AGNOSTICISM. 65 



lead him to pay no real attention to the argument lie is attacking, 

 or should betray him into material misquotation, he may at least 

 be sure that scarcely any of his readers will care to refer to the 

 original paper, or will have the opportunity of doing so. I can 

 scarcely hope that Prof. Huxley's obliging reference to the " Offi- 

 cial Report of the Church Congress " will induce many of those 

 who are influenced by his answer to my paper to purchase that 

 interesting volume, though they would be well repaid by some of 

 its other contents ; and I can hardly rely on their spending even 

 twopence upon the reprint of the paper, published by the Society 

 for Promoting Christian Knowledge. I have therefore felt obliged 

 to ask the editor of this review to be kind enough to admit to his 

 pages a brief restatement of the position which Prof. Huxley has 

 assailed, with such notice of his arguments as is practicable within 

 the comparatively brief space which can be afforded me. I could 

 not, indeed, amid the pressing claims of a college like this in term 

 time, besides the chairmanship of a hospital, a preachership, and 

 other duties, attempt any reply which would deal as thoroughly 

 as could be wished with an article of so much skill and finish. 

 But it is a matter of justice to my cause and to myself to remove 

 at once the unscientific and prejudiced representation of the case 

 which Prof. Huxley has put forward ; and fortunately there will 

 be need of no elaborate argument for this purpose. There is no 

 occasion to go beyond Prof. Huxley's own article and the lan- 

 guage of my paper to exhibit his entire misapprehension of the 

 point in dispute ; while I am much more than content to rely for 

 the invalidation of his own contentions upon the authorities he 

 himself quotes. 



What, then, is the position with which Prof. Huxley finds 

 fault ? He is good enough to say that what he calls my " descrip- 

 tion " of an agnostic may for the present pass, so that we are so 

 far, at starting, on common ground. The actual description of an 

 agnostic, which is given in my paper, is indeed distinct from the 

 words he quotes, and is taken from an authoritative source. But 

 what I have said is that, as an escape from such an article of Chris- 

 tian belief as that we have a Father in heaven, or that Jesus 

 Christ is the Judge of quick and dead, and will hereafter return to 

 judge the world, an agnostic urges that " he has no means of a sci- 

 entific knowledge of the unseen world or of the future " ; and I 

 maintain that this plea is irrelevant. Christians do not presume 

 to say that they have a scientific knowledge of such articles of 

 their creed. They say that they believe them, and they believe 

 them mainly on the assurances of Jesus Christ. Consequently their 

 characteristic difference from an agnostic consists in the fact that 

 they believe those assurances, and that he does not. Prof. Hux- 

 ley's observation, "Are there then any Christians who say that they 



VOL. XXXV. — 5 



