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After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind, it is of little purpose to tell us that women have more intelligence and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that men will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will be more skilful in reading it.
There are conceptions of GOD proclaimed from Christian pulpits which are less than the full Christian conception of GOD. The GOD who is eternal Energy and Life and Love, the GOD who is revealed in Christ, and whose Spirit is the Spirit of Freedom and Brotherhood and Truth, is neither the tyrant God of the Calvinist, nor the dead-alive God of the traditionalist, nor the obscurantist God of those who would decry knowledge and quench the Spirit.
To bring the new age into the parsonage of the reverend obscurantist in the shape of a young girl the fiancée of the pastor's son was an interesting experiment which gives occasion for strong scenes and, at last, for a drawn battle between the old and the new. The new, though not acknowledging itself to be beaten, takes to its heels, and flees in the stormy night through wind and snow.
At a time when thinking men and women were beginning to turn to the leaders of the National Church for a social policy, a government worn out by eight years of office that included a costly war was so little alive to the signs of the times as to select for promotion a prelate conspicuously identified with the obscurantist tactics of that small but noisy group in the Church of England which arrogated to itself the presumptuous claim to be the Catholic party.
Such was the extraordinary intellectual atmosphere in which the Russian educated classes lived during the early years of the sixties. On the "men with aspirations," who had longed in vain for more light and more public activity under the obscurantist, repressive regime of the preceding reign, it had an intoxicating effect.
No, the cold hand of Downing Street intervened; his second Governorship of New Zealand slammed to a close. It was an era when the Imperial spirit was niggardly, obscurantist. Brushing aside details, it is easy to see how the servant and the official masters, choosing different roads, would ultimately part.
But all these grandiose conceptions belong to the obscurantist view of human life, which is popular with all who hate, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "to think clear and see straight." People fancy that the dignity of human life demands that artists at least should be Ouidaesque, but the true dignity of the artist is to be sublimely simple rather than simply sublime.
Maimonides replies in effect, because so God's wisdom has determined and his wisdom is transcendent. There is no further impulse to investigation in such an answer. It is the reply of the obscurantist, and it is very surprising that Maimonides the rationalist should so far have forgotten his own ideal of reason and enlightenment.
The former followers of Douglas finally rallied to the man and to the party which stood for a nationalized rather than a merely localized democracy; and the triumph of the North in the war, not only put an end to the legal right of secession, but it began to emancipate the American national idea from an obscurantist individualism and provincialism.
As the occurrences are admitted, even by believers, to depend on fluctuating and unascertained personal conditions, the reluctance of physicists to examine them is very natural and intelligible. Whether the determination to taboo research into them, and to denounce their examination as of perilous moral consequence, is scientific, or is obscurantist, every one may decide for himself.
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