INTELLECTUAL STRAINING IN AUTHORSHIP, 95 



tells us that, before taking his degree at Cambridge, and for some 

 little time afterward, he was " an ardent High Churchman," but who 

 within ten years of that time gravely assured his Sunday audience as 

 follows : 



" On the whole, therefore, we seem entitled to conclude that, during 

 such time as we can have evidence of, no intelligence or volition has 

 been concerned in events happening within the range of the solar sys- 

 tem, except that of animals living on the planets. The weight of such 

 probabilities is, of course, estimated differently by different people, 

 and these questions are only just beginning to receive the right sort of 

 attention. But it does seem to me that we may expect in time to 

 have negative evidence on this point of the same kind, and the same 

 cogency, as that which forbids us to assume the existence between the 

 earth and Venus of a planet as large as either of them." 



It is hardly possible to regard a statement of that kind, made by a 

 brilliant young man to a popular audience, wdthin a few years of the 

 time when he was himself an ardent Christian, and on the mere 

 strength of the assumption that " mind without brain is a contradic- 

 tion," except as the result of a delight in intellectual straining for its 

 own sake. It is not merely that the atheistic drift is intrinsically so 

 audacious and violent, but that the mode of its statement is still more 

 audacious and violent. To assert that a disproof of a divine intelli- 

 gence might be expected of the same degree of validity as the dis- 

 proof of the existence of a large inferior planet, in a position in which 

 its influence would long ago have been detected, both directly and in- 

 directly — where, indeed, it would have vitiated every calculation made 

 for a century and a half at least — can hardly have been the result of 

 anything but a sheer desire to inflict a great intellectual shock, to pro- 

 duce the excitement of a new intellectual strain. It was, indeed, the 

 product of the same state of mind which made the same brilliant par- 

 adox-monger enjoy saying, when at college, " There is one thing in the 

 world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will 

 to obey." But that startling saying was commonplace itself com- 

 pared with those statements which he made as a mature man many 

 years later, to a large and indiscriminate popular audience. And, in 

 his great philippic against the sin of credulity, he strains matters often 

 to a point as shrill. Nay, even Mr, Pollock, in writing his memoir of 

 his friend, appears anxious to strike a similar chord. Speaking of 

 Clifford's last days, he says : " Far be it from me, as it was far from 

 him, to grudge to any man or woman the hope or comfort that may be 

 found in sincere expectation of a better life to come. But let this be 

 set down and remembered, plainly and openly, for the instruction and 

 rebuke of those who fancy that these dogmas have a monopoly of hap- 

 piness, and will not face the fact that there are true men, ay, and 

 women, to whom the dignity of manhood and the fellowship of this life, 

 undazzled by the magic of any revelation, unholpen of any promises 



