rest on the naive supposition that shine and shadow, as it were, are portable things; and that we can take bright objects out of the sunshine, and dark objects out of the shadow, and setting them both together in the diffused grey light of a studio, make a magical mosaic out of them, of gloom and glitter.  Or such teachings, to put the matter yet more simply, are like telling us to pick a primrose at noonday, and to set it by our bed-side for a night-light.

It is plain therefore that, in that loss of zest and interest, which the deadening of the moral sense, as we have seen, must bring to life, we shall get no help there.  The massy fabric of which saints and heroes were the builders, will never be re-elected by this mincing moral dandyism.

But there is another last resource of the modern school, which is far more worthy of attention, and which, being entirely sui generis, I have reserved to treat of here.  That resource is the devotion to truth as truth; not for the sake of its consequences, but in scorn of them.  Here we are told we have at least one moral end that can never be taken away from us.  It will still survive to give life a meaning, a dignity, and a value, even should the pursuit of it prove destructive to all the others.  The language used by the modern school upon this subject is very curious and instructive.  I will take two typical instances.  The common argument, says Dr. Tyndall, in favour of belief is the comfort and the gladness that it brings us, its redemption of life, in fact, from that dead and dull condition we have been just considering. ‘To this,’ he says, ’my reply is that I choose the nobler part of Emerson when, after various disenchantments, he exclaimed “I covet truth!” The gladness of true heroism, visits the heart of him who is really competent to say this.’ The following sentences are Professor Huxley’s:  ’If it is demonstrated to me,’ he says, ’that without this or that theological dogma the human race will lapse into bipedal cattle, more brutal than the beasts by reason of their greater cleverness, my next question is to ask for the proof of the dogma.  If this proof is forthcoming, it is my conviction that no drowning sailor ever clutched a hen-coop more tenaciously than mankind will hold by such dogma, whatever it may be.  But if not, then I verily believe that the human race will go its own evil way; and my only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so long as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend, they will not have reached the lowest depths of immorality.’ I will content myself with these two instances, but others of a similar kind might be multiplied indefinitely.