Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought

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JAMES WALKER, D.D., LL.D.,

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ASPECTS OF

RELIGIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC

THOUGHT

BY THE LATE

EICHAKD HOLT HUTTON

SELECTED FROM THE SPECTATOR

AND EDITED BY HIS NIECE

ELIZABETH M. ROSCOE

3Lond(m
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1899

All rights reserved

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First Edition, April
Reprinted^ May, 1899

I

1

In publishing the following collection of essays
selected from the articles in the Spectator by my
uncle, the late Mr. R. H. Hutton, I wish grate-
fully to acknowledge the kindness and generosity
of his co-editor and intimate friend, Mr. Meredith
Townsend.

The essays are published as they appeared in that
journal, with many others of a like nature, week
by week and year after year.

They were written amid the stress and strain of
arduous political and literary editorial work.

E. M. R.

And what are things eternal ? — powers depart,
Possessions vanish, and opinions change,
And passions hold a fluctuating seat :
But, by the storms of circumstance unshaken,
And subject neither to eclipse nor wane,
Duty exists ; — immutably survive,
For our support, the measures and the forms,
Which an abstract intelligence supplies ;
Whose kingdom is, where time and space are not.
Of other converse which mind, soul, and heart,
Do, with united urgency, require,
What more that may not perish ? — Thou, dread source,
Prime, self-existing cause and end of all
That in the scale of being fill their place ;
Above our human region, or below,
Set and sustained ; —

• • • • • «

Thou, Thou alone
Art everlasting, and the blessed Spirits,
Which Thou includest, as the sea her waves :
For adoration Thou endur'st ; endure
For consciousness the motions of Thy will ;
For apprehension those transcendent truths
Of the pure intellect, that stand as laws
(Submission constituting strength and power)
Even to Thy Being's infinite majesty ! "

Wordsworth. — The Excursion.

CONTENTS

1. Creeds and Worship

2. The Various Causes of Scepticism .

3. The Spiritual Fatigue of the World

4. Religious Uncertainty

PAGE

1

8

17
24

5. The Debts of Theology to Secular Movements 31

6. The Warden of Keble on Difficulties in

Religion 39

7. The Materialists' Stronghold .

8. Professor Clifford on the Sin of Credulity

9. Professor Wace on Belief

10. Professor Tyndall on Materialism .

11. Mr. Martineau on Materialism

12. Dr. Ward on the Divine Pre-Movement

13. The Great Agnostic

14. A Problem arising out of the Decalogue

15. Science and Mystery

45
54
63
71
80
89
99
107
114

X CONTENTS

PAGE

16. Instinct and Design 120

17. Mr. Fowle on Natural Religion . . 128

18. Mr. Justice Fry on Materialism 137

19. Professor Stokes, M.P., on Personal Identity 146

20. The Resurrection of the Body .153

21. The Modern Easter Difficulty 159

22. Dr. Abbott on Natural and Supernatural . 166

23. Mr. Llewelyn Davies on Christian Miracle . 175

24. Cardinal Newman on* Inspiration 182

25. Loss and Gain in Recent Theology . .189

26. Dr. Martineau on Spiritual Authority . . 201

27. The Head Master of Clifton College on the

Theory of Inspiration 209

28. Professor Jowett's Question .... 217

29. Mr. Gladstone and Dr. Liddon on the Bible 224

30. The Sacramental Principle .... 232

31. Prayers for the Dead 239

32. Canon Kingsley on Reasonable Prayer . 245

33. Canon Liddon on Prayer and Miracle . 252

34. Maurice and the Unitarians .... 261

35. Mr. Maurice as Heresiarch .... 268

36. Dr. George MacDonald on Hell . 276

37. Bishop Magee on the Ethics of Forgiveness . 283

38. Mr. Gladstone on the Atonement . 289

CONTENTS

39. Principal Tulloch on Spiritual Evolution

40. Mr. J. S. Mill's Religious Confession

41. Mr. John Morley on Religious Conformity

42. Mr. Arnold's Lay Sermon ....

xi

PAGE

295
302
313
322

43. Matthew Arnold's New Christian Catechism 330

x 44. Agnostic Dreamers 337

45. God, and Ideas of God 345

46. The Limits of Free Will 353

47. The Limits of Divine Power .... 359

48. Human Sympathies and Religious Capacity . 365

49. The Christian Ethics of Forbearance . . 371

50. The Modern Poetry of Doubt .... 377

51. Browning's Theology 387

52. The Humility of Science 394

53. Tennyson's Theology 402

54. The Late Lord Tennyson on the Future Life 409

• /
\

CREEDS AND WORSHIP
1870

Mr. Henry Sidgwiok, in an essay * which indicates
i , the most delicate moral discrimination on the ethics
of subscription and conformity, and as such deserves
the closest attention from all those who take a part
in debates such as those on the Act of Uniformity
and on University Tests, deprecates the use of creeds
in any form of practical devotion on the following
impressive ground : — " If the majority of the mem-
bers of any Church," he argues, "have a right to
claim that the service should be framed to meet
their devotional needs, and therefore in accordance
with their dogmatic convictions, the minority, on the
other hand, may respectfully urge that these dog-
matic convictions need not be introduced in such a
manner as to give the maximum of offence to those
who do not hold them, and at the same time produce
the minimum of devotional effect. The formal recital
of creeds is neither a natural expression of the senti-

1 The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription. By Henry
Sidgwick, M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
London : Williams and Norgate.

