that build altars to an unknown God.  The highest and the strongest faith, the deepest trust and the most loving, come with the fullest knowledge.  Indeed, the distinction between the awe of the agnostic, which is the lowest form of religion, and that highest form in which perfect love casteth out fear, springs from the fuller knowledge of the nature of the object of warship, which the latter implies.  Thus, religion and morality grow with the growth of knowledge; and neither has a worse enemy than ignorance.  The human spirit cannot grow in a one-sided manner.  Devotion to great moral ends is possible, only through the deepening and widening of man’s knowledge of the nature of the world.  Those who know God best, render unto Him the purest service.

So evident is this, that it seems at first sight to be difficult to account for that antagonism to the intellect and distrust of its deliverances, which are so emphatically expressed in the writings of Browning, and which are marked characteristics of the ordinary religious opinion of our day.  On closer examination, however, we shall discover that it is not pure emotion, or mere feeling, whose authority is set above that of reason, but rather the emotion which is the result of knowledge.  The appeal of the religious man from the doubts and difficulties, which reason levels against “the faith,” is really an appeal to the character that lies behind the emotion.  The conviction of the heart, that refuses to yield to the arguments of the understanding, is not mere feeling; but, rather, the complex experience of the past life, that manifests itself in feeling.  When an individual, clinging to his moral or religious faith, says, “I have felt it,” he opposes to the doubt, not his feeling as such, but his personality in all the wealth of its experience.  The appeal to the heart is the appeal to the unproved, but not, therefore, unauthorized, testimony of the best men at their best moments, when their vision of truth is clearest.  No one pretends that “the loud and empty voice of untrained passion and prejudice” has any authority in matters of moral and religious faith; though, in such cases, “feeling” may lack neither depth nor intensity.  If the “feelings” of the good man were dissociated from his character, and stripped bare of all the significance they obtain therefrom, their worthlessness would become apparent.  The profound error of condemning knowledge in order to honour feeling, is hidden only by the fact that the feeling is already informed and inspired with knowledge.  Religious agnosticism, like all other forms of the theory of nescience, derives its plausibility from the adventitious help it purloins from the knowledge which it condemns.