Ah that we clergymen would summon up courage to tell them that! Courage
to tell them, what need not hamper for a moment the freedom of their
investigations, what will add to them a sanction--I may say a
sanctity--that the unknown _x_ which lies below all phenomena, which is
for ever at work on all phenomena, on the whole and on every part of the
whole, down to the colouring of every leaf and the curdling of every cell
of protoplasm, is none other than that which the old Hebrews called--by a
metaphor, no doubt: for how can man speak of the unseen, save in
metaphors drawn from the seen?--but by the only metaphor adequate to
express the perpetual and omnipresent miracle; The Breath of God; The
Spirit who is The Lord, and The Giver of Life.

In the rest, let us too think, and let us too observe. For if we are
ignorant, not merely of the results of experimental science, but of the
methods thereof: then we and the men of science shall have no common
ground whereon to stretch out kindly hands to each other.

But let us have patience and faith; and not suppose in haste, that when
those hands are stretched out it will be needful for us to leave our
standing-ground, or to cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the
temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest students who are too
high-minded to care for popularity themselves.

True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those
Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy cannot
be that which is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is
to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has sprung from
Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme
effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges:
and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only