AN AGNOSTICS PROGRESS FROM THE KNOWN TO THE UNKNOWN.

Anyone who has related stories to children knows with what jealous fidelity they make the narrator follow the original text. "So, as Don Quixote and Sancho were talking what should they see but fifteen or twenty windmills." "No, it was thirty or forty," insist the little listeners with grave reproof. Something of our old childish conservatism makes the first glances into "An Agnostics's Progress " (Messrs. Williams and Norgate, London) a little disconcerting. For the man whose pilgrimage we follow here, though we first meet him in rags and sore distress, though we find him harassed from within and from without, is strangely unlike our old friend Christian. The new pilgrim sets out indeed upon a journey in consternation and heaviness of spirit, but the city he leaves behind him is the stronghold of orthodoxy, and the guide to whom he commits himself is no infallible evangelist who calls aloud to the very heavens for confirmation of what he says, and is answered by visible signs and wonders. Quæstor, the Agnostic, sets out under the guidance of experiences, resolute in one belief—that he can take no man's words and on ecclesiastical interpretation as the basis of his belief; that the individual exercise of individual reason and the sincere study of the knowledge laboriously won by man from life and nature through past ages must constitute the final test of what can be known. But many a fear weakens his heart, and many a pang assails him as his old spiritual guides cry out in stern denunciation of the tempter who would lead him to destruction, and old friends seek to who him back to the positive creed and the belief of his youth. But even as his prototype was representative of only a narrow phase of Protestantism, so Quaestor from the first belonged to the section who take hold of the material rather than the spiritual side of religion. "Who knows," he cries in his despair, " when I shall be called to the beyond ? and who knows what shall befall me there?" The fear from which he seeks deliverance is not the dread of offending God, and of losing the higher aspirations of the soul in the passion-tossed ocean of life. All his early thoughts and cares are, as he says "to save myself from the powers of the beyond." In this respect Quæstor has more affinity with Bunyan's pilgrim than with the agnostic of the present day, who has learned to fear rather that there is no hereafter at all, and spends no terror on the possible life that awaits him beyond the grave. It is not the "fear that kills" which drives so many of our modern thinkers to open revolt or passive indifference with regard to dogmatic creeds. It is the spectacle of a world full of sorrow and suffering and moral degradation ; of a world in which countless millions of human beings are doomed before their birth to utter misery by hereditary taint, by hopelessly immoral surroundings, and by diseases that the skill of no physician can touch, the spectacle of a world in which the most terrible infamy that can fall upon a woman is connived at by society, and even shamelessly defended by many as a necessary evil. In the face of these and countless other problems equally bewildering, the modern agnostic says to the orthodox believer, "You tell me that the world is under the guidance of One infinitely wise and good and omnipotent. Could it be much worse if all were left to brute force and blind chance ? Confess after all that your litanies and creeds are but the expression of the vague hopes and fears that have originated in the human mind from age to age. You may be right in your beliefs, but you may not. I neither affirm nor deny, but I do say you cannot know —speak you never with so profound a fervor."
We take it the author's purpose in writing "An Agnostic's Progress" on the lines employed by Bunyan was to show how the questions that perplex a thinking man with regard to orthodox beliefs have in modern days changed front; to show that when an inherited creed crumbles away, such a man is too honest to pretend to believe what his reason forces him to reject; and finally to show what motives and helps are afforded by the actual experience of human life to replace in some measure the authoritative utterances that are no longer regarded as a divine revelation. Thus Quaestor hoped to attain truth as the goal of his pilgrimage. He turned his back on the city of superstition unable to take any man's assurance as to what will bring him peace and rest —forced to think and to act for himself in the profound change that has been worked in his mind by the new outlook he has obtained the new motives that shape his course. He studies reverently the sciences that throw light on the past history of the earth and the races that inhabit it. He would have tarried longer were it not that his mission was to teach and work in the world, and not to study in the schools. After leaving the great halls of learning, he went on his way with growing serenity. After this we find Quæstor luxuriating in the perfection of harmony of the palace beautiful in which his knowledge and sympathy with his kind were stimulated and widened. But this also must be left, and then came a terrible encounter once more with superstition, who charged Quæstor with being a recreant, and implored him to return, saying, " For with me only can your feebleness be supported by omnipotence and your sinfulness be hidden in the spotless robes of righteousness offered to you again and again, but stubbornly and haughtily rejected." As a crowning argument superstition is made to say—" Your new masters offer you nothing at all." "Nay," said Quæstor, "they offer me light and liberty, and a life of service and noble deeds."
It is from no desire to find fault that we take exception to the inference contained in this reply. That many great and noble souls have been unable to accept the truths dearest to Christianity we know. That the tide of modem thought and scientific research have set against the acceptance of definite dogmas is undeniable. But the light that comes with pure love of God and a passionate devotion to the highest interests of our race, the liberty that comes with the renunciation of self-seeking, the renunciation of the world the flesh and the devil; the lives of unselfish service that have been lived by the obscurest followers of Christ; the noble deeds that have been wrought in every land in which His name has sounded like a clarion to awaken men and women from the lethargy of self indulgence, of vanity and carnal pleasure— where do we find even a faint reflection of these when we leave the countries in which Christianity has flourished? All that agnosticism, that positivism, that freethought in any form have yet accomplished for the spiritual regeneration of mankind, sinks into utter insignificance when compared with what has been achieved by faith in a crucified Lord. And when we revert to the joyous sensuousness of the pagans at their very best, the comparison is even more striking. For, as Hegel says, that natural elation of soul which characterised the Greeks did not rise to the subjective freedom of the Ego itself; to the inwardness that belongs to the Christian religion; to the recognition of spirit as a definite positive being. When "the fretful stir unprofitable, and the fever of the world" have wearied and jaded the spirit; when the egoistic injustice that is so often allied with power repels us; when the hopeless degradation in which so many of our land are sunk appals us, it is the memory and the communion of souls that are aflame with the love of God which have most influence in keeping at bay the cynical scepticism that is apt to grow on us as to the dignity and moral worth of human life. When we are most oppressed with the

Heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world

the men and women who give renewed nobility to life are not Christians of the contemptible Metus kind whose highest conception of religion is but a gross "other-worldliness," who tell us that we are to do good in order to be rewarded, and to hold to doctrines we no longer believe, lest hereafter, if not in this world, we should be punished. No, it is those who by the denial of self and an unfaltering self-devotion make the world purer and better, who are unwearied in well doing, who dread what is crooked and impure more than the bitterest poverty, who look with faith and longing to a life beyond as a life of infinite love and purity where all that is best in human nature will develop and grow strong. "Poor and ragged and crippled as you see me, this is all I have gained by many years of waiting and of effort under your direction," Quaestor says to Metus, who has been his priest.
It is the radical weakness of Banyan's Parable that all who differed from his pilgrim are doomed creatures. The book its a unique exposition of that painfully contracted form of belief which represents a small chosen number as the sole recipients of heaven's eternal blessings. Without is the great wilderness of the world in which lost souls wander, while this select flock is guided by supernatural signs and wonders, fed with manna and quails till they are safely penned in that impossible paradise of Oriental indolence and material splendor, which dull fanatics have preached till they made ardent souls fear rather than hope for immortality. "He saves the sheep, the goats be doth not save" is the text Bunyan preached with sickening reiteration. Before enquiring what is the leading motive of the "Agnostic's Progress" let us briefly follow Quæstor to the close of his pilgrimage. After his sore contest with superstition he is overtaken by Gracious, a tender yet courageous maiden, who with fear and misgiving has left the familiar paths, and who holds on the way with Quæstor till they passed through the valley of the shadow of death, and reached the camps of Giant Pagan and Giant Pope. To the seductive influences of the latter Gracious, who had at the best been but a shrinking wayfarer in the unknown path, followed by Quæstor, finally yielded herself, while her companion disdaining alike the frivolousness of the Pagan crew, "and the slavish superstition of the opposite camp," went sadly on his way. At last he arrived at Vanity Fair, where his special mission was for truth and justice. He found much to marvel at and to deplore, and the strange power of sympathy which he possessed seemed to give him an instinctive knowledge of the sorrows, the failings, and the sins of the people. After he had looked round the great city, seething with the tumult of life—the mad race for wealth, for pleasure, for notoriety or distinction in every form— Quæstor settled down to earn his own living. " This necessary duty was the best excuse which the selfish and unscrupulous had to offer for being of no service and often for being of positive dis-service to their fellows; but our pilgrim knew his vocation better, and in his hours of work and of leisure he felt the claims of his brethren and his sisters always strong upon him. The calling which he chose for himself was that of a writer.

