The service rendered to humanity by Mr. Herbert Spencer in the elaboration of the Synthetic Philosophy, should command the admiration and gratitude of all broad-minded men. There are certain fallacies in the argument by which Religion is relegated into the "Unknowable," however, to which it will be the purpose of this essay to call the reader's attention. If Religion really be, by its very nature, unknowable, it follows that as man grows in intelligence, the extent to which it occupies his thought will tend to diminish towards final extinction. It is a thoroughly wholesome state of affairs that, like all things which claim our consideration, Religion should again and again be compelled to step into the arena to vindicate its right to hold sway over humanity. Nor is the attitude of many minds which places Religion upon the defensive, unreasonable, or the outgrowth of a perverse spirit, but, on the contrary, it results from the questionings of those eager to find the truth and anxious to "prove all things" and cast error aside. Let us see if Religion can withstand the fierce onslaught, threatening its very life, which Mr. Spencer makes in his "First Principles" (pp. 3-123). Our author's first attempt is to "form something like a general theory of current opinions," so as neither to "over-estimate nor under-estimate their worth." As a special case from the examination of which he hopes to derive a general method, he traces the evolution of government from the beginning until now. It is held that no belief concerning government is wholly true or false; "each of them insists upon a certain subordination of individual actions to social requirements.... From the oldest and rudest idea of allegiance, down to the most advanced political theory of our own day, there is on this point complete unanimity." He speaks of this subordination as a postulate "which is, indeed, of self-evident validity," as ranking "next in certainty to the postulates of exact science." As the result of his search for "a generalization which may habitually guide us when seeking for the soul of truth in things erroneous," he concludes: "This method is to compare all opinions of the same genus; to set aside as more or less discrediting one another those various special and concrete elements in which such opinions disagree; to observe what remains after the discordant constituents have been eliminated, and to find for the remaining constituent that abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent modifications."