tenet there is nothing degrading; any more than there is anything degrading in the tenet as an imaginative conception. And looking to the infinite importance of getting right conduct,—three-fourths of human life,—established, and to the inevitable anthropomorphism and extra-belief of men in dealing with ideas, one might well hesitate to attack an anthropomorphism or an extra-belief by which men helped themselves in conduct, merely because an anthropomorphism or an extra-belief it is, so long as it served its purpose, so long as it was firmly and undoubtingly held, and almost universally prevailing.
But, after all, the question sooner or later arises in respect to a matter taken for granted, like the Catholic doctrine of the Mass or the Protestant doctrine of Justification: Is it sure? can what is here assumed be verified? And this is the real objection both to the Catholic and to the Protestant doctrine as a basis for conduct;—not that it is a degrading superstition, but that it is not sure; that it assumes what cannot be verified.
For a long time this objection occurred to scarcely any body. And there are still, and for a long time yet there will be, many to whom it does not occur. In particular, on those 'devout women' who in the history of religion have continually played a part in many respects so beautiful but in some respects so mischievous,—on them, and on a certain number of men like them, it has and can as yet have, so far as one can see, no effect at all. Who that watches the energumens during the celebration of the Communion in some Ritualistic church, their gestures and behaviour, the floor of the church strewn with what seem to be the dying and the dead, progress to the altar almost barred by forms suddenly dropping as if they were shot in battle,—who that observes this delighted adoption of vehement rites, till yesterday unknown, adopted and practised now with all that absence of
