thrill the spiritual imagination, and to quicken the heart to better
love and to nobler dreams. He rebukes the private sins of individuals
and the public sins of nations. In the _Faerie Queene_, the
"soul-diseased knight" was in a state

"_In which his torment often was so great,
That like a lyon he would cry and rare,
And rend his flesh, and his own synewes eat_."

But Fidelia, like the faithful pastor, was both

"_able with her word to kill,
And raise againe to life the heart that she did thrill_."

This power has at times been misunderstood and misapplied. No human
authority can bind the conscience, nor set rules and regulations for the
soul of man. The prerogative of final direction belongs to God alone. No
man may arrogate it--no pastor for people, no husband for wife, no wife
for husband, no parent for child. The sadness of the world has been,
that men have not always been spiritually free. Freedom has been a
social growth--a phase of progress. It has taken wars and persecutions,
revolutions and reformations, the blood of saints and martyrs, the
sorrow of ages, to plant this precept in the mind of man.

The evangelist warns. He speaks of sin, death, hell, and the judgment
to come. It is for these things that he is sent to testify. These are
not the catch-words of a new sort of Fear King who uses oral terrors to
affright the soul of man. Heaven and hell are not a new sort of
ghost-land: retribution is not a larger way of tribal revenge.