t 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 sai