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otherwise than shadowy and illusory, when their very substance is made
of doubts laboriously and ingeniously twisted into the semblance of
convictions? In one way or other that is the characteristic mark of the
theological systems of the present day. Proof is abandoned for
persuasion. The orthodox believer professed once to prove the facts
which he asserted and to show that his dogmas expressed the truth. He
now only tries to show that the alleged facts don't matter, and that
the dogmas are meaningless. Nearly two centuries ago, for example, a
deist pointed out that the writer of the Book of Daniel, like other
people, must have written after the events which he mentioned. All the
learned, down to Dr. Pusey, denounced his theory, and declared his
argument to be utterly destructive of the faith. Now an orthodox
professor will admit that the deist was perfectly right, and only tries
to persuade himself that arguments from facts are superfluous. The
supposed foundation is gone: the superstructure is not to be affected.
What the keenest disputant now seeks to show is, not that the truth of
the records can be established beyond reasonable doubt; but that no
absolute contradiction in terms is involved in supposing that they
correspond more or less roughly to something which may possibly have
happened. So long as a thing is not proved false by mathematical
demonstration, I may still continue to take it for a divine revelation,
and to listen respectfully when experienced statesmen and learned
professors assure me with perfect gravity that they can believe in
Noah's flood or in the swine of Gadara. They have an unquestionable
right to believe if they please: and they expect me to accept the facts
for the sake of the doctrine. There, unluckily, I have a similar
difficulty. It is the orthodox who are the systematic sceptics. The
most famous philosophers of my youth endeavoured to upset the deist by
laying the foundation of Agnosticism, arbitrarily tagged to an orthodox
conclusion. They told me to believe a doctrine because it was totally
impossible that I should know whether it was true or not, or indeed
attach any real meaning to it whatever. The highest altar, as Sir W.
Hamilton said, was the altar to the unknown and unknowable God. Others,
seeing the inevitable tendency of such methods, have done their best to
find in that the Christian doctrine, rightly understood, the embodiment
of the highest philosophy. It is the divine voi