‘I wish you entered more than I think you do into Browning’s thoughts. He has, it seems to me, so clearly set forth the main basis of Faith, not systematically, but recurrently.
‘We must work out these matters for ourselves; but rest we cannot. You cannot in the presence of your brother’s suffering—you cannot in the presence of death say: “I care not to lift the veil, or ever to know whether there is a curtain behind which we pass or a dark abyss.”
‘Indeed, dear child, I do feel for you. When you are freer, you must come and see me, and we will talk over things. I shall not think you wicked, but believe that you do want to know God, and that He is sorry for you, because you do care, but cannot see.... It is only the contemptuous, what I may call the omniscient Agnostic, that I do not want to have anything to do with; those who sneer at the most pathetic aspirations and hopes. The reverent and yet sorrowful doubt which yet longs for dawn, shall one day be blest by the sunrise, here or hereafter.’
To the same:—
‘January 5, 1887.
‘My dear Child,—No; I don’t mind your saying anything that is in your heart.
‘As regards knowledge. We use this word, it seems, in different senses. It is not at all identical with “to form a conception of”: e.g. I cannot form a conception of what gravitation or electricity is, but I know each in a sense. These are names for something without which the kosmos as it is could not be. Or I might perhaps illustrate better by saying I can form no conception of the Universe, no complete conception, and yet from my isolated spot I look up and say, it is. Of what can we form a complete conception? Not of the “flower in the crannied wall.”
‘Any other explanation of the facts of the Universe seems to me incredible, except one, viz., that it is the utterance of supreme Wisdom and Love, and that it is adapted to the intelligence of finite beings. The Unity of law tells us there is one God, the Creator and Ruler. As regards the hypothesis of order coming out of chance atoms—the myth of a primæval chaos—can any one entertain it? Ex nihil nihil; the order we see in evolution must have existed with the original atoms, if such were the basis of created life.
‘No, I do not think it your fault, but the fault of Spinoza’s system that it cannot give you satisfaction. It is a revival, only in another form, too, of the old Greek thought of Zeus, over whom there was another God, Fate. So Spinoza’s and the Greek Supreme were not Supreme.