The language used by the modern school upon this subject is very curious and instructive.

I will take two typical instances.

The common argument, says Dr.Tyndall, in favour of belief is the comfort and the gladness that it brings us, its redemption of life, in fact, from that dead and dull condition we have been just considering.

'_To this,_' he says, '_my reply is that I choose the nobler part of Emerson when, after various disenchantments, he exclaimed "I covet_ truth!" _The gladness of true heroism, visits the heart of him who is really competent to say this._' The following sentences are Professor Huxley's: '_If it is demonstrated to me,_' he says, '_that without this or that theological dogma the human race will lapse into bipedal cattle, more brutal than the beasts by reason of their greater cleverness, my next question is to ask for the proof of the dogma.

If this proof is forthcoming, it is my conviction that no drowning sailor ever clutched a hen-coop more tenaciously than mankind will hold by such dogma, whatever it may be.
But if not, then I verily believe that the human race will go its own evil way; and my only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so long as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend, they will not have reached the lowest depths of immorality._' I will content myself with these two instances, but others of a similar kind might be multiplied indefinitely.
Now by a simple substitution of terms, such language as this will reveal at once one important fact to us.