marcation between the
two. Certainly I should never take upon myself to offer religious advice
to any one; it is difficult for those who have not qualified themselves
for the priestly office to do that with force and effect. The manner in
which a priest leads and manages a mind that has from the first been
moulded in the beliefs and observances of his Church, cannot be imitated
by a layman. A priest starts always from authority; his method, which
has been in use from the earliest ages, consists first in claiming your
unquestioning assent to certain doctrines, from which he immediately
proceeds to deduce the inferences that may affect your conduct or
regulate your thoughts. It is a method perfectly adapted to its own
ends. It can deal with all humanity, and produce the most immediate
practical results. So long as the assent to the doctrines is sincere,
the sacerdotal system may contend successfully against some of the
strongest forms of evil; but when the assent to the doctrines has ceased
to be complete, when some of them are half-believed and others not
believed at all, the system loses much of its primitive efficiency. It
seems likely that your difficulty, the difficulty of so many
intellectual men in these days, is to know where the intellectual
questions end and the purely religious ones can be considered to begin.
If you could once ascertain that, in a manner definitely satisfactory,
you would take your religious questions to a clergyman and your
intellectual ones to a man of science, and so get each solved
independently.

Without presuming to offer a solution of so complex a difficulty as
this, I may suggest to you that it is of some importance to your
intellectual life to ascertain what religion is. A book was published
many years ago by a very learned author, in which he endeavored to show
that what is vulgarly called scepticism may be intellectual religion.
Now, although nothing can be more distasteful to persons of culture
than the bigotry which refuses the name of religion to other people's
opinions, merely because they are other people's opinions, I suspect
that the popular instinct is right in denying the name of religion to
the inferences of the intellect. The description which the author just
alluded to gave of what he called intellectual religion was in fact
simply a description of philosophy, and of that discipline which the
best philosophy imposes upon the heart and the passions. On the other
hand, Dr