he preceding
objection will be apparent. It is only through restraint that the higher
kinds of temporal happiness are reached, and as confusions are cleared
away in process of discussion, it becomes patent that such restraint
finds its motive directly or indirectly in religion. When the religious
influence with which irreligious society is saturated, has exhausted
itself, and idealism is no more, the unrestrained egoistic pursuit of
enjoyment must tend to its steady diminution in quantity, and its
depreciation in kind. The sorrow and pain entailed by fidelity to the
Christian ideal is, on the whole, immeasurably less in the vast majority
of cases than that attendant on the struggles of unqualified
selfishness, while the capacities for the higher happiness are steadily
raised and largely satisfied by hope and even by some degree of present
fruition. Even vice would be in many ways sauceless and insipid in the
absence of faith. Who does not remember the old cynic's testimony (in
the "New Republic") to the piquancy lent by Christianity to many a sin,
otherwise pointless. If the moralist distinguishes between actions that
are evil because they are forbidden, and those that are forbidden
because they are evil, the libertine has a counter-distinction between
those that are forbidden because they are pleasant, and those that are
pleasant because they are forbidden. St. Paul himself is explicit enough
as to this effect of the law.

Look at it how we will, even were religion unfounded our life would on
the whole gain in fulness far more than it would lose, by our believing
in religion. Hence some of our more thoughtful agnostics, however unable
themselves to find support in what they deem an illusion, are quite
willing to acknowledge the part religion has played in the past in the
evolution of rational life, and to look upon it as a necessary factor in
the earlier stages of that process whose place is to be taken hereafter
by some as yet undefined substitute. If indeed Nature thus works by
illusions and justifies the lying means by the benevolent end, it is
hard to believe in a moral government of the universe, or to hope that
an "absolute morality"--righteousness for its own sake--will be the
outcome of such disreputable methods. But till the illusion of "absolute
morality" is strong enough to take care of itself, and has passed from
the professors to the populace, it is plainly for the interest and
happiness of individuals and