f believing, the preparation afar off for new better and
wider ways,--an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we
will lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction of
old _forms_ is not destruction of everlasting _substances_; that
Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not an end but a
beginning.

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's
theory of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly one
than Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, that
such is my deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence against
the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham
himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively
worthy of praise. It is a determinate _being_ what all the world, in a
cowardly, half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the
crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross,
steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a
laying down of cant; a saying to oneself: "Well then, this world is a
dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let
us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth
and pinion, can be made of it!" Benthamism has something complete,
manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true;
you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its _eyes_ put out! It
is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the
half-and-half state, pervading man's whole existence in that
Eighteenth Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and all
lip-believers of it, are bound to be Benthamites, if they have courage
and honesty. Benthamism is an _eyeless_ Heroism: the Human Species,
like a hapless blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps
convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin down, but
ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no harm.

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart,
that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has in the
fatalest way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That all
Godhood should vanish out of men's conception of this Universe seems
to me precisely the most brutal error,--I will not disparage
Heathenism by calling it a Heathen error,--that men could fall into.
It is not true; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinks
so wil