cxxxvi MEMOIR 



communication, so to be understood, so to be judged, and only 

 so far to be credited. The mathematical he made, I say, excep- 

 tion of: number and measure he believed in to the extent of 

 their significance, but that significance, he was never weary of 

 reminding you, was slender to the verge of nonentity. Science 

 was true, because it told us almost nothing. With a few ab- 

 stractions it could deal, and deal correctly ; conveying honestly 

 faint truths. Apply its means to any concrete fact of life, and 

 this high dialect of the wise became a childish jargon. 



Thus the atheistic youth was met at every turn by a scep- 

 ticism more complete than his own, so that the very weapons of 

 the fight were changed in his grasp to swords of paper. Cer- 

 tainly the church is not right, he would argue, but certainly not 

 the anti-church either. Men are not such fools as to be wholly 

 in the wrong, nor yet are they so placed as to be ever wholly in 

 the right. Somewhere, in mid air between the disputants, like 

 hovering Victory in some design of a Greek battle, the truth 

 hangs undiscerned. And in the meanwhile what matter these 

 uncertainties ? Eight is very obvious ; a great consent of the 

 best of mankind, a loud voice within us (whether of God, or 

 whether by inheritance, and in that case still from God) guide 

 and command us in the path of duty. He saw life very simple ; 

 he did not love refinements ; he was a friend to much conformity 

 in unessentials. For (he would argue) it is in this life as it 

 stands about us, that we are given our problem ; the manners 

 of the day are the colours of our palette ; they condition, they 

 constrain us ; and a man must be very sure he is in the right, 

 must (in a favourite phrase of his) be ' either very wise or very 

 vain,' to break with any general consent in ethics. I remember 

 taking his advice upon some point of conduct. ' Now,' he said, 

 ' how do you suppose Christ would have advised you ? ' and 

 when I had answered that he would not have counselled me 

 anything unkind or cowardly, ' No,' he said, with one of his 

 shrewd strokes at the weakness of his hearer, ' nor anything 

 amusing.' Later in life, he made less certain in the field of 

 ethics. ' The old story of the knowledge of good and evil is a 

 very true one,' I find him writing ; only (he goes on) ' the effect 



