RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES IN SCOTLAND. [TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR.']
you allow me a few words more on this subject, in case the distinction between our theories of the religious future of Scotland should prove to be one without a difference ? You say, "Nature is not God, and loyalty to a natural system not of divine origin has to our minds no meaning." I understand this exactly as I understand the definitions of God and Nature as Nohow noturans and Natura naturata. But then is this loyalty not "loyalty to God as Deity rather than as Sovereign,"—the converse of what you predict for Scotland ?
Your "loyalty to God as sovereign" is to me highly sugges- tive. It is generally admitted that in the present reign, the British people have arrived at a tolerably correct interpretation of the meaning of "loyalty to the Sovereign." According to Lord Hartington, it has "grown into a passion." Mr. Gladstone has noted with satisfaction the enthusiasm with which Birming- ham voices recently sang the National Anthem, and Mr. Free- man has somewhere said that the success of the present reign is such as almost to make us wish we could have a succession of female Sovereigns. Apart from the personal excellencies which have made so many look upon the Queen as fitted to be the ideal head of an ideal British society, I may safely take it for granted, I think, that loyalty to her as Sovereign means, in the case of reasonable men, a recognition of the fact that, to use a vulgarism, "she knows her place" in the Constitution. Sentiment apart, British loyalty means submission on the part of the people to the will of its own representatives, expressed in Parliament, placed on the Statute-book, and guarded from out- rage by a standing army of policemen,—a submission found compatible with wise change and free and energetic national life. May not loyalty to the order of Nature come to be in time as intelligible a thing as loyalty to "the common-sense of most ?"—
[No. Real loyalty can only be felt to a sentient being, or collec- tion of beings. Loyalty, "to the common sense of most," is only willingness to acquiesce in it.—En. Spectator.]
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