“I do not conceive that I do, in declaring abhorrence and contempt of such perversions of ‘sentiment,’ however ‘holy’ you may call them.  Hideous as they are, however, they are less hideous than the half-length apologies for them on the part of cultivated and civilized human beings, like our ‘spiritual’ infidels.  Your tenderness is ludicrously misplaced.  I wonder whether the same apology would extend to those exercises of simple-minded ‘faith’ in which it is said that the Spanish and Portuguese pirates sometimes indulged, when they implored the benediction of their saints on their predatory expeditions!  And yet I see not how it could be avoided; for the exorbitancies of these pirates were not more hateful to humanity than are the rites practices, and the duties enjoined, by many forms of religion.  What delightful, ingenuous ‘faith’ and genuine ‘simplicity’ of mind did these pirates manifest!”

“How can you talk so, when we make it a mark of a false revelation, that it contradicts any intuition of our moral nature?”

“Then cease to talk of your ‘absolute religion,’ as capable in any way of consecrating the hateful forms of false and cruel superstition for which you and Mr. Parker condescend to be the apologists.  The fanaticism of such pious and devout beasts as those saint-loving pirates is not a more flagrant violation of the principle of morality, than the acts which flow directly as the immediate and natural expression of the infinitely varied but all-polluting forms of idolatry with which you are pleased to identify your ’absolute religion,’ and in all of which you suppose an acceptable ‘faith’ to be very possible.  You see how Mr. Parker extends the apology to the foulest sets of his Tartar and Calmuck scoundrels; acts called murders in the codes of Christendom and civilization, but varnished over by the beautiful ‘faith’ which somehow still lurks under the most frightful practices of a simple-minded barbarian.  If this faith will shelter the abominations of a gross idolatry, I see not what else it may not sanctify.—­But, in fact, neither in the case of idolaters, nor any other religionists, is it true that ‘faith’ is independent of ‘belief’; in the case of your Calmuck, for example, the ‘belief’ is vile, and therefore the ‘faith’ vile too; faith practical enough, certainly, but one that as certainly does not ‘work by love’; and which, I think, would be well exchanged for a dead orthodoxy, or any thing else.”

It is not difficult to see the source of the fallacy into which Mr. Fellowes had fallen.  It lies in the attempt to make a distinction in fact, as well as in theory, between the “intellectual” and “emotional” parts of our nature.  It is very well for the spiritual and mental analyst to consider separately the several principles which constitute humanity, and which act, and react, and interact, in endless involution.  That there may be acts of belief that terminate chiefly in the intellect, and may be wholly worthless, who denies?  The