First Cause and Future Life.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3808, 12 March 1881, Page 1

First Cause and Future Life.

In the later years of life the intellectual vision, if often clearer, usually grows less confident and enterprising. Age is content to think, where youth would have been anxious to demonstrate and establish; and problems and enigmas, which, at. thirty, I fancied I might be able to solve, I find at sixty I must be satisfied simply to propound. I am aware that throughout this little book there runs an undercurrent of belief in two great doctrines, which yet i do not make the slightest attempt to prove. I have everywhere assumed the existence of a creator, and a continued life beyond the grave though I give no reason lor my faith in either; though I obviously do not hold these points of the Christian creed on the ordinary Christian grounds I cannot but be conscious that these questions underlie, or inextricably mingle with nearly everyone of the subjects I have htre treated. . . . The religious

views in which we have been brought up inevitably color to the last our tone of thought on all cognate matters, and largely affect the manner and direction of our approach to them, even when every dogma ot our early creed has been, if not abandoned, yet deprived of its dogmatic form as well a 8 of its original logical or authoritative basis. JNot only are doc trines often persistently retained, though the old fjundations of them have been under lined or surrendered ; but beliefs, that have long dwelt in the'mind, leave traces of their residence years after tlify have been discarded and dislodged. It would, perhaps, be more correct to say that they linger with a sort of loving obstinacy in their old abode, long after they have itCiived notice to quit. Their chamber is never, to the end of time, quite swept and garnished. The mind ia never altogether as if they had not been there. When a " yes "or" no " answer is demanded to a proposition for and against which argumeut and evidence seem equally balauced, the decision is sure to be different in minds, one of which comes new to the question while- the other has held a preconceived opinion, even though on. grounds which he now recognises as erronaous or insufficient. It was my lot to inherit from Puritan forefathers the strongest impressions as to the great doctrines of religion at a time when the mind is most plastic and most tenacious of such impressions. And though I recognise as iully as any man of science the hollowness of most of the foundations on which those impressions are based, and the entire invalidity of the tenure on which I held them', yet I by no means feel compelled to throw up the possession merely because the old title deeds are full of flaws. The existence of a wise and beneficeut Creator, and of a renewed life hereafter, are still to me beliefs—especially the first -very nearly approaching the solidity of absolute convictions. The one is almost a certainty, the other a solemn hqpe. And ifc does not seem to me unpbilosophical to ailow my contemplations of life, or my. speculations on the problems it presents to run iv the grooves worn in the mind by its antecedent history, so long as no dogmatism is allowed, and no disprovable datum is suffered to intrude.

The question lies in. a small compass. Of actual knowledge we have simply iiothidg. Those who believe in a creative