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do not profess to contend that we can comprehend all that God is, or that 
our conceptions (it is perhaps better to say this than conception ) of Him 
correspond in all respects to the fulness of the reality. All that we say 
is, that He is not to us the “ Unknowable,” for we feel that much may be 
certainly known about Him, and that, if it be true that “ our knowledge of 
Him be not absolute but relative,” that knowledge is a knowledge, accurate 
so far as it goes, of His Being, so far as it is made known through those 
relations— a knowledge derived from consciousness, from reason, and from 
revelation both in its external and internal sense. 
Mr. Spencer, it must be added, has in some respects modified in his 
appendix the statement he made in his First Principles . What he says in 
the former may be seen in § 4. In his appendix (p. 581), he says “ that an 
Unknowable Power, known with absolute certainty” (does this mean 
unconnected or entire certainty ?) “ is the sphere for religious feeling.” 
Whether the words I have quoted above do or do not warrant the con- 
clusion which Mr. Spencer goes on emphatically to disavow, that he 
has declared “ the ignorance alone to be the sphere of religious feeling,” I 
have no desire to discuss. What I do wish to point out is, that a great 
many other persons than Professor Birks have drawn this conclusion, or a 
conclusion practically undistinguishable from it. It is not what Mr. Herbert 
Spencer says, but what he is popularly regarded as saying, with which, as I 
have said, I wish to deal. It is the general notion abroad that, as God is the 
Unknowable, we cannot know anything about Him, and therefore the best 
thing we can do is to leave off thinking and feeling about Him, that I 
desire to combat. That the world in general, when it is informed that it is its 
“ highest wisdom and its highest duty to regard God as unknowable ” will 
imagine that religion is connected, not merely with the fact of the Unknow- 
ability, but with the resulting ignorance on our part, seems at least very 
likely. Mr. Herbert Spencer is, of course, not concerned with popular 
misrepresentations of his exact and carefully-considered language. But 
those who care for the interests of religion are concerned with those 
misrepresentations, and they are thankful to be able to inform the world 
that Mr. Spencer does not mean that our ignorance of God is the sphere of 
religious feeling, as many people seem to imagine. 
But, as the readers of the paper will have observed, the simile of the fog 
by no means presents the subject before us in all its bearings. The unseen, 
we may safely affirm, is very far from being in all respects the unknown. 
Physica researches have proved for us the existence of something unseen, 
with which the phenomena of nature are closely connected. That something 
we call force. Of force in itself we know nothing ; it belongs to the sphere 
of the unknowable ; but of its effects, of its methods of action, we know a 
good deal. Thus, though force belongs to the unseen, and as regards what, 
it is in itself, to the unknown, there are many “ manifestations ” of it which 
are thoroughly “ knowable.” So we contend that God, though unseen, and 
in the totality of His nature unknown to us, has also vouchsafed 
“ manifestations ” of His existence- to us which are thoroughly “ knowable,’ 
