148 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 



great happiness, still retaining through all my life the 

 blessings which have sprung and will spring from 

 that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, 

 howling, grovel in bestiality ? "Why, the very apes 

 know better, and if you shoot their young the poor 

 brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately 

 seek distraction in a gorge. 



He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty 

 distinctly, and force of character to do it ; which of 

 us dare ask for a higher summary of his life than that ? 

 For such a man there can be no fear in facing the 

 great unknown, his life has been one long experience 

 of the substantial justice of the laws by which this 

 world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them 

 still as he lays his head down for his long sleep. 



Whether astronomy and geology can or cannot be 

 made to agree with the statements as to the matters 

 of fact laid down in Genesis whether the Gospels 

 are historically true or not are matters of compara- 

 tively small moment in the face of the impassable 

 gulf between the anthropomorphism (however refined) 

 of theology and the passionless impersonality of the 

 unknown and unknowable which science shows 

 everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena. 



I am too much a believer in Butler and in the great 

 principle of the "Analogy" that "there is no 

 absurdity in theology so great that you cannot parallel 

 it by a greater absurdity of Nature" (it is not 



