on the one side, or atheism on the other, had ever had to deal in France.  Deism, in its formal acceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, or else it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who had travelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lacked strength for the continuance of their onward journey.  In the latter case, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough conviction of the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imagined to go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but not governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear of eternal punishment, and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines of property, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moral foundations of the social structure.  Or else it was a name for a purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basis of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of spiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.

The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his profession of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this.  Though the Vicar’s conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round with rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the evidences of will and intelligence in the vast machinery of the universe, yet it was essentially the product not of reason, but of emotional expansion, as every fundamental article of a faith that touches the hearts of many men must always be.  The Savoyard Vicar did not believe that a God had made the great world, and rules it with majestic power and supreme justice, in the same way in which he believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third side.  That there is a mysterious being penetrating all creation with force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only the poor description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into life than words can ever carry us.  Without for a single moment falling off into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment suffer his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a theological definition or a systematic credo.  It remains firm enough to give the religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet luminous enough to give the spiritual faculty a vivifying consciousness of freedom and space.  A creed is concerned with a number of affirmations, and is constantly held with honest strenuousness by multitudes of men and women who are unfitted by natural temperament for knowing what the glow of religious emotion means to the human soul,—­for not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of heaven.  The Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith was not a creed, and so has few affirmations; it was a single doctrine, melted in a glow of contemplative transport.  It is impossible to set about disproving