8 B S>

2 CREEDS AND WORSHIP i

ment of worship, nor obviously effective in stimu-
lating devotion; and the proper place for such
abridged statements of doctrine, even supposing
them accurately to express the convictions of the
existing generation of Churchmen (which can hardly
be said of the present Creeds), would appear to be
a manual of instruction rather than a formula of
worship." Nothing certainly could warrant the
introduction of any avowal into a devotional service,
intended for men of many shades of belief, which
gives " the maximum of offence to those who do not
hold it, and at the same time produces the minimum
of devotional effect ; " but Mr. Sidgwick, in thus
judging of the function and effect of recited
creeds, and in describing them as being merely
"abridged statements of doctrine," misses entirely,
as it seems to me, the mood of sentiment which
^ originally caused their introduction into acts of
worship, and the secret of the power they still exer-
ts cise. In fact, the very intellectual bewilderments
and scepticisms which make men so reluctant to sign
creeds, and so anxious to simplify them, lend an
immeasurable depth of gratitude and even joy to the
confession of the solid bases of fact, in which Chris-
tians find, as they conceive, the historical ground-
work of their faith. In precise proportion to the
number of influences which threaten to undermine
faith, and which embarrass the "dim and perilous
way" to it, whether these be, as in the world of
martyrs, chiefly moral and only secondarily intel-
lectual, or as it may at least often be in our own
day, chiefly intellectual, and only secondarily moral,
in that proportion must be the rest of heart, and the
glad sense of exercising a faculty of vision which
only God's grace can bestow, while confessing

I GREEDS AND WORSHIP 3

tersely, but definitely, the divine facts of a universe ^f
in many of its aspects so troubled, confusing, and !
confused. As it was not enough in the times of /
idolatry to adhere to the devotional forms of Chris-
tian worship, the heart of the Christian almost com-
pelling him to become what was characteristically
called a 'confessor' of the person and power of
Christ, — and this, I take it, not by any means merely
as a sign of open loyalty, but also for the sake of
clearly rehearsing to his own heart the positive
objects of faith on which he finally rested, — so in"
these days of solvent philosophies and critical re-
considerations of history, it is not enough for any :
Christian who can retain his Christian faith at all,
however much that be, to join in the implicit devo-
tional assumptions of his Church ; for he, too, feels >
impelled to acknowledge with a certain wonder and 1
awe the solid rock which he has found for his feet *i
amid the quicksands of speculative thought. In an ;
age when almost every educated man has at some
time or other in his life considered, with more or less
of that dread with which we gaze over the precipice
whither we feel a morbid desire to leap, the doubts
which science has suggested concerning a personal
will in the Creator, — who can by any possibility feel ,
the words, * I believe in God the Father Almighty, j
maker of heaven and earth,' to be, if they come
from his heart, a mere " abridged statement of doc-
trine," and not rather a confession as strange, as
startling, as full of witness to the power of God over
the tangled threads of our infantine thought, as the
confession of the frightened boatmen on the Sea of
Galilee, " What manner of man is this, that even the
winds and the seas obey him ? " In an age which
has seen the Leben Jem of Strauss and the Vie de

4 GREEDS AND WORSHIP I

JSsus translated into almost every European language,
and in which the tremor and vibration which such
books make have spread far beyond the circle of those
who have faced the doubts such books so powerfully
express, who by any possibility can add the confes-
sion " and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,"
whether the words in which His incarnation be
recited express his belief with perfect accuracy or
not, without something of the grateful wonder with
which Lazarus must have heard the voice which
brought him from the tomb, and while still wrapped
r in grave-clothes came forth to answer it 1 In a word,
.' the confession of the revealing Divine acts in which
! we believe, whatever these may be, whether they be
; those of the creeds as they are, or of the creeds as
j we should wish to see them, seems to me one of the
L- most natural and the happiest of the acts of worship,
like the joyful confession of the man born blind,
" One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now
I see." The man who has been wandering by night
upon the mountains does not recall and'describe with a
gladder heart the first glimpse which dawn gave him
of the track he had lost, than that with which one
who has found or recovered his faith in the divine
government of the world and its perfect manifesta-
tion in Christ recites, if he can, the words, ' God of
God, Light of Light, very God of very God/ or, if he
cannot, at least recalls in the simple words of the
earliest creed, the history of that crucifixion, resur-
rection, and ascension which, from doubtful legends,
have become to him the great landmarks both of
human history and of the inward life. The con-
scious rehearsal of the great acts on which the
Christian faith is based seems to me one of the most
simple and natural of the acts of worship, — and

m

I CREEDS AND WORSHIP 5

especially so in an age of bewildering speculation,
when we have begun to trust our own theories less
and less, and to feel that as science must at every
step study anew the facts of nature and return to
them to verify her conclusions, so faith must at
every step study anew the revealing acts of God, J
and return to them to verify her conclusions. The
recitation of the creed is an act of intellectual adora-
tion, in a day when the intellect is the source of
some of the deepest of our troubles. ^

Mr. Sidgwick apparently thinks that there is
something much less jarring to a half-conformist in
hearing devotional assumptions made in which he can
only partly concur, than in hearing the same assump-
tions positively defined by the worshippers as an
express confession of their faith. I cannot say that
I so regard it. And I cannot but think that Mr.
Sidgwick himself so regards it only because he looks
at the creed merely as "an abridged statement of
doctrine, " and not an act of intellectual adoration, —
a recurrence to the ultimate divine facts on which
our own capacity to believe is grounded. But as Dr.
Newman has pointed out in his Grammar of Assent,
that which is a mere abridged statement of doctrine
from one point of view, when you are looking to the
argumentative sources of conviction, may very natur-
ally become an act of living worship from another
point of view, when you are looking to the faith
which has been vouchsafed to you as the spring of
life and hope in a world of perplexity and doubt.
Mr. Clough has somewhere a stanza expressing the
thought that it " fortifies his soul " to remember that
all real truths will remain, and exercise their influ-
ence on the world, even though he himself should
cease to be able to discern them. So a man who

