As nations advanced in civilisation there has always been a tendency among the higher and purer minds to relegate the Great First Cause further and further back into the unknown, and to divest it of anthropomorphic attributes. When Socrates said, ‘that divinely revealed wisdom of which you speak, I deny not, inasmuch as I do not know it; I can only understand human reason,’ he spoke the identical language of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and those leaders of modern thought whom theologians call agnostics. Even in religions based on the idea of a single anthropomorphic Deity the same tendency often appears among the highest thinkers. Thus Emmanuel Deutsch, in his learned work on the Talmud, tells us, ‘Its first chapter treats of the Deity as conceived by Jewish philosophy. The existence of God is, of course, presupposed. But what of His attributes? Has He any? Scripture literally taken seems to affirm this. Yet taken in a higher sense, as understood by the Alexandrines, the Talmud, and the Targum, it denies it.’ The great Jewish doctors, Ibn Ezra, Jehuda Hilmi, and Maimonides, take this view of a divine origin shrouded in ineffable mystery. Maimonides says, ‘If you give attributes to a thing, you define this thing, and defining a thing means to bring it under some head, to compare it with something like it. God is sole of His kind. Determine Him, circumscribe Him, and you bring Him down to the modes and categories of created things.’ Even St. Paul says, ‘O the depths of God. How unsearchable are His judgments, and how inscrutable His ways’; and the Creed of our own Church, in the midst of a string of definitions all implying that God is comprehensible, has the words ‘the Father incomprehensible.’ It is evident that the reasons why these anticipations of the prevailing tendency of modern thought only appeared by glimpses, and among a very limited number of philosophic minds, arose from the fact that the miraculous theory of the universe everywhere prevailed. Every unusual occurrence was supposed to be owing to the direct supernatural interference of a Being acting in the main with human attributes, and therefore to be a direct refutation of the theory which denied the possibility of defining His attributes, and relegated Him to the dim distance of an incomprehensible Creator. With the utter breakdown of the miraculous theory, and the certainty that all the countless varieties of the universe arise, not from special interferences, but from one original impress, this theory of a reverent and devout agnosticism becomes impregnable and holds the field against all rivals. It, and it alone, is consistent with the facts of science, the deductions of reason, the axioms of morality, while at the same time it denies nothing, and leaves an ample background on which to paint the visions of faith, and to reflect back to us spectral images of our hopes and fears, our longings and aspirations.