Let us discuss this matter impersonally, without reference to our own opinions and without reference to the evidence for or against their truth.  I am not speaking now of those who hold all these ideas to be certainly true, or highly probable, and who at the same time incidentally insist on the great usefulness of such ideas in confirming morality and producing virtuous types of character.  With such persons, of course, there is no question of a dual doctrine.  They entertain certain convictions themselves, and naturally desire to have their influence extended over others.  The proposition which we have to consider is of another kind.  It expresses the notions of those who—­to take the most important kind of illustration—­think untrue the popular ideas of supernatural interference in our obscure human affairs; who think untrue the notion of the prolongation of our existence after death to fulfil the purpose of the supernatural powers; or at least who think them so extremely improbable that no reasonable man or woman, once awakened to a conviction of this improbability, would thenceforth be capable of receiving effective check or guidance from beliefs, that would have sunk slowly down to the level of doubtful guesses.  We have now to deal with those who while taking this view of certain doctrines, still declare them to be indispensable for restraining from anti-social conduct all who are not acute or instructed enough to see through them.  In other words, they think error useful, and that it may be the best thing for society that masses of men should cheat and deceive themselves in their most fervent aspirations and their deepest assurances.  This is the furthest extreme to which the empire of existing facts over principles can well be imagined to go.  It lies at the root of every discussion upon the limits which separate lawful compromise or accommodation from palpable hypocrisy.

It will probably be said that according to the theory of the school of which M. Renan is the most eloquent representative, the common people are not really cheating themselves or being cheated.  Indeed M. Renan himself has expatiated on the charm of seeing figures of the ideal in the cottages of the poor, images representing no reality, and so forth.  ‘What a delight,’ he cries, ’for the man who is borne down by six days of toil to come on the seventh to rest upon his knees, to contemplate the tall columns, a vault, arches, an altar; to listen to the chanting, to hear moral and consoling words!’[7] The dogmas which criticism attacks are not for these poor people ’the object of an explicit affirmation,’ and therefore there is no harm in them; ’it is the privilege of pure sentiment to be invulnerable, and to play with poison without being hurt by it.’  In other words, the dogmas are false, but the liturgy, as a performance stirring the senses of awe, reverence, susceptibility to beauty of various kinds, appeals to and satisfies a sentiment that is both true and