“It is ingeniously put, I admit.  I grant that there are here, as in so many other cases, limits which, though it may not be very easy to assign them, as plainly exist.  But that does not answer my question.  I want to know whether the principle is to be applied without limits at all, as your speculative theory demands?  In other words, will it or not sanctify acts of the most degrading and pernicious idolatry, of the most debasing superstition, because allied to that state of the affections in which you make the essence of faith consist?  If it will not, then your objection to me is nothing; it merely asks me to assign limits within which the exercise of the affection in question may be acceptable, or almost equally acceptable, in cases of a partially enlightened understanding.  If it will, then it leaves you open, as I conceive, and fairly open, to all the objections which have been so brusquely urged against you by your friend, in whose indignant protest against the detestable apologies for the lowest forms of religious degradation, in which so many ‘spiritual’ writers indulge, I for one heartily sympathize.”

I ventured to add, that the account of “faith” as a state of the emotions exclusively, given by some of his favorite writers, is perfectly arbitrary.  “Belief,” say they, “is wholly intellectual:  faith is wholly moral.”  Now it would be of very little consequence, if the terms be generally so understood, whether they be so used or not; men would, in that case, suppose that faith, thus restricted, implies a previous process of mind which is to be called exclusively belief.  I added, however, that I did not believe that the word faith was ever thus understood in popular use; but that, on the contrary, it was employed to imply belief founded on knowledge, or supposed knowledge, and, where the belief was, in its very nature, practical, or involved emotion, a conduct and a state of the affections corresponding thereto.  “But this,” said I, “merely respects the Popular use of the words, and if is hardly worth while to prolong discussion on it.  As to the reasoning which would show that belief does not properly exist at all, because it may be all resolved into reason, founded on the preponderance of evidence, where it does not matter whether that preponderance be a ton or a scruple,—­surely it is over-refined.  Men will always feel that there is a marked difference between the states of mind in which they assent to a proposition of which they have no more doubt than they have of their own existence, or to a proposition in the mathematics, and to one in which they feel that only a few grains turn the scale.  To this conscious difference in the condition of mind, they have given (and I suppose will not give) very different names; and though they will continue to say that they believe that two and two make four, but that they know it, they will say that they believe that they will die before the end of the century, though they will not say that they know that.  The distinction between the certain and the probable is felt to be far too important not to be marked by corresponding varieties of speech; and speech has made them according.”