Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/233

 THE RANDALL FAMILY 225

against an age grown sceptical of moral values, yet which all three yielded more or less to the influence of its reasoned or unreasoned agnosticism in things intellectual. " Analysis fails to render account of it [the Ought]," says Emerson, above. " Frantic pretension of scanning this great God's- World," says Carlyle, above. " I believe — I hope — I had almost said I fear — all is for the best. 'Tis all I can say. I know no more," says Randall, above, writing at Acton, April 29, 1862.

If the coming twentieth century shall aim to better this wholly untraditional yet intellectually blind Faith-Message from the nineteenth, with its passionately ethical yet rationally ungrounded affirmation that the " Law of the Whole" is a "Just Law," — that Man "knows the sense," but not the foundation, " of that grand word Ought,'' — that his highest wisdom is to "let my wishes be Thy Will," without knowing the necessary rectitude of that Will, — how is its success to be so much as hoped for, if it dare not put knowledge in the place of faith? I con- ceive that the crying need of this modern world, as the prime condition of all social betterment, is intellectual courage, and that the next century must either acquire this courage and press forward to a victorious philosophi- cal grounding of the Moral Law, or else share the fate of all cowards. If the " Law of the Whole " is indeed a "Just Law," it can only be just for reasons; and, if reasons exist, they can be found. To despair of itself is the one unpardonable sin of the human intellect, and its penalty is social catastrophe. On the heels of intellectual agnosticism treads ethical agnosticism; the force of every law is at bottom the force of its reasons, and, if these cannot be found, the law itself loses all force. How long will human society consent to be bound by a Moral Law

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