IN LOWEE MAN. 215 



majority of men have the requisites for true Christian belief? 

 Of the first hundred men we may count passing over West- 

 minster Bridge how many are the least distressed by any 

 sense of sin or of moral evil ? ' 



In truth, the most highly educated class in Britain is 

 charged with atheism, materialism, a faith only in what is 

 demonstrable to and by the senses, a belief that is common 

 to the savage and the child. Much has been said of late years 

 of the atheism of science, or of its cultivators. Wordsworth 

 thus describes the modern scientist, or man of science : 



A moralist 



Himself his world and his own god : 

 One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling 



Xor form, nor feeling, great or small : 

 A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, 



An intellectual all-in-all. 



' Here, 5 says Professor Blackie, the most genial genius of 

 all the academic celebrities of the 'modern Athens,' 'the great 

 philosophic poet clearly indicates that, without reverence and 

 love, the mere man of science remains incapable of compre- 

 hending either humanity or divinity : becomes practically his 

 own god.' But both philosophic poets for the Professor is 

 quite as well entitled to such a designation as Wordsworth, 

 though his philosophy is of a warmer, more human and human- 

 ising kind have before them an ideal, not actual, personage. 

 A c mere man of science ' is much less likely to exist in reality 

 than a mere poet. At all events I do not myself know any. 

 All the men of science I have encountered abroad and at home 

 are something more than mere men of science ; they are men 

 with all the ordinary human aspirations, virtues, and vices, 

 including most assuredly the highest reverence and love for 

 the good, the true, and the beautiful, wherever they are to be 

 found. Poets as well as divines would appear to require 

 constantly to be reminded that atheism and science have no 

 necessary relation or connection ; that theology is not religion, 

 but only a part or form of it ; and that devoutness and all the 

 elements of religiousness and morality may exist with or 

 without a belief in the God of the Bible, as that belief is set 

 forth in this or that creed, dogma, or Church standard. 



