Yea, Aeschylus permits not personified power to utter a single word.  It must remain mute.  The moment that a religion ventures to print a catechism supported by arguments, the moment that a political absolutism publishes an official newspaper, both are near their end.  But therein consists our triumph:  we have brought our adversaries to speech, and they must reckon with us."[A] But, we may answer, religion is not an absolutism; and, therefore, it is not near its end when it ventures to justify itself.  On the contrary, no spiritual power, be it moral or religious, can maintain its authority, if it assumes a despotic attitude; for the human spirit inevitably moves towards freedom, and that movement is the deepest necessity of its nature, which it cannot escape.  “Religion, on the ground of its sanctity, and law, on the ground of its majesty, often resist the sifting of their claims.  But in so doing, they inevitably awake a not unjust suspicion that their claims are ill-founded.  They can command the unfeigned homage of man, only when they have shown themselves able to stand the test of free inquiry.”

[Footnote A:  Religion and Philosophy in Germany.]

And if it is an error to suppose, with Browning, that the primary truths of the moral and religious consciousness belong to a region which is higher than knowledge, and can, from that side, be neither assailed nor defended; it is also an error to suppose that reason is essentially antagonistic to them.  The facts of morality and religion are precisely the richest facts of knowledge; and that faith is the most secure which is most completely illumined by reason.  Religion at its best is not a dogmatic despotism, nor is reason a merely critical and destructive faculty.  If reason is loyal to the truth of religion on which it is exercised, it will reach beneath all the conflict and clamour of disputation, to the principle of unity, on which, as we have seen, both reason and religion rest.

The “faith” to which religious spirits appeal against all the attacks of doubt, “the love” of Browning, is really implicit reason; it is “abbreviated” or concentrated knowledge; it is the manifold experiences of life focussed into an intense unity.  And, on the other hand, the “reason” which they condemn is what Carlyle calls the logic-chopping faculty.  In taking the side of faith when troubled with difficulties which they cannot lay, they are really defending the cause of reason against that of the understanding.  For it is quite true that the understanding, that is, the reason as reflective or critical, can never bring about either a moral or religious life.  It cannot create a religion, any more than physiology can produce men.  The reflection which brings doubt is always secondary; it can only exercise itself on a given material.  As Hegel frequently pointed out, it is not the function of moral philosophy to create or to institute a morality or religion, but