Or, 'is there no God? or, at best, an absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of His universe, and _seeing_ it go?' Know that for man's well-being, whatever else be needed, 'Faith is one thing needful.' Mark, 'how, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; how, without it, worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury.' Of how much else, 'for a pure moral nature, is not the loss of Religious Belief the loss?' 'All wounds, the crush of long-continued Destitution, the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, all wounds in the so genial heart would have healed again had not the life-warmth of Faith been withdrawn.' But this once lost, how recoverable? how, rather, ever acquirable? 'First must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this, its charnel house, is to arise on us, new born of Heaven, and with new healing under its wings.' Beside these burning words of Mr. Carlyle any additional words of mine would stand only as superfluous foils, and are, therefore, considerately pretermitted. CADOGAN PLACE: _December 1872._ CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. ANTI-UTILITARIANISM 1 II. HISTORY'S SCIENTIFIC PRETENSIONS 84 III. DAVID HUME AS A METAPHYSICIAN 113 IV. HUXLEYISM 158 V. RECENT PHASES OF SCIENTIFIC ATHEISM 199 VI. LIMITS OF DEMONSTRABLE THEISM 266 EPILOGUE 298 OLD-FASHIONED ETHICS AND COMMON-SENSE METAPHYSICS CHAPTER I. _ANTI-UTILITARIANISM._ I. Having, by the heading of this essay, announced that it is intended to be partly controversial, I can scarcely begin better than by furnishing the reader with the means of judging whether I myself correctly apprehend the doctrine which I am about to criticise. If, then, I were myself an Utilitarian, and, for the sake either of vindicating my own belief, or of making converts of other people, had undertaken to explain what Utilitarianism is, I should set about the task somewhat in this wise:--