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The spirit of humanity hung her head, finding that the bold reformer had only a new dogma in place of the old ones, seeing that dissenters, in their turn, were sometimes as ready as papists, with age, fagot, and excommunication.
Then reason is like a sheathed sword. Thought must be struck forth as fire is struck from flint. But under inspirational moods the mind begins to glow and kindle. Then the reason of the orator, the poet or reformer ceases to be like a taper, needing a match to light it, and becomes a sun, blazing with its own radiance.
Macbeth is called to denounce life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and "signifying nothing." Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels the visits of Satan in the desert. He must share the hopefulness of Sir Thomas More. Utopia is possible here, now, and everywhere, though execution is likely to be the penalty of too close application to principles.
We pass now from the literary pamphlets to the extract and excerpts illustrating the condition of the Church and the clergy at the end of the seventeenth and about the first half of the eighteenth century. They are of particular interest, not only in themselves, but in their relation to Swift and Macaulay to Swift as a Church reformer, to Macaulay as a social historian.
In his opinion, indeed, he merely had to overthrow that ministry and perhaps another one, and then he himself would at last take the reins of power in hand, like a reformer who would know how to pacify the nation. As outside Socialists often declared, it was evident that the blood of a dictator flowed in that sectarian's veins.
These points are all expressed repeatedly in all Emerson's utterances and mark him as one of the most illumined philosophers, as he was one of the greatest intellects of the last century, or of any other century. A strange, lonely and wonderful figure was Tolstoi, novelist, philosopher, socialist, artist and reformer. Great souls are always lonely souls, estimated by sense-conscious humans.
You, sir, ostensibly defending government and property, are allowed to be a republican, reformer, phalansterian, any thing you wish; I, on the contrary, demanding distinctly enough a slight reform in public economy, am foreordained a conservative, and likewise a friend of the dynasty. I cannot explain myself more clearly.
I had heard Louise Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the National Reformer had interested me, but I had not yet concerned myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with ever-increasing force on heart and brain.
To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality." No doubt Mill was a practical reformer as well as a philosophical thinker, and he wished on certain special points to revise the accepted code.
John A. Hobson in "The Crisis of Liberalism" describes the "practical reformer" so that anybody can recognize him: "This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the manipulation of wire-pullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by sophistical notions or other clever trickery."
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