[14] It is an orthodox writer who applies to this ratiocination the tag, _Credibile est quia ineptum est_, dismissing it as 'a blending of sceptical analysis with credulous assertion' (Rev. Dr. Mackintosh, _Hegel and Hegelianism_, p. 219). [15] Rev. Dr. R. Mackintosh, _Hegel and Hegelianism_, 1903, p. 216. Sec. 9. IDEALS Ideals, obviously, are part--the best part--of our bias: to that admission we may unhesitatingly revert. By his bias the rationalist can afford to be tried. Intellectually he makes truth his paramount consideration, and morally he insists upon the same sincerity in things intellectual as men profess to practise in honourable intercourse. I have heard a distinguished Christian scholar denounce these canons as commanding such an outrage as telling a child of its mother's shame. The charge is an illustration of the strange malice of which piety is capable. No human being ever proposed to communicate all truth of any kind to children; and the limit to the gratuitous telling of wounding truth is fixed by normal courtesy and sympathy as regards the sufferings even of adults. The charge is in fact one more illustration of the anti-veridical bias of pietism--the need to distort and pervert the case against the rationalist. And if pietism can thus distort the bearing of the intellectual canons of rationalism, much more habitually does it distort the specific purport of rationalist morals. The fact that naturalism implies utilitarianism is transformed into the proposition that utilitarianism means the subordination of all play of sympathy to an incessant calculus of profit. As we have seen, theism and Christianity alike do chronically subordinate the veridical instinct--a moral instinct like another--to lower considerations of utility; and only too often in history do we see them annulling the instincts of mercy and reciprocity by the law of dogma. Not by propounders of that test is the rationalist to be put to shame. The very basis of Christianity, in fine, is an other-world utilitarianism. 'What _profits_ it a man----?'