Miseri quibus
    Intentata nites.

At one moment she will be blessing a country with plenty, peace, and sunshine; and she will the next moment ruin the whole of it by an earthquake.  Now she is the image of thrift, now of prodigality; now of the utmost purity, now of the most revolting filth; and if, as I say, she is to be judged by any moral standard at all, her capacities for what is admirable not only make her crimes the darker, but they also make her virtues partake of the nature of sin.  How, then, can an intimacy with this eternal criminal be an ennobling or a sacred thing?  The theist, of course, believes that truth is sacred.  But his belief rests on a foundation that has been altogether renounced by the positivists.  He values truth because, in whatever direction it takes him, it takes him either to God or towards Him—­God, to whom he is in some sort akin, and after whose likeness he is in some sort made.  He sees Nature to be cruel, wicked, and bewildering when viewed by itself.  But behind Nature he sees a vaster power—­his father—­in whom mysteriously all contradictions are reconciled.  Nature for him is God’s, but it is not God; and ‘though God slay me,’ he says, ’yet will I trust in Him.’  This trust can be attained to only by an act of faith like this.  No observation or experiment, or any positive method of any kind, will be enough to give it us; rather, without faith, observation and experiment will do nothing but make it seem impossible.  Thus a belief in the sacredness of Nature, or, in other words, in the essential value of truth, is as strictly an act of religion, as strictly a defiance of the whole positive formula, as any article in any ecclesiastical creed.  It is simply a concrete form of the beginning of the Christian symbol, ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty.’  It rests on the same foundation, neither more nor less.  Nor is it too much to say that without a religion, without a belief in God, no fetish-worship was ever more ridiculous than this cultus of natural truth.

This subject is so important that it will be well to dwell on it a little longer.  I will take another passage from Dr. Tyndall, which presents it to us in a slightly different light, and which speaks explicitly not of truth itself, but of that sacred Object beyond, of which truth is only the sacramental channel to us. ’"Two things,” said Imanuel Kant’ (it is thus Dr. Tyndall writes), ’"fill me with awe—­the starry heavens, and the sense of moral responsibility in man.”  And in the hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke of action has ceased, and when the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe.  Breaking contact with the hampering details of earth, it associates him with a power which gives fulness and tone to his existence, but which he can neither analyse nor comprehend.’ This, Dr. Tyndall tells us, is the only rational statement of the fact of that ‘divine communion,’ whose nature is ‘simply distorted and desecrated’ by the unwarranted assumptions of theism.