n of the prolongation of our existence after death
to fulfil the purpose of the supernatural powers; or at least who think
them so extremely improbable that no reasonable man or woman, once
awakened to a conviction of this improbability, would thenceforth be
capable of receiving effective check or guidance from beliefs, that
would have sunk slowly down to the level of doubtful guesses. We have
now to deal with those who while taking this view of certain doctrines,
still declare them to be indispensable for restraining from anti-social
conduct all who are not acute or instructed enough to see through them.
In other words, they think error useful, and that it may be the best
thing for society that masses of men should cheat and deceive themselves
in their most fervent aspirations and their deepest assurances. This is
the furthest extreme to which the empire of existing facts over
principles can well be imagined to go. It lies at the root of every
discussion upon the limits which separate lawful compromise or
accommodation from palpable hypocrisy.

It will probably be said that according to the theory of the school of
which M. Renan is the most eloquent representative, the common people
are not really cheating themselves or being cheated. Indeed M. Renan
himself has expatiated on the charm of seeing figures of the ideal in
the cottages of the poor, images representing no reality, and so forth.
'What a delight,' he cries, 'for the man who is borne down by six days
of toil to come on the seventh to rest upon his knees, to contemplate
the tall columns, a vault, arches, an altar; to listen to the chanting,
to hear moral and consoling words!'[7] The dogmas which criticism
attacks are not for these poor people 'the object of an explicit
affirmation,' and therefore there is no harm in them; 'it is the
privilege of pure sentiment to be invulnerable, and to play with poison
without being hurt by it.' In other words, the dogmas are false, but the
liturgy, as a performance stirring the senses of awe, reverence,
susceptibility to beauty of various kinds, appeals to and satisfies a
sentiment that is both true and indispensable in the human mind. More
than this, in the two or three supreme moments of life to which men look
forward and on which they look back,--at birth, at the passing of the
threshold into fulness of life, at marriage, at death,--the Church is
present to invest the hour with a certain solemn and dignified charm.
That is