d the
reason which is its single arbiter. They forgot that imagination is as
active in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace may
become much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth. Christianity
had given to this craving in western Europe a definite mould, which
was not to be effaced in a day, and one or two of its lines mark a
permanent and noble acquisition to the highest forces of human nature.
There will have to be wrought a profounder and more far-spreading
modification than any which the French atheists could effect, before
all debilitating influences in the old creed can be effaced, its
elevating influences finally separated from them, and then permanently
preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less
questionable to the understanding.

Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. There
must be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional,
scientific, and material. And, above all, there must be the slow
steadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall retain all the
elements of moral beauty that once gave light to the old belief that
has disappeared, and must still possess a living force in the new.

Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which
Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar's
profession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was
in many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the
application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important
group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under
the circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive
in association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of
articles of faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions
which were at that moment the only practical alternative. The deism of
Rousseau could not in any case have acquired the force of the
corresponding religious reaction in England, because the former never
acquired a compact and vigorous external organisation, as the latter
did, especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable
of its developments. In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective
character of deism disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of
any great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom the
sublimation of individualism. But in itself it was a far less
retrogressive, as well as a far less p