"This is a common argument," says Tyndall, "If you only knew the comfort of belief!" Never was an author's meaning more utterly missed. Martineau is not speaking of the "comfort of belief." He is speaking of the joy of publishing good tidings. He has delighted to preach his gospel, because, from his soul, he has believed that it was good news he had to tell. If he had had no glad gospel to preach, he would have simply been silent, man-fashion. Having no help to give to sorrowing men and women, he would have honestly refrained from giving that which was no help.

It is quite plain to us, then, if not to Mr. Tyndall, that Martineau, as well as himself, is seeking the Master-force of the universe, Martineau being mainly attracted toward that Power in its moral, Tyndall in its physical manifestations. On the other hand, Tyndall lives, moves, and has his being inside of the mystery of matter. What is it, this amazing force, imprisoned in the atoms, in which he thinks he sees "the promise and potency of all life"? It is impossible for a mind like Martineau's, living in the realms of feeling, of history, of philosophy, to appreciate the tremendous impression of reality which matter makes on a mind like Tyndall's. That one sentence of Martineau's, "the material datum objective to God," is enough to show that cosmogony and religion are not one in his thought. Surely, this is dualism, not unity. The way in which he scornfully concedes to the materialist his atoms is enough to prove that he does not as yet see God "immanent in the atoms." These two fine representatives of the modern mind have much to do before they can come together; but what a noble union that would be!

One more instance of the tendencies of modern thought. Let us take a mind which has many affinities both with Tyndall and Martineau, having rather a singular admixture of the qualities of both.

Frederic Harrison, born preacher, thinker, falling upon days like these, forced away by seeming inexorable logic from the full worship of The All, from adoration of God and the city of God, the whole family in earth and heaven,

concentrates his thought, his love, his adoration upon the one part still left to him,- humanity on this earth, past, present, and to be. He follows breathlessly its struggles, weeps over its sorrow, goes down with it into its dark places, suffers with its bitter loss, and triumphs with its far victory. He holds to his heart the million million obscure toilers of the days that were and the days that are, whose labor has helped along the grand result; he worships at the shrines of the saints of humanity, who loved and suffered for their brethren; and he unites in his thought all these labors, sufferings, loves, and victories into one vast human providence, whose presence he adores, and of whose mighty whole he rejoices to feel himself one small part.

It is safe to say that such a mind could not possibly have remained outside of the Christian Church for eighteen centuries. Such a phenomenon was reserved for the nineteenth. Now, why cannot he believe in the Christian creed of the life eternal? Because he cannot conceive of thought without molecular motion. That is, the faith which would be utterly congenial to his soul is successfully antagonized by a difficulty born of physical investigation which has lodged in his mind.

To make the great synthesis, he says himself, is hopeless. Mankind must be content with the human synthesis. Why? "Because of the relativity of all knowledge." That is, a proposition derived from the metaphysical logic of a certain school of thought is a barrier gigantic enough, in his belief, to throw back forever the tide of human inquiry, whenever it overflows the narrow bounds of terrestrial life.

It is quite plain, then, that, until an advance is made all along the lines of thought, our cosmogony and our religion will be more or less at odds. Many manly minds, indeed, find noble refuge in their high trust. "We believe," they say, in the goodness of the Maker of things; and what is now dark to us in the things made we have faith to believe will one day be made clear." But none the less is it clearly our duty to press on toward the goal of our desire, the All-pervading Unity.

Let us now proceed to analyze the current theories on the great question. There are, at present, three hypotheses of, or rather attempts at, a unitary cosmogony current among thinkers:

1. The first is materialism, which attempts to give unity to the universe, on the hypothesis that matter and its properties form the sum total of things. Atoms and molecules compounded of atoms, with the forces and affinities inherent in these, ARE the universe, and besides them there is nothing else. The ideal of the materialist would be the reduction. of all the so-called elements into compounds of one class of homogeneous atoms, such as the hydrogen or the ether atom. This done, the only thing left is to resolve human consciousness and all lower life into special manifestations of atomic forces and affinities, and we have our universe, which is simply our original atom multiplied to infinity. But, even if we grant for a moment that this colossal task could be accomplished, there is still one fatal objection to the theory thus stated. It is this: It utterly ignores space. This attempt at unity ends in a tremendous dualism. What is it, this vast, this infinite Nothing, through which all forces pass, in the midst of which all matter lives, moves, and has its being? Any theory which gives no account whatever of space leaves not only Hamlet out of the play, but stage and theatre, too. It is safe, then, to say that no materialistic theory yet given to the world can even claim to be a theory of the universe.

