e God, never shall be,
treated in these columns in any other spirit than that of profound
reverence and faith.'[86] Yet he would not say, for he did not think,
that those doctrines could be demonstrated. It was the odd thing about
your brother, said his old friend T. C. Sandars to me, that he would
bring one face to face with a hopeless antinomy, and instead of trying,
like most of us, to patch it up somehow, would conclude, 'Now let us go
to breakfast.' Some of us discover a supernatural authority in these
cases; others think that the doubt which besets these doctrines results
from a vain effort to transcend the conditions of our intelligence, and
that we should give up the attempt to solve them. Most men to whom they
occur resolve that if they cannot answer their doubts they can keep them
out of sight, even of themselves. Fitzjames was peculiar in frankly
admitting the desirability of knowledge, which he yet admitted, with
equal frankness, to be unattainable. And, for various reasons, partly
from natural pugnacity, he was more frequently engaged in exposing sham
substitutes for logic than in expounding his own grounds for believing
in the probability. His own view was given most strikingly in a little
allegory which I shall slightly condense, and which will, I think,
sufficiently explain his real position in these matters. It concludes a
review of a pamphlet by William Thomson, then Archbishop of York, upon
the 'Limits of Philosophical Enquiry.'[87]

I dreamt, he says, after Bunyan's fashion, that I was in the cabin of a
ship, handsomely furnished and lighted. A number of people were
expounding the objects of the voyage and the principles of navigation.
They were contradicting each other eagerly, but each maintained that the
success of the voyage depended absolutely upon the adoption of his own
plan. The charts to which they appealed were in many places confused and
contradictory. They said that they were proclaiming the best of news,
but the substance of it was that when we reached port most of us would
be thrown into a dungeon and put to death by lingering torments. Some,
indeed, would receive different treatment; but they could not say why,
though all agreed in extolling the wisdom and mercy of the Sovereign of
the country. Saddened and confused I escaped to the deck, and found
myself somehow enrolled in the crew. The prospect was unlike the
accounts given in the cabin. There was no sun; we had but a faint
starligh