From 
 
 \ By the Author of 
 "Disunion and Reunlc 
 
 \ " A&? :: ': 
 
 HBB 
 
 , Madden) 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALI3 DRNIA 
 'Received 
 
 Accession No. 
 
 m 
 

THE 
 
 REACTION FROM SCIENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 The Author of " Disunion and Reunion" 
 
 (W. J. MADDEN) 
 
 ct rcvertere? 
 
Copyright 1898, by W. J. MADDEN. 
 
ST 
 
 To 
 those whose hearts 
 
 are troubled 
 by the burden and the mystery 
 
 of life, 
 
 and to those who 
 say they can not believe, 
 
 this book 
 is kindly dedicated. 
 
ERRATA. 
 
 On page 9, for equally substitute equably, in fifth line 
 from bottom. 
 
 On page 14, for Mirart substitute Jfivart, in ninth line 
 from bottom. 
 
 On page 26, for chain substitute chains, in third line 
 from top. 
 
 On page 77, for They are substitute They are not, in 
 third line from bottom. 
 
 On page 90, for fischu substitute fichu, in ninth line 
 from bottom. 
 
 On page 92, for touchant substitute touchent, in fourth 
 line from top. 
 
 O,i page 92, for Provines substitute Provinces, in ninth 
 line from top. 
 
 On page 101, for each substitute each other, in ninth 
 line from bottom. 
 
 On page 109, for palimpset substitute palimpsest, in 
 tenth line from bottom. 
 
 On page 136, for returns substitute returner, in fifth 
 line from bottom. 
 
 On page 139, for of them admittedly substitute of 
 admittedly, in tenth line from bottom. 
 
 On page 153, for Far from frowning on substitute 
 Far from the church frowning on, in fourteenth line 
 from top. 
 
 On page 184, for sits substitute six, in eighth line from 
 top. 
 
 On page 225, for every time substitute /;/ every time< 
 in eighth line from bottom. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Some time ago I ventured to publish a 
 small volume entitled Disunion and Reunion. 
 This was a summary of quite an extended 
 series of Sunday evening lectures delivered 
 in the Cathedral of Auckland, New Zealand. 
 The subject of these lectures w#s suggested 
 by the popular interest taken just then in the 
 question of church reunion as evidenced in 
 the frequent mention made of it in the home 
 and local press. 
 
 When that book was getting into type, 
 my work was by no means done. It had to 
 go on. The same large audiences continued 
 to come each Sunday evening expecting to 
 hear a continuance of the lectures. Being 
 in charge of the place, I felt it imperative on 
 me not to disappoint them, all the more as 
 the interest they manifested had been so 
 earnest and sustained. Though the work 
 looked limitless I made the effort. It lasted 
 eight months longer. The strain of this was 
 very great and, added to the other cares and 
 duties incidental to my position, began to 
 
 (iii) 
 
IV PREFACE. 
 
 tell. I had advice that this strain of mind, 
 together with the cerebral excitement of 
 frequent public speaking, might possibly end 
 in some sudden and fatal attack of which, 
 already, certain warning symptoms were not 
 absent. So when a change came in the gov- 
 ernment of the Diocese I availed of it to seek 
 health with honor in a long ocean voyage 
 and under other skies. 
 
 I have now the leisure to fill out the hur- 
 ried notes from which these lectures were 
 delivered. I mean, however, to allow my- 
 self a certain freedom in adding to the sub- 
 stance of these discourses and while reshap- 
 ing them in book form to use a large discre- 
 tion as to form and arrangement. This I 
 undertake the more willingly in the hope 
 that the book, should it see the light, may 
 find its way back among my numerous 
 hearers in Auckland and remind them of one 
 who shall ever gratefully cherish the remem- 
 brance of their friendship and appreciation. 
 * * # * * 
 
 In the other volume Disunion and Reun- 
 ion the question treated could interest only 
 those who still hold by the Christian name 
 and still cherish a belief in the fundamental 
 
PREFACE. V 
 
 doctrines of Christianity. But unfortunately 
 there is in our day, as is well known, a large 
 class who while living amongst Christian 
 populations and conforming outwardly, and 
 often unconsciously, to the standard of Chris- 
 tian morality, because compelled by custom 
 and convenience to do so, at the same time 
 openly renounce all belief in Christian 
 dogma. 
 
 "Our kinsmen in the flesh" and of Chris- 
 tian ancestry, they surely ought to be in- 
 cluded in the appeals now so earnestly made " 
 for religious reunion. And I think a strong 
 appeal may be addressed directly to them at 
 this moment by pointing out, that the agnos- 
 tic science which in our day has been entirely 
 responsible for the prevailing unbelief, has 
 proved unsatisfying and disappointing in its 
 conclusions; that there is more unrest among 
 men now than before it began its destructive 
 criticisms, and that many of its own promi- 
 nent professors are showing signals of dis- 
 tress. It will be practical also to bid them 
 weigh the value and use to men in their 
 every-day life of the conclusions of faith as 
 against the conclusions of unbelief and 
 thence consult for their personal safety. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Such is the simple, and let us hope, useful 
 of this book. 
 
 It is a small book. I have purposely 
 kept it small. In a busy age it will have a 
 better chance of being read. 
 
 San Jose, Cal. 1898. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 NEED OF THE REACTION - 9 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 SIGNS OF THE REACTION 22 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST - 40 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM - 54 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM - 76 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE 96- 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE - - 109, 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE "LACHRYM.E RERUM" - 119 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 "STATIO BENE FID A" - 137 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL - 152 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS - 168 ' 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 MYSTERIES 184 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 FURTHER DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS 191 
 (vii) 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 NEED OF THE REACTION. 
 
 As I sit writing this morning there lies be- 
 fore me the smiling scene of a Californian 
 fertile valley with the famous Lick Observ- 
 atory crowning Mount Hamilton on the 
 ridge of the Sierras beyond. And the 
 thought has come to me that if some wild 
 and loosened flood burst suddenly over that 
 valley, its devastating waters and the wreck 
 they should leave behind would fittingly il- 
 lustrate without much exaggeration the des- 
 olating infidelity that over a hundred years 
 ago broke over more than one country which 
 used to pass as believing in the "argument 
 for things that do not appear." Up to that 
 men deemed it reasonable to live .in a simple 
 trusting faith and bore more equally the toil 
 and the burden of existence. Since then the 
 air is filled with questionings and doubts, 
 minds are troubled and restless and from 
 the view of many the promise and sustaining 
 
 (9) 
 
IO THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 hope of future and of better things have 
 faded away. 
 
 But just as there have really been floods 
 in that valley in other days and now its soil 
 is all the richer for their coming, so, perhaps, 
 will the souls of men be better for that other 
 and more disastrous flood when its troubled 
 waters shall have receded. And happily 
 there are in these later years unmistakable 
 signs that they are subsiding. 
 
 But a little while ago the agnostic scientist, 
 always referred to as u that eminent man of 
 science," was for worldly-minded people the 
 supreme pontiff of all knowledge worth 
 knowing. In pity for a generation whose 
 ''intelligence was limited and whose mind 
 was warped by old superstitions that were 
 said to be revealed because they could not be 
 proved," he undertook to explain the uni- 
 verse on a rational and scientific basis. A 
 tone of superiority and secure self-confidence 
 marked all his pronouncements. His style 
 v?as magisterial. The crowd like that. It is 
 imposing. Here are men, they say, who 
 make you feel they are sure of what they 
 teach; let us listen to them. And they lis- 
 tened. The disciples of science in the mid- 
 
NEED OF TH REACTION. Il 
 
 century were many and credulous. The 
 output of the press proved it. Great books 
 full of the new knowledge went through 
 large editions. Popular science lectures 
 were established in all the great centers. 
 The men of agnostic science went on tour. 
 They had crowded and enthusiastic audi- 
 ences. Their novel theories and specula- 
 tions became the fashion of the hour in uni- 
 versities, in drawing-rooms, and in working- 
 men's unions. Not to be able to talk Dar- 
 win and the Origin of Species was to 
 uninformed. Not to have at least qipp^cl 
 into the hard and ponderous meditation^' of 
 Herbert Spencer was to be incompletely e 
 cated. Not to fall into praise of the classic 
 diction of Tyndall not to be an admirer of 
 the bolder and more downright style of his 
 twin-star, Mr. Huxley, and not to know at 
 least the drift of their daring and sure views, 
 was to be a very old-fashioned person and 
 much "behind the times." Not to be tinged 
 a little with the crabbed, sour scorn of 
 Thomas Carlyle and gloat over the savage 
 anger of the omniscient judgments he char- 
 tered himself to pass on all mankind, was to 
 be unadvanced. Not to be tolerant of Mr. 
 
\1 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 Leslie Stephen in his open denial and even 
 flouting of the Divinity, or his brother one 
 of the judges of England's High Court 
 of Justice in his restless theological doubt- 
 ings, was to be illiberal. To speak disap- 
 provingly of the mental gymnastics of James 
 Anthony Froude in his curious pilgrimage 
 from Anglican monasticism to the free 
 shrine of modern unbelief was to under- 
 value true freedom of mind. Such was 
 the feeling which to a very large ex- 
 tent prevailed in England and the English- 
 speaking world not so long ago. There 
 have been signs, too, that similar motions 
 of the scientific spirit had taken place in 
 most European countries. Reviews of for- 
 eign publications in Germany, France, Rus- 
 sia, Sweden, Belgium and even Holland and 
 Switzerland, made it clear that this eman- 
 cipation of human thought from the tram- 
 mels of the supernatural was triumphantly 
 proclaimed far and near. In fact from the 
 year 1850 to the end of the next quarter of 
 our century the agnostic scientists had a fair 
 and free field. They had the reading multi- 
 tude at their feet. Men would listen now to 
 no other instructors and great things were 
 
NEED OF THE REACTION. 13 
 
 vaguely hoped to come from the invigorat- 
 ing freedom of universal speculation. All 
 beliefs and traditions that hitherto prevailed 
 were to be put aside and an entirely new di- 
 rection was to be given to thought and an 
 entirely different sort of knowledge to be 
 acquired. It appeared that this could not be 
 done without throwing discredit and obloquy 
 on the older order, and very bold words were 
 now said out loud which formerly were sup- 
 pressed for fear of Coventry. "Oh, the free- 
 dom and the freshness of it," said one young 
 man, who afterwards became quite famous, 
 w r hen he read for the first time that blasphem- 
 ing enigma called Sartor Resartus.* 
 
 No patient hearing could be gained for 
 the literati of the old and orthodox side in all 
 that time. Many were chary of criticising 
 the new theories lest they should be set down 
 as opposed to learning and progress. And 
 that was a terrible label to attach to one's self. 
 A few prominent Catholic writers entered 
 the list, but as a Frenchman finely says of 
 them, it was only to carry on a coquetterie re'g- 
 lee with the scientists of skepticism. For, 
 
 *See Mr. Huxley's obituary on Tyndall in * 'Nineteenth 
 Century." February, 1894. 
 
14 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 while guarding their orthodoxy by referring 
 the ultimate cause of all things to the action 
 of an omnipotent Creator, they freely em- 
 braced the theory of evolution, i. e. the de- 
 velopment by gradual progress of everything 
 and every one from germs. 
 
 With the best intention no doubt they 
 made a sweeping sacrifice of the literal sense 
 of Genesis and wrenched somewhat violently 
 the text of the story that men so long 
 deemed sacred, as a concession^ to those who 
 were openly ignoring God and denying all 
 divine and supernatural action in the origin 
 and growth of the world and its denizens. 
 
 Now, evolution is not of that demonstra- 
 ble certainty which does not leave us yet free 
 to reject it if we choose, and while giving 
 all due credit to men of great ability like Mr. 
 Mirart and Mr. W. S. Lilly, we may be per- 
 mitted to question whether all their ingen- 
 ious pains to set up an orthodox evolution 
 have been repaid by any good result. They 
 certainly made very little impression on the 
 agnostics, and their fellow-believers are not 
 much more enlightened, while not a few 
 may have suffered from a disturbance of 
 views to no useful purpose. 
 
NEED OF THE REACTION. 15 
 
 There was one instance, however, of an 
 eminent lay-writer whose steps were not so 
 mincing in the lists. In a controversy with 
 the biggest man among the agnostics, in fact 
 the very inventor of that peculiar name, ag- 
 nostic, Mr. Gladstone held the old-fashioned 
 langauge of an uncompromising Christian. 
 He spoke of "Our Lord" and "miracles" and 
 "Satan" and "divine teaching" as a matter 
 of course without the least show of human re- 
 spect before those mighty men of science. 
 was edifying to believers to see this veteran 
 of political strife make at his great age so 
 brave a stand for the supernatural, and 
 though he may have 'failed to convince his 
 individual antagonist, his sincerity extorted 
 from Mr. Huxley a handsome compliment at 
 the close of the argument, for he applied to 
 the great statesman the words invented by 
 Shakespeare for Cleopatra 
 
 "Age can not wither him, 
 Nor custom stale his infinite variety.''* 
 
 But the day was coming when a voice of 
 protest was to be raised, not from among 
 the believers but from the ranks of the friends 
 
 * See the "Nineteenth Century, ' 'Gladstone-Huxley 
 Controversy on the miracle of the swine. 
 
16 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 and sympathizers with science. These men 
 of beliefless science were to be arraigned 
 and at length asked to show where was the 
 benefit to their fellow-men from their theo- 
 ries so loudly and confidently proclaimed. 
 They were to be summoned to point out 
 what reliable comfort they had built up or 
 were going to build up to take the place of 
 the ancient beliefs that had been a protect- 
 ing shelter to men for ages long. 
 
 The public mind was more or less pre- 
 pared for this turn of events. People had 
 been awed but had now grown a bit wearied 
 of the solemn, tiresome omniscience of these 
 men and so were in a mood to enjoy the re- 
 volt in their camp. 
 
 That pontiff of agnosticism Prof. Hux- 
 ley shortly before his death (for alas! even 
 so mighty a dictator in letters is not immune 
 from the common lot of mortals) composed 
 a general preface for the final reissue of his 
 works. In this he gives the public a bit of 
 his early mental history in his characteristic 
 style. He says that in the beginning of his 
 scientific career he found stretching across 
 his path and barring the way the old tradi- 
 tions of revelation. They were regarded as 
 
NEED OF THE REACTION. IJ 
 
 sacred and impassable. They were too high 
 to climb, he tells us, and to crawl under 
 them he would not condescend he disliked 
 mud. In this dilemma he bethought him of 
 a third way to surmount the barrier. He 
 would hew his way through, hack and de- 
 molish it! This he proceeded to do and, to 
 his great relief, found it to be only lath and 
 plaster and cardboard mere rubbish! Hav- 
 ing thus rid himself of the Bible and all 
 its tales, he marched unimpeded along his 
 scientific pathway with what practical result 
 time and his friends are begining to show. 
 
 However, he was not summoned from that 
 happy pathway he had cleared for himself 
 before he was to witness, by an unpleasant 
 irony, other and just as manly hands as his 
 beginning to hack and hew the barrier of 
 scientific theories which he and his col- 
 leagues were at such pains to erect across 
 the pathway lighted by faith. 
 
 However, the protest which is beginning 
 to be heard and which is quite a notable 
 feature in the history of contemporary secu- 
 lar thought, is not directed, it need scarce 
 be said, against scientists of that patient and 
 unassuming class who do no hacking and 
 
 2 
 
1 8 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 hewing of sacred things. There are those 
 who confine their scientific researches solely 
 to the material benefit of their fellow-men. 
 Their laborious clays have been given to 
 smooth the rough places of life and make the 
 human lot more bearable through the ex- 
 ceeding convenience of their ingenious in- 
 ventions and marvelous discoveries. But 
 they never cast disturbing trouble into the 
 souls of men nor sow disquieting doubts in 
 human minds. Such scientists are greatly 
 and deservedly honored. Watts, Steven- 
 son, Thompson (Lord Kelvin), Nasmyth, 
 Edison, Pasteur, Quatrefages, Virchow, 
 these are the men, leaders of a large and use- 
 ful class, who are justly regarded as benefac- 
 tors of their kind. Any one of these is of 
 more real worth to his fellows than all the 
 monarchs or statesmen or great captains 
 who spent their days amid the dire tragedies 
 of human slaughter which fill so largely the 
 history of the race. There are few among 
 living men who would not rather be an Edi- 
 son than an Alexander or Napoleon, a Bis- 
 marck or a Moltke. 
 
 It is not against scientists such as these 
 that either complaint can be made or reac- 
 
NEED OF THE REACTION. IQ 
 
 tion take place. The challenge that is now 
 beginning to be delivered concerns only that 
 class of scientists biologists and naturalists 
 who have pushed their work, otherwise use- 
 ful perhaps and lawful, beyond its legitimate 
 limits and assuming a dictatorship over con- 
 temporary thought, arrogantly demand the 
 surrender of all previous beliefs in favor of 
 their scientific researches proposing these 
 as the sole and only rational source of hu- 
 man knowledge. 
 
 Such a summons issued in a tone of as- 
 sured authority, has considerably disturbed 
 a multitude of minds without adding any- 
 thing to their happiness and nothing what- 
 ever to the hopes that men will ever refuse 
 to relinguish. 
 
 The chief disturbers of the world's mental 
 peace in our time have been Hegel, Schleier- 
 macher, Strauss, Hartmann, Vacherot, 
 Taine, Renan, Darwin, Tyndall, Spencer and 
 Huxley a formidable phalanx. 
 
 To these, on the literary side, must be 
 added the numerous theorists of the "social 
 question 5 ' who ignore the supernatural in 
 everything that touches the human condi- 
 tion. Such are Karl Marks, Kropotkine, 
 
20 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 John Morley, Carlyle, Hugo, Elisee Reclus, 
 Henry George, Louis Blanc, Leslie Stephen 
 and the usual host of their imitators in the 
 public press. 
 
 As may be supposed the religious leaders 
 and teachers have not been silent on the side 
 of belief. But such apologists are scarcely 
 regarded at all by those other men. They 
 are set aside and superiorly despised. Pro- 
 tests merely professional are not to be taken 
 seriously. They are Ciceronian pleadings 
 pro domo sud. In self-protection such pro- 
 tests have to be made a mere matter of course 
 that everybody expects and nobody minds. 
 Interested witnesses were out of court in this 
 important discussion and so forth. The 
 words of professional religious teachers gave 
 no alarm whatever to these agnostic scien- 
 tists. They treated them as something to be 
 amused at or as a subject for their raillery 
 and lofty scorn. 
 
 However, it was entirely another matter 
 and much more serious when murmurs of 
 misgiving and protests began to be heard 
 from the men behind them, from those whom 
 they fully believed to be sympathisers and 
 supporters from men who lived far from 
 the camp of the clericals. 
 
NEED OF THE REACTION. 21 
 
 Some few years ago vague hints began to 
 be heard, like stray shots, as to the unsatis- 
 fying results of the scientific conclusions as 
 the panacea for our mortal woes. A patient 
 hearing had hitherto been given to the agnos- 
 tic scientists, and men had been waiting in 
 confident expectation for their announce- 
 ments. The magisterial tone of these emi- 
 nent men of science had inspired nay, im- 
 posed that confidence. 
 
 In old times kings "touched for the evil." 
 In our time democracy having exploded 
 the divine in kings and most other things 
 it was science was to touch for the evils of 
 humanity. But now that its magic hand 
 had been for some time stretched forth to 
 heal, it is not apparent that the evils of poor 
 humanity are growing any lighter or less. 
 In fact never before have they been so 
 pressed upon the public attention or louder 
 plaints uttered by the masses as in our day. 
 Science it seems has been "touching" in vain. 
 In all its boasted pharmacopoea there is no 
 potent drug for humanity's ills. And so 
 men naturally began to ask of the scientists, 
 "What practical good has come to the world 
 from the years of your laborious researches 
 is a mere negative result all we are to get 
 for our patient -waiting?" 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 
 
 The first formulated and indeed formid- 
 able complaint came from a French acade- 
 mician, M. Ferdinand Brunctiere. This 
 was a startling surprise to the agnostic school 
 and caused a great sensation. He was not 
 only a man of recognized eminence in the 
 literary world, but he always passed for a 
 leader among Parisian Hires penseurs. He 
 published in the Review of which he is the 
 Directeur-gerant an article treating of what 
 he very roundly and boldly called "the suc- 
 cessive bankruptcies of science." 
 
 This article marks the date of the aggres- 
 sive reaction against the scientists of which 
 we now see the rising tide. 
 
 Re'nan in his usual tone of tranquil confi- 
 dence had announced that "religious beliefs 
 will slowly disappear from the world, mined 
 by primary instruction and by the predomi- 
 nance of science over literature and educa- 
 tion." Prof. Huxley wrote: "If the scientific 
 
 ( 22 ) 
 
SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 23 
 
 method working in the domain of history, 
 philology and archeology has become so 
 formidable to the dogmatic theologian, what 
 may not be said of the scientific method 
 working in the domain of physical science?" 
 
 To them M. Brunctiere makes answer not 
 only in the article alluded to but in others 
 with which he followed it up in 1895 and 
 1896, that religious belief far from disappear- 
 ing or being extinguished by the "scientific 
 method" is becoming recognized as the only 
 basis of solution for the problem of man's 
 social condition. In his interesting and able 
 review of Mr. A. Balfour's book "The Foun- 
 dations of Belief" he says: "What is now dis- 
 cussed is the question whether physically or 
 physiologically the necessity of belief like the 
 necessity of knowledge must enter, in some 
 part, into the very definition of man ; whether 
 historically, social evolution is conceivable 
 without the supernatural which has ever been 
 mingled with it as a guide and explanation; 
 whether morally it was ever possible to form- 
 ulate a rule of conduct for men which did not 
 draw its sanction from the absolute." 
 
 He thus honestly forces on the attention 
 of his scientific friends the fact that when men 
 
2\ THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 wish to analyze and account for humanity, 
 from what point soever it may be looked at 
 the "scientific method" is felt to be insuffi- 
 cient and that it is the religious method (to 
 borrow their word) must be relied on. M. 
 Brunctiere ranges himself on this side and 
 freely admits that it is as foolish as it is futile 
 to banish the supernatural from the discus- 
 sion of the grave problems of life. He is es- 
 pecially strong on the impotence of reason as 
 the only guide and sole source of knowledge 
 and just as feeble as reason, science, its hand- 
 maid, has also proved to be. Science, he 
 asserts, has no answer to give to the various 
 social problems which occupy present-day 
 thought so prominently; on that account 
 men are beginning to turn aside from it dis- 
 appointed and dissatisfied, to seek an answer 
 somewhere else. Science has been weighed 
 in the balance of practical knowledge and 
 found wanting. 
 
 This in substance is the conclusion of M. 
 Brunctiere, and thus he bears witness that a 
 real reaction has set in against science as pur- 
 sued by unbelievers. This writer is a power 
 in the French world of letters. Unless his 
 place were among the foremost writers of 
 
SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 25 
 
 France he would not be a member of her 
 famous Academy. It is easy then to imag- 
 ine the dismay of his fellow-agnostics at 
 such an avowal on his part. Some of them 
 called it the "great betrayal." It was not 
 that. It was only the honest admission of 
 his own return to sound sense in which he 
 showed a great courage in support of con- 
 victions unpopular with his friends. It is a 
 striking sign of the times. 
 
 But in the world of English letters there is 
 another sign just as striking. At the time 
 that M. Brunctiere was confessing his failure 
 of faith in the "scientific method/' another 
 mind not less trained and brilliant than his 
 was engaged on the same line of thought in 
 England. Not long after the Frenchman's 
 declaration of the "successive bankruptcies of 
 science" in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Mr. 
 Balfours thoughtful book "The Foundations 
 of Belief fell as a surprise on the world of 
 London. It created a profound sensation. 
 That so busy a man as the Leader of the 
 Commons could find time for the lengthy 
 and deep meditations of which this book is 
 the evidence and expression, was astonishing 
 enough. But that one whom high questions 
 
26 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 of State are supposed to absorb and whom 
 the little spiritualizing pursuit of politics 
 chainsto utterly worldly things, should be dis- 
 covered devoting a large share of attention 
 to the supernatural and the eternal questions, 
 was a shock to the worldly-minded and a 
 scandal to "advanced" thinkers of every hue. 
 What gave special cause for uneasiness was 
 the great literary power and charm displayed 
 in the book. It would scarce be possible to 
 treat in a finer and less fatiguing vein those 
 grave questions which other writers of ability 
 too often envelop in metaphysical and unre- 
 freshing obscurity. There is great variety 
 in it, there is novelty of view and originality. 
 There is an easy and confidential tone- 
 though lady-readers, if it find any, may resent 
 the bit on bonnets as decidedly rash for so 
 confirmed a bachelor as Mr. Balfour. But 
 you will remark besides a grave earnestness 
 in it, which makes you feel that the author 
 was under the stress of the liberare animam 
 meam. 
 
 The whole drift of the book is manifestly a 
 reaction against science of the dogmatizing 
 kind. It is a plea for faith and a convincing - 
 call to reinstate the supernatural in its own 
 
SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 27 
 
 place as a source of certitude and knowledge. 
 Twenty years ago the author probably would 
 not have had the courage to publish it, and 
 if he had, he would just as probably have got 
 no hearing on the subject. His first book 
 bore the less open title oi" Philosophic Doubt" 
 But the present one a manifest invitation to 
 believe was the fashion of the day and the 
 book of the season. This may be owing in 
 some measure to the high place attained by 
 the writer in the world of politics, but it is 
 owing just as much to the fact that men's 
 minds \vere prepared for it and were feeling 
 a want they find there in part supplied. It 
 shows that thousands of others are thinking 
 the same thoughts that Mr. Balfour has so 
 ably and so interestingly put into words. 
 
 It is important to note that a demand was 
 at once made for a French translation of this 
 book and as a coincidence it is interesting to 
 learn that M. Brunctiere was asked to write 
 its French preface. This shows how instinct- 
 ively and quickly was recognized the identity 
 of view of these two distinguished men on the 
 grave step of a return to religious thought 
 men who probably had never seen each other, 
 lived in different countries and had nothing 
 
28 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 in common save their previous free-thinking 
 tendencies. This is surely striking evidence 
 of a reaction. 
 
 In my book "Disunion and Reunion" I in- 
 curred no little criticism and even ridicule for 
 the statement that Scotch people would yet 
 wield an influence over English thought in 
 the direction of the old faith. Mr. Balfour is 
 a Scotchman! 
 
 Last year a M. Jules Payot, another of the 
 French libres-penseurs, in a book called "De 
 la Croyance" enters his protest also against 
 the short-comings of science. Among other 
 severe things he says: "My science does not 
 hinder my ignorance of realities from being 
 absolute; science has a symbolic language 
 and an admirable system of signs, but the 
 more it progresses the farther it gets from the 
 reality of things and plunges into abstrac- 
 tions." 
 
 Mr. Benjamin Kidcl in his book, "Social 
 Evolution" which has attained a wide and 
 just popularity, also strongly express the 
 same feeling of disappointment with the sci- 
 entific method and its exiguous results. This 
 book of Mr. Kidd's also enjoys the compli- 
 ment of a French translation. This transla- 
 
SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 2Q 
 
 tion was made last year by M. Le Monnier 
 and published by the firm of Guillaumin of 
 Paris. This would seem to indicate a de- 
 mand in France just now for a literature 
 widely different from that of the old school 
 of irreligious scoffers and incredulous phil- 
 osophers. 
 
 There is scarcely any Review in Europe or 
 for that matter in all the world, which com- 
 mands a greater influence among the literary 
 public than the Paris Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 So many of its contributors have from time 
 to time been elected to the high honor of 
 membership in the Academic Francaise, that 
 it has aptly been called the vestibule of that 
 famous Olympia. Under the rule of its 
 founder Mr. Buloz, it was unfortunately the 
 happy hunting-ground of the most aggressive 
 anti-religionists. It was through its pages 
 M. Renan first found an audience, and for a 
 long time it remained merely the organ for 
 agnostic free-thought. But of late it has 
 come to its readers as a surprise to notice how r 
 it has been steadily veering round to the or- 
 thodox compass-point of religious thought. 
 
 Time was when this Review would not 
 have published the following story of Count 
 
30 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 Cavour's end even though written by the 
 Count Benedetti: "In a lucid hour of his last 
 illness Cavour sent for his servant 'Martin/ 
 said he, 'we must part. Send in time for 
 Padre Jacobo, the parish priest of the Ma- 
 donna dei Angeli; he promised to assist me 
 in my last hour.' This priest was sent for 
 and spent a half an hour, hearing his confes- 
 sion. This he (Count Cavour) afterwards 
 told to his friend Farini: 'My niece/ he said, 
 'has brought Father Jacobo to see me, for you 
 know I must prepare for the great step into 
 eternity. I have made my confession, later 
 on I shall receive communion. I want all to 
 know, especially I want the good people of 
 Turin to know, that I die a Christian.' ' 
 
 What! Cavour sent for a Catholic priest 
 and asked for the sacraments of the church ? 
 What a scandal to the free-thinkers and his 
 fellow free-masons! Cavour, the noble radi- 
 cal the unrivaled statesman whose power- 
 ful mind swayed the councils of Europe, who 
 was years ahead of his great coeval Bismarck 
 in statecraft the untiring worker for Italia 
 Unita the intriguer with the Carbonari and 
 that plebeian bandit Garibaldi the sworn 
 foe of the Pope and the beloved of all devout 
 
SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 31 
 
 Protestants he sending for a priest and dy- 
 ing an avowed Catholic this should not 
 have been made known, it is such a bad ex- 
 ample to the atheistically enlightened! Yet 
 it is in the pages of the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes for October of last year (1896) that 
 this piece of history is given, vouched for by 
 the distinguished Ambassador who knew 
 him well. 
 
