ened to believe in a peasant's
religion, is always sure to set up some insane superstition of his own.
Open biographical volumes wherever you please, and the man who has no
faith in religion is a man who has faith in a nightmare. See that type
of the elegant sceptics,--Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He is writing a book
against Revelation; he asks a sign from heaven to tell him if his book
is approved by his Maker, and the man who cannot believe in the miracles
performed by his Saviour gravely tells us of a miracle vouchsafed to
himself. Take the hardest and strongest intellect which the hardest
and strongest race of mankind ever schooled and accomplished. See the
greatest of great men, the great Julius Caesar! Publicly he asserts
in the Senate that the immortality of the soul is a vain chimera. He
professes the creed which Roman voluptuaries deduced from Epicurus,
and denies all Divine interference in the affairs of the earth. A great
authority for the Materialists--they have none greater! They can show
on their side no intellect equal to Caesar's! And yet this magnificent
freethinker, rejecting a soul and a Deity, habitually entered his
chariot muttering a charm; crawled on his knees up the steps of a temple
to propitiate the abstraction called 'Nemesis;' and did not cross the
Rubicon till he had consulted the omens. What does all this prove?--a
very simple truth. Man has some instincts with the brutes; for instance,
hunger and sexual love. Man has one instinct peculiar to himself, found
universally (or with alleged exceptions in savage States so rare, that
they do not affect the general law(12)),--an instinct of an invisible
power without this earth, and of a life beyond the grave, which that
power vouchsafes to his spirit. But the best of us cannot violate an
instinct with impunity. Resist hunger as long as you can, and, rather
than die of starvation, your instinct will make you a cannibal; resist
love when youth and nature impel to it, and what pathologist does not
track one broad path into madness or crime? So with the noblest instinct
of all. Reject the internal conviction by which the grandest thinkers
have sanctioned the hope of the humblest Christian, and you are
servile at once to some faith inconceivably more hard to believe. The
imagination will not be withheld from its yearnings for vistas beyond
the walls of the flesh, and the span of the present hour. Philosophy
itself, in rejecting the healthful creeds by whic