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Science and
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University of Michigan

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PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY
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PROFESSOR GEORGE S. MORRIS,
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY,
1870-1889.
Presented to the University of Michigan.
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No. V.
The International Beligio-Science Series.
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY,
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
Part II.
-BY-
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE,
THE ENGLISH HISTORIAN.
-AND--
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY,
-BY-
LESLIE STEPHEN.
TORONTO:
ROSE-BELFORD PUBLISHING COMPANY.
1878.
21



SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY,
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By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, the English Historian.
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ETHICS.
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Rev. Baldwin Brown.
Dr. W. G. Ward.
SUBJECTS:
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{{

The Influence upon
Morality of a Decline
in Religious Belief.
Spes
BY

Sir James Stephen.
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Dr. Martineau.
Frederic Harrison.
The Dean of St. Paul's.
The Duke of Argyll.
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Dr. W. G. Ward.
Professor Huxley.
Mr. R. H. Hutton.

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SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY:
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
BY
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JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE,
AUTHOR OF HISTORY OF ENGLAND," ETC.
AND
BY
104120
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
LESLIE STEPHEN.
MDCCCLXXVIII.
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SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY:
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
II.
THE
HE Stoics, like the authors of the Bridgewater Treat-
ises, had pressed science into the service of religion
by the theory of final causes. They had examined the
eye, and had found an organ constructed curiously to enable
us to see. So the ear seemed to be made to hear, the feet
to walk, the hands to minister to our various necessities.
In the whole system of nature they had found an extra-
ordinary adaptation of means to special ends, and the uni-
verse, as they supposed, was generally subordinated to the
interests of man.
From the evidence of contrivance they had passed to a
contriving mind, and had built together a specious fabric
of natural theology. Lucretius met the Stoics on their
own ground, and anticipated precisely the modern objection
to the same positions. The argument creates more difficul-
ties than it removes; for if we are to suppose every thing
which exists to have been designed, we have to account
for the existence of evil, while scientifically the inference
of intention confounds organization with mechanism. In
4
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
machinery the instrument is manufactured to supply a
need which has been felt already. Men dug the ground
with their hands before they invented spades, and they
used spades before they invented plows. They made plows
to do the work more easily which they were already doing
with inferior means. They fought before they used shields
and lances; they slept on the ground before they had beds;
and they ate and drank before they had dishes and drink-
ing-cups. In the organized works of nature the process
is reversed. The use does not produce the instrument,
but the instrument occasions the use. We see because we
have eyes, we speak because we have tongues of a peculiar
form, we hear because we have ears.
But without eyes
there could be no sight, without tongues there could be
no articulation, there would be no sound if there were not
ears to hear. We are too feeble and too ignorant to place
ourselves behind the purposes of the Maker of the uni-
verse and insist that he intended this and that. We do
not know what he intended. We see only that he does
not work as we work, and if we insist on evidence of
conscious design, we make the moral phenomena of human
experience hopelessly inexplicable. Organization is not
contrivance, but immeasurably superior to contrivance.
What it is we cannot tell. We see only that the organs
which we so much admire do not come into existence com-
plete, as we should expect to find them if they were made
with a determinate purpose. They are developed slowly,
age after age, in successive modifications of a single type,
the fish's fin becoming the wing of a bird, or the arm and
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
5.
}
hand of a man, the fish's scales becoming the bird's feathers;
the horse's hoof a variation of the finger nail.
Having launched man into the world, Lucretius traces
his history along the lines of the modern palæontologist.
Sir John Lubbock might have transcribed many passages
from him without altering a word. He describes the
unclothed, houseless biped, hiding helplessly in caves, in
danger of carnivorous beasts, and poorly feeding himself
on roots and leaves. A branch of a tree provides him
with a club and pebbles are his first missiles. The stone
age follows. He tears the ground with flints. He rises to
bows and arrows. He kills animals and clothes himself
with their skins. He sees sparks fly, and learns partly
by accident the use of fire. He warms his lodging with
it and dresses his food. A forest breaks into flame on a
mountain-side. Straying afterward among the ashes of
the conflagration, he finds copper ore which had cropped
above the surface smelted by the heat. He examines
it, he heats it again, and finds it soft and malleable,
and when cold once more he discovers it to be hard as
stone and available for a thousand uses.
The copper age
succeeds the stone age, and the iron the copper, and so
on through all the epochs of mechanical discovery. The
necessities of his body being provided for, the mind begins
to work. The man opens his eyes to the wonder of what
is around him. He has done much for himself. But forces
are at work about him and within him, before which he is
helpless. Pains rack his bones, disease lays him prostrate
and powerless. Tempests destroy his crops. Floods
6
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
sweep away his homestead and his stock. The thunder
rolls, the levin bolt shoots from the cloud. The earth
shakes, the meteor blazes across the sky. The sunrise
and sunset do not strike him with wonder. He has been
accustomed to them from his birth, and he knows that if
the sun disappears, he will find it again when he wakes
from his slumber.*
But what the sun was, or what the moon, or what the
bright procession of glittering gems which on cloudless
nights passed over the vault of the sphere in majestic
calm, what these were who could tell? The largest and
brightest of these orbs moved among the stars, on courses
of their own, perhaps with life, with motion, with motives,
with will and purposes of their own, The clouds, too,
the fierce harbingers of storm and desolation, what
were they? Awe-stricken men called them gods, or the
work of gods, with passions like those of man. They
bent before them with trembling deprecation of their
wrath. They invented religion, and in so doing filled
themselves with causeless terrors which banished peace
* It would seem true that, what we call the "solar myth" had been already
suggested as an explanation of the current legends; but the theory found
no favour with Lucretius, who dismisses it in a few lines as sensible as they
are beautiful.
↓
"Nec plangore diem magno, solemque per agros
Quærebant pavidi palantes noctis in Umbris,
Sed taciti respectabant somnoque sepulti,
Dum roseâ face sol inferret lunina cœlo.
A parvis quod enim consuerunt cernere semper
Alterno tenebras et lucem tempore gigni
Non erat ut fieri posset mirarier unquam,
Nec diffidere ne terras eterna teneret.
Nox in perpetuum detracto lumine solis," De Rerum Naturâ, lib. v,
v.
{
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
7
1
from their waking thoughts and filled their dreams
with phantoms.
But their misgivings were not to haunt them forever,
"Ignorantia causarum conferre Deorum
Cogit ad Imperium res et concedere Regnum.'
""
With knowledge of the causes of things, the dominion
disappeared of these imagined beings. Nature, when
examined reverently, showed no caprice, no sign of inter-
ference or passion or wilfulness; one unchanging
sequence of natural cause and natural effect prevailed
throughout the universe. Each phenomenon was pre-
ceded by some natural force producing it, and each
advance of science was a guarantee to men of security
and happiness. Miserable man was, and miserable he
would be, so long as he was haunted by the dread of the
unknown; not that the gods themselves, whatever they
might be, inflicted pain on any inferior creatures; the gods
were blessed in themselves and paid no heed to mortals.
But wretched mortals tortured their own souls by causeless
fear and terror. Thunder and lightning were the chief
strongholds of superstition. Horace, we remember, pro-
fessed to have been converted by a thunderstorm. Lucre-
tius, though his knowledge fell far short of ours, was still
satisfied that these aerial disturbances were natural pheno-
mena. There was never thunder from a clear sky. Clouds
accompanied it always, and clouds of a peculiar charac-
ter. Could it be believed that the Olympian Jove came
down into a cloud to be nearer to his mark? If the thun-
der was his voice, he would warn before he struck; but
8
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
the flash always came before the sound. If the lightning
struck the wicked, some sign of purpose might be ad-
mitted,
icti flammus ut fulguris halent,
Pectore perfixo documen mortalibus acre.
(C
""
But these fiery missiles fall on the innocent and the evil
alike. They fall on the shrines of the gods themselves as
readily as on the palaces of tyrants. Most often they fall
on the earth or into the sea. Were we to suppose that the
Omnipotent was practising his hand? Lucretius did not
know the phenomena of electricity. But with intuitive
genius he had anticipated two, at least, of our most im-
portant modern discoveries. He had perceived that force
was a constant quantity, that it was not expended, but
was converted from one form into another. He had as-
certained, also, that heat and light were intimately con-
nected with force. A blow produced heat; sparks flew
when steel was struck with flint; lead would melt by fric-
tion, even by the friction of the air when passing swiftly
through it. His editor, Creech, selects this particular
theory as an illustration of his scientific credulity. Lucre-
tius had in fact struck on the exact explanation of the in-
candescence of meteoric stones.
*
From thunderstorms Lucretius passed to the other aerial
phenomenon of rain. Rain was credited to Jupiter Plu-
vius, or whoever it might be. Lucretius showed, with in-
genious clearness, that rain did not descend from any reser-
voir of waters above the firmament. It descended because
it had first ascended by evaporation; moisture rose from
the sea, rose from the ground, rose whenever any wet thing
Jo
6
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
9
became dry. In the sky it condensed into clouds, from
which it fell again in rain.
SLA
So going one by one, through the chief strongholds to
which superstition attached itself, the Epicurean poet in-
sisted, and as we all now admit, insisted truly, that every
one of them could be traced to natural causes acting in a
definite way, and that there was no sign anywhere of mira-
culous interposition.
Of this universal system man was a part, but not the
chief part, as in his vanity he imagined. Nature, in her
work of generation, had no special thought of man, above
her other children; she had placed him on the earth, a
being who, if he could control his passion and imagination,
if he could labour quietly and enjoy the fruit of his labor,
was capable of modest happiness, and was equally certain
of misery if he gave way to wild ambitions or disordered
appetites. Society formed naturally, and regulations were
made for the good of all, to enable society to hold together.
