part, I believe in nothing "above" nature or outside of it, which is not also in it, and visibly shining through it. It is so particularly with predictive prophecy. There is nothing more thoroughly in harmony with the system of things in which we live. The conception that all future events are connected with the present by the links of natural consequence, is a conception familiar to all science and to all philosophy. That those links should be capable of being followed, and their results foreseen by adjusted eyes, is quite according to the natural constitution and course of things. Prophetic prediction is implicit—to an almost miraculous degree—in the mysterious instincts of many of the lowest animals. It is explicit, more or less, in all the intuitions of human genius; and there is nothing difficult to conceive in this faculty being strengthened, intensified, and glorified, in minds whose relations with the spiritual world are close and special. In a more literal sense we may say of the Hebrew prophet what Tennyson says of the ideal poet:
"The marvel of the everlasting will,
An open scroll,
Before him lay."
It is a comfort to observe that Prof. Huxley is not very sanguine as to the early triumph of his own nonsense. There is no ground, he says, "for much hope that the proportion of those who cast aside these fictions and adopt the consequence of that repudiation, are, for some generations, likely to constitute a majority." Certainly not. Prof. Huxley must know that the ranks of science are crowded with men, quite as eminent as himself, who are believers in Christianity. For more than "some generations" these men are likely to have successors. A few Christian sects have lately been showing signs of a disposition to divorce belief from facts, and from all definite conceptions of objective truth. An authority among them has lately uttered a warning voice. He has told them that they have in consequence been losing ground. "The undogmatic churches have reaped the scantiest harvest, while the dogmatic churches have hitherto taken the multitude."[1] This is bad hearing for Prof. Huxley. But it is good hearing for all who hold that morality itself can not be maintained except in connection with definite beliefs. The result, so disappointing to agnosticism, is the result of a great law—Nature abhors a vacuum. Men can not live on a diet of negations. Both our intellectual and our moral natures have digestive apparatuses of their own. They require their appropriate food, and Prof. Huxley has none to give them. The sect of the knownothings is not likely to be ever popular, still less to overspread
- ↑ Address of the President of the Congregational Union at a late meeting.
