This austere faith owed much to the qualities of those who preached it. Their wide culture, their power of literary expression,[44] their intellectual vigour, and above all their moral earnestness and social enthusiasm recommended what had otherwise seemed a barren and unpromising creed. The generous humanitarian sympathies of Comte supplied the idealistic elements without which no faith can become popular, and the apparent stability of its scientific basis seemed to those impatient of speculative doubt, a great rock in a desert of shifting sand. This new scientific Humanism had an immense vogue, and its effects upon national life were, on the whole, of a quite healthy character. Occasional lapses into intolerance, no doubt, occurred; but much may be excused in the self-confidence of a new faith, not yet tested by the experiences and the criticisms of years. THEOLOGICAL POLEMICS.--The attacks of orthodox apologists upon this new orientation, though carried through with the best intentions, were too often conducted on mistaken lines and certainly on too narrow a front. A particular theory of scriptural inspiration (now widely abandoned), and of the miraculous, seemed to obsess the controversialists. Nor were the Agnostics (it must be confessed) any more alive to the real issues. Hence, to the modern student, an oppressive atmosphere of deadness and sterility seems to brood over these vigorous but superannuated polemics; and hence the complete oblivion into which this literature has fallen. The saying is profoundly true that "nothing so quickly waxes old as apologetics." Even the contributions to the subject by so accomplished a journalist as Huxley--his _Essays on Science and Christian Tradition_--can only be read by those whom an almost Teutonic industry characterises. Once so eagerly perused and earnestly pondered, the controversial literature of this interesting epoch (which now seems so remote) reposes on the higher shelves of libraries, accumulating the peaceful dust of oblivion. These projectiles have, in fact, done their work, and if they have proved less fatal than was hoped by those who launched them, they were dispatched with good intentions, and their explosion cleared the air.