ee and plenteous effusion, have
for us all the marks of a too familiar reality. Such a doctrine is an
everyday plea for self-deception, and a current justification for
illusion even among some of the finer spirits. They have persuaded
themselves not only that the life of the religious emotions is the
highest life, but that it is independent of the intellectual forms with
which history happens to have associated it. And so they refine and
sophisticate and make havoc with plain and honest interpretation, in
order to preserve a soft serenity of soul unperturbed.

Now, we are not at all concerned to dispute such positions as that
Feeling is the right starting-point of moral education; that in forming
character appeal should be to the heart rather than to the
understanding; that the only basis on which our faculties can be
harmoniously ordered is the preponderance of affection over reason.
These propositions open much grave and complex discussion, and they are
not to our present purpose. We only desire to state the evil of the
notion that a man is warranted in comforting himself with dogmas and
formularies, which he has first to empty of all definite, precise, and
clearly determinable significance, before he can get them out of the way
of his religious sensibilities. Whether Reason or Affection is to have
the empire in the society of the future, when Reason may possibly have
no more to discover for us in the region of morals and religion, and so
will have become _emeritus_ and taken a lower place, as of a tutor whose
services the human family, being now grown up, no longer
requires,--however this may be, it is at least certain that in the
meantime the spiritual life of man needs direction quite as much as it
needs impulse, and light quite as much as force. This direction and
light can only be safely procured by the free and vigorous use of the
intelligence. But the intelligence is not free in the presence of a
mortal fear lest its conclusions should trouble soft tranquillity of
spirit. There is always hope of a man so long as he dwells in the region
of the direct categorical proposition and the unambiguous term; so long
as he does not deny the rightly drawn conclusion after accepting the
major and minor premisses. This may seem a scanty virtue and very easy
grace. Yet experience shows it to be too hard of attainment for those
who tamper with disinterestedness of conviction, for the sake of
luxuriating in the softness of spir