6 CREEDS AND WORSHIP I

gazes on the Alps for the solitary time in his life
feels it fortify his soul to know that they will con-
tinue to stand there in all their silent grandeur,
when he can no longer see them, and long after his
own body is part of the dust of the earth. Precisely
of the same kind is the effect of the recital of their
^ creed on those who believe it. It arrays before their
j minds in all their grandeur and solemnity the great
1 facts on which their faith is based, and reminds
them that those facts are so, whether their attention
"l be drawn to them or not, — are so behind the clouds
of dust in which the world's worries envelope them,
as much as in the transparent moments of devotion,
— in short, that their faith is the consequence of the
existence of these great realities, and that these are
in no degree the dream of their faith. The differ-
ence between this acknowledgment, — this 'confes-
sion,' — and the mere recitation of an ' abridged
statement of doctrine ' as such, seems to me as vast
as the difference between an epitome of the doctrine
of free will and of absolute morality, and the solemn
acknowledgment that there is such an alternative for
the soul as sin or virtue, made by the individual con-
science when the exposition is over. No doubt a
man who in the presence of Necessitarians says
superfluously and perhaps combatively, * I believe in
free will,' may be fairly suspected of wishing to give
battle to those who do not hold it, but the man who,
even though a Necessitarian should be his companion,
while canvassing the nature of a moral peril to
which he was about to be exposed, should exclaim,
"I believe in right and wrong, I believe in free
will," — would never for an instant be accused of
wishing to give the maximum of offence to his com-
panion, while producing the minimum of devotional

o

1 CREEDS AND WORSHIP ' 7

effect on his own mind. Now, what I maintain is
that the creed of the English service is in no way
recited as a provocative to controversial distinctions,
but as a solemn act of spiritual survey over the ^

foundations of faith. Just as a man naturally recalls k o
deliberately the beings for whom he prays and their
needs, before praying for them, so with equal
naturalness he recalls the Being to whom he prays
and His acts, as a mode of deepening the prayer
addressed to Him. What is the most moving prayer
in the litany except the invocation of Christ's help
on the basis of a creed, — " By thine agony and
bloody sweat, by thy cross and passion, by thy
precious death and burial, by thy glorious resurrec-
tion and ascension, and by the coming . of the Holy
Ghost, good Lord deliver us " 1 And what can be
more natural than to survey previously, with a rapid
glance, the great story on which our faith is founded,
that we may distinguish the groundwork of trust
from the superstructure of devotion, and compare
the nature and acts of Him to whom we pray with^^
the long list of our sorrows and our hopes 1 Mr. \
Sidgwick, while making out, I think, an unanswer- !
able case for the frank confession by all thinking
laymen of the points on which they find a difficulty
in accepting the creeds, or even an insuperable
obstacle to concurrence in some of their articles, and
also for a general willingness to reduce the number
of such disputed confessions, has, I also think, quite
failed to realise how substantive an element of
worship the recital of a simple creed, especially in
these distracted times, really is. I suspect that it -
"fortifies the soul" of worship fully as much as
prayer itself can melt or elevate it ^

i

II

THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM

1878

I Mr. Gladstone, in his remarkable article in the
Contemporary Review on " The Sixteenth Century
Arraigned Before the Nineteenth," and Mr. Baldwin
Brown, in his not less remarkable address to the
Congregational Union at Liverpool on Tuesday on
the explanation of the great sceptical movements of
*v the day, strike the same note. They hold that the

, truest explanation of the shortcomings of scepticism
in our generation is the fault of the orthodoxy of the

'^ previous generation. It was the practical paganism
of the Catholic world, say both, which gave rise to
the Reformation ; and it was the onesidedness of the
various Reformers which gave rise to the intellectual
revolts of the later heresiarchs. Thus Mr. Baldwin

, Brown holds that it was Calvinism which caused

1 Unitarianism. " Take the Unitarian heresy in modern
times. He held that the high Calvinistic theology,
coming perilously near, as it did, to the presentation
of an interior discord in the Triune Nature, which
was harmonised by the Atonement, almost inevitably
developed a community which could see only the
unity, and felt itself called to bear witness to the

II THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM 9

vital aspect of that truth to the world." And no
doubt not only is there very great truth in the general
doctrine that the degeneracy of a great faith almost
inevitably leads to the sincere proclamation of some
half-true but energetic doctrine which is the natural
protest against the spurious form in which that faith
has been held, — just as idolatrous tendencies in
Christianity directly promoted the spread of Mahom-
medanism, — but those who know the history of |
Calvinism and Unitarianism know how much there
is to be said for Mr. Baldwin Brown's special illustra-
tion of it. At the same time, I cannot believe that
explicit reaction against a degenerate and implicitly
heterodox faith is the sufficient explanation of all
such forms of error. Else what are we to say to the ^
widespread atheism, — or to the still more dangerous,
because colder and more indifferent, secularism, — of
the present day 1 Is that to be explained as a legiti-
mate reaction against the hollo wness of any previous
form of religious faith ? It can hardly be true that !
all falsehood is half-truth, and is the proper cure for
some deficiency in the previous profession of the truth.
It may well be indeed that while the people of Europe
were slowly learning to believe in a righteous and
loving God, it was impossible for them to be taught
to believe in physical law ; and it may also be that
now when the people of Europe are being taught the
meaning and uses of physical law, it is not very easy
for them to retain at the highest point, — the point of
truth, — their belief in a righteous and loving God.
Nobody can say that in dealing with " such creatures
as we are, in such a world as the present," it is easy
to give us a firm grasp of any great class of truths
whatever without loosening our grasp on some other
class of truths, perhaps nobler and more vital, though

