Ah that we clergy would summon up courage to tell them that!  Courage to tell them—­what need not hamper for a moment the freedom of their investigations, what will add to them a sanction, I may say a sanctity—­that the unknown x which lies below all phenomena, which is for ever at work on all phenomena, on the whole and on every part of the whole, down to the colouring of every leaf and the curdling of every cell of protoplasm, is none other than that which the old Hebrews called—­(by a metaphor, no doubt—­for how can man speak of the unseen, save in metaphors drawn from the seen?—­but by the only metaphor adequate to express the perpetual and omnipresent miracle)- -The Breath of God; The Spirit who is The Lord and Giver of Life.

In the rest, gentlemen, let us think, and let us observe.  For if we are ignorant, not merely of the results of experimental science, but of the methods thereof, then we and the men of science shall have no common ground whereon to stretch out kindly hands to each other.

But let us have patience and faith; and not suppose in haste, that when those hands are stretched out it will be needful for us to leave our standing-ground, or to cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest students who are too high-minded to care for popularity themselves.

True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy cannot be that which is just now in vogue.  But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait.  Nominalism, and that “Sensationalism” which has sprung from nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort:  after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges; and Realism, and we who own the Realist creeds, may have our turn.  Only wait.  When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother’s love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really eloquent passage of his book on the “Emotions and the Will” (Second Edition, pp. 78, 79), then the end of that philosophy is very near; and an older, simpler, more human, and, as I hold, more philosophic explanation of that natural phenomenon, and of all others, may get a hearing.

Only wait; and fret not yourselves, else shall you be moved to do evil.  Remember the saying of the wise man:  “Go not after the world.  She turns on her axis; and if thou stand still long enough she will turn round to thee.”

Footnotes: 

{0} The Macmillan and Co. book from which this eBook was transcribed ("Scientific Lectures and Essays”) also contains “Town Geology”.  However, as Charles Kingsley published that as a separate book it is not included here.  It is available from Project Gutenberg.—­DP.

{1} An Address given to the Scientific Society of Winchester, 1871.

{181} A Lecture delivered to the Officers of the Royal Artillery, Woolwich, 1872.