If man would submit to these regulations, and would ful-
fill such functions of labour as fell to him, he might live
out the space of years which nature had allotted to him in
peace and content. His allotted time being over, then
comes the end. And what is the end? From such a phil-
osophy there could come but one answer. Lucretius is
only peculiar in this, that the answer which he gives has
no note of sadness in it, but is proclaimed as a message of
good news, a deliverance from groundless alarms. The
future life which haunted the consciences of the early
nations was an anticipation of torment. So far from being
2
10
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
any check on vice, Lucretius insisted that it was a prov-
ocation to crime by adding new terrors to death. The
enormities into which men were seen daily plunging were
adventured only to escape want and poverty, and want
and poverty were dreadful because they were avenues to
death. But death rightly looked on was no fearful thing,
scarcely a thing to be regretted. What was death? The
separation of soul and body. And what was soul? When a
child was conceived did some immortal spirit come racing
through the sky to take possesion of the growing germ ?
Not so at all. Soul was generated with body and corre-
sponded to body. In the human body there was a human
soul. In an animal body there was an animal soul. A
horse had not the mind of a man, nor a man the mind of
a horse. The soul was born with the body, and grew
with its growth. Feeble, like its tenement, in infancy,
it strengthened as the body strengthened, came to its
maturity when the youth became a man, and with the
coming on of age mind and limbs lost their power to-
gether.
Whatever might be the nature of the soul, it was insep-
arably connected with an organized system of matter, and
could have no existence independent of it. The human
soul and the animal soul were the same in kind, they dif-
fered only as their bodies differed, and resembled each
other in the same proportion. At death, the soul of both
dissolved like smoke, and ceased to be.
"C
'Ergo dissolvi quoque convenit omnem animai,
Naturam ceu fumus in altas aëris auras.
""
1
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
11
A
In a human body, and nowhere else, could a human
soul have existence. Clouds did not form in the sea. Fish
did not swim on dry land. Blood did not flow in a flower-
stalk, or sap in stones. To everything there was an allotted
place. The mortal had no fellowship with the immortal.
Was this a sad conclusion? "Rather," says Lucretius,
"it is the most consoling of certainties. Death is nothing,
for where death is, we are not. Before we were begotten
empires were convulsed; provinces were wasted with fire
and sword; nations were sunk in wretchedness. We knew
nothing of these calamities. They touched not us. We
could suffer nothing, for we were not. As it was before
we began to live, so it will be again when we have ceased
to live. Storms may roll over the earth, land may be
mixed with sea, and sea with sky. We shall know nothing
of it. The substance of our bodies will be in other forms,
with other souls attached to them. New beings will have
come into existence, to live and pass away as we did. But
those beings will not be us. The continuity once broken
is broken forever. We shudder when we look upon a
corpse. We imagine that when our bodies are corrupting
we shall be in some way present and conscious of our own
decay. It is not so. Our bodies will decay, but we shall
not be present. We shall not be any more. We shall not
suffer any more. Ah!" some one says, " must I leave my
wife and children, and my pleasant home? Must all be
taken from me?" They will not be taken from you, for
you will have no being. You will not miss them. You
will know no regrets or vain longings for what is gone.
(C
12
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
Your friends will lament for you. You will not lament
for them. You will be in peace.
Why, then, unhappy mortal," says Lucretius to the
vain complainers, "why do you grieve? Why cry out on
death? Has your life been happy, the banquet is over;
you have taken your fill; depart and be thankful. Have
you been unfortunate, has life brought you sorrow and
pain, why wish for more of it? Life and sorrow end to-
gether. Would you live forever? The terms of human
existence do not alter. Had you a thousand lives they
could bring you nothing new. You would but tread again
the same circle. As it has been with you, so it would be,
though you could repeat the process to eternity. This is
nature's sentence, and who shall gainsay her? Dry your
tears. Peace with your idle whines. Use your time
wisely while it is yours. A little space and it will be
gone. The ages before you were born are a mirror in
which you can read the ages to come. The past has no
terrors in it. The future has none, unless you create them
for yourself. Real, indeed, they are to you, as long as you
anticipate them. Tityus and Sisyphus, Cerberus and the
furies! the thought of these will cause you agonies as long
as you believe in them. Know these spectres for what
they are, the offspring of your own fears, and be at rest.
Who and what are you that you dream of immortality?
Wiser and nobler men than you will ever be, have lived,
and are gone. Accept your fate. There is no remedy."
Such was the Lucretian creed, which has this merit in
it, that it is free from cant. There is no half belief here;
(C
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
13
no affectation; no professions from the teeth outward, of
what the heart disowns; no feeble struggling to reconcile
the irreconcilable; no half-formed misgivings, which take
from our actions their pith and marrow, and make us dread
to look into our consciences for fear of what we may find
there. It was a creed naturally accepted by resolute men
who were too proud to play intellectual tricks with them-
selves, and in it is expressed completely the practical genius
of the Roman empire. The multitude never adopted it. The
multitude continued their offerings at the temple, consulted
the oracles, and prayed, or affected to pray, to the gods. The
State did not openly profess it. The State maintained
scrupulously the established decencies and ceremonials, but
it was the real conviction of the Roman intellect. It was
the creed of Julius Cæsar. It was the creed at heart of
Cicero. Tacitus would not have called himself an Epicu-
rean, but his opinion was substantially the same. Above
all, it was a confession of the faith on which for four cen-
turies the civilized world was ruled. The Romans knew
nothing and cared nothing for spiritual ideals. Peace, or-
der, justice between man and man, and material pros-
perity, these were the sole aims of the Roman administra-
tion, and the explanation of their contemptuous toleration
of the motley superstitions of the age.
Nations have never been formed on such principles.
Nations in their infancy aspire to something else than
material prosperity. They have beliefs, enthusiasms, pa-
triotisms, with a savor of nobleness in them. Cæsar
himself owed his conquests to the self-devotion of his sol-
14
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
diers, his own affection for them, and to his inconsistent
idealism. And the experiment of the Roman empire
showed that nations cannot any more live by such prin-
ciples after they have arrived at maturity. Coarse minds
are brutalized by them. The average mind rejects them,
and prefers superstition, however wild. Gibbon consid-
ered that, on the whole, the subjects of the empire en-
joyed greater happiness in the years which intervened be-
tween the accession of Trajan and the death of Marcus
Aurelius than at any period before or since; but it was a
happiness in which their nature became degraded, and
when the shock came of the barbarian invasions they had
lost the courage to resist.
It would of course be preposterous to pretend that there
was any general resemblance between the state of things
under the Roman sovereignty and the present condition
of Europe and America. Then, the whole civilized world
was held down under a single despotism. Now, free and
powerful nations confront each other, each jealous of its
rights, and resolute to maintain them; each professing to
prefer honour to prosperity. And yet in the long run the
fate of nations is determined by the convictions about the
nature and responsibilities of man which are embodied in
their policy, and are entertained by the ablest thinkers;
and everywhere, it may be said, opinions are now pro-
fessed by men whom we agree to admire, and are accepted
by politicians as the rule of legislation, which recall the
phenomena of the time when the old order of things
perished, as if high cultivation itself was like the blossom-
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
15
ing of a plant, the final consummation of a long series of
past efforts which precedes a great change. The flower
sheds its petals. Seed-vessels develop in the place of it,
from which after a long winter there arises a new era.
The nations of modern Europe, like the early Greeks
and Romans, formed their original policy on religion. For
centuries states and individuals alike professed to be
governed in all that they thought and did by the supposed
revelation which was given to mankind eighteen hundred
years ago. Avowed disbelief of it there was none; of
secret, silent misgiving there was probably very little.
For practical purposes that revelation was accepted as a
fact, as little allowing of doubt as the commonest pheno-
mena of daily experience. The universal confidence
received its first shock at the Reformation of the sixteenth
century. Just as the original pagan creed was made incred-
ible by the legends with which it was overspread, so
Christianity was overgrown by a forest of extravagant
superstitions. Conscience and intelligence rose in revolt,
and tore them to pieces. For a time all was well. The
weeds were gone; the faith of the early church was re-
stored in its simplicity. The Huguenots in France, the
Lutherans in Germany, the Puritans in England and Scot
land were as absolutely under the influence of religious
belief as the apostles and first converts. Providence to
them was not a form of speech, but a living reality. The
preambles of the English Acts of Parliament referred al-
ways to the will of the Almighty as the foundation of
human law. Skeptics even then had begun to exist. There
S
16
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
were men who, after the authority of the Church had been
shaken, had not acquiesced in the authority of a book;
and philosophy commenced its search for other grounds of
certainty; just as it commenced in Greece before ordinary
men had begun consciously to disbelieve in Paganism.
But in neither instance had these first efforts any wide
effect. The time was not ripe for Democritus; it was not
ripe for Hobbes or Spinoza. In an age when the massive
intellect of Cromwell was satisfied with Protestant Chris-
tianity, and hungry village congregations could demand
a second hour from their preachers, philosophy might
speculate in its closet, but it could not affect popular sen-
timent. The disintegrating forces, however, worked on
below the surface. Puritanism and its ways went out of
fashion. The austere virtues of the Commonwealth were
followed by folly and dissipation, and free thought again
raised its head. A new and enlightened generation turned
with shame and penitence from a piety which sent
wretched old women to the stake for crimes which had
no existence save in the diseased brain of cowardly fana-
tics. Disbelief in any present exercise of supernatural
power extended backward upon the past. The mythol-
ogies, the oracles, the auguries of the old world came to
be regarded as dreams. The miracles of the medieval
church were dismissed as forgery and illusion, and the
cures still alleged to be worked at the shrines of Catholic
saints were used as an argument, being admitted to be
false, to show how these legendary stories had passed into
belief. The Old and New Testament resisted longer the
A
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
17
dissolving influence. They were protected by the enchant-
ment which still surrounded the accredited records of
revelation, and the history of the chosen people was
looked on as exceptional and special. But a charm, how-
ever sacred, could not long repel the restless efforts of the
speculative intellect. If miracles were so inherently im-
probable that we were entitled to reject without exami-
nation every alleged instance of contemporary superna-
tural interposition, on what ground could we draw a line
so rigid between sacred and profane history? The lives of
the saints were as full of marvels as the Book of Kings or
the Acts of the Apostles; why were we to disbelieve every
story which lent support to a religion which we did not
like, while we insisted on the absolute truth of each single
detail which we found in the Bible? Revelation, it was
said, was itself a miracle; the divinely authenticated au-
thority for a miraculous history. Such an answer was a
tacit concession that a miracle could not be substantiated
by human evidence. The spirit of Democritus had revived
in Epicurus; the spirit of Hobbes revived in Hume. The
Essay on Miracles threw into words a conviction which
had been already formed in every logical mind in Europe.
