the doctrine of immortality. Physiology and psychology have indeed
emphasized the difficulties of conceiving a thinking mind without a
nervous system. Some are sanguine enough to think that, by scientific
examination of psychical phenomena, we may possibly come to know whether
the “spirits” of dead people exist. If the existence of such a world of
spirits were ever established, it would possibly be the greatest blow
ever sustained by Christianity. For the great appeal of this and of some
other religions

[198] lies in the promise of a future life of which otherwise we should
have no knowledge. If existence after death were proved and became a
scientific fact like the law of gravitation, a revealed religion might
lose its power. For the whole point of a revealed religion is that it is
not based on scientific facts. So far as I know, those who are
convinced, by spiritualistic experiments, that they have actual converse
with spirits of the dead, and for whom this converse, however delusive
the evidence may be, is a fact proved by experience, cease to feel any
interest in religion. They possess knowledge and can dispense with
faith.

The havoc which science and historical criticism have wrought among
orthodox beliefs during the last hundred years was not tamely submitted
to, and controversy was not the only weapon employed. Strauss was
deprived of his professorship at Tübingen, and his career was ruined.
Renan, whose sensational Life of Jesus also rejected the supernatural,
lost his chair in the Collège de France. Büchner was driven from
Tübingen (1855) for his book on Force and Matter, which, appealing to
the general public, set forth the futility of supernatural explanations
of the universe. An attempt was made to chase Haeckel from Jena. In
recent years,