and codified, if higher principles do not constrain us, society may safely be left to see morals sufficiently observed.  It is true that, notwithstanding its fluctuating rules, morality has hitherto assumed the character of a Divine institution, but its sway has not, in consequence, been more real than it must be as the simple result of human wisdom and the outcome of social experience.  The choice of a noble life is no longer a theological question, and ecclesiastical patents of truth and uprightness have finally expired.  Morality, which has ever changed its complexion and modified its injunctions according to social requirements, will necessarily be enforced as part of human evolution, and is not dependent on religious terrorism or superstitious persuasion.  If we are disposed to say:  Cui bono? and only practise morality, or be ruled by right principles, to gain a heaven or escape a hell, there is nothing lost, for such grudging and calculated morality is merely a spurious imitation which can as well be produced by social compulsion.  But if we have ever been really penetrated by the pure spirit of morality, if we have in any degree attained that elevation of mind which instinctively turns to the true and noble and shrinks from the baser level of thought and action, we shall feel no need of the stimulus of a system of rewards and punishments in a future state which has for so long been represented as essential to Christianity.

As to the other reproach, let us ask what has actually been destroyed by such an enquiry pressed to its logical conclusion.  Can Truth by any means be made less true?  Can reality be melted into thin air?  The Revelation not being a reality, that which has been destroyed is only an illusion, and that which is left is the Truth.  Losing belief in it and its contents, we have lost absolutely nothing but that which the traveller loses when the mirage, which has displayed cool waters and green shades before him, melts swiftly away.  There were no cool fountains really there to allay his thirst, no flowery meadows for his wearied limbs; his pleasure was delusion, and the wilderness is blank.  Rather the mirage with its pleasant illusion, is the human cry, than the desert with its barrenness.  Not so, is the friendly warning; seek not vainly in the desert that which is not there, but turn rather to other horizons and to surer hopes.  Do not waste life clinging to ecclesiastical dogmas which represent no eternal verities, but search elsewhere for truth which may haply be found.  What should we think of the man who persistently repulsed the persuasion that two and two make four from the ardent desire to believe that two and two make five?  Whose fault is it that two and two do make four and not five?  Whose folly is it that it should be more agreeable to think that two and two make five than to know that they only make four?  This folly is theirs who represent the value of life as dependent on the reality of special