s the mainspring of
spiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.

The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his
profession of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this.
Though the Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round
with rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the
evidences of will and intelligence in the vast machinery of the
universe, yet it was essentially the product not of reason, but of
emotional expansion, as every fundamental article of a faith that
touches the hearts of many men must always be. The Savoyard Vicar did
not believe that a God had made the great world, and rules it with
majestic power and supreme justice, in the same way in which he
believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third
side. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all creation with
force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only the poor
description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into life
than words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling off
into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment
suffer his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a
theological definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enough
to give the religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet
luminous enough to give the spiritual faculty a vivifying
consciousness of freedom and space. A creed is concerned with a number
of affirmations, and is constantly held with honest strenuousness by
multitudes of men and women who are unfitted by natural temperament
for knowing what the glow of religious emotion means to the human
soul,--for not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of
heaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was not a creed, and
so has few affirmations; it was a single doctrine, melted in a glow of
contemplative transport. It is impossible to set about disproving it,
for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against the idleness of
logomachy, and insists that the existence of the Divinity is traced
upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced, if we are only
content to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You cannot
demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks the
Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is the
best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being
who moves the u