Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/735

 physical and mental, very great kindliness and very great audacity, enthusiastic disinterestedness and almost measureless irreverence. He was a great master of gymnastic, who, when he came out second wrangler at Cambridge, was much prouder of being mentioned in "Bell's Life" as a great athlete than of being second wrangler. "His nerve at dangerous heights," wrote a friend who was his rival in gymnastic feats, "was extraordinary. I am appalled now to think that he climbed up and sat on the cross-bars of the weather-cock on a church tower; and, when, by way of doing something worse, I went up and hung by my toes to the bars, he did the same." During a journey in France, when the boat had left the quay at Havre, Clifford, arriving late, jumped on board of it, "with one of those apparently unpremeditated springs which look so well in the gymnasium." His flexibility and complete command of his own powers, both of mind and body, were probably as great as any human being ever possessed. And as he seems to have been entirely free from anything like giddiness in his gymnastic feats, so he seems to have been equally free from anything like awe in the equally marvelous gymnastic feats of his mind, treating the infinity and eternity in which his fellow creatures believed with the same sort of contemptuous familiarity with which he treated the ecclesiastical height he had once reached, only to balance himself by his toes on the weather-vane. He speaks, indeed, in the least irreverent of his antitheistic papers, of having parted from his faith in God "with such searching trouble as only cradle faiths can cause." And no doubt he must have felt something which entitled him to use this language, for Clifford was sincerity itself. Nevertheless, this is almost the only passage we have met with which points to his having gone through any crisis of the kind, while there are a great many in which he treats the faith in God with such utter, such cold contempt, that it is not easy to understand how he could ever have regarded it as being the light of his light and the life of his life, and much less how he could have realized that other men were still so regarding it, while he was launching his satire at them. In such a passage as the following, for example, he seems to be trying to show that he was as reckless of the awe which the faith in God and eternal life generate, as when, hanging with his toes on the church-vane, he was reckless of the fears which such a position as his would impart to most men: "For, after all, such a helper of man outside of humanity, the truth will not allow us to see. The dim and shadowy outlines of the superhuman deity fade slowly away from before us; and, as the mist of his presence floats aside, we perceive with greater and greater clearness the shape of a yet grander and nobler figure—of Him who made all gods, and shall unmake them. From the dim dawn of history, and from the inmost depth of every soul, the face of our father Man looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth in his eyes, and says, 'Before Jehovah was, I am.'" We transcribe the words of this parody with reluctance, and something almost of shame, but still with the feeling that they are essential to the understanding of the erratic man who wrote them, and who never could have written them if he had not been strangely deficient in those many fine chords of sympathy with his fellow men which in other skeptics like himself remain vibrating, and securing for them a certain community of sentiment with their fellows, long after the sympathy of conviction, necessary originally to agitate them to their full extent, has vanished. Doubtless, Clifford held all moral conventionality in utter horror. As he once told an audience, in face of the great danger which threatens nations that they may crystallize, like the Chinese, into inflexible habits of thought and feeling which would shut them out from progress, "it is not right to be proper." But still such a parody as we have quoted on what is to so many men the most sacred of human utterances, one indeed embodying the most solemn passion of conviction through which the heart of man has ever passed, would not have been, in most men's mouths, so much a violation of propriety as a deliberate insult to the heart of multitudes. That Professor Clifford did not so regard it seems to us quite evident. But that only shows how curiously destitute he was of some of those chords of sympathetic feeling, without the help of which it is impossible to judge with any adequacy the moral world in which you live. And with all his wonderful talent for society, and that extreme kindliness of his nature which so fascinated children, Professor Clifford certainly showed signs of a curious nakedness of the finer moral sympathies, a nakedness diminishing in great degree both the impression of cruelty which the mordant and contemptuous character of his attacks on religion would otherwise make upon us, and also, in some degree at least, the intellectual weight to be attached to his undoubted genius when it worked upon subjects of this kind.

to do with the first chapters of Genesis has long been a perplexity with those who hold it to be a veritable account of the origin of the universe, and who at the same time accept the conclusions of modern science on that subject. Differences are confessed and great ingenuity has been expended in reconciling them. In a thin volume of eighty-two pages Professor Grote gives us the results of his study of the question. He gives two versions side by side, the Hebrew text in English letters, together with the translation. Then follows a chapter on "Literary Criticism." In this the writer follows the researches