I reply that the fact is entirely true, and the inference entirely false.  And this brings me at once to a point I have before alluded to—­to the most subtle source of the entire positivist error—­the source secret and unsuspected, of so much rash confidence.

The positive school can, and do, as we have seen, point to certain things in life which have every appearance, at first sight, of adequate moral ends.  Their adequacy seems to be verified by every right feeling, and also by practical experiment.  But there is one great fact that is forgotten.  The positive school, when they deal with life, profess to exhibit its resources to us wholly free from the false aids of religion.  They profess (if I may coin a word) to have de-religionized it before they deal with it.  But about this matter they betray a most strange ignorance.  They think the task is far simpler than it is.  They seem to look on religion as existing nowhere except in its pure form, in the form of distinct devotional feeling, or in the conscious assents of faith; and, these once got rid of, they fancy that life is de-religionized.  But the process thus far is really only begun; indeed, as far as immediate results go, it is hardly even begun; for it is really but a very small proportion of religion that exists pure.  The greater part of it has entered into combination with the acts and feelings of life, thus forming as it were, a kind of amalgam with them, giving them new properties, a new colour, a new consistence.  To de-religionize life, then, it is not enough to condemn creeds and to abolish prayers.  We must further sublimate the beliefs and feelings, which prayers and creeds hold pure, out of the lay life around us.  Under this process, even if imperfectly performed, it will soon become clear that religion in greater or less proportions is lurking everywhere.  We shall see it yielded up even by things in which we should least look for it—­by wit, by humour, by secular ambition, by most forms of vice, and by our daily light amusements.  Much more shall we see it yielded up by heroism, by purity, by affection, and by love of truth—­by all those things that the positivists most specially praise.

The positivists think, it would seem, that they had but to kill God, and that his inheritance shall be ours.  They strike out accordingly the theistic beliefs in question, and then turn instantly to life:  they sort its resources, count its treasures, and then say, ’Aim at this, and this, and this.  See how beautiful is holiness; see how rapturous is pleasure.  Surely these are worth seeking for their own sakes, without any “reward or punishment looming in the future."’ They find, in fact, the interests and the sentiments of the world’s present life—­all the glow and all the gloom of it—­lying before them like the colours on a painter’s palette, and think they have nothing to do but set to work and use them.  But let them wait a moment; they are in far too great a hurry.  The palette and its colours are not nearly ready for them.