There are here some indications of that strong reaction of the present
century towards ancient forms of church life. This reaction seems to me a
further consequence of that admiration of power of which I have spoken.
For, finding the progress of discovery in the laws of nature constantly
bring an assurance most satisfactory to the intellect, men began to
demand a similar assurance in other matters; and whatever department of
human thought could not be subjected to experiment or did not admit of
logical proof began to be regarded with suspicion. The highest realms of
human thought--where indeed only grand conviction, and that the result
not of research, but of obedience to the voice within, can be had--came
to be by such regarded as regions where, no scientific assurance being
procurable, it was only to his loss that a man should go wandering: the
whole affair was unworthy of him. And if there be no guide of humanity
but the intellect, and nothing worthy of its regard but what that
intellect can isolate and describe in the forms peculiar to its
operations,--that is, if a man has relations to nothing beyond his
definition, is not a creature of the immeasurable,--then these men are
right. But there have appeared along with them other thinkers who could
not thus be satisfied--men who had in their souls a hunger which the
neatest laws of nature could not content, who could not live on
chemistry, or mathematics, or even on geology, without the primal law of
_their_ many dim-dawning wonders--that is, the Being, if such there might
be, who thought their laws first and then embodied them in a world of
aeonian growth.
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