opposite poles in what relates to the work of religion on man and on life. In all he has written, he treats religion as mainly a thing of the mind, and concerned essentially with mystery. I say—and here I am on my own ground—that religion is mainly a thing of feeling and of conduct, and is concerned essentially with duty. I agree that religion has also an intellectual base; but here I insist that this intellectual basis must rest on something that can be known and conceived and at least partly understood; and that it can not be found at all in what is unknowable, inconceivable, and in no way whatever to be understood.
Now, in. maintaining this, I have with me almost the whole of the competent minds which have dealt with this question. Mr. Spencer puts it rather as if it were merely fanaticism on my part which prevents me from accepting his theory of Religion; as if Sir James Stephen's difficulties would disappear if he could be induced to read the "Principles of Sociology" and the rest. Mr. Spencer must remember that in his Religion of the Unknowable he stands almost alone. He is, in fact, insisting to mankind, in a matter where all men have some opinion, on one of the most gigantic paradoxes in the history of thought. I know myself of no single thinker in Europe who has come forward to support this religion of an Unknowable Cause, which can not be presented in terms of consciousness, to which the words emotion, will, intelligence can not be applied with any meaning, and yet which stands in the place of a supposed anthropomorphic Creator. Mr. George II. Lewes, who of all modern philosophers was the closest to Mr. Spencer, and of recent English philosophers the most nearly his equal, wrote ten years ago: "Deeply as we may feel the mystery of the universe and the limitations of our faculties, the foundations of a creed can only rest on the Known and the Knowable." With that I believe every school of thought but a few dreamy mystics has agreed. Every religious teacher, movement, or body, has equally started from that. For myself, I feel that I stand alongside of the religious spirits of every time and of every church in claiming for religion some intelligible object of reverence, and the field of feeling and of conduct, as well as that of awe. Every notice of my criticism of Mr. Spencer which has fallen under my eye adopted my view of the hollowness of the Unknowable as a basis of Religion. So say Agnostics, Materialists, Sceptics, Christians, Catholics, Theists, and Positivists. All with one consent disclaim making a Religion of the Unknowable. Mr. Herbert Spencer may construct an Athanasian Creed of the "Inscrutable Existence"—which is neither God nor being—but he stands as yet Athanasius contra mundum. It is not, therefore, through the hardness of my heart and the stiffness of my neck that I can not follow him here.
Let us now sum up the various positions which Mr. Spencer would impose on us as to Religion. After his two articles and the recent
