SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 13 



and regretful : as witness the bitter cry of Romanes 

 when he had lost that belief in Christianity which 

 he regained in his latter days. 



" Forasmuch as I am far from being able to 

 agree with those who affirm that the twilight 

 doctrine of the c new faith ' is a desirable sub- 

 stitute for the waning splendor of ' the old,' I 

 am not ashamed to confess that, with this virtual 

 negation of God, the universe to me has lost its 

 soul of loveliness ; and although from henceforth 

 the precept ' to work while it is day ' will doubt- 

 less but gain an intensified force from the 

 terribly intensified meaning of the words that 

 ' the night cometh when no man can work,' 

 yet when at times I think, as think at times I must, 

 of the appalling contrast between the hallowed 

 glory of that creed which once was mine, and the 

 lonely mystery of existence as now I find it at 

 such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid 

 the sharpest pang of which my nature is sus- 

 ceptible."* 



Mr. Chesterton, in one of his delightful flashes 

 of thought, reminds us that " the hardest thing 

 to remember about our own time, of course,' is 

 simply that it is a time ; we all instinctively think 

 of it as the Day of Judgment."! Those of the mid- 

 Victorian era had no doubts in their minds that 

 religion and all it entails had come to judgment, 

 and been dismissed with costs. It is perhaps not 

 wonderful that the new wine of scientific dis- 

 covery, the marvellous outpouring of researches 



* A Candid Examination of Theism^ p. 114. 

 t Charles Dickens, p. 288. 



