alism had to go, there was a time when it seemed to
many by no means unlikely that Agnosticism might have to be accepted as
its substitute. And if that had been so the case would have been
scarcely less desperate. We might have been left with a philosophy of
a kind, but we should have been deprived of any object which could
evoke within our hearts the trust and affection that are needed to
sustain a religion. However, as it proved, there was no great cause
for fear. Agnosticism was subjected in its turn to the ordeal of
criticism, and the result proved that it had not in it the substance
and force that could give it any permanent hold upon the best
intelligence of the age.

If Agnosticism could have been content to confine itself to positive
assertions, there might have been less cause to find fault with it.
But its name stood for negation, and its temper was in accord with its
name. The exponents of Agnosticism were not {47} satisfied with
affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought
mysterious. They insisted that it is unknowable, and that not merely
in the sense that it is incomprehensible, not to be fully grasped, but
unknowable in the sense that nothing at all can be known about it. And
then, having laid down this as their fundamental principle, they
proceeded at once, with a strange inconsistency, to assert that we can
know what it is _not_. This above all else, they said, it is not: it
is not personal. True, Herbert Spencer maintained that it is as far
raised above personality as personality is raised above
unconsciousness; but the stress was laid not upon the affirmation of
super-personality, but upon the denial and rejection of anything like
personality as we understand it.

The position was really untenable. Possibly, if we could detect no
more in Nature than power, we might be content, intellectually, to stop
at the affirmation of inscrutable force. But if there is also design,
then we are bound to go a step further. Bishop Harvey Goodwin
expressed this exactly when he said: "Purpose means person." No doubt
personality in the Creator must be something far higher and fuller than
personality in the creature. The German philosopher Lotze was speaking
the truth when he declared that "to all finite minds {48} there is
allotted but a pale copy" of personality; "the finiteness of the
finite," being "not a producing condition of personality," as has often
been maintained, "but a lim