What I have left to say bears solely upon this.

CHAPTER XIII.

BELIEF AND WILL.

     ’Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for
     righteousness.’

Arguments are like the seed, or like the soul, as Paul conceived of it, which he compared to seed.  They are not quickened unless they die.  As long as they remain for us in the form of arguments they do no work.  Their work begins only, after a time and in secret, when they have sunk down into the memory, and have been left to lie there; when the hostility and distrust they were regarded with dies away; when, unperceived, they melt into the mental system, and, becoming part of oneself, effect a turning round of the soul.  This is true, at least, when the matters dealt with are such as have engaged us here.  It may be true, too, of those who discern and urge the arguments, just as well as of those upon whom they urge them.  But the immediate barrenness of much patient and careful reasoning should not make us think that it is lost labour.  One way or other it will some day bear its fruit.  Sometimes the intellect is the servant of the heart.  At other times the heart must follow slowly upon the heels of the intellect.

And such is the case now.  For centuries man’s faith and all his loftier feelings had their way made plain before them.  The whole empire of human thought belonged to them.  But this old state of things endures no longer.  Upon this Empire, as upon that of Rome, calamity has at last fallen.  A horde of intellectual barbarians has burst in upon it, and has occupied by force the length and breadth of it.  The result has been astounding.  Had the invaders been barbarians only, they might have been repelled easily; but they were barbarians armed with the most powerful weapons of civilisation.  They were a phenomenon new to history:  they showed us real knowledge in the hands of real ignorance; and the work of the combination thus far has been ruin, not reorganisation.  Few great movements at the beginning have been conscious of their own true tendency; but no great movement has mistaken it like modern Positivism.  Seeing just too well to have the true instinct of blindness, and too ill to have the proper guidance from sight, it has tightened its clutch upon the world of thought, only to impart to it its own confusion.  What lies before men now is to reduce this confusion to order, by a patient and calm employment of the intellect.  Intellect itself will never re-kindle faith, or restore any of those powers that are at present so failing and so feeble; but it will work like a pioneer to prepare their way before them, if they are ever revived otherwise, encouraged in its labours, perhaps not even by hope, but at any rate by the hope of hope.