To render dogma infallible is to make it something that no longer has to be fought for. This attitude ultimately undermines the whole structure for belief. If it is only infallible ideas that we are to believe, then belief loses all its moral force. It is no longer a fierce struggle to maintain one’s intellectual position. Nothing is at stake. One is not braced in faith with the hosts of hell assailing one’s citadel. To the puritan, belief meant something to be gloweringly and tenaciously held against the world, the flesh and the devil. But Catholic belief, in the Newman atmosphere, is too sheltered, too safely insured, to count excitingly. One only yawns over it, as his own deep soul must have secretly yawned over it, and turns aside to the genuine issues of life. But this is just what we should do with belief. We are passing out of the faith era, and belief, as an intellectual attitude, has almost ceased to play an active part in our life. In the scientific attitude there is no place whatever for belief. We have no right to “believe” anything unless it has been experimentally proved. But if it has been proved, then we do not say we “believe” it, because this would imply that an alternative was possible. All we do is to register our common assent to the new truth’s incontrovertibility. Nor has belief any place in the loose, indecisive issues of ordinary living. We have to act constantly on insufficient evidence, on the best “opinion” we can get. But opinion is not belief, and we are lost if we treat it so. Belief is dogmatic, but opinion has value only when it is tentative, questioning. The fact is that in modern thinking the attitude of belief has given place to what may be called the higher plausibility. Stern, rugged conviction which has no scientific background behind it is coming to be dealt with rather impatiently by the modern mind. We have difficulty in distinguishing it from prejudice. There is no hostility to faith, if by “faith” we only mean an emotional core of desire driving towards some ideal. But idealism is a very different thing from belief. Belief is impelled from behind; it is sterile, fixed. Belief has no seeds of progress, no constructive impulse. An ideal, on the other hand, is an illumined end towards which our hopes and endeavors converge. It looks forward and pulls us along with it. It is ideals and not beliefs that motivate the modern mind. It is meaningless to say that we “believe” in our ideals. This separates our ideals from us. But what they are is just the push of our temperaments towards perfection. They are what is most inseparably and intrinsically ourselves. The place of a belief which put truth outside of us and made virtue a hard clinging to it has been taken by the idealism which merges us with the growing end we wish to achieve.