Then there are the sensualists of all classes in life. It is a strange thing to notice that of all the commands of religions, of all laws of conduct they have given forth, but one only is almost invariably kept. There is but one crime that the religious rarely commit, and that is sensuality. It is true the rule is not absolute. There are the Swedenborgians, if theirs can be called a religion. I doubt myself if it be so, if this one fact did not oust it from the family of faiths. But however that may be, sensuality in all history has been almost always allied to irreligion. Not as a consequence, but because I think both proceed from the same cause, a nerve weakness and irritability arising from deficient vitality, a want of the finer emotions, which are religion. Finally, there are the philosophers. In all history, in all countries, in all faiths there have been the thinkers, the reasoners, the "lovers of wisdom," and they have rejected the religion of their people. Of what sort are these philosophers? Are they, as they claim to be, the cream of mankind, those who have the pure reason? Are they such as the world admires? I think not. For pure reason does not appeal to mankind. It is too cold, too hard, too arid. It is barren and produces nothing. What has philosophy given the world but unending words? It is the denial of emotion, and emotion is life. It is the reduction of living to the formula of mathematics--a grey world. Those who, rejecting religion, rely on pure reason, are those who have lost the stronger emotions, who have heads but no hearts, while the enthusiasts have hearts but no heads. And in between these lie the great mass of men who are religious but not fanatics, who reason but who do not look to reason to prove their religion, the men and women who live large lives, and are lost neither in the tumult of unrestrained emotion, nor bound in the iron limits of a mental syllogism. "Do you infer," it will be asked, "that religion is in inverse ratio to reason? But it is not so. Many men, most men of the highest intellectual attainments, have been deeply religious, great soldiers, sailors, statesmen, discoverers; the great men are on our side, the thinkers have been with us." I am not sure of that. The great _doers_ have always been religious, the great thinkers rarely so. No man has ever, I think, sat down calmly unbiassed to reason out his religion and not ended by rejecting it. The great men who have also been religious do not invalidate what I say. Newton was a great thinker, perhaps one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He could follow natural laws and occurrences with the keenest eye for flaws, for mistakes, for rash assumption. He could never accept until he had proved. But did he ever apply this acumen to religion? Not so; he accepted at once the chronology of the Old Testament unhesitatingly, blindly, and worked out a chronology of the Fall much as did Archbishop Usher.