THE PRACTICAL PROSPECT.
_Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck....
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell._
Shakespeare, _Sonnet XIV_.
The prospects I have been just describing as the goal of positive
progress will seem, no doubt, to many to be quite impossible in its
cheerlessness. If the future glory of our race was a dream, not worth
dwelling on, much more so, they will say, is such a future abasement of
it as this. They will say that optimism may at times have perhaps been
over-sanguine, but that this was simply the exuberance of health;
whereas pessimism is, in its very nature, the gloom and languor of a
disease.
Now with much of this view of the matter I entirely agree. I admit that
the prospect I have described may be an impossible one; personally, I
believe it is so. I admit also that pessimism is the consciousness of
disease, confessing itself. But the significance of these admissions is
the very opposite of what it is commonly supposed to be. They do not
make the pessimism I have been arguing one whit less worthy of
attention; on the contrary, they make it more worthy. This is the point
on which I may most readily be misunderstood. I will therefore try to
make my meaning as clear as possible.
Pessimism, then, represents, to the popular mind, a philosophy or view
of life the very name of which is enough to condemn it. The popular
mind, however, overlooks one important point. Pessimism is a vague word.
It does not represent one philosophy, but several; and before we, in any
case, reject its claims on our attention, we should take care to see
what its exact meaning is.
The views of life it includes may be classified in two ways. In the
first place, they are either what we may call critical pessimisms or
prospective pessimisms: of which the thesis of the first is that human
life is essentially evil; and of the second, that whatever human life
may be now, its tendency is to get worse instead of better. The one is
the denial of human happiness; the other the denial of human hope. But
there is a second classification to make, traversing this one, and far
more important. Pessimism may be either absolute or hypothetical. The
first of these maintains its theses as statements of actual facts; the
second, which is, of its nature, prospective mainly, only maintains them
as statements of what will be facts, in the event of certain possible
though it may be remote contingencies.
Now, absolute pessimism, whether it be critical or prospective, can be
nothing, in the present state of the world, but an exhibition of ill
temper or folly. It is hard to imagine a greater waste of ingenuity than
the attempts that have been made sometimes to deduce from the nature of
pain and pleasure, that the balance in life must be always in favour of
the former, and that life itself is necessarily and universally an evil.
Let the arguments be never so elaborate, they are blown away like
cobwebs by a breath of open-air experience. Equally useless are the
attempts to predict the gloom of the future. Such predictions either
mean nothing, or else they are mere loose conjectures, suggested by low
spirits or disappointment. They are of no philosophic or scientific
value; and though in some cases they may give literary expression to
moods already existing, they will never produce conviction in minds that
would else be unconvinced. The gift of prophecy as to general human
history is not a gift that any philosophy can bestow. It could only be
acquired through a superhuman inspiration which is denied to man or
through a superhuman sagacity which is never attained by him.
The hypothetical pessimism that is contained in my arguments is a very
different thing from this, and far humbler. It makes no foolish attempts
to say anything general about the present, or anything absolute about
the future. As to the future, it only takes the absolute things that
have been said by others; and not professing any certainty about their
truth, merely explains their meaning. It deals with a certain change in
human beliefs, now confidently predicted; but it does not say that this
prediction will be fulfilled. It says only that if it be, a change, not
at present counted on, will be effected in human life. It says that
human life will degenerate if the creed of positivism be ever generally
accepted; but it not only does not say that it ever will be accepted by
everybody: rather, it emphatically points out that as yet it has been
accepted fully by nobody. The positive school say that their view of
life is the only sound one. They boast that it is founded on the rock of
fact, not on the sand-bank of sentiment; that it is the final
philosophy, that will last as long as man lasts, and that very soon it
will have seen the extinction of all the others. It is the positivists
who are the prophets, not I. My aim has been not to confirm the
prophecy, but to explain its meaning; and my arguments will be all the
more opportune at the present moment, the more reason we have to think
the prophecy false.
It may be asked why, if we think it false, we should trouble our heads
about it. And the answer to this is to be found in the present age
itself. Whatever may be the future fate of positive thought, whatever
confidence may be felt by any of us that it cannot in the long run gain
a final hold upon the world, its present power and the present results
of it cannot be overlooked. That degradation of life that I have been
describing as the result of positivism--of what the age we live in calls
the only rational view of things--may indeed never be completed; but let
us look carefully around us, and we shall see that it is already begun.
