Tradition, then, does not necessarily exclude private judgment, and private judgment does not necessarily imply the rejection of tradition--that is, of transmitted belief. The one does not even necessarily confine or restrict the activity of the other. They are so far from being essentially antagonistic, that they may co-operate, may support and help each other; nay, they must do, if religious development is to be natural, easy, peaceful, and regular. This is but saying in another form that religious development, when true and normal, must combine and harmonise conservatism and progress. All development must do that, or it will be of an imperfect and injurious kind. In nature the rule of development is neither _revolution_ nor _reaction_, but _evolution_--a process which is at once conservative and progressive, which brings the new out of the old by the continuous growth and elaboration of the germs of life into organic completeness. All that is essential in the old is retained and perfected, while the form is altered to accord with new circumstances and to respond to new wants. It should not be otherwise in the moral and social worlds. The only true progress there, also, is that continuous and consistent development which can only be secured through true conservatism--through retaining, applying, and utilising whatever truth and goodness the past has brought down to the present; and the only true conservatism is that which secures against stagnation and death by continuous progress. Therefore it is that, alike in matters of civil polity, of scientific research, and of religious life, wisdom lies in combining the conservative with the progressive spirit, the principle of authority with the principle of liberty, due respect to the collective reason in history with due respect to the rights of the individual reason. The man who has not humility enough to feel that he is but one among the living millions of men, and that his whole generation is but a single link in the great chain of the human race--who is arrogant enough to fancy that wisdom on any great human interest has begun with himself, and that he may consequently begin history for himself,--the man who is not conservative to the extent of possessing this humility, and shrinking from this arrogance, is no truly free man, but the slave of his own vanity, and the inheritance which his fathers have left him will be little increased by him. The man, on the other hand, who always accepts what is as what ought to be; who identifies the actual with the reasonable; who would have to-morrow exactly like to-day; who would hold fast what Providence is most clearly showing ought to pass away, or to pass into something better,--the man, in a word, who would lay an arrest on the germs of life and truth, and prevent them from sprouting and ripening--is the very opposite of genuinely conservative--is the most dangerous of destructives. There is nothing so conservative against decay and