Widnes Examiner. — 1892-12-17 (Widnes, Cheshire, England)

THE LAST SHOT FROM A BORROWED BLUNDERBUSS. Sir,—Did I seek to snatch cheap victory from small op ponents, I might raise the shout of triumph, and call your readers' attention to the way in which our "Learner" • retires from the contest, snarling with tail depressed,but with a parting salute from his borrowed blunderbuss. It would be easy to show that this too backward "Learner," like the naughty boy, is good only at "calling names." But I very much prefer to attempt to draw good from our correspondent rather than perpetuate rancorous evil. I quite expect many to differ from me in my presentation of things as they strike me ; in doing so let them only give a reason for their dissidence, and I shall have no complaint to make.  The essential features of this correspondence are Agnosticism and Evolution. My contention is,that Agnosticism is, in the present stage of human knowledge, the bourne and final destination of all consistent and continuouS reasoning on the subject. As to evolution, it is the only rational explanation of the appearance of things around us ; its alternative, specific creation, being now relegated tothe limbo of detected delusion. No one,unprepared with a sound alternative explanation of natural phenomena, can reasonably reject evolution. But let it be noted that I spoke of consistent and continuous reasoning on the subject. It is the want of this continuous and consistent reasoning that makes the world so full of other than Agnostics and Evolutionists. When men mount the Car of Logic,it should be with the full determination to go with it whithersoever and as far as ever it will carry them. Instead of this,they use it—if used at ali— as they would a railway, to take them where they wish off, and allow the conveyance to to go, when they drop go on without them.. New,logic is like the ever-progressive steam leg of Miss Kilmanseg ; when once started it carries its owner (or present occupier), nolens tolens,' whithersoever it will, until the motive power is spent. The denominations affort. excellent examples of this ratiocinative suicide by jumping from the onwardmoving vehicle of rational thought. From Roman Catholicism through Anglicanism anil Unitarianism up to Agnosticism, we have a fine gradation illustrating the "go as you will "in place of the" go as you ought " mode of logical conveyance. All these fprens of religious thought have been in advance of their times. They have each one of them being the more or less logical termini of their Periods. To change the metaphor, each by standing upon the ratiocinative ruins of its predecessor has got a better view and more extended horizon. Greekism and Romanism are the negation of religious thought ; Unitarianism is the acme of Christion religions thought. But while the latter sect claim to be the summit of religious thought, they have but dropped from the car at a convenient halting place. The vehicle of thought is still moving and has left them to die, denominationally, where their parents or guardians placed them. This essentially human feature of sticking where our early training left us is no virtue, but merely the result of an instinctive attachment to the habitual.  Now where, among all the sects, our inchoate friend " A Learner may be I know not, but certain it is that he, like the small-beer toper an "get no furrarder." Nor can we wonder at this, remembering the astounding specimenc cf unreasoning with which be has favoured us. To my thinking" A Learner "is to some extent a type of the times. We are in a state of transition. The