods--they who were content to play in the coarsest manner the part of gay young bloods, _sowing_ their wild oats, and with a recklessness of consequences to their female partners never by possibility rivalled by men. I believe and affirm that lustre the most dazzling and blinding would not have any _ennobling_ effect except as received into a matrix of previous unearthly and holy type. As to Bacchus being eternally young, the ancients had no idea or power to frame the idea of eternity. Their eternity was a limitary thing. And this I say not empirically, but _a priori_, on the ground that without the idea of holiness and unfleshliness, eternity cannot rise buoyant from the ground, cannot sustain itself. But waive this, and what becomes of the other things? If he were characteristically distinguished as young, then, by a mere rebound of the logic, the others were not so honoured, else where is the special privilege of Bacchus? 'And she shall sing there as in the days of her youth' (Hosea ii. 15).--The case of pathos, a person coming back to places, recalling the days of youth after a long woe, is quite unknown to the ancients--nay, the maternal affection itself, though used inevitably, is never consciously reviewed as an object of beauty. Duties arise everywhere, but--do not mistake--not under their sublime form _as_ duties. I claim the honour to have first exposed a fallacy too common: duties never did, never will, arise save under Christianity, since without it the sense of a morality lightened by religious motive, aspiring to holiness, not only of act, but of motive, had not before it even arisen. It is the pressure of society, its mere needs and palpable claims, which first calls forth duties, but not _as_ duties; rather as the casting of parts in a scenical arrangement. A duty, under the low conception to which at first it conforms, is a _role_, no more; it is strictly what we mean when we talk of a _part_. The sense of conscience strictly is not touched under any preceding system of religion. It is the daughter of Christianity. How little did Wordsworth seize the fact in his Ode: 'Stern Daughter of the Voice of God' is not enough; the voice of God is the conscience; and neither has been developed except by Christianity. The conscience of a pagan was a conscience pointing to detection: it pointed only to the needs of society, and caused fear, shame, anxiety, only on the principles of sympathy; that is, from the impossibility of releasing himself from a dependence on the reciprocal feelings--the rebound, the dependence on the _re_sentments of others.