'Friends, companions, and train
The avalanche swept from our side,'[20]
and no one felt the strain, the positive agony of soul, in greater degree than did George Romanes. Step by step he abandoned the position he had maintained in his Burney Prize, with no great pauses, rather, as it seems, with startling rapidity, and with sad and with reluctant backward glances he took up a position of agnosticism, for a time almost of materialism. He wrote a book, published in 1876, which was entitled 'A Candid Examination of Theism.' It is almost needless to discuss the work, as it has been dealt with by its author in his posthumous 'Thoughts on Religion.' It is an able piece of work, and is marked throughout by a lofty spirit, a profound sadness, and a belief (which years after he criticised sharply) in the exclusive light of the scientific method in the Court of Reason.
His education had been on strictly scientific lines, and the limitations of thought produced by such education are clearly seen in that essay; 'limitations' which the philosophical and the metaphysical tendencies of his mind soon led him to overstep.
The reaction against the conclusions of the essay set in far sooner than has been at all suspected. Perhaps the first published mark of reaction is the Rede Lecture[21] of 1885.
Yet anyone who reads carefully the conclusion of the 'Candid Examination'[22] will see the note of 'longing and thirsting for God.'
There are many who abandon belief for various reasons, and who in various methods stifle regret and call in stoicism to their aid. There are those who really care very little about the 'ultimate problems,' and who find the world of sense quite enough to occupy them. And there are souls who seem to be constantly crying out in their darkness for light, the burden of whose cry seems to be: 'Fecisti nos ad te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.' These last have within them the capacity for holiness, the capacity for a real and tremendous power to witness for the truth, to do and to suffer pro causa Dei. To this class George Romanes belonged. By nature he was deeply and truly religious, and interested and absorbed as he was in science, it is no exaggeration to say he was just as keenly interested in theology, that is to say, in the deepest and ultimate problems of theology. By the questions which divide Christians he was not greatly attracted, and he never could see any reason for the bitterness which exists between e.g. Roman and Anglican.
This is anticipating. In 1878 he had touched the very depths of scepticism, and he would have rejected the idea of a possibility of return, and would have rejected it in terms of unmeasured regret.
A letter from Mr. Darwin is interesting.