SPOTTISWOODE LONDON: PRINTED BY AND Co., NEW-STREET BRITISH 28FE 76 HUSEUM SQUARE ་ ་ PREFACE. As the remarks in the following pages on the teachers of our growing school of materialism are plain-spoken, I may lay myself a little open in the quarter on which their warriors, if they deign to reply, may charge, if I mistake not, with the greatest chance of applause from their admirers. Let me hope that this consideration will win pardon for a preface which discourses of myself. I beg leave to state, not as a preacher, but as trying in vain with my feeble human ability to talk science where science is out of bounds, that I am a firm maintainer of the first of our XXXIX Articles. I say and I believe: Unus est vivus et verus Deus, æternus, incorporeus, impartibilis, impassibilis, immensæ potentiæ, sapientiæ et bonitatis, creator et conservator omnium, tum visibilium, tum invisi bilium. More precisely, I hold that this God in the beginning made all things, not ex nihilo, but out of nothing but Himself. I believe that He is at this moment exactly as at the first, if ever there was a first, making all things out of nothing but Himself; that He can, if He chooses, cease to make; and that, if He should for one second suspend His will to work, all things but Himself would for that second cease to be. Further, as a scientific thinker, where thought is for ever repulsed, yet for ever attracted with more exalted joy, I believe in a Trinity in Unity; namely, I believe first in God the Unrevealed and Unrevealable; secondly, in God the Revealed; and thirdly, in God the Revealer. That is, I hold that, if my power of thought and knowledge could be expanded so as to set me far above the loftiest finite intelligence, and so that I could answer scientifically every question which I knew how to ask about this Cosmos, I should still be, all the same as now, affirming and adoring, with thankful and exulting strains, the Unrevealed and Unrevealable save to Himself, who is not only the Revealed, πávτa kai èv πâơɩ, but is infinitely more, infinitely in His perfection transcending all— |