Why, then, has materialism had its able advocates, from Democritus downward? And why do they reappear in force to-day? It is because of the great central truth in the theory, which is this: "Matter is real, and no theory of the universe which does not bring out its reality can possibly be true." Nay there is a deeper truth yet hidden beneath: "Every thing is real. Spirit, therefore, if it exists, must be real."

The first truth is the inspiration of all scientific investigators. To-day, its triumphs are legion: they are destined to be past all count. They have already extended over the whole domain of inanimate nature, and they will extend to

every part of man's nature which is solvable by molecular forces.

Foolish materialists of course claim much more than this. Some of them are loudly exclaiming, as if it were anything new, and as if it were a crushing disproof of the very existence of spirit, that all life processes can be expressed in terms of matter. But who ever imagined that life processes, that is, life receipts and expenditures, could be expressed in anything else? If matter is what you spend and what you earn and what you use as your sole currency, your debtor and creditor account must be made out in the currency you use. If you have nothing but dollars and cents to earn and spend, you must keep your cash account in terms of dollars and cents. You keep your bone account in terms of lime, for that is what you use in making or unmaking bone, and so on. Bodily accounts are kept in terms of body, by lungbreaths, heart-beats, nerve-thrills, and brain-changes. Expense of matter is made up by supply of matter, expense of a particular kind of matter by a supply of that particular kind, expense of oxygen by supply of oxygen, of lime by lime, of carbon by carbon, of the hydrocarbons by the hydrocarbons, etc.

To sum up, the deep truth in materialism must find its place in any true theory of the universe; but materialism is not itself a theory of the universe at all. It is a theory of the atomic part of the universe. Whatever, in either man or space, is not composed of atoms is wholly left out. It cannot give to the universe the unity we seek.

2. The second is idealism. The idealist builds up his universe of mind alone. Matter is a fair illusion of finite mind, produced for beneficent purposes by the infinite mind. Such terms as matter, motion, force, etc., are, at bottom, only symbols, to which no ultimate reality corresponds. There is nothing real but spirit.

Now, it is not surprising that physicists should get out of patience with this theory, which they, naturally enough, regard as an attempt to solve the great problem by simply ignoring its conditions. Easy enough to solve your equa

tion of two unknown quantities by suppressing x altogether! It is certainly difficult for a physicist to form a mental picture of a symbol vibrating a billion times in a second, of an illusion taking eight minutes to pass from sun to earth, or even of a form of thought conveying instantaneously across the galaxy the gravitating force from a million stars. It must be confessed that there is an element of comedy in the attitude of the idealist of the second class, from which those of the first class only escape by their high faith and noble purpose. It is certainly a royal road to the solution of the problem "Why Rocks are Hard," to assert that both rock and hardness are illusions of the mind, or to answer "why star gravitates to star" by proving, ideally, that there are no stars, but only symbols; and it is provoking to the physicist, who feels the awful problem both of rock and star, and is assured that the tremendous solution, if ever found, must absolutely solve rock and star, as well as mind and soul, to be jauntily shown to his own. private room in this poetic air-castle of the mind for all

answer.

But the physicist must remember that great souls have been and still are imprisoned in this limbo. The reason is not far to seek. In an age when science could only suggest doubts, and was quite incapable of giving genuine help to the distresses of thought and feeling, fine spirits, who could not wholly ignore the great problem, sought refuge in a solution which gave the needed unity to the universe, and preserved the sanctities and religions of the soul, which materialism has always failed to do.

Idealism, then, has gained the unity at the cost of the reality of the universe, while materialism gains the reality at the cost of the unity. Neither of them, then, affords a solution to the problem we are pondering, though each embodies a mighty truth which must form part of the solution.

3. The third is the doctrine of "the unknowable." Science and religion, thinker and saint, are alike invited to join hands on the conviction that concerning the foundation of the uni