Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/105

 tells us that, before taking his degree at Cambridge, and for some little time afterward, he was "an ardent High Churchman," but who within ten years of that time gravely assured his Sunday audience as follows:

"On the whole, therefore, we seem entitled to conclude that, during such time as we can have evidence of, no intelligence or volition has been concerned in events happening within the range of the solar system, except that of animals living on the planets. The weight of such probabilities is, of course, estimated differently by different people, and these questions are only just beginning to receive the right sort of attention. But it does seem to me that we may expect in time to have negative evidence on this point of the same kind, and the same cogency, as that which forbids us to assume the existence between the earth and Venus of a planet as large as either of them."

It is hardly possible to regard a statement of that kind, made by a brilliant young man to a popular audience, within a few years of the time when he was himself an ardent Christian, and on the mere strength of the assumption that "mind without brain is a contradiction," except as the result of a delight in intellectual straining for its own sake. It is not merely that the atheistic drift is intrinsically so audacious and violent, but that the mode of its statement is still more audacious and violent. To assert that a disproof of a divine intelligence might be expected of the same degree of validity as the disproof of the existence of a large inferior planet, in a position in which its influence would long ago have been detected, both directly and indirectly—where, indeed, it would have vitiated every calculation made for a century and a half at least—can hardly have been the result of anything but a sheer desire to inflict a great intellectual shock, to produce the excitement of a new intellectual strain. It was, indeed, the product of the same state of mind which made the same brilliant paradox-monger enjoy saying, when at college, "There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey." But that startling saying was commonplace itself compared with those statements which he made as a mature man many years later, to a large and indiscriminate popular audience. And, in his great philippic against the sin of credulity, he strains matters often to a point as shrill. Nay, even Mr. Pollock, in writing his memoir of his friend, appears anxious to strike a similar chord. Speaking of Clifford's last days, he says: "Far be it from me, as it was far from him, to grudge to any man or woman the hope or comfort that may be found in sincere expectation of a better life to come. But let this be set down and remembered, plainly and openly, for the instruction and rebuke of those who fancy that these dogmas have a monopoly of happiness, and will not face the fact that there are true men, ay, and women, to whom the dignity of manhood and the fellowship of this life, undazzled by the magic of any revelation, unholpen [sic] of any promises