The process, it is true, is at present not very apparent; or if it is,
its nature is altogether mistaken. This, however, only makes it more
momentous; and the great reason why it is desirable to deal so rudely
with the optimist system of the positivists is that it lies like a misty
veil over the real surface of facts, and conceals the very change that
it professes to make impossible. It is a kind of moral chloroform,
which, instead of curing an illness, only makes us fatally unconscious
of its most alarming symptoms.
But though an effort be thus required to realise our true condition, it
is an effort which, before all things, we ought to make; and which, if
we try, we can all make readily. A little careful memory, a little
careful observation, will open the eyes of most of us to the real truth
of things; it will reveal to us a spectacle that is indeed appalling,
and the more candidly we survey it, the more shall we feel aghast at it.
To begin, then, let us once more consider two notorious facts: first,
that over all the world at the present day a denial is spreading itself
of all religions dogmas, more complete than has ever before been known;
and, secondly, that in spite of this speculative denial, and in the
places where it has done its work most thoroughly, a mass of moral
earnestness seems to survive untouched. I do not attempt to deny the
fact; I desire, on the contrary, to draw all attention to it. But the
condition in which it survives is commonly not in the least realised.
The class of men concerned with it are like soldiers who may be fighting
more bravely perhaps than ever; but who are fighting, though none
observe it, with the death-wound under their uniforms. Of all the signs
of the times, these high-minded unbelievers are thought to be the most
reassuring; but really they are the very reverse of this. The reason why
their true condition has passed unnoticed is, that it is a condition
that is naturally silent, and that has great difficulty in finding a
mouthpiece. The only two parties who have had any interest in commenting
on it have been the very parties least able to understand, and most
certain to distort it. They have been either the professed champions of
theism, or else the visionary optimists of positivism; the former of
whom have had no sympathy with positive principles, and the latter no
discernment of their results. The class of men we are considering are
equally at variance with both of these; they agree with each in one
respect, and in another they agree with neither. They agree with the one
that religious belief is false; they agree with the other that unbelief
is miserable. What wonder then that they should have kept their
condition to themselves? Nearly all public dealing with it has been left
to men who can praise the only doctrines that they can preach as true,
or who else can condemn as false the doctrines that they deplore as
mischievous. As for the others, whose mental and moral convictions are
at variance, they have neither any heart to proclaim the one, nor any
intellectual standpoint from which to proclaim the other. Their only
impulse is to struggle and to endure in silence. Let us, however, try to
intrude upon their privacy, even though it be rudely and painfully, and
see what their real state is; for it is these men who are the true
product of the present age, its most special and distinguishing feature,
and the first-fruits of what we are told is to be the philosophy of the
enlightened future.
To begin, then, let us remember what these men were when Christians; and
we shall be better able to realise what they are now. They were men who
believed firmly in the supreme and solemn importance of life, in the
privilege that it was to live, despite all temporal sorrow. They had a
rule of conduct which would guide them, they believed, to the true end
of their being--to an existence satisfying and excellent beyond anything
that imagination could suggest to them; they had the dread of a
corresponding ruin to fortify themselves in their struggle against the
wrong; and they had a God ever present, to help and hear, and take pity
on them. And yet even thus, selfishness would beset the most unselfish,
and weariness the most determined. How hard the battle was, is known to
all; it has been the most prominent commonplace in human thought and
language. The constancy and the strength of temptation, and the
insidiousness of the arguments it was supported by, has been proverbial.
To explain away the difference between good and evil, to subtly steal
its meaning out of long-suffering and self-denial, and, above all, to
argue that in sinning '_we shall not surely die_,' a work which was
supposed to belong especially to the devil, has been supposed to have
been accomplished by him with a success continually irresistible. What,
then, is likely to be the case now, with men who are still beset with
the same temptations, when not only they have no hell to frighten, no
heaven to allure, and no God to help them; but when all the arguments
that they once felt belonged to the father of lies, are pressed on them
from every side as the most solemn and universal truths? Thus far the
result has been a singular one. With an astonishing vigour the moral
impetus still survives the cessation of the forces that originated and
sustained it; and in many cases there is no diminution of it traceable,
so far as action goes. This, however, is only true, for the most part,
of men advanced in years, in whom habits of virtue have grown strong,
and whose age, position, and circumstances secure them from strong
temptation. To see the real work of positive thought we must go to
younger men, whose characters are less formed, whose careers are still
before them, and on whom temptation of all kinds has stronger hold. We
shall find such men with the sense of virtue equally vivid in them, and
the desire to practise it probably far more passionate; but the effect
of positive thought on them we shall see to be very different.
