seem to be easily explained:  the one sacrifices reason to faith; the other sacrifices faith to reason.  But there is abundant evidence to show that both faith (meaning thereby the religious emotions) and reason are ineradicable elements in the human mind.  That which seriously and permanently offends against either cannot be true.  For creatures differently constituted from man—­either all reason or all pure disembodied emotion—­it might be otherwise; but, for man, as he is, the epithet ‘true’ seems to be excluded from any set of propositions that has such results.

Even in the more limited sense, and confining the term to propositions purely intellectual, there is, I think we must say, a presumption against the truth of that which involves so deep and wide a chasm in human nature.  Without importing teleology, we should naturally expect that the intellect and the emotions should be capable of working harmoniously together.  They do so in most things:  why should they not in the highest matters of all?  If the one set of opinions is anti-rational and the other anti-emotional, as we see practically that they are, is not this in itself an antecedent presumption against either of them?  It may not be enough to prove at once that the syllogism is defective:  still less is it a sufficient warrant for establishing an opposite syllogism.  But it does seem to be enough to give the scientific reasoner pause, and to make him go over the line of his argument again and again and yet again, with the suspicion that there is (as how well there may be!) a flaw somewhere.

It would not, I think, be difficult to point out such flaws [Endnote 352:1]—­some of them, as it appears, of considerable magnitude.  But the subject is one that would take us far away out of our present course, and for its proper development would require a technical knowledge of the processes of physical science which I do not possess.  Leaving this on one side, and regarding them only in the abstract, the considerations stated above seem to point to the necessity of something of the nature of a compromise.  And yet there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as compromise in opinions.  Compromise belongs to the world of practice; it is only admitted by an illicit process into the world of thought.  The author of ‘Supernatural Religion’ is doubtless right in deprecating that ’illogical zeal which flings to the pursuing wolves of doubt and unbelief, scrap by scrap,’ all the distinctive doctrines of Christianity.  Belief, it is true, must be ultimately logical to stand.  It must have an inner cohesion and inter-dependence.  It must start from a fixed principle.  This has been, and still is, the besetting weakness of the theology of mediation.  It is apt to form itself merely by stripping off what seem to be excrescences from the outside, and not by radically reconstructing itself, on a firmly established basis, from within.  The difficulty in such a process is to draw the line.  There is a delusive appearance