onger I live, my dear
Louis," he wrote but a few months before his death, "the more convinced
I become of a direct care by God--which is reasonably impossible--but
there it is." And in his last year he took the Communion.

But at the time when I fell under his influence he stood more aloof; and
this made him the more impressive to a youthful atheist. He had a keen
sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained
all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once
made and generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and
reason. But he never dreamed it could be accurate, knowing that words
stand symbol for the indefinable. I came to him once with a problem
which had puzzled me out of measure: What is a cause? why out of so many
innumerable millions of conditions, all necessary, should one be singled
out and ticketed "the cause"? "You do not understand," said he. "A cause
is the answer to a question: it designates that condition which I happen
to know, and you happen not to know." It was thus, with partial
exception of the mathematical, that he thought of all means of
reasoning: they were in his eyes but means of communication, so to be
understood, so to be judged, and only so far to be credited. The
mathematical he made, I say, exception of: number and measure he
believed in to the extent of their significance, but that significance,
he was never weary of reminding you, was slender to the verge of
nonentity. Science was true, because it told us almost nothing. With a
few abstractions it could deal, and deal correctly; conveying honestly
faint truths. Apply its means to any concrete fact of life, and this
high dialect of the wise became a childish jargon.

Thus the atheistic youth was met at every turn by a scepticism more
complete than his own, so that the very weapons of the fight were
changed in his grasp to swords of paper. Certainly the church is not
right, he would argue, but certainly not the anti-church either. Men are
not such fools as to be wholly in the wrong, nor yet are they so placed
as to be ever wholly in the right. Somewhere, in mid air between the
disputants, like hovering Victory in some design of a Greek battle, the
truth hangs undiscerned. And in the meanwhile what matter these
uncertainties? Right is very obvious; a great consent of the best of
mankind, a loud voice within us (whether of God, or whether by
inheritance, and in that case still from