Nor can it be urged that though some part of our interest thus depends on the beliefs, rather than on their being true, yet the consequences of self-deception are so momentous, as to create a spirit of criticism to balance or over-balance the said bias of credulity. For though the consequences of denial are disastrous if the beliefs are true, yet if they are false, the ill-consequences of belief are almost insignificant. It is sometimes said too hastily that if religion be an illusion, then religious people lose both this life and the next; and it is assumed that an unrestrained devotion to pleasure would secure a happiness which faith requires us to forego. But unless we take a gross, and really unthinkable view of the homogeneity of all happiness, and reduce its differences to degree and quantity, the shallowness of the preceding objection will be apparent. It is only through restraint that the higher kinds of temporal happiness are reached, and as confusions are cleared away in process of discussion, it becomes patent that such restraint finds its motive directly or indirectly in religion. When the religious influence with which irreligious society is saturated, has exhausted itself, and idealism is no more, the unrestrained egoistic pursuit of enjoyment must tend to its steady diminution in quantity, and its depreciation in kind. The sorrow and pain entailed by fidelity to the Christian ideal is, on the whole, immeasurably less in the vast majority of cases than that attendant on the struggles of unqualified selfishness, while the capacities for the higher happiness are steadily raised and largely satisfied by hope and even by some degree of present fruition. Even vice would be in many ways sauceless and insipid in the absence of faith. Who does not remember the old cynic's testimony (in the "New Republic") to the piquancy lent by Christianity to many a sin, otherwise pointless. If the moralist distinguishes between actions that are evil because they are forbidden, and those that are forbidden because they are evil, the libertine has a counter-distinction between those that are forbidden because they are pleasant, and those that are pleasant because they are forbidden. St. Paul himself is explicit enough as to this effect of the law.