for others,
a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the
unbelieving heart. We feel that a faith in masses and holy water
adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the
inner soul of faith's reality; and if we were ourselves in the place of
the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off
believers of this pattern from their infinite reward. It is evident
that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses
and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a
living option. Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on
its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem
such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for them
specifically, leaves us unmoved. As well might the Mahdi write to us,
saying, "I am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence.
You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be
cut off from the light of the sun. Weigh, then, your infinite gain if
I am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!" His logic
would be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it on us, for the
hypothesis he offers us is dead. No tendency to act on it exists in us
to any degree.

{7}

The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of
view, simply silly. From another point of view it is worse than silly,
it is vile. When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical
sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested
moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience
and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to
the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar;
how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,--then how
besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes
blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things
from out of his private dream! Can we wonder if those bred in the
rugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing such
subjectivism out of their mouths? The whole system of loyalties which
grow up in the schools of science go dead against its toleration; so
that it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever
should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the
incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitt