confessions and rites of the Christian churches have been the grosser expression.  Just as what was once the new dispensation was preached a Judaeos ad Judaeos apud Judaeos, so must the new, that is to be, find a Christian teacher and Christian hearers.  It can hardly be other than an expansion, a development, a readaptation, of all the moral and spiritual truth that lay hidden under the worn-out forms.  It must be such a harmonising of the truth with our intellectual conceptions as shall fit it to be an active guide to conduct.  In a world ’where men sit and hear each other groan, where but to think is to be full of sorrow,’ it is hard to imagine a time when we shall be indifferent to that sovereign legend of Pity.  We have to incorporate it in some wider gospel of Justice and Progress.

I shall not, I hope, be suspected of any desire to prophesy too smooth things.  It is no object of ours to bridge over the gulf between belief in the vulgar theology and disbelief.  Nor for a single moment do we pretend that, when all the points of contact between virtuous belief and virtuous disbelief are made the most of that good faith will allow, there will not still and after all remain a terrible controversy between those who cling passionately to all the consolations, mysteries, personalities, of the orthodox faith, and us who have made up our minds to face the worst, and to shape, as best we can, a life in which the cardinal verities of the common creed shall have no place.  The future faith, like the faith of the past, brings not peace but a sword.  It is a tale not of concord, but of households divided against themselves.  Those who are incessantly striving to make the old bottles hold the new wine, to reconcile the irreconcilable, to bring the Bible and the dogmas of the churches to be good friends with history and criticism, are prompted by the humanest intention.[21] One sympathises with this amiable anxiety to soften shocks, and break the rudeness of a vital transition.  In this essay, at any rate, there is no such attempt.  We know that it is the son against the father, and the mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law.  No softness of speech will disguise the portentous differences between those who admit a supernatural revelation and those who deny it.  No charity nor goodwill can narrow the intellectual breach between those who declare that a world without an ever-present Creator with intelligible attributes would be to them empty and void, and those who insist that none of the attributes of a Creator can ever be grasped by the finite intelligence of men.[22] Our object in urging the historic, semi-conservative, and almost sympathetic quality, which distinguishes the unbelief of to-day from the unbelief of a hundred years ago, is only to show that the most strenuous and upright of plain-speakers is less likely to shock and wound the lawful sensibilities of devout persons than he would have been so long as unbelief went no further than bitter attack on small details.  In short, all save the purely negative and purely destructive school of freethinkers, are now able to deal with the beliefs from which they dissent, in a way which makes patient and disinterested controversy not wholly impossible.