are with much justice claimed by it as its
works and gifts. The whole sensuous surroundings of our lives are its
subjects, and are doing it daily homage; and there is not a conquest
over distance, disease, or darkness that does not seem to bear witness
to its intellectual supremacy. The opinion, therefore, that is now
abroad in the world is that the positive school are the monopolists of
unbiassed reason; that reason, therefore, is altogether fatal to
religion; and that those who deny this, only do so through ignorance or
through wilful blindness. As long as this opinion lasts, the revival of
faith is hopeless. What we are now about to examine is, how far this
opinion is well founded.

The arguments which operate against religion with the leaders of modern
thought, and through their intellectual example on the world at large,
divide themselves into three classes, and are derived from three
distinct branches of thought and study. They may be distinguished as
physical, moral, and historical. Few of these arguments, taken
separately, can be called altogether new. Their new power has been
caused by the simultaneous filling up and completion of all of them; by
their transmutation from filmy visions into massive and vast realities;
from unauthorised misgivings into the most rigid and compelling of
demonstrations: and still more, by the brilliant and sudden annihilation
of the most obvious difficulties, which till very lately had neutralised
and held their power in check.

Of these three sets of arguments, the two first bear upon all religion,
whilst the third bears upon it only as embodied in some exclusive form.
Thus the physicist argues, for example, that consciousness being a
function of the brain, unless the universe be a single brain itself,
there can be no conscious God.[33] The moral philosopher argues that sin
and misery being so prevalent, there can be no Almighty and all-merciful
God. And the historian argues that all alleged revelations can be shown
to have had analogous histories; and that therefore, even if God exists,
there is no one religion through which He has specially revealed
Himself. These are rough specimens solubly, _so far as observation can
carry us_, mind with matter. The great gulf between the two has at last
been spanned. The bridge across it, that was so long seen in dreams and
despaired of, has been thrown triumphantly--a solid compact fabric, on
which a hundred intellectual masons are still at