 In the same pages too has appeared far the 
 best appreciation of the life and work of the 
 late Cardinal Manning from the pen of a 
 Protestant gentleman, M. Francis de Pres- 
 sense. When his able and sympathetic 
 articles were published afterwards as a book 
 it w r as "crowned" by the French Academy. 
 
 Last year also in this Review a writer of 
 great and versatile talent, with the liquid Bo- 
 hemian name of Wyzewa, is permitted to give 
 a remarkable criticism of that stupendous 
 work (in eight hundred and sixty-five parts) 
 of the artist M. Tissot. The opening words of 
 his critique are so much to the purpose of this 
 chapter that I may be pardoned for quoting 
 them at some length in translation: "Every- 
 "one has heard of that beautiful and good 
 "princess who after long years of perfect 
 
32 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. . 
 
 "wedded bliss was brought back by her hus- 
 "band and left in the wild woods where he 
 "first found her. Her only fault truly a 
 "rare one was that she was too good and 
 "too beautiful at least so says the story. 
 "But I fancy that born as she was in a wood 
 "and knowing nothing but love, many little 
 "rustic traits helped to detach from her the 
 "princely husband's affections. Perchance 
 "he bethought him that she once tended 
 "sheep and was of rather low birth, or per- 
 "haps as he grew older he acquired new tastes 
 "and fresh desires, her natural disapproval of 
 "which he could ill brook. All we know is 
 "that he treated her most shamefully; but 
 "hardly had he again consigned her to her 
 "native woods than he was seen to run about 
 "the world in the most light-hearted manner 
 "looking for a more amiable princess and one 
 "worthier of being the wife of a prince like 
 "him, than the poor, discarded first love. 
 "He soon discovered, however, that the 
 "princess he had put away was the best of 
 "them all; for none of those he subsequently 
 "encountered could bestow upon him the 
 "happiness he sought. So after saying to 
 "himself twentv times over no doubt 
 
SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 33 
 
 "through pride or maybe weakness that 
 "he never, never would recall her from exile, 
 "still finding that he could neither live nor 
 "die without her, he one fine day set out to 
 "look for her again. The v legend adds that 
 "it was even a great happiness to him to 
 "have succeeded in finding her and though 
 "she would have preferred his return 
 "grounded on more tender reasons, such as 
 "deep regret for his treatment of her and not 
 "merely because he felt the want of her, she 
 "nevertheless, touched by his misery, forgot 
 "and forgave. This is the only "point where 
 "this naive story falls short in perfect like- 
 "ness to another story that is just now pass- 
 "ing under our eyes. There is not one of the 
 "adventures of this prince that we can not 
 "compare to our own adventures since we 
 "banished from our heart the old Christian 
 "faith some fifty years ago that had been for 
 "so many centuries our trusted and faithful 
 "companion. ... It had seemed to us 
 "too childish, we grew tired of it, it interfered 
 "too much with our inclinations and we too 
 "went about the world in search of a new 
 "worship. Our hearts grew young in the 
 "free air and not a phantom rose before our 
 3 
 
34 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 "view but we decked it with all the graces. 
 "First we adored science. This is what Re- 
 "nan recommended us to do in exchange for 
 "the faith he took from us. He set against 
 "the 'unclean and puerile ideal/ he pro- 
 fessed to find in Christianity 'the superior 
 "sanctity of the scientific ideal.' Science 
 "alone, he said, was pure. But after forcing 
 "ourselves to love the substitute, it was far 
 "from giving us the moral support we used 
 "to get from Christianity. In fact we found 
 "it refused us everything, even the smallest 
 "grain of solid truth. Then, after how many 
 "other specters did we run and found them 
 "but phantoms that melted at our touch! 
 "Like the prince in the story we were now 
 "left alone, but just as little as he, were we 
 "able to bear our solitude. For doing or 
 "for dreaming for living or dying we must 
 "have a faith. This is why some of us have 
 "taken courage and have begun to deplore 
 "aloud the loss of the old faith." A more 
 earnest testimony than this to the present- 
 day reaction it would be hard indeed to find. 
 
 The popular reception given to M. Tissot's 
 
SIGNS OF THE REACTION. .35 
 
 marvelous artistic work in Paris, of which 
 M. Wyzewa writes with such sympathy in 
 the article from which the foregoing is 
 taken, is another very striking sign of this 
 reaction. This great artist has devoted ten 
 years of his life to the accomplishment of 
 this one work, no other than the painted 
 story of the life of Christ. He went out to 
 Palestine, as he himself tells us, with the Gos- 
 pels in his hand and there studied on the 
 spot all the places \vhere that divine life was 
 lived. The result of his work was exhibited 
 at the Salon of the Champ-de-Mars in 1894. 
 It forms a series of no less than eight hun- 
 dred and sixty-five different studies. 
 
 It needed the courage of a great and sin- 
 cere mind thus to set once more before the 
 eyes of the most frivolous population in the 
 world the entire life of our Saviour. It was 
 also a strange venture at this late date to 
 handle again a subject exhausted by the la- 
 bors of so many others. Had it not been, 
 treated a thousand times from every aspect 
 and had not the worldly-minded long since 
 turned weariedly away from it? Nothing 
 could possibly be thought of less inviting to 
 the mundane Parisians, Yet he never fal- 
 
36 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 tered and to leave no mistake about his ob- 
 ject he appended to each painted scene an 
 explanatory note of his own, which confessed 
 his faith and evidenced the reverent spirit 
 which prompted his work. His success was 
 beyond all expectation. Seldom has such a 
 reception been given to any artistic work in 
 our time. For three months immense 
 crowds invaded the galleries in the Champ- 
 de-Mars. Surprise, respect, unstinted ad- 
 miration were the tribute paid to this su- 
 preme effort of Christian genius, and an 
 eminent art-critic, not by any means of a 
 pious turn himself, has declared that it was 
 impossible for any one who came there to 
 leave without feeling the better for having 
 come and seen. This splendid work seems 
 like an inspiration. It was completed about 
 the time that Ernest Renan lay dying in 
 Paris. He was the Arch-Arian of the nine- 
 teenth century. His cynical impudence in 
 speaking of our Lord was never surpassed. 
 He called him "that delicious young man 
 from Galilee" and in another place "that de- 
 lightful charlatan"! His treatment of the 
 sacred life had destroyed all idea of Christ's 
 divinity in thousands of minds. And now 
 
SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 37 
 
 almost at the door of his dying chamber a 
 reviving elixir was being administered to the 
 faith he so powerfully strove to kill. 
 
 On the same lines though in a different 
 way the distinguished Russian writer Count 
 Leo Tolstoi has also been helping on the re- 
 action. That a layman of wealth, high posi- 
 tion, and scholarly attainments should oc- 
 cupy himself in a serious and reverent spirit 
 in editing a version of the Gospels at this 
 late hour of our era is very disconcerting to 
 the Huxleyan minds that have so long la- 
 bored to discredit them. His book which 
 bears the title simply of "The Gospels" was 
 published in 1894 and in the following year 
 was translated into French. 
 
 In the introduction he declares at once 
 the motive of his \vriting, "for me," he 
 says, "there is nothing at all so important as 
 this light which for eighteen hundred years 
 has illuminated mankind." He excuses him- 
 self from all discussion as to the personality 
 and history of Christ and he adds "it is 
 enough for me that His doctrine is the only 
 one that gives meaning to my life." 
 
38 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 It is also a significant fact that in a very 
 recent number of a secular American maga- 
 zine the Viscount Melchoir de Vogue, a 
 brilliant member of the French Academy, 
 should announce to the public of the United 
 States that in his opinion the greatest of liv- 
 ing men is the present Pope. And this is 
 not an obiter dictum, it is the thesis of the 
 article and in proof of this rather bold asser- 
 tion he alleges that the Pope as "an enlight- 
 ened guide in the supernatural unto his 
 fellow-men has been of more practical use to 
 them and has afforded them more valuable 
 help than any of his contemporaries." 
 
 As a psychological puzzle I am tempted 
 to mention here a somewhat strange coinci- 
 dence. While M. de Vogue was engaged 
 on this serious and evidently sincere piece of 
 work, which is also characterized by all the 
 thoroughness of his great ability, he was at 
 the same time in another quarter publishing 
 a French story of a lubricious kind. This 
 story bears the title of "Jean d' Agreve" and 
 treats of a strange phase of illicit love. It 
 may perhaps be pleaded in excuse that the 
 utter loathing created by the vivid picture 
 drawn of his hero as a worthless, egotistic, 
 
SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 39 
 
 self-pampered, uncleanly and sensual pagan 
 coxcomb, and by the no less repulsive picture 
 of the heroine, as an utterly sensual married 
 woman, a mere animal in her sensuality, can 
 not but influence people in favor of the 
 higher and purer life but he does not say 
 so. That is a risky way to inculcate virtue. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 
 
 I think it is clear from the foregoing that 
 the reaction against the scientists of the anti- 
 supernatural and anti-religious class has 
 commenced and most likely will continue. 
 It will be helpful to that end and not with- 
 out interest to many readers to explain why 
 people are dissatisfied with the researches of 
 the agnostic scientists. 
 
 The reason is short and intelligible their 
 conclusions bring no comfort and are of no 
 vise to any human mind in answering the 
 questions that are always present to men 
 whence have I come, why am I here, and 
 what is to become of me? 
 
 For instance: 
 
 The last question personally and vitally 
 affects everybody. There is no more cer- 
 tain fact than that we shall not be very long 
 in existence here. What is going to happen 
 then? Every individual human being wants 
 to know something definite about that. The 
 (40) 
 
WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 4! 
 
 universal fact of death makes it so personally 
 interesting to each and every one. Well, 
 when the "scientific method" and its conclu- 
 sions are eagerly scrutinized for information 
 on this point of such intense interest, people 
 are amazed to find, after all the brave parade 
 made of them in these recent years, that they 
 are dumb on this vital question. The ut- 
 most the honester scientists say is We d0 
 not know. Some less scrupulous say There 
 is nothing to follow or to happen. But that 
 is not honest for they give no proof not the 
 shadow of a proof of their assertion. 
 
 The former, indeed, advise every one not to 
 trouble about it to let themselves go with 
 the great tide of human life into the void 
 the unknown. There is nothing to fear, no 
 cause for alarm. Now the great mass of 
 men never have believed and never will be- 
 lieve that. It is no wonder their disappoint- 
 ment is great. An apt pupil of the ' 'scien- 
 tific method" in her "Story of an African 
 Farm" declares rather helplessly that "the 
 tears of the mourners and the mud of the 
 grave cement the power of the priests!" 
 rather halting logic in our friend. One 
 would think it was the priests invented death. 
 
42 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 They, poor men, have got to face the muddy 
 grave as well as other people and are quite 
 as much interested as to what is to become 
 of them as everybody else, but they are not 
 at all likely to be so daring or reckless as to 
 lend themselves to deceptions about a matter 
 that involves their own outlook and well- 
 being in common with all others. This is a 
 specimen of prejudice-raising which begets 
 that daring attitude in some, but which hap- 
 pily does not satisfy the multitude. 
 
 But though the "scientific method" has 
 nothing to tell about the mysterious future 
 after death, it has a great deal to say about 
 our origin. 
 
 On this ground science is much more at 
 home and very confident. For, unlike the 
 future, the past at all events is real and ex- 
 plorable and science claims it as its own pe- 
 culiar province for research. For the last 
 forty years lakes of ink and reams of paper 
 have been expended on reports by the scien- 
 tist of their independent search across the 
 ages for the first vital spark. To prosecute 
 their researches quite unshackled by any pre- 
 
WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 43 
 
 conceived notions they abolished and wiped 
 out all previous maps and charts which used 
 to serve humanity as a guide over the distant 
 and difficult country of its past. These maps 
 and charts they declared to be utterly useless 
 and misleading and \vere accountable for all 
 the myths and superstitions about the origin 
 or mankind which had so long degraded the 
 human mind. They would undertake this 
 exploration anew with common sense and en- 
 lightened reason aided by the modern scien- 
 tific method as sole guides. They would 
 tramp every inch of that ground to its ut- 
 most limits for themselves, taking nothing 
 from hearsay or tradition. They would strip 
 it of all its mysteries and bogeys and bring 
 back but the plain, simple answers that hon- 
 est nature had to give. So they began, and 
 ever since they have led the world a length- 
 ening and weary walk through the domain 
 of time. 
 
 At first the way was pleasant and interest- 
 ing enough. It lay through the zoological 
 department of the earth. Here as long as 
 the study was confined to comparative anat- 
 omy the bone-structure of the various ani- 
 mal families, their similarities and dissimilar- 
 
44 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 ities, it was curious and not uninteresting. 
 Years of patient skill and labor were de- 
 voted to this. To most people the motive 
 of this minute curiosity about the formation 
 of the animal world would have been to ad- 
 mire the skill of the original designer of those 
 marvelous structures (in which man had 
 nothing whatever to do), and be lost in won- 
 der at the resources of his great power. But 
 the scientists never stopped to call attention 
 to that. Their object was to find out what 
 man really was and how he came to be. 
 
 After more years of patient and minute 
 study of animal structure a deliberate and 
 definite pronouncement was at length made 
 on the subject. Everybody now knows what 
 this pronouncement was and with what min- 
 gled feelings it was received by the world 
 when first put forth by Mr. Darwin. As 
 the result of his long studies he declared that 
 man was not always as he is, that he did not 
 enjoy, as was hitherto supposed, a distinct 
 and different creation from the animals, 
 that he passed through other forms before 
 he attained his present shape, and in a pro- 
 cess which he called by the now famous 
 word evolution, man was shown to have "de- 
 
WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 45 
 
 scendecT from brute animals. He even spec- 
 ified the immediate ancestor from which, as 
 far as his studies then warranted him to say, 
 he was gradually evolved in the animal 
 world. Many think Mr. Darwin made a 
 fatal mistake in thus particularizing, for it 
 was then the world laughed irreverently and 
 theories that move to laughter lose all their 
 dignity. Though he clothed his announce- 
 ment in grave words of learned sound 
 namely, that our dear ancestor was quadru- 
 manous, "arborial in his habits" and probably 
 (a concession as he was now to speak more 
 plainly), "furnished with a tail;" the facetious 
 world caught the meaning at once "oh, we 
 are descended from monkeys et solvuntur 
 risu! That was a severe check to the new 
 biological science and a poor reward for such 
 long and arduous labors. 
 
 But Mr. Darwin was quite serious and he 
 abated nothing in his arguments and his as- 
 sertions. His co-workers and followers 
 stood by him and proclaimed his discovery 
 a triumph. But their investigations were 
 not going to end with our "quadrumanous" 
 friend who was given to climbing trees and 
 "probably furnished with a tail," 
 
46 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 Arrived at this stage of man's existence the 
 free investigators were only now, so to speak, 
 securely on the scent. They had yet to ar- 
 rive at the more elementary conditions of his 
 earthly life. So, for many more years, they 
 wandered back through the wastes of time. 
 They searched the rocks for fossils. They 
 explored the caves and traveled the bed of 
 the sea for specimens of life. They waded 
 through swamps and quagmires and fished 
 for tadpoles and mud-fish. Then at last came 
 the announcement that the utmost limit of 
 primal living forms had been reached. 
 There in the "cells" of those minutest creat- 
 ures lay the "fons et origo" of all terrestrial 
 life. They named it protoplastic matter. 
 
 From the mud-fish through varied forms 
 came all animals; and just the same as the 
 rest, from the mud-fish, through the ape, 
 came mankind! Not long since Mr. Dar- 
 win's fellow-scientists and pupils erected a 
 statue to his memory in his native town of 
 Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England presum- 
 ably in gratitude for his elevating discovery 
 as to their descent. "Hey! a mad world my 
 masters." 
 
 Since Darwin's time further investigations 
 
WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 47 
 
 have been made about this protoplastic mat- 
 ter. The scientists did not wish the world 
 to suppose that they knew nothing of its na- 
 ture. They brought chemistry to bear on 
 it. They took it into the laboratory, set out 
 their crucibles, retorts, solvents and stills 
 and worked out an analysis of this subtle sub- 
 stance result: four gases, oxygen, hydrogen, 
 nitrogen and carbon! By evolution there- 
 fore man as we know him "the thing to be 
 demonstrated" of the scientists was at one 
 time a monkey, sometime previously proto- 
 plasm, and prior to that, four gases! But 
 the ordinary common sense of men will not 
 be satisfied with these results. They do not 
 account for man. They say nothing of his 
 chief attributes. How is he, a thinking be- 
 ing, of great intelligence, capable of self- 
 reflection, self-guidance and self-government? 
 The agnostic scientists will not admit that 
 anything came to him from outside as an en- 
 dowment or the act of another being, 
 their sole reason for not doing so being the 
 questionably logical one that they have 
 found no evidence of any creative act or cre- 
 ating being. A negative reason like this 
 does not satisfy as long as they are unable 
 
48 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 to supply a positive one and assign a definite 
 cause for a visible, palpable, undeniable fact, 
 namely, intelligent life. It will not do to 
 merely inform mankind that aboriginally 
 they were four gases. They inevitably want 
 to know how the four gases came to think, 
 to reflect, to make thought rule action and 
 account to themselves for their sensations. 
 
 So for the practical minded all those re- 
 searches of the scientists into the origin of 
 man and the sources of life are entirely un- 
 satisfying. They have failed to indicate 
 any intelligible or adequate cause for compos- 
 ite human life, such as we all know it to be. 
 They are dumb before the universally inter- 
 esting question which will never cease to be 
 asked, Whence are we? 
 
 One of the most influential of those scien- 
 tists the man who gave the name agnostic 
 to the sect (by no means new), not long be- 
 fore his death, made the bold and what 
 seemed to him the consoling statement that 
 "Christianity was driven to its last ditch.'' 
 With gratitude the Christian may thank the 
 man for teaching him that word. That ques- 
 tion is a final and a fatal ditch for "science." 
 Further efforts, indeed, have been made to 
 
WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 49 
 
 scramble out of it. Some relied on the 
 theory of spontaneous generation and elab- 
 orate experiments were patiently made to 
 sustain it. But the leading scientists hon- 
 estly admitted that it was not sustainable 
 and, as is well known, is now totally aban- 
 doned by the scientific. This conception of 
 life or the living principle producing itself in- 
 volves a mystery as great as any in the reve- 
 lation which those scientists affect to discard. 
 Yet it was an unconscious adaptation of the 
 eternal begetting of the Word in the God- 
 head described by St. John. But to transfer 
 what can happen in the eternal and necessary 
 being to the contingent and transitory is not 
 in the rules of logic. 
 
 Others have since made a wilder and 
 bolder plunge .to get out of the difficulty. 
 The appearance of initial life on this planet 
 they say is easily explained by the fact that 
 the earth in its course through space encoun- 
 ters a lot of cosmic dust which adheres to it 
 and thus, mingled with this dust, living 
 germs of protoplastic thinking matter found 
 a home on our globe. But this ingenious 
 theory is as little final as the others, for 
 where or when in cosmic space did this living 
 4 
 
5O THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 protoplasm get its life and how came it to be 
 endowed with the wonderful potentialities of 
 which the mental and physical faculties cf 
 men and women are the development? 
 That will not do. 
 
 Thus the labors of unaided science have 
 failed to give us any light on the question 
 which so personally interests every living 
 human being Whence are we? 
 
 There is another question just as pressing 
 and more important to men on which the in- 
 dependent scientists, according to their en- 
 gagement, are bound to satisfy them Why 
 are we here at all? 
 
 Their investigation of this question the 
 purpose of human life has not resulted in 
 anything pleasanter and more encouraging 
 for us than their dissertations on our origin. 
 
 In Mr. Darwin's books the "Descent of 
 Man' and "The Origin of Species" as well as 
 in the writings of those who follow and in- 
 dorse him, all we learn is that mankind has 
 been cast into the melee of this world to 
 fight ! to struggle for his very existence and 
 in that struggle to prove his fitness to live by 
 "surviving." 
 
WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 51 
 
 I do not think it exaggeration to say that 
 this is absolutely all that can be learned from 
 those bulky volumes on the vital question 
 Why are men here at all? When you come 
 to extract from those books any practical or 
 serviceable meaning or conclusions the only 
 wonderful thing left you to admire is that 
 men could write so much and say so little. 
 But when the conclusion is arrived at it is 
 only vexation of spirit. Of what use or com- 
 fort is it to humanity to be told that there is 
 a compelling and invariable law of struggle 
 in animated nature in which the weak must 
 always go down before the strong the ill- 
 suited yield to the "fittest." For whose par- 
 ticular amusement this rather savage game 
 was invented or to what use the survivors 
 were to put their "survival" these writers do 
 not seem to have any sort of care. Why, a 
 prize-ring has more meaning than the theater 
 of human life in their view. Not to seem 
 entirely barren, however, in their specula- 
 tions, those ignorers of a divine purpose ap- 
 ply evolution to man in his "survived" stage. 
 He is not by any means done with evolution 
 after merely surviving. That is a slow, ma- 
 jestic if despotic process which is never more 
 
52 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 to let go its grip. Formed into society as a 
 survived species, man must go on evoluting, 
 constantly tending to a state of greater per- 
 fectability and so ad infinitum. That may 
 be all very well for the individuals of the race 
 who may reach that end, but what about 
 those who have passed off the scene, those 
 who are passing now and who will daily 
 pass off through "death's cruel gate'' before 
 tasting the delights of this vague perfectabil- 
 ity of the scientists. Truly a vexation of 
 spirit. And that is all they have to say. 
 And if asked whether the deeds done in the 
 days of his surviving have any bearing per- 
 sonally and as an individual on man's condi- 
 tion after he dies or what is to become of him 
 then they say, "Oh, we are agnostics; you 
 must not ask us anything about these myste- 
 rious things; we do not know, for science has 
 told us we can not know anything about 
 {hem. Science has not discovered any intel- 
 ligent Creator nor any meaning in life be- 
 yond a struggle for existence, never came 
 across such a thing as a soul, nor discovered 
 any trace of any other existence or world 
 for man but this." This is the last word of 
 science, so turn down the lights, the lecture 
 
WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 53 
 
 is over and the audience is left groping and 
 bumping against each other in the dark. 
 
 These unsatisfying results of agnostic 
 science have provoked the protest of which 
 we saw the clear indications in the preceding 
 chapter, and most people \vill allow that it 
 was time, for the credit of common sense, to 
 protest. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 
 
 The frequent failure of the "scientific 
 method" applied to the conditions of life is 
 another reason for the reaction. The scien- 
 tific method, of course makes a tabula rasa of 
 all previous religious traditions. Religion, 
 that is, a knowledge of supernatural things 
 and their relation to us, science has declared 
 unproven and therefore to be set aside and 
 not taken into account in the problems of 
 man's conduct and existence. 
 
 When men, then, in our time, came to 
 think on account of the great inequality of 
 fortune and increase of want, that society 
 should be reconstructed or at least read- 
 justed many schemes were proposed for 
 this end. Most of them proceeded on agnos- 
 tic lines, that is, were purely materialist and 
 secular and omitted all calculation on man's 
 spiritual nature, its demands, its defects and 
 its aspirations. A fair type of these propos- 
 als is to be found in Mr. Bellamy's book, 
 (54) 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 55 
 
 "Looking Backward." He did well to lay the 
 scene of it in the year 2000 when none 
 of his readers will be there to enjoy the 
 delightful happiness of his reconstructed so- 
 ciety. However, we have the advantage of 
 having witnessed some experiments in this 
 reconstruction so brilliantly depicted on 
 paper. It will be interesting and conclusive 
 to give the story of a few of them. 
 
 In 1894, in the city of Brisbane, Queen 
 land, a lame printer named Lane assumed 
 mission to his fellow-trademen and laborers, 
 inviting their co-operation for a new social 
 scheme. He had long been known as a la- 
 bor organizer and a leader in the unions. 
 But nearly all the strikes he had engaged in 
 and helped on so actively had ended badly in 
 the long run for the workers. 
 
 This led him to think it was impossible to 
 improve the social condition of the working- 
 man while surrounded by the class prejudices 
 and the adverse influences of the wealthy in 
 society as at present constituted. Suppose 
 they could be moved away from those sur- 
 roundings and, putting oceans between them 
 and those irritating, stupid class-divisions, and 
 given a chance to found society anew on the 
 
56 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 lines laid down by the clever theorists he had 
 long studied and admired, there was no rea- 
 son why they should not succeed. 
 
 It was a poor compliment to the Queens- 
 land government whose legislation in favor 
 of the workingman had for some time been 
 notorious and by some people deemed far 
 too socialist and radical. But it failed to 
 satisfy the aspirations of Mr. Lane and his 
 friends. He drew up an outline of his proj- 
 ect and addressed it not only to the working- 
 men of Queensland but also to the working- 
 men of all the Australian colonies. As many 
 as could contribute a little to a common fund 
 necessary to start them (I think it was 60), 
 were invited to come away to Paraguay in 
 South America and found a New Australia. 
 Nor was this a step in the dark, for Lane had 
 been in communication with Paraguayan au- 
 thorities who, anxious for immigration and 
 too poor to pay for it like its richer neigh- 
 bors of the Argentina, welcomed his propos- 
 als and offered grants of land in the interior. 
 This was a great inducement, but a greater 
 was the perfect freedom they were to enjoy. 
 No clergyman or preacher of any kind was 
 to be allowed to join. They were to have no 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 57 
 
 church or profess any religion. No lawyers 
 were to come they should have no courts 
 nor police. Community of interests and as 
 much as possible community of goods was to 
 secure agreement and exclusion of all class 
 distinction, guarantee good fellowship and 
 happiness. Well-ordered industry without 
 the slavery and stigma of labor would in- 
 sure prosperity without the unnecessary 
 abundance which had bred the luxury and 
 idleness so corrupting and baneful to the 
 older society. 
 
 Hundreds of applications poured in. The 
 money was freely deposited. Lane chartered 
 a large sailing vessel and had her laden (in 
 Sydney harbor) with provisions and imple- 
 ments requisite for pioneering. So numer- 
 ous had been the applications that all could 
 not be accommodated on the first voyage. A 
 selection of about 300 was made, and in due 
 time with a great flourish from the labor 
 world and an ovation from the unemployed 
 in which Sydney seems always to abound, 
 they set sail for their New Australia beyond 
 the wide Pacific. 
 
 It is a weary way round the Horn to the 
 La Plata, and from the banks of that famous 
 
58 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 river to the site of the New Australia it is a 
 long trek, as they say in Africa. So those 
 of us who felt an interest in watching the re- 
 sult of this extraordinary modern socialist 
 experiment had to possess our souls in pa- 
 tience wnen the good ship was lost to view. 
 It was undoubtedly a remarkable event in 
 our times and full of interest for every one 
 who gave a thought to the great social prob- 
 lem. Those men had gone out to teach 
 the world a realistic lesson in building up the 
 proper kind of human society. They would 
 put to a practical test the favorite paper so- 
 cial theories that of late had got such wide 
 circulation. The world had reason to feel 
 obliged to them. A valuable wisdom was to 
 be learned from the result. 
 
 Nearly a year went by before we had any 
 tidings. Lane's first report of things was fa- 
 vorable enough. All had arrived in safety. 
 The Paraguayan Government had been as 
 good as its word and besides had been very 
 helpful. There was just a hint that great dif- 
 ficulties had to be overcome, there were 
 many things which could not be foreseen nor 
 provided for beforehand. Still it was too 
 soon to be either too sanguine or discour- 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 59 
 
 aged. Meanwhile he recommended that 
 the applicants who could not be accommo- 
 dated on the first trip should now be for- 
 warded with fresh supplies and promised 
 that the newcomers should find everything 
 in good shape and should not have to con- 
 tend with the discomforts of first settlement. 
 
 (By the way, the lands of one of the old 
 Jesuit missions once so famous and flourish- 
 ing had been assigned them.) On this re- 
 port two hundred more, if I rightly remem- 
 ber, set out on the second expedition. 
 
 They were not very long gone when a 
 rumor from another source reached the 
 Sydney press that things were not going 
 smoothly in Lane's Utopia, with a caution to 
 other intending emigrants to await further 
 developments. This caused some uneasi- 
 ness, and the news of the arrival of the vessel 
 in the Plata was anxiously looked for. It 
 came. At Monte Video the new emigrants 
 were surprised to find some members of the 
 first expedition waiting for them. No, they 
 had not come to greet them and show them 
 the way they were waiting for a chance to 
 get back! Alas! poor humanity; it was the 
 old story disagreements, disputes, jeal- 
 
60 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 ousies, schism. The thing was not working, 
 they said, and was not going to work. Lane 
 was a dictator. They fancied they had come 
 out to be rid of that kind of thing, but they 
 were deceived, and so on. 
 
