258 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



that, revelation of God in nature which is vouch- 

 safed only to reverent and earnest study. So is 

 the self-forgetting critic, who seeks at all costs to 

 learn and teach what is true, though after years 

 of study he may have to tell us no new thing but 

 an old truth recovered or enriched or established 

 by new proofs. So is it no less in the humbler 

 vocations in life, which are great and noble in pro- 

 portion as they are recognized as vocations, and 

 therefore as a ministry which can only rightly be 

 discharged by those who know that their sufficiency 

 is of God. 



Thus the religious view of man and his relation 

 to God carries with it a sense of human insuffi- 

 ciency, and the correlated truth of our dependence 

 on Him Who is the source of Truth. We are 

 encompassed by the unknown. Our knowledge, 

 whether of God, of nature, or of ourselves, is but 

 as a scintillation in the darkness. May not all our 

 boasted knowledge of nature be, as the greatest 

 of its champions suggests, " an ordinary phantasma- 

 goria generated by the Ego, unfolding its successive 

 scenes on the background of the abyss of nothing- 

 ness " ? 1 And if so, is it worth while to go on ? 

 Who is sufficient for the work of interpreting the 

 mystery which lies about us ? And the answer 

 of religion implies a change in our whole attitude 

 of thought. The darkness is in us ; the light is 



1 Huxley's " Hume," p. Si, 



