SCIENCE AND MAN. 357 



Accustomed as I am to harsh language, I am quite 

 prepared to hear my * poetic rendering ' branded as a 

 * falsehood ' and a ' fib.' The vituperation is unmer- 

 ited, for poetry or ideality, and untruth are assuredly 

 very different things. The one may vivify, while the 

 other kills. When St. John extends the notion of a 

 soul to ' souls washed in the blood of Christ y does he 

 ' fib ? ' Indeed, if the appeal to ideality is censurable, 

 Christ himself ought not to have escaped censure. Nor 

 did he escape it. ' How can this man give us his flesh to 

 eat?' expressed the sceptical flouting of unpoetic na- 

 tures. Such are still amongst us. Cardinal Manning 

 would doubtless tell any Protestant who rejects the doc- 

 trine of transubstantiation that he ' fibs ' away the plain 

 words of his Saviour when he reduces ' the Body of the 

 Lord ' in the sacrament to a mere figure of speech. 



Though misuse may render it grotesque or insin- 

 cere, the idealisation of ancient conceptions, when done 

 consciously and above board, has, in my opinion, an im- 

 portant future. We are not radically different from 

 our historic ancestors, and any feeling which affected 

 them profoundly, requires only appropriate clothing to 

 affect us. The world will not likely relinquish its heri- 

 tage of poetic feeling, and metaphysic will be welcomed 

 when it abandons its pretensions to scientific discovery 

 and consents to be ranked as a kind of poetry. * A good 

 symbol,' says Emerson, 'is a missionary to persuade 

 thousands. The Vedas, the Edda, the Koran, are each 

 remembered by its happiest figure. There is no more 

 welcome gift to men than a new symbol. They assim- 

 ilate themselves to it, deal with it in all ways, and it will 

 last a hundred years. Then comes a new genius and 

 brings another.' Our ideas of God and the soul are 

 obviously subject to this symbolic mutation. They are 

 not now what they were a century ago. They will not 



