ART. IV.-AGNOSTICISM.

UNBELIEF is as fond of new names as the unclean spirit was of the swept and garnished house. To a threadbare system a new name is a precious boon; it hides the old blemishes, it promises fresh revelations, it secures a new hearing. From time to time there have arisen many self-confessed pantheists, deists, atheists. To-day a genuine representative of either of these classes is almost a rara avis. Even avowed materialists and positivists are ominously scarce. For the time being, the opponents of theism prefer to affect the title of "agnostics." The word itself is not older than the year 1876, being, if the writer mistakes not, the cunning invention of Leslie Stephen, a fellow of Cambridge; but the system, if such it can be called, is not newer than Locke and Hume; than Hobbes and the Baconian theory; than the Greek root from which it was fashioned; than the immemorial attitudes of the human mind. "Waiter," said the newly elected member of a petty bench, "call me 'Judge,' and call it loud." Our contemporary gainsayer likes his new cognomen, and likes to have us call it loud.

Agnosticism, then. What does the new term stand for? Specifically, it stands for the venerable theory that the human mind can neither know nor conceive realities existing outside of the sphere of sense. It takes the position of neither affirming nor denying the existence of God, on the assumption that divine existence is necessarily unknowable. It declares, indeed, that the fundamental axiom of divine being, namely, self-existence, is unthinkable. The mind's primal and universal intuition of a First Cause is suicidal to thought, for, according to Herbert Spencer, "If we admit that there can be something uncaused, there is no reason to assume a cause for any thing." "The conception of the Absolute and Infinite, from whatever side we view it," says he, quoting Mansell," appears encompassed with contradictions." There may be Intelligence and Volition in the world, but he maintains he is forever incapacitated for seeing them. Mind may feel after, but never can find, God. It may build altars and burn incense to the Unknown God, but may never rise to the certainty of declaring him to man.

The new name, all must admit, is prepossessing. It is no iron ding-dong of braggart denial, but a silvery and engaging sound stealing down from what is apparently no mean altitude of thought. There is reason to believe that already it has gone out through pretty much all the earth, and has been received with favor every-where by those who do not like to retain God in their knowledge. Indeed, it bears on its face a subtle plausibility fitted to conciliate and deceive the very elect. For, at first blush, agnosticism seems to admit the existence of a God. Its "perhaps" has the look of an encouraging concession. Perhaps, says our agnostic, there may be over yonder across the gulf, or even here at hand, a God as intelligent, holy, benevolent, philanthropic, as hath entered into the heart of faith. The liberality of such a concession, however, is about equal to that of one who beams good cheer on a beggar and sends him on his way to find Captain Kidd's money. Magnificent treasure, no doubt, if one could get at it; real treasure, too, though far away; a treasure not undemonstrably under the pavement of this very city! A feast, after the Barmacide order.

The new name, moreover, gives its owner a show of deeper wisdom in his generation than the atheist possessed. The fundamental principle of the atheist involved him in the most palpable absurdity. It assumed that, having made the round of the universe, having fathomed all conceivable and inconceivable possibilities, he was prepared to report the impossibility of a divine existence. A prodigious assumption, which began by saying there is no God, only to end by making the theorist himself a god! The agnostic affects an intellectual meekness quite in contrast with all this. He has the manner of one whose increase of information has made him aware how small the sum of his own knowledge is. "Cautions science" has taught him humility. He does not shake his fist skyward, but extends his open palm thither. He recognizes the mystery of existence. He seems to even re-enforce a certain doctrine of the very Scriptures, whose familiarity with the Unknowable must often shock him. He is fond of reiterating the challenge of Job, "Canst thou by searching find out the Almighty to perfection?" He quotes with approval the saying of Paul, "Dwelling in light which no man

can

approach unto." He finds a forcible statement of his hypothesis in the declaration of Isaiah, "Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself."

Much of the plausibility of the agnostic's assumption, doubtless, lurks in its new Greek name. Thrust upon us suddenly, and with an air of candor, the glittering coin appears at first glance altogether worthy reception and currency. A little careful examination, however, betrays the art of the plater. Agnosticism involves necessary conclusions quite as fatal and absurd as any that belong to the branded and rejected deism, or pantheism, or atheism, of past generations.

1. Agnosticism is practical atheism.

The agnostic's universe is actually as empty of God as the atheist's. For, if God have an existence, he must avoid all the ordinary modes of existence. He must, indeed, be careful to so create and to so control the world as not to exhibit intelligence. He must descend to the level of David before Achish and simulate non-intelligence. Let the earth grow never so corrupt and full of violence, he must never betray existence by retributive and penal providences. The Power Not Ourselves must never make for righteousness, lest some sharp-eyed watcher catch a glimpse of the divine glory and joyfully reveal the Promethean secret to men. The agnostic Deity must in some anonymous way cure the human conscience of its universal habit of figuring to itself a Righteous Governor who sides with oppressed virtue and avenges transgression. Man's intuitions must be stifled, or they will filch the secret of divine existence, and keep parallel with the literal truth. Man must be kept from dreaming these startling realistic dreams about eternal life, for there is great danger that he will by means of them live as though he actually knew there were a God.