Now, the positive school itself will say that such men have all they
need. They confessedly have conscience left to them--the supernatural
moral judgment, that is, as applied to themselves--which has been
analysed, but not destroyed; and the position of which, we are told, has
been changed only by its being set on a foundation of fact, instead of a
foundation of superstition. Mill said that having learnt what the sunset
clouds were made of, he still found that he admired them as much as
ever; '_therefore_,' he said, '_I saw at once that there was nothing to
be feared from analysis_.' And this is exactly what the positive school
say of conscience. A shallower falsehood, however, it is not easy to
conceive. It is true that conscience in one way may, for a time at
least, survive any kind of analysis. It may continue, with undiminished
distinctness, its old approvals and menaces. But that alone is nothing
at all to the point. Conscience is of practical value, not only because
it says certain things, but because it says them, as we think, with
authority. If its authority goes, and its advice continues, it may
indeed molest, but it will no longer direct us. Now, though the voice of
conscience may, as the positive school say, survive their analysis of
it, its authority will not. That authority has always taken the form of
a menace, as well as of an approval; and the menace at any rate, upon
all positive principles, is nothing but big words that can break no
bones. As soon as we realise it to be but this, its effect must cease
instantly. The power of conscience resides not in what we hear it to be,
but in what we believe it to be. A housemaid may be deterred from going
to meet her lover in the garden, because a howling ghost is believed to
haunt the laurels; but she will go to him fast enough when she discovers
that the sounds that alarmed her were not a soul in torture, but the cat
in love. The case of conscience is exactly analogous to this.
And now let us turn again to the case in question. Men of such a
character as I have been just describing may find conscience quite equal
to giving a glow, by its approval, to their virtuous wishes; but they
will find it quite unequal to sustaining them against their vicious
ones; and the more vigorous the intellect of the man, the more feeble
will be the power of conscience. When a man is very strongly tempted to
do a thing which he believes to be wrong, it is almost inevitable that
he will test to the utmost the reasons of this belief; or if he does not
do this before he yields to the temptation, yet if he does happen to
yield to it, he will certainly do so after. Thus, unless we suppose
human nature to be completely changed, and all our powers of observation
completely misleading, the inward condition of the class in question is
this. However calm the outer surface of their lives may seem, under the
surface there is a continual discord; and also, though they alone may
perceive it, a continued decadence. In various degrees they all yield to
temptation; all men in the vigour of their manhood do; and conscience
still fills them with its old monitions and reproaches. But it cannot
enforce obedience. They feel it to be the truth, but at the same time
they know it to be a lie; and though they long to be coerced by it, they
find it cannot coerce them. Reason, which was once its minister, is now
the tribune of their passions, and forbids them, in times of passion,
to submit to it. They are not suffered to forget that it is not what it
says it is, that
_It never came from on high,
And never rose from below_:
and they cannot help chiding themselves with the irrepressible
self-reproach,
_Am I to be overawed
By what I cannot but know,
Is a juggle born of the brain?_
Thus their conscience, though not stifled, is dethroned; it is become a
fugitive Pretender; and that part of them that would desire its
restoration is set down as an intellectual _malignant_, powerless indeed
to restore its sovereign.
_Invalidasque tibi tendens, heu non tua, palmas._
Conscience, in short, as soon as its power is needed, is like their own
selves dethroned within themselves, wringing its hands over a rebellion
it is powerless to suppress. And then, when the storm is over, when the
passions again subside, and their lives once more return to their wonted
channels, it can only come back humbly and dejected, and give them in a
timid voice a faint, dishonoured blessing.
Such lives as these are all of them really in a state of moral
consumption. The disease in its earlier stage is a very subtle one; and
it may not be generally fatal for years, or even for generations. But
it is a disease that can be transmitted from parent to child; and its
progress is none the less sure because it is slow; nor is it less fatal
and painful because it may often give a new beauty to the complexion. On
various constitutions it takes hold in various ways, and its presence is
first detected by the sufferer under various trials, and betrayed to the
observer by various symptoms. What I have just been describing is the
action that is at the root of it; but with the individual it does not
always take that form. Often indeed it does; but oftener still perhaps
it is discovered not in the helpless yet reluctant yielding to vice, but
in the sadness and the despondency with which virtue is practised--in
the dull leaden hours of blank endurance or of difficult endeavour; or
in the little satisfaction that, when the struggle has ceased, the
reward of struggle brings with it.
