RELIGION cxxxv 



could never be induced to think them more or less than views. Religion 

 ' All dogma is to me mere form,' he wrote ; ' dogmas are mere J 

 blind struggles to express the inexpressible. I cannot conceive 

 that any single proposition whatever in religion is true in the 

 scientific sense ; and yet all the while I think the religious view 

 of the world is the most true view. Try to separate from the 

 mass of their statements that which is common to Socrates, 

 Isaiah, David, St. Bernard, the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet, 

 Bunyan yes, and George Eliot : of course you do not believe 

 that this something could be written down in a set of proposi- 

 tions like Euclid, neither will you deny that there is something 

 common and this something very valuable. ... I shall be sorry 

 if the boys ever give a moment's thought to the question of what 

 community they belong to I hope they will belong to the great 

 community.' I should observe that as time went on his confor- 

 mity to the church in which he was born grew more complete, and 

 his views drew nearer the conventional. ' The longer I live, my 

 dear Louis,' he wrote but a few months before his death, ' the more 

 convinced I become of a direct care by God which is reasonably 

 impossible but there it is.' And in his last year he took the 

 communion. 



But at the time when I fell under his influence, he stood 

 more aloof; and this made him the more impressive to a youth- 

 ful atheist. He had a keen sense of language and its imperial 

 influence on men ; language contained all the great and sound 

 metaphysics, he was wont to say ; and a word once made and 

 generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and 

 reason. But he never dreamed it could be accurate, knowing 

 that words stand symbol for the indefinable. I came to him 

 once with a problem which had puzzled me out of measure : 

 what is a cause ? why out of so many innumerable millions of 

 conditions, all necessary, should one be singled out and ticketed 

 ' the cause ? ' ' You do not understand,' said he. ' A cause is 

 the answer to a question : it designates that condition which I 

 happen to know and you happen not to know.' It was thus, 

 with partial exception of the mathematical, that he thought of 

 all means of reasoning : they were in his eyes but means of 



