convictions are as strong as theirs, to treat the most radical dissidence as that and nothing other or worse?  Logically, it perhaps might not be hard to convict them of inconsistency, but then, as has been so often said, inconsistency is a totally different thing from insincerity, or doubting adherence, or silent scepticism.  The beliefs of an ordinary man are a complex structure of very subtle materials, all compacted into a whole, not by logic, but by lack of logic; not by syllogism or sorites, but by the vague.

As a plain matter of fact and observation, we may all perceive that dissent from religious opinion less and less implies reproach in any serious sense.  We all of us know in the flesh liberal catholics and latitudinarian protestants, who hold the very considerable number of beliefs that remain to them, quite as firmly and undoubtingly as believers who are neither liberal nor latitudinarian.  The compatibility of error in faith with virtue in conduct is to them only a mystery the more, a branch of the insoluble problem of Evil, permitted by a Being at once all-powerful and all-benevolent.  Stringent logic may make short work of either fact,—­a benevolent author of evil, or a virtuous despiser of divine truth.  But in an atmosphere of mystery, logical contradictions melt away.  Faith gives a sanction to that tolerant and charitable judgment of the character of heretics, which has its real springs partly in common human sympathy whereby we are all bound to one another, and partly in experience, which teaches us that practical righteousness and speculative orthodoxy do not always have their roots in the same soil.  The world is every day growing larger.  The range of the facts of the human race is being enormously extended by naturalists, by historians, by philologists, by travellers, by critics.  The manifold past experiences of humanity are daily opening out to us in vaster and at the same time more ordered proportions.  And so even those who hold fast to Christianity as the noblest, strongest, and only final conclusion of these experiences, are yet constrained to admit that it is no more than a single term in a very long and intricate series.

The object of the foregoing digression is to show some cause for thinking that dissent from the current beliefs is less and less likely to inflict upon those who retain them any very intolerable kind or degree of mental pain.  Therefore it is in so far all the plainer, as well as easier, a duty not to conceal such dissent.  What we have been saying comes to this.  If a believer finds that his son, for instance, has ceased to believe, he no longer has this disbelief thrust upon him in gross and irreverent forms.  Nor does he any longer suppose that the unbelieving son must necessarily be a profligate.  And moreover, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he no longer supposes that infidels, of his own family or acquaintance at any rate, will consume for eternal ages in lakes of burning marl.