Beyond a doubt, one of the heaviest charges against the popular creed is that, while its ministers have raged against the smallest theological error, and convulsed the world by their ridiculous disputes concerning mysteries altogether beyond the reach of human comprehension, they have complacently endured and even fostered moral heresies which withered up the very roots of virtue. The whole tone of ordinary Romish exhortation, _faire son salut_, is often base beyond expression; and the teaching of the Church of England in the last century was no better. Here are some specimens of it. Rutherford says (_Nature and Obligations of Virtue_, 1744), “Every man’s happiness is the ultimate end which reason teaches him to pursue, and the constant and uniform practice of virtue becomes our duty _when_ revelation has informed us that God will make us finally happy in a life after this.” Paley is no better. He says:[1] “Virtue is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and _for the sake of everlasting happiness_. According to which definition, the good of mankind is the subject, the will of God the rule, and _everlasting happiness the motive of virtue_.” Waterland, the great champion of Trinitarianism, went even further. He says that “being just and grateful without future prospects has as much of moral virtue in it _as folly or indiscretion has_.” These are the kind of doctrines which have been placidly admitted among the recognized teachings of the great Christian Churches. Nor have some of the philosophers proved a whit more conscious of the simple notion of duty. Bentham, for example,[2] plainly lays it down that for a man to give up a larger pleasure of his own for a smaller one of his neighbor’s is an act not of virtue, but of _folly_. Certainly, if the new Agnostics had no types of religion or morality save these thoroughly debased ones wherewith to compare their system, they might well claim to be the evangelists of a purer gospel. Better, assuredly better, would it be to believe in no God than to pay homage to the all-adorable Author of Good for the sake of the payment we expect him to give us. Better, assuredly better, to expect no life beyond the grave than to poison every act of courage, justice, or beneficence by the vile notion of being rewarded for it in heaven; or to refrain from treachery and cruelty and lies, merely, like a beaten hound, from dread of the bloody scourge of hell.