Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/269

 as it is involved in the laws of thought, cannot be without practical import." Our positivist brethren will, of course, seek to impugn the validity of such reasoning; but they are, as a rule, persons so superstitiously anti-superstitious that their objections may be discounted almost by anticipation. In any case Mr. Picton believes that he has passed clean through the prevalent materialism, and emerged into a spiritual effulgence, which irradiates, in some degree, the darkest crannies of human destiny. He has unbounded faith, that is to say loyalty, to the divine will, as he apprehends it.

But, if his own faith in the Eternal overflows, his charity towards those who have stopped midway in the ascent of the materialistic hill of difficulty is equally without limit. "Take the philosopher," he says, "who thought out, or thinks he has thought out, his system of the universe. Finding no place therein for a God such as he was taught to speak about and dream about in his childish years, he calmly says, 'There is no God at all.' &hellip; He is confident in his system of the universe, and is assured that it always works together under the same conditions to the same ends. He would stake his life upon the certainty that impurity and duplicity and dishonesty must bring misery and confusion into the commonwealth. Now, such a man has far more trust in the Lord than ever he supposes. Through despair of presenting that inconceivable Being in any form whatever to his consciousness, he fancies that he dispenses with the thought entirely. But the more nearly he comes to a realization of oneness in that system of the universe which he thinks he has wrought out, the more nearly does he come to the thought of