10 THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM II

it may be also, for that very reason, a class of truths
less difficult to recover. Still, this is a very different
thing from saying that every form of explicit error is
due to reaction against some still more serious implicit
error in the faith of our fathers. Voltaire may have
been raised up as a wholesome scourge of selfish
superstitions, and yet it does not follow that every
one who follows Voltaire has been driven into the
rank of his followers by disgust for such superstitions.
/ So far as I can see, the theory that the spiritual and
moral law of action and reaction will account for all
dominant errors, is an exaggeration of the function
of a valuable, though limited principle. Doubtless,
asceticism and monasticism lead to reactions in which
the fibre of human character is dangerously relaxed ;
doubtless, mysticism encourages the growth of ration-
alism, and rationalism in its turn some kind of
v_ regression to idealism and mysticism. Still, these
| complementary phases of faith are not sufficient, or
1 nearly sufficient, to account for all we see ; nor could
; they be so, unless man were indeed alone in the world,
I and the Hegelianism which explains all his convictions
as partly the growth of, and partly the recoil against,
( previous convictions, were true. What it leaves out
of account is the free, reciprocal action — not neces-
sarily determined by any considerations of this sort,
— of God on man, and if I may say so without
irreverence, since this is clearly the teaching of Christ,
I — of man on God. Luther never forgot this most
important of all the explanations of the growth or
-decay of the religious life. " We say to our Lord
God," he said, " that if He will have His Church, He
must keep it, for we cannot keep it ; and if we could,
we should be the proudest asses under heaven. " And
Luther implied, of course, that it might please God

II THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM 11

to humble the Church, to make it feel His presence
less at one time, as well as more at another ; to give
it, for His good purposes, times of aridity, convention-
ality, and artificiality, as well as times of rich and
flowing faith. And if it be true, as Christ teaches,
that man may take the initiative with God, as well
as God with man, — that times of trust are times of
grace, that knocking leads to opening, — that when
man throws himself on God, God pours a new tide
of spiritual life into man, then, surely, one of the
explanations of a want of faith in the invisible is a
previous want of appeal to the invisible, — a self-
occupation in thoughts and things which turn us
away from the invisible, a life of absorption in the
superficial phenomena of existence, a generation of
outward interests and outward service. This is an
explanation almost opposite to that of the law of
action and reaction. That law would suggest that
to an age of too much outwardness and coldness, an
age of pietism or mysticism would inevitably succeed.
Yet such is by no means the universal experience of
men. On the contrary, the age in which it was said
that " the word of the Lord was precious in those
days, — there was no open vision," immediately pre-
ceded the age in which the Jews demanded a king,
because their faith in that succession of divine judges
by which they had been distinguished from the
neighbouring peoples, had in great measure disap-
peared. The times distinguished by the apparent
silence of Heaven frequently lead to periods which are
relatively periods of secularism in human history, not
to periods of true and deep religious life. And the ,
recent access of Atheism seems to be even more due ]
to an apparent dryness of the spiritual life of man /
(which may be quite as much due to the will of

12 THE VAKIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM II

Heaven as to the will of man) than to any reaction
from former superstitions. As Luther would have
said, God has not thought fit to keep His Church as
He once kept it. God may have willed that, for a
time, it would be better for man to try to the full,
what he could, and what he could not do, without
conscious trust in Himself. He may have willed, —
as He certainly appears to have willed during many
generations even of the life of the people who were
specially trained to reveal His mind to the world, —
to withhold that stream of spiritual inspiration which
is perhaps the only thing corresponding, in the religi-
ous life, to what the physicists call " verification " in
the world of positive phenomena. We hear on all
sides the complaint of the Agnostics that it is not
their fault if they do not believe in God, — that they
will believe at once, if His existence can be verified
to them, — that, as Professor Huxley puts it, "no
drowning sailor ever clutched a hen-coop more tenaci-
ously " than they would clutch a belief in God which
could be verified. If they do not exactly cry aloud,
they yet seem to cry under their breath, with the
prophet, " Oh, that thou wouldest rend the heavens,
that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains
might flow down at thy presence ! " — in other words,
that if only something physical might " verify " the
divine presence for them, they would be only too
happy to accept it. And yet in almost the same
breath they declare, — and declare most reasonably, —
that nothing physical could prove it, that happen
what might, they could only interpret any physical
event as a new aspect of nature, that nature is so
large and so elastic, that no room is left in it for
anything physical to rank as supernatural. Well, it is
obvious that such a state of mind as this is one which

II THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM 13

could be changed by the direct touch of the Divine
Spirit, and by that only, — by an event of the soul,
not an event of the body, — by the power which con-
vinces the conscience, not by any power which only
enlarges the experience of the senses.

But it does not follow that because no such event
happens, — because the only verification of which the
case admits, does not take place, — the Agnostic has
either, on the one hand, the least right to suppose
himself entitled to assume the negative view to be
true ; or, on the other hand, may fairly be regarded
by those who do recognise as final evidence, the
influence of God over their soul, as morally inferior
to themselves. Neither of these conclusions is true.
The Agnostic is not right, for his negative experience,
however frequently repeated, cannot outweigh a single
clear experience of a positive kind. But none the
less, he must not, on account of this negative experi-
ence, be treated as morally inferior to one who has
verified the existence of a divine will over him and
in him ; — for if it has been, as doubtless it has, for the
advantage of mankind that hundreds of generations
should have felt the need of high social and moral
laws, before ever social and moral laws were established
and obeyed, and that hundreds of generations more
felt the need of a clear recognition of constant
physical laws, before physical laws were discovered
and turned to account, why should it not also be for
the advantage of man that certain classes, even in the
modern times of larger knowledge and higher aims,
should be taught to feel acutely the need of a divine
light for the true interpretation even of those physical
principles of order, which they are so strenuous in
asserting and enforcing in their apparent divorce from
any spiritual principle ? I may say roughly, — a very

14 THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM n

great thinker indeed did say, — that during the middle-
ages thinking men were chiefly occupied in sounding
their own minds, to see how much light the careful
exploring of those minds might shed on the external
order of things; and that a knowledge of the in-
sufficiency of the study of mind to explain the laws
of matter, was the first step to that true study of the
laws of matter which followed. And I believe that
the eminent Agnostics of the present day may be said
to be discharging the similar function of exaggerating
indefinitely the influence of material laws in things
moral and spiritual, — in order eventually to show
their well-marked limits ; — that they are trying (and
failing) to prove that material laws are the true keys
to the knowledge of mental and moral life, just as
the middle-ages tried and failed to show that moral
and spiritual laws were the true keys to the know-
ledge of material life. And it would be just as
"foolish to suppose the modern physicists inferior to
those who do not fall into their error, only because
they are not equally fascinated by their truths, as it
would have been to denounce the Schoolmen as
morally inferior to the first heralds of the new science,
only for trying to deduce principles of astronomy out
of the a priori and abstract conceptions of the human
mind. The truth is, that in every great stage of
human progress there is, and must be, an undue
appreciation of the step just made. In some sense,
it may be said that Providence is the real cause of
that undue appreciation. It is, of course, the divine
guidance which determines the main lines of direction
and intensity for human thought ; and if the Creator
withdraws Himself at times from the vision of men,
or of some men, it is no doubt for the benefit of all
men that He does so. To speak of those who do not

II THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM 15

themselves see God as " living without God in the
world," is itself atheism. You might as well suppose
that before the atmosphere was recognised as having
weight and substance, men who did not know the
difference between it and a vacuum lived without the
air they breathed. God is not less behind the con-
sciousness of men who have no glimpse of Him
through their consciousness, than He is within the ;
heart of those who worship Him ; and the only real
rejection of God is the resistance to His Word,
whether it be felt as His Word, or only as a mysteri-
ous claim on the human will which it is impossible
adequately to define. I hold that, in a sense, God is ,
Himself, in all probability, no unfrequent cause of \
the blindness of men to His presence. He retires
behind the veil of sense when He wishes us to explore
the boundaries of sense, and to become fully aware of
a life beyond. The physicists in every school are
doing this great work for us now. They are explain-
ing, defining, mapping all the currents of physical
influence, and from time to time crying out, like
Professor Huxley, for " the hen-coop " of which, like
shipwrecked sailors, they see no sign ; like Professor
Tyndall, for the elevating idealism which is conspicu-
ous by its absence in all their investigations ; like
Professor Clifford, for something to replace the theism
of Kingsley and Martineau. To suppose that the
men who are doing this great work,— who are map-
ping for us the quicksands and sunken rocks of
physical scepticism, — are necessarily deserted by God,
because they do not see Him, is to be more truly
atheists than any physicist. There is a scepticism^
which is of God's making, in order that we may see •
how many of the highest springs of human life are
founded in trust, — how everything else fails, even in

,"v

16 THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM II

v the highest minds, to produce order, peace, and calm.
The physicists of to-day are suffering for us, as well
as for themselves. It is their failure to find light,
which will show where the light is not, and also where

' it is. As Mr. Mallock well says, in the best paper
he has yet written — that in the Nineteenth Century, on
■" Faith and Verification," — the pitiful cries of modern
physicists, as they raise their hands to what they
deem a spiritual vacuum, are about the best auguries
we could have that it is not in physical science that

v man can ever find his salvation.

Ill

THE SPIRITUAL FATIGUE OF THE WORLD

1889

Dr. Liddon, in the new volume which he has just
published under the title of Christmas-Tide Sermons,
begins with two striking sermons on St. Thomas, in
which he suggests that one of the modern maladies,
which palliates though it does not justify a good
deal of its unbelief, is "a morbidly active imagina-
tion which cannot acquiesce in the idea of fixed and •
unalterable truth." Such a malady of imagination j
there no doubt is, and it shows itself in morbid ,
activity ; but this morbid activity is more often, I /
believe, the inability to rest which is due to over-
fatigue, than the inability to rest which is due to (
abundance of life, — the restlessness of fever, not the /
restlessness of overflowing vitality. Look at such a
book as Amiel's Journal, of which Mrs. Humphry
Ward has just issued a new edition, with a portrait
in which Amiel looks out upon the world with tired
eyes that seem to be discerning in every new glimpse
they take of life, some fresh difficulty which his
strenuous but wearied soul cannot surmount. " Que N -
vivre est difficile, mon cceur fatigu6 ! " are the }
words with which his long scrutiny of himself con-

8 o

18 THE SPIRITUAL FATIGUE OF THE WORLD ill

eludes ; and perhaps the most characteristic thing in
a journal full of characteristic things is this, — " Am
I not more attached to the ennuis I know, than in
love with pleasures unknown to me?" " Attached
to the ennuis I know " ! — : is it not the condition of
half the souls which are yearning for faith and
unable to attain it ? Shelley declared nearly seventy
years ago : —

" The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last ! "

But since Shelley made that declaration, the world
has grown more weary of the present than it was
then of the past, and now, too, seems to be so weary
of the future that it yearns after some modern form
of the Nirvana doctrine of the Buddhists. When
Mrs. Humphry Ward makes her dying hero, Kobert
Elsmere, declare that he can neither ascribe nor
deny personality or intelligence to God, is it not
obvious that the predominant feeling in that tired
mind which is dying of its spiritual struggles is
something like Amiel's "Que vivre est difficile,
- mon cosur fatigu^ ! " — the difference being, however,
that Amiel was really dying when he so wrote, and
that physical exhaustion may have prompted the
exclamation; while there is no reason at all to
suppose that Mrs. Humphry Ward intended her
imaginary hero's deliberate judgment to be sympto-
matic of the physical exhaustion of his condition.
Kobert Elsmere's fatigue is purely intellectual and
moral, not physical. Yet he can neither affirm nor
deny the eternal spring of life in God, for it is at
[■ least clear that if God may be denied personality and
', intelligence, He must also be denied what forms part
of the very essence of life to all human experience.

*■

III THE SPIRITUAL FATIGUE OF THE WORLD 19

Dr. Liddon might even have suggested, what is not^
I think, at all improbable, that when St. Thomas
anticipated, as he remarks, "something of the posi-
tive spirit of the modern world," and was so anxious
" to escape illusions and to arrive at truth by experi-
ment," that he would trust only his own senses, it
was just because he was more subject than the other
Apostles to this dejection and weariness of the soul.
Does not the suggestion, when Christ prepares to
return to Jerusalem to restore Lazarus to life, " Let
us also go that we may die with him," read like the
cry of an affectionate but weary soul that could see
no end to all the tragic elements which were gather-
ing so thick about our Lord, except death, and had
not a glimpse of the new life and refreshment that
was about to spring from that great collapse of their
recent hopes 1 Indeed, the question which forms the
subject of Dr. Liddon's second sermon on St. Thomas,
"Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how
can we know the way ? " has all the air of a mind
that had almost exhausted itself already in the effort
to follow the vivid but mystic teaching of his master
in tracks to him new and strange ; and if so, there is
less reason to wonder that when he was told that
Christ had appeared to the ten Apostles in Jerusalem,
he found the statement a new demand upon his spiritual
nature to which he was hardly equal, so that he de-
volved, as it were, upon his senses the responsibility of
faith. " Except I shall see in his hands the print of
the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails
and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe."
There is the same tone of fatigued spiritual feel-
ing about a great deal of the scepticism of to-day.
As Dr. Liddon says, men are impressed by the
apparent difficulties of Christianity, and ask to put

20 THE SPIRITUAL FATIGUE OF THE WORLD in

their hands into the print of the nails if they are to
receive it ; but in all probability they would not find
it any the easier to believe if they could do so ; they
would immediately explain it away as subjective
illusion. Most likely they have not vivid life enough
in themselves to enter into so great a manifestation
of the divine life : —

" For we, brought forth and reared in hours
Of change, alarm, surprise,
What shelter to grow ripe is ours,
What leisure to grow wise ? "

Is it not this want of vivid life in themselves which
• ' makes men like Amiel at once unable to believe and

to disbelieve, unable to reject so great and natural a
consolation for the soul as faith, and yet unable to
accept it 1 Dr. Liddon finds fault with the Poet-
/ Laureate for saying : —

" There lives more ifaith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."

But there I think that he does not quite give the
significance which Tennyson meant to be given to
the epithet " honest " doubt. There is a healthy
doubt which may properly be called " honest," and
which is in many men and women the beginning of
true faith ; but it is not the doubt of mere hesitation
and ennui. It is not even the rather sickly faith
which the Poet- Laureate describes in some lines
which perhaps better deserved Dr. Liddon's stricture
than the line praising " honest doubt " : —

" I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,

■P^^BF

III THE SPIRITUAL FATIGUE OF THE WORLD 21

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope. 5 '

This " faint " trusting of the larger hope, this double ^
mind of which the one self shrinks and suffers in the
shadow, while the other only totters feebly towards
the light, betrays, I think, a good deal more of the
morbid tendency of the day, than doubt which faces
calmly and boldly the testing of its true significance.
I feel quite sure that a vast deal of the spiritual
lassitude of the day is due much less to the magni-
tude of the obstacles to hearty faith than to the
fatigue of spirit with which those obstacles are ,
regarded. The modern world is far too full of small '
cares and interests, and the modern conception of life
and its duties is far too favourable to the frittering
away of life on a multitude of petty distractions.
As Dr. Liddon says in the sermon I have referred
to, a great deal of the scepticism of the day is
due to the insufficiency of people's knowledge of
Christianity, to their very superficial acquaintance
with it, the complete absence of any preparation for
sounding its depths, and surveying its wide horizon,
and apprehending the inner harmonies of its spiritual
teaching. And, in fact, this is often impossible with
the meagre amount of life which remains to be
thrown into the search for spiritual truth after all
the other excitements of life have been provided
for. There is now no adequate economy of human
strength for the higher objects of life, too much
a great deal being lavished on its petty interests.
People are attached to their religion much as Amiel
said that he was attached to his emuis. They have

22 THE SPIRITUAL FATIGUE OF THE WORLD III

not the strength requisite either to give it up or to
give themselves up to its demands, and so they
hover in a miserable state of nervous tension on the
boundary that divides faith from doubt, their worldly
energy being diminished by the anxious glances they
cast over their shoulder at the faith which they half-
believe, and their spiritual energy being "sicklied
o'er by the pale cast " of sceptical hesitations. Chris-
tianity cannot be understood in any degree without
being approached with a certain passion both of hope
and fear. The whole history which led up to it, the
whole history which has flowed forth from it, has
been a history of spiritual passion, and there is no
meaning in Christianity at all if it be not true that
divine passion is as deep-rooted in the eternal spirit
as infinite reason itself. If men come to Christ with
exhausted natures they will never know what there
is in Him. And they do come too often to the
study of His teaching with the mere fag-end of their
powers, with heart and mind both battered and
fevered by the contending interests and pleasures of
a life that is much too full of small excitements.
No doubt Christianity offers a new life of its own,
and an inexhaustible spring of that life ; but it offers
it only to those who can give a life for a life, who
can give up the whole mind and heart that a new
mind and a new heart may be substituted in their
place. There must be the power to exult even in
suffering for a great end, in those who would really
r understand the passion of Christian teaching ; and
[ the power to exult in suffering for a great end
takes an intensity of nature which is very easily
extinguished by a life of minute distractions and
of widely distributed affections. A generation, of
which the most impressive characteristic is its

Ill THE SPIRITUAL FATIGUE OF THE WORLD 23

spiritual fatigue, will never be truly Christian till it
can husband its energy better, and consent to forego
many petty interests that it may not forego the
religion of the Cross.

