EVERY ONE who has studied the workings of his own intelligence knows that it is not all at once that a discussion on an important and difficult subject sinks into the mind and produces its legitimate effect. The conversation on Theism narrated in our last chapter seemed at first to Cholmeley to be a sort of dream. The conclusions to which it pointed hovered about his intelligence, but when they sought to enter in and establish themselves there, they encountered a host of adversaries who challenged their right, some intellectual and some moral. The habits of thought which had been growing and strengthening for ten years and more were not to be dislodged so easily. The critical spirit demanded its right to play the part to which it had been so long accustomed, of an universal solvent. The unwillingness to submit, the dislike of the yoke which Theism imposes, made the thought of yielding a most repulsive one. All this put the positive arguments for a God at a great disadvantage, and there was a struggle in his mind in which the victory seemed very uncertain. On the one hand, habit and inclination, pride and self-sufficiency, stormed against the intruding convictions, and he was half angry with his friend for putting so clearly before him the arguments he had long managed to evade. On the other hand these arguments had, after all, an ally somewhere deep down in his nature, and this, their friend and ally, pleaded their cause and demanded for them a fair hearing, and urged him not to put them aside as he would fain have done. There was something within him that told him they were true, and forced on him an unpleasant conviction that, in all his sceptical talk and sceptical thoughts, he had partly been saying what he did not really mean, partly deceiving himself as well as others the self-deception following on and being the result of the frequent discussions in which he had urged the Agnostic arguments, often from a mere love of arguing and a mischievous pride in trying to make the cause he knew to be the worse appear the better in the eyes of his listeners. By frequent repetition of these arguments he had unconsciously made them his own, and been influenced by them, until at length, when he said that he had ceased to believe in a God, there was no conscious lie in his mouth, though all the time there was a half-conscious lie in his heart, an uncomfortable feeling that though the ground beneath his feet seemed solid enough, it might at any moment crumble away and send him headlong he knew not where.

And now an appeal had been made to him to put off this cloak that he had been wearing, and he somehow dreaded the consequences of laying it aside. He felt like a man to whom excessive stimulants had become a second nature, and who could not face the painful effort it would cost him to abandon them, though all the time, in spite of a feeble attempt to persuade himself they were necessary, he was conscious in his inmost soul that they were hurrying him to the grave. So too in the soul of Cholmeley, two counter tendencies were at work, producing a most unpleasant struggle, the pain of which made him wish from time to time that he had never allowed the question to be re-opened, and regret the candid avowal that he really wished to believe.

Saville observed the signs of a conflict going on in the mind of his friend, and wisely refrained for several days from any allusion to the subject. They talked over the scenes of their boyhood, and the various fortunes of their school-fellows in after life, and had a warm discussion on the moot question whether school-boy days afford a clear prognostic of the subsequent history of the full-grown man. This last topic led on somehow to the question of inherited tendencies, and Cholmeley had remarked rather cynically that the son of an Anglican clergyman rarely follows his father’s profession, unless indeed there is a family living waiting for him, or some mental or moral deficiency seems likely to hinder his success in other walks of life. To this Saville objected as too sweeping an assertion, and had several instances to bring forward of clergymen’s sons whom he felt sure had entered the Anglican ministry from conscientious motives, and whom he believed had been led to do so by the good influence of their sires. Cholmeley had answered that he did not deny that there might be developed in some family that mixture of mild benevolence and love of a comfortable easy-going life which characterized the parson, and especially the country parson, but that he did not think it right to regard the indulgence of such a natural tendency as an act of high virtue or as identical with an inspiration from Heaven. Then seeing his inconsistency, he corrected himself. “After all,” he said, “perhaps there is no solid ground for distinguishing between one impulse and the other; the impulse to a life of easy-going comfort, and the impulse to a life of virtuous self-sacrifice. In the one case, as in the other, there are certain forces which impel us, and it seems to me that the forces which must ultimately prevail are those which are in the long run best calculated to promote the welfare of the individual or the species.”

Saville saw that the conversation was drifting towards the object which was uppermost in the thoughts of both himself and his friend, and resolved to encourage its tendency. “I don’t quite understand what you mean,” he said.

“I mean,” said Cholmeley, “that I think all virtue, even the highest, is ultimately identical with utility, even where the two seem at variance, and that therefore the choice of a higher life is really the choice of a life which in the long run will pay the best.”

“I don’t deny that,” said Saville, “but quid deinde?”

“Why, if that is so, the so-called moral law is easily accounted for on utilitarian grounds, and the argument you alluded to the other day from the moral law to a moral Lawgiver, from conscience to God, is worth nothing at all.”

“I don’t see your inference.”

“Why, it is clear enough, if all virtue promotes our interest and all vice is opposed to it, that by the law of evolution there will be gradually developed in mankind certain tendencies which men call virtuous tendencies, but which are really only the natural instinct which tends continually more and more to whatever experience shows to be beneficial to us. When once any such tendency is established in us, we are uncomfortable if we run counter to it; we are haunted by a fear of the evil consequences which we know will follow from the disregard of what has become a law of our nature. This voice of conscience, as it is called, is but the inherited persuasion that one kind of action will be followed by pleasant consequences and the other by painful ones, and in that case I do not see how you can argue from it to a Personal Being whose authority it bears. If I eat something indigestible for supper I have a most unpleasant conviction that during a sleepless night or on the morrow’s morn I shall have to suffer for my imprudence. In the same way, if I break any of those generalized experiences which are called moral laws, I have a similar conviction that I shall have to pay the penalty of what I have done. The only difference between the two cases seems to me to be that the one case I argue mainly from my own personal experience, in the other from the accumulated experiences of mankind in general. In each case the painful feeling I endure has the same origin. It arises from a fear of the consequences of my own action. In the case of the indigestible supper you allow that there is no need for dragging in any supernatural Personal Being in order to account for my uncomfortable state of mind. Why then should you do so in the case of a breach of the moral law?”

“Cholmeley,” answered Saville seriously, “I have already warned you that the arguments for the existence of a God though convincing, are not resistless. Somehow or other it is always possible either to propose a fair seeming theory which will account for at least the greater proportion of the facts adduced in favour of Theism, or else to create a mist in your intelligence, and under cover of it to evade the argument on the plea of its being a metaphysical or transcendental one, out of the sphere of human experience. If a man has the desire not to believe, depend upon it, believe he will not. Nay, I may go further, though after all it comes to the same thing, and do not hesitate to say that if he has not a positive desire to believe, believe he will not, or at least his belief will never be a firm or lasting.”

“Don’t be angry, Saville,” said Cholmeley, “or give me up as a bad job. I think I have the positive desire to believe, at least I hope so. I put the case of the Experimentalists as strongly as I could to draw out your answer. I am sure you don’t want me to shirk the difficulties.”

“No, indeed,” answered Saville with a sigh of relief, “and the argument we are engaged upon is one which has two peculiarities which expose it to the attacks of the sceptical objector. In the first place it appeals to the internal and individual experience of each, and in this respect a little resembles I the so-called argument from consciousness; in the second place it is an argument which will not stand by itself. It cannot be separated from the argument from design and from causation without being exposed to the charge of petitio principii, in that it implicitly assumes the very...