CHAP. XIII.] CONSEQUENCES. 415 



in God and a future life, we then have but a subjective 

 support for our intuitions of truth, goodness, and beauty, and 

 no certainty that we cannot benefit those we love by evil 

 actions, if such appear desirable to us ; moreover, we then 

 have no motive for loving our neighbour, or forgiving our 

 enemy, beyond what our spontaneous disposition prompts us 

 to love or to forgive. In the same way, such disbelief 

 deprives us of any certainty that &quot;the right&quot; is &quot;necessarily 

 our greatest happiness,&quot; rewards and punishments become 

 confined to this world, and merely such as we may hope to 

 obtain without real merit, or to evade. In the same way, 

 again, we cease to have any motive to restrain our instincts 

 and passions beyond the degree to which selfish considerations 

 prompt us to restrain them. 



Place two men, in all things equal, save that one accepts, 

 and the other rejects the belief referred to. Let them be 

 exposed to temptations. It is as certain as any mathematical 

 truth that such beliefs will operate in promoting virtue, and 

 in repressing vice in the one who accepts them. 



What then must be the effect of education in which these 

 supreme truths are ignored ? What must be the effect of an 

 &quot; amelioration &quot; of the condition of the masses which should, 

 at first, give them increased physical comfort indeed, but 

 which should tend to make such considerations as temporal 

 welfare the all-important or primary one ? 



As to the consequences of the wide acceptance of his, Mr. 

 Herbert Spencer s, views, that writer himself admits : 



&quot; Few, if any, are as yet fitted wholly to dispense with such [reli 

 gious] conceptions as are current. The highest abstractions take so 

 great a mental power to realise with any vividness, and are so inopera 

 tive upon conduct unless they are vividly realised, that their regulative 

 effects must for a long period to come be appreciable on but a small 



minority Those who relinquish the faith in which they have 



been brought up, for this most abstract faith in which science and 

 religion unite, may not uncommonly fail to act up to their convictions. 

 Left to their organic morality, enforced only by general reasonings 

 imperfectly wrought out and difficult to keep before the mind, their 

 delects of nature will often come out more strongly than they would 

 have done under their previous creed.&quot; First Principles, p. 117. 



