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. Truebner & Co.: 1878.

CHAPTER IX.

THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC NEGATION.

_I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my mouth let no dog bark._

Before beginning to analyse the forces that are decomposing religious
belief, it will be well to remark briefly on the means by which these
forces are applied to the world at large. To a certain extent they are
applied directly; that is, many of the facts that are now becoming
obvious the common sense of all men assimilates spontaneously, and
derives, unbidden, its own doubts or denials from them. But the chief
power of positivism is derived otherwise. It is derived not directly
from the premisses that it puts before us, but from the intellectual
prestige of its exponents, who, to the destruction of private judgment,
are forcing on us their own personal conclusions from them. This
prestige, indeed, is by no means to be wondered at. If men ever believed
a teacher '_for his works' sake_,' the positive school is associated
with enough signs and wonders. All those astonishing powers that man has
acquired in this century