provide for the freedom, immortality,
and moral providence of the more sanguine faith.

"For what is man looked at from this point of view? . . . Man,
so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no
longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended
heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his
story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the
meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which
first converted a dead organic compound into the living
progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as yet knows
nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine,
disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords
of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, a
race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and
intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant. . . . We
sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared
with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the
divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of
our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed,
and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the
race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will
go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The
uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a
brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will
be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable
monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love
stronger than death, will be as though they had never been.
Nor will anything that _is_ be better or be worse for all that
the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have
striven through countless generations to effect."[265:24]

[Sidenote: Naturalism as the Basis for a Religion of Service, Wonder,
and Renunciation.]

Sect. 125. But though our philosopher must accept the truth of this
terrible picture, he is not left without spiritual resources. The
abstract religion provided for the agnostic faithful by Herbert Spencer
does not, it is true, afford any nourishment to the religious nature. He
would have men look for a deep spring of life in the negative idea of
mystery, the apotheosis of ignorance, while religious faith to live at
all must lay hold upon reality.