“ Looking at the worlds of faith and doubt as they have actually been for centuries past, we should say without hesitation that the so-called truth — and rightly so called, if we think only of the intellectual kernel of doctrine — has misunderstood error no less gravely, and sometimes much more disastrously, than error has misunderstood truth. ”

“ But instead of insisting that sin is so hateful because it is an offence against an Infinite Being, we hold that the true order of thought to be that it is so great an offence against an Infinite Being because it is so intrinsically hateful. The infinitude of the Being who abhors sin does not make sin any the worse. ”

“ We do not hold the truth, so far as we hold that all agnosticism is per verse and wilful. But then, that shows that the truth which can understand error must, if it be the truth of fallible men, contain a very much larger proportion of charity than of mere intellectual accuracy. ”

“ The Catholics’ exaggeration of the “glory of Gods’ as the aim of all right action, confuses and obscures instead of illuminating their very true teaching as to the infinite and mysterious hatefulness of sin. It is not, so far as we can judge, in the least by deriving the hatefulness of sin from the infinitude of the Being to whom it is hateful, that Catholics will succeed in implanting in agnostics that profound dread of it, which they are quite rightly eager to inspire. ”

“ Just as the worldly man can never come into real contact with the true religious life without being conscious that there is in it something which he cannot explain away, so the historian can never come into contact with the story of revelation without being conscious that he is face to face with the real manifestation of an invisible righteousness which thoroughly comprehends man, however little man may comprehend his deeper counsels, and however resolutely man may wander from his appointed ways. ”

“ Wilfrid Ward does, that nothing is so likely to undermine agnosticism as direct contact with those whose life is wholly rooted in the spiritual world, and who live for God in all the actions and thoughts of their life. ”

“ John Morley and George Eliot have offered of the Christian life, is by getting men to see how totally different in point of fact is the amiability which actually springs from those naturalistic motives of action, and the spiritual life which really finds all its nourishment and all its joy — and so much more joy than others find even in the most disinterested service of humanity — in the service of God. ”

“ Ward is certainly on the right tack when he says that the most formidable of the sceptics are those who admit the beauty and nobility of the Christian life, but who explain it by natural causes, and without assuming any belief in God. ”

“ Ward himself shows, by trying to persuade his brother Catholics that agnostics are often sincere and ear nest men whose minds are eager for the light, though they appear so impervious to that species of truth which we call religious. ”