Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/299

Letter 26] movement of a limb, or most fleeting shade of thought, in each one of the myriads of human mechanisms called men.

The thorough-going materialist, when he rebukes his son and tells him that he "ought not to have" told a lie, knows perfectly well that his son could not possibly help telling that lie, and that he was bound by all the laws of nature to tell it. The materialist father is, in fact, telling a lie himself; only more deliberately than the little son. He is using words which have no true meaning for him, as a kind of oil to grease the wheels of the little machine before him, having learned by accumulated experience that this lying phrase, "You ought to have," has for many thousands of years proved a very effective kind of oil, and that the true and scientific phrase, "It would have been better if you could have, but you could not," would be wholly inefficacious. But since it is obvious that this view of existence converts all moral language, and almost all the higher relations of life, into one gigantic lie, I make no apology at all for putting it by with contempt as being beneath the consideration of a child of ten—at which age, as far as I remember I grappled with this question of predestination, and settled it (so far as I was concerned, for ever) by coming to the conclusion that "it does not work." Now when you have once given up, as unworkable, the theory that all our thoughts and emotions spring necessarily from antecedent material causes, you have bidden good-bye to Knowledge, so far as concerns the origin of human thought, and you are thrown back upon Faith. I believe therefore, and I make no apology for my belief, that the mysterious fluctuations of human thought and will may sometimes proceed from God without the intervention of material causes, perhaps in virtue of the existence of some invisible law of union by which the souls of men are united to God and to one another.