. His
objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion
that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its
lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and
repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church.

Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands of the partisans of
every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to
disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very
instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was
satisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he
knew there is a supreme God, and that the soul must have here and
hereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found these
truths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent the
Christian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the New
Testament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from the
Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of the
heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not in
the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that any
man desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing either
reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearing
on its efficacy or conclusiveness.

Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because
it makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and
binds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can
neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be
able to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote,
to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The
temperature of thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil
rising to a point when a mystery like this, definite enough to be
imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding
as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those
instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of
its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to
associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long
brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with an
assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake,
because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness
of human effort can never be doubted, and