n, which it is safe to obey or to profess, but not possible to
embrace with full internal assent. If this were to be allowed, then
the celebrated saying, "O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I
have a soul!" would be the highest measure of devotion:--but who can
really pray to a being, about whose existence he is seriously in
doubt?

I considered that Mr. Keble met this difficulty by ascribing the
firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, not to the
probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of faith
and love which accepted it. In matters of religion, he seemed to say,
it is not merely probability which makes us intellectually certain,
but probability as it is put to account by faith and love. It is
faith and love which give to probability a force which it has not in
itself. Faith and love are directed towards an object; in the vision
of that object they live; it is that object, received in faith and
love, which renders it reasonable to take probability as sufficient
for internal conviction. Thus the argument about probability, in the
matter of religion, became an argument from personality, which in
fact is one form of the argument from authority.

In illustration, Mr. Keble used to quote the words of the psalm: "I
will guide thee with mine _eye_. Be ye not like to horse and mule,
which have no understanding; whose mouths must be held with bit and
bridle, lest they fall upon thee." This is the very difference, he
used to say, between slaves, and friends or children. Friends do not
ask for literal commands; but, from their knowledge of the speaker,
they understand his half-words, and from love of him they anticipate
his wishes. Hence it is, that in his poem for St. Bartholomew's Day,
he speaks of the "Eye of God's word;" and in the note quotes Mr.
Miller, of Worcester College, who remarks, in his Bampton Lectures,
on the special power of Scripture, as having "this eye, like that of
a portrait, uniformly fixed upon us, turn where we will." The view
thus suggested by Mr. Keble, is brought forward in one of the
earliest of the "Tracts for the Times." In No. 8 I say, "The Gospel
is a Law of Liberty. We are treated as sons, not as servants; not
subjected to a code of formal commandments, but addressed as those
who love God, and wish to please Him."

I did not at all dispute this view of the matter, for I made use of
it myself; but I was dissatisfied, because it did not go to the root
of