h it professes to deal.
A religion that does not possess this, but is compelled to hand over the
whole of life to secular science, signs its own death warrant. It
commits suicide to save itself from execution. And as people realise
this they turn to clear-eyed science for guidance, leaving religion to
such representatives of primitive animism as still survive in a
civilised community.

CHAPTER XIII.

AGNOSTICISM.

The primary difficulty in dealing with Agnosticism is its elusive
character. It is a word of various and vague meanings, and many of those
who use it seem to have no great anxiety to fix its meaning with any
degree of precision. It is used now in a philosophic and now in a
religious sense, and its use in the one connection is justified by its
use in another. It has become, in the half century of its existence, as
indefinite as "religion," and about as enlightening. On the one side it
appears as a counsel of mental integrity with which everyone will agree,
and on the other, the religious side, it will vary from a form that is
identical, with that much-dreaded "Atheism," to a religious or
"reverent" Agnosticism that reminds one--mentally and morally--of
Methodism minus its creed. Indeed, to say that a man is an Agnostic
nowadays tells one no more than calling a man religious indicates to
which one of the world's sects he gives his adherence.

The only aspect of Agnosticism that we are here vitally concerned with
is its relation to religion, or specifically with the god-idea. But it
will be necessary to say a word, in passing, on at least one other
phase.

And first as to the origin of the term. The credit for the first use of
the term has always been given to the late Professor Huxley. Mr. R. H.
Hutton says that Huxley first suggested the word at a meeting of friends
in the house of Mr. James Knowles in 1869. Professor Huxley says that he
deliberately adopted it because, "When I reached intellectual maturity
and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a
pantheist; a materialist, or an idealist, a Christian, or a freethinker,
I found that the more I learned and reflected the less ready was the
answer, until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art
nor part with any of these denominations except the last.... So I took
thought and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of
'agnostic.'" And he goes on to explain that the term was used as
antithetical to