 Having come so far and the complainants 
 being comparatively few, the second batch 
 continued on " their way to see for them- 
 selves. 
 
 There was silence again for another inter- 
 val on the subject in Sydney. Then more 
 rumors found their way into the papers 
 from time to time. Now it was an interview 
 with a returned New Australian, again it 
 was a defense from Lane and explanations 
 from his friends, then recriminations until 
 people did not know what to think. After 
 a while came a consular report that distress 
 was prevailing among the immigrants; that 
 many had found their way to the coast, were 
 destitute among a people whose language 
 was not theirs and were begging- passages 
 home in English ships! 
 
 Last scene in this eventful history: A 
 member of the New South Wales Parliament 
 unfolded to the House so dismal a story of 
 the plight these New Australians found 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 6 1 
 
 themselves in, so far away in a foreign land, 
 that a motion for their relief was generously 
 carried and measures were sanctioned to fa- 
 cilitate their return home. So ended this 
 scheme to reconstruct society on the scien-* 
 tific method of ignoring all knowledge of 
 man's first beginning or last end. The pro- 
 moters forgot one all-important matter, that, 
 whoever would reconstruct society, where it 
 needs reconstruction, should first reconstruct 
 human nature. And science has nothing to 
 say about that. 
 
 The second case is still more instructive, 
 for this second attempt at solving the social 
 trouble was backed by all the resources of 
 well-ordered government and legislative au- 
 thority. It had none of the drawbacks of 
 emigration nor the heart-breaks of distant 
 exile. It was carried out comfortably at 
 home. 
 
 There is no place in the world where sec- 
 ular socialism, that is, a socialism without any 
 reference to God, man's relation to his will 
 or laws, conscience or any supernatural con- 
 sideration whatsoever, has had so fair a field 
 or so much in its favor as in the Australasian 
 Colonies. Universal suffrage, which, in one 
 
62 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 of them at least, includes women, has given 
 the making of the laws into the hands of the 
 so-called common people, because in a new 
 country the common people are for a long 
 time in the immense majority. The policy 
 of the governors sent from England is, as far 
 as I have seen, not to interfere with any do- 
 . mestic legislative arrangements the colonists 
 see fit to make. This legislation, notably in 
 Queensland, South Australia and New Zea- 
 land, is inspired by all the modern secularist 
 social doctrines. Equalization of wealth, 
 leveling class distinctions, expropriation of 
 large landholders, the land for the people, 
 resumption by government of public convey- 
 ance, telegraphic and telephonic service (an 
 immense source of patronage) public funds to 
 be advanced to the people for private enter- 
 prise, chiefly agricultural however, easy mar- 
 riage laws and facilities for divorce, free, 
 secular, and compulsory education, perfect 
 independence in voting, no privilege on ac- 
 count of class or calling, accorded by the 
 State such is the programme. Surely never 
 before had "the people'' such a chance to re- 
 alize their dreams of prosperity and social 
 happiness. Let us see how much of that they 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 63 
 
 have attained. Ten years ought to yield re- 
 sults enough to judge by, and that is about the 
 time the Legislatures have been cleared of the 
 old conservative, exclusive and aristocratic 
 control. I shall take the Colony with which I 
 am best acquainted New Zealand. In 1896 
 there were more prisoners in the immense 
 jails of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, 
 and Dunedin than in 1886. The prison for 
 long penal sentences in the south was full, 
 accommodating from eight to nine hundred 
 convicts. The four large asylums for the in- 
 sane were overcrowded in 1896, the smallest 
 accommodating one thousand patients. In 
 1894, the most dangerous and damaging 
 labor strikes brought trade almost to a stand- 
 still and caused much privation and suffer- 
 ing. These few facts speak for themselves. 
 Popular legislation, so far, left humanity 
 pretty much as it found it, perhaps a trifle 
 worse. Yet "labor members" were numer- 
 ous in the legislative Assembly; into the 
 Council or Upper House were introduced four 
 journeymen, a boiler-maker, a printer, a com- 
 positor and a joiner, while among the Min- 
 isters, the real rulers of the country, were an 
 ex-pedler and ex-miner and "pub" proprietor 
 
64 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 (these two became Prime Ministers) and ex- 
 grocer and a telegraph clerk! 
 
 Their greatest experiment in social equal- 
 ity and an approach to orderly communism 
 was the founding of Village Settlements. This 
 scheme originated in New Zealand and was 
 adopted later in some of the Australian Col- 
 onies. It was a plain attempt to give reality 
 to Mr. Bellamy's prophetic visions and there- 
 fore interesting to follow its fortunes. 
 
 The chief features of the scheme were 
 these : 
 
 Associations were to be formed consisting 
 of not less than twenty persons. 
 
 To each member of the association the 
 government would allot sixty-four acres of 
 land and a money loan of fifty pounds to be 
 repaid at five pounds a year for ten years. 
 Five pounds an acre should be spent each 
 year on improvements. Every association 
 was to be directed by a board of three trustees 
 elected by the villagers from their own body. 
 No member should have any private or sep- 
 arate interest in the land save the possession 
 and use of that portion allotted to him by the 
 Trustees. 
 
 The rules of living and work were very mi- 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 65 
 
 nute. They provided for the kind of mem- 
 bers to be admitted. 
 
 Women were eligible. Asiatics were not. 
 No member was to be admitted without the 
 sanction of the board. The board had power 
 to expel members for disobedience to rule or 
 absence from work without leave. An ap- 
 peal lay from the board's decisions to the body 
 of the members who decided by vote a bare 
 majority sufficing. The board resumed pos- 
 session of the rights of the expelled and even 
 of the deceased, reallotting the property for 
 the benefit of the community. The board 
 was elected for one year and was eligible for 
 re-election. The board's powers were very ex- 
 tensive. They were what Fourier, that patri- 
 arch of Socialism in France three-quarters 
 of a century ago, imagined they ought to be. 
 Probably the promoters of that Parliamen- 
 tary Bill at the antipodes had made acquaint- 
 ance with the views of that fertile dreamer. 
 The board was charged with the responsi- 
 bility of the villagers to the government. 
 They regulated the work to be performed, 
 assigned to each one his task and prescribed 
 the hours. The board managed the cooper- 
 ative stores and fixed the payment-in-kind 
 5 
 
66 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 to be made to each family money currency 
 was to be dispensed with. The functions of 
 mayor, corporation and magistrate were 
 discharged by the board and they were be- 
 sides constituted inspectors of domestic ar- 
 rangements and guardians of the general wel- 
 fare in fact such a Pooh-Bah was never seen 
 as this board of the Village Settlement. 
 
 As regards the earnings it was arranged 
 that two-thirds were to be distributed as divi- 
 dends, the other third reserved for interest 
 and improvements. Any one incapacitated 
 from work without fault w r ould continue to 
 participate to the full share in results. 
 
 The villagers w^ere to show deference and 
 respect to the members of the board. Resi- 
 dence was compulsory. All absences should 
 be duly authorized, save a half-month's holi- 
 day in the year, which was a right. No buy- 
 ing or selling was to be permitted in the set- 
 tlement without the knowledge and sanction 
 of the board. If the board ordered the prof- 
 its made by any individual whether within or 
 without the association to be paid into the 
 common fund, it should be done. All tools 
 and implements were to be looked on as the 
 property of the community. All were to 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 67 
 
 consider themselves as possessing only the 
 use of the land and not proprietors or farmers 
 in the old sense. Every Friday dockets or 
 coupons were to be distributed to each fam- 
 ily entitling the bearer to supplies of all kinds 
 at the stores. Finally, the legal dissolution 
 of the association could be declared by the 
 ''general assembly" of all the members but 
 not before the State was safe-guarded in all 
 its outlay and all debts paid. 
 
 Such were the Village Settlements "in New 
 Zealand and other Antipodean regions 
 praiseworthy effort no doubt to advance the 
 well-being of the people. It is sad to relate 
 they have all been dismal failures, and the 
 reason is not far to seek. 
 
 It would be very blamable to make it a 
 reproach to the promoters who now wield 
 the political power, that they once were ped- 
 lers, publicans or petty clerks. But it is a 
 reproach to these men that they gave the bad 
 example to the people they professed to serve 
 of discarding all religion from their own lives 
 and excluding all consideration of its restrain- 
 ing influences over men, from their manage- 
 ment of public affairs. A late workingman 
 Prime Minister in New Zealand, was once 
 
68 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 notorious as a lecturer on the atheistic plat- 
 form and when he came to die cut off in his 
 prime the whole country knew that to the 
 end he was true to his principles and false to 
 his God. He was buried with civil rites. 
 In those days when that two-handed fallacy 
 and most fallacious of shibboleths liberty of 
 conscience is bandied about, it may be said 
 that no one should find fault with a man's 
 opinions or professions. But in the ordinances 
 of God and in the matter of obedience to His 
 will who can honestly pretend there is 
 liberty of "conscience" or conduct for any- 
 body? And if men assume that there is no 
 God to be taken into account nor any rules 
 laid down I5y Him for human conduct the 
 logic of facts quickly refutes their assump- 
 tion. The failure of agnostic Socialist 
 schemes such as the Colonial Village Settle- 
 ments demonstrates that unless men feel 
 themselves answerable to a higher and 
 greater power than their fellow-men and 
 amenable to a Judge whose reprimand and 
 award reach far beyond this life, they never 
 will be capable of the self-sacrifice, self- 
 restraint and self-denial absolutely necessary 
 for living or laboring together with any ap- 
 proach to peace and concord. 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 69 
 
 So after but a few years of trial most of 
 those Village Settlements have broken up. 
 Quarrels and bickerings, in some cases ac- 
 companied by assault and violence, were re- 
 ported from all sides until the governments 
 are pretty sick of their experiments. 
 
 In South Australia towards the end 1895 it 
 became necessary to institute a parliamentary 
 inquiry into the state of those Village Settle- 
 ments. Thirteen such associations had been 
 there established but two years before. The 
 evidence given before the committee was de- 
 plorable and conclusive. The settlers were 
 found to have fallen into debt all round, to 
 the government, to merchants, to the banks. 
 The board charged settlers with idleness and 
 incapacity, the settlers charged the Board 
 with despotism. In some of the villages with 
 not more than two hundred or three hundred 
 inhabitants, distinct parties had already been 
 formed as inveterate in opposition as any 
 Tory to Whig or Radical to Liberal-Unionist. 
 Alas! poor humanity. Another strange fea- 
 ture appeared. Nearly all the settlers before 
 they entered the association were ardent dis- 
 ciples of the lecturers under the "red flag" 
 and readers of the abounding communistic 
 
70 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 press. The Village Settlement was the beau 
 ideal of these theorists the practical real- 
 ity of their doctrines. A short trial brought 
 a rude undeceiving. One man was heard 
 to declare that for years he had been 
 an advocate of "the land for the people"- 
 but now he preferred to believe in "the land 
 for Tom O'Grady" without "the people." 
 Another had been eager to live where every 
 one was to be a brother and sister, but now 
 he thought it more peaceable to be a friend- 
 less orphan, and so on. They all agreed that 
 somehow the thing would not work nor was 
 it ever likely to work in the way laid down 
 for them. 
 
 I have dwelt on these somewhat dry details 
 but not without a purpose, because I mean 
 to show presently how in contrast to the sci- 
 entific method these same conditions of com- 
 mon life are actually being fulfilled under our 
 very eyes, if we would only use them to see, 
 and have been successfully fulfilled for cen- 
 turies under the religious method and by 
 force of the supernatural motive. 
 
 But before entering upon that and as it is 
 a matter of present public interest I wish here 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 71 
 
 to notice the still broader and bolder experi- 
 ment in the "land question" which these same 
 socialist and agnostic legislators of the An- 
 tipodes have entered upon. In 1894 the 
 New Zealand ministry began a trial of that 
 Land Nationalization scheme advocated by 
 Mr. Henry George, of which the world has 
 heard so much talk of late. 
 
 They passed a "perpetual lease" bill by 
 which land in New Zealand shall henceforth 
 be held by tenant-occupiers only, the State 
 possessing the fee-simple and becoming 
 the grand landlord of all the country by de- 
 grees. 
 
 The "limitation of holdings" was another 
 important measure. It provided that for the 
 future no one person shall acquire more than 
 four hundred acres of purely agricultural 
 land, or more than eight hundred acres of 
 land part agricultural, part pastoral, or more 
 than two thousand acres of purely pastoral 
 land. This measure is a step, nay, a stride, 
 towards the equal partition of the land among 
 the people and aimed at the "squatter" or 
 large station-owning class. The last election, 
 1896, was looked on as the most important 
 ever held in New Zealand, because during 
 
72 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 this term of office immense tracts of Crown 
 lands will fall into the hands of the govern- 
 ment formerly leased under "squatter" as- 
 cendency at the merest nominal rent to large 
 pastoralists in addition to what they had al- 
 ready purchased, at a cheap figure also. It 
 was therefore of immense interest to the large 
 station-owners that they should have a voice 
 in deciding whether those old leases should 
 be renewed or not, while it was perfectly well 
 known that if the promoters of the new land 
 laws the party then in power got in again 
 those leases would most certainly not be re- 
 newed. It may be imagined how eagerly 
 both sides prepared for the fight. It was the 
 last great effort of the Conservative party 
 which for some time has been in a hopeless 
 minority. Like the Tories in England who 
 fell back on the rump of the dissident Liberals 
 and became Liberal-Unionists in order to re- 
 main in power, the Conservatives were ready 
 to ally themselves with any old party that 
 would give them a chance of a majority. 
 They adopted the platform of the liquor Pro- 
 hibitionists with somewhat wry faces it 
 may be supposed. They also gained some 
 strength from those, and they were many, 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 73 
 
 whose confidence was shaken by some recent 
 financial blundering of the popular party's 
 ministry. But to no avail. Last November 
 they were defeated at the polls and those im- 
 portant expiring leases are at the mercy of 
 the land nationalizes. But it was not alone 
 for renewed leases the large land-holders were 
 fighting, it was for their very existence, for 
 there was yet another land measure passed by 
 the Popular party which affected them most 
 seriously. It was the "progressive land tax" 
 bill, which provides that taxes will go on in- 
 creasing heavier and heavier on every thou- 
 sand acres of pastoral land above the pre- 
 scribed number. -It is another way of ex- 
 propriating the big land-owners. Coming- 
 together with the large outlay necessitated 
 by -the rabbit-pest it has made large station 
 owning a losing and ruinous occupation. 
 Some proprietors have already sold out to the 
 government, the only available customer, 
 and all would be willing to do so and leave 
 the country if they could. Thus the work- 
 ingman's government will be ultimately free 
 to parcel out the land among the working- 
 men. The outcome of this very courageous 
 legislation can not of course be fully foreseen, 
 
74 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 for it is only the next generation will be wit- 
 ness of final results. But one experiment al- 
 ready made by the government with an estate 
 purchased from dissatisfied owners does. not 
 augur fair things for their further ventures 
 in the future. It is now widely rumored 
 that the government has not found the 
 State farmers of this Cheviot Estate any less 
 troublesome, more honest or happier than 
 the village settlers. The truth is those new 
 legislative reformers of humanity are at- 
 tempting the impossible task of promoting 
 the contentment and happiness of men with- 
 out improving that human nature from 
 which all their miseries spring. The genius 
 of the "scientific method/' which entirely ig- 
 nores the cultivation and correction of that 
 human nature, is deluding these obstinate 
 but well-meaning politicians of agnostic so- 
 cialism. A whole generation has now issued 
 from the free and secular . schools founded 
 also by them. And what result can be 
 looked for from pupils who never once within 
 their walls had heard inculcated the only ef- 
 fective principle of moral restraint and self- 
 control nor ever heard mentioned the name 
 or existence of the supreme Arbiter of hu- 
 
AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 75 
 
 man conduct? In some schools indeed such 
 things have been mentioned only however 
 to be sneered at by atheist teachers, of whom 
 there are a very large number in these State 
 schools. The evidences accumulating from 
 every side of perverse and vicious conduct 
 
 demonstrate the utter inability of those 
 
 - 
 
 purely secular experiments in Socialism to 
 meet the aspirations of humanity for a more 
 tolerable mundane existence. No wonder 
 people are beginning to clamor for some 
 more successful solution. 
 
 It will be well worth while then in the next 
 chapter to show that this very socialism and 
 communism so much advocated in these 
 latter days and so often abortively attempted 
 by some men, are not only not impossible and 
 unattainable but have for centuries been re- 
 alized and actually exist with the happiest re- 
 sults in the world of to-day. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 
 
 I have before my mind a body of men in 
 the world at this present moment numbering 
 roughly some twelve thousand associates. 
 They are drawn in most part from the poorer 
 classes. They are strangers to each other in 
 the sense that they come not from the same 
 place or even from the same country they 
 are of many nations. There is no distinc- 
 tion of rank or class among them save what 
 good order requires. The places of author- 
 ity are filled by election and, in the minor 
 trusts, by appointment. All whether in au- 
 thority or not are equal before the general 
 regulations or rule of life. They possess 
 property, places of abode and means of sub- 
 sistence, but everything is in common. No 
 individual possesses anything in his own 
 right, yet all have the use of what is owned. 
 They may inherit from relatives and others as 
 individuals, but such inheritance may be used 
 only for some good purpose and by permis- 
 (76) 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 77 
 
 sion. They can however will it back to 
 whom they please outside their own body. 
 They work, not as they please, but only as 
 work is assigned them. The main employ- 
 ment is of one kind, they teach mostly the 
 poor. They teach too those who can pay, 
 to be able to teach more of the poor who can 
 not. They also instruct the ignorant of the 
 adult working classes. After that they do all 
 their own domestic work. Beyond the mar- 
 keting and cooking and cleaning up, that is 
 very little, each one in his private life being 
 his own servant. They are ready however at 
 all times for any deed of neighborly benevo- 
 lence that may lie at their hands to do. They 
 have joined the ambulances in time of war. 
 They have their own times for relaxation and 
 moderate enjoyment, but the pleasures which 
 the world pursues with so much zest and cost 
 concern them not. They are never permitted 
 to be unoccupied. Their day is of seventeen 
 hours and minutely regulated. Their night is 
 of seven hours from 9 P. M. to 4 A. M. or 10 
 P. M_ to 5 A. M. in some climates. They 
 are^lovers of the soft life. They live to- 
 gether in groups and call each other 
 "brothers." They are interchangeable from 
 
78 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 group to group and though they are scattered 
 widely through the world all follow one and 
 the same rule and obey one voice. At stated 
 times they hold general assemblies, each 
 house electing a representative delegate. 
 They have thus existed for over two hundred 
 years. They join young, live long, and die 
 in the ranks. They renew the dead by ever 
 increasing volunteers. In sickness and old 
 age they receive a constant and tender care. 
 They must needs like this life and must deem 
 it happiest and best for them to abide in it so 
 long. This is a living and wonderful fact for 
 all men to see. 
 
 I have in view again a body of women in 
 the world to-day numbering some fourteen 
 thousand. They differ from the men, just 
 alluded to, in that they are drawn from all 
 classes of society, from families of wealth and 
 title down to the daughters of the poor. 
 They differ too in that their works have a 
 range as wide as human wants. They tend 
 leper hospitals or smallpox patients or yel- 
 low fever cases. They teach fashionable 
 academies or instruct little duskv natives un- 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 79 
 
 der the tropics. They go under fire on 
 the battle-field to aid the wounded or into 
 the slums of towns to dress the sores of the 
 uncleanly sick and charm away by soothing 
 words the sullen despair of the suffering 
 poor. They give lessons in painting, lec- 
 tures on physical science or preside at an or- 
 gan. They cook like professional chefs, 
 wash the pans and kettles, launder and scrub 
 the house. They train the workman's child 
 to lace-making and embroidery, short-hand, 
 and typewriting, or take charge of a lunatic 
 asylum or a female prison. They have open 
 homes for the friendless young of their sex, 
 and shelters with a sister's welcome for the 
 fallen and unfortunate, fourteen thousand 
 of them, busy ever at all these w r orks 
 all over the world! And all that work 
 they do for nothing. There is no personal 
 gain they get no money for it individually. 
 There is no rank or division of class among 
 them. The countess and the peasant work 
 side by side. They wear the same costume 
 the same plain and rather coarse garb. 
 You can scarce tell who is who, for all are 
 trained to gentle manners, and when they 
 want to spend a few pennies they often laugh 
 
8o THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 together to find they have not got them. 
 Though they have gone apart from their 
 own kin to live with strangers they have 
 homes in common wherever they go and 
 they call each other "sister" which they truly 
 are to each other in will and deed. They 
 rise at 4 o'clock at all seasons and in 
 every climate, and there is scarcely a climate 
 where they are not found, and they retire at 
 9 P. M. Through their long day they 
 agree to be busy, . always busy. They agree 
 to be cheerful too to help others through 
 sorrow. Their government or plan of man- 
 agement is very simple but very perfect. 
 They are all subject to one head and that 
 is a man. He is called the director. But 
 he is not absolute or despotic. There are 
 others to whom he is responsible, and he 
 guides only by long-established and fully 
 accepted rule. There is ample and full pro- 
 tection for the weakest and youngest among 
 them. Brave and wonderful little army! 
 Death claims them as other mortals but their 
 ranks never seem to thin. Human hearts 
 beat beneath their blue serge robe women's 
 hearts with all her tenderness and yearnings 
 but disciplined. They, too, have their 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 8 1 
 
 general assemblies now and again and then 
 it is wonderful to hear them tell the blended 
 story of their world-wide experience, for the 
 great human drama has been unfolded before 
 them in the by-ways of life the fierce pas- 
 sions at play, the hopes, the fears, the griefs, 
 and joys of the human struggle they have 
 witnessed it all and borne part in the action. 
 Among themselves they are republican in 
 simplicity and equality, and if one is given 
 charge, as must needs be, she is obliged to call 
 herself the servant to obviate distressing airs 
 and keep her humble. For women are 
 prone, perhaps more so than men, to men's 
 great weakness, which Shakespeare so finely 
 censures 
 
 "Man, proud man, 
 Clothed in a little brief authority, 
 Doth play such tricks before high heaven 
 As make the angels weep, ' ' 
 
 or laugh perhaps would be better. They 
 are guarded against that and are not per- 
 mitted to distress each other or either amuse 
 or grieve the angels. They choose never to 
 call anything their own they say our shoes, 
 and if things get mixed in the washing 
 they do not mind, provided they fit they 
 6 
 
82 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 put them on. They sit at the same table 
 and eat the same food, what one has all 
 have. What could be more perfect commun- 
 ism than this? Have you ever heard of 
 socialism more complete ? Nor is this 
 a state of things they are merely experi- 
 menting on. Their association came into 
 existence about the time that London was 
 burning and was made desolate by its great 
 plague. And for these two centuries and 
 more without dispute or quarrel this same 
 life has been lived by multitudes of those 
 weak and gentle women. They must have 
 found it good to live so. The stage of ex- 
 periment is over long ago, and at this hour 
 there are some fourteen thousand who live 
 so still and make no noise about it either. 
 
 Again I have before me yet another body 
 who have gone apart from their kindred to 
 live a similar life in their own fashion. It is 
 a body of men. I have lately seen it stated 
 that at the present moment they number 
 about fifteen thousand. They differ from 
 the former bodies in that they are drawn 
 from the aristocracy of talent. Except a 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 83 
 
 minority of lay-associates who do the lower 
 order of w r ork but who yet enjoy to the full 
 equality of membership and share in the 
 common life, all the rest are gentlemen 
 highly educated and accomplished. This 
 element is admittedly the hardest to deal 
 with in the matter of socialism, for "knowl- 
 edge puffeth up" as a wise writer said long 
 ago and nothing puffs up like it. Yet 
 three hundred and forty years have gone by 
 since they first came together and without 
 any friction from within they have succeeded 
 in merging self in the common number and 
 have lived in true fraternity, equality and 
 that liberty they like best. No matter how 
 much the body gains in w r ealth or acquires 
 in property it does not make any individual 
 among them one doit or dime the richer. 
 No member wants or cares to own anything, 
 not even the coat or hat he may be wearing, 
 and were he asked to take them off and let 
 another have them, he would do so and re- 
 ceive others though inferior. There are no 
 parties among them nor any private enter- 
 prise or interest to be pursued. All yield 
 themselves voluntarily to the strictest disci- 
 pline and each receives his orders what to do 
 
84 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 or where to go, even to the most distant 
 place, without* a murmur. They have com- 
 mon homes and a common table and like the 
 others only seven hours' rest. Their employ- 
 ments are very varied but their main work is 
 secondary and higher grade teaching next 
 to having knowledge is the pleasure of im- 
 parting it, and the years are long that they 
 devote to its acquisition. However there is 
 this peculiarity to their body. After the 
 general and thorough training, to which all 
 are submitted, has been completed, then 
 great latitude is allowed to individual bents 
 and tastes. One man has a taste for oratory 
 well, an orator let him be and give him all 
 the time that the drudgery and toil of ora- 
 tory requires. 
 
 Another man likes astronomy they build 
 him an observatory and stock it with instru- 
 ments. They have three very famous ob- 
 servatories at present, at Rome, Manilla, and 
 Havana. They will let their man go in 
 charge of government astronomical expedi- 
 tions. One died at the Cape in such employ- 
 ment not long ago. 
 
 Another man has a talent for writing let 
 him w r rite by all means and have every facil- 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 85 
 
 ity for publication. Or they found a monthly 
 magazine and let him edit it. 
 
 Another loves teaching they find him "a 
 chair" and make him a life-long professor. 
 
 Another thinks he can manage the strange 
 peoples of distant countries they send him 
 to China, Korea, and Japan. 
 
 Another has a tact for civilizing savages 
 they plant him among the very worst speci- 
 mens to be found in Northwest Australia 
 and Borneo. 
 
 Another has the social gift and will carry 
 weight in society they give him a good 
 coat arid let him dine out. 
 
 Another has a turn for the physical sci- 
 ences they build him a laboratory, supply 
 him with chemicals and a microscope, and 
 let him correspond with "learned societies." 
 
 Thus the widest room is given to individ- 
 uality, yet from one governing hand go out 
 the threads of the wide network that holds 
 all in the unity of the common life. When- 
 ever and from wheresoever they are called 
 back, they come. Wherever sent, they go. 
 In declining years or strength they have a 
 welcome home and a brother's care. When 
 they die they make no will, they have noth- 
 
86 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 ing to leave even their old clothes are not 
 theirs. Did Marx or Blanc or Fourier or 
 Bellamy or George or Wm Morris ever 
 formulate a more complete socialism or com- 
 munism than that? The schemes that these 
 men have sketched for us remain mostly on 
 paper. When tried they break down. But 
 this body is a living reality, an achievement, a 
 success! Why is this? The answer is very 
 simple. Those writers confine their view 
 solely to this life, but the men and women I 
 have described, work both for this life and 
 the next or rather work through this life 
 with a view to that they believe eternal. 
 
 The self-restraint and the curbing of all 
 self-seeking necessary that men should live 
 together in peace while pursuing a common 
 end find no motive strong enough to sustain 
 them in the mere temporal Advantage of a 
 little more security or temporal happiness to 
 be attained. This is a matter of fact. It 
 has been proved by the failure of the trials 
 essayed over and over again. 
 
 The socialist Village Settlements in the 
 Australian Colonies just described are a 
 notorious and very recent example. It is 
 well known that in other places groups of 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 87 
 
 people wearied by the aimless frivolity of 
 what is called society and pained by the 
 seemingly unjust inequalities of life, now and 
 again, have gone apart to try the experi- 
 ment of the common life on purely secular 
 lines. The New England Brook Farm com- 
 munity (disciples of Fourierism and Mar- 
 garet Fuller) were the wonder and the talk of 
 the world for a brief season and ended in the 
 pitying smiles of many. 
 
 The biography of the late Lawrence Oli- 
 phant supplies another and very inter- 
 esting instance, though the story is sad 
 enough. Readers of his works can not fail 
 to recognize his brilliant gifts of mind and to 
 admire the grace and fluency of a style that 
 entitles him to a high place among the writ- 
 ers of our century. Readers of his biog- 
 raphy will w r onder that a man like him born 
 to good social position, attaining by his tal- 
 ents high rank in the diplomatic service of 
 his country, eagerly bid for and largely paid 
 as a journalist, should have abandoned a 
 career of such brilliant promise and, in un- 
 rest of soul, sought the happier way of a 
 higher and unworldly life. But to relin- 
 quish wealth and high position, to brave 
 
88 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 public opinion, to bear the pitying comments 
 of friends, above all to lead his young and 
 accomplished life-partner into his venture, 
 displays at least the courage of sincerity. It 
 all reads like some far-off old religious ro- 
 mance rather than a true story of real life 
 from our worldliest of centuries. 
 
 But the strangest and saddest part is the 
 singular choice he made of a guide to -that 
 hard and mystic way. This was a certain 
 American, an ardent preacher of the higher 
 life and the better way. It is almost 
 unaccountable how a man of Oliphant's in- 
 telligence and worldly experience should 
 have fallen so easily under the influence of 
 that person, who, as the sequel showed, was 
 more of an adventurer, if not a mountebank, 
 than a spiritual enthusiast. Yet so it was, 
 even to the extent of utter self-abandonment. 
 He and his young wife accompanied him 
 to America and having made over to him all 
 their money and even their personal effects, 
 were put to work by him on his communistic 
 farm. His despotism over them went the 
 length not only of imposing the rudest and 
 most drudging toil upon those refined peo- 
 ple but of separating them and forbidding 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 89 
 
 them even to speak to each other. But their 
 fortitude soon gave way and they came out 
 of this painful and humiliating experience 
 shattered in health and fortune and survived 
 it only a very few years. 
 
