54 PROLOGUE I 



tiori supplied the motives which reason was 

 supposed to be incompetent to furnish. Religion, 

 at first independent of morality, gradually took 

 morality under its protection ; and the super- 

 naturalists have ever since tried to persuade 

 mankind that the existence of ethics is bound up 

 with that of supernaturalism. 



I am not of that opinion, But, whether it is 

 correct or otherwise, it is very clear to me that, 

 as Beelzebub is not to be cast out by the aid of 

 Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established 

 by immorality. It is, we are told, the special 

 peculiarity of the devil that he was a liar from 

 the beginning. If we set out in life with pre- 

 tending to know that which we do not know ; with 

 professing to accept for proof evidence which we 

 are well aware is inadequate ; with wilfully 

 shutting our eyes and our ears to facts which 

 militate against this or that comfortable hypo- 

 thesis ; we are assuredly doing our best to deserve 

 the same character. 



I have not the presumption to imagine that, in 

 spite of all my efforts, errors may not have crept 

 into these propositions. But I am tolerably 

 confident that time will prove them to be 

 substantially correct. And if they are so, I 

 confess I do not see how any extant supernatural- 

 istic system can also claim exactness. That they 

 are irreconcilable with the biblical cosmogony, 



