« COWARDLY AGNOSTICISM." 237 



chasuble and the embroidered robe of theology, they are its hair- 

 shirt, and its hair-shirt in tatters — utterly useless for the purpose 

 to which it is despairingly applied, and serving only to make the 

 forlorn wearer ridiculous. I propose to show that in retaining 

 this dishonored garment, agnosticism is playing the part of an 

 intellectual Ananias and Sapphira ; and that in professing to give 

 up all that it can not demonstrate, it is keeping back part, and the 

 larger part of the price — not, however, from dishonesty, but from 

 a dogged and obstinate cowardice, from a terror of facing the ruin 

 which its own principles have made. 



Some, no doubt, will think that this is a rash undertaking, or 

 else that I am merely indulging in the luxury of a little rhetoric. 

 I hope to convince the reader that the undertaking is not rash, 

 and that I mean my expressions to be taken in a frigid and literal 

 sense. Let me begin then by repeating one thing, which I have 

 said before. "When I say that agnosticism is fatal to our concep- 

 tion of duty, I do not mean that it is fatal to those broad rules 

 and obligations which are obviously necessary to any civilized 

 society, which are distinctly defensible on obvious utilitarian 

 grounds, and which, speaking generally, can be enforced by exter- 

 nal sanctions. These rules and obligations have existed from the 

 earliest ages of social life, and are sure to exist as long as social 

 life exists. But so far are they from giving life a meaning, that 

 on Prof. Huxley's own showing they have barely made life toler- 

 able. A general obedience to them for thousands and thousands 

 of years has left " the evolution of man, as set forth in the annals 

 of history/' the " most unutterably saddening study " that Prof. 

 Huxley knows. From the earliest ages to the present — Prof. Hux- 

 ley admits this — the nature of man has been such that, despite 

 their laws and their knowledge, most men have made themselves 

 miserable by yielding to " greed " and to " ambition/' and by prac- 

 ticing " infinite wickedness." They have proscribed their wisest 

 when alive, and accorded them a "foolish" hero-worship when 

 dead. Infinite wickedness, blindness, and idiotic emotion have, 

 then, according to Prof. Huxley's deliberate estimate, marked and 

 marred men from the earliest ages to the present ; and he deliber- 

 ately says also, that " as men ever have been, they probably ever 

 will be." 



To do our duty, then, evidently implies a struggle. The im- 

 pulses usually uppermost in us have to be checked, or chastened, 

 by others, and these other impulses have to be generated, by fixing 

 our attention on considerations which lie somehow beneath the 

 surface. If this were not so, men would always have done their 

 duty ; and their history would not have been " unutterably sad- 

 dening," as Prof. Huxley says it has been. What sort of consid- 

 erations, then, must those we require be ? Before answering 



