[1889] Within the last few months, the public has received much and varied information on the subject of agnostics, their tenets, and even their future. Agnosticism exercised the orators of the Church Congress at Manchester.[51] It has been furnished with a set of “articles” fewer, but not less rigid, and certainly not less consistent than […]

[1889] Those who passed from Dr. Wace’s article in the last number of the “Nineteenth Century” to the anticipatory confutation of it which followed in “The New Reformation,” must have enjoyed the pleasure of a dramatic surprise–just as when the fifth act of a new play proves unexpectedly bright and interesting. Mrs. Ward will, I […]

[1889] Nemo ergo ex me scire quaerat, quod me nescire scio, nisi forte ut nescire discat. –AUGUSTINUS, De Civ. Dei, xii. 7. [81] The present discussion has arisen out of the use, which has become general in the last few years, of the terms “Agnostic” and “Agnosticism.” The people who call themselves “Agnostics” have been […]

[1890] I had fondly hoped that Mr. Gladstone and I had come to an end of disputation, and that the hatchet of war was finally superseded by the calumet, which, as Mr. Gladstone, I believe, objects to tobacco, I was quite willing to smoke for both. But I have had, once again, to discover that […]

[1891] The series of essays, in defence of the historical accuracy of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, contributed by Mr. Gladstone to “Good Words,” having been revised and enlarged by their author, appeared last year as a separate volume, under the somewhat defiant title of “The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture.” The last of these […]

[1887] In the opening sentences of a contribution to the last number of this Review,[20] the Duke of Argyll has favoured me with a lecture on the proprieties of controversy, to which I should be disposed to listen with more docility if his Grace’s precepts appeared to me to be based upon rational principles, or […]

[1887] If there is any truth in the old adage that a burnt child dreads the fire, I ought to be very loath to touch a sermon, while the memory of what befell me on a recent occasion, possibly not yet forgotten by the readers of the Nineteenth Century, is uneffaced. But I suppose that […]

[1889] Charles, or, more properly, Karl, King of the Franks, consecrated Roman Emperor in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day, A.D. 800, and known to posterity as the Great (chiefly by his agglutinative Gallicised denomination, of Charlemagne), was a man great in all ways, physically and mentally. Within a couple of centuries after his death Charlemagne […]

[1891] In the course of a discussion which has been going on during the last two years,[46] it has been maintained by the defenders of ecclesiastical Christianity that the demonology of the books of the New Testament is an essential and integral part of the revelation of the nature of the spiritual world promulgated by […]

[1887] Next to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending investigations, the intellectual sin which is commonest and most hurtful to those who devote themselves to the increase of knowledge is the omission to profit by the experience of their predecessors recorded in the history of science and philosophy. It is true that, at […]