circumstances than they can be.  But, seriously, let me try, if possible, to fathom this curious dogma,—­I beg your pardon,—­sentiment, I mean.  Belief without faith in an intelligible sense (if by this last we mean a condition of the emotions or affections), I can understand; though if the truth believed be of a nature to excite to emotion and to dictate action, and fail to do so, I doubt whether men in general would not call that belief spurious.  For example, if a man, on being told that his house was on fire, sat still in his neighbor’s chimney-corner, and took no notice of the matter, most persons would say that his assent was no true belief; for it did not produce its effects, did not produce faith.  But whether faith can ever exist independently of belief,—­whether it is not always involved with it,—­and whether there can be a faith worth a farthing that is not based on a true belief,—­that is the point on which I want light.  If I understand you, an acceptable faith may or may not coexist with a true belief; and men who believe in Jupiter or Jehovah, in one God or a thousand, who worship the sun, or an idol, or a cat, or a monkey, all may have an equally acceptable faith.”

“I affirm it.”

“That as there may be belief in a truth without faith, so there may be faith, though the intellect believes in a falsehood;—­that faith, in fact, is independent of knowledge, or of any particular condition of the intellect?”

“I do not like the terms in which you express the sentiment, but I, for one, believe it substantially correct.”

“Never mind the form; I am quite willing to employ other terms, if you will supply them”

“Well, then,” said Fellowes, “I should say, with Mr. Parker, that the principle of true faith may be found to coexist with the grossest and most hideous misconceptions of God, while the absence of it may coexist with the truest and most elevated belief.”

“That, I think, comes to much the same as I said.  Now about the latter we have no dispute.  It is the former that I want light upon:  the latter only shows that a belief, which ought to be practical, and if not practical is nothing, is but a species of hypocrisy; and, of course, I have nothing to say for it.  My uncle here, who is still one of the orthodox, who believes that an ‘acceptable faith’ and a belief in the divinity of a monkey or a cat are somehow quite incompatible, would be among the first to acknowledge the latter position.  He would say, ’No doubt there has often been such a thing as “dead orthodoxy,”—­a creed of the “letter,”—­a religion exclusively dependent on logic, and nothing to do with the feeling’s; —­belief that is not sublimated into faith;—­a system of arteries and veins infiltrated with some colored substance, like the specimens in an anatomical museum, but in which none of the lifeblood of religion circulates.  But surely,’ he would say, ’it does not follow, that, because there has been belief without faith, there is or can be any independent of some belief, or an acceptable faith without a true belief.’”