deliberately repel as a
blasphemy what it has hitherto accepted as a commonplace.

This objection is itself so obvious that it has not escaped notice. But
the very fact of its obviousness has tended to hide the true force of
it, and coming so readily to the surface, it has been set down as
superficial. It is, however, very constantly recognised, and is being
met on all sides with a very elaborate answer. It is this answer that I
shall now proceed to consider. It is a very important one, and it
deserves our most close attention, as it contains the chief present
argument for the positive faith in life. I shall show how this argument
is vitiated by a fundamental fallacy.

It is admitted that to a hasty glance there may certainly seem some
danger of our faith in life's value collapsing, together with our belief
in God. It is admitted that this is not in the least irrational. But it
is contended that a scientific study of the past will show us that these
fears are groundless, and will reassure us as to the future. We are
referred to a new branch of knowledge, the philosophy of history, and we
are assured that by this all our doubts will be set at rest. This
philosophy of history resembles, on an extended scale, the practical
wisdom learnt by the man of the world. As long as a man is inexperienced
and new to life, each calamity as it comes to him seems something unique
and overwhelming, but as he lives on, suffers more of them, and yet
finds that he is not overwhelmed, he learns to reduce them to their
right dimensions, and is able, with sufficient self-possession, to let
each of them teach some useful lesson to him.

Thus we, it is said, if we were not better instructed, might naturally
take the present decline of faith to be an unprecedented calamity that
was ushering in an eve of darkness and utter ruin. But the philosophy
of history puts the whole matter in a different light. It teaches us
that the condition of the world in our day, though not normal, is yet by
no means peculiar. It points to numerous parallels in former ages, and
treats the rise and fall of creeds as regular phenomena in human
history, whose causes and recurrence we can distinctly trace. Other
nations and races have had creeds, and have lost them; they have
thought, as some of us think, that the loss would ruin them: and yet
they have not been ruined. Creeds, it is contended, were imaginative,
provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying an