These definitions of these words were prepared more than a year ago, at the special written request of Rev. Lyman Abbott, D. D., the pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn; and the list is a copy of the first rough draft or study made in compliance with that request, but, for reasons unnecessary to explain here, has not yet been presented to him. For what use these definitions were intended by him I am neither authorized nor prepared to positively state. Dr. Abbott is in special charge of theology, liturgies, and ecclesiastical history, as editorial contributor, under the chief editorship of Prof. William D. Whitney, in the preparation of The Century Dictionary, which is an encyclopedic dictionary of the English language, now in course of publication by the Century Company, the first volume of which now lies before me. . .. In Volume I the words agnostic and agnosticism are defined at length, with references to Huxley, Romanes, and Cobbe, and to the source of the suggestion of the same by Prof. Huxley in the mention by St. Paul of the altar he had seen erected by the Athenians to the Unknown God.[1]
As I have previously informed you, early in his pastorship of Plymouth Church, Dr. Abbott declared his belief in the evolution philosophy, and his high sense of the value of its co-operation in the religious work of the future. He is also the editor of The Christian Union, the leading liberal religious newspaper in America. His position as such may be stated to be evangelical-liberal, or conservative-progressive, with the promise of moving faster and further, as soon as circumstances permit. Practically, things are in a ferment in all religious denominations in America at this time; or, to speak more accurately, we seem to be entering a new constructive period, and one which furnishes agnosticism and evolution their great religious opportunity.
In the statement referred to I have used the words metagnostic and metagnosticism to preserve or make parallelism in form with the words agnostic and agnosticism, to which the public eye and ear have now become accustomed, and to the better present the expressive antithesis involved therein. I am, however, fully aware that a word-form and meaning directly derived from the word metanoeite (metanoeo), which is the actual word placed in the mouth of Christ by and through the Greek original, would have certain great advantages. Prominent among them would be the ever-present evidence it would furnish that in the gospel, as actually preached by Christ and his immediate contemporaries and handed down to us, so far as we know it, the human mind was to occupy the leading place, to be elevated, and
- ↑ The authority of the Century Dictionary for this erroneous explanation of Prof. Huxley's derivation of the word "agnostic" (see letter from Prof. Huxley) was the New English Dictionary.
