explains it. And what is more, he explains it by referring its growth to
the better, and not to the worse part of human nature. He traces it to
men's cravings for a higher morality. He finds its source in their
aspirations after nobler expression of that feeling for the
incommensurable things, which is in truth under so many varieties of
inwoven pattern the common universal web of religious faith.

The result of this way of looking at a creed which a man no longer
accepts, is that he is able to speak of it with patience and historic
respect. He can openly mark his dissent from it, without exacerbating
the orthodox sentiment by galling pleasantries or bitter animadversion
upon details. We are now awake to the all-important truth that belief in
this or that detail of superstition is the result of an irrational state
of mind, and flows logically from superstitious premisses. We see that
it is to begin at the wrong end, to assail the deductions as impossible,
instead of sedulously building up a state of mind in which their
impossibility would become spontaneously visible.

Besides the great change which such a point of view makes in men's way
of speaking of a religion, whose dogmas and documents they reject, there
is this further consideration leaning in the same direction. The
tendency of modern free thought is more and more visibly towards the
extraction of the first and more permanent elements of the old faith, to
make the purified material of the new. When Dr. Congreve met the famous
epigram about Comte's system being Catholicism minus Christianity, by
the reply that it is Catholicism plus Science, he gave an ingenious
expression to the direction which is almost necessarily taken by all who
attempt, in however informal a manner, to construct for themselves some
working system of faith, in place of the faith which science and
criticism have sapped. In what ultimate form, acceptable to great