n, indulgence: he throws himself into the
minds of his opponents, he accounts for their mistakes. He knows the
weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its
limits. If he be an unbeliever, he will be too profound and large-minded
to ridicule religion or to act against it; he is too wise to be a
dogmatist or fanatic in his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he
even supports institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he
does not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it contents him
to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them. He is a
friend of religious toleration, and that, not only because his philosophy
has taught him to look on all forms of faith with an impartial eye, but
also from the gentleness and effeminacy of feeling, which is the attendant
on civilization.

Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even when he is
not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of imagination and
sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of the sublime, majestic,
and beautiful, without which there can be no large philosophy. Sometimes
he acknowledges the being of God, sometimes he invests an unknown
principle or quality with the attributes of perfection. And this deduction
of his reason, or creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such
excellent thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a
teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity itself. From
the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical powers, he is able to see
what sentiments are consistent in those who hold any religious doctrine at
all, and he appears to others to feel and to hold a whole circle of
theological truths, which exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number
of deductions.

* * * * *

Such are some of the lineaments of the ethical character, which the
cultivated intellect will form, apart from religious principle. They are
seen within the pale of the Church and without it, in holy men, and in
profligate; they form the _beau-ideal_ of the world; they partly assist
and partly distort the development of the Catholic. They may subserve the
education of a St. Francis de Sales or a Cardinal Pole; they may be the
limits of the contemplation of a Shaftesbury or a Gibbon. Basil and Julian
were fellow-students at the schools of Athens; and one became the Saint
and Doctor of the Church, the o