If the supernatural was to be admitted any longer, it
must be received by faith; it could not be proved by
reason. So far as philosophy had a word to say about the
matter, the theological position had been taken by storm.
Hume's arguments were desperately resisted, as it was
natural that they should be. Ingenious attempts were
made to recover the captured lines, but the conclusions.
B
S
18
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
demanded were too weighty for the premises. No human
skill could make it probable on grounds of reason that
while profane history was full of fiction and mistakes,
every incident and every word should have been recorded.
exactly in sacred history. Such a history would be itself
the greatest of miracles; and to assume a miraculous book
was an act of faith, as Hume said, and it could be nothing
else.
In the last century there were no penny newspapers
carrying over the world the newest discoveries, with
leading articles and criticisms addressed to the million.
Philosophic writings had a small and select circulation,
and the million continued to think as their fathers had
thought. If we can believe Berkely and Butler, however,
their most accomplished lay contemporaries had ceased
to believe in Christianity as completely as Pericles and
Alcibiades had ceased to believe in Jupiter; and had the
political condition of the world remained undisturbed,
the doubt would have probably extended downward, and
the state of opinion at which we have at present arrived
might have been anticipated by half a century. But the
growth of liberalism on the Continent had been swifter
than with us. The catastrophe of the French Revolu-
tion, with the enthronement of the Goddess of Reason,
appeared as the visible fruit of infidelity. The English
mind was terrified back out of its uncertainties, and de-
termined, reason or no reason, that it would not have the
Bible called in question. It was decided that Hume had
been sufficiently answered by Lardner and Paley. The
ANCIENT AND MOdern.
19
>
discussion was not to be reopened; and English middle
life returned for nearly half a century to the fixed con-
victions of earlier times.
Behind the banner thus resolutely raised came an effort
to restore the influence of religion on the heart and emo-
tions. First, there was a prominent revival of evangelical
piety. As the wave of spiritual feeling lost its force, it
has been succeeded by superstition and by a less sincere
and simple, but still ardent appeal to tradition and Cath-
olic principles. The leaky vessel has not been repaired,
for repairs were impossible, but the chinks and flaws in
her planking have been tarred over and painted. Stained
windows have gone back into the churches, and the white
light which sufficed for the simple, truth-loving Protes-
tants has been replaced by the enervating tints so dear
to the devotional soul. Organs and choristers, altars and
altar ornaments, fine clothes and processions, the mystery
of the real presence, in the name of which more crimes
have been perpetrated in Europe than can be laid to the
charge of the bloody idol in Tauris-we have them even
now among us in full activity. The religious mind has
set itself with all its might to make things seem what
they are not, and turn back the river of destiny to its sa-
cred fountains.
1
In vain. Practical life has meanwhile gone its way.
The principles of the once abhorred French Revolution
have been adopted as the rule of political action, even in
conservative England; and silently, without noise or op-
position, we have taken Jeremy Bentham for our practi-
20
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
cal prophet, and have admitted as completely as was ad-
mitted by Augustus Cæsar, or Trajan, that civil govern-
ment has no object beyond the material welfare of the
people. The will of God has no more a place, even by
courtesy, in our modern statutes. Political economy is
the creed which governs the actions of public men; and
political economy, by claiming to be an interpretation of
a law of nature, dispenses with Providence, while it as-
sumes as an axiom that the masses of men are, have been,
and ever will be influenced by nothing else than a consid-
eration of material interest. Eccentric individuals may
have their generosities, their pieties, their tastes for art
or science or amusement. Interest is the one constant
commanding motive on which the practical statesman
can rely. Respectable people fight against the unwel-
come truth when it is thrust upon them inconveniently.
They believe in political economy, and they believe that
they believe in Christianity. Naively and unconsciously
they betray their true convictions in the language which
they habitually use. When the English Liturgy was
written, "wealth" meant well-being. Well-being is now
money. Ask what a man is worth, the answer is his
rent-roll. Has he been fortunate? He has made a good
speculation, or he has inherited a "legacy" when he did
not expect it. Is the nation "prosperous"? Where
should we look but to the rate of wages and the imports
and exports? Are we in an age of progress? The in-
come-tax decides. The standard of human value has be-
come again what it was under the Cæsars, and which
Christianity came into the world to declare that it was
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
21
}
church. They continued S
They say
They say their prayers in
3
not. People continue to go to
then to go to the temples.
public, or perhaps in private. So they did then. The
clergy pray for rain or fine weather, and on great occa-
sions, such as the potato blight, the archbishop issues a
special form of petition for its removal. But the clergy
and the archbishop are aware all the time that the evils
which they pray against depend on natural causes, and
that a prayer from a Christian minister will as little bring
a change of weather as the incantation of a Caffre rain-
maker. We keep to conventional forms, because none of
us likes to acknowledge what we all know to be true;
but we do not believe; we do not even believe that we
believe, the bishops themselves no more than the rest
of us; no more than the College of Augurs in Cato's.
time believed in the sacred chickens.
An energetic people are impatient of insincerity, and
the convictions which we all act upon have at last found
a voice precisely as convictions of an analogous kind found
a voice in Lucretius. We have practically eliminated
Providence from the administration of things. The Lucre-
tian philosophy has revived again, reinforced by a vast
accumulation of new knowledge, to tell us, as Lucretius
did, that the universe can be accounted for without the
hypothesis of a Providence. The theory of develop-
ment, as it is called, does not deny the existence of God
more than Epicureanism denied it.
[any
It denies only
that the phenomena require the existence of such a being
to account for them. For a time, even after the authority
of tradition was shaken, science seemed to be on the side of
22
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
(C
religion. The evidence of design in nature was urged, as it
was urged by the Stoics, in proof of a designing mind;
and as long as each species of plant and animal was be-
lieved to be distinct from every other, each one of them
required a special art of creation to bring it into being.
Both positions are now abandoned by advanced scientific.
thinkers. Lucretius's objections are again held to be fatal
to "final causes." If the omnia ex ovo" is not an ac-
knowledged certainty, if we are not yet agreed that we
are all descended from a jelly-fish, yet every naturalist of
consequence is convinced that the phenomena of life are
produced on constant and uniformly acting principles of
law; that the history of the animal creation is a history
of progressive growth, lower forms being succeeded by
higher, as the foetus in the womb develops into a man,
without any sign of the action of any external energizing
powers.
Moral and historical philosophy have modelled them-
selves on the same type. Moral philsoophy, based on the
necessities of society and general expediency, needs no
God, or voice of God, in the conscience, to explain its
principles, while the admitted facts that the character of
a man depends on his organic tendencies, affected by
education and circumstances, have modified, in spite of
us, our notions of free-will and our definition of moral re-
sponsibility. In history, again, ingenious writers discover
laws of evolution, causes operating through centuries, de-
termining the characteristics of successive epochs, exhib-
iting individuals as the plaything of broad and general
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
23
forces, and reducing still further the limits within which
they can be the authors of their own actions. Unchanged
in principle, the Lucretian interpretation of life and its
conditions is passing swiftly into general acceptance.
And now arises the serious question how far these no-
tions will go, and how they will affect such spiritual be-
lief as we still continue to hold? The theory of develop-
ment may be held, and is held, by many persons who
look forward to a life beyond the grave. Can this ex-
pectation any longer allege a rational ground for itself, or
is it a plant which grew in another soil, and lingers now
as an exotic in a climate with which it has no natural
affinity? Time will show; but meanwhile we may learn
something from the history of the past. In the Rome of
the Empire, religion had less to say for itself than it has
now, and science relatively had far greater advantage
over it. The print which has been left by Christianity on
the character of mankind is too deep to be effaced or dis-
regarded. Yet even in the Roman Empire, the sciences
which mastered the intellect could not master the emo-
tion, and there is an insight of emotion which the intel-
lect can not explain, but which, nevertheless, does and will
exercise an influence which can not be ignored; and there
are virtues necessary to human society which will only
grow when emotion is allowed to speak.
The educated Romans had satisfied themselves that
there was no hereafter; that Tartarus was a dream, and
that at death they faded into smoke. They could dis-
course eloquently on the good and the beautiful. They
24
SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.
could enforce order by the policeman. They could de-
velop useful arts. They could cultivate science and
material progress. They could create the condition, in
fact, which was so impressive to the mind of Gibbon.
But morality and purity and charity, patriotism, enthu-
siasm, even art and poetry, whithered under a creed which
deprived life of its human interest and the imagination
of every object which could kindle it. Very remarkably,
even among statesmen like Celsus, who still held to the
scientific formula of things, a belief in a future life and
future retribution made its way once more against the
wind into the position of an admitted truth. The better
sort of men clung vaguely to the moral principles of reli-
gion; and when paganism was fairly dead, all that had
been true in paganism, a belief in God, a belief that the
world after all was not deserted by a moral government,
that our earthly life is but the threshold of our true exist-
ence, all this revived in Christianity. Centuries passed
before the transformation was complete, centuries of mis-
erable retribution for the long pursuit of a godless, ma-
terial prosperity. The civilized animals (for animals only
they had proclaimed themselves to be) were awakened
roughly from their dreams by the fierce inrush of the
"Scourge of God" out of the northern forests.
Man's nature is the same as it always was. Science
has much to teach us, but its message is not the last nor
the highest. If we may infer the future from the past,
a time will come when we shall cease to be dazzled with
the thing which we call progress, when increasing "wealth"
や
​द
ANCIENT AND MODERN.
25
will cease to satisfy, nay, may be found incapable of be-
ing produced or preserved except when regulated to a
secondary place, when the illusions which have strangled
religion shall be burnt away and the immortal part of it
restored to its rightful sovereignty. A long weary road
may lie before us. Not easy will an inviolable atmos-
phere of reverence form again round spiritual faith to
warn off the insolent intruder. Piety, reverence, humble
adoration of the great Maker of the world, are in them-
selves so beautiful that religious faith might have re-
mained forever behind that enchanted shield, if imagina-
tive devotion could have kept within bounds its wild
demands upon the reason. Not till Catholics had piled
superstition on superstition, not till Protestants had elab-
orated a speculative theology which conscience as well
as intellect at length flung from it as incredible, did the
angels which guarded the shrine fold their wings and fly.
The garden of Eden is desecrated now by the trampling
of controversy, and no ingenious reconciliations of religion
and science, no rivers of casuistic holy water, can restore
the ruined loveliness of traditionary faith. But the truth
which is in religion will assert itself again as it asserted
itself before. A society without God in the heart of it
is not permitted to exist; and when once more a spiritual
creed has established itself which men can act on in their
lives, and believe with their whole souls, it is to be hoped
that they will have grown wiser by experience, and will
not again leave the most precious of their possessions to
be ruined by the extravagances of exaggerating credulity.
·
A
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
BY LESLIE STEPHEN.
A
N attempt has recently been made to obtain currency
for the new nickname-Agnostic. Protests against
nicknames are foolish; foolish because unavailing, and
foolish because nicknames are always harmless.
A pro-
test in this case would be especially foolish; for the nick-
name in question seems to indicate a distinct advance in
the courtesies of controversy. The old theological phrase
for an intellectual opponent was Atheist-a name which
still retains a certain flavour as of the stake in this world
and hell-fire in the next, and which, moreover, implies an
inaccuracy of some importance. Dogmatic Atheism—the
doctrine that there is no God, whatever may be meant by
God-is, to say the least, a rare phase of opinion. The
word Agnosticism, on the other hand, seems to imply a
fairly accurate appreciation of a form of creed already
common and daily spreading. The Agnostic is one who
asserts-what no one denies-that there are limits to the
sphere of human intelligence. He asserts, further, what
many theologians have expressly maintained, that those
limits are such as to exclude at least what Mr. Lewes has
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
27
1
so happily called "metempirical" knowledge. But he
goes further and asserts, in opposition to theologians, that
theology lies within this forbidden sphere. This last
assertion raises the important issue; and, though I have
no pretension to invent an opposition nickname, I may
venture for the purposes of this article to describe the
rival school as Gnostics.
The Gnostic holds that our reason can in some sense tran-
scend the narrow limits of experience. He holds that we can
attain truths not capable of verification, and not needing
verification by actual experiment or observation. He holds,
further, that a knowledge of those truths is essential to the
highest interests of mankind, and enables us in some sort to
solve the dark riddle of the universe. A complete solution,
as every one admits, is beyond our power. But some an-
swer may be given to the doubts which harass and per-
plex us when we try to frame any adequate conception of
the vast order of which we form an insignificant portion.
We cannot say why this or that arrangement is what it
is; we can say, though obscurely, that some answer
exists, and would be satisfactory if we could only find it.
Overpowered, as every honest and serious thinker is at
times overpowered, by the sight of pain, folly, and help-
lessness, by the jarring discords which run through the
vast harmony of the universe, we are yet enabled to hear
at times a whisper that all is well, to trust to it as coming
from the most authentic source, and to know that only
the temporary bars of sense prevent us from recognising
with certainty that the harmony beneath the discords is
28
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
a reality and not a dream. This knowledge is embodied
in the central dogma of theology. God is the name of
the harmony; and God is knowable. Who would not
be happy in accepting this belief, if he could accept it
honestly? Who would not be glad if he could say with
confidence, the evil is transitory, the good eternal: our
doubts are due to limitations destined to be abolished, and
the world is really an embodiment of love and wisdom,
however dark it may appear to our faculties? And yet,
if the so-called knowledge be illusory, are we not bound
by the most sacred obligations to recognise the facts?
Our brief path is dark enough on any hypothesis. We
cannot afford to turn aside after every ignis futuus with-
out asking whether it leads to sounder footing or to hope-
less quagmires. Dreams may be pleasanter for the moment
than realities; but happiness must be won by adapting
our lives to the realities. And who that has felt the bur-
den of existence, and suffered under well-meant efforts at
consolation, will deny that such consolations are the bitter-
est of mockeries? Pain is not an evil; death is not a
separation; sickness is but a blessing in disguise. Have
the gloomiest speculations of avowed pessimists ever
tortured sufferers like those kindly platitudes? Is there
a more cutting piece of satire in the language than the
reference in our funeral service to the "sure and certain
hope of a blessed resurrection?" To dispel genuine hopes
might be painful, however salutary. To suppress these
spasmodic efforts to fly in the face of facts would be some
comfort even in the distress which they are meant to
alleviate.
Y
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
29
}
""
Besides the important question whether the Gnostic
can prove his dogmas, there is therefore the further
question whether the dogmas, if granted, have any mean-
ing. Do they answer our doubts or mock us with the
appearance of an answer? The Gnostics pride them-
selves on their knowledge. Have they anything to tell
us? They rebuke what they call the "pride of reason
in the name of a still more exalted pride. The scientific
reasoner is arrogant because he sets limits to the faculty
in which he trusts, and denies the existence of any other
faculty. They are humble because they dare to tread in
the regions which he declares to be inaccessible. But
without bandying such accusations, or asking which pride
is the greatest, the Gnostics are at least bound to show
some ostensible justification for their complacency. Have
they discovered a firm resting-place from which they are
entitled to look down in compassion or contempt upon
those who hold it to be a mere edifice of moonshine ? If
they have diminished by a scruple the weight of one
passing doubt, we should be grateful: perhaps we should
be converts. If not, why condemn Agnosticism?
I have said that our knowledge is in any case limited.
I may add that, on any showing, there is a danger in fail-
ing to recognise the limits of possible knowledge. The
word Gnostic has some awkward associations. It once
described certain heretics who got into trouble from
fancying that inen could frame theories of the Divine
mode of existence. The sects have been dead for many
centuries. Their fundamental assumptions can hardly be
J
30
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
1
quite extinct, Not long ago, at least, there appeared in
the papers a string of propositions framed-so we were
assured-by some of the most candid and most learned of
living theologians. These propositions defined by the
help of various languages the precise relations which
exist between the persons of the Trinity. It is an odd,
though far from an unprecedented, circumstance that the
unbeliever cannot quote them for fear of profanity. If
they were transplanted into the pages of the Fortnightly
Review, it would be impossible to convince any one that
the intention was not to mock the simple-minded persons
who, we must suppose, were not themselves intentionally
irreverent. It is enough to say that they defined the nature
of God Almighty with an accuracy from which modest.
naturalists would shrink in describing the genesis of
a black-beetle. I know not whether these dogmas were
put forward as articles of faith, as pious conjectures, or as
tentative contributions to a sound theory. At any rate,
it was supposed that they were interesting to beings of
flesh and blood. If so, one can only ask in wonder
whether an utter want of reverence is most strongly im-
plied in this mode of dealing with sacred mysteries; or
an utter ignorance of the existing state of the world in
the assumption that the question which really divides
mankind is the double procession of the Holy Ghost; or
an utter incapacity for speculation in the confusion of
these dead exuvie of long-past modes of thought with
living intellectual tissue; or an utter want of imagina-
tion, or of even a rudimentary sense of humour, in the
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
31
hypothesis that the promulgation of such dogmas could
produce anything but the laughter of sceptics and the
contempt of the healthy human intellect?
The sect which requires to be encountered in these days
is not one which boggles over the filioque, but certain
successors of those Ephesians who told Paul that they did
not even know" whether there were any Holy Ghost."
But it explains some modern phenomena when we find
that the leaders of theology hope to reconcile faith and
reason, and to show that the old symbols have still a
right to the allegiance of our hearts and brains, by put-
ting forth these portentous propositions. We are strug-
gling with hard facts, and they would arm us with the
forgotten tools of scholasticism. We wish for spiritual
food, and are to be put off with these ancient mummeries
of forgotten dogma. If Agnosticism is the frame of mind
which summarily rejects these imbecilities, and would re-
strain the human intellect from wasting its powers on the
attempt to galvanize into sham activity this caput mor-
tuum of old theology, nobody need be afraid of the name.
Argument against such adversaries would be itself a
foolish waste of time. Let the dead bury their dead, and
Old Catholics decide whether the Holy Ghost proceeds
from the Father and the Son or from the Father alone.
Gentlemen indeed who still read the Athanasian Creed,
and profess to attach some meaning to its statements,
have no right to sneer at their brethren who persist in
taking things seriously. But for men who long for facts
instead of phrases, the only possible course is to allow
32
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
such vagaries to take their own course to the limbo to
which they are naturally destined, simply noting, by the
way, that modern Gnosticism may lead to puerilities.
which one blushes even to notice,
It is not with such phenomena that we have seriously
to deal. Nobody maintains that the unassisted human
intellect can discover the true theory of the Trinity; and
the charge of Agnosticism refers, of course, to the sphere
of reason, not to the sphere of revelation. Yet those who
attack the doctrine are chiefly believers in revelation; and
as such they should condescend to answer one important
question. Is not the denunciation of reason a common-
place with theologians? What could be easier than to
form a catena of the most philosophical defenders of
Christianity who have exhausted language in declaring
the impotence of the unassisted intellect? Comte has not
more explicitly enounced the incapacity of man to deal
with the Absolute and the Infinite than a whole series of or-
thodox writers. Trust your reason, we have been told till
we are tired of the phrase, and you will become Atheists
or Agnostics. We take you at your word; we become
Agnostics. What right have you to turn round and
rate us for being a degree more logical than yourselves?
Our right, you reply, is founded upon a Divine revelation
to ourselves or our church. Let us grant-it is a very
liberal concession-that the right may conceivably be es-
tablished; but still you are at one with us in philosophy.
You say as we say that the natural man can know noth-
ing of the Divine nature. That is Agnosticism. Our
くご
​AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
33
fundamental principle is not only granted, but asserted.
By what logical device you succeed in overleaping the
barriers which you have declared to be insuperable is
another question. At least you have no primâ facie
ground for attacking our assumption that the limits of
the human intellect are what you declare them to be.
