The allocution under consideration has a certain papal flavour.  Mr. Harrison speaks with authority and not as one of the common scribes of the period.  He knows not only what agnosticism is and how it has come about, but what will become of it.  The agnostic is to content himself with being the precursor of the positivist.  In his place, as a sort of navvy levelling the ground and cleansing it of such poor stuff as Christianity, he is a useful creature who deserves patting on the back, on condition that he does not venture beyond his last.  But let not these scientific Sanballats presume that they are good enough to take part in the building of the Temple—­they are mere Samaritans, doomed to die out in proportion as the Religion of Humanity is accepted by mankind.  Well, if that is their fate, they have time to be cheerful.  But let us hear Mr. Harrison’s pronouncement of their doom.

“Agnosticism is a stage in the evolution of religion, an entirely negative stage, the point reached by physicists, a purely mental conclusion, with no relation to things social at all” (p. 154).  I am quite dazed by this declaration.  Are there, then, any “conclusions” that are not “purely mental”?  Is there “no relation to things social” in “mental conclusions” which affect men’s whole conception of life?  Was that prince of agnostics, David Hume, particularly imbued with physical science?  Supposing physical science to be non-existent, would not the agnostic principle, applied by the philologist and the historian, lead to exactly the same results?  Is the modern more or less complete suspension of judgment as to the facts of the history of regal Rome, or the real origin of the Homeric poems, anything but agnosticism in history and in literature?  And if so, how can agnosticism be the “mere negation of the physicist”?

“Agnosticism is a stage in the evolution of religion.”  No two people agree as to what is meant by the term “religion”; but if it means, as I think it ought to mean, simply the reverence and love for the ethical ideal, and the desire to realise that ideal in life, which every man ought to feel—­then I say agnosticism has no more to do with it than it has to do with music or painting.  If, on the other hand, Mr. Harrison, like most people, means by “religion” theology, then, in my judgment, agnosticism can be said to be a stage in its evolution, only as death may be said to be the final stage in the evolution of life.

     When agnostic logic is simply one of the canons of thought,
     agnosticism, as a distinctive faith, will have spontaneously
     disappeared (p. 155).

I can but marvel that such sentences as this, and those already quoted, should have proceeded from Mr. Harrison’s pen.  Does he really mean to suggest that agnostics have a logic peculiar to themselves?  Will lie kindly help me out of my bewilderment when I try to think of “logic” being anything else than the canon (which, I believe, means rule) of thought?  As to agnosticism being a distinctive faith, I have already shown that it cannot possibly be anything of the kind, unless perfect faith in logic is distinctive of agnostics; which, after all, it may be.