ny the theology of ours. But the
theology he denied was incomplete and puerile. He was not denying any
'All-embracer and All-sustainer,' for he knew of none such. And his
denial of the gods he did deny left him room for the affirmation of
others, whose existence, if considered accurately, was equally
inconsistent with his own scientific premisses. Again, in his denial of
any immortality for man, what he denied is not the future that we are
denying. The only future he knew of was one a belief in which had no
influence on us, except for sadness. It was a protraction only of what
is worst in life; it was in no way a completion of what is best in it.
But with us the case is altogether different. Formerly the supernatural
could not be denied completely, because it was not known completely. Not
to affirm is a very different thing from to deny. And many beliefs which
the positivists of the modern world are denying, the positivists of the
ancient world more or less consciously lived by.

Next, there is this point to remember. Whilst during the Christian
centuries, the devotion to a supernatural and extramundane aim has been
engendering, as a recent writer has observed with indignation, a
degrading '_pessimism as to the essential dignity of man_,'[3] the world
which we have been to a certain extent disregarding has been changing
its character for us. In a number of ways, whilst we have not been
perceiving it, its objective grandeur has been dwindling; and the
imagination, when again called to the feat, cannot reinvest it with its
old gorgeous colouring. Once the world, with the human race, who were
the masters of it, was a thing of vast magnitude--the centre of the
whole creation. The mind had no larger conceptions that were vivid
enough to dwarf it. But now all this has changed. In the words of a
well-known modern English historian, _'The floor of heaven, inlaid with
stars, has sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and
the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, is seen to be but
a small atom in the awful easiness of the universe.'_[4] The whole
position, indeed, is reversed. The skies once seemed to pay the earth
homage, and to serve it with light and shelter. Now they do nothing, so
far as the imagination is concerned, but spurn and dwarf it. And when we
come to the details of the earth's surface itself, the case is just the
same. It, in its extent, has grown little and paltry to us. The wonder
and