Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/90

82 openly "substitute Humanity for God," and refuse the transforming adoration of the heart to any conception which is not level to the bare positive understanding, they also—with all their eloquence and persuasive amiability—"charm" their contemporaries utterly in vain. As modern England will never again become papal and mediæval, so (it may be safely predicted) modern England will never become atheist or positivist. Our countrymen are in too healthy and vigorous a mental condition to impale themselves on either horn of this uncongenial dilemma. But they may, and it is to be hoped they will, surrender themselves to the far higher and more scientific teaching of men like Mr. Spencer; and will learn from them to think out to just and practical conclusions the deeply interesting—and to some minds the quite absorbing—question of religion.

But then—with all respect be it said—Mr. Spencer must really help us to think further on than he has yet done; or he will find the Christian clergy (whom he is under temptation to despise) will be beforehand with him. He has most ably "purified" for us our idea of God; he has pruned away all kinds of anthropomorphic accretions; he has dressed up and ridiculed afresh the Guy Fawkes crudities of by-gone times, which he apparently "sees no reason should ever be forgot"; he has reminded the country parsons of a good many scientific facts, which they read, it is true, in every book and review from Monday till Saturday and then so provokingly forget on Sundays; and he has schooled them into the reflection that a Power present in innumerable worlds hardly needs our flattery, or indeed any kind of service from us at all. But then all this is abundantly done already by the steady reading, from every lectern throughout the land, of those grand old prophets and apostles of the higher religious thought, who perpetually harp upon this same string. "God," they reiterate, "is not a man," that he should lie or repent; "Bring no more vain oblations"; "The sacrifices of God are a troubled spirit"; "Thou thoughtest wickedly that I am such a one as thyself"; "God dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshiped with men's hands, as though he needed anything." Nay, the present writer—who probably sits under a great many more sermons in the course of the year than Mr. Spencer does—is firmly persuaded that every curate in the Church of England and every Nonconformist minister are perfectly aware of these great truths and on suitable occasions preach them; and that what they want to be taught is something beyond all this A B C and all this negation—viz., what are the fundamental conceptions on which they may securely build up, not their philosophical negations, but their popular assertions about religion. For a religion of mere negations is as good as no religion at all. It seems hardly worth while to go down Sunday after Sunday to St. George's Hall, or to any other hall, simply to be told that Heaven has nothing whatever to say to us. We can