Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism

58 SPIRITUAL SABBATHISM
Mansel, in his famous lectures on the hmits of religious
thought, ended in blank agnosticism. God
is wholly unknowable. But if unknowable, why
God? Why not, with Spencer, merely the Unknowable?
Mr. Benn, the materialist, gloats over
Mansel's conclusion.
It Is not for us to call God unknowable. That
is much too "practical" a conclusion. It is of a
piece with the excessive practicality of those good
people who have refused to support colleges and
laboratories, and have seen no use for higher mathematics.
God sends severe or gentle retribution to
such men. Too often he is obliged to throw important
discoveries into the hands of men who are
not ordinarily called religious.
His gentle retributions
come in the way of wireless telegraphy, or redeemed
farms, or antitoxin.
The last named blessing
we owe to two men—one a German and one a
Japanese—neither of whom would pass muster as
a "practical" man or as an orthodox Christian.
But Behring and Kitasuto loved their laboratory and
they loved mankind, and they have their reward.
We need then to look deep enough to see that In
all abstract and abstruse thinking there is an element
of the eternal, an element which may serve spiritual
ends. The mathematics which gave us wireless
telegraphy are timeless, and enable us to conquer