IV

RELIGIOUS UNCERTAINTY
1880

The Kev. Edward White has just published a striking
little book on The Tone and Teaching of the New Testa-
ment on Certainty in Religion, 1 which was preached as
the Merchants' Lecture for the last October in the
Weigh-House Chapel, where the late Dr. Binney was
so long the minister. It would be difficult to find a
/ more suitable subject for consideration at Christmas-
time than the comparative certainty and uncertainty
of the Christians of the first age and the Christians
of this. Assuredly if, when the word " Christmas "
is mentioned in any society, the certain convictions
could be enumerated to which the mention of the
word gives rise, how very small a proportion of them
would be religious convictions, or perhaps even
irreligious convictions, at all. Some would feel
certain that they were going to suffer from season-
able conventions; others would feel certain that
they were going to make themselves ill; a few
young people would feel certain that they were
going to be happy ; many would feel certain that
they were going to be rather more than usually

1 Elliot Stock.

rv RELIGIOUS UNCERTAINTY 25

unreal ; and how very rare would be any flash of deep
and eager conviction that there is anything at all in
the invisible world corresponding to the external
festival to be celebrated. Mr. White's striking little
book brings out very powerfully how strong a con-
trast to this state of mind is afforded by the mind of
the writers of the New Testament. Take one passage,
in which he begins his sketch of that mind : —

"Let attention be drawn to the remarkable pheno-
menon that these books — from the Gospel of Matthew
onward to Apocalypse — though differing in style, object,
and feeling, are marked by one characteristic, which per-
vades them in every page, — and that is, the solemn tone of
certainty which runs through them, without one single
breakdown into speculation or balancing of probabilities.
At all events, these writers thoroughly believed what they
wrote. This characteristic distinguishes the New Testar
ment books, not only from all the Roman literature of
the same age, but from all other Greek books that ever
were written. In those literatures you have argument
on both sides, guess, divination, doubt, mockery, despair.
But here every page overflows with the feeling of
certainty. The Evangelists and Apostles of the Gospel
absolutely exhaust all the language of certainty in giving
expression to their ideas. There are no words expressive
of absolute truth and trustworthiness, and intense faith
founded on that trustworthiness, which these men have
not employed. * This is the victory which has overcome
the world ' of doubters — * even their faith/ Such
thorough belief and confidence were contagious. They
drove mankind before them, ' and shut them up ' in the
fold of faith. The Roman world at large believed
nothing much — but at least these men believed, * nothing
doubting.' The New Testament stands up like a mighty
and immovable rock of certainty in the midst of the wide,
unstable sea of contemporary thought — in the Jewish,

r

26 RELIGIOUS UNCERTAINTY IV

Greek, and Roman world. You feel this tone of certainty
in the teaching which they report from the lips of
their Master — the Christ. Christ sets Himself before
us as The Truth. He has no long arguments, no pro-
cesses indicating inquiry on His own part> or inference,
or hesitation. But every word of His is struck with a
definite sovereign image of truth upon it, like gold under
the descending stamp of the mint c Verily, verily, I say
unto you: 7 this is the steadfast introduction to every
lesson. In Him there is no * feeling after God ' in the
dark ; no derivation of wisdom from earlier teachers ; no
modest citation of authorities : the only quotation is from
prophecy, to point out its punctual fulfilment in Himself.
Christ, in the Gospels, is represented to us as the Truth
of Eternal Thought, alighting on the earth in the form of
Man, and speaking absolutely as One who 'knew both
what was in Man' and what was in God. His intellec-
tual countenance is * as the sun shining in its strength.' "

In discussing the vast change between this state of
mind and the state of mind of the great majority of
those who make up even the genuinely Christian
world of the present day, Mr. White makes many
suggestions tending to show the unreasonableness of
the new state of mental vacillation in which Chris-
tians so often find themselves ; but his subject does
not lead him to consider why it is that so many
who would probably quite agree in all he says are
still, more or less, in the condition of mind which he
condemns. I am disposed to think that the chief
reason why there is so much more vacillation on the
subject of religious truth, even amongst those who
hold it, than the Apostles would have understood at
all, is, to speak it shortly, that so much more of the
modern intellect is engaged, and seriously engaged,
with the surface of life, and so much less of it, in

IV RELIGIOUS UNCERTAINTY 27

proportion, with the roots of that life. The Apostles )
and Evangelists belonged to a race whose most
earnest life had for centuries been engaged on the
unseen world, whether for good or for evil. The
Jews have never been deficient in worldliness, but
yet that part of them, — good or bad, — which was
not worldly was very much the reverse indeed.
Their intellect* whenever it was not sunk in the
commoner earthly interests, was absorbed in the
vision of the perfect righteousness, and the prospect
of a perfectly righteous reign upon earth, or else in
fierce dogmatic controversies which clouded over that
vision. This was the side on which the intellect of
Judaism was raised above the more selfish of human
occupations. The Jewish race, so far as it rose
above the earth, exercised itself in these great
matters, — threw its whole heart into them.

In the modern world it is very different. A very
great part of the best thought of the best men is
occupied in very large degree with interests which
have all the largeness and catholicity, as one may j
say, of something quasi-spiritual, and yet no vestige j
of the true spiritual world in them, no vestige in J
them of the great conflict between darkness and light,
between evil and good, between temptation and .
grace. The area of perfectly disinterested and *
perfectly innocent and wholesome interests which •
are not in the least moral or spiritual interests has j
grown vastly in the modern world, and the effect of/
this is that a much larger portion of the permanent
mind of good men is usually eagerly at work in
tracking out clues which have neither the taint of
moral danger about them on the one side, nor the
inspiration of spiritual help on the other. A great
part of the minds of good men is thus invested in

28 RELIGIOUS UNCERTAINTY IV

secular interests which are not in the bad sense
worldly, and which are indeed in a very real sense
unworldly, though they cannot be called moral or
spiritual, nay, which, far from calling up the vision
of an unseen world, only tend to give a deeper intel-
lectual fascination to the spectacle of the seen world.
The vast growth of interests and studies which, like
the world of the mathematician or physicist, of the
geologist or botanist, of the sculptor or artist, of the
economist or statistician, of the geographer or astro-
nomer, of the musician or superficial poet, — to say
nothing of the world of the mechanician and the
student of all sorts of delicate practical arts, — excite
the most absorbing interest, and yet not an interest
which turns at all directly on the eternal issues of
good and evil, holiness and iniquity, — this vast area
of new interests has undoubtedly drained away a
great deal of the intensity of life devoted in earlier
ages to the ultimate spiritual issues of time and
eternity. To my mind it seems one great reason
for the comparative vacillation of religious men on
religious subjects, that so many of the best of these
men are now more or less absorbed in problems of
a much more finite and limited character, and yet
problems quite as free from the contagion of spiritual
evil as they are from the attraction of spiritual
good, so that when the mind reverts to the great
ultimate issues it is with a sort of start, and a sense
of inadequacy to grasp them with anything like the
same force with which these smaller problems are
grasped, that to some extent dizzies the mind, and
produces that feeling of uncertainty which, as Mr.
White justly says, would have been almost incon-
ceivable to the first preachers of Christianity. To
them the choice lay between living in the world of

