region, in which the lower impulse is entirely inconsistent with the grave appreciation of beauty. In the aesthetic movement, Pater concerned himself solely with the doctrine; but at the same time it is undeniably true that the leaders of a movement are always judged by the extravagances of their followers; and the anxiety and even suspicion with which Pater’s views were at one time regarded in Oxford, were due to the fact that those with whom he was in a certain sense in sympathy on the higher aesthetic grounds, applied the doctrine of beauty to a recklessness of practice which Pater not only condemned, but the contemplation of which both disgusted and appalled him. It is better to have no misconception on this point. It is as unfair to think of Pater as in sympathy with the decadent school, as it is to attribute to the original teachers of Predestination the immoral distortion of the doctrines which disgraced some of their fanatical sectaries. When the whole movement has, so to speak, shaken down; when we can look dispassionately at the part which the aesthetic school has played in the mental development of the age, we shall be able, while we condemn whole-heartedly the excesses of the advanced disciples, to discern the part that Pater and the other leaders of the movement played in setting the deliberate appreciation of beauty, the sedulous training of the perceptions in the discrimination of the subtle effects of impassioned art, in its right place among the forces which tend to the ennobling of human character and temperament. Having thus drawn out, as far as possible, what Pater’s ethical creed was not, let us try to indicate the nature and movement of his religious life. He began, it is plain, by feeling the strong aesthetic attraction of the accessories of religion; probably he did not disentangle the elements of religious faith from the effect which great churches, solemn ceremonial, ecclesiastical music, and hieratic pomp had upon his mind. As Jowett is once, in early days, reported to have said to him somewhat irritably, at the close of a discussion, “Mr. Pater, you seem to think that religion is all idolatry!” But as soon as Pater plunged into the study of metaphysics, he found that philosophy began to act as a solvent upon his creed; he still had a bias towards the expression of religious truth; and his half-formed idea of becoming a Unitarian minister, which, as I have said, was suggested in all probability by the career of Coleridge, was the outcome of this mood.