The agnostics have been driven back on agnosticism; and are already recovering from the shock.  They find themselves in a really unknown world under really unknown gods; a world which is more mystical, or at least more mysterious.  For in the Victorian age the agnostics were not really agnostics.  They might be better described as reverent materialists; or at any rate monists.  They had at least at the back of their minds a clear and consistent concept of their rather clockwork cosmos; that is why they could not admit the smallest speck of the supernatural into their clockwork.  But to-day it is very hard for a scientific man to say where the supernatural ends or the natural begins, or what name should be given to either.  The word agnostic has ceased to be a polite word for atheist.  It has become a real word for a very real state of mind, conscious of many possibilities beyond that of the atheist, and not excluding that of the polytheist.  It is no longer a question of defining or denying a simple central power, but of balancing the brain in a bewilderment of new powers which seem to overlap and might even conflict.  Nature herself has become unnatural.  The wind is blowing from the other side of the desert, not now with noble truism “There is no God but God,” but rather with that other motto out of the deeper anarchy of Asia, drawn out by Mr. Kipling, in the shape of a native proverb, in the very story already mentioned; “Your gods and my gods, do you or I know which is the stronger?” There was a mystical story I read somewhere in my boyhood, of which the only image that remains is that of a rose-bush growing mysteriously in the middle of a room.  Taking this image for the sake of argument, we can easily fancy a man half-conscious and convinced that he is delirious, or still partly in a dream, because he sees such a magic bush growing irrationally in the middle of his bedroom.  All the walls and furniture are familiar and solid, the table, the clock, the telephone, the looking glass or what not; there is nothing unnatural but this one hovering hallucination or optical delusion of green and red.  Now that was very much the view taken of the Rose of Sharon, the mystical rose of the sacred tradition of Palestine, by any educated man about 1850, when the rationalism of the eighteenth century was supposed to have found full support in the science of the nineteenth.  He had a sentiment about a rose:  he was still glad it had fragrance or atmosphere; though he remembered with a slight discomfort that it had thorns.  But what bothered him about it was that it was impossible.  And what made him think it impossible was it was inconsistent with everything else.  It was one solitary and monstrous exception to the sort of rule that ought to have no exceptions.  Science did not convince him that there were few miracles, but that there were no miracles; and why should there be miracles only in Palestine and only for one short period?  It was a single and senseless contradiction to an otherwise