more sensible of the moral objections to the hell of
popular belief. He thought that it represented the Creator as a cruel
and arbitrary tyrant, whose vengeance was to be evaded by legal
fictions. Still, the absolute necessity of some 'sanction' of a
spiritual kind seemed clear to him. Without it, every religion would
fall to pieces, as every system of government would be dissolved without
'coercion.' And this is the final conclusion of his book in chapters
with which he was, as I find from his letters, not altogether satisfied.
He explains in the preface to his second edition that the question was
too wide for complete treatment in the limits. Briefly the doctrine
seems to be this. The Utilitarian or Positivist can frame a kind of
commonplace morality, which is good as far as it goes. It includes
benevolence and sympathy; but hardly gets beyond ordering men to love
their friends and hate their enemies. To raise morality to a higher
strain, to justify what it generally called self-sacrifice, to make men
capable of elevated action, they require something more. That something
is the belief in God and a future world. 'I entirely agree,' he says,
'with the commonplaces about the importance of these doctrines.'[160]
'If they be mere dreams life is a much poorer and pettier thing, and
mere physical comfort far more important than has hitherto been
supposed. Morality, he says, depends on religion. If it be asked whether
we ought to rise beyond the average utilitarian morality, he replies,
'Yes, if there is a God and a future state. No, if there is no God and
no future state.'[161] And what is to be said of those doctrines, the
ultimate foundation, if not of an average morality, yet of all morality
above the current commonplaces? Here we have substantially the religious
theory upon which I have already dwelt. He illustrates it here by
quotations from Mill, who admits the 'thread of consciousness' to be an
ultimate inexplicability, and by a passage from Carlyle, 'the greatest
poet of the age,' setting forth the mystery of the 'Me.' He believes in
a Being who, though not purely benevolent, has so arranged the universe,
that virtue is the law prescribed to his creatures. The law is stern and
inflexible, and excites a feeling less of love than of 'awful respect.'
The facts of life are the same upon any theory; but atheism makes the
case utterly hopeless. A belief in God is inextricably connected with a
belief in morality, and if one