When any doctrine, however clear, is disproved, we intend to give it up. As friends bear their dead forth to the green fields, and lay the cherished forms away forever out of sight, so, when science renders it impossible longer to hold them, will we gather up our most cherished beliefs and bury them forever. We seek truth, though it leave us in the world orphans, and write upon every tombstone, "Death is an eternal sleep." But there need be no fears of such a result. Again and again has the death of the Eternal been proclaimed, but in every case it proved that the wish, not reason, was father to the thought. Times innumerable has religion been overthrown ; but still the devout soul kneels and prays. Aye, more, as in the retreat of the ten thousand, the weapons cast into our camp have been used to kindle our fires. We could not have spared the criticism to which we have been subjected. In its fierce blaze superstitions have shriveled and perished. Narrow and unworthy creeds have gone out in flame, and left the human mind free for a truer and nobler thought. Nature's calm uniformities overawed the tendency to find tokens of Divine displeasure in every untoward event, and taught man that there is no especial smile in the sunshine, and no peculiar judgment in the storm. Its vast extent also warned him against the egotism of supposing that the universe exists for him alone.

But now that we have in a measure learned

these lessons, we look round to find that we would not have back the old conceptions, if they could be had for the wishing. Who would longer care in the interests of piety to set up the date of creation 4004 B. C.? or to restore the crystal firmament with its points of light? The long times of geology and astronomy seem sublimest symbols of His infinite years. And surely the flashing splendors of the skies, the ponderous orbs, the blazing suns, the measureless distances, the mighty periods, are infinitely more worthy of the Creator than the pitiful, peep-show heaven for which the Church once contended. Never before was the universe so fit a manifestation and abode of the God we love as it is to-day. Never did the heavens so declare the glory of God as they do now. The most impressive lesson of the past is to fear nothing that is true, and to despair of nothing that is good. It bids us lay aside that secret skepticism of our own teachings, which is at once our weakness and our disgrace, and fear nothing from the truth, and fear nothing for it. We listen without dread, or even fear, for the last and worst word that science can utter; and we are confident that when that word shall have been uttered, the devout soul will still have the warrant of reason, as well as of faith, for joining in that ancient ascription of praise to the "King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God."

IT

CHAPTER VI.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION.

T only remains to collect the results of our examination, that we may get a connected view of the principles of the New Philosophy. As between science and religion in general, we found that Mr. Spencer's arguments were such as to make both impossible. The ideas involved in religion are, in the last analysis, no less conceivable than those involved in science. If, then, the inconceivability of these ideas is a sufficient reason for discarding religion, it is also warrant enough for discarding science. But if the fundamental reality can so manifest itself as to make a true science possible, there is no reason why it should not so manifest itself as to make a true religion possible-no reason in the argument, I mean; the needs of Mr. Spencer's system are reason enough for him.

The claim that the limited and conditioned nature of our faculties renders religious knowledge impossible, tells with equal force against all knowledge. The limited nature of our faculties does, indeed, confine us to a limited knowledge-but a limited knowledge may be true as far as it goes. If so, we may

trust the knowledge we have; if not, all truth disappears. To deny, then, the validity of religious knowledge, on the ground of its limitation, can only end in the denial of all knowledge. It must be borne in mind that, with Mr. Spencer, the unknowable is one and identical, though there is nowhere any proof of this unity. For any argument he offers, there might be an infinite number of unknowables, all quantitatively and qualitatively different. His position, then, is that the limited nature of our faculties utterly prohibits us from reaching the unknowable on its religious side, while we are entirely competent to deal with it on its scientific side. The truth is, that the unknowable is simply formless, indeterminate, dead substance, which obeys only mechanical laws, and has no religious side. Mr. Spencer, however, does not admit this, and confuses both himself and his readers with logical jugglery and thimble-rigging over the absolute, the infinite, the unconditioned, the first cause, etc. The following conclusions emerge at the end of the show:

Religion is impossible, because it involves unthinkable ideas;

Science is possible, though it involves the same unthinkable ideas.

God must be conceived as self-existent, and is, therefore, an untenable hypothesis ;

The fundamental reality must be conceived as selfexistent, and is not an untenable hypothesis.

God must be conceived as eternal; and is, hence,

an untenable hypothesis ;

The fundamental reality must also be conceived as eternal, and is not an untenable hypothesis.

To affirm the eternity of God, would land us in insoluble contradictions;

To affirm the eternity of matter and force, is the highest necessity of our thought.

God must be conceived as first cause and absolute. But these conceptions contradict each other—a cause cannot be absolute, since it stands in relation to its the absolute cannot be cause, since cause implies relation.

effect;

Yet the only absolute we know is known as first cause, is known in causal relation to the universe. All other absolutes are metaphysical impostors, and the alleged difficulty vanishes.

God must also be conceived as infinite. "He must. contain all power and transcend all law," and "cannot be distinguished from the finite by the absence of any quality which the finite possesses.

God possesses all power, but cannot reveal himself. God, though possessing all that the finite does, has no knowledge, no consciousness, no intelligence, no personality.

Our highest wisdom is to recognize the mystery of the absolute, and abandon the "carpenter theory" of creation for the higher view, that "evolution is a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity