298 
take too strong a dose^ tke law of your nature is that you 
succumb to the nature of its influence. 
An Italian ecclesiastic^* who abandoned the Christian 
religion and afterwards, as a professor at Milan, had 
considerable influence for evil, clothed his no faitk in the 
following expressive terms, well adapted to the somewhat 
Machiavellian shrewdness of his countrymen. 
“ The world is what it is, and it is because it is ; any other reason what- 
ever of its essence and of its existence can be nothing but a sophism or an 
illusion.” t 
Mr. Eeynolds seems to me to lose himself sometimes in the 
vain attempt to conciliate scientists by adopting from them 
theories of Becoming and of Being, inimical to faith, and of 
which Science herself is beginning to be ashamed. 
I take, as an illustration, the following sentence : — 
This connexion of all visible things with the invisible, and of germs that 
are possibly not organised in the sense of being eggs, possibly in themselves 
dead as the inanimate matter a\\dp)utrejiable substances out of which they creej) 
as living things, is evidence, amounting to scientific proof (!), that there is a 
continual going forth from the unseen to the seen; evermore an awakening 
of life from the dead, which, whether called evolution or creation, renders the 
universe a sort of enchanted valley; and adds a strange unlooked-for confirma- 
tion to expectation that the forms which matter assumes are not its real 
substance, — not essentials, but accidents. Whether any piece of matter shall 
take the shape of solid or liquid or gas, seems a question of temperature and 
pressure. Who can tell the fixed and unvarying elemental form of matter ? 
Has it any such form ? Is it a mere condition of energy or force in loco ? 
Ought we to regard it as endowed with the faculty of assuming every variety of 
shape according to the mere accidents of environment ? Truly the world we 
live in is one of marvels ; and if we regard it as a manifestation of the Divine 
Being, the mysteries are analogous to those of the written revelation profound, 
and as to essence inscrutable ” (p. 5). 
This passage ought to have been pronounced ex cathedra, to 
an admiring audience. 
As it is found in a hooh written for the benefit of the 
agnostic, I must confess that I read it with extreme surprise. 
I thought that I was an interested and deeply- sympathising 
spectator of a duel between a champion of the faith and an 
agnostic, and here I behold my man lost in a fog and exposed 
to a mortal thrust without apparently being at all aware of his 
danger. 
“ Indignor, quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus. 
Verum opere in longo fas est obrepere somnura.” J 
* Known under the pseudonym of Franchi. 
+ The Heavenly Father, by Ernest Kaville (p. 158}. 
J Horace, De Arte Poet lea, ed. 1741. 