 On the other hand, the thousands of peo- 
 ple, banded together under similar condi- 
 tions, in the three associations I have de- 
 scribed, succeed and persevere unto the end, 
 happy in their undertaking. 
 
 That description is no fancy sketch. 
 
 These associations are living facts visible 
 before the world and have names. The first 
 is an Order of French origin known as the 
 Brothers of the Christian Schools, commonly 
 called in English "The Christian Brothers." 
 The second, also of French foundation, is the 
 congregation of the "Filles de la Charite" 
 the famous Sisters of Charity those with 
 the great, white, wing-like bonnets supposed 
 to be adopted from the Picardy or Norman 
 peasant head-dress of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. And the third is the celebrated Order 
 whose members write the formidable S. J. 
 after their names Societas Jesu Jesuits. 
 
 One of the moral \vonders of the world is 
 the Noviciate of the Sisters of Charity in the 
 
90 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 Rue du Bac touching on the wicked Latin 
 quarter the seminaire as they call it, semi- 
 narium, in spiritual botany the nursery, where 
 the seeds of piety in every variety are planted 
 under cover, and its tender shoots sprout in 
 warm shelter from passion's storms. If you 
 are respectable and get yourself authenti- 
 cated you can have a peep. Under an old 
 portico in that rather dingy street you enter 
 one of the largest private properties in the 
 heart of Paris. When I saw the Novices it 
 was on a procession clay. They numbered 
 then between five and six hundred. It was 
 a wonderful sight. The bloom of youth was 
 on them all and beauty's bloom on many 
 the usual slender proportion of it as in any 
 crowd of the sex. They were dressed all 
 alike half cap, half old-fashioned bonnet 
 a fijg.chu and plain black gown like decent, 
 cleanly, French country girls. They were 
 of many nationalities of all ranks. The 
 neighboring, aristocratic Faubourg St. Ger- 
 main was even represented. It was delightful 
 to hear that immense chorus of young voices 
 in the hymns. What a holocaust to heaven 
 in those young lives. They were here prepar- 
 ing, in innocence and purity of life, for the 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 9! 
 
 great renouncement. Out from that train- 
 ing cot would go those carrier-doves of the 
 Divine Compassion to minister to all human- 
 ity's miseries. For two hundred years they 
 have been going into every clime, across 
 many seas. They are going still, if indeed 
 they have not been evicted by those noble 
 persecutors of all that is good, messieurs the 
 municipal councillors of Paris. 
 
 A little farther dow r n on the same 
 "Rive Ganche" near the "Invalides" you 
 may see a similar, if not quite as pic- 
 turesque a sight in the Noviciate of the 
 Freres des Ecoles. It is certain they 
 have been disturbed, drafted into the com- 
 mon barrack-room to serve their military 
 term by the votes of those "emanci- 
 pators of the race" the Republican deputies 
 of modern France. There were not enough 
 soldiers without disturbing those devoted in- 
 structors of the poor! Will any one solve 
 the mystery why so many men and women 
 are found to hate, storm, and rage against 
 everything that is really pure and good? 
 If any one doubts there is a devil let him 
 ponder that fact. Left and right of that 
 river Seine there is heaped up as much hu- 
 
92 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 man defiance of God and depravity as could 
 well cumber any given equal space of this 
 earth's surtace. Wedged in between les 
 extremes se toucti&nt" you have those par- 
 terres of virtue's finest flower to stay the sus- 
 pended sword of the Divine Avenger. 
 
 The Noviciates of the Great Society S. J. 
 are everywhere. There is one for each of its 
 twenty or so of Provings. 
 
 But these three orders by no means ex- 
 haust the list of those who seek their happi- 
 ness and welfare in the common life even at 
 the present day. I selected them as types. 
 They are not even as old as some others 
 which still exist. One has been thirteen cen- 
 turies in existence. Millions of men have 
 passed through its ranks in that time and 
 hundreds of thousands of women through 
 those of the female branch, dwelling in per- 
 fect communism and purest socialism. This 
 is the famous Order of the Benedictines. 
 The Cistercians and Carthusians date from 
 a thousand years back. The Friars Minor, 
 the Friars Preachers and women's Orders of 
 Carmelites, Franciscans and Poor Clares, six 
 hundred or seven hundred years. 
 
 Far from decreasing since the times of the 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 93 
 
 so-called Reformers of the sixteenth century 
 these associations of pious communism have 
 had so prolific a growth that the Council of 
 the Vatican had it on its programme to de- 
 vise a scheme for their limitation and the 
 amalgamation at least of those whose founda- 
 tion \vas only of comparatively recent date. 
 And they all succeed ! It is surely worth 
 the while of our agnostic socialists to in- 
 quire into the secret of that success. If they 
 are sincere it ought to be of the highest in- 
 terest to them to know that a socialism and a 
 communism in the best meaning of those 
 words, well regulated and successfully con- 
 ducted, do exist and are actually practised at 
 this very hour and have existed so for cen- 
 turies. This they may see if they but use 
 their eyes, and may moreover learn the se- 
 cret of this amazing fact. For the men and 
 women who have gone apart to tread the 
 peaceful happy way of self-renouncement 
 have enrolled themselves in no secret socie- 
 ties. The conditions of their lives are per- 
 fectly well known. Their friends and rela- 
 tives, from whom they are by no means sev- 
 ered either in converse or affection, know 
 perfectly how they live, why they so live and 
 
94 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 are quite at ease as to their conduct and wel- 
 fare arid their sanity. There is a certain 
 class of people who do not weigh this latter 
 fact sufficiently when they officiously display 
 their fears and anxiety about conventual life. 
 It should make them feel they are meddling 
 in a business which is the immediate concern 
 of those friends and relatives to attend to, 
 and who do attend to it and are perfectly sat- 
 isfied that it is all well with those who are near 
 and dear to them. This fact is also a crush- 
 ing refutation of the many coarse and gratu- 
 itous assertions on this subject that rest as a 
 blur and blot on many a page of English lit- 
 erature for the last three hundred years. 
 
 Our agnostic theorists and unsuccessful ex- 
 perimentalists in the common life will find 
 that those other men and women have lived 
 it and died in it because above and beyond 
 this theater of human passions, weaknesses 
 and contentions they lifted eyes of faith and 
 held in vie\v as their goal the life that ends 
 not and knows no strife. 
 
 And they may rest assured if they will 
 only read the lesson of facts, that all other 
 communism and socialism not founded in a 
 faith like that are simply impossible. There 
 is no proof so convincing as experience. 
 
INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 95 
 
 And if there is one experience more invari- 
 able in this world than another it is that mo- 
 tives of faith have here succeeded where bare 
 human efforts have always failed. 
 
 In traveling the highways of the world I 
 have been surprised to find how many of our 
 brethren separated in the various sects ' are 
 strangely uninformed and misinformed about 
 the great religious Orders actually existing 
 in the Catholic Church. Whenever I at- 
 tempted to describe them they listened with 
 either an air of incredulity or as if the tale 
 were of some long-past romance. As for 
 the many people who "believe in nothing" I 
 might as well have talked to them of the plan- 
 etary beings of Mars or Neptune so little did 
 they suspect that there were fellow-men 
 around them leading such wondrous lives. 
 
 For such as these this chapter will not be 
 amiss. "But surely you do not expect all 
 the world to become Jesuits and nuns to im- 
 prove their social condition?" By no means, 
 but what I do assert is that every experiment 
 in socialism that is not founded, in a modi- 
 fied degree of course, on the supernatural 
 motives that inspire these great Orders is 
 sure to end in disruption and confusion. 
 Without religion it could not endure. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCI- 
 ENCE. 
 
 If the scientists who ignore revelation have 
 presented us with only a very uninviting and 
 somewhat slimy account of our origin and 
 are entirely mute before the question of what 
 is to become of us, let us see if they can sat- 
 isfy or reconcile us to the state of things we 
 have to endure in our intermediate passage 
 between our cradle and our grave. The 
 human life transitory gift of each one of us, 
 brief and sure to end that is the problem of 
 the highest interest to men. 
 
 Few there are who fail to feel how trying 
 and puzzling are its varying moods and 
 varied fortunes. "Moving accidents," there 
 are, "by flood and field" perils, seeming in- 
 justices, fearful cruelties, unfair inequalities, 
 pain, sorrow, suffering, race antagonisms, 
 human slaughter by human hands until the 
 earth is soaked in blood and human history 
 (96) 
 
QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. 97 
 
 grows red as we read. Men want to know 
 Why should these things be? 
 
 In another aspect this planet of ours looks 
 like a huge penal settlement adrift upon the 
 sky. While all men are born to work of 
 some kind, nine-tenths of them are con- 
 demned to hard labor for life. The lot of 
 the majority is a rough one and their condi- 
 tion is prolonged poverty, while everywhere 
 absolute pauperism is more or less to be 
 found. Suffering and sorrow with impartial 
 hand knock at every door. There is no 
 house be it ever so grand or ever so wretched 
 that has not or has not had its secret sorrow 
 and its chamber of sickness, pain, and death. 
 
 Why has it been so ordered and who has 
 ordered it so? Surely it was not man. 
 
 Each one's gift of life is a troublesome 
 thing. It demands constant thought and 
 care. Any relenting or neglect means star- 
 vation, dirt, suffering, and disease. Each 
 minute part of the bodily organization must 
 be ministered to and some of its functions 
 are most humiliating. What is it in our 
 nature that makes some things painfully and 
 shamefully repugnant to us with no choice 
 but submission to them? Life is threatened 
 7 
 
98 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 with fearful dangers. Think of the storms 
 that rage, the hurricanes, tornadoes, the 
 choking, blinding blizzards of winter, the 
 sun-stroke of the summer-time, earthquakes, 
 tidal waves (thirty-five thousand people de- 
 stroyed in Japan the other day), of the anni- 
 hilating lightning. When "the sea gives up 
 its dead" that went down in doomed ships, 
 what a host it will be! When the graves of 
 earth shall yawn how many shriveled corpses 
 will bear the scars of violent ends! 
 
 Think of the fierce beasts and poison- 
 bearing reptiles that lurk upon the earth 
 where the sun shines hottest the prowling 
 tiger that carries off between his powerful 
 jaws living, agonizing Indian villagers to de- 
 vour them at leisure in his lair, and the other 
 "tiger of the sea" that bites through bones 
 and flesh at a single snap the deaf adder of 
 the sugar plantations, whose swift sting paral- 
 yzes from head to foot with electric speed 
 the sword-fish that pierces a body and lashes 
 it to death upon the waves the stinging sea 
 slug that benumbs the swimmer, and, strang- 
 est beast of all, the man-eating man the can- 
 nibal of the Pacific seas! 
 
 Think of the wasting, desolating plagues 
 
QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. 99 
 
 and epidemics, cholera, yellow fever, bubonic 
 plague. Men did not invent such things 
 surely and while they are laying their vic- 
 tims low in agony, no hand from outside is 
 interposed to check their cruel course. 
 
 Perhaps the saddest feature of this world, 
 and fraught with ever-threatening danger, are 
 the inter-racial hatreds and aversions. Three 
 hundred millions of Chinese call us "foreign 
 devils" and "barbarians," and we call them in 
 equally complimentary contempt "chinkies" 
 and "chows." Two hundred and odd mil- 
 lions of Mahomedans curse us for "Chris- 
 tian dogs" and W T C call them "unspeakable 
 Turks," and though their creed is "death to 
 the Christians," of which they often give 
 startling illustrations as recently in Armenia, 
 yet when they ask for loans of money we have 
 witnessed the strange paradox of Christians 
 pouring millions of gold into their treasury 
 oh no, not for charity or peace-offerings 
 but for greed of the high interest offered, and 
 the wily Turk pats those fat bags of money 
 and says, "Ha, this will keep those Christian 
 dogs from biting they can not now hurt our 
 Moslem nation for fear of losing all this 
 money we have them safe in 'Turkish 
 
100 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 bonds !' ' and so he slays Armenian and 
 Greek and the bonded "powers" stand 
 around looking very foolish. 
 
 There are, besides, three or four hundred 
 millions of Brahmins and Buddhists as far 
 apart from us and all the rest as if they 
 came from a different Creator. 
 
 And when those race aversions reach an 
 acute stage, as they do from time to time, and 
 the races come into contact, the spirit of 
 human slaughter broods over men and the 
 earth takes on the appearance of a pandemo- 
 nium where the battles rage. At this hour 
 what we know as Christendom, is one vast 
 military camp. Its component nations, in 
 dread and distrust of each other, are armed 
 with the deadliest weapons yet invented, and 
 fleets of fearful engines of destruction ride 
 the seas. 
 
 Some men, seized with a just alarm, are agi- 
 tating for peaceful arbitration as a substitute 
 for war. But mankind and human passions, 
 being what they are, they agitate for a Utopia. 
 The godless recklessness which is a product of 
 the ''scientific method" and which is so gen- 
 eral in our times, makes war inevitable and its 
 total abolition but a fond dream. Besides in 
 
QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. IOI 
 
 such a state of society as the present, it is not 
 without its uses. 
 
 But why should all this be? 
 
 And why worse even than this is it that 
 as soon as men begin to congregate in towns 
 and cities almqst the first public structure 
 they erect is a jail to protect themselves from 
 violent outbreaks of the vicious inclinations 
 and the unruly behavior of their fellow-citi- 
 zens? Jails are everywhere and always well 
 filled. Depravity and vice haunt the out- 
 skirts of every aggregate of humanity, and 
 men have to tax themselves enormously for 
 protection from their troubling and pervad- 
 ing presence. 
 
 Besides being a public danger the ruin 
 brought on individuals by moral evil is in evi- 
 dence on every side and the petty, hateful pas- 
 sions that men bring into play against each 
 embitter many a life and mar the peace of so- 
 cial existence. 
 
 It would be pessimism to say that human 
 life was made up only of this dismal catalogue 
 of woes, and pessimism is false, and because 
 it is false it is also wrong. Much happiness 
 is attainable and attained, and few indeed 
 there are who do not taste at some time the 
 
102 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 gladness of life. But iliere are those ugly 
 facts that press us on every side, real and un- 
 deniable, and there is no reflective mind that 
 does not impatiently ask Why, why should 
 these terrible things be? 
 
 And what answer have the agnostic scien- 
 tists to give? Practically none they have to 
 notice them of course, but their explanations 
 bear no message of comfort to men, they lead 
 rather to despair. 
 
 The arch-agnostic Mr. Huxley confessed 
 himself so puzzled by the woes of humanity 
 that he considered the happiest result would 
 be for some "friendly comet to collide with 
 this wretched earth and end up the whole 
 thing in destruction!" 
 
 Mr. Carlyle is represented by his biog- 
 rapher, Mr. Froude, as going about per- 
 petually moaning and groaning over the 
 "black confusion" of things on which, by the 
 way, his thirty published volumes the re- 
 sult of his much-lauded Golden Silence 
 shed not the smallest light for any one. 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer wraps himself in the 
 clouds of the dark "Unknowable" and can 
 not, of course, pretend to trace to any cause 
 or permissive will what is beyond the dispen- 
 
QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. IO3 
 
 sation and control of men. The disciples of 
 Mr. Darwin and the legion developers of his 
 evolution theory tell us, as a rule, that all these 
 cruel facts proceed, in blind and powerless 
 obedience, from certain fixed law r s whose end 
 is to aid in the indefinite process of this great 
 evolution. All the facts of life are normal 
 and natural, and under the exigency of law 
 are working toward some final emancipation. 
 Whether this explanation honestly satisfies 
 themselves is their own affair. It is but poor 
 comfort to the actual and antecedent suffer- 
 ers in this "Juggernaut" procession. There 
 is no man who does not feel that his is a per- 
 sonality distinct and separate from every one 
 else all his own. "What is to become of 
 me?" has a most intimate and exclusive inter- 
 est for each individual person independently 
 of every one else, and it is profoundly disap- 
 pointing to be told that this personality, of 
 which I am so intimately conscious, is but an 
 irresponsible factor in the vast process of 
 evolution. An atom of a great aggregate 
 borne upon an irresistible tide whither no 
 one knows. Over and above this dismal 
 spoliation of our personality, no information, 
 as already stated, is given us as to how we 
 
104 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 came to be cast into this whirling evolution, 
 what good it is to do or what benefit is ulti- 
 mately to be derived from it. 
 
 Thus the "scientific method" has left the 
 world in a very unsatisfactory plight and it is 
 little wonder that confidence in its high 
 promises of emancipating thought, liberating 
 the human mind from superstitions, and ele- 
 vating our intelligence, has weakened consid- 
 erably. 
 
 But if the teachings of the "scientific 
 method" be cheerless and unsatisfying to the 
 individual, the logical results of its influence 
 on private conduct are disastrous to society. 
 If men believed about themselves what they 
 read in the agnostic science-books and pro- 
 ceeded to act on what they learn from them, 
 the world in the long run would become well- 
 nigh uninhabitable. The First Cause of our 
 being, it is there stated, is not only unknown 
 but unknowable and the final cause just as un- 
 discoverable; it then becomes at once clear to 
 men that they have no final responsibility for 
 their conduct to any one. An unknown au- 
 thority is no restraint on conduct, to a 
 nebulous judge men give no sort of care, and 
 we all know to what human conduct without 
 
QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. 105 
 
 restraint leads. The moment a man pro- 
 fesses the principles of the "scientific method," 
 which unfortunately is too often done in the 
 foolish phrase, "Oh, I have no religion; I do 
 not believe in anything!" you may quite fairly 
 suspect that man in every relation of life. 
 Suspect his honesty. With his principles it 
 would be quite foolish of him not to cheat 
 and. turn everything to his own advantage by 
 fair means or foul when it can be safely 
 done. Suspect him of being hard-hearted, 
 selfish and unfeeling. Why should he not 
 be, if it suits him? He knows no authority 
 over his personal feelings. Suspect him of 
 being vindictive and revengeful. He will 
 pursue relentlessly whoever crosses or injures 
 him. To gain his revenge he will not stick 
 at secret murder. Why should he? If he 
 can be safe from men there is nobody else to 
 fear. 
 
 Suspect his chastity. There are very few, 
 if any at all, who are not intermittently solic- 
 ited by lustful fancies. Will this agnostic 
 who spurns accountability and writes down 
 divine commands as superstitious lies, hesi- 
 tate at indulgence wherever and however he 
 can, when so inclined? His logic would call 
 
106 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 him a fool if he did. Thus this free-thinking 
 disciple of the "scientific method" uncon- 
 sciously proclaims himself an object of dis- 
 trust to his fellow-men in every dealing and 
 social relation of life, and they in turn would 
 be very foolish not to distrust him. Mutual 
 trust and confidence are absolutely necessary 
 for decent and tolerable society. The ag- 
 nostic principle, if rigidly followed, utterly 
 destroys those pleasant bonds and society 
 ceases to be either tolerable or decent. 
 
 Moreover the basis of justice on which hu- 
 man laws rest is undermined by the scientific 
 method in its account of human existence. 
 Why should a judge impose a penal sen- 
 tence on one who quotes the agnostic evolu- 
 tionist (whom a great part of the world de- 
 lights to honor) for his assertion that he is 
 under the spell of a natural law impelling him 
 to struggle for existence and that there is no 
 being known to nature who has given pro- 
 hibitory commands or who will bring him to 
 account? He can plead from their text that 
 his impulses are nature's work, not his. Why 
 punish him for them? It is unjust. He is 
 but an irresponsible factor in the gresft evolu- 
 tionary process. When he cheated and stole 
 
QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. 107 
 
 and was revenged and murdered, in the whole 
 story of human life as told him by the evolu- 
 tionists, there is not a shred of evidence to 
 show him guilty of moral wrong or wicked- 
 ness. There have been and are in our days 
 agnostic judges, B ram wells and Stephens, on 
 whom the accused could turn and declare 
 from their own beliefs or want of them, that 
 their laws have no foundation, and their 
 courts, frauds on poor evoluted humanity. 
 
 The same would apply to domestic rule 
 and parental authority. The children could 
 turn on agnostic parents and demand by 
 what right they corrected or punished them 
 for the peccadillos and unruliness to which 
 all children are prone, but which make family 
 life impossible if unrestrained. The children 
 can appeal to nature and impulse, sacred in 
 the eyes of agnostic parents, and deny that 
 they are in .fault, and no fault therefore no 
 correction why punish a poor evoluted 
 mud-fish? how expect moral rectitude in a 
 lepidosiren or conscience in protoplasm? 
 The "scientific method" cries out against 
 such things. 
 
 Thus carried to its logical conclusions in 
 practical life, agnostic science would upturn 
 
I08 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 human society from its very foundation and 
 convert this earth into a pandemonium. 
 
 The clear perception of this has shaken 
 the confidence of many minds in this much- 
 praised "method" of dispensing with all in- 
 formation from the supernatural, and they 
 are turning back again to the old ground 
 for a more rational account of themselves, 
 their lives and their destiny. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. 
 
 In contrast to the unaided and self-reliant 
 "scientific method" let us recall what the old 
 story, believed for so long a time and by so 
 many to be revealed, tells us about ourselves, 
 
 It certainly has the merit of presenting a 
 picture of our origin which does not repel 
 or put us to shame. Of recent years that 
 picture has been kept a good deal out of 
 the common view, "skyed" by the men of 
 science. It has moreover been smeared 
 over by much protoplastic mud, so that like 
 a palimpsei manuscript, w r e must do some 
 scraping to get at the original etching 
 which means that it is not easy to induce 
 people nowadays to go over again carefully 
 so familiar a lesson as the Scripture story of 
 the creation. But compared to the dismal 
 tale of the scientists on the same subject it is 
 absolutely pleasant and most flattering to 
 us. In place of mud swamps where "lepido- 
 sirens" swim and slumber, it introduces us to 
 
 (109) 
 
110 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 a fair garden where golden fruit is on the 
 trees. Cool, clear streams are flowing on the 
 carpet of green through the glades a 
 wondrous variety of animals, tame and gen- 
 tle, peacefully browse, and birds of every 
 hue float and sing in the blue above. 
 
 There is one form just moulded and still 
 lying upon the earth, but far finer and more 
 perfect in line than any animal. And over 
 that still inanimate form the Great Maker, 
 God, it is said and said, remark, without 
 any explanation or apology of wearying 
 demonstration, just as a matter of course, 
 taken for granted as the great first logical 
 necessity that all right reason demands and 
 postulates God breathes ! That creative 
 and mysterious secret the spiraculum vitae 
 life from the Divine breathing, courses at 
 once through the finely modeled members 
 of that prostrate form it glows and moves, 
 the eyes open and light up the features with 
 intelligence, and then this last and greatest of 
 the Creator's works rises and stands erect 
 the first living man. That is what we infer 
 from the plain reading of Genesis and what 
 men for ages have been satisfied with and 
 proud to believe. But in these later times 
 
THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. Ill 
 
 it seems that this will not do at all. It is too 
 simple, too plain, too nursery-story-like for 
 the trained and powerful modern intellect. 
 Facts, it is alleged, have been brought to 
 light by intelligent research which prove 
 that this was not could not be the way in 
 which we were made. The human mind is 
 surely very perverse in this as in other wel 
 known things. You w r ould suppose that 
 handsomely set-up being like man should be 
 very glad just to find himself so, without in- 
 quiring too minutely how he came to be so 
 gifted a being the first, the superior among 
 all the visible living things on this earth. 
 But no, that position does not suit our mod- 
 erns. They want to sweep away that priv- 
 ileged pre-eminence as a childish fable, not- 
 withstanding the visible evidence all around 
 us, and reduce man to the same common 
 level of origin with the animals, no greater 
 specifically, no better essentially. "Grant," 
 says Mr. Darwin, "a simple archetypal crea- 
 ture like a mud-fish with five senses and 
 some vestige of a mind, and I believe natural 
 selection will account for the production of 
 every vertebrate animal. 7 ' Well, well, I 
 much prefer the other story. 
 
112 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 And that story so long held by so many of 
 our race as a sacred tradition continues with 
 a still more interesting simplicity. Adam, 
 our prototype and first father being thus 
 fashioned, the Great Creator makes over to 
 him and his, with a generous bounty that 
 men forget, as a gift forever, all the other 
 wondrous, works of his creation. He made 
 him lord of creation with dominion over 
 every living thing. In trial of his ownership 
 Adam summons all living things to his pres- 
 ence, and lo, they obey his call! Submis- 
 sively they defile before him and as they pass 
 he names them according to their kind. But, 
 as yet there is a certain loneliness in his state. 
 These animals are fair to see in the grace and 
 freshness of their primal type, but from not 
 one of them all comes back to their new 
 master an answering voice of intelligence 
 no communion on equal terms of soul and 
 mind. The Great Maker, however, does not 
 leave him in that loneliness. He prepares a 
 delightful surprise for him. He throws him 
 into a deep sleep, and as he slept, by some 
 mysterious process of creation, not at all nec- 
 essary for us to know, and which with our 
 present limited intelligence it is impossible for 
 
THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. 113 
 
 us to understand, he took from Adam's sub- 
 stance, material out of which he builds up 
 another form like to his own, and sets it over 
 against him to look on when awakened. 
 With what delight and wonder must he not 
 have gazed on this new thing of exquisite 
 beauty. He had seen the animals and doubt- 
 less admired their wonderful formation, but 
 what animal of them all showed anything 
 like to that in shapeliness of form and 
 comely grace? Its shape is like his shape, 
 but, oh, more finely, more delicately, more ex- 
 quisitely moulded! It moves and speaks, it 
 comestowards him. Adam peers into those 
 eyes on a level with his own, with joy he 
 beholds a responsive intelligence in their 
 light, and in rapture exclaims, "Now truly is 
 this the flesh of my flesh and the bone of my 
 bone," and he hails the first woman as "Eva 
 the mother of the living." This is how it 
 reads in the old, old story. No mention be- 
 ing made of an "archetypal creature like a 
 mud-fish with five senses and a vestige of a 
 mind," the scientists laugh it to scorn. "I 
 would give absolutely nothing," says Mr. 
 Darwin, "for natural selection if it requires 
 miraculous addition at any one stage of de- 
 8 
 
114 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 scent." "I hope," said Mr. Tyndall in his 
 Belfast address, "to find in matter the origin 
 of all terrestrial things." 
 
 To talk of the miraculous at the beginning 
 of things where all is miracle to us, seems 
 shallow if not impertinent. It is irritating 
 to think that puny men, who pass away after 
 a brief life, fancy themselves competent from 
 a mere examination of fossil animal forma- 
 tions to enter the domain of the Creator and 
 infallibly insist that the great mystery of life 
 began in the way they arrange and in no 
 other. 
 
 In view of the fact that the scientists in 
 many countries nowadays regard the theory 
 of evolution as a scientific truth, some of our 
 writers, it is true, maintain that evolution is 
 perfectly compatible with the story of Gen- 
 esis, as far as the corporal formation of the 
 race is concerned. Very well. If they 
 wish to enter upon that experimental inter- 
 pretation of the sacred Scriptures they are 
 free to do so. The Church does not forbid 
 it, provided they hold by the dogma that 
 God as Creator is back of it all. But let 
 them not forget, in their enthusiasm for 
 scientific research and their complacent ac- 
 
THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. 115 
 
 ceptance, as scientific truths, of the generali- 
 zations from biological and geological facts, 
 that it is precisely that dogma which their 
 agnostic friends want to have ignored. 
 From their avow T al it is perfectly well known 
 that their object is to dispense with the ne- 
 cessity or even the supposition of a Divine 
 Creator. To our orthodox enthusiasts for 
 evolution this should be a note of warning not 
 to allow themselves to be led too far afield. 
 I know they say there is no danger, we 
 can admit all the postulates of evolution and 
 still assert that they are but the Creator's 
 modus operandi. That they can do this is 
 not at all so clear. If you admit a common 
 protoplastic origin for all living things and 
 a subsequent transitional change from spe- 
 cies to species, how differentiate between ra- 
 tional and non-rational creatures? how ex- 
 plain responsibility and non-responsibility, ac- 
 countability and non-accountability? Where 
 does the rational basis of man's nature come 
 in? At what stage of his evolution was it 
 added on? Was it as he was passing from 
 the mud-fish into the reptile or from the rep- 
 tile to the bird, or from the bird to the quad- 
 ruped or from the four-footed to the four-* 
 
Il6 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 handed animal or finally from the erect quad- 
 rumanus "furnished with a tail" into the 
 man? Where and when and how did our ra- 
 tional nature accrue to us? Whence the soul, 
 with its moral sense and aspiration for im- 
 mortality? Evolution has not only no word 
 to tell us about that, but it is impossible to 
 see how it can come into the theory at all. 
 The truth is, biologists and geologists can 
 legitimately argue on the subject of creation 
 only a posteriori, that is from the few facts 
 they have been able to marshal from the 
 skeletons of animal life, the processes of gen- 
 eration and the surface of the earth. This 
 we all know to be an imperfect and fallible 
 method for deducing universal conclusions 
 or establishing general rules. When scien- 
 tists pass to a priori statements, that is, lay 
 down how the creation must have taken 
 place, they are guilty of the fallacy known to 
 logicians as the transitus a genere ad genus 
 a fraudulent skip from one position to an- 
 other position altogether different and then 
 proclaiming from the second what they pur- 
 ported to have found in the first. To make 
 a priori infallible statements as to the man- 
 ner of creation (which they do with seemingly 
 
THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. Iiy 
 
 great security), they must either be more 
 than men and share the creative faculty 
 themselves or have stood on the level of the 
 Creator's platform while He was working, 
 which is of course absurd. No matter what 
 may be its merits as a theory, evolution proves 
 far too little for us as rational, responsible 
 and accountable men, and so will never sat- 
 isfy us. It has no practical value for us as a 
 light upon the meaning of our origin or our- 
 selves and may just as well be relegated to 
 the glass cases of museums as a curiosity or 
 conundrum of scientific speculation. The 
 other story is more comprehensive and satis- 
 fying it is certainly more agreeable and it 
 is as elevating as agreeable. It gives us an 
 exalted idea of ourselves to know that WQ 
 are descended from a first pair, a man and 
 woman fashioned by an Almighty Creator 
 and endowed with an intelligence far above 
 the rest of His works. Secure in that 
 thought we are safe from the despair which 
 must beset those who believe that they have 
 been cast out unacknowledged and disowned 
 by some unknown and brute cause into the 
 whirling mass of the evolutionary struggle. 
 We feel an intelligent ownership back of us 
 
IlS THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 and a Fatherhood above us which will not 
 permit the existence we received to be 
 merely a torture and a mockery nor the aspi- 
 rations implanted in our breasts dreams of 
 Tantalus. 
 
