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stances ; whereas, if it is to be worth anything, the power which 
impels us to what is good should be above all things steady 
and enduring. It would be anticipating were I to enlarge 
now upon a third point, that one of the chief objections to 
Mr. Arnold's definition of God is, that it makes emotion 
impossible, at least in religion.* That “ morality touched by 
emotion " is a sufficient definition of religion I am, therefore, 
not disposed to admit; though I am ready to grant that 
emotion may have an important part to play in disposing 
us to religion, and that it ought to be capable of being evoked 
by the idea of God. 
10. Starting with an incomplete and unsatisfactory definition 
of religion itself, Mr. Arnold proceeds to lay down the proposi- 
tion, that nothing is to be believed which is not directly 
verifiable (Preface, p. x.b The reason that he gives (p. 42) 
for not believing in a “ Personal First Cause, the moral and 
intelligent governor of the world," is, that it is not “ ad- 
mittedly certain and verifiable." But before this can be 
admitted as a sufficient reason, it must be proved that 
nothing is, or ought to be believed, but what is “ admittedly 
certain and verifiable by reason," in other words, that a 
revelation is an impossibility. No doubt it may be useful 
for those who have lost their hold on revelation to be re- 
minded how many of its truths are “ admittedly certain and 
verifiable." “ I believe in this,” says Kingsley's hero, 
Lancelot, in “ Yeast," stamping upon the earth, and he is the 
type of a good many men ; but even his belief in “ this," 
when carried into practice and corrected by the effects of an 
earnest attempt to follow his conscience and do his duty, is 
supposed to have led him, as it has led many others, to believe 
in much else beside. To such persons it may be well to say 
that even those truths which are thought least “ verifiable," 
are capable of much verification ; that the experiences of the 
soul are as much facts as the functions of the body ; that the 
inner history of man, his cravings and how they were satisfied, 
his prayers and how they were answered, his beliefs and how 
they were formed, are as much real history as that of the 
Greeks and Romans, or that of the crust of the earth ; that 
the spiritual forces which produced prophets, apostles, 
saints, are as real, unless we entirely abandon our ordi- 
nary use of the laws of evidence, as the intellectual forces 
which have given us poets, philosophers, and statesmen, or 
* “ We can adore a Person, but we cannot adore principles — Robertson, 
Lect. Y. on Epist. to Corinthians. 
