have eaten their way into it. Like a secret sap they have flavoured
every fruit in the garden. They are like a powerful drug, a stimulant,
that has been injected into our whole system.

If then we could appraise the vigour and value of life independent of
religion, we can draw no direct conclusions from observing it in its
present state. Before such observations can teach us anything, there is
a great deal that will have to be made allowance for: and the positive
school, when they reason from life as it is, are building therefore on
an utterly unsound foundation. It is emphatically untrue to say that a
single example in the present day, or for matter of that any number of
examples, either goes or can go any way towards proving the adequacy of
any non-religious formula. For all such formulæ have first to be further
analysed before we know how far they are really non-religious; and
secondly the religious element that will be certainly found existing in
them will have, hypothetically, to be removed.

It would be well if the positive school would spend in this spiritual
analysis but a little of that skill they have attained to in their
analysis of matter. In their experiments, for instance, on spontaneous
generation, what untold pains have been taken! With what laborious
thought, with what emulous ingenuity, have they struggled to completely
sterilise the fluids in which they are to seek for the new production of
life! How jealously do they guard against leaving there any already
existing germs! How easily do they tell us their experiments may be
vitiated by the smallest oversight!

Surely spiritual matters are worthy of an equally careful treatment.
For what we have here to study is not the production of the lowest forms
of animal life, but the highest forms of human happiness. These were