Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/23

xxii subtleties inseparable from the most searching thought, while its refutation unavoidably carries the thinker into the intricacies of dialectic that to the general mind are least inviting, or are even repellent.

Since the diffusion of the doctrines of Darwin and Spencer, the more alert portion of the religious world has exhibited a busy haste to readjust its theological conceptions to the new views. In fact, these efforts have been noticeable for their speed and adroitness rather than for their large or considerate judgment; in their anxiety for harmony with the new, they have not seldom lost sight of the cardinal truths in the old. Memorable, unrivalled among them, was the proposal of Matthew Arnold, in the rôle of a devoted English Churchman, to replace the Personal God of “the religion in which we have been brought up,” and in the name of saving this religion, by his now famous “Power, not ourselves, that makes for Righteousness”: a proposal which while sacrificing the very heart of the warrant for calling the religion Christian — the belief in the divine Personality — was put forward in the most evident good faith that it was Christian still, and in a form so eminent for literary excellence that it beyond doubt increased the spread of its agnostic views in the very act of satirising the “Unknowable,” and preserved for the New Negation, in a lasting monument of English letters, the aesthetic charm which it added to the cause.

Agnosticism thus became adult and adorned, and made its conquests. But it was to meet a mortal foe; a foe, too, sprung from its own germinal stock. The