Judea, Greece, Rome, and Spain.  And, a priori, it might be argued that the only possible ground for that cordial unanimity of society upon fundamental questions which is essential to a stable and highly developed civilization is a common faith in some central rightful authority competent to demand and enforce equal obedience from all classes; in other words, faith in God.  A band of savages might be held in a lax social union by the common fear of some brawny chief, but in civilized communities it is the real divinity that doth hedge about the king or other civil head that gives cohesion to the social mass.  As a political force, therefore, religion cannot be dispensed with.

Religion is not only useless, Mr. Mill proceeds, but “there is a very real evil consequent on ascribing a supernatural origin to the received maxims of morality.  That origin consecrates the whole of them, and protects them from being discussed and criticised.”  Such an objection hardly comes with good grace from Mr. Mill, who spends his strength to prove that a divine sanction has no efficacy when not backed by human authority.  Nor has such an objection, if it were true, any application to the case till it is absolutely proved that all religions are of human origin, or else that more harm results from believing human systems divine than from believing one divine system to be of human growth.  Neither of these alternatives does he attempt to establish, and he explicitly admits it is impossible to prove the former.  But the objection is not true.  Human criticism has never been backward to attack all systems of morality, despite the popular faith in their divine origin.  Christianity especially has had its historic and intellectual and moral foundations attacked by able critics in every century since its introduction on earth.  But in the face of every form of opposition it has made a steady progress, and strengthened its hold upon the human heart and conscience as the world has advanced in culture.  It is to-day professed by a larger number of disciples and with a more intelligent faith than at any other period of its history.  It is the dominant religion in those countries which are in the van of human progress, whose political institutions are the freest in the world, and whose inhabitants are the happiest and most virtuous.  And despite its insoluble mysteries it has always received the assent of the highest intelligence to its divine origin.  “My faith,” said De Quincey, “is that though a great man may, by a rare possibility, be an infidel, an intellect of the highest order must build on Christianity.”  And Bacon’s testimony is to the same effect.  “It is only,” he says, “when superficially tested that philosophy leads away from God:  deeper draughts of a thorough and real philosophy bring us back to Him.”  And poor Tyndall, standing afar off in the outer regions of pure intellect, hard by the

            ever-breaking shore
  That tumbles in the godless deep,