, and, because
you had decided a case one way, refused to admit evidence for the other
view, what would be the value of your decision?

I cannot here argue the justice of this view of Newman's theories,
though personally I think it just. But it is, in any case, eminently
characteristic. Fitzjames, like Newman, had been much influenced by
Butler. Both of them, after a fashion, accept Butler's famous saying
that 'probability is the guide of life.' Newman, believing in the
necessity of dogma, holds that we are justified in transmuting the
belief corresponding to probability into such 'certitude' as corresponds
to demonstration. He does so by the help of appeals to our conscience,
which, for the reasons just given, fail to have any force for his
opponent. Fitzjames adhered steadily to Butler's doctrine. There is, he
says, a probability of the truth of the great religious doctrines--of
the existence of a God and a soul; and, therefore, of the correctness of
the belief that this world is a school or a preparation for something
higher and better. No one could speak more emphatically than he often
did of the vast importance of these doctrines. To hold them, he says,
makes all the difference between a man and a beast. But his almost
passionate assertion of this opinion would never lead him to
over-estimate the evidence in its favour. We do not know the truth of
these doctrines; we only know that they are probably true, and that
probability is and must be enough for us; we must not torture our
guesses into a sham appearance of infallible reasoning, nor call them
self-evident because we cannot prove them, nor try to transfer the case
from the court of reason to the court of sentiment or emotion.

I might say, if I wished to be paradoxical, that this doctrine seems
strange precisely because it is so common. It is what most people who
think at all believe, but what nobody likes to avow. We have become so
accustomed to the assertion that it is a duty for the ignorant to hold
with unequivocal faith doctrines which are notoriously the very centres
of philosophical doubt, that it is hard to believe that a man can regard
them as at once important and incapable of strict proof. Fitzjames
naturally appears to the orthodox as an unbeliever, because he admits
the doubt. He replies to one such charge that the 'broad general
doctrines, which are the only consolation in death and the only solid
sanction of morality, never have been, and, pleas