Practical atheism! For what is this affirming that God will never make himself known in creation, providence, retribution, moral inspiration, and intuition, but a new-fangled way of saying that there is no God at all? Verily, the hands are the hands of an agnostic, but the voice is the voice of an atheist. A God that never thinks, never acts, that has no moral affections-what is that but a nonentity? Putting the treasure at the foot of the rainbow-what is that but a poetical method of saying the rainbow has no foot? A God who does not

think, who makes no moral distinctions, who will not punish or reward men-how far removed is he from the no-God-at-all of the atheist? The most naïve and outspoken agnostics have acknowledged, indeed, that agnosticism really amounts to the annihilation of the divine existence. "We have seen," writes one of them, "the spring sun shine out of an empty heaven to light up a soulless earth; we have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead.”

Now, a being that is

dead, and always has been, is, in plain English, a being without existence. Let us understand, then, that though the Lorelei is singing a new song in the upper air, the jagged reefs and watery deeps lurk as of old below.

If agnosticism involves all the chilly and revolting consequences of atheism, no more does it escape the grotesque cosmogony of that system. The agnostic must face the same dilemma as the atheist: the world came either from God or from chance. He dare not admit that it was made by his unknowable God, for that would make him knowable to an alarming degree. The God-made heavens would betake themselves to telling his glory. Nor has he the hardihood to adopt the theory of the fortuitous concourse of atoms. The word "evolution" is his god-send, as the theist would say. But the broken and hand-piercing staff is not good to lean upon. The word describes not the origin of things, but their process. I ask a blind man just arrived at my door from a distant eity who led him hither. He betakes himself to naming streets, highways, paths, crossings, lanes; he goes on calling off landmarks, sign-boards, finger-posts, historic trees, town pumps, hamlets, villages, cities. My good man," I break in, "these things could never have brought you hither—whose hand was it that slipped out of yours at my gate?" So the agnostic, striving to eliminate God from his own processes, seizes on the names of certain methods and fashions of operation, which he names laws with especial reverence. These are only the avenues along which matter has been conducted hither. The unanswered question is, Who conducted it hither? 2. The agnostic is inconsistent with his own principles. Touching matters beyond the realm of sense perception, he professes to affirm nothing. Of the phenomena of matter, he knows much; of God, he can know nothing. Now, the 18-FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXVI.

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assertion that we can know nothing about God is far more than an assumption concerning the limits of human perception. It. is a tremendous assumption concerning the divine possibilities. of self-revelation. It may be admitted that the denizens of a South American ant-hill can hardly send hither an expedition on a voyage of discovery, and go back reporting that such a person as I exists. But, if I choose, may I not make a voyage of revelation, let my shadow fall upon them, feed them, defend them, and though unable to unvail the total contents of my nature to them, could I not reveal to them altogether reliably the fact that I exist? The agnostic's language is far meeker than his theory. His theory knows a good many important things about the unknowable God. Somehow or other it has ascertained that he that formed the ear cannot hear, that he that made the tongue cannot communicate. By some means the agnostic has learned that he who has so marvelously and gloriously hung system on system in everlasting equilib rium, who has inspired ten thousand dialects, is yet powerless to invent the vaguest code of signals to flash across the abyss. some trustworthy gleams of himself. The agnostic has gone outside and looked at man, and found him woefully sightless, deaf, and dumb. He has looked at God, taken account of his skill, and discovered that communication is out of the question. Laura Bridgman had her Dr. Howe to find the secret wicket-gate of the imprisoned soul and put it in communion with himself and all the world. But this Almighty of the agnostic can find no needle's eye in the blank walls of human nature for the flashing through of one ray of his divine glory! Such is the necessary inconsistency of the system.

3. Agnosticism ignores the vital distinction between the unknowable and the inexplicable.

The theist insists quite as strenuously as the agnostic on the limitations of human knowledge concerning God. But limita . tion is something quite different from negation. The agnostic brands all so-called knowledge of God as illusory, unreliable, unreal. The theist maintains that human knowledge of God is real and trustworthy as far as it goes. The peasant knows nothing of actinic and ultra-violet rays, of wave-lengths and angles of refraction; but he does know that a sunbeam is, for example, luminous. Now, the luminosity of light is just as