i
Intuition and evidence seem to have something of the same relation that
faith and reason, luck and cunning, freewill and necessity and demand and
supply have. They grow up hand in hand and no man can say which comes
first. It is the same with life and death, which lurk one within the
other as do rest and unrest, change and persistence, heat and cold,
poverty and riches, harmony and counterpoint, night and day, summer and
winter.
And so with pantheism and atheism; loving everybody is loving nobody, and
God everywhere is, practically, God nowhere. I once asked a man if he
was a free-thinker; he replied that he did not think he was. And so, I
have heard of a man exclaiming “I am an atheist, thank God!” Those who
say there is a God are wrong unless they mean at the same time that there
is no God, and vice versa. The difference is the same as that between
plus nothing and minus nothing, and it is hard to say which we ought to
admire and thank most—the first theist or the first atheist.
Nevertheless, for many reasons, the plus nothing is to be preferred.
ii
To be poor is to be contemptible, to be very poor is worse still, and so
on; but to be actually at the point of death through poverty is to be
sublime. So “when weakness is utter, honour ceaseth.” [_The Righteous
Man_, p. 390, _post_.]
iii
The meeting of extremes is never clearer than in the case of moral and
intellectual strength and weakness. We may say with Hesiod “How much the
half is greater than the whole!” or with S. Paul “My strength is made
perfect in weakness”; they come to much the same thing. We all know
strength so strong as to be weaker than weakness and weakness so great as
to be stronger than strength.
iv
The Queen travels as the Countess of Balmoral and would probably be very
glad, if she could, to travel as plain Mrs. Smith. There is a good deal
of the Queen lurking in every Mrs. Smith and, conversely, a good deal of
Mrs. Smith lurking in every queen.