Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/79

Rh in the goodness and usefulness of its practical consequences. Berkeley, on the other hand, creates a God who is primarily ethical, and tends toward a system of morality which is primarily religious. He appeals to utility to induce men to believe in God; he appeals to divinity to compel them to goodness.

This conception may seem to have been dictated primarily by practical exigencies; but those who have followed the latest developments of Christian apologetics will realize that in this respect also Berkeley was a precursor of the moderns. The religious pragmatism of certain Anglo-Saxon thinkers is to be found in germ in the works of the Bishop of Cloyne; and Le Roy's recent and profound attempt to escape from the scholastic demonstrations of the existence of God and to form a new concept of divinity has led precisely to the identification of God with that instinct for moral progress which is immanent in the human soul.