the point in argument, waste their strength in trifles,
misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved
than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he
is too clear-headed to be unjust, he is as simple as he is
forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.

"Nowhere shall we find greater candour, consideration, indulgence;
he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for
their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason as well as
its strength, its province, and its limits. If he be an unbeliever
he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or
to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in
his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even supports
institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he does
not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it contents
him to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them.
He is a friend of religious toleration, and that, not only because
his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with
an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of
feeling which is the attendant on civilisation.

"Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even
when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of
imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of
the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be
no large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of God,
sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the
attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or
creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent
thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a
teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity
itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical
powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those
who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others
to feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which
exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions.

"Such are the lineaments of the ethical character which the
cultivated intellect will form apart from religious principle."

Surely this is a wonderful utterance