482 Darwinism and Religious Thought 
what we think we ought to think’, truly scientific in its employment 
of hypothesis and verification, and in growing conviction of the reality 
of its subject-matter through the repeated victories of a mastery 
which advances, like science, in the Baconian road of obedience. It 
is reasonable to hope that progress in this respect will be more rapid 
and sure when religious study enlists more men affected by scientific 
desire and endowed with scientific capacity. 
The class of investigating minds is a small one, possibly even 
smaller than that of reflecting minds. Very few persons at any 
period are able to find out anything whatever. There are few 
observers, few discoverers, few who even wish to discover truth. In 
how many societies the problems of philology which face every person 
who speaks English are left unattempted! And if the inquiring or 
the successfully inquiring class of minds is small, much smaller, of 
course, is the class of those possessing the scientific aptitude in an 
eminent degree. During the last age this most distinguished class 
was to a very great extent absorbed in the study of phenomena, a 
study which had fallen into arrears. -For we stood possessed, in rudi- 
ment, of means of observation, means for travelling and acquisition, 
qualifying men for a larger knowledge than had yet been attempted. 
These were now to be directed with new accuracy and ardour upon 
the fabric and behaviour of the world of sense. Our debt to the 
great masters in physical science who overtook and almost out- 
stripped the task cannot be measured; and, under the honourable 
leadership of Ruskin, we may all well do penance if we have failed 
“in the respect due to their great powers of thought, or in the 
admiration due to the far scope of their discovery.” With what 
miraculous mental energy and divine good fortune—as Romans said 
of their soldiers—did our men of curiosity face the apparently im- 
penetrable mysteries of nature! And how natural it was that 
immense accessions of knowledge, unrelated to the spiritual facts 
of life, should discredit Christian faith, by the apparent superiority 
of the new work to the feeble and unprogressive knowledge of 
Christian believers! The day is coming when men of this mental 
character and rank, of this curiosity, this energy and this good 
fortune in investigation, will be employed in opening mysteries of < - 
a spiritual nature. They will silence with masterful witness the 
over-confident denials of naturalism. They will be in danger of the 
widespread recognition which thirty years ago accompanied every 
utterance of Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer. They will contribute, in 
1G. Tyrrell, in Mediaevalism, has a chapter which is full of the important moral 
element in « scientific attitude. ‘The only infallible guardian of truth is the spirit of 
truthfulness.” Mediaevalism, p. 182, London, 1908. 
2 Queen of the Air, Preface, p. vii. London, 1906. 
