"[19]
I have quoted these passages at length, because they convey in a more
forcible, guarded, and accurate manner than any others with which I am
acquainted, the strictly rational standing of this great subject prior to
the date at which the above-quoted passage was written. Therefore, as I
have said, if it had been my lot to have lived in the last generation, I
should certainly have rested in these "sublime conceptions" as in an
argument supreme and irrefutable. I should have felt that the progress of
physical knowledge could never exert any other influence on Theism than
that of ever tending more and more to confirm that magnificent belief, by
continuously expanding our human thoughts into progressively advancing
conceptions, ever grander and yet more grand, of that tremendous Origin of
Things--the Mind of God. Such would have been my hope--such would have been
my prayer. But now, how changed! Never in the history of man has so
terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now
behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might,
uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and
burying our highest life in mindless desolation. Science, whom erstwhile we
thought a very Angel of God, pointing to that great barrier of Law, and
proclaiming to the restless sea of changing doubt, "Hitherto shalt thou
come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed,"--even
Science has now herself thrown down this trusted barrier; the flood-gates
of infidelity are open, and Atheism overwhelming is upon us.
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