An earlier, and perhaps more general symptom still, is one that is not
personal. It consists not in the way in which men regard themselves, but
in the way in which they regard others. In their own case, their
habitual desire of right, and their habitual aversion to wrong, may have
been enough to keep them from any open breach with conscience, or from
putting it to an open shame. But its precarious position is revealed to
them when they turn to others. Sin from which they recoil themselves
they see committed in the life around them, and they find that it
cannot excite the horror or disapproval, which from its supposed nature
it should. They find themselves powerless to pass any general judgment,
or to extend the law they live by to any beyond themselves. The whole
prospect that environs them has become morally colourless; and they
discern in their attitude towards the world without, what it must one
day come to be towards the world within. A state of mind like this is no
dream. It is a malady of the modern world--a malady of our own
generation, which can escape no eyes that will look for it. It is
betraying itself every moment around us, in conversation, in literature,
and in legislation.
Such, then, is the condition of that large and increasing class on which
modern thought is beginning to do its work. Its work must be looked for
here, and not in narrower quarters; not amongst professors and
lecturers, but amongst the busy crowd about us; not on the platforms of
institutions, or in the lay sermons of specialists, but amongst
politicians, artists, sportsmen, men of business, lovers--in '_the tides
of life, and in the storm of action_'--amongst men who have their own
way to force or choose in the world, and their daily balance to strike
between self-denial and pleasure--on whom the positive principles have
been forced as true, and who have no time or talent to do anything else
but live by them. It is amongst these that we must look to see what
such principles really result in; and of these we must choose not those
who would welcome license, but those who long passionately to live by
law. It is the condition of such men that I have been just describing.
Its characteristics are vain self-reproach, joyless commendation, weary
struggle, listless success, general indifference, and the prospect that
if matters are going thus badly with them, they will go even worse with
their children.
Such a spectacle certainly is not one that has much promise for the
optimist; and the more we consider it, the more sad and ominous will it
appear to us. Indeed, when the present age shall realise its own
condition truly, the dejection of which it is slowly growing conscious
may perhaps give way to despair. This condition, however, is so
portentous that it is difficult to persuade ourselves that it is what it
seems to be, and that it is not a dream. But the more steadily we look
at it, the more real will its appalling features appear to us. We are
literally in an age to which history can show no parallel, and which is
new to the experience of humanity; and though the moral dejection we
have been dwelling on may have had many seeming counterparts in other
times, this is, as it were, solid substance, whereas they were only
shadows. I have pointed out already in my first chapter how unexampled
is the state in which the world now finds itself; but we will dwell
once again upon its more general features. Within less than a century,
distance has been all but annihilated, and the earth has practically,
and to the imagination, been reduced to a fraction of its former size.
Its possible resources have become mean and narrow, set before us as
matters of every-day statistics. All the old haze of wonder is melting
away from it; and the old local enthusiasms, which depended so largely
on ignorance and isolation, are melting likewise. Knowledge has
accumulated in a way never before dreamed of. The fountains of the past
seem to have been broken up, and to be pouring all their secrets into
the consciousness of the present. For the first time man's wide and
varied history has become a coherent whole to him. Partly a cause and
partly a result of this, a new sense has sprung up in him--an intense
self-consciousness as to his own position; and his entire view of
himself is undergoing a vague change: whilst the positive basis on which
knowledge has been placed, has given it a constant and coercive force,
and has made the same change common to the whole civilised world.
Thought and feeling amongst the western nations are conforming to a
single pattern: they are losing their old chivalrous character, their
possibilities of isolated conquest and intellectual adventure. They are
settling down into a uniform mass, that moves or stagnates like a
modern army, and whose alternative lines of march have been mapped out
beforehand. Such is the condition of the western world; and the western
world is beginning now, at all points, to bear upon the east. Thus
opinions that the present age is forming for itself have a weight and a
volume that opinions never before possessed. They are the first
beginnings, not of natural, or of social, but of human opinion--an
oecumenical self-consciousness on the part of man as to his own
prospects and his own position. The great question is, what shape
finally will this dawning self-consciousness take? Will it contain in it
that negation of the supernatural which our positive assertions are at
present supposed to necessitate? If so, then it is not possible to
conceive that this last development of humanity, this stupendous break
from the past which is being accomplished by our understanding of it,
will not be the sort of break which takes place when a man awakes from a
dream, and finds all that he most prized vanished from him. It is
impossible to conceive that this awakening, this discovery by man of
himself, will not be the beginning of his decadence; that it will not be
the discovery on his part that he is a lesser and a lower thing than he
thought he was, and that his condition will not sink till it tallies
with his own opinion of it.
