s
death, the doctrine of evolution had made itself profoundly felt in the
discussion of all aspects of life, including that of religion. There
seemed no longer any reason for the barrier between science and religion
which Spencer had once thought requisite.

The epithet agnostic, as applied to a certain attitude of scientific
mind, is just, as over against excessive claims to valid knowledge made,
now by theology and now by speculative philosophy. It is hardly
descriptive in any absolute sense. Spencer had coined the rather
fortunate illustration which describes science as a gradually increasing
sphere, such that every addition to its surface does but bring us into
more extensive contact with surrounding nescience. Even upon this
illustration Ward has commented that the metaphor is misleading. The
continent of our knowledge is not merely bounded by an ocean of
ignorance. It is intersected and cut up by straits and seas of
ignorance. The author of _Ecce Coelum_ has declared: 'Things die out
under the microscope into the same unfathomed and, so far as we can see,
unfathomable mystery, into which they die off beyond the range of our
most powerful telescope.' This sense of the circumambient unknown has
become cardinal with the best spirits of the age. Men have a more
rigorous sense of what constitutes knowledge.

They have reckoned more strictly with the methods by which alone secure
and solid knowledge may be attained. They have undisguised scepticism as
to alleged knowledge not arrived at in those ways. It was the working of
these motives which gave to the labours of the middle of the nineteenth
century so prevailingly the aspect of denial, the character which
Carlyle described as an everlasting No. This was but a preparatory
stage, a retrogression for a new and firmer advance.

In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a becoming
modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into which all our
thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction which agnosticism has
administered. It is a fact which has had disastrous consequences, that
precisely the department of thought, namely the religious, which one
might suppose would most have reminded men of the outlying mystery, that
phase of life whose very atmosphere is mystery, has most often been
guilty of arrant dogmatism. It has been thus guilty upon the basis of
the claim that it possessed a revelation. It has allowed itself
unlimited licence of affirmati