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"I see nothing in true Christianity but good for the human race surely you speak only to call out my own views. If there is anything in any church policy or polity which requires reforming, let it be reformed." "Excuse me, doctor," I said; "but I had thought you yourself an agnostic.
They could always meet in Berlin, and have their pamphlets printed there; and we could do nothing. But, you see, the whole situation's changed with the Emperor's conversion. He's one of those heavy, consistent men quite stupid, of course who act their principles right out to the farthest detail. So long as he was agnostic he allowed almost anything to go on.
As, humanly speaking, Saul of Tarsus saved Christianity from being a Jewish sect and made it universal, so Gautama extricated the new enthusiasm of humanity from the priests. He made Aryan religion the property of all India. What had been a rare monopoly as narrow as Judaism, he made the inheritance of all Asia. Gautama was a protestant and a reformer, not an agnostic or skeptic.
If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages.
The tone was agnostic; but timidly agnostic. He had never freed himself from the shackles of early prepossessions. He had not the necessary daring to clear up his doubts. Sometimes I fancy that it was this difference in the two men that lay at the bottom of the unfortunate antagonism between Owen and Huxley. There is in Owen's writing, where he is not purely scientific, a touch of the apologist.
"Ah," says his adversary, seizing his opportunity, "then you declare that Jesus Christ was untruthful, for he said so and so;" a very telling method of rousing prejudice. But suppose that the value of the evidence as to what Jesus may have said and done, and as to the exact nature and scope of his authority, is just that which the agnostic finds it most difficult to determine.
Nor would Areopagus or Akropolis be puzzled so much had St Paul preached to them the modern European Christianity with its complicated spirit of all kinds of compromises with Heaven and Hell, compromise with the State, Plutocracy, Nationalism, Imperialism, Conquest, War, Diplomacy, Secular Philosophy, Secular Science, Agnostic Parliaments, Tribal Chauvinism, Education, Officialism, Bureaucracy, etc., etc.
She would probably have been surprised if Father Damon had told her that she was in this following a great example, and there might have been a tang of agnostic bitterness in her reply. When she thought of it the condition seemed to her hopeless, and the attitude of what was called civilization towards it so remorseless and indifferent, and that of Christianity so pharisaical.
Additional light is received from the observation that scientists adhere to their agnostic conclusions even after the premises have been found at fault, on which they based their conclusions. It is the end and aim of evolution to demonstrate that all processes of life and the history of living organisms may be accounted for without the assumption of a personal Creator.
I shall not outrage your own and my own manhood by alluding to anything which the more partisan church people say of this brilliant agnostic; and I say what I do, only because in your distant home you may some day wonder just what is behind an agnostic demonstration such as he is leading up to, and which is certain to centralize the dissatisfied spirit of the country into an anti-church propaganda of no mean proportions.
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