This is no mere verbal retort. Half, or more than half
of our adversaries agree formally with our leading princi-
ple. They cannot attack us without upsetting the very
ground upon which the ablest advocates of their own case
rely. The last English writer who professed to defend
Christianity with weapons drawn from wide and genuine
philosophical knowledge was Dean Mansel. The whole
substance of his argument was simply and solely the as-
sertion of the first principles of Agnosticism. Mr. Her-
bert Spencer, the prophet of the Unknowable, the foremost
representative of Agnosticism, professes in his programme
to be carrying “a step further the doctrine put into shape
by Hamilton and Mansel." Nobody, I suspect, would
now deny, nobody except Dean Mansel himself ever
denied very seriously, that the "further step" thus taken
was the logical step. Opponents both from within and
without the Church, Mr. Maurice and Mr. Mill, agreed
that this affiliation was legitimate. The Old Testament
represents Jehovah as human, as vindictive, as prescribing
immoralities; therefore Jehovah was not the true God;
that was the contention of the infidel. We know noth-
ing whatever about the true God, was the reply, for God
means the Absolute and the Infinite. Any special act
34
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
may come from God, for it may be a moral miracle; any
attribute may represent the character of God to man, for
we know nothing whatever of his real attributes, and
cannot even conceive him as endowed with attributes.
The doctrine of the Atonement cannot be revolting, be-
cause it cannot have any meaning. Mr. Spencer hardly
goes a step beyond his original, except, indeed, in can-
dour.
Most believers repudiate Dean Mansel's arguments.
They were an anachronism. They were fatal to the de-
caying creed of pure Theism, and powerless against the
growing creed of Agnosticism. When theology had vital
power enough to throw out fresh branches, the orthodox
could venture to attack the Deist, and the Deist could as-
sail the traditional beliefs. As the impulse grows fainter,
it is seen that such a warfare is suicidal. The old rivals
must make an alliance against the common enemy. The
theologian must appeal for help to the metaphysician
whom he reviled. Orthodoxy used to call Spinoza an
Atheist; it is now glad to argue that even Spinoza is a
witness on its own side. Yet the most genuine theology
still avows its hatred of reason and distrusts sham alli-
Dr. Newman is not, like Dean Mansel, a profound
metaphysician, but his admirable rhetoric expresses a far
finer religious instinct. He feels more keenly, if he does not
reason so systematically; and the force of one side of his
case is undeniable. He holds that the unassisted reason can-
not afford a sufficient support for a belief in God. He
declares, as innumerable writers of less power have de-
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
35
clared, that there is "no medium, in true philosophy, be-
tween Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly con-
sistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds
itself here below, must embrace either the one or the
other."* He looks in vain for any antagonist, except the
Catholic Church, capable of baffling and withstanding
"the fierce energy of passion, and the all-corroding, all-
dissolving, scepticism of the intellect in religious mat-
ters." Some such doctrine is in fact but a natural cor-
ollary from the doctrine of human corruption held by all
genuine theologians. The very basis of orthodox theolo-
gy is the actual separation of the creation from the
creator. In the Grammar of Assent, Dr. Newman tells us
that we
can only glean from the surface of the world some
faint and fragmentary views" of God. I see," he pro-
ceeds, "only a choice of alternatives in view of so critical
a fact; either there is no creator or he has disowned his
creatures."+ The absence of God from his own world is
the one prominent fact which startles and appals him. Dr.
Newman, of course, does not see or does not admit the
obvious consequence. He asserts most emphatically that
he believes in the existence of God as firmly as in his own
existence; and he finds the ultimate proof of this doctrine
CC
CC
+
a proof not to be put into mood and figure-in the
testimony of the conscience. But he apparently admits
that Atheism is as logical, that is, as free from self-contra-
diction, as Catholicism. He certainly declares that
History of my Religious Opinions,” pp. 322-3.
+Ib. p. 379.
+ "Grammar of Assent," p. 392,
++
*
Ge
36
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
Į
though the ordinary arguments are conclusive, they are
not in practice convincing Sound reason would of
course establish theology; but corrupt man does not and
cannot reason soundly. Dr. Newman, however, goes
further than this. His Theism can only be supported by
help of his Catholicity. If, therefore, Dr. Newman had
never heard of the Catholic Church, if, that is, he were in
the position of the great majority of men now living, and
of the overwhelming majority of the race which has lived
since its first appearance, he would be driven to one of
two alternatives. Either he would be an Atheist or he
would be an Agnostic. His conscience might say, there is
a God; his observation would say, there is no God.
Moreover, the voice of conscience has been very differ-
ently interpreted. Dr. Newman's interpretation has no
force for any one who, like most men, does not share his
intuitions. To such persons, therefore, there can be, on
Dr. Newman's own showing, no refuge except the admit-
tedly logical refuge of Atheism. Even if they shared his
intuitions they would be necessarily sceptics until the
Catholic Church came to their aid, for their intuitions
would be in hopeless conflict with their experience. I
need hardly add that, to some minds, the proposed alli-
ance with reason of a Church which admits that its tenets
are corroded and dissolved wherever free reason is allowed
to play upon them, is rather suspicious. At any rate,
Dr. Newman's arguments go to prove that man, as guided
by reason, ought to be an Agnostic, and that, at the pres-
ent moment, Agnosticism is the only reasonable faith for
at least three-quarters of the race.
4
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
37
All, then, who think that men should not be dogmatic
about matters beyond the sphere of reason or even con-
ceivability, who hold that reason, however weak, is our
sole guide, or who find that their conscience does not
testify to the divinity of the Catholic God, but declares
the moral doctrines of Catholicity to be demonstrably er-
roneous, are entitled to claim such orthodox writers as
sharing their fundamental principles, though refusing to
draw the legitimate inferences. The authority of Dean
Mansel and Dr. Newman may of course be repudiated. In
one sense, however, they are simply stating an undeniable
fact. The race collectively is agnostic, whatever may be
the case with individuals. Newton might be certain of
the truth of his doctrines whilst other thinkers were con-
vinced of their falsity. It could not be said that the
doctrines were certainly true, so long as they were doubted
in good faith by competent reasoners. Dr. Newman may
be as much convinced of the truth of his theology as Mr.
Huxley of its error. But speaking of the race and not of
the individual, there is no plainer fact in history than the
fact that hitherto no knowledge has been attained. There
is not a single proof of natural theology of which the
negative has not been maintained as vigorously as the
affirmative. The fact is notorious.
You tell us to be ashamed of professing ignorance.
Where is the shame of ignorance in matters still involved
in endless and hopeless controversy? Is it not rather a
duty? Why should a lad who has just run the gauntlet
of examinations and escaped to a country parsonage be
38
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
dogmatic, when his dogmas are denounced as erroneous
by half the philosophers of the world? What theory of the
universe am I to accept as demonstrably established? At
the very earliest dawn of philosophy men were divided
by earlier forms of the same problems which divide them
now. Shall I be a Platonist or an Aristotelian? a nomi-
nalist or a realist? Shall I admit or deny the existence
of innate ideas? Shall I believe in the possibility or in
the impossibility of transcending experience? Go to the
medieval philosophy, says one smart controversialist. To
which medieval philosophy, pray? And why 'should I
believe you rather than the great thinkers of the seven-
teenth century, who agreed with one accord that the first
condition of intellectual progress was the destruction of
that philosophy? There would be no difficulty if it were
a question of physical science. I might believe in Galileo
and Newton and their successors down to Adams and
Leverrier without hesitation, because they all substan-
tially agree. But when men deal with the old problems
there are still the old doubts. Shall I believe in Hobbes
or in Descartes? Can I stop where Descartes stopped, or
must I go on to Spinoza? Or shall I follow Locke's
guidance, and end with Hume's scepticism? Or listen to
Kant, and, if so, shall I decide that he is right in destroying
theology or in reconstructing it, or in both performances?
Does Hegel hold the key of the secret, or is he a mere
spinner of jargon? May not Feuerbach or Schopenhauer
represent the true development of metaphysical inquiry?
Shall I put faith in Hamilton and Mansel, and, if so, shall
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AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
39
I read their conclusions by the help of Mr. Spencer, or
shall I believe in Mill or in Mr. Lewes ? State any one
proposition in which all philosophers agree and I will ad-
mit it to be true; or any one which has a manifest balance
of authority, and I will agree that it is probable. But so
long as every philosopher flatly contradicts the first prin-
ciples of his predecessors, why affect certainty? The only
agreement I can discover is, that there is no philosopher of
whom his opponents have not said that his opinions lead
logically either to Pantheism or to Atheism.
When all the witnesses thus contradict each other, the
primâ fucie result is pure scepticism. There is no cer-
tainty. Who am I, if I were the ablest of all modern
thinkers, to say summarily that all the great men who
differed from me are wrong, and so wrong that their
difference should not even raise a doubt in my mind?
From such scepticism there is indeed one, and, so far as
I can see, but one, escape. The very hopelessness of the
controversy shows that the reasoners have been transcend-
ing the limits of reason. They have reached a point
where, as at the pole, the compass points indifferently to
every quarter. Thus there is a chance that I may retain
what is valuable in the chaos of speculation, and reject
what is bewildering by confining the mind to its proper
limits. But has any limit ever been suggested, except a
limit which comes in substance to an exclusion of all
ontology? In short, if I would avoid utter scepticism,
must I not be an Agnostic?
Let us suppose, however, that this difficulty can be
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40
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
evaded. Suppose that, after calling witnesses from all
schools and all ages, I can find ground for excluding all
the witnesses who make against me. Let me say, for
example, that the whole school which refuses to transcend
experience errs from the wickedness of its heart and the
consequent dulness of its intellect. Some people seem to
think that a plausible and happy suggestion. Let the
theologian have his necessary laws of thought, which enable
him to evolve truth beyond all need of verification from
experience. Where will the process end? The question
answers itself. The path has been trodden again and
again till it is as familiar as the first rule of arithmetic.
