The demolition of credulity is, as I have said, a wholly desirable and beneficial thing.  Most intelligent people have found some happiness in learning that the dealings of God—­that is, the creative and originative power behind the universe—­are at all events not whimsical, however unintelligible they may be.  No one at all events is now required to reconcile with his religious faith a detailed belief in the Mosaic cosmogony, or to accept the fact that a Hebrew prophet was enabled to summon bears from a wood to tear to pieces some unhappy boys who found food for mirth in his personal appearance.  That is a pure gain.  But side by side with this entirely wholesome process, there are a good many people who have thrown overboard, together with their credulity, a quality of a far higher and nobler kind, which may be called faith.  Men who have seen many mysteries explained, and many dark riddles solved in nature, have fallen into what is called materialism, from the mistaken idea that the explanation of material phenomena will hold good for the discernment of abstract phenomena.  Yet any one who approaches the results of scientific investigation in a philosophical and a poetical spirit, sees clearly enough that nothing has been attempted but analysis, and that the mystery which surrounds us is only thrust a little further off, while the darkness is as impenetrable and profound as ever.  All that we have learnt is how natural law works; we have not come near to learning why it works as it does.  All we have really acquired is a knowledge that the audacious and unsatisfactory theories, such, for instance, as the old-fashioned scheme of redemption, by which men have attempted with a pathetic hopefulness to justify the ways of God to man, are, and are bound to be, despairingly incomplete.  The danger of the scientific spirit is not that it is too agnostic, but that it is not agnostic enough:  it professes to account for everything when it only has a very few of the data in its grasp.  The materialistic philosophy tends to be a tyranny which menaces liberty of thought.  Every one has a right to deduce what theory he can from his own experience.  The one thing that we have no sort of right to do is to enforce that theory upon people whose experience does not confirm it.  We may invite them to act upon our assumptions, but we must not blame them if they end by considering them to be baseless.  I was talking the other day to an ardent Roman Catholic, who described by a parable the light in which he viewed the authority of the Church.  He said that it was as if he were half-way up a hill, prevented from looking over into a hidden valley by the slope of the ground.  On the hill-top, he said, might be supposed to stand people in whose good faith and accuracy of vision he had complete confidence.  If they described to him what they saw in the valley beyond, he would not dream of mistrusting them.  But the analogy breaks down at every point, because the essence of