5 PROCEEDINGS MANCHESTER INSTITUTE 



This is not a comfortable situation for a man morally earnest 

 and sincere. He cannot, or thinks he cannot, be at home in the 

 church. At the same time he has no interest in any society 

 which lives in denial, which preaches a negative philosophy, often 

 enough in a crude and blatant way. He feels the needs of the 

 inward life, the need of an ideal and of fellowship in an ideal. It 

 occurs to me that your society might be a help to such a man. 

 For supposing" he has lost God, lost faith in a future life, there 

 still remain three verities for him to follow — the truths and laws 

 of science, the beauty of the world, and the moral law he finds 

 within him, whose voice remains authentic and imperative amidst 

 the ruins of religious faith. If he follow these he is following 

 gleams of light which are no will-o-the-wisp, but celestial torches 

 which will light the way to the great sun. Indeed I do not see 

 how a genuine institute of art and science can fail to teach relig- 

 ion in an indirect way. To know how to love truth for its own 

 sake is religion, and what is religion but the completest synthe- 

 sis of beauty and truth, in its transcendent source, God ; and our 

 perception that the synthesis is both a necessity of thought and 

 heart. Something like this perception I think must have been 

 in the soul of Keats when he wrote, 



" Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all 

 Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." 



