ds--the
conscience of man nobly conformed to the great obedience of the
everlasting laws? What are we to say of lives such as those of Gotama,
Socrates and Christ? Nothing. Like the psalmist of Israel, I am
struck dumb in the presence of a vision so majestical. _Deveni in
altitudinem maris et silui_: "I came unto the great deeps and I held my
peace".

[1] See his well-known essays, "The Ethics of Belief" and "The Ethics
of Religion".

[2] Prof. J. Seth, in his _Study of Ethical Principles_, concludes from
Mr. Huxley's Romanes lecture that "agnosticism could scarcely have been
the final resting place for such a mind".

[3] I have ventured to repeat here a portion of the argument set forth
in the chapter on "Ethics and Theism".

VII.

PRIESTS AND PROPHETS.

One of the most striking characteristics of the ecclesiastic, as
opposed to the religious mind, is its tendency to concentrate its
attention upon detail to the exclusion of fundamental principles. We
are assured that the same habit distinguishes the statesman from the
party man, or mere politician. At any rate, we have had abundant
evidence during the past fifty years--evidence which has been
emphasised during the past year--that the love of detail, of all that
comes under that washing of cups and platters, of first places and
salutations in the market-place, resplendent raiment and broad
phylacteries, which Jesus so summarily denounced in the official
religion of his own time, is still a mark of the ecclesiastic temper in
the England of to-day. If a man--even though that man be a
pope--should question the validity of its "orders," volleys of
sacerdotal refutation are fired from the press, the whole atmosphere is
electric with the controversial charges such profanity provokes. But
let a man proclaim that there is no such institution as "orders" at
all, that true religion, that Christianity, as conceived by its
founder, is destitute of ritual, priest and sacrifice, and everything
is still as a Quakers' meeting. How is it that men will seriously
devote their energies to repelling such side attacks as those directed
against them by rival churches, while they totally neglect to satisfy
an enlightened age as to the validity of the fundamental assumption on
which their entire system reposes? The pope and the Eastern Churches
may be serious rivals in the camp ecclesiastic, but what are our native
pontiffs and priests to reply to men like Hatch, Jo