A serious conviction held by a human being is generally found to be an inner citadel surrounded by a network of prejudices. It was only Johnson's intimate friends who were admitted into the central fortress of his faith: the rest of the world saw it plainly indeed, but did not get nearer than the girdle of defensive prejudices outside, and to them they { 142} often got nearer than they liked. Whether people discovered that Johnson was a Christian or not, they were quite certain to discover that he was a Churchman. His High Church and Tory guns were always ready for action, and Lord Auchinleck is perhaps the only recorded assailant who succeeded in silencing them. The praise he gave to the dearest of his friends, "He hated a fool, he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig: he was a very good hater," was exactly applicable to himself. For us the word Whig has come to mean a dignified aristocrat who, by the pressure of family tradition, maintains a painful association with vulgar Radicals: for Johnson it meant a rebel against the principle of authority. From that point of view he was accustomed to say with perfect justice that the first Whig was the Devil. His sallies at the general expense of the enemies of "Church and King" must not be confused with those on many other subjects, as, for instance, on the Scotch, which were partly humorous in intention as well as in expression. He trounced the Scotch to annoy Boswell and amuse himself. He trounced Whigs, Quakers and Presbyterians because he loved authority both in Church and State. These latter outbursts represented definite opinions which were held, as usually happens, with all the { 143} more passion because reason had not been allowed to play her full part in their maturing. Johnson could hold no views to which he had not been able to supply a rational foundation: but in these matters passion had been given a free hand in the superstructure.