“The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt:  it is an outcome of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor altruistic.  It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an inspiration in the finer sentiments of our generation, but the glow which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a happier earth.  It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and assails untruth and injustice, for these are elemental principles of social life; but it appeals more confidently to the warmer sympathy which is linking the scattered children of the race, and it urges all to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the creation of happiness.  The advance guard of the race, the men and women in whom mental alertness is associated with fine feeling, cry that they have reached Pisgah’s slope and in increasing numbers men and women are pressing on to see if it be really the Promised Land.”

“Pisgah—­the Promised Land!” Mr. McCabe in that passage sounds as if he were half-way to “Oh!  Beulah Land!” and the tambourine.

That “larger spirit,” we maintain, is God; those “impulses” are the power of God, and Mr. McCabe serves a Master he denies.  He has but to realise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune God of the Catholic Church, and banish his intense suspicion that he may yet be lured back to that altar he abandoned, he has but to look up from that preoccupation, and immediately he will begin to realise the presence of Divinity.

3.  God is an external reality

It may be argued that if atheists and agnostics when they set themselves to express the good will that is in them, do shape out God, that if their conception of right living falls in so completely with the conception of God’s service as to be broadly identical, then indeed God, like the ether of scientific speculation, is no more than a theory, no more than an imaginative externalisation of man’s inherent good will.  Why trouble about God then?  Is not the declaration of a good disposition a sufficient evidence of salvation?  What is the difference between such benevolent unbelievers as Professor Metchnikoff or Mr. McCabe and those who have found God?

The difference is this, that the benevolent atheist stands alone upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral strength.  A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs beneath his feet.  He has not really given himself or got away from himself.  He has no one to whom he can give himself.  He is still a masterless man.  His exaltation is self-centred, is priggishness, his fall is unrestrained by any exterior obligation.  His devotion is only