If this be really the case, we shall not be able to dispose of
pessimism by calling it a disease; for the disease will be real and
universal, and pessimism will be nothing but the scientific description
of it. The pessimist is only silenced by being called diseased, when it
is meant that the disease imputed to him is either hypochondriacal or
peculiar to himself. But in the present case the disease is real,
deep-seated, and extending steadily. The only question for us is, is it
curable or incurable? This the event alone can answer: but as no future
can be produced but through the agency of the present, the event, to a
certain extent, must be in our own hands. For us, at any rate, the first
thing to be done is to face boldly our own present condition, and the
causes that are producing it. To become alive to our danger is the one
way to escape from it. But the danger is at present felt rather than
known. The class of men we are considering are conscious, as Mr. Matthew
Arnold says, '_of a void that mines the breast_;' but each thinks that
this is a fancy only, and hardly dares communicate it to his fellows.
Here and there, however, by accident, it is already finding unintended
expression; and signs come to the surface of the vague distrust and
misgiving that are working under it. The form it takes amongst the
general masses that are affected by it is, as might be expected,
practical rather than analytical. They are conscious of the loss that
the loss of faith is to them; and more or less coherently they long for
its recovery. Outwardly, indeed, they may often sneer at it; but outward
signs in such matters are very deceiving. Much of the bitter and
arrogant certitude to be found about us in the expression of unbelief,
is really like the bitterness of a woman against her lover, which has
not been the cause of her resolving to leave him, but which has been
caused by his having left her. In estimating what is really the state of
feeling about us, we must not look only at the surface. We must remember
that deep feeling often expresses itself by contradicting itself; also
that it often exists where it is not expressed at all, or where it
betrays rather than expresses itself; and, further, that during the
hours of common intercourse, it tends, for the time being, to disappear.
People cannot be always exclaiming in drawing-rooms that they have lost
their Lord; and the fact may be temporarily forgotten because they have
lost their portmanteau. All serious reflections are like reflections in
water--a pebble will disturb them, and make a dull pond sparkle. But the
sparkle dies, and the reflection comes again. And there are many about
us, though they never confess their pain, and perhaps themselves hardly
like to acknowledge it, whose hearts are aching for the religion that
they can no longer believe in. Their lonely hours, between the intervals
of gaiety, are passed with barren and sombre thoughts; and a cry rises
to their lips but never passes them.
Amongst such a class it is somehow startling to find the most unlikely
people at times placing themselves. Professor Clifford, for instance,
who of all our present positivists is most uproarious in his optimism,
has yet admitted that the religion he invites us to trample on is, under
certain forms, an ennobling and sustaining thing; and for such theism as
that of Charles Kingsley's he has expressed his deepest reverence.
Again, there is Professor Huxley. He denies with the most dogmatic and
unbending severity any right to man to any supernatural faith; and he
'_will not for a moment admit_' that our higher life will suffer in
consequence.[29] And yet '_the lover of moral beauty_,' he says
wistfully, '_struggling through a world of sorrow and sin, is surely as
much the stronger for believing that sooner or later a vision of perfect
peace and goodness will burst upon him, as the toiler up a mountain for
the belief that beyond crag and snow lie home and rest_.' And he adds,
as we have seen already, that could a faith like what he here indicates
be placed upon a firm basis, mankind would cling to it as '_tenaciously
as ever a drowning sailor did to a hen-coop_.' But all this wide-spread
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 vigour 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
_Like a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life._
Such is the condition of mind that is now spreading rapidly, and which,
sooner or later, 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 neighbourhood 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.[30] '_One thing_,' says Dr. Newman,
'_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_ _as far as we have the means of judging at present,
centuries must run out first._'[31]
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 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._'[32]
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] '_For my own part, I do not for one moment admit that morality is
not strong enough to hold its own._'--Prof. Huxley, _Nineteenth
Century_, May, 1877.
[30] 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.
[31] A letter to the Duke of Norfolk, by J.H. Newman, D.D., p. 35.
Pickering: 1875.
[32] A Candid Examination of Theism. By Physicus. Trübner & Co.: 1878.