ither the professed champions of
theism, or else the visionary optimists of positivism; the former of
whom have had no sympathy with positive principles, and the latter no
discernment of their results. The class of men we are considering are
equally at variance with both of these; they agree with each in one
respect, and in another they agree with neither. They agree with the one
that religious belief is false; they agree with the other that unbelief
is miserable. What wonder then that they should have kept their
condition to themselves? Nearly all public dealing with it has been left
to men who can praise the only doctrines that they can preach as true,
or who else can condemn as false the doctrines that they deplore as
mischievous. As for the others, whose mental and moral convictions are
at variance, they have neither any heart to proclaim the one, nor any
intellectual standpoint from which to proclaim the other. Their only
impulse is to struggle and to endure in silence. Let us, however, try to
intrude upon their privacy, even though it be rudely and painfully, and
see what their real state is; for it is these men who are the true
product of the present age, its most special and distinguishing feature,
and the first-fruits of what we are told is to be the philosophy of the
enlightened future.

To begin, then, let us remember what these men were when Christians; and
we shall be better able to realise what they are now. They were men who
believed firmly in the supreme and solemn importance of life, in the
privilege that it was to live, despite all temporal sorrow. They had a
rule of conduct which would guide them, they believed, to the true end
of their being--to an existence satisfying and excellent beyond anything
that imagination could suggest to them; they had the dread of a
corresponding ruin to fortify themselves in their struggle against the
wrong; and they had a God ever present, to help and hear, and take pity
on them. And yet even thus, selfishness would beset the most unselfish,
and weariness the most determined. How hard the battle was, is known to
all; it has been the most prominent commonplace in human thought and
language. The constancy and the strength of temptation, and the
insidiousness of the arguments it was supported by, has been proverbial.
To explain away the difference between good and evil, to subtly steal
its meaning out of long-suffering and self-denial, and, above all, to
argue that in sinn