Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/22

Rh Awe, and these had their only secure footing in the unfathomable and the mysterious — the omnipresence of the Omnipotent, from which none can escape, whose ways are past finding out. Thus, finally, — let it not be overlooked, — the belief of traditional religion in the Personality of God, in the self-conscious purposive Wisdom and Love at the root of all things, was to disappear. Not, to be sure, in behalf of Materialism; not in behalf of Atheism, taken as the dogmatic denial of God; but in behalf of Agnosticism, the far subtler avoidance of a Personal Absolute, — an avoidance all the more plausible from its appeal to the impartiality which is of the essence of reason; an appeal to the rational neutrality that would no more deny than it would assert God, would no more assert than it would deny the eternity of Matter, but with disciplined self-restraint would confine itself to the affirmation, declared alone defensible, of simply some Ultimate Reality, whose nature was impenetrable to our knowledge.

Confronted as our human intelligence always is with the fact of our ignorance, and bred as the religious thinking of that day had been in apologetics based on an agnostic philosophy such as Hamilton’s; impressed, too, as the general public was, religious and non-religious alike, with the steadfast march of natural science towards bringing all facts under the reign of physical law, — above all, under the law of evolution, — we need not wonder that this public was widely and deeply influenced by this philosophy. It is accessible to the general intelligence, and its evidences are impressive to minds unacquainted with the