4,0 LORD GRIMTHORPE 
invented or stated definitely and accepted as rational by any 
but some trumpery and temporary school or party till some 
other has come in. If the common history is true, as it 
must be unless a better is established as more probable, the 
doctrine of responsibility is true in just the same degree. 
It is no longer an isolated theory or creed depending only 
on its intrinsic probability, great as that is, but an essential 
part of a structure that has stood for ages, and grows stronger 
and larger every day, and of which, until some other archi- 
tect is found and proved to be more probable, we are bound 
to say that “the builder and maker is God.” That is the 
practical difficulty which deniers of future life and responsi- 
bility have to face and answer, before they can expect any 
man capable of reasoning to accept their denial as worth any- 
thing. Those who have their own reasons for wishing the 
denial to be true will probably succeed. in persuading them- 
selves that it is, or that professing ignorance about it is 
sufficient excuse for ignoring it. But nothing can be more 
certain than that, if they are wrong on the main question of 
the truth of the system of which this is a fundamental part, 
they have not the smallest chance of their agnosticism being 
accepted as an excuse. Agnosticism is ipso facto unbeliet, 
and if the Bible is true we know what that involves. 
Here I might well stop, and indeed I have no more to say 
on the bare question of whether it is rational to believe or to 
act as if we believed in no future responsibility. For it is 
quite a different question how that responsibility is likely to 
be administered, as we say of earthly justice. Some persons 
fancy that they have done all that need be done to make 
unbelievers easy by declaiming on the injustice of holding 
honestly ignorant or unwilling offenders guilty of death. 
That might be worth something if it were any part of our 
doctrine that no allowance will be made for such difficulties 
by the righteous Judge, though we have no means of know- 
ing what that allowance will be in each case. All that I 
have to say on that point is that an excuse is only a demand 
for mitigation of punishment, not a plea of not guilty, and 
still less a proof of it. As for the plea of ignorance, nothing 
is more certain than that it is very often wilful. We hear 
men boasting of their desire to read both sides, while they 
practically mean that they read all that they get hold of 
against the accepted faith, and fancy they know all the 
reasons for it, and probably soon find objections to 1t which 
they cannot answer, and therefore yield to them. How few 
do we meet with who even try to balance the probabilities of 
