One more point of much importance ought to be mentioned.  The belief that heresy is the result of wilful depravity is fast dying out.  People no longer seriously think that speculative error is bound up with moral iniquity, or that mistaken thinking is either the result or the cause of wicked living.  Even the official mouthpieces of established beliefs now usually represent a bad heart as only one among other possible causes of unbelief.  It divides the curse with ignorance, intellectual shallowness, the unfortunate influence of plausible heresiarchs, and other alternative roots of evil.  They thus leave a way of escape, by which the person who does not share their own convictions may still be credited with a good moral character.  Some persons, it is true, ’cannot see how a man who deliberately rejects the Roman Catholic religion can, in the eyes of those who earnestly believe it, be other than a rebel against God.’  They assure us that, ’as opinions become better marked and more distinctly connected with action, the truth that decided dissent from them implies more or less of a reproach upon those who hold them decidedly, becomes so obvious that every one perceives it.’  No doubt a protestant or a sceptic regards the beliefs of a catholic as a reproach upon the believer’s understanding.  So the man whose whole faith rests on the miraculous and on acts of special intervention, regards the strictly positive and scientific thinker as the dupe of a crude and narrow logic.  But this now carries with it no implication of moral obliquity.  De Maistre’s rather grotesque conviction that infidels always die of horrible diseases with special names, could now only be held among the very dregs of the ecclesiastical world.

Nor is it correct to say that ’when religious differences come to be, and are regarded as, mere differences of opinion, it is because the controversy is really decided in the sceptical sense.’  Those who agree with the present writer, for example, are not sceptics.  They positively, absolutely, and without reserve, reject as false the whole system of objective propositions which make up the popular belief of the day, in one and all of its theological expressions.  They look upon that system as mischievous in its consequences to society, for many reasons,—­among others because it tends to divert and misdirect the most energetic faculties of human nature.  This, however, does not make them suspect the motives or the habitual morality of those who remain in the creed in which they were nurtured.  The difference is a difference of opinion, as purely as if we refused to accept the undulatory theory of light; and we treat it as such.  Then reverse this.  Why is it any more impossible for those who remain in the theological stage, who are not in the smallest degree sceptical, who in their heart of hearts embrace without a shadow of misgiving all the mysteries of the faith, why is it any more impossible for them than for us, whose