defended; it is also an error to suppose that reason is essentially
antagonistic to them. The facts of morality and religion are precisely
the richest facts of knowledge; and that faith is the most secure which
is most completely illumined by reason. Religion at its best is not a
dogmatic despotism, nor is reason a merely critical and destructive
faculty. If reason is loyal to the truth of religion on which it is
exercised, it will reach beneath all the conflict and clamour of
disputation, to the principle of unity, on which, as we have seen, both
reason and religion rest.

The "faith" to which religious spirits appeal against all the attacks of
doubt, "the love" of Browning, is really implicit reason; it is
"abbreviated" or concentrated knowledge; it is the manifold experiences
of life focussed into an intense unity. And, on the other hand, the
"reason" which they condemn is what Carlyle calls the logic-chopping
faculty. In taking the side of faith when troubled with difficulties
which they cannot lay, they are really defending the cause of reason
against that of the understanding. For it is quite true that the
understanding, that is, the reason as reflective or critical, can never
bring about either a moral or religious life. It cannot create a
religion, any more than physiology can produce men. The reflection which
brings doubt is always secondary; it can only exercise itself on a given
material. As Hegel frequently pointed out, it is not the function of
moral philosophy to create or to institute a morality or religion, but
to understand them. The facts must first be given; they must be actual
experiences of the human spirit. Moral philosophy and theology differ
from the moral or religious life, in the same way as geology differs
from the earth, or astronomy from the heavenly bodies. The latter are
facts; the former are theories about the facts. Religion is an attitude
of the human spirit towards the highest; morality is the realization of