it as "tenaciously as ever a drowing sailor did to a hen-coop." But all this widespread and increasing feeling is felt at present to be of no avail. The wish to believe is there; but the belief is as far off as ever. There is a power in the air around· us by which man's faith seems paralysed. The intellect, we were thinking but now, had acquired a new vigor and a clearer vision; but the result of this growth is, with many, to have made it an incubus, and it lies upon all their deepest hopes and wishes

Such is the condition of mind that is now spreading rapidly, and which, sooner or latter, we must look steadily in the face. Nor is it confined to those who are its direct victims. Those who still cling, and cling firmly, to belief are in an indirect way touched by it. Religion cannot fail to be changed by the neighborhood of irreligion. If it is persecuted, it may burn up with greater fervour; but if it is not persecuted, it must in some measure be chilled. Believers and unbelievers, separated as they are by their tenets, are yet in these days mixed together in all the acts and relations of life. They are united by habits, by blood, and by friendship, and they are each obliged continually to ignore or excuse what they hold to be the errors of the other. In a state of things like

this, it is plain that the conviction of believers can have neither the fierce intensity that belongs to a minority under persecution, nor the placid confidence that belongs to an overwhelming majority. They can neither hate the unbelievers, for they daily live in amity with them, nor despise altogether their judgment, for the most eminent thinkers of the day belong to them. By such conditions as these the strongest faith cannot fail to be affected. As regards the individuals who retain it, it may not lose its firmness, but it must lose something of its fervour; and as regards its own future hold upon the human race, it is faith no longer, but is anxious doubt, or, at best, a desperate trust. Dr. Newman has pointed out how even the Pope has recognised in the sedate and ominous rise of our modern earth-born positivism some phenomenon vaster and of a different nature from the outburst of a petulant heresy ; he seems to recognise it as a belligerent rather than a rebel.* "One thing," says Dr. Newman,

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except by an almost miraculous interposition, cannot be; and that is a return to the universal religious sentiment, the public opinion, of the mediæval time. The Pope himself calls those centuries 'the ages of faith.' Such endemic faith may certainly be decreed for some future time; but

* These words may no doubt be easily pressed into a sense which Catholics would repudiate. But if not pressed unduly, they represent what will, I believe, be admitted to be a fact.

as far as we have the means of judging at present, centuries must run out first."*

In this last sentence is indicated the vast and universal question, which the mind of humanity is gathering itself together to ask-will the faith that we are so fast losing ever again revive for us? And my one aim in this book has been to demonstrate that the entire future tone of life, and the entire course of future civilisation, depends on the answer which this question receives.

There is, however, this further point to consider. Need the answer we are speaking of be definite and universal? or can we look forward to its remaining undecided till the end of time? Now I have already tried to make it evident that for the individual, at any rate, it must by-and-by be definite one way or the other. The thorough positive thinker will not be able to retain in supreme power principles which have no positive basis. He cannot go on adoring a hunger which he knows can never be satisfied, or cringing before fears which he knows will never be realised. And even if this should for a time be possible, his case will be worse, not better. Conscience, if it still remains with him, will remain not as a living thing- a severe but kindly guide-but as the menacing ghost of the religion he has murdered, and which comes to embitter degradation, not to

* A letter to the Duke of Norfolk, by J. H. Newman, D.D., p. 35. Pickering: 1875.

raise it. The moral life, it is true, will still exist for him, but it will probably, in literal truth,

'Creep on a broken wing

Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear."

But a state of things like this can hardly be looked forward to as conceivably of any long continuance. Religion would come back, or conscience would go. Nor do I think that the future which Dr. Newman seems to anticipate can be regarded as probable either. He seems to anticipate a continuance side by side of faith and positivism, each with their own adherents, and fighting a ceaseless battle in which neither gains the victory. I venture to submit that the new forms now at work in the world are not forms that will do their work by halves. When once the age shall have mastered them, they will be either one thing or the other-they will be either impotent or omnipotent. Their public exponents at present boast that they will be omnipotent; and more and more the world about us is beginning to believe the boast. But the world feels uneasily that the import of it will be very different from what we are assured it is. One English writer, indeed, on the positive side, has already seen clearly what the movement really means, whose continuance and whose consummation he declares to us to be a necessity. "Never," he says, "in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as

that which all who look may now behold, advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation."*

The question I shall now proceed to is the exact causes of this movement, and the chances and the powers that the human race has of resisting it.

CHAPTER IX.

THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC NEGATION.

"I am Sir Oracle,

And when I ope my mouth let no dog bark

EFORE beginning to analyse the forces that

BEFO

To

are decomposing religious belief, it will be well to remark briefly on the means by which these forces are applied to the world at large. a certain extent they are applied directly; that is, many of the facts that are now becoming obvious the common sense of all men assimilates spontaneously, and derives, unbidden, its own doubts or denials from them. But the chief But the chief power of positivism is derived otherwise. It is derived

*A Candid Examination of Theism. By Physicus. Trübner & Co.: 1878.