at the other.

PIOUS PUERILITIES.

Faith and credulity are the same thing with different names. When a man
has plenty of faith he is ready to believe anything. However fantastic
it may be, however childish, however infantile, he accepts it with
gaping wonder. His imagination is not necessarily strong, but it is
easily excited. Macaulay held that savages have stronger imaginations
than civilised men, and that as the reason developes the imagination
decays. But, in our opinion, he was mistaken. The imagination does not
wither under the growth of reason; on the contrary, it flourishes
more strongly. It is, however, disciplined by reason, and guided by
knowledge; and it only appears to be weaker because the relation between
it and other faculties has changed. The imagination of the savage
seems powerful because his other faculties are weak. In the absence of
knowledge it cuts the most astonishing capers, just as a bird would if
it were suddenly deprived of sight. Now the savage is a mental child,
and the ignorant and thoughtless are mental savages. They credit the
absurdest stories, and indulge in the most ridiculous speculations. When
religion ministers to their weakness, as it always does, they gravely
discuss the most astonishing puerilities. Indeed, the history of
religious thought--that is, of the infantile vagaries of the human
mind--is full of puerilites. There is hardly an absurdity which learned
divines have not debated as seriously as scientists discuss the nebular
hypothesis or the evolution theory. They have argued how many angels
could dance on the point of a needle; whether Adam had a navel; whether
ghosts and demons could cohabit with women; whether animals could
sin; and what was to be done with a rat that devoured a holy wafer. We
believe the decision of the last weighty problem, after long debate, was
that the rat, having the body of Christ in its body, was sanctified, and
that it had to be eaten by the priest, by which means the second person
of the Trinity was saved from desecration.

But of all the pious puerilities on record, probably the worst are
ascribed to the rabbis. The faith of those gentlemen was unbounded,
and they were so fond of trivialities, that where they found none they
manufactured them. The rabbis belonged to the most credulous race of
antiquity. "Tell that to the Jews," as we see from Juvenal, was as
common as our saying, "Tell that to the marines." The chosen people were
in