The man who, with characteristic downrightness, has blurted out most openly this last doubt of all—the doubt whether doubt be an evil—is, as my readers will have recognized, Mr. Justice Stephen. In the concluding pages of one of his sledge-hammerings on the heads of his adversaries, in the _Nineteenth Century_ for last June, he rung the changes upon the idea (with some reservations, to be presently noted) as follows:— “If human life is in the course of being fully described by science, I do not see what materials there are for any religion, or, indeed, what would be the use of one, or why it is wanted. We can get on very well without one, for though the view of life which science is opening to us gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things to enjoy.... The world seems to me a very good world, if it would only last. It is full of pleasant people and curious things, and I think that most men find no great difficulty in turning their minds away from its transient character. Love, friendship, ambition, science, literature, art, politics, commerce, professions, trades, and a thousand other matters, will go equally well, as far as I can see, whether there is, or is not, a God or a future state.”—_Nineteenth Century_, No. 88, p. 917. Had these noteworthy words been written by an obscure individual, small weight would have attached to them. We might have observed on reading them that the—not wise—person who three thousand years ago “said in his heart, there is no God,” had in the interval plucked up courage to say in the magazines that it does not signify whether there be one or not. But the dictum comes to us from a gentleman who happens to be the very antithesis of the object of Solomon’s detestation, a man of distinguished ability and unsullied character, of great knowledge of the world (as revealed to successful lawyers), of almost abnormal clear-headedness; and lastly, strangest anomaly of all! who is the representative of a family in which the tenderest and purest type of Protestant piety has long been hereditary. It is the last utterance of the devout “Clapham School,” of Venn, Stephen, Hannah More and Wilberforce, which we hear saying: “I think we could do very well without religion.”