on concerning the most remote and
difficult matters. It has alleged miraculously communicated information
concerning those matters. It has clothed with a divine
authoritativeness, overriding the mature reflexion and laborious
investigation of learned men, that which was, after all, nothing but the
innocent imaginings of the childhood of the race. In this good sense of
a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves
within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which
is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age. It is not that
religious men have abandoned the thought of revelation. They apprehended
more justly the nature of revelation. They confess that there is much
ignorance which revelation does not mitigate. _Exeunt omnia in
mysterium_. They are prepared to say concerning many of the dicta of
religiosity, that they cannot affirm their truth. They are prepared to
say concerning the experience of God and the soul, that they know these
with an indefeasible certitude. This just and wholesome attitude toward
religious truth is only a corollary of the attitude which science has
taught us toward all truth whatsoever.

The strictly philosophic term phenomenon, to which science has taken so
kindly, is in itself an explicit avowal of something beyond the
phenomenal. Spencer is careful to insist upon this relation of the
phenomenal to the noumenal. His _Synthetic Philosophy_ opens with an
exposition of this non-relative or absolute, without which the relative
itself becomes contradictory. It is an essential part of Spencer's
doctrine to maintain that our consciousness of the absolute, indefinite
as it is, is positive and not negative. 'Though the absolute cannot in
any manner or degree be known, in the strict sense of knowing, yet we
find that its positive existence is a necessary datum of consciousness.
The belief which this datum of consciousness constitutes has a higher
warrant than any other belief whatsoever.' In short, the absolute or
noumenal, according to Spencer, though not known as the phenomenal or
relative is known, is so far from being for knowledge a pure blank, that
the phenomenal, which is said to be known, is in the strict sense
inconceivable without it. This actuality behind appearances, without
which appearances are unthinkable, is by Spencer identified with that
ultimate verity upon which religion ever insists. Religion itself is a
phenomenon, and the source