ever advanced by a
competent intelligence on the side of faith. Pascal's thesis is that if
the unbeliever is wrong, he runs a frightful risk of future torment;
whereas, if he should after all be right, he will be no worse off after
death for having believed. So the 'belief' required of him is a simple
mindless and faithless conformity to a conditional threat. To such moral
perversity can religion persuade.

To Pascal's wager there have been many retorts. Mill declared that if a
God should doom him to hell for having been unable to believe in such a
God, 'to hell he would go'--glad, by implication, not to be in heaven.
Mansel's sole answer was a puerile attempt at a pious sneer. Clifford,
in effect, denounced the Pascalian appeal for what it was, a base appeal
to fear.[7] But it is unnecessary to resort to such logical
supererogation. There are two obvious and decisive rebuttals to Pascal's
doctrine on purely logical ground. Firstly, his thesis is available to
the Moslem or the polytheist no less than to the Christian; and when put
from either of these sides it leaves the Christian running the very risk
with which he menaces the unbeliever. He may have chosen the wrong God.
Secondly, the hypothetical Good God, if in any intelligible sense worthy
of the name, would conceivably be as likely to send Pascal to hell for
dishonouring him as to send the honest atheist there for refusing to
make-believe. The pietist has dishonoured himself to no purpose.

The _a posteriori_ argument for religious conformity has thus come to
nothing; and the process of argument has revealed the
religio-utilitarian champion of morality as traitor to that cause. There
is left him, indeed, the plea that religious fears and sanctions are
good for the ill-disposed believer, who ought, therefore, not to be
disillusioned. As regards the simple dogma of deity, the position has
the emphatic support of Voltaire. But Voltaire declined to use the
favourite menaces of faith, as do many religionists of to-day; and if
those menaces are to be rationally vindicated, there must first be
raised the question whether they could not be improved upon for the
purpose professed. Leaving that task to those who affect them, the
rationalist may claim to be justified in acting on the maxim that
honesty is the best policy in the intellectual as in the commercial
life. There has been no such historical harvest of moral betterment from
the religion of fear as could induce him