always received
the assent of the highest intelligence to its divine origin. "My
faith," said De Quincey, "is that though a great man may, by a rare
possibility, be an infidel, an intellect of the highest order must
build on Christianity." And Bacon's testimony is to the same effect.
"It is only," he says, "when superficially tested that philosophy
leads away from God: deeper draughts of a thorough and real philosophy
bring us back to Him." And poor Tyndall, standing afar off in the
outer regions of pure intellect, hard by the

ever-breaking shore
That tumbles in the godless deep,

has recently been heard to murmur that in his loftiest moments the
promise and potency of matter give no response to the deepest cry of
the soul. And along the centuries stand the princes of thought, Paul,
Augustine, Bacon, Luther, Milton, Pascal, Kepler, Newton, Coleridge,
Faraday, Herschel, testifying to the impregnability of the
intellectual foundation of the Christian faith.

If Mr. Mill's arguments to prove the worthlessness of Christianity are
open to many objections, the reasons he offers for accepting his
substitute, the Religion of Humanity, are utterly baseless and
delusive. For faith in God he would have us adopt an ideal conception
of what human life can be made in the future, and sacrifice all our
present enjoyment to secure a realization of that conception ages
hence. This, says he, is a better religion than any belief respecting
the unseen powers. "If individual life is short, the life of the human
species is not." How does he know this? The dark demon of Nature he
has so vividly described may sweep away the puny race to-morrow by
some fell cataclysm; and it would be a blessing if she did in his
view. "If such an object," he continues, "appears small to a mind
accustomed to dream of infinite and eternal beatitudes, it will expand
into far other dimensions when these _baseless fancies_ shall have
receded into the past." But if we must feed our moral natures on
"baseless fancies," most men will prefer the Christian dogmas of
immortality, the infinite capacity of development of the human soul,
the brotherhood of the race and its vital union with its Creator, and
its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this
life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although
Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and enervating dreams, to
his beggarly improved substitute, which appeals