 There is hardly a doubt that the many 
 who are turning away dissatisfied with the 
 conclusions of Agnostic Science will find a 
 more secure and peaceful refuge for the mind 
 in the opening words of the ancient creed 
 "I believe in God the Father, Almighty Cre- 
 ator of heaven and earth and of all things." 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE "LACHRYM-/E RERUM." 
 
 If the story science has to tell us of our 
 origin be an uninviting 1 one, still more dread- 
 ful are its lessons about the evils of life. As 
 an explanation of the harassing' problems of 
 existence with its manifold evils and the 
 "tears of things," the bare theory of 
 natural selection, struggle for existence and 
 survival of the fittest is revolting. Applied to 
 sentient and intelligent beings it implies the 
 infliction of a shocking, meaningless cruelty 
 a blind, wanton injustice on the poor hu- 
 man race. For those who feel overborne by 
 the evils of life, evils that are very real and 
 very terrible, and have nothing to stay them 
 but this bald theory of struggle and survival, 
 what refuge logically remains but 
 
 "To take arms against a sea of troubles 
 And by opposing end them/* 
 
 or to express it without the poetry com- 
 mit suicide! Many are doing so now almost 
 
 (119) 
 
120 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 daily in countries where formerly that stupid 
 revolt against the Giver of life used to be ex- 
 tremely rare. Suicide clubs, we are told, 
 have even been formed. Modern suicide 
 has thus assumed a cool deliberateness where 
 before it used to be the unreasoned act of a 
 wild despair. 
 
 This is quite as it should be according to 
 the "scientific method" of accounting for 
 things. If there were nothing but that, it is 
 a proper and a wise thing for the unfortunate 
 to kill themselves. But happily the great 
 majority of rational beings hold the act of 
 self-destruction, no matter how heavily life's 
 fardels weigh, as a thing to be abhorred. 
 Why? Because they evidently do not trust 
 the "conclusions of science," they look else- 
 where for the something more sustaining that 
 "gives them pause" before that dread and 
 tragic act. 
 
 They find the motive in the old story of 
 revelation. Millions have found that suffi- 
 cient motive before them, millions find it 
 now, and millions will continue to seek and 
 find it sufficient, in spite of the fatal deduc- 
 tions from agnostic science. 
 
 The origin of evil has ever been the puzzle 
 
THE "LACHRYMAL RERUM. 121 
 
 of the human mind. The ancients sought its 
 solution in the absurdities and superstitions 
 of polytheism. In the early Christian cen- 
 turies an eastern monk, in a clumsy but pious 
 effort to free God from any share in it, imag- 
 ined his two eternal and coequal Principles, 
 one essentially good, and the other essentially 
 bad, so that every good thing comes 
 from the one and everything bad from 
 the other. This blunt logic all metaphysi- 
 cians agree to call an absurdity, since two 
 eternal and opposing Principles are impossi- 
 ble. This doctrine had an immense vogue 
 at the time and Manicheism, as it was called 
 from its author, counted numerous followers 
 for nearly three centuries. Carried to its 
 strict conclusions in practical life the sect be- 
 came a nuisance and a scandal, and its teach- 
 ings and practises were many times refuted 
 and condemned. It is strange that we 
 should see in our day a revival of this ex- 
 ploded system with the same good-natured 
 motive of finding a convenient escape from 
 difficulties about the nature of God. Very 
 recently a little book called "Evolution and 
 Evil" was published in Edinburgh, in which 
 the author harks back on the old Manichean 
 
122 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 principles to fill a manifest gap in the 
 evolution theory. The agnostic evolution- 
 ists either forgot to say or had not the cour- 
 age of the absurdity, that wickedness and 
 crime must have been somewhere rudimen- 
 tally inherent in their protoplastic mud-fish, 
 and did not forecaste the time when jails 
 would have to be built for those dear little 
 creatures evolutecl into men and women. 
 
 This hard-headed Scotchman clearly sees 
 where the evolutionary scientists egregiously 
 break down. He is evidently dissatisfied 
 with them for stopping short at the point of 
 all others the most interesting and important 
 to us. But he has gone to the wrong source 
 to supply the omission. . . . This is 
 how, in outline, the origin of evil is ac- 
 counted for in the story of Revelation. The 
 picture it now presents us is not as fair or 
 cheering as that in which it traced our or- 
 igin. It is indeed a changed scene. The 
 prospect is somber, the sky is lowering, the 
 garden is full of weeds, the animals have 
 gone wild for a dire thing has befallen the 
 fortunes of the first pair. He who made the 
 gift of all things to this first man and woman 
 could not, of course, withdraw himself from 
 
THE "LACHRYM^E RERUM. 123 
 
 his own creation. Nothing was more rea- 
 sonable than that He should exact some ac- 
 knowledgment from them; that they should 
 at least continue to know Him, to admit His 
 sovereignty, and show a grateful submission. 
 He therefore made one small reservation 
 from their free use of all He had given them, 
 as a test of this acknowledgment. To One 
 infinitely rich in creative power it did not 
 really matter what that test was, provided it 
 was a test. And certainly it does not seem 
 much that He demanded. Of all this varied 
 creation which He placed at their disposal 
 He informed them that there was just one 
 thing He wished them not to touch or use. 
 But this aroused their curiosity and through 
 a perverseness, with which we have since be- 
 come very familiar, though they had plenty 
 of everything else besides, that one thing be- 
 came the object of their intensest desire, the 
 very thing that seemed to them they could 
 least do without. They failed in the test, 
 they broke down under so small a trial and 
 disobeyed. There is the origin of evil, the 
 evil that affects us in this human life. So 
 Milton said, five thousand six hundred years 
 later expressing the survived tradition 
 
124 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 * 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste 
 Brought death into the world and all our woe, 
 With loss of Eden . . . sing, heavenly Muse." 
 
 The Creator was displeased. Could any- 
 thing be more just or natural than that He 
 should be? The first parents fell out of favor. 
 From being perfect in their kind as the high- 
 est and best work of the mundane creation, 
 made in the image and likeness of the creat- 
 ing Divinity, they deteriorated. The will 
 that opposed the Supreme Will lost its 
 strength, the intellect that shared the Divine 
 knowledge lost its privilege, the image of the 
 Deity was blurred in their soul and they 
 stood in the case of rebels. And when they 
 began to beget children they could only be- 
 get them of that nature in which they them- 
 selves were, could impart to them no other 
 when begetting them, and so we all came to 
 stand in the case of rebels, under a ban. 
 This is the kernel of the story. It is an ac- 
 count, and the oldest account, of how the 
 misfortunes, undeniable and ever-present, of 
 our race came about. It is at least an intel- 
 ligible account, it is reasonable and most 
 likely. It has been very long in possession 
 
THE "LACHRYMAL RERUM." 125 
 
 and before it is cast aside as a myth some- 
 thing better ought to be proposed in its 
 stead. Have the agnostic scientists given us 
 any juster reason why humanity is in a penal 
 state, why wickedness abounds, and calami- 
 ties afflict, and why there is no such thing as 
 perfect and long-continued happiness or 
 contentment to be found in all this earth of 
 ours? By no means. Their statements are 
 most disheartening in presence of these hard 
 realities and conduce to despair, and they 
 may thank the utter helplessness of their 
 conclusions for the reaction that is steadily 
 setting in against their magisterial utterances. 
 On the other hand the story of the old tra- 
 dition is most hopeful in its sequel. It tells 
 of a restoration and the "blissful state" to be 
 regained, as Milton words it. Such a theory 
 gives a new and more hopeful complexion to 
 human life; it makes the struggle worth en- 
 during, because it gives it an intelligible and 
 stimulating meaning. The struggle is com- 
 paratively brief, and at the end of it, is the 
 possibility of full and lasting compensation 
 for every danger and every pain endured. 
 Yes, say the scientists, if it was only true 
 the admixture of the marvelous such as the 
 
126 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 talking serpent savors at once of the mythi- 
 cal. 
 
 But why should it not be true? Is it be- 
 cause you have found no trace of it in biology 
 and geology that therefore it did not happen? 
 That would be bad logic. Meanwhile cer- 
 tain facts of life are there, and you have not 
 been able to assign any adequate cause for 
 them. It is therefore unfair of you to inter- 
 fere with those who fall back on the tradition 
 of the race about them. 
 
 The first intelligent progenitors of our 
 race were sure to transmit a minute and ac- 
 curate account of all that happened at its be- 
 ginning to their intelligent posterity. It 
 would be contrary to the whole human mode 
 of acting if they did not. It is incredible 
 that they never should have mentioned a 
 word on a subject so deeply important to all 
 posterity, and it is most improbable that 
 what they imparted was not carefully re- 
 peated at least substantially. So important 
 is it as affecting human life and conduct, that 
 when it came first to be written down multi- 
 tudes have always believed, as a thing reason- 
 able and quite to be expected, that the writer 
 was guaranteed by the direct action of the 
 
THE "LACHRYM^ RERUM. 127 
 
 great Creator from substantial mistake, or, in 
 other words, inspired. It is reasonable to be- 
 lieve all this, especially as it assigns a suffi- 
 cient cause for many things in human life and 
 character otherwise absolutely unintelligible 
 to us. With regard to the marvelous inci- 
 dents of the story, who can tell what is pos- 
 sible or impossible to a Creator of such won- 
 drous skill and power which, if we are not 
 blind, \ve must acknowledge him to possess? 
 Every man, not intoxicated to asphyxia 
 with his own puny conceit, must honestly ad- 
 mit that he has no locus standi in objecting 
 to the ways selected by an Agent immeasur- 
 ably superior to him, to bring about his 
 purposes no matter how peculiar or even gro- 
 tesque they may now seem to us. The mat- 
 ter being beyond our power and outside our 
 province to interfere in, it is wiser to accept 
 the only reasonable explanation, within our 
 reach, of the strange state in which we find 
 ourselves. It is more than merely wise to 
 do it, it becomes imperative when we see its 
 practical bearing on our actual condition in 
 life and on our ultimate fate. Look around 
 on humanity in general as we know it. Is 
 it not a grandeur in ruins, rather than a 
 
128 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 bran-new structure erected on flimsy foun- 
 dations and progressing gradually to com- 
 pletion? When you look upon a stately 
 ruin you never say, Here is something gradu- 
 ally growing to perfection; how fair it will 
 be to look upon when completed! No, you 
 judge from this shapely arch, that bit of 
 tracery, or those broken pillars that origi- 
 nally it had been a fine building. In the same 
 way when amid the fierce passions, mean- 
 nesses and deformities of human nature so 
 abundantly illustrated for us by history and 
 made real to us by our contemporary wars, 
 our jails and courts of law, we are able to 
 trace remnants of a far nobler condition in 
 generous impulses, in deeds of gentle virtue, 
 of self-sacrifice and heroism in love for the 
 beautiful, the pursuit of it in art, music, in 
 poetry in the yearnings for the good and 
 the true, we say, How beautiful it must have 
 been before the ruin came! So that our per- 
 sonal experience of humanity corroborates 
 the tradition that man began with the perfect 
 human nature which some calamity disturbed 
 and shattered. Even when some meanness 
 or frailty overtakes us individually the first 
 thought that comes in sober moments is, 
 
THE "LACHRYMAL RERUM. 129 
 
 "Oh, for shame, we ought to have been above 
 that!" showing that there is a remnant of a 
 higher, nobler nature yet within us. 
 
 There is nothing in the shape of man that 
 does not exhibit the remnant of a nobler na- 
 ture. The blacks of North Queensland are 
 supposed to be the very lowest types of hu- 
 manity. If I may be pardoned a personal 
 reminiscence, I wish to relate here how I 
 found that remnant even among them. 
 They were small incidents, it is true, but 
 none the less they illustrate what I say. I 
 was one day visiting a camp of blacks who 
 lived on the warm sand-dunes inside a man- 
 grove swamp, on the north side of Cook- 
 town harbor. In front of one of the miser- 
 able huts which are only used as sleeping- 
 places, being long, narrow and scarcely 
 three feet high, a poor old woman was seated 
 on the ground industriously knitting, with 
 very primitive implements, a small open- 
 work bag, such as children might use for 
 school-books. The material was the native 
 twine made from dried fiber and dyed in dif- 
 ferent colors. Anxious to get a memento of 
 the rude skill of this very backward people, 
 who seemed to me in their homes to have 
 
130 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 touched the lowest rung of the human ladder, 
 I put a silver coin in her hand and made 
 signs that I wanted the bag. She looked at 
 it and shook her head, which I took to mean 
 that she would not part with it. It was not 
 so, however. One of the men came up and 
 managed to explain that she did not wish to 
 give it to me unfinished, but would finish it 
 as soon as possible and send it over to-mor- 
 row. Considering that it was a good four 
 miles across the water, I thought the chances 
 of getting it very slight, still I left her in pos- 
 session of the coin and passed on. As we 
 were at breakfast on the trelliced veranda of 
 the house at which I was staying in the town 
 at 7:30 the next morning, two of those coal- 
 black natives timidly approached, holding 
 up that bag! Honorable, was it not, in that 
 poor creature? Another day, strolling by the 
 shore, I saw some Chinese beche-de-mer fishers 
 bargaining with a native black. Their net, 
 it appears, had got fouled in the deep chan- 
 nel some distance from the shore. These 
 blacks are famous divers and the Chinamen 
 were inducing him to go down to free their 
 net. He at length consented and put off 
 with them in their boat. At that moment 
 
THE "LACHRYMAL RERUM. 131 
 
 his wife, carrying a small child, came running 
 down. It was too late to stop him, so she 
 stood with riveted gaze looking at that boat. 
 Beauty is not a strong point in those poor 
 people, in fact it is not a point at all, but it 
 was beautiful to see the play of fine qualities 
 of soul and heart in that poor black face. The 
 job turned out somewhat troublesome and 
 the diver had to make three different descents 
 to the rocky bottom, remaining down what 
 seemed to be quite a long time each dive. 
 While he was under water the young wife 
 seemed beside herself. I do not think I ever 
 saw r such genuine feeling expressed in any 
 face, white or black there was tenderness, 
 protest, devoted love in it, and when he came 
 safe to shore, relief with a sort of sad, re- 
 proachful delight. Beautiful remnant of the 
 nobler nature even in the dregs of humanity! 
 I can not help adding in illustration of the 
 abominable meanness of man that, a few 
 minutes later, I saw those Chinamen cheat 
 that poor black! They put him off with two 
 ounces of coarse tobacco and a handful of 
 stale biscuit for a task that gold coin would 
 not have induced themselves to undertake. 
 The poor fellow took that squalid pay quite 
 
132 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 meekly and went away. There be yellow 
 men, thought I, in some things, lower than 
 Queensland Blacks. 
 
 Is it not more rational to believe that such 
 virtues have been left in a nature once all vir- 
 tuous, and that such vices come from its de- 
 terioration, than to assert that both are de- 
 veloped out of mud-fish? 
 
 Mere science leaves man without hope in 
 his miseries. It admits them as facts; it 
 even points them out, but gives no satisfac- 
 tory reason why they are there, and supplies 
 no motive for the patient endurance of them. 
 Doleful, indeed, if not cruel, is its attitude in 
 presence of the universal fact of death. 
 When the quickly passing life of each individ- 
 ual is over and he must leave behind all he 
 loved, prized and strove for, science stands 
 by in pitiable and helpless silence. 
 
 Not so the theories of revealed tradition. 
 It has the story of a reconciliation between 
 a displeased Creator and ungratefully delin- 
 quent creatures. The nature passed on to 
 their progeny by the first pair after 
 their disobedience is to undergo a process 
 of restoration by the proffered interven- 
 tion of 'the Godhead, and, by the fulfilment 
 
THE "LACHRYMLE RERUM." 133 
 
 of new and not very difficult conditions, 
 the title-deeds, forfeited by the bankrupt 
 parents, to the "blissful state," are to be 
 given back to all the children of men. 
 Here at once a meaning is given to human 
 life, the touch-spring is supplied to human 
 action. The trial and the struggle endure, it 
 is true, for each individual of the race. But 
 the very possibility of reinstatement is an 
 end worth his efforts. The great sanctions 
 for upright conduct are kept ever present to 
 him immense reward for success penalty 
 for wilful failure. These, \vith the higher 
 feeling of loyalty to the intentions of the 
 benevolent Creator, supply motive power to 
 the whole moral world. They are the real 
 and efficient agency for civilizing humanity 
 and have been admitted and are still admit- 
 ted by the majority of men to be the best the 
 world has got up to the present moment. 
 They have inspired and still continue to in- 
 spire all that is best in heroic self-devotion. 
 They sweeten social life, help to the patient 
 if not cheerful endurance of pain and sorrow, 
 and altogether have proved far too prac- 
 tically useful to the human family to be con- 
 temned and renounced at the summons of a 
 
134 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 science which has but a gospel of darkness 
 and despair to offer in their stead. That 
 which has been the mainstay of millions of 
 the most civilized people in the past, and has 
 best reconciled them to life in its varying for- 
 tunes, it would be most unwise to discard 
 until at least something as good has been 
 found. It is certain that the results of scien- 
 tific research supply no such substitute. A 
 great multitude in our time have been led 
 away by the ably-edited pretensions of the 
 scientists and have laid aside the guiding 
 motives of life derived from faith, relinquish- 
 ing all external observances of religion. Yet 
 the restlessness of minds has by no means 
 abated. It shows itself in many ways at this 
 hour to be as great if not greater than ever. 
 The recent closing of the grave over many 
 of the men who made the greatest stir in the 
 mental world for the past forty years has 
 given food for sobering reflection to many of 
 their disciples and admirers who, weary of the 
 emptiness of their master's conclusions, are 
 longing again for the comfort of a confident 
 and unfaltering faith. 
 
 They found its formula regarding our 
 origin in the opening words of the old Creed 
 
THE ^LACHRYM^E RERUM. " 135 
 
 already quoted. The second part of that 
 Creed gives motive and meaning for the hu- 
 man life they are actually leading: "And I 
 believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our 
 Lord, who for us men and for our eternal 
 safety came out of the heavens and took 
 flesh through the Holy Spirit from Mary, 
 the Virgin, and was made man. He was 
 also crucified for us, suffered, and was bur- 
 ied. And the third day He arose from the 
 dead and ascended to the heavens; thence 
 He shall come to judge the living and the 
 dead." 
 
 This describes the restoration of the race 
 and the final issue that awaits it. He who 
 raised it up again, helped it and made salva- 
 tion possible for its members, will also be 
 their Judge. 
 
 "Oh, but this is bringing us back to our 
 catechism again it is faith and most of it 
 must be taken on trust!" Precisely, and 
 why should you be ashamed of it? Lift 
 yourself above your little self and think of 
 the distinguished men men whose tran- 
 scendent ability is admitted on all hands 
 who at the present day all around you openly 
 believe and advocate all that. Mr. Gladstone 
 does so and who will deny his superiority of 
 
136 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 intellect? England's great Prime Minister 
 Lord Salisbury believes it all. England's 
 Lord Chancellor believes it, so does conspic- 
 uously her Lord Chief Justice, so do most of 
 her able jurists. So do her ablest diplomat- 
 ists Lord Dufferin, Sir Rutherford Alcock 
 (lately deceased after a most distinguished 
 career) Sir Philip Currie, Lord Brassey and 
 the present able Ambassador to the Court of 
 Russia. President McKinley believes it, so 
 do his living predecessors in that highest of 
 all America's positions, Mr. Harrison and Mr. 
 Cleveland. These are but some of the great 
 names, and is your judgment likely to be of 
 more value than the convictions of such men 
 as these? Why, before such an array of abil- 
 ity on the side of belief, the cynical apostasy 
 of a John Morley (vide his "Voltaire"), the 
 ravings of Thomas Carlyle as exhibited by 
 his trusty showman, Mr. Froude, and the 
 poisoned shafts of Prof. Huxley the Bob 
 Ingersoll of England seem impertinences 
 of no weight whatever. 
 
 Yes, the goal of the returns' from this un- 
 satisfying agnostic science is faith, belief in 
 the communications vouchsafed to us by 
 the Great Master, Owner, and Maker of us 
 and of all things. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 "STATIO BENE FIDA." 
 
 No one, at all observant of the signs of his 
 times, can fail to see a movement away from 
 agnostic science and back to belief. But 
 is there a sure haven for the unrest of the re- 
 turning? If unfaith and faith were just two 
 camps the question would be simple enough. 
 Unfortunately the ungovernable tendencies 
 of human thought, its refusal to be restricted, 
 its opposition to restraint, no matter how- 
 reasonable that restriction and restraint may 
 be demonstrated to be, have divided the fol- 
 lowers of faith into many camps. This 
 being a fact and a sad one, it is too well 
 know r n to be denied and too real and present 
 with us, to be ignored. This domestic quar- 
 rel has been the excuse for agnosticism and 
 is the strong point with the remainder adher- 
 ents of that forlorn cause. In any sincere 
 effort, then, to be of use as a guide to the un- 
 restful soul after its incautious excursion into 
 the bewildering maze of agnostic science 
 
 (i37) 
 
138 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 this unpleasant fact must be faced and hon- 
 estly weighed. 
 
 However, it has the disadvantage of mak- 
 ing the writer appear in the light of a special 
 pleader for his own views, and special plead- 
 ing arouses suspicion and arms prejudice. 
 "Oh, he is fighting for his own side of course 
 all he says is sure to be biased in favor of 
 the section to which he belongs." And so, 
 when there are contending interests, it is 
 hard to get a hearing for the special plea. 
 
 I therefore wish to avoid all appearance 
 of that as much as possible and merely invite 
 the reader to the inspection of facts as they 
 exist about us. Facts are the most persua- 
 sive of arguments.- They are not so dry as 
 polemics. 
 
 I suppose then that the intelligent wanderer, 
 in quest of the dropped threads of his old 
 faith, would like to give in his adherence to a 
 body of doctrine about which there is no 
 uncertainty, fluctuation, or dispute among 
 its particular followers, rather than to one 
 about which there is much dispute, diver- 
 gence, and dissent among those who vari- 
 ously profess it. 
 
 I suppose he would prefer to join a body 
 
"STATIC BENE FIDA. , 139 
 
 that has a long and continuous history, to 
 one that has a much shorter and somewhat 
 broken history. I suppose he would feel 
 more secure in associating with a body which 
 is numerically greater, while agreeing among 
 themselves as a unit, than all other dissidents 
 from that body put together and disagreeing 
 among themselves. Now such exactly are 
 the characteristics of the two phases of Chris- 
 tian faith which, as mere facts, visibly and un- 
 deniably confront him in the world to-day. 
 
 Everybody knows who Leo XIII is. He 
 is the two hundred and fifty-seventh, in direct 
 succession, of the men who held his place in 
 Rome for nearly nineteen centuries. Every- 
 body knows that there are over one thousand 
 bishops all over the world, men of education 
 and intelligence, many of thefij admittedly 
 high intelligence, who all hold their place 
 and title from him, acknowledge his author- 
 ity, and are in perfect agreement with him in 
 every essential particular. Under them 
 there are between two and three hundred 
 thousand clergy in the same perfect agree- 
 ment w T ith their bishops and under them 
 again between two and three hundred 
 million of laity in perfect accord with their 
 
140 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 pastors. No danger of our friend feeling 
 lonely in such a company at any rate. Let 
 him enter the poorest of their churches, be 
 it on an Irish mountain-side or in a 
 bush-town at the Antipodes or the fa- 
 mous cathedrals of continental Europe or in. 
 the Spanish Americas, he will hear the same 
 identical doctrine taught in each and all, and 
 the same rite of divine worship observed. 
 That must appeal to him as something ad- 
 mirable and arrest his interested attention. 
 
 Here then is one broad fact, easily verifi- 
 able, spread out to his view at this moment. 
 Everybody knows, also, who the young Tsar 
 Nicolas is. He is the head of a church, a 
 very numerous church, but his title as such 
 does not reach very far back, at most to his 
 savage ancestor, Peter, in the last century, 
 while the faith of that church which came 
 from Greece is substantially the Roman faith 
 but marred by a break in allegiance to the 
 lawful successor of the apostles and denial 
 of his authority as divinely appointed judge 
 and guardian of that faith. Everybody 
 knows who Emperor William II is. He is 
 the head of a church whose title goes back 
 only a few centuries, and the faith of that 
 
4< STATIO BENE FIDA." 141 
 
 church is in entire disagreement \vith that of 
 the Greek and Russian and only a very frag- 
 mentary agreement indeed with that of the 
 Roman, while from the principle of free pri- 
 vate judgment and by consequence the lack 
 of a standard within its own limits, there is 
 abundant domestic disagreement and inde- 
 pendent sectional branches. 
 
 Everybody knows who Queen Victoria is. 
 She is the head of a church, but her title to 
 spiritual supremacy passed to her only indi- 
 rectly from the Tudor line of monarchs from 
 whom she is not even descended, and who 
 usurped that sacred title only a few hundred 
 years ago because of a rebellious quarrel 
 . with the Pope over an adulterous marriage. 
 Meanwhile the Anglican Church is entirely 
 independent as to authority and standard of 
 belief from the Greek-Russian and the Ger- 
 man Lutheran. Within the English fold, 
 too, the right of private judgment prevails 
 and has been a powerful dissolvent. As a 
 result there are nearly two hundred distinct 
 and independent religious sects in England 
 and throughout the wide domain of her 
 colonial empire and also in English-speaking 
 America the same strange spectacle, in pro- 
 
142 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 portionate extent, may be witnessed. In- 
 deed the ultimate logical result of this free 
 private judgment seems to be as many re- 
 ligions as there are men. And is it not a 
 curious thing that men demand a freedom in 
 religious matters not permitted them in mat- 
 ters of State or in other relations of life? 
 The State does not tolerate private judgment 
 about its constitution and its laws, if carried 
 into practise, as it is so unrestrainedly in re- 
 ligion. 
 
 However, as a matter of fact, this is the 
 other phase of Christian faith presented to 
 actual view by the most civilized of the na- 
 tions to-day. That this is pretty accurately 
 their condition nobody can deny, as it is a 
 thing of common and public notoriety. 
 
 No\v is it likely that our friend will lightly 
 commit his spiritual hopes and future wel- 
 fare to such a Babel confusion of religious 
 guidance? Common prudence and sound 
 sense would deter him from so little promis- 
 ing a course. Besides if he hears of the prayer 
 of the Divine Founder of the whole system 
 "that the world, may knoiv, Father, that 
 Thou "hast sent me, let these he one as Thou art 
 in me and I in Thee 9 ' it will be clear to him 
 
"STATIC BENE FIDA. 143 
 
 that there must be something very wrong 
 about all these people for they are not one 
 but two hundred churches. It would there- 
 fore be something more than imprudent, it 
 would be rash and dangerous, to follow after 
 their way. 
 
 If he is to subscribe in full to Christianity, 
 from which, supposedly, he originally started 
 out in quest of something new, he has but one 
 alternative. The fact of the marvelous unity 
 combined with great numerical strength, of 
 historical tradition, will forcibly appeal to 
 his logical mind and incline him to become 
 one of the two hundred and fifty millions 
 who own Leo as visible chief. 
 
