7 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the "world. It is too barren, too empty-handed. It makes even 

 science poor, robbing it of half of its intellectual interest and of 

 almost all its charm. Men who talk about " plans/' and " appa- 

 ratuses/' and " contrivances/' and then tell us they don't mean 

 what the words imply, are feeding themselves and us on husks 

 indeed. 



But Prof. Huxley has his revenge. In words which seem to 

 express the most supercilious contempt, he refers to those who, 

 " having distilled away every inconvenient matter of fact in 

 Christian history, continue to pay divine honors to the residue." 

 This is a bitter sentence. I do not think it is a just one as applied 

 to the authors of the volume called Lux Mundi ; but I fear it is 

 more justly applicable to religionists of the Robert Elsmere type. 

 Prof. Huxley ridicules them in a mock sentence supposed to be 

 coming in some Bampton Lecture of the future : " No longer in 

 contact with fact of any kind, faith stands now and forever 

 proudly inaccessible to all the attacks of the infidel." I should 

 not like to speak in this tone to, or of, any minds which are per- 

 plexed. But I agree with Prof. Huxley that, as flesh and blood 

 must have a skeleton, so both sentiment and faith must have an 

 object. They can not hang in air with no footing either in earth 

 or heaven. Nothing can be more certain than that " nature " did 

 not generate itself. The things which are seen were certainly not 

 made of things that do appear.* The things which are seen are 

 all temporal. It is the things which are not seen that are alone 

 eternal. All this belongs to our universal experience, and is part 

 of our all too scanty stock of necessary truths. What we call 

 nature ourselves included must have had an origin and a cause. 

 These are the objects of religion. Of two things we may be sure 

 about theology : first, that there must be facts concerning it ; and, 

 secondly, that these facts must be the supreme facts with which 

 we have to do. They may or may not be accessible to us, but 

 they must exist as realities with all their dynamic apparatus, 

 and with all their corresponding laws. It is the business of all 

 men to see those facts as best they may, and to obey those laws as 

 best they can. It is impossible, therefore, to admire or even to 

 respect the attitude of men who, in these matters, do nothing but 

 stand by the highwaysides of life mocking. Least of all is this 

 attitude to be respected in our professed agnostics. They should 

 at least remember that they have nothing to give us of their own. 

 Ignorance even fictitious ignorance is the motto on their flag. 

 They do not plead it humbly as a confession, or use the sense of 

 it as a stimulus to exertion. They claim it proudly as a boast, 

 and use it as a weapon to repulse the light. With them knowl- 



* Hebrews, xi, 3. 



