99 
dangerous a tendency, that, as was pointed out at the time of 
their appearance, they strike, not only at the foundations of 
religion, but of morality also.* That the first is the case is 
only too clear from the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer quotes 
Dean Mansel with approbation in the opening chapters of his 
First Principles, in which he declares religion to have no 
practical bearing whatever upon life. Dean Mansel is the 
authority he quotes for regarding religion as the “ negative 
pole of thought,”]- as being practically valueless, because, 
instead of being connected with the real and the tangible, it is 
concerned entirely with the uncertain and the unintelligible. J 
It is on Dean Mansel’s principles that Mr. Spencer tells us that 
religion may be dismissed from our thoughts because “the 
mystery it contemplates is ultimate and absolute.” § 
2. Mr. Goldwin Smith has pointed out the key to this 
extraordinary contradiction between different portions of Dean 
Mansel’s volume, when he refers to the “happy inconsis- 
tency ” || between Dean Mansel as a philosopher and Dean 
Mansel as a Christian. It is not the Dean’s religious but his 
metaphysical principles that are to blame. In spite of his 
earnest Christianity, his great learning, his unrivalled felicity 
of expression, and — metaphysical speculations apart — his un- 
questionable orthodoxy, he has become a victim of a false 
system of philosophy, and, in spite of some brilliant affairs of 
outposts, he has really betrayed the citadel into the enemy’s 
hands. It is the object of this present paper to investigate, 
as far as such brief limits permit, the grounds on which God 
is said to be unknowable, and the grounds on which Christians 
assert that they may know Him. The question is one of 
* See Mr. Goldwin Smith’s strictures on Dean Mansel’s Lectures. 
f First Principles , p. 107. 
X “ Religion and science are, therefore, necessary correlatives. . . . They 
stand respectively for those two antithetical modes of consciousness which 
cannot exist asunder. A known cannot be thought of apart from an 
unknown ; nor can an unknown be thought of apart from a known.” — First 
Principles, p. 107. [I quote from the fourth edition.] 
§ P)id. 
|| Rational Religion and the Rationalistic Objections to the Bampton 
Lectures for 1858. Preface, p. ix. “ Throughout these lectures, with the 
dark growth of the negative philosophy there twines in happy contra- 
diction, a more wholesome plant, attesting the real geniality of the soil 
beneath.” — Ibid., p. 18. “Nor while I adhere to the doctrine opposed to 
that of the lecturer, in regard to his main positions, will I conclude these 
brief observations without paying the humble tribute of my sincere admira- 
tion to the power of statement displayed in some parts of his book It 
is one thing to use controversial weapons borrowed from negative philo- 
sophy; it is another thing to be yourself a negative philosopher.” — Ibid., 
p. 20. 
