en that throughout history, as between individuals among
ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us
churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us
freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence,
and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget--that God is truth.
Yet, essential as they are to one another, each keeps too absolutely to
the circle of its own convictions, and, but half able to recognise the
merit of principles which are alien to its own, regards the other as its
natural enemy.

To the warm and enthusiastic pietist the enquirer appears as a hater of
God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soiling with rude and
insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he
has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he
calls the honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire.
The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil
creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too
desires only truth--first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and
scaffold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputation, in
worldly fortune; and as the whirligig of time brings round his turn of
triumph, takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness,
his own period of wild revenge. The service of truth is made to appear
as one thing, the service of God as another; and in that fatal
separation religion dishonours itself with unavailing enmity to what
nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in humiliation; and
science, welcoming the character which its adversary flings upon it,
turns away with answering hostility from doctrines without which its own
highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes.

Is this antagonism a law of humanity? As mankind move upwards through
the ascending circles of progress, is it for ever to be with them as
with the globe which they inhabit--of which one hemisphere is
perpetually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away?
Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith
never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each
new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world
to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism
and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in
periods of utter darkness, or lif