He took such cognizance of men and things

If any beat a horse you felt he knew,

If any cursed a woman he took note.

In Vanity Fair Quaestor met with nearly all those whom he had seen or known previously among them. Gracious, who under the guidance of Father Boniface, worked with other sisters among the poor, and the sick, and the sinful, to Quæstor seemed "the general-in-chief." His "courage and his enterprise, if there was any wrong that could be righted at once; his patience and his persistence, if there was aught that could only be remedied after long delay, and perhaps not by himself, but by others coming after, for whom he might clear the way a little; his forbearance with the stupid and the illogical; his trenchant denunciations of evil that was strong and set up in high places; his inspiring encouragements to those that were weak and faltering—all was known to Gracious ; and though such work on the part of an unbeliever who utterly rejected the faith on which her life was anchored confuted and somewhat disquieted her, yet made her work better and her own influence of a higher character than if she had blindly walked in the path marked out for her by Boniface."
At last the time comes for Quæstor to leave Vanity Fair and accomplish what was still before him of the journey to the Home of Truth. On his way he fell into the hands of Giant Despair, and was for a time immured in the castle of Pessimism. But from this snare also he escaped, and, at last reached the land of Beulah, where, "what is the Command of the conscience is the delight of the soul. Self-questioning seems to cease, and the better nature expands in the kindly air. And here Quæstor found that he had reached the Home of Truth—at least as far as truth could be contained in any locality; for it is ever enlarging and widening, and he even at this latest stage of his journey was still a modest learner, who reached forward to higher and greater issues than he had attained to." Here, also, Quaestor was cheered by the presence of Gracious, and her face was the last that he looked on as she held up the symbol of her faith before his eyes.
Such is a brief survey of Quaestor's pilgrimage. The author's design in writing it is clear. It is to give us in symbolic fashion the picture of a man who is compelled to abjure allegiance to church and creed. He must hear and see for himself what the schools have to say and what life has to teach. He is almost against his will forced to see that the men who profess to give spiritual guidance have no authoritative hold on the human intellect. He asks—How do you know that these splendid promises, these tremendous threats that you by turns hold out, are really true? And in the din of sects and the bitter antagonisms of widely differing beliefs he discerns no sure, no heaven-appointed guide. What men so confidently affirm of God and immortality may be true, but he decides that as for him his work in this life must be done irrespective of the magnificent expectations that are so dear to the heart of humanity. And so he takes up his work in the world, which is to labor to the utmost on behalf of his fellow-men. He has broken away from those who call themselves by the name of Christ, but he has not and cannot dissever himself from the mighty impulse which the teaching of Christ has given to mankind.
Renan, in his "Recollections," refers to a legend popular in Brittany, of a town called Is, supposed to have been swallowed up by the sea at some unknown time. The fisher folk aver that the spires of the churches may be seen in the hollow of the waves when the sea is rough, while during a calm the music of their bells ringing out the hymn appropriate to the day rises above the water. The churches of Is, to quote what Renan said of himself, are still at the bottom of Quæster's heart, and the bells call him to prayers. But instead of reciting an ave or going to confession he visits the fatherless and the dying and the widows in their affliction; he does battle to the uttermost for the true and just, and no strain of self-seeking will tempt him to utter conventionalities with his lips which he does not believe in his heart. And finally, Quæstor is one of many whom the bigotry and ignorance of sectaries have driven into so-called scepticism. The presumptuous dogmatising about matters that are no part of true religion threatens more and more to close the churches against the minds that are imbued with the knowledge and culture of our age. But now as of old the Master's words are true, that those who do not work against Him are for Him.

 The South Australian Advertiser 23 March 1885,