the consolations, mysteries,
personalities, of the orthodox faith, and us who have made up our minds
to face the worst, and to shape, as best we can, a life in which the
cardinal verities of the common creed shall have no place. The future
faith, like the faith of the past, brings not peace but a sword. It is a
tale not of concord, but of households divided against themselves. Those
who are incessantly striving to make the old bottles hold the new wine,
to reconcile the irreconcilable, to bring the Bible and the dogmas of
the churches to be good friends with history and criticism, are prompted
by the humanest intention.[21] One sympathises with this amiable anxiety
to soften shocks, and break the rudeness of a vital transition. In this
essay, at any rate, there is no such attempt. We know that it is the son
against the father, and the mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law.
No softness of speech will disguise the portentous differences between
those who admit a supernatural revelation and those who deny it. No
charity nor goodwill can narrow the intellectual breach between those
who declare that a world without an ever-present Creator with
intelligible attributes would be to them empty and void, and those who
insist that none of the attributes of a Creator can ever be grasped by
the finite intelligence of men.[22] Our object in urging the historic,
semi-conservative, and almost sympathetic quality, which distinguishes
the unbelief of to-day from the unbelief of a hundred years ago, is only
to show that the most strenuous and upright of plain-speakers is less
likely to shock and wound the lawful sensibilities of devout persons
than he would have been so long as unbelief went no further than bitter
attack on small details. In short, all save the purely negative and
purely destructive school of freethinkers, are now able to deal with
the beliefs from which they dissent, in a way which makes patient and
disinterested controversy not wholly impossible.

One more point of much importance ought to be mentioned. The belief that
heresy is the result of wilful depravity is fast dying out. People no
longer seriously think that speculative error is bound up with moral
iniquity, or that mistaken thinking is either the result or the cause of
wicked living. Even the official mouthpieces of established beliefs now
usually represent a bad heart as only one among other possible causes of
unbelief. It divides the curse with ignorance,