that no one who has not made himself drunk with the thin sour wine of a crude and absolute logic will refuse to consider it.  Before, however, attempting to illustrate cases of conscience in this order, we venture to make a short digression into the region of the matter, as distinct from the manner of free speech.  One or two changes of great importance in the way in which men think about religion, bear directly upon the conditions on which they may permit themselves and others to speak about it.

The peculiar character of all the best kinds of dissent from the nominal creed of the time, makes it rather less difficult for us to try to reconcile unflinching honesty with a just and becoming regard for the feelings of those who have claims upon our forbearance, than would have been the case a hundred years ago.  ‘It is not now with a polite sneer,’ as a high ecclesiastical authority lately admitted, ’still less with a rude buffet or coarse words, that Christianity is assailed.’  Before churchmen congratulate themselves too warmly on this improvement in the nature of the attack, perhaps they ought to ask themselves how far it is due to the change in the position of the defending party.  The truth is that the coarse and realistic criticism of which Voltaire was the consummate master, has done its work.  It has driven the defenders of the old faith into the milder and more genial climate of non-natural interpretations, and the historic sense, and a certain elastic relativity of dogma.  The old criticism was victorious, but after victory it vanished.  One reason of this was that the coarse and realistic forms of belief had either vanished before it, or else they forsook their ancient pretensions and clothed themselves in more modest robes.  The consequence of this, and of other causes which might be named, is that the modern attack, while fully as serious and much more radical, has a certain gravity, decorum, and worthiness of form.  No one of any sense or knowledge now thinks the Christian religion had its origin in deliberate imposture.  The modern freethinker does not attack it; he explains it.  And what is more, he explains it by referring its growth to the better, and not to the worse part of human nature.  He traces it to men’s cravings for a higher morality.  He finds its source in their aspirations after nobler expression of that feeling for the incommensurable things, which is in truth under so many varieties of inwoven pattern the common universal web of religious faith.

The result of this way of looking at a creed which a man no longer accepts, is that he is able to speak of it with patience and historic respect.  He can openly mark his dissent from it, without exacerbating the orthodox sentiment by galling pleasantries or bitter animadversion upon details.  We are now awake to the all-important truth that belief in this or that detail of superstition is the result of an irrational state of mind, and flows logically from superstitious premisses.  We see that it is to begin at the wrong end, to assail the deductions as impossible, instead of sedulously building up a state of mind in which their impossibility would become spontaneously visible.