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.