 However, it must be admitted that he will 
 be confronted with another fact for which 
 the restlessness of certain minds in other dis- 
 rupted branches of Christianity is account- 
 able. There have been many in our day 
 who, not venturing to go the whole daring 
 length of total unbelief under the lead of 
 agnostic scientists on the one hand, and not 
 content, on the other, to rest under the re- 
 straining soul-discipline of Christianity, have 
 bethought them of the Buddhistic faith of the 
 far East, which seemed to them to impose 
 
144 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 the minimum of individual obligation and to 
 be free from harassing complications of doc- 
 trine. Hence the recent introduction of 
 what has been named Theosophy among the 
 more civilized peoples. 
 
 I doubt if this curious cult will arrest the 
 attention of any capable or reflective mind 
 for an}^ long time. It has had, however, a 
 certain vogue and its present standing may 
 be examined not unprofitably. It is as hard 
 to get any precise statement of this new 
 osophy or of the Buddhism it is supposed to 
 represent as the late Professor Freeman said 
 it was to fix Freemasonry as a historical fact, 
 or come at any reliable evidence about it 
 (Italy, page 34). 
 
 In a certain American university the dis- 
 satisfied Christians of a philosophy class not 
 very long ago, with a view to adopting The- 
 osophy as a substitute for the faith of their 
 fathers, invited a Hindu Bonze or priest 
 named Dharmapala to give them an authen- 
 tic and concise version of Buddhism. To 
 elicit more readily what they wanted to know 
 they decided to proceed by way of question 
 and answer, so they put up the Hindu on the 
 platform of their hall for interrogation and 
 
"STATIC BENE FIDA." 145 
 
 appointed their professor as leading cross- 
 examiner. But it soon appeared that the 
 professor was like a man diving on a rubber 
 surface, he could not get under. After sev- 
 eral questions answered in the high-flowing 
 and vague style of the Hindus this professor, 
 who himself was evidently tired of the ver- 
 sion of Christianity as taught in one of the 
 two hundred sects in which he was brought 
 up, seemed to lose patience and exclaimed 
 with an air of profound disappointment: "But 
 all this scarcely differs from what Christian- 
 ity exacts." Nirvana being the heart of the 
 system, the professor next questioned him 
 about this. What was its nature? how was it 
 to be attained? and when attained what was 
 it like? On these points Dharmapala dis- 
 coursed in grandiose and soaring phrases to 
 which the examiner frankly declared he 
 could attach no practical meaning. He 
 finally asked the learned Bonze to give them 
 a short, intelligible description of what they 
 might expect in the state of Nirvana; he re- 
 plied that "no one having yet attained to it, 
 it would be impossible to do so!" A full ac- 
 count of this proceeding appeared in the San 
 Francisco papers in the early summer of the 
 10 
 
146 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 year 1897. But we have not since been in- 
 formed that a temple to Buddha has been 
 erected in this very eclectic Californian uni- 
 versity. 
 
 An effort was made to popularize Bud- 
 dhism among the upper classes in England 
 under the pontifical patronage of Mr. Edwin 
 Arnold before he was made a knight (and 
 there was a time when the English Court 
 would not have admitted an English Bud- 
 dhist among its equerries), but it took no 
 hold there. The advent of Madam Blavatsky 
 and Prof. Max Muller's able exposure of 
 that lady's ignorance and charlatan preten- 
 sions may be considered the requiem of The- 
 osophy as far as England is concerned. The 
 theosophical priestess subsequently removed 
 her headquarters to Paris. Among a cer- 
 tain class of the French, ever ready to experi- 
 ment with the newest sensation, she met 
 with some success, but her poor, clumsy con- 
 juring with familiar spirits from the Pamirs 
 was exposed by a fellow-countryman, the 
 editor of a St. Petersburg journal. He wrote 
 a biography of this Mrs. Blavatsky, and not 
 the least useful of the labors of the London 
 Psychical Research Society was the transla- 
 
"STATIC BENE FIDA." 147 
 
 tion of that remarkable and sadly interesting 
 book and its circulation over the English- 
 speaking world. How any sane person 
 could continue to pursue this phantom of a 
 faith after reading this book passes compre- 
 hension. 
 
 It is true that Mrs. Blavatsky's very erratic 
 disciple, Mrs. Besant, published another biog- 
 raphy enthusiastically favorable to her, but 
 it was manifestly compiled from material 
 supplied by the most interested of witnesses, 
 the lady whose praises are sung. 
 
 It is also true that much has been said in 
 favor of the purer forms of Buddhism, nota- 
 bly by Mr. Max Muller, and the word of that 
 wonderful scholar is of great weight. But 
 by the purer forms the professor is careful to 
 explain the high moral maxims which he 
 found in its ancient writing. Surely we 
 need not go to Ceylon or Thibet for high 
 moral maxims! Are they not to be found 
 as high as any one need desire in the book 
 from w r hich with scarcely any doubt Gua- 
 tama Buddha himself and his disciples 
 largely borrowed the Old Testament and 
 which the New Christian Testament en- 
 dorses and adopts? 
 
148 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 Much is made, too, of the statement that 
 Buddhism is the religion of three hundred 
 millions of the human race. But far too 
 much is made of this. Without due exami- 
 nation that broad statement is certainly cal- 
 culated to impress and disturb the ordinary 
 un-Buddhistic mind. But, first, supposing 
 them three hundred million it may be asked, 
 What is the quality of that portion of the hu- 
 man race? Are the people composing it 
 among the foremost, best educated and most 
 civilized peoples of the world? Surely not. 
 
 Again that statement is contested. Travel- 
 ers who have come from the Eastern lands 
 
 
 
 assert that this number as representing those 
 who are really Buddhists is enormously ex- 
 aggerated. I have seen it reduced by some 
 writers to as much as one-tenth! 
 
 But even allowing for a very great number 
 it is beyond doubt that the divisions and dif- 
 ferences among them in creed and practise 
 far exceed even the fragments into which the 
 so-called reformed-Christianity is split. 
 
 Almost the first object that greeted the vis- 
 itor to the last great World Exhibition in Paris 
 was a huge statue of Buddha. Any civilized 
 man gazing at that most inartistic, clumsy and 
 
"STATIC BENE FIDA." 149 
 
 stupid-looking travesty of the human form, 
 must have felt nothing but aversion, and 
 passed on with a sigh of pity for the aberra- 
 tions of the human mind when abandoned to 
 its own purblind groping for the great secret. 
 
 Mahomedanism will also greet our friend 
 as another of the world's great facts in super- 
 naturalism. To find what is attractive or of 
 value in that, he has but to do two things 
 examine what historians who write of the 
 sixth century have to say of its founder 
 that remarkable Bedouin camel-driver of that 
 period, and of his preceptor, the ex-Nestorian 
 monk. Next, reflect on what is the lowest 
 animal instinct in men and what Mahomed- 
 anism promises and permits in satisfaction of 
 it. When he has done this, it can be safely 
 left to himself to say whether respect for his 
 own intelligence and regard for our weaker 
 and gentler sisters will permit him to enrol 
 himself among the followers of the prophet's 
 present representative whom a great English 
 statesman has proclaimed to our age as "the 
 great Assassin." 
 
 He will encounter still another fact in the 
 world of religions far less in proportion than 
 the last but far greater in significance and 
 even mystery. He will see a people some 
 
150 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 seven millions in number scattered through 
 the world, owning no country yet as distinct 
 and apart from all other peoples as if their 
 "place and nation" had not been taken away. 
 If he read history aright he will think gently 
 of the Jew. He will forget Shakespeare's 
 Jew the worldly and commercial Jew that 
 deals in "usance" and "pounds of Christian 
 flesh." He will remember this people for 
 their grand tradition. He will remember 
 them as the progenitors of our whole race, as 
 the chosen people of God and of old time. 
 His most favored nation. He will think of 
 them as the people whose influence on the 
 world stands first and without any rival; and 
 he will think of them in the later time when, 
 alas! they let their day go by and standing 
 belated by the wayside allowed their sacred 
 inheritance to pass to the Gentile. He will 
 think of them, then, as the poor outlawed, 
 hunted race, driven and persecuted for weary 
 centuries at the hands of those whom the di- 
 vine compassion of their gentle Master, Him- 
 self of Jewish blood, should have taught hu- 
 maner methods. He will recognize in their 
 marvelous preservation a divine intention and 
 a lingering of divine regard. He will recog- 
 nize remnants of their greatness in their su- 
 
''STATIC BENE FIDA. 15! 
 
 perior intelligence which, when the opening 
 comes to them, makes them still leaders 
 among men, as it has at this hour made them 
 princes in the world's commerce. And finally 
 he will remember them as the people of a 
 prophecy yet to be fulfilled, which tells that 
 their latest progeny on earth will be rallied to 
 the spiritual kingdom of Him whom their 
 fathers, foiled in their mistaken hopes for na- 
 tional glory, rejected and delivered over to 
 torture and to death. 
 
 It is not good in us to think unkindly of 
 Jews when the Master's latest prayer was for 
 their forgiveness. 
 
 They are a living fact in our world to-day. 
 In their creed they profess and possess the 
 truth the genuine truth that we too hold 
 in honor only they have halted short of its 
 divine fulness. 
 
 Such is the full prospect before those who 
 are returning disappointed and empty from 
 their agnostic experiences. If to the care- 
 ful use of their intelligence, they but 
 add a humble prayer for guidance and for 
 strength, there is little doubt which anchor- 
 ing ground will appear to them the statio 
 bene fida, the right trusty harbor for their 
 souls. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 
 
 The returning agnostic will find that in the 
 "safe harbor" indicated in the last chapter 
 his love of science need not, by any means, 
 be shed at its entrance nor its fascinating pur- 
 suit be necessarily abandoned. 
 
 Though the parent church of Christianity 
 does not assign the place of first importance 
 to the study of the natural sciences she is far 
 from forbidding that study to her members. 
 This very year 1897 gives a striking proof 
 of this. The Fourth Catholic Scientific Con- 
 gress was held at Fribourg in Switzerland at 
 the end of the summer. The most eminent 
 Catholic scientists and their number is not 
 small were invited to attend. The meeting- 
 was thoroughly representative of the Catholic 
 world. There were delegates from Great 
 Britain, Ireland, the United States, France, 
 Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany and Belgium 
 two hundred papers on scientific subjects 
 were read at the sessions of the Congress. 
 
IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 153 
 
 Almost every branch of human knowledge 
 was discussed the social question, law, his- 
 tory, political economy, physics, mathemat- 
 ics, astronomy, biology, art, philosophy, re- 
 ligion. Surely a syllabus ample enough to 
 satisfy the most ambitiously scientific. All 
 these had their share of friendly debate. The 
 leading and most useful feature of the discus- 
 sions seems to be an honest effort to deter- 
 mine what has been really demonstrated in 
 science and what has not, thereby separating 
 true science from that which has not as yet 
 established its title to that august name. 
 
 Far from, frowning on this enterprise as 
 fraught with danger to matters of defined 
 faith it was entered upon with the permission 
 and full approval of the Head of the Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 But there is besides permanent testimony 
 to the freedom of scientific pursuits within 
 her fold in the programmes of her higher edu- 
 cational establishments in all parts of the 
 world. They may be had for the asking any- 
 where and a perusal of them will show how 
 false it is to say, as Mr. Huxley unfairly said, 
 that this church is always opposed to the 
 study of science. 
 
154 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 The pursuit of science in itself she has 
 never opposed. But she has combated and 
 must always combat the conclusions of certain 
 scientists in which the existence of God is de- 
 nied, or in which He is declared to be un- 
 known and absolutely unknowable, and 
 therefore is not to be counted or thought of 
 at all in human affairs; in which the human 
 soul and man's immortality are also counted 
 out, and in which all revelation or knowledge, 
 derived from Him who created us, about our- 
 selves and the meaning of our lives, is to be 
 rejected as a fraudulent and absurd invention 
 an imposture! Yes, these assertions al- 
 leged to be directly derived from science, the 
 Church, and I fancy the saner and better part 
 of mankind, will always contest and refute, 
 maintaining that they are not legitimate con- 
 clusions from true and demonstrated science. 
 Why they are persistently asserted by men of 
 name before the world is a secret of their own 
 personal and private lives which the great ac- 
 counting day will record. It is certain the 
 conclusions of Science favor the freest kind 
 of living. They act as mutes on the strings 
 of conscience. 
 
 The returning agnostic will find, too, in 
 
IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 155 
 
 the teaching and practise of that church not 
 mere dry speculative dogmatism having ref- 
 erence only to the life hereafter, but much 
 that is valuable in its practical bearing on 
 the actual life of the world, much that is of 
 great service to society, curative of its ills and 
 fenders to its dangers. 
 
 What are the things which agitate and 
 alarm society at the present day? 
 
 i. There is the unrest of the masses of the 
 laboring poor their aw r akening to the con- 
 sciousness of the fact that they are poor and 
 ill-provided with the comforts of life and 
 slave-driven in work which at best is preca- 
 rious, and from the profits of which only the 
 very slenderest share comes to them, while 
 there are a favored few into whose hands 
 enormous wealth has been gathered, who 
 have apparently bought themselves free from 
 general sentence of toil, who live in extreme 
 comfort and luxury and who command an 
 abounding market of needy men to do every- 
 thing for them, even to the increasing of their 
 already great stores of riches. This glaring 
 inequality is the root of the socialism so uni- 
 versally discussed in our times, and is assum- 
 ing such threatening attitudes against estab- 
 
156 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 lished order and peace almost everywhere 
 now. 
 
 He will find in this church some very prac- 
 tical teachings to assuage this acute feeling 
 and mitigate the danger of its violent out- 
 break if listened to. 
 
 In a former chapter I briefly but truthfully 
 described numerous societies of men and 
 women who actually exist around us and 
 have existed for a very long time where com- 
 radeship and harmony prevail with perfect 
 equality and unity of purpose for a common 
 good a good by no means restricted to self, 
 but helpful to others, and a life, not ease-lov- 
 ing and indolent, but ceaselessly and devot- 
 edly active in the cause of ignorant, needy 
 and suffering humanity. It is the supernat- 
 ural motive the reflex from the eternal life 
 and all they are taught about the will, the 
 justice and the holiness of the Omnipotent, 
 which alone makes the self-devotion the 
 self-immolation of such an existence possible 
 in this world. And it is the same motive and 
 none other, applied of course in a lessened 
 degree and modified to meet the circum- 
 stances of worldly occupations, that will re- 
 strain the poor within the bounds of modera- 
 
IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 157 
 
 tion in their just efforts to better their condi- 
 tion and guide them securely in the way of 
 happiness. It is through men's minds the 
 world is best governed better than by the 
 ruder means of force and terror, and unless 
 it is ingrained in men how unwise it is to give 
 all their thought absorbingly to a life so pass- 
 ing and so short, and practise no virtue, 
 which is the price of better things in the more 
 enduring one in other words, admit the 
 supernatural into their thoughts and daily 
 lives in vain will you propose "nationaliza- 
 tion of all the instruments of production/' 
 "unification of labor/' and "equal distribu- 
 tion of profits/ 7 "land tax" or "single tax/' 
 Fourier's "Phalansteries," Comte's "Polity," 
 or any of those well-intentioned schemes for 
 social improvement, of which the last forty 
 years have been so prolific. Nor is the su- 
 pernatural motive a nostrum with which to 
 beguile the poor. It is for rich and poor 
 alike. The supernatural must be readmit- 
 ted into the lives of both in much larger 
 measure than it is at present, before there is 
 the slightest chance of restoring peace be- 
 tween capital and labor. It is quite certain 
 that these benevolent schemes of the 
 
158 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 Georges, the Marks, and the Morrises will 
 never succeed. With men, as they are now, 
 they are unworkable. That the supernatural 
 no longer occupies the prominent place it 
 ought in the lives of multitudes of men in our 
 time is due mainly to the wrangling and divi- 
 sions of sects since the sixteenth century. 
 So the first step in efforts to restore it would 
 be to bring about a. reunion of Christendom 
 under one form of faith. 
 
 But this, it will be answered, is as Utopian 
 as the schemes of single taxers and national- 
 izers "of land and instruments of produc- 
 tion." I do not entirely admit that, but I 
 say that unless some approach to it is made, 
 notwithstanding the impious sneers of a reck- 
 less minority, you may despair of a settle- 
 ment of the social question. Agitation and 
 storm and fights will come violence and 
 bloodshed will be witnessed again, but when 
 their short season is over things will fall back 
 into the same, if not a worse, state again 
 the future but repeating the past. Mr. Ben- 
 jamin Kidd in his "Social Evolution' 9 says that 
 the "altruism" on which the socialists de- 
 pend to make their proposals a success is not 
 to be found in human nature. He maintains 
 
IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 159 
 
 that "the altruism that ever did anything or 
 ever will do anything among men has been 
 generated by religion and religion alone/' 
 
 The late Professor Blaikie, whose sym- 
 pathies were strongly in favor of a moderate 
 socialist programme, also confesses in one of 
 his essays that "the true altruistic spirit, nec- 
 essary for the success of socialism, must 
 come from the fountain of religion and so- 
 cialism must enter into closer alliance with 
 religion." It is a pity that many will have to 
 ask "Which?" Socialism is as broad as 
 humanity, and religion ought to be able to 
 confront it as one, and with no faltering and 
 uncertain doctrine. This latter condition, at 
 any rate, our returning friend will find well 
 fulfilled in the great church still united under 
 Leo XIII, who, by the way, is acknowledged 
 in our day as the best exponent of socialism 
 in its highest and truest sense. 
 
 2. Our age is suffering, and in some places 
 alarmingly so, from a deplorable change in 
 women's views of maternity. 
 
 In France premiums have been offered by 
 government for larger families! 
 
 Not long since a prominent New York 
 physician, in an article contributed to the 
 
l6o THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 North American Review, raised the alarm for 
 America on this delicate but most important 
 subject. He declares it has become the rule 
 with American wives either not to bear chil- 
 dren at all or to have but one or two at most. 
 Among the causes to which he attributes this 
 dreadful state of things he notes "the loosen- 
 ing of religion's hold on American parents.'' 
 They no longer regard its strict prohibition 
 of this practise and have taken the matter 
 into their own hands. In the Catholic 
 Church a most successful remedy is applied 
 to this. The practise and obligation there 
 enjoined of the regular "confession of sins," 
 which has come in for such aspersion at the 
 hands of the separatist Christians, but which 
 is really one of the greatest forces for moral 
 good in the world, though the least obtrusive 
 and most silent, renders such deplorable prac- 
 tises impossible. Every Catholic woman 
 knows that the benefit of this sacrament 
 would be uncompromisingly denied until all 
 such sinful tampering with nature's laws was 
 completely abandoned. And their faith in 
 their church's teaching always prevails. 
 
 It is not out of place to add here that the 
 prejudiced attacks on "the confessional" 
 
IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. l6l 
 
 happily growing less in this more reasonable 
 age have no foundation in fact. Here is a 
 simple way to test it. You may meet every- 
 where whole families whose members of both 
 sexes have made it a lifelong practise "to go 
 to confession." Ask any of them collectively 
 or individually if any harm or evil has come 
 to them from that practise? Their answer 
 will be, "No." Ask them if they ever heard 
 anything in that confessional that was not 
 for their good? You may rely on it their 
 answer will be, "Never." The thing stands to 
 reason. If there were in this practise 
 adopted by millions of people, as a part of 
 their lives and so for many hundreds of years, 
 anything radically or grossly wrong, it would 
 have become of such public notoriety long 
 ago, that no one of respectability would be 
 found to follow such a practise; but as many 
 follow it as ever many most excellent peo- 
 ple, you will find, if you only take the trouble 
 to inquire, which proves that a most unjust 
 prejudice has been propagated against it. 
 
 3. Our age is suffering from the loss of re- 
 spect for the sacredness of the marriage bond. 
 Facility of divorce, which now nearly every- 
 where prevails under the unrighteous usur- 
 ii 
 
l62 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 pation of the civil power over an institution 
 directly established and safeguarded by God 
 Himself, has resulted in sad consequences to 
 society. It is not unusual for a woman to 
 meet at social gatherings two, three and even 
 four men to whom she had been severally 
 married! The disruption of families follows 
 so many foundations of civilized society 
 uprooted. Children are robbed of their 
 homes and neglected. The filial feeling, hith- 
 erto so wholesome and sweet an influence in 
 life, is blighted and ruined by a precocious 
 knowledge of the disgraceful frailties of 
 parents. 
 
 The most repulsive feature in this author- 
 ized license of manners is that these divorce 
 courts offer a premium and an invitation to 
 vice, for almost immediately the "respond- 
 ent and co-respondent" get married. These 
 shameless people often unblushingly own 
 that their infidelities have been committed 
 that the divorce court may have evidence to 
 set them free to indulge their unnatural and 
 illicit amours. And the court obediently 
 enters into their plot. 
 
 Against this manifest drifting into pagan 
 barbarism, the ancient Church stands firm. 
 
IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 163 
 
 It proclaims to the world that marriage is not 
 a thing to be tampered with by any human 
 authority whatsoever. "Whom God has 
 joined together let no man put asunder," is 
 her charter on this. The yoke which has 
 been deliberately and validly assumed it is 
 God's will, she declares must be borne to the 
 end. The marriage bond is sacred made 
 by God Himself and in the keeping only of 
 those who represent Him. No marriages, 
 she says, done in slipshod fashion over the 
 counter of registry offices shall be blessed by 
 her. No halting, conditioned form of mar- 
 riage on which rests the gloomy shadow of 
 a prospective divorce and takes away from 
 the young people that security of "settling 
 in life" they so eagerly looked forward to, is 
 permitted by her it must be "for better, for 
 worse till death do us part." And if in a 
 minority of cases the yoke hopelessly chafes 
 and the couple prove ill-suited to each other, 
 she meets that with the legal separation from 
 "bed and board," but insists that for the com- 
 mon good the inconvenience of celibacy must 
 be borne until the death of one shall set the 
 other free. 
 
 4. Our age suffers from a lack of honesty 
 
164 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 in public and private life. People are begin- 
 ning to be puzzled to know what to do with 
 their money which prudent thrift rightly dic- 
 tates to them to put by for "the rainy day." 
 The exposure of gigantic swindles like that 
 of J. Balfour, ex-M. P., &c., the wholesale 
 plunder of the Panama stockholders, the 
 "booming" of worthless or fictitious proper- 
 ties and stocks as investments, awaken the 
 world from time to time to the fact that mul- 
 titudes of men have lost all conscience about 
 stealing the money of others. The expens- 
 ive excitement of "turf and "ring" gambling 
 has created a passion for petty pilfering 
 which leaves no employer safe. The system 
 of electing office holders and judges only for 
 a short period has opened the door to cor- 
 ruption and dishonest jobbery of all kinds 
 where that system prevails, until people get 
 little value for their taxes and can scarcely 
 get justice fairly administered. 
 
 To this serious and dangerous wrongdoing 
 the Church firmly opposes the "refusal of ab- 
 solution in confession" to the thief and cheat, 
 no matter of what rank or position, until res- 
 titution be made to those who were wronged, 
 and until robberv in everv form be aban- 
 
IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 165 
 
 doned. The world little knows the powerful 
 help it lost in its affairs when the separating 
 Christians of the sixteenth century decreed 
 to discontinue the practise of confessing their 
 sins. 
 
 5. Our age is suffering from a loss of 
 what may be called, for want of a less awk- 
 ward word, femininity in women. An am- 
 bitious spirit has entered into them. They 
 are hungering for a share in all public affairs 
 and aim at abolishing all distinctions of sex 
 in the avocations of life. Why may not we 
 do everything that men do? they say. And 
 they proceed to do it never reckoning how 
 much of their charm they shed with their 
 skirts. They stop not even at skimming the 
 highways and dashing through our streets 
 in that new and least modest of postures 
 astride of a bicycle. 
 
 Well, the church has nothing de fide on the 
 manners of women, but she has plenty to re- 
 strain their excesses in the wise traditions 
 from which she does not intend to depart, 
 and in the golden rules for women's conduct 
 which she has by no means abrogated. She 
 has quiet but sufficient means to see to it that 
 her children, who are styled in her liturgy 
 
1 66 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 the devotus femineus sexus, shall not make 
 themselves instead of helpful examples in 
 modest reserve wanton occasions of spirit- 
 ual hurt to men. Women owe their present 
 high place in civilization, as well as their res- 
 cue from a barbarous degradation in past 
 times, exclusively to the action of this ancient 
 Church. They should, not ungratefully, re- 
 member that. If they choose to forget it and 
 despise her counsels, so wise from long ex- 
 perience, it is certain they will fall back into 
 the same cruel subjection again. Let them 
 turn their eyes to the Orient! Who of them 
 would be Moslem women or Hindoos? 
 Well, to that, the half-unsexed woman of to- 
 day is inevitably hastening her sisters of the 
 future! 
 
 Thus our friend will find that the practises 
 and teachings of this oldest Christian church 
 are by no means all dry mysticism or value- 
 less speculation. All the other way. There 
 is hardly a detail of human life on which they 
 have not a direct and beneficent bearing and 
 undoubtedly make for the true civilization 
 and happiness of the race. 
 
 A signal service was rendered to the 
 Christian world when the Council of Trent, 
 
IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 167 
 
 amid the mental confusion of the sixteenth 
 century, issued a clear and unhesitating re- 
 statement of the whole Catholic creed. He 
 would do well to refer to that settled stand- 
 ard of faith for further details. Many edi- 
 tions of it have been published in the Latin 
 tongue as well as translations, and may be 
 procured from any Catholic publishing 
 house. True, since that time two points of 
 doctrine have been defined the Immacu- 
 late Conception of B. V. and the Infallibility 
 of the Pope quoad fidem et mores, But defin- 
 ing does not mean inventing. It does not 
 mean that those points were not hitherto be- 
 lieved. On the contrary, it is an affirmation 
 that they w^ere always accepted as true by the 
 church generally, but that no pressing need 
 of formulating them as beyond all dispute, 
 that is defining them, having arisen, they 
 were not hitherto incorporated in set terms 
 among the articles of faith. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BE- 
 LIEVERS. 
 
 There never was a time when "the just 
 man living by faith" was more exposed to 
 disturbing influences than he is at present. 
 
 i. Magazines and Reviews have multiplied 
 to an enormous extent. They are not what 
 they used to be. They have no particular 
 views, no principles, take no sides, and repre- 
 sent no party. They open their pages im- 
 partially to error and to truth alike. They 
 are open debating ground from which no 
 subject is excluded, where nothing is sacred 
 any longer, nothing exempt from the most 
 searching and adventurous criticism. Side 
 by side with an interesting account of travel 
 or some question of politics you have a fierce 
 onslaught on the Bible, on some particular 
 point of belief or religious practise. To take 
 a hap-hazard instance look at the North 
 American Review for December, 1895, where 
 (168) 
 
PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 169 
 
 Prof. Goodwin Smith disports his Voltairean- 
 ism. Look at almost any number of the 
 London Nineteenth Century, or of the Fort- 
 nightly Review, the same medley of confusing 
 views on every aspect of religion and the 
 supernatural may be encountered. This 
 species of literature has a very wide circula- 
 tion and makes favorite short reading for 
 hosts of men who are too busy to study 
 things au fond or read whole books. Ther 
 is little doubt that this literature is account 
 able for much of the unbelief and of the un- 
 settled belief that prevails. 
 
 It is, then, a danger to the believer. 
 
 But what is to be done about it? 
 
 It is hopeless to expect that the unre- 
 strained liberty of the press in this particular 
 will be. interfered with. No government 
 cares any longer to intervene in favor of re- 
 ligious belief. As governments they ignore 
 the fact that God has rights over the minds 
 of his creature. 
 
 It only remains then for individuals, who 
 do care for faith, to refuse to aid and abet 
 such publications by neither subscribing for 
 nor reading them. 
 
 "Oh, what narrow-minded advice! People 
 
1 70 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 ought to know all sides of questions; it is un- 
 fair and cowardly not to listen to what people 
 have to say." To this remonstrance, which 
 will at once be made in many quarters, the 
 Catholic believer at least can most reasonably 
 answer, that he does not choose to employ 
 himself so idly as reading denials and con- 
 tradictions of matters that for him were 
 settled ages ago by expert authority which 
 he deeply respects and on which he has long 
 since made up his mind that it is safer and 
 wiser for him to rely. It is not cowardly 
 it is common sense and prudence not to listen 
 to people who only succeed in upsetting the 
 mind on subjects he deems very vital to his 
 happiness and have nothing at all to offer in 
 place of the hope they deprive him of, and 
 leave him only in bewilderment. It is not 
 unfair in him to demand at least the liberty 
 of not listening to very bad and very unprac- 
 tical advice. Take for instance Goodwin 
 Smith's article above referred to. He seeks 
 to undermine all respect for the Bible and 
 flatly denies it to represent God's instructions 
 or the expression of His will to His creatures. 
 Well, what are we to accept in place of it? 
 Mr. Smith's instructions to the world ? 
 
PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 1 7 1 
 
 Hardly! For hundreds of years this ques- 
 tion was deliberated upon again and again by 
 intelligent educated men, men of cultivated 
 intellect, of different nationalities and differ- 
 ent times, and they all have delivered a unani- 
 mous verdict in favor of this most ancient and 
 venerated of books. That ought to be 
 enough for any ordinary man and the believ- 
 ing Catholic knows that it is enough for 
 him. Nor does he feel he is surrendering his 
 reason or his judgment in any way. He 
 rather feels he is vindicating his common 
 sense and acting as all sensible men do in the 
 ordinary affairs of life. There are legislative 
 bodies and Supreme Courts of law every- 
 where. No reasonable citizen ever thinks he 
 is surrendering his reason or judgment in ac- 
 cepting their decisions, and on occasion he 
 is willing even to surrender his own private 
 judgment as the wisest and safest thing for 
 him to do. If any one button-holes him and 
 lays out arguments to prove to him that he 
 should not do so, he says, "That is foolish 
 talk/' and he does not listen. Every sensible 
 man applauds him for that. On subjects that 
 to him are of much higher importance than 
 State laws, why refuse to the believer the 
 
IJ2 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 same approval that the citizen is sure to get 
 for acting so sensibly? 
 
 Or take Mr. Huxley's assertive articles in 
 the Nineteenth Century. Why should the 
 believer waste time in reading what hundreds 
 of men, whom he knows better and respects 
 more than Mr. Huxley, have told the world 
 long ago were matters fixed and decided on 
 as of faith and founded on divine authority? 
 All the Huxleys in the world could not 
 change his opinion now, and even if they 
 could they have nothing to offer on which he 
 could rest for courage and hope as he rests 
 on his present belief. 
 
 Therefore the best and only thing to do is 
 to leave those men and dangerous literary 
 symposiums severely alone. When you are 
 walking out peacefully with a sound head and 
 whole skin, and rocks are flying about, you 
 do not go deliberately in the way of them. 
 "But," it will be answered again, "Cardinals 
 Manning and Newman and Gibbons contrib- 
 uted to the pages of these magazines." 
 
 That these distinguished men felt impelled 
 to reply to outrageous attacks on revelation 
 wherever opportunity afforded, is by no 
 means a formal approval of the methods 
 
PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 173 
 
 adopted by the publishers of those new ec- 
 lectic periodicals. Probably they were glad 
 of the chance to turn an evil, they could not 
 abolish, into a vehicle for at least some good. 
 Moreover there is no need to have recourse 
 to these monthly papers to find out what 
 these eminent churchmen have to say; that 
 may be found in better and fuller form in their 
 own published works. 
 
 2. Free Public Libraries are another dan- 
 ger. They are everywhere the rage in our 
 days. Though free they are in another sense 
 compulsory. People are compelled to pay 
 for them in taxes, if private munificence has 
 not stepped in to build and endow them. In 
 another sense too they are really free very 
 free indeed. There is no censorship for any 
 kind of book, except the openly obscene. The 
 shelves of those libraries are as impartially 
 open to irreligious falsehood, attacks on faith 
 and the supernatural, and to religious truth, 
 as the pages of the new symposium journals. 
 
 These library buildings, all handsome, sub- 
 stantial structures on which public money is 
 unstintedly lavished, are said to have many 
 advantages. They are nice cozy shelters for 
 the poor and unemployed. No one will 
 
174 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 grudge them for that purpose though no 
 doubt something less pretentious would do 
 in most places. 
 
 They keep the working classes out of sa- 
 loons and gambling places. This is a matter 
 of statistics that I am not competent to deal 
 with, but if they do and do them no worse 
 harm, supply no poison for their souls all 
 right. 
 
 They are a great help to the poor scholar 
 and intelligent mechanic where books beyond 
 their slender purses may be consulted ex- 
 cellent. The best and newest literature, his- 
 tory, travels, fiction, etc., is there within easy 
 reach of all who can not have home libraries 
 and who, out of working hours, are fond of 
 reading and self-improvement admirable 
 too, only it must here be added that from 
 universal experience the heaviest demand is 
 always on the fiction department, especially 
 by the youthful of both sexes, so the "self- 
 improvement" is of a shady and doubtful 
 kind. 
 
 They add to the culture and refinement, 
 lessen ignorance and keep up education 
 among the people. The experiment is too 
 new to pronounce yet with confidence on 
 
PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 175 
 
 these happy effects. It should be the wish 
 of every one that they may do so. But it is 
 just possible that just such miscellaneous 
 reading may have a lowering effect on moral- 
 ity. And what will compensate a nation for 
 that calamity? 
 
 Further than that and a greater calamity is 
 it to leave a people without any religious 
 faith whatever. This is the recorded convic- 
 tion of the wisest men in every generation. 
 And beyond all doubt these free Public Li- 
 braries in one respect contribute to this dan- 
 ger. In nearly every one of them, on de- 
 mand you can obtain any of the books that 
 contain the most virulent attacks upon relig- 
 ious belief for the last hundred years. 
 
 And what is to be done? 
 
 We can not send Samsons through the 
 world to pull them down. We can not boy- 
 cott them like the symposium magazines 
 we should be summoned for taxes all the 
 same. 
 
 There remains only reform. Every rate- 
 payer with a conscience for his country 
 should agitate for a stricter censorship over 
 all books of a dangerous tendency and the 
 appointment of competent and upright cen- 
 
1 76 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 sors. As no discrimination is to be hoped for 
 in favor of any particular theological works, 
 owing to the unhappy confusion introduced 
 by the sects, eliminate that department alto- 
 gether from the public libraries allow no 
 books of any kind treating of religion. That 
 is about the best that can be done and any 
 body of united rate-payers could easily insist 
 on it. 
 
 3. Legislators declare that this had to be 
 done in the Public School system. The mul- 
 titude of contending sects, they said, left them 
 no choice but to drop religion altogether 
 from public education. This may be a good 
 argument to make use of for purifying the 
 Public Libraries, where the omission can do 
 no harm. 
 
 But unfortunately such action, as applied 
 to daily training of young children, consti- 
 tutes the greatest of all dangers to the relig- 
 ious faith of a country, and, as experience is 
 every day abundantly proving, is accountable 
 for the vast amount of religious indifference 
 among the adult population wherever that 
 system prevails. 
 
 It is a fallacy to say that dropping all re- 
 ligion out of education was the only choice 
 
PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 177 
 
 left to settle the question. There is more 
 than one way of settling it. 
 
 If the body of men in charge of state af- 
 fairs deem it, in their might, incumbent upon 
 them to prescribe what kind of education 
 the people's children shall receive a right 
 which is by no means incontestable then 
 .rather than close the school-room door upon 
 all religion they should have first tried, if they 
 themselves still retain any due reverence for 
 God's rights, less sweeping and less perilous 
 measures. 
 
 The people are divided into two classes. 
 One maintains that religion forms a part 
 and the most important part of education. 
 The other says it does not. Meanwhile the 
 State, assuming the duty of educating the na- 
 tion, levies taxes for the purpose from all and 
 yet positively refuses to have anything to say 
 to religion. In the eyes of the first class, and 
 they are no inconsiderable number, as the 
 State fails in an essential part of its duty, they 
 question the justice of the tax. But as they 
 can not resist the might of the State they obey 
 the law under protest, and peacefully "suggest 
 another way out of the difficulty. They 
 say, Remit us our proportion of this publig 
 
178 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 tax which we promise to apply to the educa- 
 tion that includes religious training for our 
 children. That seems perfectly fair and just. 
 
 Legislators reply that this would be cum- 
 brous and troublesome. Yes, but if it is fair 
 and just and right, is it not worth the trouble? 
 Does it not make the trouble a duty to that 
 class of citizens? They also make answer 
 that it would breed divisions in the country 
 to the danger of the State. 
 
 The advocates of religious training meet 
 this with denial. They protest their loyalty 
 to the Constitution and offer any guarantee 
 the State may see fit to exact, in the way of 
 inspection of their schools and vigilance over 
 their methods, in proof of their good faith. 
 
 It is objected, in the third place, that it 
 would break up uniformity in the standard of 
 national education, which everybody admits 
 ought to be maintained. 
 
 Well, so do the religious educators admit 
 it, and profess themselves ready to adopt the 
 State standard in all secular branches where 
 they do not clash with their religious views, 
 which is only likely to happen in the sub- 
 ject of history and they are moreover will- 
 ing that the efficiency of their schools should 
 be tested by State educational experts. 
 
PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 179 
 
 Could any demand be more manifestly fair 
 than theirs, surrounded by such safeguards? 
 
 Why is it not granted then? 
 
 Because there is another large class who 
 want to fling over all religion and who know 
 that the present system admirably helps their 
 desires. This is a proof of the danger to all 
 belief which results from these schools. 
 
 And (2) there is another equally large class 
 whom, unhappily, sectarian jealousy and 
 long-cherished animosity to another section 
 of their fellow-citizens place in opposition to 
 everything desired by them "We will not 
 listen to any demand you make or any plea 
 you put forth/' they say; "we suspect and 
 distrust you." Shame! And this is a coun- 
 try that boasts of perfect freedom and tolera- 
 tion! In face of such opposition it can only 
 be hoped that time will bring a more enlight- 
 ened and kinder feeling. Meanwhile it rests 
 upon those who care for the preservation of 
 religious faith to do their part as citizens to 
 remove prejudice. This prejudice rests on 
 the hollowest of cries, yet one that always 
 gains the people's ear and excites their alarm. 
 Whenever the demand is heard for sanction 
 and aid to schools with religious training in 
 
l8o THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 their programme, the cry is raised, "Our great 
 national school system is in danger!" It 
 rings through the land and at once rallies 
 multitudes of people in opposition, who never 
 thought about the question, who do not even 
 understand what the danger may be or how 
 or w T hence it is to come. 
 
 It will be a duty to say and to show to such 
 people that the national school system is not 
 in danger, that this cry is as false as it is cap- 
 tious, that the real danger is loss of a 
 people's religious faith and the forfeit to the 
 nation's detriment, of the greatest moral force 
 for order and right conduct in this world. 
 
 "The home and the church," it is said 
 again, "are the places for religious training, 
 they are sufficient to avert this danger." 
 
 No doubt the home and the church bear 
 their share of good influence upon the child, 
 but experience show r s that this influence does 
 not reach far enough and as often as not is 
 more than outweighed by the loose example 
 the child witnesses in the religionless school. 
 The child ought to be habituated to a rever- 
 ence for religion and impressed with its great 
 importance in this life and for the next. But 
 how expect the child to deem that important 
 
PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. l8l 
 
 about which he never hears his teachers say 
 one word on any of the six days of his weekly 
 school-life? And if anything is ever said 
 about it, it is more often than not a sneer 
 from an agnostic teacher or a mockery of it 
 in the mouths of his companions. No, it 
 must be taken as generally true that unless 
 religious ideas are interwoven with the chief 
 occupation of the child's daily life, he will 
 value them very little in his riper years. 
 
 It is not, then, unfair to assert that one of 
 the greatest dangers to religious belief in our 
 times is the system of purely worldly educa- 
 tion imposed on so many countries to-day in 
 spite of the unceasing protest of the oldest 
 church in the world and the two hundred and 
 fifty millions of its members. 
 
 4. Another and no slight danger is the 
 extreme worldliness and luxurious living of 
 the rich. Think of the vast sums expended 
 on their purely selfish tastes and pursuits. 
 Take a peep into those splendid and costly 
 club-houses the soft lounge of the Sybarite 
 and Epicurean. Think of the floating palace 
 pleasure yachts, the gorgeous villas at the 
 summer resorts, the brilliant equipages and 
 the dazzling toilettes, male and female. We 
 
182 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 shudder at the polygamous Turk and the un- 
 bridled animalism of the Oriental, but who 
 keeps up those hundreds of costly and name- 
 less establishments of licentiousness in every 
 Christian city? Place side by side in your 
 thoughts what you have learned of Christian- 
 ity and its counsels, and say what could pos- 
 sibly be in common between the one picture 
 and the other? The luxury-loving rich are 
 of the "eat, drink, to-morrow we die" class, 
 and their example, like a contagion, spreads 
 down through the ranks of the less favored 
 of fortune in a reduced degree. Until these 
 people wake up to the dread reality that here 
 is not the place of final satisfaction and final 
 reward, that it is a species of most reckless 
 gambling to stake all on their few years here, 
 faith can find no place among them or give 
 anything to hope for. 
 
 5. Fiction which is turned out by the ton 
 to amuse the leisure hour, is another danger. 
 What does the best of it parade across its 
 stage as representative of human society ? 
 Why, a thronging crowd of unadulterated 
 heathens. Even in the exquisitely refined and 
 delicate stories of Miss Jane Austen, whom 
 Lord Macaulay so highly praised, and in the 
 
PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 183 
 
 admittedly clean novels of such masters as 
 Thackeray and Dickens, you would never for 
 a moment be reminded that you were read- 
 ing about the inhabitants of a world once vis- 
 ited by a Divine Teacher and a Divine Re- 
 deemer. Say what people may, that can not 
 help having the effect of slowly lulling the 
 constant reader into an unholy and unsafe 
 forgetfulness, and forming the fascinated 
 reader into the mould and stamp of his favor- 
 ite hero and heroine "These people seem to 
 have got on famously without much ado 
 about religion, why not I?" he is apt to say. 
 
 The returning agnostic must not fail to 
 take account of these five dangers and health- 
 ily exercise his faith in not only avoiding but 
 doing battle against their deadly tendencies. 
 
 In the following brief and final chapter I 
 offer a few hints to smooth the w r ay for some 
 minds whom the many mysteries of faith hin- 
 der and perplex without reason as will be 
 seen. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 MYSTERIES. 
 
 We have to swallow a lot of "camels" in 
 this world around us, why hesitate about a 
 few more? 
 
 From where I am sitting now I can see, in 
 a bee line, the great Lick Observatory six- 
 teen atmospheric miles away, it is thirty-two 
 by the road. It looks just like a coach and 
 sits on the summit of the range. Yet I know 
 that under that little white dome, there is the 
 largest telescope yet mounted in the world; 
 and there are sidereal telescopes, elaborate 
 photographic instruments, quadrants, sex- 
 tants, true meridians what not? There is a 
 trained staff of observers and distinguished 
 mathematicians who live up there in six 
 months of cloud and snow, five thousand feet 
 above the heads and away from the converse 
 of their fellows, to discover for us the secrets 
 of the stars. It cost nearly a million dollars to 
 instal that small establishment. And how lit- 
 tle, how very little, they have been able to tell 
 (W) 
 
MYSTERIES. 185 
 
 us; and without at all depreciating their great 
 devotedness and industry how useless in the 
 practical affairs of men has even that little 
 proved to be! They have given us a few pic- 
 tures. But as well photograph a "Fruit- 
 vale" orange or a squash-melon, for all those 
 pictures tell in reality of Mars or the moon. 
 It was up there they discovered the fifth 
 moon of Jupiter, a fact w r hich Professor Ball 
 informed his readers, in the London News, 
 was of "vast importance." In the hard real- 
 ities of life and its personal concerns what is 
 it to me whether Jupiter has five moons or 
 fifty? They make stupendous calculations 
 about the distances, the gravity and motions 
 of planets, stars, double stars, comets and 
 nebulae. Curious no doubt, but they are 
 still gazing into mystery, and are as far from 
 solving the familiar riddles close around them 
 as ever. They have made great advances in 
 knowledge of the sun. But who will tell us 
 what heat really is, and why it acts so pecul- 
 iarly? That sun is one million times the 
 bulk of our earth; it is ninety-three millions 
 of miles distant very well. The flood of 
 heat cast out by a bulk like that ought to en- 
 tirely envelop and keep in equal warmth all 
 
186 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 parts of a small globe like the earth. So one 
 would fancy. But ask Dr. Nansen to tell you 
 what he saw and felt last year at the North 
 Pole. No obliquity of the earth's axis will 
 ever satisfy me as an explanation of that. 
 But here is the real mystery of heat. It 
 travels all the ninety-three millions of miles 
 to come to us and for all that distance up 
 to within a few feet it is cold, icy cold, proof, 
 rise up straight into that sunshine in a bal- 
 loon; in an hour or two you will be a frost- 
 bitten corpse, the same sun still shining on 
 you. Yet what enormous initial heat must 
 have been projected to warm that little bed 
 out there in the garden and make those 
 spring flo\vers look so gay this morning! 
 Last w r eek Professor Holden and his friends 
 up at the "Lick" had several feet of snow all 
 round them, while we were sitting in shirt 
 sleeves and wearing sunhats from the heat 
 down here! The illustration of the glass of 
 a hot-house usually offered in explanation of 
 this solves not for me the mystery why a 
 thing that was icy cold becomes blazing hot 
 by mere contact with the atmosphere, or by 
 coming under it so to speak. Yet you be- 
 lieve in heat. It is a thing that will blister 
 
MYSTERIES. 1 87 
 
 you if you do not believe in it. You, at the 
 same time, really know nothing at all about 
 the thing itself. 
 
 Up at that "Lick" they will tell you the 
 weight of this great earth enormous 
 the figures in pounds would reach from here 
 to there. Yet this tremendous bulk is float- 
 ing about in, apparently, nothing! When 
 we lie down upon it at night or step abroad 
 upon it in the day, how do we know it will 
 not give way under us and leave us there? 
 We do not know at all, because everybody 
 will tell you, if they are straight and honest, 
 that au fond it is a mystery to us, yet you be- 
 lieve it will not give way, you never heard of 
 such a thing. Centripetal and centrifugal 
 forces keep it up. Yes, of course, but what 
 really is the thing, the res of that force, no 
 one ever has told or ever will be able to 
 tell us. 
 
 Again, this earth is round. Some belated 
 people still say it is not, but I know it is, be- 
 cause some years ago I left the shore of that 
 neighboring bay of San Francisco on the 
 train, traveling eastward, and without ever 
 turning back I sailed in again through its 
 Golden Gate at an exactly opposite point of 
 
188 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 the compass! Well, two-thirds of its vast,, 
 round surface is water; why doesn't it spill? 
 In the twenty-four days' stretch across the 
 great Pacific we all believed it would not spill, 
 but why, not a soul of us knew. Of course, 
 most of us did know about "diurnal motion," 
 and "pressure of atmosphere," and such other 
 school-boy explanation, but the whole vast 
 phenomenon and its nicety of arrangement 
 who can ever comprehend? 
 
 While I write, too, there is a beautiful little 
 creeper called the "Bridal-veil" silently 
 throwing its small, tender tentacles around 
 that porch there, climbing the training laths 
 as skilfully as a sailor-boy shins a halyard. 
 What is it makes it do that? What is the 
 force within it which pushes and guides? We 
 all believed it would surely do that, as soon as 
 this spring-time was old enough and the birds 
 were singing again but how, the wisest of us 
 do not know. 
 
 These and a score of other things "as fa- 
 miliar as household words" mystify us, yet 
 we delight to believe in them all because they 
 give us delight. And yet we grumble and 
 question and doubt and say we can not pos- 
 sibly believe a few other mysterious or mirac- 
 
MYSTERIES. 189 
 
 ulous things because we can not see through 
 them at once. How absurd of us! And 
 they come to us, too, on a word we ought to 
 respect at leat that millions as good as 
 we did respect and believe. It is backed, 
 moreover, by a promise that if we but 
 humbly-patient enough, this film-covered 
 glass through which the light comes only 
 very "darkly" will some day be shattered and 
 the whole infinite range of knowledge and its 
 unraveled secrets will be in full view with a 
 whole eternity to revel in satiating this 
 craving of ours to know. It is worth wait- 
 ing for ever so patiently ever so humbly, is 
 it not? and vastly better, you will agree, than 
 the "exterior darkness" where the other 
 people are to be forever who are both impa- 
 tient and proud. 
 
 The men of science object that in matters 
 of faith or belief we surrender our reason. 
 There is a fallacy, and not an honest one, in 
 that assertion. It is not our reason we sur- 
 render. It is our understanding. Our rea- 
 son supplies us with valid and sufficient mo- 
 tives for believing what we can not under- 
 
190 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 stand even in the common things of life. 
 Our reason we are never forbidden to use, 
 but many objects are withdrawn from our un- 
 derstanding and though it can not always 
 serve us, is no hindrance to our belief. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 FURTHER DIFFICULTIES AND 
 THEIR ANSWERS. 
 
 There are particular points of doctrine 
 which some allege to be a block in the way of 
 their believing, or at least a cause of their 
 doubting and their unrest of mind. 
 
 With such persons I have had no small ex- 
 perience. I have met them on the high- 
 ways of the world on the decks of ocean 
 steamers, in railways and stage-coaches, in 
 out-of-the-way towns of the New World, on 
 lonely sheep-farms, in hotels and in private 
 homes. 
 
 It may be useful to relate this experience, 
 and it may prove helpful to others like them, 
 to subjoin the answers to their difficulties. 
 
 I remember a young person on board the 
 S. S. Rhotomahana coasting around New Zea- 
 land saying so earnestly: "If I could only 
 know for certain what God wants me to do, 
 there is nothing, it seems to me, that I would 
 not do for Him. * * * No, no, not what 
 
 (191) 
 
IQ2 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 is in books or what men say I want Him to 
 tell me Himself." 
 
 Reply. You want what nobody else in the 
 world is privileged to have is that 
 reasonable? He certainly gave instruc- 
 tions fully enough what each one is to 
 do they have been handed down by 
 tradition accurately enough. True, 
 men have confused some parts of them 
 but still on proper inquiry they are 
 determinable and millions agree about 
 them unreasonable expectation is fool- 
 ish and futile. 
 
 I remember the wealthy young squatter, as 
 
 the Arumac drew out from wharf to resume 
 
 her Australian coasting trip, looking wearily 
 
 over the busy scene and saying, "What is the 
 
 meaning of it all?" that is, the life of men 
 
 the world we had been discussing. 
 
 Reply. Unaided by information from the 
 
 Author of it we never can know. Hence 
 
 the need of revelation, and our duty to 
 
 consult it and submit to what it tells us. 
 
 Guesses from the data around us will 
 
 never answer your question. 
 
 I remember the celebrated meteorologist 
 
 laying down for a smoking-room audience 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 193 
 
 a sympathetic one in mid-ocean, that the 
 only comfortable way to live was just to fol- 
 low all the instincts of nature when it can be 
 conveniently done, they must be right, else 
 we should not have them. 
 Reply. It is honorable to be a naturalist in 
 botany and the laws of storms as you are 
 but dishonor and shame and remorse 
 are sure to follow the naturalism you 
 advocate outside your profession there 
 is nothing more certain than that, as 
 abundant experience around us in the 
 world shows, law courts and jails are 
 the sad necessities imposed by the "in- 
 stincts of nature" that you would have 
 men follow when it pleased them 
 therefore there is something wrong 
 with nature human nature in many 
 respects since it leads to such disaster. 
 It needs restraint and discipline and 
 only when corrected by a higher teach- 
 ing it can be trusted at all. 
 I remember the young American sugar- 
 planter, exiled in the tropics, guessing that 
 whoever put him in this world would "look 
 after him all right/' and if he were to go on 
 existing forever the same disposer of him 
 
194 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 would no doubt continue to do so, he 
 "guessed he'd leave it just like that." 
 Reply. -If He put you here just like a piece 
 of furniture a table or a rocking-chair, 
 no doubt he would but if He put you 
 here and gave you the means expressly 
 designed for looking after yourself, do 
 not be too sure that He will not hold 
 you responsible for not making use of 
 them. And that you could not pos- 
 sibly make a mistake about it, He told 
 you what way he wanted you and ex- 
 pected you to use them in looking after 
 yourself at least thousands of your 
 fellow-beings intelligent fellow-beings 
 quite as intelligent as you, perhaps 
 much more so, think He has. An En- 
 glish writer of repute declared that he 
 "would rather be an atheist and believe 
 there was no God, than believe there 
 was a God who having created rational 
 beings, gave them no intimation of 
 His will nor made any communication 
 to them whatever the former is a 
 daring creed, but the other is a foolish 
 one." 
 I remember the famous humorist serious 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 195 
 
 for the moment, while we plowed the At- 
 lantic, w r anting to know how the God, repre- 
 sented to us by the preachers, could be a pos- 
 sibility in view of such a world as this is: and 
 the English mechanic-engineer saying with 
 an air of relief, but as if the relief were not 
 quite comfortable, "Yes, a good many people 
 now say there is no such being at all." 
 Reply. The humorist in question is a well- 
 known persifleur of religion perhaps 
 since Voltaire's time no other author 
 certainly none in the English tongue, 
 has done so much harm to religious be- 
 lief by sneers veneered with wit than he. 
 He acknowledged on that very after- 
 noon that he had passed a most irre- 
 ligious youth got no instruction and 
 knew nothing of religion but what he 
 afterwards picked up himself. Besides, 
 on his own admission, and to judge 
 from a few choice personal anecdotes, 
 that portion of his existence had been 
 none of the cleanest. However, I told 
 him he was going against the universal 
 sense of mankind in every time and 
 place, which is not a safe thing to do, 
 and that the reason this world, as it is, 
 
196 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 did not better reflect the Supreme Being 
 in all His goodness was owing to the gift 
 of free will to men and the exceedingly 
 bad use that was made of it "bringing 
 death into the world and all our woe." 
 And the bad use that many still con- 
 tinue to make of it. For our friend the 
 engine-maker I might have quoted the 
 opening of a certain Psalm "The fool 
 says in his heart there is no God." But 
 if any good is to be done to such people 
 you must never be offensive to them. 
 Prove to them there is a God by the 
 very -necessity of the case no other 
 way of accounting for our world and 
 its teeming life. 
 
 I remember the exceedingly agreeable and 
 perfectly gentlemanly young "station owner," 
 fond of reading in the lonely evenings to the 
 sound of the Pacific surf; very advanced in 
 his opinions about "prehistoric man" and the 
 myths of revelation. Though reared in the 
 Church of England and married to a convent- 
 educated and Catholic wife he declared his 
 utter inability to believe what his Christian 
 neighbors seemed to do so easily. 
 Reply. See the danger of reading books by 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 1 97 
 
 subtle and -accomplished speculators 
 without any previous training for argu- 
 ment and never having heard the proper 
 explanations of the leading facts of rev- 
 elation. Pre-historic man solves no 
 mystery of the creation it pushes it 
 back a step, that's all. 
 
 But pre-historic man has by no means 
 been certainly discovered. He has 
 turned out to be a mistake of the geolo- 
 gists, or at least many skilled in that 
 experimental investigation geology 
 it can hardly be called a science, cer- 
 tainly not an exact one admit that the 
 evidence for him is only slenderly par- 
 tial therefore entirely inconclusive. 
 Thirdly, what does it matter to us, as a 
 practical question, how old our race is; 
 the individual responsibility for individ- 
 ual conduct remains for each one of 
 us, and that is what should chiefly oc- 
 cupy our attention. Again, we should 
 be chary of talking of myths where so 
 much that is mysterious and inexpli- 
 cable to us lies under our very eyes all 
 around. There is a point in all hu- 
 man reasoning where something must 
 
198 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 be taken without proof, if reason itself 
 is not to sink into the void where folly 
 reigns, and madness rages. 
 
 As to inability to believe like his 
 neighbors were he as humble as they 
 were; had he confessed his sins and re- 
 pented of them as they had; had he 
 quietly and trustfully prayed daily as 
 they do, belief would have been as easy 
 to him as to them. Without those 
 things it is easy to no one. Nor is the 
 question of personal sin a rash judg- 
 ment. Without certain fixed moral re- 
 straints and instructive guidance in 
 youth, it is impossible for any one to 
 escape falling into temptation, and hav- 
 ing sinned, and sin remaining, a parti- 
 tion is raised between God and the soul. 
 Until that is removed the peace of be- 
 lieving will never come. It was not for 
 nothing we were told, "Blessed are the 
 clean of heart for they shall see God." 
 This implies its converse, Unblessed are 
 the unclean of heart, for they can not 
 see God. 
 
 I remember the Queensland "slop-shop" 
 keeper who told me to write him down an 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 199 
 
 atheist. He said this was a country of free 
 thought, and he did not want any more 
 trouble than his business gave him. 
 Reply. True, every one was free, before the 
 law, to think as he pleased, but there 
 was a higher law before which he was 
 not free, -else why did he not with equal 
 freedom think he was not to die; think 
 that he could arrange for his continued 
 existence just as it suited him; that, he 
 could not do. Therefore, there was a 
 Power superior to him of which he had 
 better take account. His business no 
 doubt demanded attention and should 
 have it, but a day would come when 
 business and all he ever gained by it 
 should stay behind and he would have 
 to go forth alone, as little consulted as 
 when he was sent here. Is it not a lit- 
 tle daring, then, to brave a Power so 
 much greater than he and not try to 
 find out what that Power requires to be 
 done beyond mere business, which is 
 not the ultimate end of man? 
 I remember the old fellow on an American 
 "ranch" who boasted being then in the 
 very "sere leaf," indeed that he never had 
 
200 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 done anything wrong (in his numerous family 
 such a thing as prayer was unknown) ; he was 
 not afraid to die. He had been pretty suc- 
 cessful after a hard struggle in this life, and if 
 there happened to be another life, he would 
 struggle there too, and no doubt meet with 
 the same success. Moreover, he had been a 
 good Mason and everybody knew that* the 
 Free Masons were too great a body to fear 
 anything or anybody! "They were all right." 
 Reply. A seared conscience is the greatest 
 of calamities. It is the eternal judg- 
 ment already passed. It is a most dif- 
 ficult thing to revivify with new sap. 
 But it is the only chance. It may be 
 done by convincing this self-satisfied 
 soul that he had done wrong, by omis- 
 sion for instance. "Remember to keep 
 holy my Sabbath day," was that never 
 infringed in course of your long life? 
 "Thou shalt adore thy God and Him 
 only shalt thou serve." You rarely, if 
 ever, even acknowledged Him by 
 prayer, and so forth. As for that con- 
 fidence in the great Masonic body, be 
 not deceived about their importance or 
 help. Why, they were unheard of be- 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 2OI 
 
 fore the seventeenth century and orig- 
 inated among the Socinians and other 
 free-thought Protestants of these com- 
 paratively recent times. As a mutual 
 help society you may have derived cer- 
 tain money benefits from it, but its 
 methods are suspect to all candid minds. 
 If all its objects are good why act like 
 conspirators and bind people by oath 
 and (sometimes) under penalty of death 
 to secrecy ? It becomes apparent 
 every day that their methods are either 
 foolish or wicked. They are losing 
 caste among all sensible and re- 
 spectable people, and it may be safely 
 predicted that, in time, this sensational 
 association will die oblivion's death 
 like all other absurd conspiracies. The 
 first notice ever taken of them by the 
 Popes was in 1738. Clement XII. ex- 
 plained who they were and what were 
 their objects, and forbade all Catholics 
 to have anything to do with them. If 
 they had existed always throughout 
 Europe is it likely that the watchful 
 head of European society, the Pope, 
 would never have heard of them before 
 or noticed them? most unlikely. 
 
