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Updated: June 29, 2025
Now it is certainly true that the argument from consequences is one that ought to be applied with great caution. Yet I am not at all sure that it has not a real basis in philosophy as well as in nature. The very existence of these two great parties, the Ultramontane and the Secularist, over against each other, seems to be it kind of standing protest against either of them.
In organic connection with it was a large debating hall, in which the most notorious secularist lecturers held forth every Sunday evening; and next door to it, under its shadow and patronage, was a little dingy shop filled to overflowing with the coarsest free-thinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll's books occupying the place of honour in the window and the Freethinker placard flaunting at the door.
German socialism, ever since Karl Marx, has been fundamentally antagonistic to any religion whatsoever. It is purely secularist in tone. This is also a strained situation, liable to become perverse.
Really active souls have many confirmations and repudiations as their life deepens and their knowledge widens. But what is to guide the child before its first confirmation? Not mere orders, because orders must have a sanction of some sort or why should the child obey them? If, as a Secularist, you refuse to teach any sanction, you must say "You will be punished if you disobey."
And with a great stretch of all his young frame he fell back on the catalogue he was looking through, while Ancrum went on turning over a copy of 'The Reasoner, a vigorous Secularist paper of the day, which he had found on the counter, and which had suggested his question. Knowledge success: it was for these that David burned, and he laid rapid hands upon them.
It is admitted, then, by the Secularist himself, that there may be a God, that there may be evidence of His existence, that it may yet be discovered in the progress of natural reason, and that to deny any one of these possibilities would be to assume "infallibility," or to arrogate "infinite knowledge as the ground of disproof."
For nothing can be more certain than that some of the finest powers and noblest work of the human mind have been developed by the struggle to know what the Secularist declares is neither knowable nor worth knowing. Yet the histories of philosophy which he began to turn over were in truth no more fruitful to him than the talk of the Reasoner.
He had taken the lad up eagerly as soon as he had discovered both his connection with Purcell and his daring rebellious temper; had backed him up in all his quarrels with his master; had taken him to the Hall of Science, and introduced him to the speakers there; and had generally paraded him as a secularist convert, snatched from the very jaws of the Baptist.
But the truth is "the sceptics," in any general sense, were not proud of him. He was a very young man, with a great deal to learn, who had a very brief career as a Secularist in East London. In a thoughtless moment a local Secular Society gave him office, and that fact is his entire stock-in-trade as a "converted Freethinker."
"I love her because she is so good," was Erica's invariable reply. She and the fraulein shared a bedroom, and many were the arguments they had together. The effect of being separated from her own people was, very naturally, to make Erica a more devoted secularist.
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