condition of circumstances, and to common minds one of its first essentials is the exclusion of painful and harassing doubt. A system of belief may be false, superstitious, and reactionary, and may yet be conducive to human happiness if it furnishes great multitudes of men with what they believe to be a key to the universe, if it consoles them in those seasons of agonizing bereavement when the consolations of enlightened reason are but empty words, if it supports their feeble and tottering minds in the gloomy hours of sickness and of approaching death. A credulous and superstitious nature may be degraded, but in the many cases where superstition does not assume a persecuting or appalling form it is not unhappy, and degradation, apart from unhappiness, can have no place in utilitarian ethics. No error can be more grave than to imagine that when a critical spirit is abroad the pleasant beliefs will all remain, and the painful ones alone will perish. To introduce into the mind the consciousness of ignorance and the pangs of doubt is to inflict or endure much suffering, which may even survive the period of transition. “Why is it,” said Luther’s wife, looking sadly back upon the sensuous creed which she had left, “that in our old faith we prayed so often and so warmly, and that our prayers are now so few and so cold?”(79) It is related of an old monk named Serapion, who had embraced the heresy of the anthropomorphites, that he was convinced by a brother monk of the folly of attributing to the Almighty a human form. He bowed his reason humbly to the Catholic creed; but when he knelt down to pray, the image which his imagination had conceived, and on which for so many years his affections had been concentrated, had disappeared, and the old man burst into tears, exclaiming, “You have deprived me of my God.”(80) These are indeed facts which must be deeply painful to all who are concerned with the history of opinion. The possibility of often adding to the happiness of men by diffusing abroad, or at least sustaining pleasing falsehoods, and the suffering that must commonly result from their dissolution, can hardly reasonably be denied. There is one, and but one, adequate reason that can always justify men in critically reviewing what they have been taught. It is, the conviction that opinions should not be regarded as mere mental luxuries, that truth should be deemed an end distinct from and superior to utility, and that it is a moral duty to pursue it, whether it leads to pleasure or whether it leads to pain. Among the many wise sayings which antiquity ascribed to Pythagoras, few are more remarkable than his division of virtue into two distinct branches—to be truthful and to do good.(81)