CHRISTIAN AGNOSTICISM, ^3 



not believe that we are physically so well cared for as we are — natu- 

 rally selected, evolved, provided with every possible adaptation to our 

 material environment, and given the prize at last as " the fittest of all 

 possible beings to survive " — and then are left utterly in the lurch as 

 regards all our higher wants. No, our instinct revolts against such a 

 supposition ; and we crave to know on what grounds something can 

 be said, as well as on what grounds almost everything can be denied. 



3. Now, Mr. Spencer could help us in this quest, if he would. His 

 analysis, in " First Principles," of our religious conceptions shows what 

 he could do. He there — while carefully warning us that all our knowl- 

 edge is merely relative, and that our reasoning faculties do not present 

 to us truth as it is, but only as it is reflected on the mirror of our 

 mind — places nevertheless such confidence in those faculties that he 

 allows them, in Buddhist-fashion, to strip away feature after feature, 

 as it were, from our religious conception of God, and to reduce it to a 

 grim skeleton labeled " Everlasting Force." But why " Force " only ? 

 To begin with, surely this also is a "conception." It is engendered 

 by a multitude of observations blending into a higher unity and taking 

 at last a definite shape. And the only sanction it has to rest upon is, 

 not {ex hypothesi) any certainty or absolute truth in human logic, but 

 simply an ineradicable faith that, to us at any rate, the notions of 

 " permanence " and *^ force " sufficiently represent^ though they may 

 not actually be, the truth. We seem, then, already to have made the 

 grand transition from reasoning to conceiving, from destruction to 

 construction, from restless analysis to quiet synthesis, and from logic 

 to belief that the great Unknown is, in one word, Power — " an infinite 

 and eternal energy." 



4. But just as we draw from the stores of our own consciousness 

 this idea of " Power," of force, of muscular or mental energy, precisely 

 in the same way we are justified in drawing the idea of "purpose " in 

 the direction of that energy. In fact, we can not anyhow conceive 

 of force without " direction " of some kind ; and our instincts im- 

 peratively demand of us, when we think of force in the highest and 

 sublimest way we can, that we impregnate that idea with another 

 product of our plastic imagination, and conceive it as efficiently directed 

 to some worthy end — in short, as power and wisdom combined. This 

 may be, and undoubtedly is, quite as human and relative and pro- 

 visional a conception as that of a pure blind, unguided Force would be. 

 But while the mind shrinks with unmitigated horror from the notion 

 of " an infinite and eternal Energy," loose as it were in the universe, 

 without any rational purpose or aim, but wielding portentous cosmic 

 forces at hap-hazard, as a madman or a rogue-elephant might do, the 

 mind rests and is satisfied when it can once feel assured that all is 

 guided and has perfect efficiency for (what we can only call) some 

 worthy " design." The word is, of course, utterly inadequate when 

 things of such a scale are in question. But can Mr. Spencer or any one 



