THE CONTROVERSIALIST 165 



colour are brought into play ; greater stress is laid on 

 the importance of baptismal and other sacramental 

 rites, with the consequent aggrandisement of the sac- 

 erdotalist as their divinely authorised administrator. 

 The emotions have unwholesome excitation ; the rea- 

 • son is drugged. A sermon — if it be not a sleeping- 

 draught — makes appeals to the intellect; it may 

 convert, or it may fail to convince. But a rite 

 requires unquestioning acceptance of its supernatural 

 obligation and nature as the condition of its efficacy. 

 To partake in it demands no mental effort. This 

 thaumaturgy in religion has its correlatives in the 

 pseudo-mysticism of the present day, as in the spuri- 

 ous remedies of " Christian Science " for diseases ; in 

 the trickeries of spiritualism, whose phenomena, were 

 they true, would, as Huxley said, " furnish an addi- 

 tional argument against suicide " ; l in the charlatanry 

 of palmistry, astrology, and other quackeries, eviden- 

 cing how superficial are the changes in human nature. 

 "So little trouble," says Thucydides, "do men take 

 in search after truth ; so readily do they accept what- 

 ever comes first to hand." 2 



Huxley was well equipped in historical knowledge. 

 When Dr. St. George Mivart cited Suarez and other 

 schoolmen in his criticisms on the Origin of Species, 



1 I. 420; and see Coll. Essays, v. pp. 341, 342. 

 2 1. 20 (Jowett's Trans.). 



