is lived the mass of
religious life so-called, untouched either by ecstasy or by conceptual
unbelief as distinguished from passive conformity. But the conflict of
the thinking minority is unceasing; and orthodox professions of triumph
deceive no one who is really engaged in the struggle.

On both sides it has long been a question of balancing 'probabilities,'
a conflict of 'reasons.' Bacon, declaring that he would 'rather believe
all the fables in the Golden Legend and the Koran than that this
universal frame is without a mind,' opened a door that let in all the
forces of doubt. The Koran is the form in which the God-idea recommended
itself to the Moslem mind, as the Bible is the form in which it
commended itself to the Christian; and if for each the other is always
fabulising in detail, where could be the certitude of the common
doctrine? Was mind any likelier to be the form of the power of the
universe than any other of the anthropomorphic characteristics of
Jehovah and Allah and Zeus? However that might be, Bacon was appealing
to the sheer sense of probability; the 'Evidences' of Grotius were
addressed to the same kind of judgment; and Pascal's 'wager' was a blank
appeal to the principle of chances plus the instinct of fear. Butler,
anxiously striving to reduce the straggling deistic controversy to its
logical bases, accepted the test of probability as the guide of life;
and Gladstone, his last champion, with all his show of sheer faith,
strenuously endorses the doctrine. The vital question is seen to be,
then, whether the Butlerian 'believer' or the rationalist is the more
loyal to that standard of probability by which each avowedly guides
himself.

But Butler, in the very act of professedly basing his case on
probability, introduced the contrary principle. Gladstone, gravely
reprehending that Jesuit doctrine misleadingly termed Probabilism--which
permits of a choice of the less probable course in morals and
belief--supposed himself to be upholding a true Probabilism in Butler.
The fact is that Butler, seeking to checkmate the Deists, committed
himself to anomaly as a mark of revelation. 'You believe,' he virtually
argued, 'in a benevolent God of Nature, though Nature is full of
ostensible cruelty and heartlessness: if these moral anomalies do not
stagger your deism, why should anomalies in the Scriptures be for you an
argument against their being a divine revelation? Should you not rather
expect to find difficult