dence is brought forward in its favor. I cannot believe only because I wish.
Miss Cobbe would keep belief in the unprovable on the ground that it "casts a glamor over life". I desire to see life as it is. If we would judge a landscape rightly we must not look at it through colored glasses. Unhappily, few people really love Truth; they prefer illusions, if the illusions are pleasanter than the truths, and become very angry with those who point out that illusions are not realities, and who are not afraid to recognise painful and disheartening truths. What should we think of a farmer who left undrained a fever-breeding swamp on the ground that the marsh-fires were "so pretty"? Yet there are people who would preserve the swamps of superstition because their dancing flames "cast a glamor over life".
"Again, it will not merely belittle life, it will carnalise it to take Religion out of it. . . . . It needs no argument to prove that, as the bestial tendencies in us have scarcely been kept down while we believed ourselves to be immortal souls, they will have it still more their own way when we feel assured we are only mortal bodies." This sentence would be easier to deal with if Miss Cobbe had vouchsafed to tell us which tendencies in man she regards as "bestial". I should have regarded war as one of the strongest examples of a bestial tendency, but judging from her next paragraph Miss Cobbe does not regard war with the detestation felt for it by Atheists. Excuses for the brutality of war, however, may be looked for from anyone who admires the Bible.
It may be frankly acknowledged, however, that man inherits from his brute progenitors various bestial tendencies which are in course of elimination. The wild beast desire to fight is one of these, and this has been encouraged, not checked, by religion. National rivalries have often grown out of the rivalries of national Gods. "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God", quoth Jahveh of the Hebrews, and the bloodiest wars waged by the human race have been the wars waged in the name of God. The "Holy War" has ever been a war of extermination, whether undertaken by the Moabites for Chemosh, by the Hebrews for Jahveh, by the Christians for Christ. Another bestial tendency is the lust of the male for the female apart from love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been encouraged by religion, as witness the polygamy and concubinage of
