[216] and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness.”  The characteristic of Leslie Stephen’s essays is that they are less directed to showing that orthodox theology is untrue as that there is no reality about it, and that its solutions of difficulties are sham solutions.  If it solved any part of the mystery, it would be welcome, but it does not, it only adds new difficulties.  It is “a mere edifice of moonshine.”  The writer makes no attempt to prove by logic that ultimate reality lies outside the limits of human reason.  He bases this conclusion on the fact that all philosophers hopelessly contradict one another; if the subject-matter of philosophy were, like physical science, within the reach of the intelligence, some agreement must have been reached.

The Broad Church movement, the attempts to liberalize Christianity, to pour its old wine into new bottles, to make it unsectarian and undogmatic, to find compromises between theology and science, found no favour in Leslie Stephen’s eyes, and he criticized all this with a certain contempt.  There was a controversy about the efficacy of prayer.  Is it reasonable, for instance, to pray for rain?  Here science and theology were at issue on a practical

[217] point which comes within the domain of science.  Some theologians adopted the compromise that to pray against an eclipse would be foolish, but to pray for rain might be sensible.  “One phenomenon,” Stephen wrote, “is just as much the result of fixed causes as the other; but it is easier for the imagination to suppose the interference of a divine agent to be hidden away somewhere amidst the infinitely complex play of forces, which elude our calculations in meteorological phenomena, than to believe in it where the forces are simple enough to admit of prediction.  The distinction is of course invalid in a scientific sense.  Almighty power can interfere as easily with the events which are, as with those which are not, in the Nautical Almanac.  One cannot suppose that God retreats as science advances, and that he spoke in thunder and lightning till Franklin unravelled the laws of their phenomena.”

Again, when a controversy about hell engaged public attention, and some otherwise orthodox theologians bethought themselves that eternal punishment was a horrible doctrine and then found that the evidence for it was not quite conclusive and were bold enough to say so, Leslie Stephen stepped in to point out that, if so, historical

[218] Christianity deserves all that its most virulent enemies have said about it in this respect.  When the Christian creed really ruled men’s consciences, nobody could utter a word against the truth of the dogma of hell.  If that dogma had not an intimate organic connection with the creed, if it had been a mere unimportant accident, it could not have been so vigorous and persistent wherever Christianity was strongest.  The attempt to eliminate it or soften