Let us however pass this by; let us refuse to subject their teaching to
the extreme rigour of even their own law; and let us grant that by some
mixed use of fancy or of mysticism, they can turn to Nature as to some
vast moral hieroglyph. What sort of morality do they find in it? Nature,
as positive observation reveals her to us, is a thing that can have no
claim either on our reverence or our approbation. Once apply any moral
test to her conduct, and as J.S. Mill has so forcibly pointed out, she
becomes a monster. There is no crime that men abhor or perpetrate that
Nature does not commit daily on an exaggerated scale. She knows no sense
either of justice or mercy. Continually indeed she seems to be tender,
and loving, and bountiful; but all that, at such times, those that know
her can exclaim to her, is

_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.