When they no longer seem to matter, belief falls away from them. And, broadly speaking, we have come to see that things do not greatly matter unless they affect life and conduct.
"The Kingdom of Heaven" is within you; and if your doctrinal test does not produce good ethical results, you begin to doubt—not the Kingdom of Heaven—but the doctrine on which it was made to depend.
Similarly, if a doctrine obviously lays itself open to grave abuse, or presents strong temptation to the infirmities of human nature, you begin to doubt whether it is so heavenly in origin as it pretends to be.
The doctrine held by some cannibal African tribe that the bride's mother shall provide the wedding-breakfast in her own person, is so clearly a truckling to the prejudice against mothers-in-law—which exists even in this country—that such a religious tenet immediately becomes suspect, and we guess that it emanates not from the gods but from their maker, man.
Notice, too, how the gradual displacement of miracle has been brought about. So long as miracles appealed to the human mind as a moral and not a licentious expedient for the Creator of the universe to indulge in, they remained acceptable to the human understanding and were easily believed. Their real dethronement began when it was seen that a belief in them gave the greatest possible assistance to the cruel, grasping, and criminal
