The mind has a thousand eyes,
       And the heart but one;
     Yet the light of a whole life dies
       When love is done.’

Love is known to be all this.  How great, then, is Christianity, as being the religion of love, and causing men to believe both in the cause of love’s supremacy and the infinity of God’s love to man.

FOOTNOTES: 

[55] Cf.  Pascal, Pensees.  ’For we must not mistake ourselves, we have as much that is automatic in us as intellectual, and hence it comes that the instrument by which persuasion is brought about is not demonstration alone.  How few things are demonstrated!  Proofs can only convince the mind; custom makes our strongest proofs and those which we hold most firmly, it sways the automaton, which draws the unconscious intellect after it....  It is then custom that makes so many men Christians, custom that makes them Turks, heathen, artisans, soldiers, &c.  Lastly, we must resort to custom when once the mind has seen where truth is, in order to slake our thirst and steep ourselves in that belief which escapes us at every hour, for to have proofs always at hand were too onerous.  We must acquire a more easy belief, that of custom, which without violence, without art, without argument, causes our assent and inclines all our powers to this belief, so that our soul naturally falls into it....

’It is not enough to believe only by force of conviction if the automaton is inclined to believe the contrary.  Both parts of us then must be obliged to believe, the intellect by arguments which it is enough to have admitted once in our lives, the automaton by custom, and by not allowing it to incline in the contrary direction. Inclina cor meum Deus.’  See also Newman’s Grammar of Assent, chap. vi. and Church’s Human Life and its Conditions, pp. 67-9.

[56] [The author has added, “For suffering in brutes see further on,” but nothing further on the subject appears to have been written.—­ED.]

[57] [In this connexion I may again notice that two days before his death George Romanes expressed his cordial approval of Professor Knight’s Aspects of Theism—­a work in which great stress is laid on the argument from intuition in different forms.—­ED.]

[58] On this subject see Pascal, Pensees (Kegan Paul’s trans.) p. 103.

Sec. 5.  FAITH IN CHRISTIANITY.

Christianity comes up for serious investigation in the present treatise, because this Examination of Religion [i.e. of the validity of the religious consciousness] has to do with the evidences of Theism presented by man, and not only by nature minus man.  Now of the religious consciousness Christianity is unquestionably the highest product.