free play, for the sake of keeping undisturbed certain luxurious spiritual sensibilities.  This choice of emotional gratification before truth and upright dealing with one’s own understanding, creates a character that is certainly far less unlovely than those who sacrifice their intellectual integrity to more material convenience.  The moral flaw is less palpable and less gross.  Yet here too there is the stain of intellectual improbity, and it is perhaps all the more mischievous for being partly hidden under the mien of spiritual exaltation.

There is in literature no more seductive illustration of this seductive type than Rousseau’s renowned character of the Savoyard Vicar—­penetrated with scepticism as to the attributes of the deity, the meaning of the holy rites, the authenticity of the sacred documents; yet full of reverence, and ever respecting in silence what he could neither reject nor understand.  ‘The essential worship,’ he says, ’is the worship of the heart.  God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to him.  In old days I used to say mass with the levity which in time infects even the gravest things when we do them too often.  Since acquiring my new principles [of reverential scepticism] I celebrate it with more veneration:  I am overcome by the majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so ill what pertains to its author.  When I approach the moment of consecration, I collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required by the church and the majesty of the sacrament.  I strive to annihilate my reason before the Supreme Intelligence, saying, Who art thou that thou shouldst measure infinite power?’[17]

The Savoyard Vicar is not imaginary.  The acquiescence in indefinite ideas for the sake of comforted emotions, and the abnegation of strong convictions in order to make room for free and plenteous effusion, have for us all the marks of a too familiar reality.  Such a doctrine is an everyday plea for self-deception, and a current justification for illusion even among some of the finer spirits.  They have persuaded themselves not only that the life of the religious emotions is the highest life, but that it is independent of the intellectual forms with which history happens to have associated it.  And so they refine and sophisticate and make havoc with plain and honest interpretation, in order to preserve a soft serenity of soul unperturbed.

Now, we are not at all concerned to dispute such positions as that Feeling is the right starting-point of moral education; that in forming character appeal should be to the heart rather than to the understanding; that the only basis on which our faculties can be harmoniously ordered is the preponderance of affection over reason.  These propositions open much grave and complex discussion, and they are not to our present purpose.  We only desire to state the evil of the notion that a man is warranted in comforting himself