22 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



retained a keen appreciation of all its best elements. But as her intel- 

 lect expanded and her knowledge widened, sLe too found it impossible 

 to rest in the old belief, and, with a painful wrench from a revered 

 father and loving friends, she also passed over from the ranks of ortho- 

 doxy. She also, after a life of profound and earnest thought, came 

 to the conclusion recorded of her by an intimate friend and admirer, 

 Mr. INIyers : 



" I remember how at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the 

 Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May ; and she, 

 stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three 

 words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of 

 men — the words God, Immortality, Duty — pronounced, with terrible 

 earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the 

 second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, per- 

 haps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and 

 unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell ; her grave, majestic 

 countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom ; it was 

 as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls 

 of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable 

 fates." 



Such instances as these can not be the result of mere accident. As 

 long as skepticism was confined to a limited number of scientific men, 

 it might be possible to think that it was merely the exaggeration of a 

 particular train of thought pursued too exclusively. But when science 

 has become the prevailing mode of thought, and has been brought 

 home to the minds of all educated persons, it is no longer possible to 

 represent it as an exceptional aberration. And where the bell-wethers 

 of thought lead the way, the flock will follow. What the greatest 

 thinkers think to-day, the mass of thinkers will think to-morrow, and 

 the great army of non-thinkers will assume to be self-evident the day 

 after. This is very nearly the case at the present day ; the great 

 thinkers have gone before, the mass of thinkers have followed, and 

 the still greater mass of non-thinkers are wavering and about to fol- 

 low. It is no longer, with those who think at all, a question of abso- 

 lute faith against absolute disbelief, but of the more or less shade of 

 "faintness" with which they cling to the "larger hope." 



This is nowhere more apparent than in the writings of those who 

 attempt to stem the tide which sets so strongly against orthodoxy. 

 They resolve themselves mainly into one long wail of "oh the pity of 

 it, the pity of it ! " if the simple faith of olden times should disappear 

 fi'om the world. They show eloquently and conclusively that science 

 and philosophy can not satisfy the aspirations or afford the consola- 

 tions of religion. They expose the hollowness of the substitutes 

 which have been proposed, such as the worship of the unknowable, or 

 the cult of humanity. They win an easy triumph over the exaggera- 

 tions of those who resolve all the historical records of Christianity into 



