If we look calmly at the possible future of human thought, it will appear from what we have just seen, that physical science of itself can do little to control or cramp it; nor until man consents to resign his belief in virtue and his own dignity altogether, will it be able to repress religious faith, should other causes tend to produce a new outbreak of it.  But the chief difficulties in the matter are still in store for us.  Let us see never so clearly that science, if we are moral beings, can do nothing to weaken our belief in God and immortality, but still leaves us free, if we will, to believe in them, it seems getting clearer and yet more clear that these beliefs are inconsistent with themselves, and conflict with these very moral feelings, of which they are invoked as an explanation.  Here it is true that reason does confront us, and what answer to make to it is a very serious question.  This applies even to natural religion in its haziest and most compliant form; and as applied to any form of orthodoxy its force is doubled.  What we have seen thus far is, that if there be a moral world at all, our knowledge of nature contains nothing inconsistent with theism.  We have now to enquire how far theism is inconsistent with our conceptions of the moral world.

In treating these difficulties, we will for the present consider them as applying only to religion in general, not to any special form of it.  The position of orthodoxy we will reserve for a separate treatment.  For convenience’ sake, however, I shall take as a symbol of all religion the vaguer and more general teachings of Christianity; but I shall be adducing them not as teachings revealed by heaven, but simply as developed by the religious consciousness of men.

To begin then with the great primary difficulties:  these, though they take various forms, can all in the last resort be reduced to two—­the existence of evil in the face of the power of God, and the freedom of man’s will in the face of the will of God.  And what I shall try to make plain with respect to these is this:  not that they are not difficulties—­not that they are not insoluble difficulties; but that they are not difficulties due to religion or theism, nor by abandoning theism can we in any way escape from them.  They start into being not with the belief in God, and a future of rewards and punishments, but with the belief in the moral law and in virtue, and they are common to all systems in which the worth of virtue is recognised.

The vulgar view of the matter cannot be better stated than in the following account given by J.S.  Mill of the anti-religious reasonings of his father.  He looked upon religion, says his son, ’as the greatest enemy of morality; first, by setting up fictitious excellences—­belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of humankind, and causing them to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues; but above all by radically vitiating the standard of