clear that these beliefs are inconsistent with
themselves, and conflict with these very moral feelings, of which they
are invoked as an explanation. Here it is true that reason does confront
us, and what answer to make to it is a very serious question. This
applies even to natural religion in its haziest and most compliant form;
and as applied to any form of orthodoxy its force is doubled. What we
have seen thus far is, that if there be a moral world at all, our
knowledge of nature contains nothing inconsistent with theism. We have
now to enquire how far theism is inconsistent with our conceptions of
the moral world.

In treating these difficulties, we will for the present consider them as
applying only to religion in general, not to any special form of it. The
position of orthodoxy we will reserve for a separate treatment. For
convenience' sake, however, I shall take as a symbol of all religion the
vaguer and more general teachings of Christianity; but I shall be
adducing them not as teachings revealed by heaven, but simply as
developed by the religious consciousness of men.

To begin then with the great primary difficulties: these, though they
take various forms, can all in the last resort be reduced to two--the
existence of evil in the face of the power of God, and the freedom of
man's will in the face of the will of God. And what I shall try to make
plain with respect to these is this: not that they are not
difficulties--not that they are not insoluble difficulties; but that
they are not difficulties due to religion or theism, nor by abandoning
theism can we in any way escape from them. They start into being not
with the belief in God, and a future of rewards and punishments, but
with the belief in the moral law and in virtue, and they are common to
all systems in which the worth of virtue is recognised.

The vulgar view of the matter cannot be better stated than in the
following account given by J.S. Mill of the anti-religious reasonings of
his father. He looked upon religion, says his son, '_as the greatest
enemy of morality; first, by setting up fictitious excellences--belief
in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the
good of humankind, and causing them to be accepted as substitutes for
genuine virtues_; but above all _by radically vitiating the standard of
morals, making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom, indeed,
it lavishes all the phrases of adulation, but whom, in