Admit that the mind can reason about the Absolute and
the Infinite, and you will get to Spinoza. No refutation
of his arguments, starting from his premises, has ever been
even apparently successful. In fact, the chain of reason-
ing is substantially too short and simple to be for a mo-
ment doubtful. Theology, if logical, leads straight to
Pantheism. The Infinite God is everything. All things
are bound together as cause and effect. God, the first
cause, is the cause of all effects down to the most remote.
In one form or other, that is the conclusion to which all
theology approximates as it is pushed to its legitimate
result.
Here, then, we have an apparent triumph over Agnos-
ticism. But nobody can accept Spinoza without rejecting
all the doctrines for which the Gnostics really contend.
In the first place, revelation and the God of revelation
disappears. The argument according to Spinoza against
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
41
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supernaturalism differs from the argument according to
Hume in being more peremptory. Hume only denies
that a past miracle can be proved by evidence: Spinoza
denies that it could ever have happened. As a fact,
miracles and a local revelation were first assailed by
Deists more effectually than by sceptics. The old The-
ology was seen to be unworthy of the God of nature, be-
fore it was said that nature could not be regarded through
the theological representation. And, in the next place,
the orthodox assault upon the value of Pantheism is irre-
sistible. Pantheism can give no ground for morality,
for nature is as much the cause of vice as the cause of
virtue; it can give no ground for an optimist view of the
universe, for nature causes evil as much as it causes good.
We no longer doubt, it is true, whether there be a God,
for our God means all reality; but every doubt which we
entertained about the universe is transferred to the God
upon whom the universe is moulded. The attempt to
transfer to pure being or to the abstraction Nature the
feelings with which we are taught to regard a person of
transcendent wisdom and benevolence is, as theologians
assert, hopeless. To deny the existence of God is in this
sense the same as to deny the existence of no-God. We
keep the old word; we have altered the whole of its con-
tents. A Pantheist is, as a rule, one who looks upon the
universe through his feelings instead of his reason, and
who regards it with love because his habitual frame of
mind is amiable. But he has no logical argument as
against the Pessimist, who regards it with dread unquali-
42
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
fied by love, or the Agnostic, who finds it impossible to
regard it with any but a colourless emotion.
The Gnostic, then, gains nothing by admitting the
claims of a faculty which at once overturns his con-
clusions. His second step is invariably to half-retract
his first. We are bound by a necessary law of thought,
he tells us, to believe in universal causation. Very well,
then let us be Pantheists. No, he says; another neces-
sary law of thought tells us that causation is not universal.
We know that the will is free, or, in other words, that
the class of phenomena most important to us are not
caused. This is the position of the ordinary Deist; and
it is of vital importance to him, for otherwise the con-
nection between Deism and morality is, on his own ground,
untenable. The ablest and most logical thinkers have
declared that the freewill doctrine involves a fallacy, and
have unravelled the fallacy to their own satisfaction.
Whether right or wrong, they have at least this advan-
tage, that, on their showing, reason is on this point con-
sistent with itself. The advocate of freewill, on the
other hand, declares that an insoluble antinomy occurs at
the very threshold of his speculations. An uncaused phe-
nomenon is unthinkable; yet consciousness testifies that
our actions, so far as they are voluntary, are uncaused.
In face of such a contradiction, the only rational state of
mind is scepticism. A mind balanced between two
necessary and contradictory thoughts must be in a hope-
less state of doubt. The Gnostic, therefore, starts by pro-
claiming that we must all be Agnostics in regard to a
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AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
matter of primary philosophical importance. If by free-
will he means anything else than a denial of causation,
his statement is irrelevant.
For, it must be noticed, this is not one of the refined
speculative problems which may be neglected in our or-
dinary reasoning. The ancient puzzles about the one and
the many, or the infinite and the finite, may or may not
be insoluble. They do not affect our practical knowledge.
Familiar difficulties have been raised as to our concep-
tions of motion: the hare and tortoise problem may be
revived by modern metaphysicians; but the mathemati-
cian may continue to calculate the movements of the
planets and never doubt whether the quicker body will
in fact overtake the slower. The freewill problem can-
not be thus shirked. We all admit that a competent rea-
soner can foretell the motions of the moon; and we admit
it because we know that there is no element of objective.
chance in the problem. But the determinist asserts whilst
the libertarian denies that it would be possible for an
adequate intelligence to foretell the actions of a man or a
There is or is not an element of objective chance in
the question; and whether there is or is not, must be de-
cided by reason and observation, independently of those
puzzles about the infinite and the finite which affect
equally the man and the planet. The anti-determinist
asserts the existence of chance so positively, that he doubts
whether God himself can foretell the future of humanity;
or, at least he is unable to reconcile Divine prescience
with his favourite doctrine.
race.
44
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
In most practical questions, indeed, the difference is of
little importance. The believer in freewill admits that we
can make an approximate guess; the determinist admits
that our faculty of calculation is limited. But when
we turn to the problems with which the Gnostic desires
to deal, the problem is of primary importance. Freewill
is made responsible for all the moral evil in the world.
God made man perfect, but he gave his creature freewill.
The exercise of that freewill has converted the world into
a scene in which the most striking fact, as Dr. Newman
tells us, is the absence of the Creator. It follows, then,
that all this evil, the sight of which leads some of us to
Atheism, some to blank despair, and some to epicurean
indifference, and the horror of which is at the root of
every vigorous religious creed, results from accident. If
even God could have foretold it, he foretold it in virtue
of faculties inconceivable to finite minds; and no man,
however exalted his faculties, could by any possibility
have foretold it. Here, then, is Agnosticism in the high-
est degree. An inexorable necessity of thought makes it
absolutely impossible for us to say whether this world is
the anteroom to heaven or hell. We do not know, nay,
it is intrinsically impossible for us to know, whether the
universe is to be a source of endless felicity or a ghastly
and everlasting torture-house. The Gnostic invites us to
rejoice because the existence of an infinitely good and wise
Creator is a guarantee for our happiness. He adds in the
same breath that this good and wise being has left it to
chance whether his creatures shall all, or in any propor-
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
45
}
1
tion, go straight to the devil. He reviles the Calvinist,
who dares to think that God has settled the point by his
arbitrary will. Is an arbitrary decision better or worse
than a trusting to chance? We know that there is a
great First Cause; but we add that there are at this
moment in the world some twelve hundred million little
first causes which may damn or save themselves as they
please.
The freewill hypothesis is the device by which theolo-
gians try to relieve God of the responsibility for the suf-
fering of his creation. It is required for another purpose.
It enables the Creator to be also the judge. Man must
be partly independent of God, or God would be at once
pulling the wires and punishing the puppets. So far the
argument is unimpeachable; but the device justifies God
at the expense of making the universe a moral chaos.
Grant the existence of this arbitrary force called freewill,
and we shall be forced to admit that, if justice is to be
found anywhere, it is at least not to be found in this
strange anarchy, where chance and fate are struggling
for the mastery,
The fundamental proposition of the anti-determinist,
that which contains the whole pith and substance of his
teaching, is this: that a determined action cannot be
meritorious. Desert can only accrue in respect of actions
which are self-caused, or in so far as they are self-caused;
and self-caused is merely a periphrasis for uncaused.
Now no one dares to say that our conduct is entirely self-
caused. The assumption is implied in every act of our
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46
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
lives and every speculation about history that men's
actions are determined, exclusively or to a great extent,
by their character and their circumstances. Only so far
as that doctrine is true can human nature be the subject
of any reasoning whatever; for reason is but the reflection
of external regularity, and vanishes with the admission
of chance. Our conduct, then, is the resultant of the two
forces which we may call fate and freewill. Fate is but
a name for the will of God. He is responsible for placing
us with a certain character in a certain position; he can-
not justly punish us for the consequences; we are res-
ponsible to him for the effects of our freewill alone, if
freewill exists. That is the very contention of the anti-
determinist; let us look for a moment at the conse-
quences.
The ancient difficulty which has perplexed men since
the days of Job is this: Why are happiness and misery
arbitrarily distributed? Why do the good so often suffer
and the evil so often flourish? The difficulty, says the
determinist, arises entirely from applying the conception
of justice where it is manifestly out of place. The advo-
cate of freewill refuses this escape, and is perplexed by a
further difficulty. Why are virtue and vice arbitrarily
distributed? Of all the puzzles of this dark world, or of
all forms of the one great puzzle, the most appalling is
that which meets us at the corner of every street. Look
at the children growing up amidst moral poison; see the
brothel and the public-house turning out harlots and
drunkards by the thousand; at the brutalized elders.
}
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
47
1
preaching cruelty and shamelessness by example; and
deny, if you can, that lust and brutality are generated as
certainly as scrofula and typhus. Nobody dares to deny
it. All philanthropists admit it; and every hope of im-
provement is based on the assumption that the moral
character is determined by its surroundings. What does
the theological advocate of freewill say to reconcile such
a spectacle with our moral conceptions? Will God damn
all these wretches for faults due to causes as much beyond
their power as the shape of their limbs or as the orbits of
the planets? Or will he make some allowance, and decline
to ask for grapes from thistles, and exact purity of life
from beings born in corruption, breathing corruption, and
trained in corruption? Let us try each alternative.
To Job's difficulty it has been replied that, though
virtue is not always rewarded and vice punished, yet
virtue as such is rewarded, and vice as such is punished.
If that be true, God, on the free will hypothesis, must be
unjust. Virtue and vice, as the facts irresistibly prove,
are caused by fate or by God's will as well as by freewill,
that is, our own will. To punish a man brought up in a
London slum by the rule applicable to a man brought up
at the feet of Christ is manifestly the height of injustice.
Nay, for anything we can tell, for we know nothing of
the circumstances of their birth and education, the effort
which Judas Iscariot exerted in restoring the price of
blood may have required a greater force of freewill than
would have saved Peter from denying his master. Moll
Flanders may put forth more power to keep out of the
48
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
lowest depths of vice than a girl brought up in a convent
to kill herself by ascetic austerities. If, in short, reward
is proportioned to virtue, it cannot be proportioned to
merit; for merit, by the hypothesis, is proportioned to
the freewill, which is only one of the factors of virtue.
