ty for sin, as a guarantee for good government or as a
condition of general progress, Christianity is defended on any ground
rather than on that of the truth of its narratives or the conformity of
its doctrine to good sense, moral or other. And the pleas are
entertainingly internecine.

One day we are told that it makes for race-survival; the next, that it
is a spiritual stay for races that are dying out, and a great deathbed
comfort to ex-cannibals, with a past of many murders. A creed which
involves a cosmology is recommended, not by such arguments as may
commend a cosmology, but by pleas of subjective agreeableness which in
any discussion of historic fact would be felt to savour of trifling.

And this simple and spontaneous sophistry is in a measure kept in
countenance by quasi-philosophies such as that of the 'Will to Believe'
and that latterly termed Pragmatism. The former, as brilliantly
propounded by the late Professor James, amounts simply to this, that in
matters on which there is no good or sufficient evidence either way, we
do well to believe what we would like to believe. As the precept comes
from the thinker who passed on to students the counsel of Pascal
concerning the opiate value of religious practices,[13] it is easy to
infer how it will tend to be interpreted. And the second philosophy is
like unto the first, in so far as it conveys, under cover of the true
formula that the valid beliefs are those which affect action, the
antinomian hint that if we think we have found any belief a help to
action, it is thereby sufficiently certificated as true.

The rationalist comment on Pragmatism, thus applied, is that it really
discredits the religious beliefs of most men, inasmuch as they never
relate their faith to action in general, would not stake a shilling on a
prayer, have no working faith in providence, and do not in the least
desire to pass from this life to another. But these men do not study
philosophy; while the emotional believers, who really feel their faith
to be a help in life, do not need the pragmatist's precept, and believe
without it.

What is true in Pragmatism is of the essence of Rationalism. Our lives
at their best are made valid for us by our mutual trust, our reciprocal
sincerities; and Rationalism consists in the effort to extend
intellectual and moral sincerity to the study of all problems. It may
permit, none the less, of some such genial or affectionate glozing of
some facts as lov