illusions, which they have religiously adopted.  To discover that a former belief is unfounded is to change nothing of the realities of existence.  The sun will descend as it passes the meridian whether we believe it to be noon or not.  It is idle and foolish, if human, to repine because the truth is not precisely what we thought it, and at least we shall not change reality by childishly clinging to a dream.

The argument so often employed by theologians that Divine Revelation is necessary for man, and that certain views contained in that Revelation are required by our moral consciousness, is purely imaginary and derived from the Revelation which it seeks to maintain.  The only thing absolutely necessary for man is Truth; and to that, and that alone, must our moral consciousness adapt itself.  Reason and experience forbid the expectation that we can acquire any knowledge otherwise than through natural channels.  We might as well expect to be supernaturally nourished as supernaturally informed.  To complain that we do not know all that we desire to know is foolish and unreasonable.  It is tantamount to complaining that the mind of man is not differently constituted.  To attain the full altitude of the Knowable, whatever that may be, should be our earnest aim, and more than this is not for humanity.  We may be certain that information which is beyond the ultimate reach of Reason is as unnecessary as it is inaccessible.  Man may know all that man requires to know.

We gain more than we lose by awaking to find that our Theology is human invention and our eschatology an unhealthy dream.  We are freed from the incubus of base Hebrew mythology, and from doctrines of Divine government which outrage morality and set cruelty and injustice in the place of holiness.  If we have to abandon cherished anthropomorphic visions of future Blessedness, the details of which are either of unseizable dimness or of questionable joy, we are at least delivered from quibbling discussions of the meaning of [Greek:  aionios], and our eternal hope is unclouded by the doubt whether mankind is to be tortured in hell for ever and a day, or for a day without the ever.  At the end of life there may be no definite vista of a Heaven glowing with the light of apocalyptic imagination, but neither will there be the unutterable horror of a Purgatory or a Hell lurid with flames for the helpless victims of an unjust but omnipotent Creator.  To entertain such libellous representations at all as part of the contents of “Divine Revelation,” it was necessary to assert that man was incompetent to judge of the ways of the God of Revelation, and must not suppose him endowed with the perfection of human conceptions of justice and mercy, but submit to call wrong right and right wrong at the foot of an almighty Despot.  But now the reproach of such reasoning is shaken from our shoulders, and returns to the Jewish superstition from which it sprang.