202 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 This condition of soul in old age 
 always arises from keeping the mind in 
 culpable religious ignorance through 
 life. If people would read even the 
 Catechism occasionally this could never 
 happen. 
 
 I remember the Colonial young lady 
 High school graduate who professed to be- 
 lieve in nothing and was heard to long for 
 some one to arise who should free the world 
 from this "bother" about religion. 
 Reply. (I regret to say that this case is but 
 a type of numerous young ladies to be 
 met in the Colonies, as an outcome of 
 free, compulsory and secular education. 
 While I was in Wellington, N. Z., a 
 young girl of 19 walked out one fine 
 summer morning from her parents' 
 well-to-do home, furnished with sketch- 
 ing materials, and sat down in the pub- 
 lic park apparently for a practise in 
 drawing of which she was rather fond. 
 After a while she there deliberately 
 took a pistol from her pocket and blew 
 her brains out!) The best remedy for 
 our young friend, whom everybody ad- 
 mitted to be as amiable as she was fair. 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 203 
 
 turned out to be association with a 
 good Catholic family in which there 
 were well-brought-up young girls like 
 herself, who did not preach to her or 
 at her, but who won her by the happy 
 and unostentatious example of their 
 own lives and in time of need did her 
 gentle and generous service. 
 I remember the amiable and hospitable 
 lady born far south of the Equator, who was 
 "trying Theosophy;" liked it very well, but 
 had not got so far as to reconcile herself to 
 the fact that her four beautiful children had 
 already been cats or mice or snakes, may be, 
 in the preexistence of the second or third 
 piano-sphere; her husband was a Rosecrucian 
 and very deep in the occult. 
 Reply. I gave her a "Life of Madame Bla- 
 vatsky," by a gentleman of St. Peters- 
 burg, whose work has been translated 
 into English and published at the cost 
 of the London "Psychical Research 
 Society/ 7 That work must conclu- 
 sively end forever, in all reasonable and 
 respectable minds, the theosophic 
 craze. On her own evidence this 
 woman is proved to be but a clever ad- 
 
204 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 venturess, who did not stick at the 
 meanest tricks of a common charlatan 
 to deceive and delude her dupes. This 
 book may be had from any London 
 book agent, and is most useful to have 
 just now to lay Maliatmas and spooks. 
 I remember the man who was puzzled to 
 know if Christ were God and came to re- 
 deem the w r orld, why was it not visibly re- 
 deemed? Did the world as we see it look as 
 if it were redeemed? The world is full of sin 
 and suffering and death. Then he told a 
 story of a poor old negro Methodist of Caro- 
 lina who had had "salvation" preached at him 
 all his life, and who was very religious in his 
 own bothered way; one day an earthquake 
 happened that shook things up "pretty con- 
 siderable" and scared the old man so that he 
 took to his prayers. "O A'mighty God," he 
 said, "you come right down heah and fix 
 things up, but don't you send yo' Son dis 
 time, come yo'self dis job is too big and 
 mebbe He can't do it." He excused the pro- 
 fanity by the great simplicity of the poor, old 
 soul, but he had no doubt but the same idea 
 was struggling through the old darkey's brain 
 that was such a trouble to his own mind. 
 The thing was de facto not accomplished. 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 205 
 
 Reply. Redemption, as has always been ex- 
 plained, does not primarily regard the 
 earthly condition of the race. Its ef- 
 fect is to make it possible for man to re- 
 gain a title to the "eternal inheritance" 
 "facia redemptions" the price hav- 
 ing been paid for him. The title had 
 been hopelessly lost to him, an infinite 
 reparation was needed co-equal with 
 the character of Him who was wronged 
 by revolt against His command. This 
 was done through the Incarnation; and 
 through that alone could it have been 
 effected. But it has not ended man's 
 state of probation it now gives him a 
 powerful and salutary motive for effort; 
 he is assured that he can earn the great 
 reward and his earning power, so to 
 speak, is made effective and secure. 
 
 It is not accurate to say that there 
 are no effects visible in the world from 
 the Incarnation and its work. A vast 
 change for the better has come over 
 the lives of men, w r ho by the good use 
 of their free will have lent themselves 
 to the influence of Christianity. Com- 
 parisons of Christian lives \vith the 
 
206 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 most cultured among ancient peoples, 
 prove this beneficial change beyond 
 all doubt. And the cotemporary 
 knowledge we have of peoples not 
 yet Christianized affords evidence of 
 Christianity's elevating and civilizing 
 influence. If sin abounds and its 
 necessary shadow suffering, it conies 
 from the perverse use of a will left 
 free to choose evil courses, which 
 unfortunately the majority do, in spite 
 of and in opposition to the teachings 
 and protests of Christianity; and so 
 have apparently discredited by their 
 conduct the work of the Redemption. 
 Death for the good is not an evil; you 
 ought to be a little more advanced in 
 reasoning power and intelligence than 
 the "negro from Carolina." 
 I remember the proprietor of a New Zea- 
 land homestead picturesquely situated by the 
 "wide Pacific strand" a man of more than 
 average education, who was very aggressive 
 against all things of faith. His mind had 
 even taken an angry turn. His mother, to 
 whom he had been much attached, had died 
 in the slow suffering of cancer. This in- 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 207 
 
 censed him against the supernal Power he 
 
 used to say, "If I could only get at it !" 
 
 He assumed the role of an infidel propa- 
 gandist on all occasions even with his poor 
 workmen. He had only two children. One 
 had been baptized by the care of the grand- 
 mother, who was "an Anglican;" when she 
 died he kept the second unbaptized as an 
 experiment to show off against "the other fel- 
 low." He had made his gentle and amiable 
 little wife as great an unbeliever as himself. 
 Reply. He was reared in the Anglican com- 
 munion. Time has sadly demonstrated 
 that private judgment is the portico of 
 free thought, which means thought ut- 
 terly unbridled and unlicensed a thing 
 that is fast making human society un- 
 bearable for reasonable and civilized 
 men. Mrs. Besant, the wife of an An- 
 glican parson, has also informed the 
 world that the sight of her first baby, 
 agonizing in diphtheria, steeled her 
 heart against God and religion. It is 
 as unfair as it is shallow to charge to 
 God every particular of the condition 
 of secondary causes who are free agents 
 and endowed with faculties for self-help 
 
2O8 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 and mutual protection. It looks a fair 
 bargain that the First Cause should 
 have given over a portion of His crea- 
 tion to such agents furnished with suf- 
 ficient capital, so to speak, to get along. 
 He added to it besides a great liberality 
 of treatment, never interfering with 
 them for their allotted time, withdraw- 
 ing his visible presence lest it should 
 inconvenience or hamper them in any 
 way; and for all that only exacting a 
 reasonable service and acknowledg- 
 ment. The accidents of all kinds oc- 
 curring in this temporary condition of 
 things (and sickness and diseases are 
 among them) regard the secondary 
 agents. To expect Him to interfere in 
 every case exceeds the limits of His 
 part of the bargain as a Provisor 
 generalis the primary Providence. It 
 is much to have been assured by Him, 
 that full and just compensation shall 
 be made to those who submissively 
 suffer; "Merces tua magna nimis." It 
 is charged that it is inhumane in Him 
 to look on at suffering, able to relieve 
 and cure, and not doing so; even men 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 2OQ 
 
 would not be so unfeeling were it in 
 their power. But this is making God 
 human merely. We hear a good deal 
 from infidels about anthropomorphism, 
 which obtains, say they, when be- 
 lievers reduce God merely to human 
 dimensions in their conception of Him. 
 But what are they doing in the case dis- 
 cussed? Why, they are supposing God 
 to be exactly like the human being, and 
 blaming Him for not being so. A 
 perpetual interference for relief of every 
 pang or pain no matter how prolonged 
 would upset the whole established 
 order, which no rational being, at 
 present, looks for. If this state were 
 final perhaps we might, with a show 
 of reason, look to Him for help at every 
 turn. But it is not final, we know; 
 and the general expectation is that the 
 day of full compensation and explana- 
 tion will surely come. 
 
 With regard to the stupid and unfair 
 experiment of this man with his unbap- 
 tized boy, the same explanation holds 
 good as was given above about redemp- 
 tion. The effects await on the action 
 
2IO THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 of free will and its use, and the sacra- 
 ment chiefly refers to the spiritual order 
 and the eternal future state. It is not 
 a visible and miraculous transformation 
 in the present; no one pretends that it 
 is. The titled Poet who returned a 
 Buddhist from Japan delights to dwell 
 on the superiority of manners and bear- 
 ing of Japanese children over Christian 
 children. Besides that this depends 
 on what kind of Christian children 
 he has been acquainted with; he forgets 
 that we learn from other travelers 
 in that country, as intelligently ob- 
 servant as he, that the Japs in gen- 
 eral even from a tender age, are the 
 most shamelessly lascivious of peoples 
 and the Chinese, as is well known, 
 are hardly better. 
 
 Finally, with regard to this man's 
 wish "to get at" the great First Cause- 
 merely to fancy this little five-feet long 
 thing with a bald head "getting at" the 
 mighty Maker of the universe, has 
 something so sublimely ludicrous in it 
 that it would amuse if its diabolic blas- 
 phemy did not terrify. 
 
DIFFICULTIES AJSTD THEIR ANSWERS. 211 
 
 I remember the souls troubled about 
 prayer. One said that it was talking into a 
 great silence; it was hard not to grow tired 
 of saying things all by yourself to which no 
 sound or word was ever heard in reply; that 
 it required a force of imagination, which 
 many people do not possess, to fancy God 
 present with us or listening when we pray. 
 Reply. Prayer of course is not like a human 
 conversation. It is impossible without 
 faith. Prepared by what faith teaches 
 about it; that there is a God who is in- 
 terested in us because he owns us; who 
 wishes us to look on Him as a Father 
 and expects us to depend on and con- 
 fide in Him; who is all powerful, able 
 and willing to help in all things for our 
 good then with such conviction in 
 mind, it will appear far from talking into 
 void, or tiresome or needing imagina- 
 tion. At the same time every one must 
 confess to a kind of natural need of 
 communing about himself with some 
 one. This comes from the fact of our 
 individuality. The peculiar and dis- 
 tinct personality each one has, makes 
 us uncomfortable to feel alone and iso- 
 
212 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 lated amid the accidents and fortunes 
 of a temporary existence. This is a 
 natural predisposition to prayer. It is 
 evidenced in the child telling all about 
 its little self and its concerns to its 
 mother or its care-taker. Nor does 
 the same want ever leave the man, 
 which proves the reasonableness of the 
 assertions of faith. 
 
 Another had given up prayer because it 
 seems so unmanly cow r ardly in fact to 
 grovel perpetually, to bepraise and beg. 
 Reply. An unmanly or cowardly act is to re- 
 fuse to face a danger or to endure a 
 hardship or to shirk a painful or labori- 
 ous task when duty and a greater good 
 call on us to do and dare. Where do 
 we do any of these mean things in 
 prayer? We feel our dependence, 
 knowing we have been created by a 
 Power superior to ourselves exalting 
 the qualities of that Creator, idealizing 
 His great and good attributes, is so far 
 from groveling that it exalts our idea 
 of ourselves increases our esteem for 
 ourselves and gives us courage. It is 
 only fair and just in us to acknowledge 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 213 
 
 our dependence, and manly, too. We 
 ask to be strengthened as to what He 
 wants us to do, and made ready to do 
 it at any cost or trouble to ourselves. 
 Recognizing in ourselves an inherent 
 weakness to do what is good and noble, 
 we seek His help and encouragement 
 to overcome our sluggish inclinations. 
 What is cowardly or unmanly in all 
 that? Why, it is brave and manly, and 
 rational. 
 
 We break His commands and sue for 
 pardon. If we did not, it would be con- 
 tempt of the High Court and most in- 
 sulting to Him. Among ourselves men 
 do not commend or admire the brag- 
 gart or desperado who violates his 
 country's laws and despises its courts 
 of justice. The man who assaults a 
 battery of Maxim guns with a pea- 
 shooter or a pop-gun is not set down 
 among the manly and the brave he is 
 a fool. Not less a fool is the man who 
 daunts the Omnipotent and braves the 
 eternal punishment. 
 
 You have to study the difference be- 
 tween the brave man and a fool. 
 
214 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 Another was troubled at seeing people in 
 long hours of prayer before the altar at such 
 times as the Quarant 'ore, or Nuns and Monks 
 in their chapels they come and go and never 
 the slightest notice taken of them, or at least 
 sign of approval how wearisome! 
 Reply. These good people know what they 
 are doing. They are quite satisfied 
 about the silence, recognize it as part 
 of the trial of faith, and are content to 
 await the end, knowing that the day 
 for silence will be over soon and knowl- 
 edge of all things imparted. I was 
 once surprised to find in a novel of the 
 sensuous school this sentence: "When 
 men and women rise from prayer and 
 find themselves better, that prayer is 
 answered." 
 
 That is the only notice those good 
 souls want or expect. 
 
 Another foun-rl a great difficulty in the text 
 of Matt. vi:7, where much speaking in prayer 
 is forbidden by our Lord; in fact He there 
 confines all prayer to one short form the 
 Our Father and the direct contradiction to 
 that in the voluminous prayer-books and 
 Breviaries is sanctioned and enjoined by the 
 Church. 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 215 
 
 Reply. That text is aimed at the correction 
 of one special abuse the ostentatious 
 and empty piety of the Pharisees as 
 may plainly be seen by reading the 
 whole passage. 
 
 In other places, when not addressing 
 Himself to an abuse, our Lord incul- 
 cates frequent and repeated prayer and 
 gave the example Himself of lo.ng 
 prayer prolix-ins orabat. 
 
 The Our Father is a short form, it is 
 true, but prayers of all kinds no matter 
 how long are nothing but the expan- 
 sions of that divine compendium, as 
 ascetic writers often demonstrated. 
 Another adduced puzzling cases of people 
 who prayed long and earnestly for a mani- 
 festly good thing and were not heard one 
 especially about people weakly addicted to the 
 drink habit. He had known some who were 
 so ashamed and conscious of that terrible 
 \veakness that they left nothing undone, fol- 
 lowed strictly every spiritual advice, novenas, 
 communions, confessions, for help, and to no 
 avail they fell again and again. 
 Reply. It is nowhere taught that miracles 
 follow prayers on all occasions. 
 
2l6 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 Neither must it be looked for, that 
 prayer should result in loss of will- 
 power in the petitioner in any given ac- 
 tion or habit one's will is not sud- 
 denly taken away and grace substituted 
 for it. We must be satisfied to strug- 
 gle against temptation aided by grace, 
 with a will very much inclined to the 
 evil whose habit we culpably began. 
 
 In the case cited there were relapses, 
 it is true, but to my knowledge there 
 were intervals of abstention and im- 
 provement and that was a decided gain. 
 We can not know the workings of an 
 individual soul or what flaw there may 
 be in its disposition to account for fail- 
 ure, but it is there, be assured, lies the 
 cause. Our Lord promised that every- 
 thing we ask the Father in His name 
 shall be granted yes, but it must be in 
 everything in matter and disposition 
 entirely worthy of the holy name we 
 ask in. 
 
 I remember the soul distressed by the sight 
 of a crucifix; the thought would keep rising, 
 What kind of a Being or Justice can that be 
 who could look on a spectacle so horrible and 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 217 
 
 be pleased or placated or appeased by it or 
 even accept it at all? Then the question 
 would come If that is God if Christ is God 
 have we not the curious situation of God 
 offering Himself to Himself Himself suf- 
 fering that His own self or His own Justice 
 may be satisfied? There are souls would 
 rather suffer any loss themselves than accept 
 anything so cruel from another. 
 Reply. This opens up the whole mystery of 
 the Incarnation, and it is a very great 
 one. We can never hope to fathom 
 that here below. Convince yourself of 
 having been assured on very good au- 
 thority, accepted by millions as wise as 
 you, that unless that happened it would 
 fare very badly with you and with all 
 this world. Relieve yourself also with 
 the opinion that all the cruel details of 
 that sacrifice were not essential because 
 a word an act one tear of a divine 
 and human person, would have been 
 price enough for many condemned 
 races all his actions being of infinite 
 value but Christ chose Himself to un- 
 dergo them to increase men's notion of 
 the great guilt of sin and offer a strik- 
 
2l8 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 ing contradiction in His own person to 
 pride, lust and guilty indulgences to 
 which they are, as everybody knows, 
 and as He foreknew, so prone. 
 
 It is not accurate to say that God of- 
 fered Himself to Himself barely. There 
 was present in the offering a human na- 
 ture suffering, too, and whose suffer- 
 ings clothed round by a divine person- 
 ality, became infinite in value and Co- 
 equal with the magnitude of an offense 
 done to infinite justice and majesty. 
 About souls suffering loss rather than 
 accept for themselves so cruel a sacri- 
 fice they little know what they are 
 talking about. On the assurance of 
 revelation there is nothing more certain 
 than that if that loss did overtake them 
 they would be eternally sorry for their 
 pride-inspired and ignorant folly. 
 I remember others disturbed by reading 
 about the world in the time of Christ. It was 
 in a very bad state there were teeming pop- 
 ulations in the farther East, in India, Thibet, 
 China, Japan Brahmins, Buddhists, Confu- 
 cians, Shinto idol worshipers. Black Africa 
 was crowded with naked savage cannibals 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 219 
 
 reveling in lust, slaughter, blood, cruelty 
 worse than the horrors there to-day, no doubt. 
 The vast Roman Empire had altars for im- 
 pure idols and temples for a hundred gods. 
 The islands of antipodean seas were peopled 
 as now, with fearful flesh-eating tribes. 
 Christ came to teach and to save all, yet He 
 seemed to take no care at all about these 
 hundreds of millions, living and dying while 
 He lived. He never alluded to their exist- 
 ence. His work was restricted very local. 
 A very small number knew he was there at 
 all, and fewer still knew him for the Messiah, 
 and when He died, notwithstanding all His 
 miracles, scarcely any at all believed or were 
 converted. 
 
 Reply. The same difficulty shadows the whole 
 history of the Jews. It lies in the words 
 chosen people. The fact is certainly be- 
 fore us that they were divinely favored 
 before all other and more numerous 
 peoples. At the same time it clears 
 away a good deal of the mystery to re- 
 member that all peoples in the far-back 
 centuries were Hebrews once all of 
 the one stock. The human race was 
 once small in number, but in the growth 
 
220 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 and vast increase there was a disper- 
 sion-process and a winnowing accord- 
 ing to deserts; and God dealt to each 
 the measure of His justice and treatment 
 of His wisdom, that they deserved from 
 Him. Abraham and his seed deserved 
 best from Him and so were made His 
 favored agents. The rest were left to 
 wander apart and left to their own de- 
 vices, just as we see most of them still 
 yellow, red, brown and black men 
 idolaters and cannibals. 
 
 Christ did not choose to appear si- 
 multaneously and preach to them all, 
 though being divine. He might have 
 done so, it is true. Equally true that 
 millions still remain ignorant of Him 
 and His divine mission. But to argue 
 with justice from this and similar facts 
 regarding peoples, we should know the 
 whole state of the case concerning 
 the history of their conduct and deal- 
 ings with God. Manifestly we do not 
 know and never can know that, so it is 
 but reasonable to assume a neutral, if a 
 waiting, attitude. Had Christ come in 
 that clearly superhuman character, then 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 221 
 
 the present order of trial would have 
 there and then ended. Belief should 
 have been compelled and faith dis- 
 pensed with. That kind of coming, 
 how r ever, is promised and will happen 
 then all things shall be made manifest. 
 As to the fewness of the converted, 
 notwithstanding all the miracles our 
 Lord performed, it must be remem- 
 bered that the immense numbers 
 5,000 after one sermon and 3,000 after 
 another who became Christians im- 
 mediately on the apostle's preaching 
 Christ crucified and risen, must have 
 been those who had seen Him and wit- 
 nessed His miracles, and some the sub- 
 jects of them in their own persons, else 
 they would never have yielded so 
 readily. 
 
 I remember those again who were sad- 
 dened in mind and doubtful of a divine good- 
 ness by the cruelties of life; the hideous de- 
 formities and diseases, the slow agony of 
 wasting cancers and leprosy and the like; the 
 blood-thirstiness that breaks out in all man- 
 kind, savage and civilized alike; then the 
 cruelties of the animal world; all the fierce 
 
222 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 beasts and poisonous things; tigers, lions, 
 snakes, jaguars, wild elephants, sharks and 
 sword-fish, vultures, hawks, eagles the 
 butcher-bird that impales its living food on 
 a thorn and sits waching its writhings the 
 sea louse that eats into the spinal marrow of 
 the whale and drives the monster mad the 
 Kea of New Zealand that digs its beak into 
 the flesh of the live sheep for the kidney fat 
 and only that who gave them all those piti- 
 less instincts? 
 
 Reply. Why should such things trouble 
 your mind? Have you personally any 
 great reason to complain of God's good- 
 ness to you? If unhappily there arc 
 people subject to the fearful ills that 
 flesh is heir to, as a consequence of the 
 aboriginal blight of evil, has not God 
 imparted instincts of compassion and 
 mutual help to his creatures? All are 
 not so afflicted far from it only the 
 few, very few, comparatively, and it 
 generally comes from the accidents oc- 
 casioned 'by secondary causes; and is it 
 not beautiful to see the sane always 
 ready to succor the unsound, exhibit- 
 ing rare and unselfish virtue and confer- 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 223 
 
 ring comparative happiness on the af- 
 flicted? Men are thus made the vice- 
 gerents the secondary Providence of 
 God to one another in the world. The 
 old scholastics have discussed the ani- 
 mals and their ways. It was their opin- 
 ion that having been made for man and 
 originally subject to him, it was part of 
 his penalty when he fell, that the animals 
 should break away from him into a 
 wild state and become his enemies, and 
 thus diverted, by his fault, from their 
 original destination, they have ramped 
 about, soured lost waste parts of the 
 creation, in fact, ever since; but the 
 Creator has not left man at their mercy; 
 man still holds the upper hand, in the 
 main, as everybody knows. Human 
 blood-thirstiness is the ruinous part of 
 a structure that once was noble, and 
 which still shows not unsightly bits of 
 what it originally was. It can only be 
 accounted for on the ground of the fall 
 into moral evil the failure in the first 
 trial of free will another part of sin's 
 penalty. 
 
 The instances of set and deliberate 
 
224 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 cruelty of animals are far from being 
 authenticated, nor are such practises 
 uniform and habitual. A sheep farmer 
 of long experience in New Zealand told 
 me that the Kea bird learned to locate 
 the kidney fat of the sheep from his habit 
 of prowling about the station slaughter- 
 yard and picking at the sheep-skins 
 spread out to dry with the wool down. 
 The most toothsome bit was this fat in 
 the region of the kidneys or liver, and 
 when the skins were not there to be 
 picked, he went for the sheep on the 
 hills and, locating the part where he 
 got his so-appetizing morsel, he fas- 
 tened his claws in the wool and sunk his 
 beak in the soft flesh above the 
 haunches, even then he did not always 
 strike the fat directly either, or neatly! 
 Other birds, from imitative habit, 
 copied the knowing ones and so this 
 curious custom of theirs came to be. 
 
 For the rest, what are animals to you ; 
 you have not created them; you are 
 not responsible for them? They are 
 very near us, and they are as far away 
 from us as mystery; they are strangers 
 
DIITU I L I II-.S AND THEIR ANSWERS. 225 
 
 to us in reality. They live their own 
 peculiar life and there's an end of it. 
 I remember others, and they were many, 
 who were incensed against the doctrine of 
 Hell. Some felt that a Being who could 
 look on at the tortures of his own crea- 
 ture for eternity, could not be an object of 
 any one's love, admiration and adoration; 
 others, that they were doing God a service, 
 vindicating Him, by repudiating what they 
 called a horrible doctrine; others asserted that 
 it was a fiction invented by men to hold other 
 men in subjection by force of terror a horrid 
 nightmare imposed on human minds by 
 the designing and so on. 
 Reply. Xo doubt Hell is an awful doctrine. 
 Xo use in saying that it is easy to be 
 calmly reconciled to it. But there is 
 no use either in denying it. Viewing 
 the minds of men as a whole 1 , ^ every 
 time it formed an inseparable portion of 
 religious belief. This extrinsic evidence 
 throws doubt at once on your denial. 
 But the thing is so awful that pre- 
 sented even as doubtful it should urge 
 every one to take no risk, to seek fur- 
 ther and make himself very sure lie is 
 15 
 
226 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 making no mistake about what may 
 result in such frightful disaster to him- 
 self. For it is said to be eternal and a 
 punishment. 
 
 Then he should remember that if this 
 be so, no amount of assertion or repu- 
 diation on his part can in the least alter 
 the fact. And if our Lord ever revealed 
 anything about the unseen in unmis- 
 takable terms, it was this sombre fact. 
 
 There is one comfort at any rate. We 
 are not there yet, and there are ways of 
 escaping going there. And the ways 
 are so well known and within easy 
 reach, that we can be morally sure of 
 never having to go there if we like. 
 
 The only reason why any one goes to 
 that dreadful place is that he departs 
 from life in a state of overt rebellion 
 and contempt for the great Creator who 
 gave him his being. Where else could 
 he go? Surely he could not expect to 
 be cordially greeted and richly re- 
 warded and welcomed hospitably, after 
 such reckless and daring conduct as his. 
 Those \vho have power in this world 
 are not accustomed to w r elcome to their 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 227 
 
 homes and dine and be hail-fellows 
 with the men who despise their author- 
 ity and trample on the laws such a 
 thing was never heard of. Do you 
 think it will be any different in the realm 
 beyond the grave? The love of God 
 comes irresistibly with serving Him 
 and acknowledging Him above all 
 with a good conscience. The truth is 
 a good deal of this questioning about 
 Hell arises from not having a good con- 
 science and knowing very well why 
 having got into scrapes by sinning 
 freely, it takes a lot of whistling to keep 
 up courage, like the boy passing 
 through the graveyard. When you 
 pass in your walks by a convict-prison, 
 you know very well there is a painful 
 state of things going on there fellow- 
 beings undergoing severe and often 
 dreadful punishment. You return to 
 your dinner none the less with appetite 
 unimpaired. You do not rail against the 
 judge and are not the least angry witli 
 the jury who convicted. Why? Be- 
 cause you very sensibly say Justice de- 
 manded it. But it need not be eternal 
 
228 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. 
 
 To say that you must be in a position 
 to understand all about God's justice, 
 which you are not, that being infinite 
 and above our limited comprehension. 
 Besides between you and me is there 
 anything less than the sanction of eter- 
 nal punishment that will restrain the 
 run of men from vice? You know 
 there is not. Your rearrangement of 
 things for God is to say it without wish- 
 ing to be impolite, an impertinence. 
 It does not concern us; we are not mas- 
 ters here. If there is one thing clearer 
 than another it is that we are wholly 
 dependent otherwise we could settle 
 down comfortably and arrange to 'stay 
 in life as long as we pleased. But we 
 can not stay. Some one will call some 
 day. So it is wisest to prepare to go 
 in submission, and you may be sure 
 everything will be right with us then. 
 The general disposition of things 
 here below and our destinies are not in 
 our hands, but it is given to us to make 
 the best of them and, turning them to 
 our advantage, we need not go to Hell. 
 But enough the famous and devout 
 
DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 22Q 
 
 author of the "Imitation" propounds rather 
 dogmatically that "they who travel much are 
 rarely (without emphasis) sanctified" by the 
 way how did he know since he never went 
 anywhere? but be that as it may, the widely- 
 traveled meet by the waysides and on the 
 high-roads of life many odd specimens of hu- 
 manity and fall in with curious phases of hu- 
 man psychology. If their experiences take 
 a little of the spiritual shine off themselves, 
 there is left them a compensation from the 
 good or instruction or pleasure that others 
 may derive from reading them, even in the 
 very humble way here presented. 
 
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