On both sides it has long been a question of balancing 'probabilities,' a conflict of 'reasons.' Bacon, declaring that he would 'rather believe all the fables in the Golden Legend and the Koran than that this universal frame is without a mind,' opened a door that let in all the forces of doubt. The Koran is the form in which the God-idea recommended itself to the Moslem mind, as the Bible is the form in which it commended itself to the Christian; and if for each the other is always fabulising in detail, where could be the certitude of the common doctrine? Was mind any likelier to be the form of the power of the universe than any other of the anthropomorphic characteristics of Jehovah and Allah and Zeus? However that might be, Bacon was appealing to the sheer sense of probability; the 'Evidences' of Grotius were addressed to the same kind of judgment; and Pascal's 'wager' was a blank appeal to the principle of chances plus the instinct of fear. Butler, anxiously striving to reduce the straggling deistic controversy to its logical bases, accepted the test of probability as the guide of life; and Gladstone, his last champion, with all his show of sheer faith, strenuously endorses the doctrine. The vital question is seen to be, then, whether the Butlerian 'believer' or the rationalist is the more loyal to that standard of probability by which each avowedly guides himself. But Butler, in the very act of professedly basing his case on probability, introduced the contrary principle. Gladstone, gravely reprehending that Jesuit doctrine misleadingly termed Probabilism--which permits of a choice of the less probable course in morals and belief--supposed himself to be upholding a true Probabilism in Butler. The fact is that Butler, seeking to checkmate the Deists, committed himself to anomaly as a mark of revelation. 'You believe,' he virtually argued, 'in a benevolent God of Nature, though Nature is full of ostensible cruelty and heartlessness: if these moral anomalies do not stagger your deism, why should anomalies in the Scriptures be for you an argument against their being a divine revelation? Should you not rather expect to find difficulties in the revelation as in Nature?' So that the champion of the standard of probability ends by putting an element of improbability as a mark of divine truth.