known to fulfil its needs and satisfy its aspirations? Agnosticism is
thus directly destructive of it. We cannot, indeed, prove God as the
conclusion of a syllogism, for He is the primary hypothesis of all
proof. But, nevertheless, we cannot reach Him without knowledge. Emotion
reveals no object, but is consequent upon the revelation of it; feeling
yields no truth, but is the witness of the worth of a truth for the
individual. If man were shut up to mere feeling, even the awe of the
devout agnostic would be impossible. For the Unknowable cannot generate
any emotion. It appears to do so, only because the Unknowable of the
agnostic is not altogether unknown to him; but is a vast, abysmal
"Something," that has occupied with its shadowy presence the field of
his imagination. It is paganism stricken with the plague, and philosophy
afflicted with blindness, that build altars to an unknown God. The
highest and the strongest faith, the deepest trust and the most loving,
come with the fullest knowledge. Indeed, the distinction between the awe
of the agnostic, which is the lowest form of religion, and that highest
form in which perfect love casteth out fear, springs from the fuller
knowledge of the nature of the object of warship, which the latter
implies. Thus, religion and morality grow with the growth of knowledge;
and neither has a worse enemy than ignorance. The human spirit cannot
grow in a one-sided manner. Devotion to great moral ends is possible,
only through the deepening and widening of man's knowledge of the nature
of the world. Those who know God best, render unto Him the purest
service.

So evident is this, that it seems at first sight to be difficult to
account for that antagonism to the intellect and distrust of its
deliverances, which are so emphatically expressed in the writings of
Browning, and which are marked characteristics of the ordinary religious
opinion of our day. On closer examination, however, we shall discover