But it is in the region of the personal virtues--purity, truth, temperance, contentment--that the loss of the belief in God will be most disastrous. I am far from maintaining that, putting religion wholly out of sight, there are not motives of a purely ethical kind left which _ought_ to make men practise the highest inward virtue. But I think it needs only a slight knowledge of human nature to perceive that the shutting up of the window of the soul, through which an awful and most holy Spectator has hitherto been believed to gaze into all its secrets, must leave a great deal in darkness which has been till now illumined with a sin-exposing light. It takes much for a man to say, like the author of _In Memoriam_,-- “The _dead_ shall look me through and through.” The idea of any eye perceiving all that is going on in the recesses of the mind,--the double motives, the unfaithfulnesses, the vanities, the memories of old shameful errors,--this is hard enough. But the belief that such introspection is always taking place, and by the Holiest of all beings, is undoubtedly a sort of purification such as no mere solitary process of self-examination can resemble. Even a warm human friendship in youth brings with it always a burst of self-knowledge. We see ourselves quite freshly in our friend’s view of us. But a thousand times greater inevitably is the self-revelation which comes with the realized presence of God in the soul, the flood of sunshine which discloses all the motes which fill the atmosphere of our thoughts. Now, though it is only spiritually-minded men who know this experience in its full intensity, yet every man who believes in God has gleams of it at intervals through life which are never afterward quite forgotten. But, more (and this is a point which concerns the whole Theistic moral argument most importantly), the supreme experience of spiritual men is _filtered down_ through all grades of minds by books and intercourse. The lofty standard of purity which has been revealed to them is partially exhibited by their words and example, and forms a kind of high-water mark for lesser souls. It is an immense gain, even to very poor sinners, that there should be a few rich saints; and every man who has attained a lofty conception of holiness helps to make all the world around him conscious of its unholiness. He is a mirror in a dark place: the ray of light which has fallen on him dispels somewhat of the gloom around. Thus, if the belief in God be lost to humanity, we shall lose not only the direct, the incalculable effects on individual souls of the belief in a divine Searcher of Hearts, but also the indirect and universal uplifting influence on society of the presence of men who have experienced such effects, and formed their moral standard accordingly. Is it too much to augur that the result will be a depreciation of the common ideal standard, and a consequently still further depression of the practical level of personal virtue?