Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/80

70 the world. It is too barren, too empty-handed. It makes even science poor, robbing it of half of its intellectual interest and of almost all its charm. Men who talk about "plans" and "apparatuses" and "contrivances" and then tell us they don't mean what the words imply, are feeding themselves and us on husks indeed.

But Prof. Huxley has his revenge. In words which seem to express the most supercilious contempt, he refers to those who, "having distilled away every inconvenient matter of fact in Christian history, continue to pay divine honors to the residue." This is a bitter sentence. I do not think it is a just one as applied to the authors of the volume called Lux Mundi; but I fear it is more justly applicable to religionists of the Robert Elsmere type. Prof. Huxley ridicules them in a mock sentence supposed to be coming in some Bampton Lecture of the future: "No longer in contact with fact of any kind, faith stands now and forever proudly inaccessible to all the attacks of the infidel." I should not like to speak in this tone to, or of, any minds which are perplexed. But I agree with Prof. Huxley that, as flesh and blood must have a skeleton, so both sentiment and faith must have an object. They can not hang in air with no footing either in earth or heaven. Nothing can be more certain than that "nature" did not generate itself. The things which are seen were certainly not made of things that do appear. The things which are seen are all temporal. It is the things which are not seen that are alone eternal. All this belongs to our universal experience, and is part of our all too scanty stock of necessary truths. What we call nature—ourselves included—must have had an origin and a cause. These are the objects of religion. Of two things we may be sure about theology: first, that there must be facts concerning it; and, secondly, that these facts must be the supreme facts with which we have to do. They may or may not be accessible to us, but they must exist as realities—with all their dynamic apparatus, and with all their corresponding laws. It is the business of all men to see those facts as best they may, and to obey those laws as best they can. It is impossible, therefore, to admire or even to respect the attitude of men who, in these matters, do nothing but stand by the highway sides of life mocking. Least of all is this attitude to be respected in our professed agnostics. They should at least remember that they have nothing to give us of their own. Ignorance—even fictitious ignorance—is the motto on their flag. They do not plead it humbly as a confession, or use the sense of it as a stimulus to exertion. They claim it proudly as a boast, and use it as a weapon to repulse the light. With them