We endeavoured to follow Christianity in the depth of its distinction between right and wrong.  Herein this religion is of priceless value.  Philosophy proclaims the unity of our nature.  To philosophy every passion is as natural as every act of saintlike negation, and one of the usual effects of thinking or philosophising is to bring together all that is apparently contrary in man, and to show how it proceeds really from one centre.  But Christianity had not to propound a theory of man; it had to redeem the world.  It laid awful stress on the duality in us, and the stress laid on that duality is the world’s salvation.  The words right and wrong are not felt now as they were felt by Paul.  They shade off one into the other.  Nevertheless, if mankind is not to be lost, the ancient antagonism must be maintained.  The shallowest of mortals is able now to laugh at the notion of a personal devil.  No doubt there is no such thing existent; but the horror at evil which could find no other expression than in the creation of a devil is no subject for laughter, and if it do not in some shape or other survive, the race itself will not survive.  No religion, so far as I know, has dwelt like Christianity with such profound earnestness on the bisection of man—­on the distinction within him, vital to the very last degree, between the higher and the lower, heaven and hell.  What utter folly is it because of an antique vesture to condemn as effete what the vesture clothes!  Its doctrine and its sacred story are fixtures in concrete form of precious thoughts purchased by blood and tears.

I fancy I see the sneer of theologians and critics at our efforts.  The theologians will mock us because we had nothing better to say.  I can only reply that we did our best.  We said all we knew, and we would most thankfully have said more, had we been sure that it must be true.  I would remind, too, those of our judges who think that we were such wretched mortals, blind leaders of the blind, that there have been long ages during which men never pretended to understand more than we professed to understand.  To say nothing of the Jews, whose meagre system would certainly not have been thought either satisfying or orthodox by modern Christians, the Greeks and Romans lived in no clearer light than that which shines on me.  The critics, too, will condemn because of our weakness; but this defect I at once concede.  The severest critic could not possibly be so severe as I am upon myself.  I know my failings.  He, probably, would miss many of them.  But, again I urge that men are not to be debarred by reason of weakness from doing what little good may lie within reach of their hands.  Had we attempted to save scholars and thinkers we should have deserved the ridicule with which no doubt we shall be visited.  We aspired to save nobody.  We knew no salvation ourselves.  We ventured humbly to bring a feeble ray of light into the dwellings of two or three poor men and women; and if Prometheus, fettered to his rock, dwelt with pride on the blind hopes which he had caused to visit mortals, the hopes which “stopped the continued anticipation of their destiny,” we perhaps may be pardoned if at times we thought that what we were doing was not altogether vanity.