ith the
great forces that move the world, we may contribute some fragment to an
edifice which will not be broken down; that to think for others instead
of limiting our hopes to our petty interests is the best remedy for
unavailing regret. We can take our part in the long warfare of man
against the world, which is nothing else but the gradual accommodation
of the race to the conditions of its dwelling-place. By so disciplining
our thoughts that we may fight eagerly and hopefully, we have the best
security for happiness, and not in encouraging an idle dwelling upon
visions which can never be verified, and which are apt to become most
ghastly when we most wish for consolation.

To the question, then, from which I started, it seems that an
unequivocal reply can be given. Why help to destroy the old faith from
which people derive, or believe themselves to derive, so much spiritual
solace? The answer is, that the loss is overbalanced by the gain. We
lose nothing that ought to be really comforting in the ancient creeds;
we are relieved from much that is burdensome to the imagination and to
the intellect. Those creeds were indeed in great part the work of the
best and ablest of our forefathers; they therefore provide some
expression for the highest emotions of which our nature is capable; but,
to say nothing of the lower elements which have intruded, of the
concessions made to bad passions, and to the wants of a ruder form of
society, they are at best the approximations to the truth of men who
entertained a radically erroneous conception of the universe.
Astronomers who went on the Ptolemaic theory managed to provide a very
fair description of the actual phenomena of the heavens; but the solid
result of their labors was not lost when the Copernican system took its
place; and incalculable advantages followed from casting aside the old
cumbrous machinery of cycles and epicycles in favor of the simpler
conceptions of the new doctrine. A similar change follows when man is
placed at the centre of the religious and moral system. We still retain
the faiths at which theologians arrived by a complex machinery of
arbitrary contrivances destined to compensate one set of dogmas by
another. The justice of God the Father is tempered by the mercy of God
the Son, as the planet wheeled too far forward by the cycle is brought
back to its place by the epicycle. When we strike out the elaborate
arrangements, the truths which they aim at expressing