The apparent injustice may, of course, be remedied by
some unknowable compensation; but, for all that appears,
it is the height of injustice to reward equally equal at-
tainments under entirely different conditions. In other
words, the theologian has raised a difficulty from which
he can only escape by the help of Agnosticism. Justice
is not to be found in the visible arrangements of the
universe.
Let us, then, take the other alternative. Assume that
rewards are proportioned not to virtue but to merit. God
will judge us by what we have done for ourselves, not by
the tendencies which he has impressed upon us. The
difficulty is disguised, for it is not diminished, and
morality is degraded. A man should be valued, say all
the deepest moralists, by his nature, not by his external
acts; by what he is, not by how he came to be what he
is. Virtue is heaven, and vice is hell. Divine rewards
and punishments are not arbitrarily annexed, but repre-
sent the natural state of a being brought into harmony
with the supreme law, or in hopeless conflict with it. We
need a change of nature, not a series of acts unconnected
with our nature. Virtue is a reality precisely in so far as
it is a part of nature, not of accident; of our fate, not of
our freewill. The assertion in some shape of these truths
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
49
has been at the bottom of all great moral and religious
reforms. The attempt to patch up some compromise be-
tween this and the opposite theory has generated those
endless controversies about grace and free will on which
no Christian church has ever been able to make up
its
mind, and which warn us that we are once more plunging
into Agnosticism. In order to make the Creator the
judge, you assume that part of man's actions are his own.
Only on that showing can he have merit as against his
Maker. Admitting this, and only if we admit this, we
get a footing for the debtor and creditor theories of
morality—for the doctrine that man runs up a score with
heaven in respect of that part of his conduct which is
uncaused. Thus we have a ground for the various theo-
ries of merit by which priests have thriven and churches
been corrupted; but it is at the cost of splitting human
nature in two, and making happiness depend upon
those acts which are not really part of our true selves.
It is not, however, my purpose to show the immorality
or the unreasonableness of the doctrine. I shall only re-
mark that it is essentially agnostic. Only in so far as phe-
nomena embody fixed "laws" can we have any ground
for inference in this world, and, à fortiori, from this world
to the next. If happiness is the natural consequence of
virtue, we may plausibly argue that the virtuous will be
happy hereafter. If heaven be a bonus arbitrarily be-
stowed upon the exercise of an inscrutable power, all
analogies break down. The merit of an action as be-
tween men depends upon the motives. The actions for
D
50
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
which God rewards and punishes are the actions or those
parts of actions which are independent of motive. Pun-
ishment amongst men is regulated by some considerations
of its utility to the criminal or his fellows. No conceiv-
able measure of Divine punishment can even be suggested
when once we distinguish between divine and natural;
and the very essence of the theory is that such a distinc-
tion exists. For whatever may be true of the next world,
we begin by assuming that new principles are to be called
into play hereafter. The new world is summoned into
being to redress the balance of the old. The fate which
here too often makes the good miserable and the bad
happy, which still more strangely fetters our wills and
forces the strong will into wickedness and strengthens
the weak will to goodness, will then be suspended. The
motive which induces us to believe in the good arrange-
ment hereafter is precisely the badness of this. Such a
motive to belief cannot itself be a reason for belief. We
believe because it is unreasonable. This world, once more,
is a chaos, in which the most conspicuous fact is the
absence of the Creator. Nay, it is so chaotic that, ac-
cording to theologians, infinite rewards and penalties are
required to square the account and redress the injustice
here accumulated. What is this, so far as the natural
reason is concerned, but the very superlative of Agnos-
ticism? The appeal to experience can lead to nothing,
for our very object is to contradict experience. We
appeal to facts to show that facts are illusory. The appeal
to à priori reason is not more hopeful, for you begin
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
51
t
i
by showing that reason on these matters is self-contra-
dictory, and you insist that human nature is radically
irregular, and therefore beyond the sphere of reason. If
you could succeed in deducing any theory by reason, rea-
son would, on your showing, be at hopeless issue with
experience.
There are two questions, in short, about the universe
which must be answered to escape from Agnosticism.
The great fact which puzzles the mind is the vast amount
of evil. It may be answered that evil is an illusion,
because God is benevolent; or it may be answered that
evil is deserved, because God is just. In one case the
doubt is removed by denying the existence of the diffi-
culty, in the other it is made tolerable by satisfying our
consciences. We have seen what natural reason can do
towards justifying these answers. To escape from Ag-
nosticism we become Pantheists; then the divine reality
must be the counterpart of phenomenal nature, and all
the difficulties recur. We escape from Pantheism by the
illogical device of free will. Then God is indeed good
and wise, but God is no longer omnipotent. By his side
we erect a fetish called free will, which is potent enough
to defeat all God's good purposes, and to make his
absence from his own universe the most conspicuous fact
given by observation; and which, at the same time, is by
its own nature intrinsically arbitrary in its action. Your
Gnosticism tells us that an Almighty benevolence is
watching over everything, and bringing good out of evil.
Whence then comes the evil? By freewill; that is, by
52
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
chance! It is an exception, an exception which covers,
say, half the phenomena, and includes all that puzzle us
Say boldly at once no explanation can be given, and then
proceed to denounce Agnosticism. If, again, we take the
moral problem, the Pantheist view shows desert as before
God to be a contradiction in terms. We are what he has
made us; nay, we are but manifestations of himself-
how can he complain? Escape from the dilemma by
making us independent of God, and God, so far as the
observed universe can tell us, becomes systematically
unjust. He rewards the good and the bad, and gives
equal reward to the free agent and the slave of fate.
Where are we to turn for a solution?
Let us turn to revelation; that is the most obvious
reply. By all means, though this is to admit that natural
reason cannot help us; or, in other words, directly produ-
ces more Agnosticism, though indirectly it makes an open-
ing for revelation. There is, indeed, a difficulty here.
Pure theism, as we have observed, is in reality as vitally
opposed to historical revelation as simple scepticism.
The word God is used by the metaphysician and the
savage. It may mean anything from "pure Being" down
to the most degraded fetish. The "universal consent ” is
a consent to use the same phrase for antagonistic con-
ceptions for order and chaos, for absolute unity or utter
heterogeneity, for a universe governed by a human will
or by a will of which man cannot form the slightest con-
ception. This is of course a difficulty which runs off the
orthodox disputant like water from a duck's back. He
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AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
53
appeals to his conscience, and his conscience tells him
just what he wants. It reveals a Being just at that point
in the scale between the two extremes which is conve-
nient for his purposes. I open, for example, a harmless
little treatise by a divine who need not be named. He
knows intuitively, so he says, that there is a God, who is
benevolent and wise, and endowed with personality, that
is to say, conceived anthropomorphically enough to be
capable of acting upon the universe, and yet so far differ-
ent from man as to be able to throw a decent veil of
mystery over his more questionable actions. Well, I
reply, my intuition tells me of no such being. Then, says
the divine, I can't prove my statements, but you would
recognise their truth if your heart or your intellect were
not corrupted: that is, you must be a knave or a fool.
This is a kind of argument to which one is perfectly
accustomed in theology. I am right, and you are wrong;
and I am right because I am good and wise. By all
means; and now let us see what your wisdom and good-
ness can tell us.
The Christian revelation makes statements which, if true,
are undoubtedly of the very highest importance. God is
angry with man. Unless we believe and repent we shall all
be damned. It is impossible, indeed, for its advocates even
to say this without instantly contradicting themselves.
Their doctrine frightens them. They explain in various
ways that a great many people will be saved without
believing, and that eternal damnation is not eternal nor
damnation. It is only the vulgar who hold such views,
54
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
and who, of course, must not be disturbed in them; but
they are not for the intelligent. God grants "uncove-
nanted mercies "—that is, he sometimes lets a sinner off,
though he has not made a legal bargain about it-an
explanation calculated to exalt our conceptions of the
Deity! But let us pass over these endless shufflings from
the horrible to the meaningless. Christianity tells us in
various ways how the wrath of the Creator may be
appeased and his goodwill ensured. The doctrine is
manifestly important to believers; but does it give us a
clearer or a happier view of the universe? That is what
is required for the confusion of Agnostics; and, if the
mystery were in part solved, or the clouds thinned in the
slightest degree, Christianity would triumph by its in-
herent merits. Let us then ask once more, Does Christi-
anity exhibit the ruler of the universe as benevolent or
as just?
If I were to assert that of every ten beings born into
this world nine would be damned, that all who refused to
believe what they did not hold to be proved, and all who
sinned from overwhelming temptation, and all who
had not had the good fortune to be the subjects of a
miraculous conversion or the recipients of a grace con-
veyed by a magical charm, would be tortured to all eter-
nity, what would an orthodox theologian reply? He
could not say, "That is false;" I might appeal to the
highest authorities for my justification; nor, in fact, could
he on his own showing deny the possibility. Hell, he
says, exists; he does not know who will be damned;
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
55
}
though he does know that all men are by nature corrupt
and liable to be damned if not saved by supernatura]
grace. He might, and probably would, now say, "That
is rash. You have no authority for saying how many
will be lost and how many saved: you cannot even say
what is meant by hell or heaven: you cannot tell how
far God may be better than his word, though you may
be sure that he won't be worse than his word." And what
is all this but to say, We know nothing about it? In
other words, to fall back on Agnosticism? The difficulty,
as theologians truly say, is not so much that evil is eter-
nal, as that evil exists. That is in substance a frank ad-
mission that, as nobody can explain evil, nobody can ex-
plain anything. Your revelation, which was to prove the
benevolence of God, has proved only that God's benevo-
lence may be consistent with the eternal and infinite
· misery of most of his creatures; you escape only by say-
ing that it is also consistent with their not being eternally
and infinitely miserable. That is, the revelation reveals
nothing.
But the revelation shows God to be just. Now, if the
freewill hypothesis be rejected—and it is rejected not only
by infidels but by the most consistent theologians-this
question cannot really arise at all. Jonathan Edwards
will prove that there cannot be a question of justice as
between man and God. The creature has no rights against
his Creator. The question of justice merges in the ques-
tion of benevolence; and Edwards will go on to say that
most men are damned, and that the blessed will thank
-
56
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
God for their tortures. That is logical, but not consoling.
