We must, they think, have avowedly a
heavenly background to the world, but our gaze should be restricted
habitually within the visible horizon. The future life is to tinge the
general atmosphere, but not to be offered as a definite goal of action
or a distinct object of contemplation.
The persons against whom, so far as I know, the charge of materialism
can be brought with the greatest plausibility at the present day are
those who still force themselves to bow before the most grossly material
symbols, and give a physical interpretation to the articles of her
creed. A man who proposes to look for God in this miserable world and
finds Him visiting the diseased imagination of a sickly nun, may perhaps
be in some sense called a materialist, and there is more materialism of
this variety in popular sentimentalisms about the "blood of Jesus" than
in all the writings of the profane men of science. But in a
philosophical sense the charge rests on a pure misunderstanding.
The man of science or, in other words, the man who most rigidly confines
his imagination within the bounds of the knowable, is every whit as
ready to protest against "materialism" as his antagonist.
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