scholar once defined it to be. "Faith," said
this unconscious plagiarist of Tertullian, "is the power of saying you
believe things which are incredible."

Now I, and many other Agnostics, believe that faith, in this sense, is
an abomination; and though we do not indulge in the luxury of
self-righteousness so far as to call those who are not of our way of
thinking hard names, we do not feel that the disagreement between
ourselves and those who hold this doctrine is even more moral than
intellectual. It is desirable there should be an end of any mistakes
on this topic. If our clerical opponents were clearly aware of the
real state of the case, there would be an end of the curious delusion,
which often appears between the lines of their writings, that those
whom they are so fond of calling "Infidels" are people who not only
ought to be, but in their hearts are, ashamed of themselves. It would
be discourteous to do more than hint the antipodal opposition of this
pleasant dream of theirs to facts.

The clerics and their lay allies commonly tell us, that if we refuse
to admit that there is good ground for expressing definite convictions
about certain topics, the bonds of human society will dissolve and
mankind lapse into savagery. There are several answers to this
assertion. One is that the bonds of human society were formed without
the aid of their theology; and, in the opinion of not a few competent
judges, have been weakened rather than strengthened by a good deal of
it. Greek science, Greek art, the ethics of old Israel, the social
organisation of old Rome, contrived to come into being, without the
help of any one who believed in a single distinctive article of the
simplest of the Christian creeds. The science, the art, the
jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern
world have grown out of those of Greece and Rome--not by favour of,
but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity,
to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of
this world, were alike despicable.

Again, all that is best in the ethics of the modern world, in so far
as it has not grown out of Greek thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the
direct development of the ethics of old Israel. There is no code of
legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, so
tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law; and, if the Gospels
are to be trusted, Jesus of Nazareth himself decla