62 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It is only the second-rate men of science who loudly vaunt their 

 ability to do without religion altogether, and proclaim their fixed and 

 unchangeable resolve for its entire suppression. As well resolve to 

 suppress the Gulf Stream or the eccentricity of the earth's orbit ! If 

 the horizon of man's thought is bounded on all sides by mystery, it is 

 in simple obedience to the law of his nature that he gives some shape 

 to that mystery. It were mental cowardice to shrink from facing it ; it 

 were positive imbecility to declare that the coast -line between known 

 and unknown had no shape at all. Granted that the line be a slowly 

 fluctuating one, and that conquests here and losses there reveal them- 

 selves in course of time, and one day become " striking " to the com- 

 monest observer, does that fact acquit of folly the Agnostic statement 

 that, now and here, there is no thinkable line at all, no features to be 

 described, nothing to sketch, no appreciable curves and headlands, no 

 conception possible which shall integrate (for practical utility) that 

 great Beyond whose boundaries, on the hither side at least, are known 

 to us ? Men who can only attend to one thing at a time, and whose 

 " one thing " is the field of a microscope or " the anatomy of the 

 lower part of the hindmost bone of the skull of a carp," ' may perhaps 

 escape the common lot of manhood by ceasing to be "men," in any 

 ordinary sense of the word. But, for people who live in the open air 

 and sunshine of common life, there is the same necessity for a religion 

 as there is for that mental map of our whereabouts that we all carry 

 with us in our brains. Let any one recall his sensations when he has 

 at any time been overtaken in a fog or a snow-storm, and when all his 

 bearings have been blotted out, then he will readily understand the 

 need which all men feel for a theology of some kind, and he will appre- 

 ciate what the old-school divines meant when they said that " Theology 

 was the queen and mistress of the sciences," harmonizing and gathering 

 up into architectonic unity all the multifarious threads that the sub- 

 ordinate sciences had spun. 



I. One is driven, nowadays, to repeat both in public and private 

 these very obvious reflections, owing to the extraordinary persistence 

 with which certain philosophers think fit to inform us that we are all 

 making a great mistake ; that we can do very well without a religion ; 

 ^d that, though it is true " man can not live by bread alone," but 

 must have ideas, yet the creed b}"- which he maj' very well make shift 

 to live is this — " Somethistg is." * In point of brevity there is here 

 little to desire. The Apostles' Creed is prolix by comparison, and 

 although we might fairly take exception to " some-thing," as embody- 

 ing two very concrete acts of the imagination, and therefore capable 



' Cf. Mivart, " Contemporary Evolution " (1876), p. 134. 



* Physicus, "Examination of Theism " (1878), p. 142: "What was the essential 

 substance of that [atheistic] theory? Apparently it was the bare statement of the 

 unthinkable fact that Something Is. The essence of atheism I take to consist in the 

 single dogma of self-existence as itself sufficient to constitute a theory of things." 



