he latter remains
the natural one for reverent ingrained prejudice, alias inculcated
faith; but it is only so much sophisticated folklore for the student of
life, nature, history, philosophy. The latest forms of it are but
defecations of the earlier. For Arnold, trained in reverence and avid of
reverend sanctions, the deity of his fellows is confessedly but a
'magnified non-natural man'; and his substituted
'Something-not-ourselves-which-makes-for-righteousness,' in turn, is for
his critics but an evasion of the problem of the
something-not-ourselves-which-makes-for-unrighteousness.

In sum, then, the case for rationalism as against the creeds is that
they recognise no rational test for truth, and apply none. They are
all, to say the least, grossly improbable in the light of the fullest
human knowledge; and the acceptance of them means either passive
disregard of the principle of sufficient reason or the habitual
employment of arguments which upon any other kind of issue would be
recognised by all competent men as at best utterly inadequate. Theology
is the most uncandid of all the current sciences; its results are the
most self-contradictory; its premisses the most incoherent. Upon those
theologians, then, who accuse the rationalist of self-will and
prejudice, he is forced to retort the charge with a double emphasis.
They are daily disloyal to the Canon of Consistency, which is for him
the moral law of the intellectual life. Claiming to propound the highest
truth, they override all the tests by which truth is to be known.

The modern defence of 'faith,' whether Christian or theistic, is less
and less an attempt to prove truth of doctrine--save as regards the
defence of historicity; more and more an attempt to prove its usefulness
or its comfortableness. Faith has turned utilitarian, as regards its
apologetics. John Mill erred somewhat, indeed, in endorsing the
statement that down to his time much had been written on the truth of
religion, and 'little, at least in the way of discussion or controversy,
concerning its usefulness.' Christian bishops early learned to claim for
their creed a gift of prosperity; and in the eighteenth century there
was an abundance of utilitarian vindication of the faith. But latterly
this has more and more coloured the whole defence. Either as a promise
of peace or as one of comfort and stimulus, as a plea for emotional
indulgence or for the joy of the sense of deliverance from
responsibili