indispensable in the human mind.  More than this, in the two or three supreme moments of life to which men look forward and on which they look back,—­at birth, at the passing of the threshold into fulness of life, at marriage, at death,—­the Church is present to invest the hour with a certain solemn and dignified charm.  That is the way in which the instructed are to look at the services of a Church, after they have themselves ceased to believe its faith, us a true account of various matters which it professes to account for truly.

It will be perceived that this is not exactly the ground of those who think a number of what they confess to be untruths, wholesome for the common people for reasons of police, and who would maintain churches on the same principle on which they maintain the county constabulary.  It is a psychological, not a political ground.  It is on the whole a more true, as well as a far more exalted position.  The human soul, they say, has these lovely and elevating aspirations; not to satisfy them is to leave man a dwarfed creature.  Why quarrel with a system that leaves you to satisfy them in the true way, and does much to satisfy thorn in a false but not very harmful way among those who unfortunately have to sit in the darkness of the outer court?

This is not a proper occasion for saying anything about the adequateness of the catholic, or any other special manner of fostering and solacing the religious impulses of men.  We have to assume that the instructed class believe the catholic dogmas to be untrue, and yet wishes the uninstructed to be handed over to a system that reposes on the theory that these dogmas are superlatively true.  What then is to be said of the tenableness of such a position?  To the plain man it looks like a deliberate connivance at a plan for the propagation of error—­assuming, as I say, for the moment, that these articles of belief are erroneous and contrary to fact and evidence.  Ah, but, we are told, the people make no explicit affirmation of dogma; that does nothing for them; they are indifferent to it.  A great variety of things might be said to this statement.  We might ask, for instance, whether the people ever made an explicit affirmation of dogma in the past, or whether it was always the hazy indifferent matter which it is supposed to be now.  If so, whether we shall not have to re-cast our most fundamental notions of the way in which Christian civilisation has been evolved.  If not, and if people did once explicitly affirm dogma, when exactly was it that they ceased to do so?

The answers to these questions would all go to show that at the time when religion was the great controlling and organising force in conduct, the prime elemental dogmas were accepted with the most vivid conviction of reality.  I do not pretend that the common people followed all the inferences which the intellectual subtlety of the master-spirits of theology drew so industriously from the simple premisses of scripture and tradition.  But assuredly dogma was at the foundation of the whole structure.  When did it cease to be so?  How was the structure supported, after you had altered this condition of things?