394 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



— as an effort on the part of man to bring the mystery of 

 life and nature within the range of his capacities; as a 

 temporary and essentially fluxional rendering in terms 

 of knowledge of that which transcends all knowledge, and 

 admits only of ideal approach. 



The signs of the times, I think, point in this direction. 

 It is, for example, the obvious aim of Mr. Matthew Arnold 

 to protect, amid the wreck of d6gma, the poetic basis of 

 religion. And it is to be remembered that under the cir- 

 cumstances poetry may be the purest accessible truth. In 

 other influential quarters a similar spirit is at work. In. a 

 remarkable article published by Professor Knight of St. 

 Andrews in the September number of the *' Nineteenth 

 Century," amid other free utterances, we have this one: 

 *'If matter is not eternal, its first emergence into being 

 is a miracle beside which all others dwindle into absolute 

 insignificance. But, as has often been pointed out, the 

 process is unthinkable; the sudden apocalypse of a ma- 

 terial world out of blank nonentity cannot be imagined;* 

 its emergence into order out of chaos when 'without form 

 and void' of life, is merely a poetic rendering of the doctrine 

 of its slow evolution.''^ These are all bold words to be 

 spoken before the moral philosophy class of a Scotch 

 university, while those I have underlined show a remark- 

 able freedom of dealing with the sacred text. They re- 

 peat in terser language what I ventured to utter four years 

 ago regarding the Book of Grenesis. "Profoundly inter- 

 esting and indeed pathetic to me are those attempts of the 

 opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. 



* Professor Knight will have to reckon with the English Marriage Service, 

 one of whose Collects begins thus: "O God, who by thy mighty power hast 

 made all things of nothing." 



