whole; that a final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and that to make emotion in this or any other respect a test of objective truth and a ground of positive belief, is to lower both truth and the reason which is its single arbiter.  They forgot that imagination is as active in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace may become much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth.  Christianity had given to this craving in western Europe a definite mould, which was not to be effaced in a day, and one or two of its lines mark a permanent and noble acquisition to the highest forces of human nature.  There will have to be wrought a profounder and more far-spreading modification than any which the French atheists could effect, before all debilitating influences in the old creed can be effaced, its elevating influences finally separated from them, and then permanently preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less questionable to the understanding.

Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice.  There must be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional, scientific, and material.  And, above all, there must be the slow steadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall retain all the elements of moral beauty that once gave light to the old belief that has disappeared, and must still possess a living force in the new.

Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith was the famous symbol.  Evil as this reaction was in many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under the circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive in association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of articles of faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions which were at that moment the only practical alternative.  The deism of Rousseau could not in any case have acquired the force of the corresponding religious reaction in England, because the former never acquired a compact and vigorous external organisation, as the latter did, especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable of its developments.  In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective character of deism disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of any great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom the sublimation of individualism.  But in itself it was a far less retrogressive, as well as a far less powerful, movement.  It kept fewer of those dogmas which gradual change of intellectual climate had reduced to the condition of rank superstitions.  It preserved some of its own, which a still further extension of the same change is assuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless, along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will never willingly let die.