MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 21 



" There is more faith in honest doubt, 

 Believe me, than in half the creeds." 



The change which has come over modern thought can not be 

 better exemplified than by taking the instance of three great writers 

 whose works have produced a powerful influence — Carlyle, Renan, and 

 George Eliot. They were all three born and brought up in the very 

 heart of different phases of the old beliefs — Carlyle, in a family which 

 might be taken as a type of the best qualities of Scottish Presbyte- 

 rianism, bred in a west country farmhouse, under the eye of a father 

 and mother whom he loved and revered, who might have been the 

 originals of Burns's " Cotter's Saturday Night," or the descendants of 

 the martyrs of Claverhouse. His own temperament strongly inclined 

 to a stern Puritanical piety ; his favorite heroes were Cromwell and 

 John Knox ; his whole nature was antipathetic to science. As his 

 biographer, Fronde, reports of him, " He liked ill men like Humboldt, 

 Laplace, and the author of the 'Vestiges.' He refused Darwin's 

 transmutation of species as unproved ; he fought against it, though I 

 could see he dreaded that it might turn out true." And yet the de- 

 liberate conclusion at which he arrived was that " he did not think it 

 possible that educated honest men could even profess much longer to 

 believe in historical Christianity." 



The case of Renan was equally remarkable. He was born in the 

 cottage of Breton peasants of the purest type of simple, pious. Cath- 

 olic faith. Their one idea of rising above the life of a peasant was to 

 become a priest, and their great ambition for their boy was that he 

 might be so far honored as one day to become a country cure. Young 

 Renan, accordingly, from the first day he showed cleverness, and got 

 to the top of his class in the village school, was destined for the priest- 

 hood. He was taken in hand by priests, and found in them his kind- 

 est friends ; they sent him to college, and in due time to the Central 

 Seminary where young men were trained for orders. All his tradi- 

 tions, all his affections, all his interests, led in that direction, and yet 

 he gave up everything rather than subscribe to what he no longer 

 believed to be true. His conversion was brought about in this way : 

 Having been appointed assistant to a professor of Hebrew, he became 

 a profound scholar in Oriental languages ; this led to his studying the 

 Scriptures carefully in the original, and the conclusion forced itself 

 upon him that the miraculous part of the narrative had no historical 

 foundation. Like Carlyle, the turn of his mind was not scientific, and 

 while denying miracles he remained keenly appreciative of all that 

 was beautiful and poetical in the life and teaching of Jesus, which he 

 has brought more vividly before the world in his writings than had 

 ever been done by orthodox commentators. 



George Eliot, again, was brought up in yet' another phase of ortho- 

 dox Christianity — that of middle-class nonconformist Evangelicalism. 

 She embraced this creed fervently, and, as we see in her " Dinah," 



