Thus the child went into a far country and fed among swine, and, failing to come to itself and return to its father's house, the old gentleman disinherited it, once and forever. A younger son, however, is christened “Liberal Union,” and whether it will remain at home to take care of the old man in his dotage remains to be seen.
Huxley's Paradox.
“The whole analogy of natural operations furnish so complete and crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are called secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe, that, in view of the intimate relations of man and the rest of the living world, and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no reason for doubting that all are co-ordinate terms of nature's great progression, from formless to formed, from the inorganic to the organic, from blind force to conscious intellect and will.” Huxley's Evidence of Man's Place in Nature, London, 1864, p. 107.
A writer in the Spectator charged Professor Huxley with Atheism. The professor replies, in the number of that paper for February 10, 1866, thus: “I do not know that I care very much about popular odium, so there is no great merit in saying that if I really saw fit to deny the existence of a God I should certainly do so for the sake of my own intellectual freedom, and be the honest Atheist you are pleased to say I am. As it happens, however, I can not take this position with honesty, inasmuch as it is, and always has been, a favorite tenet that Atheism is as absurd, logically speaking, as Polytheism.” In the same sheet, he says: “The denying the possibility of miracles seems to me quite as unjustifiable as Atheism.” Is Huxley in conflict with Huxley?
The Triumphing Reign Of Light.
The next psychic cycle, it seems to me, will witness a synthesis of thought and faith, a recognition of the fact that it is impossible for reason to find solid ground that is not consecrated ground; that all philosophy and all science belong to religion; that all truth is a revelation of God; that the truths of written revelation, if not intelligible to reason, are nevertheless consonant with reason; and that divine agency, instead of standing removed from man by infinite intervals of time and space, is, indeed, the true name of those energies which work their myriad phenomena in the natural world around us. This consummation—at once the inspiration of a fervent religion and the prophecy of the loftiest science—is to be the noontide reign of wedded intellect and faith, whose morning rays already stream far above our horizon.—Winchell. Re. and Sci. p. 84.