MORE IMPASSIONED AND REFLECTIVE MAN. 39 



be studied for a few moments contemplative and 

 emotional natures are no doubt found, characters, too, 

 of high capability and distinction, nevertheless they are 

 not its leaders, certainly not its popular leaders. The 

 religious leader is active, controversial, pugnacious; 

 he defends with vigilance and attacks with confidence. 

 Contemplation wanders, undermines, disintegrates ; 

 action consolidates and confirms. What is called 

 religious contemplation is not contemplation at all ; it 

 is, strictly speaking, either adoration, or stupefaction, 

 or ecstasy. Famous religious leaders have had high 

 qualities, but they have had more of energy, self- 

 confidence, self-importance, and censoriousness than 

 of love, or pity, or hate, or anger, or scorn. How 

 different the life-outlook, and the life-outcome, of 

 perhaps the most active and least emotional men in 

 history Becket, Laud, Bunyan, Wesley, and Newman 

 from the life-outlook, and life-outcome, of the most 

 emotional of known men and women Dante, Burns, 

 Byron, Hawthorne, George Eliot, and Charlotte 

 Bronte. It would seem that action in the form of 

 speech and the outer life, have that charm for some 

 religious leaders which contemplation and the inner 

 life have for some poets and some novelists. Bunyan 

 was probably the most affectionate of the religious 

 leaders just enumerated, yet he trampled on the ten- 

 derest domestic affections in obeying a physiological 

 impulse to rhetorical activity which he mistook for a 

 call from God. Wesley only escaped domestic em- 

 broilment, so far as he did escape it, by travelling 

 yearly thousands of miles and preaching thousands of 

 sermons compelled thereto by irresistible organisa- 

 tion. Newman, whose affections, his sister remarked, 

 were slight, declared that God had called upon him to 



