for them than for us, whose convictions are as strong as
theirs, to treat the most radical dissidence as that and nothing other
or worse? Logically, it perhaps might not be hard to convict them of
inconsistency, but then, as has been so often said, inconsistency is a
totally different thing from insincerity, or doubting adherence, or
silent scepticism. The beliefs of an ordinary man are a complex
structure of very subtle materials, all compacted into a whole, not by
logic, but by lack of logic; not by syllogism or sorites, but by the
vague.

As a plain matter of fact and observation, we may all perceive that
dissent from religious opinion less and less implies reproach in any
serious sense. We all of us know in the flesh liberal catholics and
latitudinarian protestants, who hold the very considerable number of
beliefs that remain to them, quite as firmly and undoubtingly as
believers who are neither liberal nor latitudinarian. The compatibility
of error in faith with virtue in conduct is to them only a mystery the
more, a branch of the insoluble problem of Evil, permitted by a Being at
once all-powerful and all-benevolent. Stringent logic may make short
work of either fact,--a benevolent author of evil, or a virtuous
despiser of divine truth. But in an atmosphere of mystery, logical
contradictions melt away. Faith gives a sanction to that tolerant and
charitable judgment of the character of heretics, which has its real
springs partly in common human sympathy whereby we are all bound to one
another, and partly in experience, which teaches us that practical
righteousness and speculative orthodoxy do not always have their roots
in the same soil. The world is every day growing larger. The range of
the facts of the human race is being enormously extended by naturalists,
by historians, by philologists, by travellers, by critics. The manifold
past experiences of humanity are daily opening out to us in vaster and
at the same time more ordered proportions. And so even those who hold
fast to Christianity as the noblest, strongest, and only final
conclusion of these experiences, are yet constrained to admit that it is
no more than a single term in a very long and intricate series.

The object of the foregoing digression is to show some cause for
thinking that dissent from the current beliefs is less and less likely
to inflict upon those who retain them any very intolerable kind or
degree of mental pain. Therefore it is in so fa