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I also foresaw the extreme difficulty of enforcing military training upon Quakers, the Salvation Army, the Peace Society, and many Nonconformists and Rationalists. Nevertheless, twenty-five years ago I advocated Conscription in a carefully-reasoned article that appeared in Mr. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette.
The case of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point here. Rationalists feel his fearful array of insufficiencies.
Similarly, the heretics and rationalists, whose criticism was even more dangerous to the Church than the open violence of the State, had more in common with their opponents than we should infer from the duration and the character of the disputes which they provoked.
Naming the disjunction doesn't debar us from also naming the conjunction in a later modifying statement, for the two are absolutely co-ordinate elements in the finite tissue of experience. Everywhere we find rationalists using the same kind of reasoning. The primal whole which is their vision must be there not only as a fact but as a logical necessity.
Perhaps the great majority of the clergy deserve the indictment of rationalists. Mr. McCabe can prove his case by citing the exceptions. After all, the accusation is neither new nor original. Voltaire set the tune.
The hunger of the human heart for knowledge of God persists though all the old religious systems may prove illusions. Our little rationalists imagine that they are hitting the foundations of religion when they successfully assail the crumbling walls of dogmas. Religious life escapes their fire. Faith and hope rise above disillusionment. Love knows instinctively that it is not made of dust.
Both mystics and rationalists, however, are deceived by their mental agility; the immediate exists, even if dialectic cannot explain it.
We know of no parallel instance of a change of opinion so great and sudden, unless it be the marvellous transition of certain modern Rationalists who were wont to ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity as absurd and incomprehensible, but who have now arrived at the conclusion that it is the fundamental law of human thought!
Full of enthusiasm for the ideas of his English friends, he wrote Letters on the English a triumph of deistic philosophy and sarcastic criticism of church and society. The opinions which Voltaire henceforth never ceased to expound had long been held by English rationalists.
If Burke began his "Vindication of Natural Society," with intent to produce a burlesque, he missed his aim, and came very near convincing himself of the truth of his proposition. And in fact, the book was hailed by the rationalists as a vindication of Rousseau's philosophy. Burke was a conservative rationalist, which is something like an altruistic pessimist.
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