XII.J THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. 2G3 



sympathy with us, but as one to which no emotion wliat- 

 cver can be ascribed, and we are expressly forbidden, " by 

 dut}/,^"* to adinn personality of God as much as to deny it 

 of Ilitn. How such a bein^ can be presented as an object 

 on which to exercise religious emotion it is difiicult indeed 

 to understand.' Aspiration, love, devotion to be poured 

 forth upon what we can never know, upon what we can 

 never alTirm to know, or care for, us, our thoughts or actions, 

 or to possess the attributes of wisdom and goodness ! The 

 worship offered in such a religion must be, as Prof. Huxley 

 says,^ "for the most part of the silent sort" — silent not 

 only as to the spoken word, but silent as to the mental 

 conception also. It will be dillicult to distinguish the fol- 

 lower of this religion from the follower of none, and the 

 man who declines either to assert or to deny the existence 

 of God is practically in tlie position of an atlieist. For 

 theism enjoins the cultivation of sentiments of love and de- 

 votion to God, and the practice of their external expression. 

 Atheism forbids both, while the simply non-thcist abstains 

 in conformity with the prohibition of the atheist, and thus 

 practically sides with him. Moreover, since man cannot 

 imagine that of which he has no experience in any way 

 whatever, and since he has experience only of human per- 

 fections and of the powers and properties of inferior exist- 

 ences, if he be required to deny human perfections and to 



• Mr. J. Martineau, in his "Essays," vol. i., p. 211, observes : " Mr. 

 Fpeucer's conditions of pious worship arc hard to satisfy ; there must he 

 between the Divine and human no communion of thought, relations of 

 conscience, or approach of afTection." ..." Dut you cannot constitute 

 a religion out of mystery alone, any more than out of knowledge alone ; 

 nor can you measure the relation of doctrines to humility and piety by 

 the mere amount of conscious darkness which they leave. All worship, 

 being directed to what is above us and transcends our comprehension, 

 stands in presence of a mystery. But not all that stands before a mys- 

 tery is worship." 



^ " Lay Sermons," p. 20. 



