Change, 'in the
abstract,' is what is wanted by a people who are at the same time
inquiring and wealthy. Instead of statesmen they desire shufflers; and
compromise in conduct and ambiguity in speech are, though nobody will
confess it, the public qualities now most in vogue.
Not exactly, however, those calculated to meet the case of Tancred.
The interview was long, for Tan-cred listened with apparent respect
and deference to the individual under whose auspices he had entered the
Church of Christ; but the replies to his inquiries, though more adroit
than the duke's, were in reality not more satisfactory, and could not,
in any way, meet the inexorable logic of Lord Montacute. The bishop
was as little able as the duke to indicate the principle on which the
present order of things in England was founded; neither faith nor
its consequence, duty, was at all illustrated or invigorated by his
handling. He utterly failed in reconciling a belief in ecclesiastical
truth with the support of religious dissent. When he tried to define
in whom the power of government should repose, he was lost in a maze of
phrases, and afforded his pupil not a single fact.
'It cannot be denied,' at length said Tancred, with great calmness,
'that society was once regulated by God, and that now it is regulated by
man.
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