Note 5 — MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

E.g., the following passage, which deserves to be reprinted a hundred times, Nineteenth Century, July, 1877, p. 832: “We entirely agree with the theologians that our age is beset with a grievous danger of materialism. There is a school of teachers abroad, and they have found an echo here, who dream that victorious vivisection will ultimately win them anatomical solutions of man’s moral and spiritual mysteries. Such unholy nightmares, it is true, are not likely to beguile many minds in a country like this, where social and moral problems are still in their natural ascendant. But there is a subtler kind of materialism, of which the dangers are real. It does not, indeed, put forth the bestial sophism that the apex of philosophy is to be won by improved microscopes and new batteries. But then it has nothing to say about the spiritual life of men. It fills the air with pæans to science, but it always means physical, not moral science. It shirks the question of questions,—To what human end is this knowledge? How shall man thereby order his life as a whole? Where is he to find the object of the yearnings of his spirit?”

I am not concerned to defend the orthodox ideal of heaven against Mr. Harrison’s strictures; but I cannot help entering a protest against his sneer at the “eternity of the tabor” as “so gross, so sensual a creed.” It seems to me it errs by an excessive and unreal spirituality. It was, certainly, not a “gross” or “sensual” order of mind which deemed the act of adoration to be one wherein man could spend an eternity of ecstasy.