nothing could be more unlikely than that natures disposed to virtue, trained under good influences, peculiarly sensitive to opinion and guarded by intellectual tastes, would lapse into vice as soon as the traditional sanction was removed. But what is to prevent the withdrawal of the traditional sanction from producing its natural effect upon the morality of the mass of mankind? The commercial swindler or the political sharper, when the divine authority of conscience is gone, will feel that he has only the opinion of society to reckon with, and he knows how to reckon with the opinion of society. If Macbeth is ready, provided he can succeed in this world, to "jump the life to come," much more ready will villainy be to "jump" the bad consequences of its actions to humanity when its own conscious existence shall have closed. Rate the practical effect of religious beliefs as low and that of social influences as high as you may, there can surely be no doubt that morality has received some support from the authority of an inward monitor regarded as the voice of God. The worst of men would have wished to die the death of the righteous; he would have been glad, if he could, when death approached, to cancel his crimes; and the conviction, or misgiving, which this implied, could not fail to have some influence upon the generality of mankind, though no doubt the influence was weakened rather than strengthened by the extravagant and incredible form in which the doctrine of future retribution was presented by the dominant theology. The denial of the existence of God and of a Future State, in a word, is the dethronement of conscience; and society will pass, to say the least, through a dangerous interval before social science can fill the vacant throne. Avowed scepticism is likely to be disinterested and therefore to be moral; it is among the unavowed sceptics and conformists to political religions that the consequences of the change may be expected to appear.