ON PRACTICAL OPTIMISM. 225 
faith in an Ideal, 7.e., a Divine, order and constitution of 
things, and to this Divine order the best and most instructive 
testimony which can be found anywhere is given to men 
in the Bible. Faith in God is brought into highest intensity 
and reality by the outcome of the progressive teaching of the 
Hebrew Scriptures, which culminates in the religion of 
Christ. When Hartmann asserts that in an age which is 
being increasingly secularised, Christianity will become “ what 
it exclusively. was at its origin, the best consolation of the 
poor and wretched,” yet confesses that “ only slowly and gra- 
dually can the power of an idea so great as the Christian be 
broken,” he is really bearing testimony to the fact that 
Christianity meets the deepest needs of the human race, and 
prevents men from entertaining a philosophy of despair. And 
the following words from Amiel’s Journal Intime may be well 
contrasted with this contemptuous reference of Hartmann to » 
the Christian religion :—‘ This orgie of philosophic thought” 
(says Amiel, so he describes pessimism), “ identifying error 
with existence itself, and developing the axiom of Prudhon, 
‘ Hvil is God,’ will bring back the mass of mankind to the 
Christian theodicy, which is neither pessimist nor optimist, 
but simply declares that the felicity which Christianity calls 
eternal life is accessible to man.” 
22. Faith in a future life—or the hope of a future exist- 
ence, 2.e. of a timeless, ideai progress for the individual and 
for society — is an essential factor of consideration when 
we ask the question, Is hfe worth living? And in the 
Christian religion this fact of ‘‘ immortality” becomes 
(though still girt about with much necessary mystery for 
finite minds) a stimulus and hope of great mctive power and 
consolatory influence. Mr. Sully seems to me to make a 
misleading statement when he says that “ the thought of a 
more than counterbalancing good in a future state may, no 
doubt, if we are capable of a persistent imagination of the 
remote, help us to bear our present misery, but it does not 
make this misery one whit less real.”’ When we are “ helped 
to bear” a present uncomfortable condition of things, it 
surely makes the discomfort, and the perplexity attendant on 
it, less. And the idea of ‘‘a future life”? need not be esti- 
mated as chronologically remote, for it is connected with a 
spiritual world which encompasses us, into which we may be 
at any moment transferred. ‘lhe modern watchwords of 
“ Progress” and “ Evolution” are of very attenuated moral 
worth as motive, if Death ends all, and if there is not really 
in store an Ideal Good to which the world-process is being 
conducted. In the Christian Scriptures a personal hope of 
