ace into the air; thrust herself into the
hands of the first passer-by who stopped to look at her,
and escaped in triumph, as she thought, into the centre
of a nosegay. But her triumph was short-lived: in a
few hours she withered and died.

I was reminded of this story when hearing a living
thinker of some eminence once say that he considered
Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually it
was absurd, and practically an offence, over which he
stumbled; and it would have been far better for mankind,
he thought, if they could have kept clear of superstition,
and followed on upon the track of the Grecian
philosophy, so little do men care to understand the
conditions which have made them what they are, and which
has created for them that very wisdom in which they
themselves are so contented. But it is strange, indeed, that
a person who could deliberately adopt such a conclusion
should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If
a mere absurdity could make its way out of a little
fishing village in Galilee, and spread through the whole
civilized world; if men are so pitiably silly, that in an
age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers
should have sunk under an absorption of fear and folly,
should have allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of
heroism, of devotion, self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness
there was among them; surely there were nothing better
for a wise man than to make the best of his time, and
to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering
himself in a very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for
mankind or for their opinions. For what better test of
truth have we than the ablest men's acceptance of it;
and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago deliberately
accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what
right have we to hope that with the same natures, the
same passions, the same understandings, no better proof
against deception, we, like they, are not entangled in
what, at the close of another era, shall seem again
ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber
and Ceres (bread and wine) may be translated literally by
the modern Protestant; and the sarcasms which Clement
and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed, the modern
sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to
destroy an idol when another, or the same in another
form takes immediate possession of the vacant pedestal?

But it is not so. Ptolemy was not perfect, but
Newton had been a f