Passing this over, can revelation prove that God is just,
assuming that justice is a word applicable to dealings be-
tween the potter and the pot?
And here we are sent to the "great argument of But-
ler." Like some other theological arguments already
noticed, that great argument is to many minds-that of
James Mill, for example-a direct assault upon Theism, or,
in other words, an argument for Agnosticism. Briefly
stated, it comes to this. The God of revelation cannot be
the God of nature, said the Deists, because the God of
revelation is unjust. The God of revelation, replied
Butler, may be the God of nature, for the God of
nature is unjust. Stripped of its various involutions,
that is the sum and substance of this celebrated piece of
reasoning. Butler, I must say in passing, deserves high
credit for two things. The first is, that he is the only
theologian who has ever had the courage to admit that
any difficulty existed when he was struggling most desper-
ately to meet the difficulty; though even Butler could
not admit that such a difficulty should affect a man's con-
duct. Secondly, Butler's argument really rests upon a
moral theory, mistaken indeed in some senses, but pos-
sessing a stoical grandeur. To admit, however, that
Butler was a noble and a comparatively candid thinker,
is not to admit that he ever faced the real difficulty. It
need not be asked here by what means he evaded it. His
position is in any case plain. Christianity tells us, as he
thinks, that God damns men for being bad, whether they
.
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
57
1
could help it or not, and that he lets them off, or lets some
of them off, for the sufferings of others. He damns the
helpless and punishes the innocent. Horrible! exclaims
the infidel. Possibly, replies Butler, but nature is just as
bad. All suffering is punishment. It strikes the good as
well as the wicked. The father sins, and the son suffers.
I drink too much, and my son has the gout. In another
world, we may suppose that the same system will be car-
ried out more thoroughly. God will pardon some sinners.
because he punished Christ, and he will damn others ever-
lastingly. That is his way. A certain degree of wrong-
doing here leads to irremediable suffering, or rather to
suffering remediable by death alone. In the next world
there is no death; therefore the suffering won't be reme-
diable at all. The world is a scene of probation, destined
to fit us for a better life. As a matter of fact, most men
make it a discipline of vice instead of a discipline of vir-
tue; and most men, therefore, will presumably be damned.
We see the same thing in the waste of seeds and animal
life, and may suppose, therefore, that it is part of the
general scheme of Providence.
This is the Christian revelation according to Butler.
Does it make the world better? Does it not rather add
indefinitely to the terror produced by the sight of all its
miseries, and justify James Mill for feeling that rather
than such a God he would have no God? What escape can
be suggested? The obvious one: it is all a mystery; and
what is mystery but the theological phrase for Agnosti-
cism? God has spoken and endorsed all our most hideous
58
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
doubts. He has said, let there be light, and there is no
light—no light but rather darkness visible, serving only
to discover sights of woe.
The believers who desire to soften away the old dogmas
-in other words, to take refuge from the unpleasant
results of their doctrine with the Agnostics, and to retain
the pleasant results with the Gnostics-have a different
mode of escape. They know that God is good and just;
that evil will somehow disappear and apparent injustice
be somehow redressed. The practical objection to this
amiable creed suggests a sad comment upon the whole
controversy. We fly to religion to escape from our dark
forebodings. But a religion which stifles those forebod-
ings always fails to satisfy us. We long to hear that they
are groundless. Directly we are told that they are ground-
less, we distrust our authority. No poetry lives which
reflects only the cheerful emotions. Our sweetest songs
are those which tell of saddest thought. We can bring
harmony out of melancholy; we cannot banish melancholy
from the world. And the religious utterances, which are
the highest form of poetry, are bound by the same law.
There is a deep sadness in the world. Turn and twist the
thought as you may, there is no escape. Optimism would
be soothing if it were possible; in fact, it is impossible,
and therefore a constant mockery; and of all dogmas that
ever were invented, that which has least vitality is the
dogma that whatever is, is right.
Let us, however, consider for a moment what is the net
result of this pleasant creed. Its philosophical basis may
!
1
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
59
be sought in pure reason or in experience; but, as a rule,
its adherents are ready to admit that the pure reason
requires the support of the emotions before such a doctrine.
can be established, and are therefore marked by a certain
tinge of mysticism. They feel rather than know. The
awe with which they regard the universe, the tender glow
of reverence and love with which the bare sight of nature
affects them, is to them the ultimate guarantee of their
beliefs. Happy those who feel such emotions! Only when
they try to extract definite statements of fact from these
impalpable sentiments, they should beware how far such
statements are apt to come into terrible collision with
reality. And, meanwhile, those who have been disabused
with Candide, who have felt the weariness and pain of.
all "this unintelligible world," and have not been able to
escape into any mystic rapture, have as much to say for
their own version of the facts. Is happiness a dream, or
misery; or is it all a dream? Does not our answer vary
with our health and with our condition? When, rapt in
the security of a happy life, we cannot even conceive that
our happiness will fail, we are practical optimists. When
some random blow out of the dark crushes the pillars
round which our life has been entwined as recklessly as a
boy sweeps away a cobweb, when at a single step we
plunge through the flimsy crust of happiness into the deep
gulfs beneath, we are tempted to turn to pessimism.
Who shall decide, and how? Of all questions that can be
asked, the most important is surely this: Is the tangled
web of this world composed chiefly of happiness or of
60
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
misery? and of all questions that can be asked, it is surely
the most unanswerable. For in no other problem is the
difficulty of discarding the illusions arising from our own
experience, of eliminating "the personal error" and gain-
ing an outside standing-point, so hopeless.
In any case, the real appeal must be to experience. On-
tologists may manufacture libraries of jargon without
touching the point. They have never made or suggested
the barest possibility of making a bridge from the world
of pure reason to the contingent world in which we live.
To the thinker who tries to construct the universe out of
pure reason, the actual existence of error in our minds,
and disorder in the outside world presents a difficulty as
hopeless as that which the existence of vice and misery
presents to the optimist who tries to construct the universe
out of pure goodness. To say that misery does not exist
is to contradict the primary testimony of consciousness;
to argue on à priori grounds that misery or happiness
predominates is as hopeless a task as to deduce from the
principle of the excluded middle the distance from St.
Paul's to Westminster Abbey. Questions of fact can only
be solved by examining facts. Perhaps such evidence
would show, and if a guess were worth anything, I should
add that I guess that it would show, that happiness pre-
dominates over misery in the composition of the known
world. I am, therefore, not prejudiced against the Gnos-
tic's conclusion; but I add that the evidence is just as
open to me as to him. The whole world in which we live
may be an illusion-a veil to be withdrawn in some higher
1
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
61
į
state of being. But be it what it may, it supplies all the
evidence upon which we can rely. If evil predominates
here, we have no reason to suppose that good predom-
inates elsewhere. All the ingenuity of theologians can
never shake our conviction that facts are what we feel
them to be, nor invert the plain inference from facts;
and facts are just as open to one school of thought as to
another.
What then, is the net result? One insoluble doubt has
haunted men's minds since the thought began in the world.
No answer has ever been suggested. One school of philos-
ophers hands it to the next. It is denied in one form
only to reappear in another.
The question is not which
system excludes the doubt, but how it expresses the doubt.
Admit or deny the competence of reason in theory, we all
agree that it fails in practice. Theologians revile reason
as much as Agnostics; they then appeal to it and it de-
cides against them. They amend their plea by excluding
certain questions from its jurisdiction, and those questions
include the whole difficulty. They go to revelation, and
revelation replies by calling doubt mystery. They declare
that their consciousness declares just what they want it
to declare. Ours declares something else. Who is to
decide? The only appeal is to experience, and to appeal
to experience is to admit the fundamental dogma of Agnos-
ticism.
Is it not, then, the very height of audacity, in face of a
difficulty, which meets us at every turn, which has per-
plexed all the ablest thinkers in proportion to their ability,
62
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
which vanishes in one shape only to show itself in ano-
ther, to declare roundly, not only that the difficulty can
be solved, but that it does not exist? Why, when no
honest man will deny in private that every ultimate prob-
lem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest.
men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the
duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spec-
tacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of
ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and dark-
ness, learning only by incessantly repeated blunders, ob-
taining a glimmering of truth by falling into every con-
ceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily
needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to
describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet
when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know
the of the universe as well as the map of our infinites-
map
imal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that
he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness.
Amidst all the endless and hopeless controversies which
have left nothing but bare husks of meaningless words,
we have been able to discover certain reliable truths. They
don't take us very far, and the condition of discovering
them has been distrust of à priori guesses, and the sys-
tematic interrogation of experience. Let us, say some of
us, follow at least this clue. Here we shall find sufficient
guidance for the needs of life, though we renounce forever
the attempt to get behind the veil which no one has suc-
ceeded in raising: if, indeed, there be anything behind.
You miserable Agnostics! is the retort; throw aside such
J
AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY.
63
rubbish, and cling to the old husks. Stick to the words
which profess to explain everything; call your doubts
mysteries and they won't disturb you any longer; and be-
lieve in those necessary truths of which no two philoso-
phers have ever succeeded in giving the same version.
Gentlemen, we can only reply, wait till you have some
show of agreement amongst yourselves. Wait till you
can give some answer, not palpably a verbal answer, to
some one of the doubts which oppress us as they oppress
you. Wait till you can point to some single truth, how-
ever trifling, which has been discovered by your method,
and will stand the test of discussion and verification. Wait
till
you can appeal to reason without in the same breath
vilifying reason. Wait till your divine revelations have
something more to reveal than the hope that the hideous
doubts which they suggest may possibly be without foun-
dation. Till then, we shall be content to admit openly
what you whisper under your breath, or hide in technical
jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man
knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that,
knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about
his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavour to
be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth
officially your contempt for scepticism, we will at least
try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own
bluster.
Uor M
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breathes a more Christian spirit. Mr. Greg is a Christian, though not of the
narrow school. He means this book as a defence of Christianity; and although
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evidences, he does so more in sorrow than in anger, and more in love than in
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Believe me,
than in half the creeds."-Tennyson.
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