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earnest, irrepressible, unceasing yearning, to immortality in 

 another sphere. Tennyson has expressed this beautifully : — 



" Thou wilt not leave us in the dust ; 



Thou madest man, he knows not why : 

 He thinks he was not made to die : 

 And Thou hast made him ; Thou art just. 



"We have but faith ; we cannot know ; 

 For knowledge is of things we see ; 

 And yet we trust it comes from Thee, 

 A beam in darkness ; let it grow." 



Science opens no field to which these intuitions belong, or 

 in which they can find a resting-place. It cannot satisfy 

 them. It leaves us in the dark, helpless and hopeless, on 

 those very points which, constituted as we are with yearning 

 affections and boundless aspirations, are of supremest import- 

 ance. That very theory of " the survival of the fittest " is 

 here completely at fault ; for it would represent a series of 

 beliefs to have been developed in the mind, which are yet 

 useless and deceptive. No effort of genius, no perverse skill 

 of sophistry, can ever reconcile these beliefs with any theory 

 of evolution; for if this be the ultimate result of the latest 

 combinations of atoms, if this be all that nature has done or 

 can do, then this ultimate result is human life without adequate 

 motive, "' affections with no object sufiicient to fill them, hopes 

 of immortality never to be realised, aspirations after God and 

 godliness never to be attained ; and thus, too, myriads of 

 myriads of other nebulas may still be the potentials of 

 delusions, and their outcomes the kingdom of despair." ^ 



But a sounder and a higher philosophy, the philosophy 

 embodied in the Revelation of God, gives far other teaching. 

 It tells man that those grand intuitions were not implanted in 

 vain. It leads him to look beyond the material universe for 

 the satisfaction of his profoundest thoughts, and the realisation 

 of his most earnest longings. It sees exhibited in some form 

 by every nation, tribe, and family of mankind, a feeling of 

 dependence on One greater than man, and of moral obligation 

 to One holier than man. This feeling arises with the earliest 

 development of consciousness, and it grows and strengthens 

 with our mental growth. We caunot repress it ; and the 

 mind which is compelled to interpret the impressions received 

 through the senses, as proofs of the reality of the material 

 woi'ld, is in like manner compelled to interpret the intuitions 



* Pritchard, Address at Brighton. 



