rcipient,' thus inexpensively cutting the knot of argument; and,
himself a wilful continuator of the thought-forms of the savage,
declares himself to be transcending the earthiness of the sciences in
virtue of which he is civilised. All this is a poor way of proving
serenity; as poor, at bottom, as the perpetual display of wrath at
gainsaying by men who claim to have the backing of Omnipotence.
Consciousness of intercourse with the supernatural has never ostensibly
availed to give the common run of theists imperturbability in their
intercourse with the naturalist.

And if in the stress of controversy the rationalist should in turn prove
himself capable of perturbation, let him, avowing that he claims no
supernatural stay, at least plead that he sets up no intellectual
'colour line,' and that his gospel is after all fraternal enough. Once
more, he does but ask the theist to take one more step in a criticism
which he has already carried far, with small trouble to himself. Every
religion sets aside every other: the rationalist only sets aside one
more. Every theist has negated a million Gods save one: the rationalist
does but negate the millionth. And in doing this, he is not committing
the verbal nullity of saying, There is no God--a formula never fathered
by a considerate atheist. God, undefined,=_x_; and we do not say, There
is no _x_. Of the defined God-idea, whichsoever, we demonstrate the
untenableness; but in giving the theist an inconceivable universe we
surely meet his appetite for the transcendent.

Rationalism, when all is said, is the undertaking, in George Eliot's
phrase, to do without opium. And perhaps the shrewdest challenge to it
is the denial that the average man can so abstain--a denial which may be
backed by the reminder that the framer of the phrase did not. A jurist
once cheerfully assured the present writer that the mass of men will
never do without alcohol and religion. He was not aware that he was
adapting a Byronic blasphemy. It may be that in a world in which most
men chronically crave alternately stimulants and narcotics, he was in a
measure right. But as one of his two necessaries is already under a
widening medical indictment and avoidance, it may be that the other will
fare similarly. In any case, is not the ideal a worthy one, as ideals
go?

FOOTNOTES:

[14] It is an orthodox writer who applies to this ratiocination the tag,
_Credibile est quia ineptum est_, dismissing it as 'a blending