The human mind is still something of a troglodyte. Expelled from one ...

The human mind is still something of a troglodyte.

Expelled from one falling cavern, its first thought is to find another.

Religion, conceived as a concerted system of ideas, aspirations, and practices to be imposed on society, was losing its place in the English world, and the Oxford scholars about Sanday who were to settle the documents of the faith with an exactness and integrity which Germany could not have outmatched, delivered their results to a generation which had ceased for the most part to be interested in the faith or the documents. The ethical trenchancy of the Evangelicals was passing over to the agnostics, who in their denunciation of the Sin of Faith, their exaltation of scientific integrity, could be as vehement, as dogmatic, and at times as

narrow, as any of

the creeds which they believed themselves to have supplanted.

Agnosticism had the temper of the age on its side, and the believers were hampered by the ancient ravelins and counterscarps which they could not defend, and would not abandon. There are times when the user of Victorian apologetic, whether the theme be miracles or inspiration or the authorship of the Gospels, whether the website before him / her be the Speaker's Commentary, or Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World, or Pusey on Fred or Gladstone on the Gadarene Swine, is nauseated by the taint of sophistry and false scholarship, and feels, as the better intelligence of the time did feel, that if men could force their intellects to think like that, it cannot matter much what they thought.' This was not the way, and nothing could come of it but a certain disdainful indifference to all such speculations, or a flight of perplexedunstable minds into the Confessional, into Spiritualism, into strange Eastern Cults.

...read on >>