IV RELIGIOUS UNCERTAINTY 29

sense without God and living in the world of spirit
with God. In modern times there is, as it were, a
third very real alternative, namely, living in a world
intermediate between sense and spirit, a world of
very narrowly limited but perfectly wholesome and
pure interests, to which the mind fits and adapts
itself till it is absolutely bewildered by leaning once
more over the great gulf which separates good and
evil, which divides heaven from hell. St. Paul told -*
his disciples, "Walk in the spirit, and ye shall not
fulfil the lust of the flesh; for the flesh lusteth
against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh,
and these are contrary the one to the other." But
would he have said that the most ardent study of
the phenomena of electricity, for instance, or even
the devotion of a lifetime to the elaboration of a new
form of escapement or steam-engine, was "fulfilling
the lust of the flesh "1 I do not think he would.
Nevertheless, he would certainly not have called it
"walking in the spirit." Between the spiritual
world which, — whether good or evil, — was to the
Jews the chief intellectual world, and the life of the
flesh, there has arisen a great world of the under-
standing, with principles and interests of its own,
the habitual inhabiting of which appears to be quite
as bad a preparation for the spiritual life as it is for the
life of the flesh. Those who live chiefly in this world,
— and how many of us do ! — come to the true spiritual
world with a sense of bewilderment which makes it
very difficult to attach to the judgments we form upon
it the same sense of certainty which is felt concerning
the intellectual issues of that more limited world to
which so large a part of our intellectual life is devoted.
It is perfectly true that no true man can really
avoid altogether the gra*vest spiritual issues, and

I;

30 RELIGIOUS UNCERTAINTY IV

that when he is in contact with these issues, especi-
ally when he is dealing with the personal issue- of
right or wrong for his own will, he begins to realise
the meaning of the unseen world in the very sense in
which the Christian apostles and evangelists realised
it, and then perhaps he knows what religious certainty
means. But the meaning and measure of certainty
in that region are very different from the meaning and
measure of certainty in that world of understanding
in which so large a part of the better human life is
now passed. And I do not hesitate to say that, quite
apart from the intrinsic difficulties of religious ques-
tions, one of the chief bewilderments of modern life
in relation to religion is this,— that men have learnt
most of their tests of certainty in a region which is
not spiritual at all, and in which certainty hardly
involves the inward judgment of the true man, but
only, at most, a kind of shadow of the man. Pos-
sibly, as we go deeper in knowledge, this stage may
pass away. Possibly men will one day learn to
trace up the principles involved in the superficial
problems which occupy us so much now into the
deeper world of true spirit. But I very much doubt
whether all the present unreality which arises in
relation to things spiritual, from the finite weights
and measures and the mechanical tests of accuracy
to which so many of our thoughts are subjected in
the world in which so much of our lives is spent, is
one for which men are themselves wholly respon-
sible. A certain amount of shadow appears to be
necessarily cast on the true spirit of man by the rapid
growth in relative importance of his practical under-
standing. Still, true men will do all in their power
to hasten the time when the understanding itself shall
become as spiritual as it is now in essence carnal.

THE DEBTS OP THEOLOGY TO SECULAR MOVEMENTS

1871

Mr. Llewelyn Davies has taken for the subject
of a very wise and interesting article in the Contem-
porary Review the debt which Theology owes to what )
is commonly called the World, or rather to move-
ments which are entirely outside the theological
sphere, and often headed by men who have no belief
whatever in theology. Mr. Davies shows that
theology has been compelled by the movement in
favour of ' Toleration ' to set a much higher value on
that perfect spiritual freedom which is a condition of
all real allegiance to God, and so to elevate the cry
for ' Toleration ' into the demand for setting the heart
at liberty ; that the democratic movement has com-
pelled theology to reconsider the foundations of
religious equality, and discover that Christ requires
the rich and great to live for the sake of the poor
multitude, and, indeed, to use their riches and power
only as ministers to those who have neither riches
nor power; that the economic movement has com-
pelled theology to recognise that there is a far higher
spiritual service to be done by making men truly
independent, i.e. masters of themselves, than by so

32 DEBTS OP THEOLOGY TO SECULAR MOVEMENTS v

helping them in their physical difficulties as to encour-
age them to lean on the generosity of others ; that
the conceptions of justice caused by a deeper under-
standing of human law have compelled theology to
abandon its substitutional theory of atonement ; and
finally, that the scientific movement has compelled
theology to abandon its conception of God as showing
Himself solely or chiefly in rare and strange occur-
rences like miracles, and to retreat on the great declara-
tion of St. Paul's faith in " one God and Father of
all, who is above all, and through all, and in all."

This assertion of Mr. Davies's is profoundly true
and very striking. It is of no small importance
that theologians should know that theology is just as
apt to go astray if it attempt to interpret the mind
of God without reference to the teaching of events
and the signstof the times, as the world is apt to go

f astray if it attempt to interpret the teaching of events
and the signs of the times without reference to the

x mind of God. But the essay will be very apt to give
rise to a criticism of this kind ; if theology can only
learn the true mind of God on subjects of this
importance, under compulsion, as it were, from the
world, — if some of its highest lessons are mere after-
thoughts to which it has been compelled to come
under penalty of losing all hold upon the world
unless it could discover some spiritual principle which
would harmonise with the "manifest destiny" of
social movements, — how can it be said to be in any
sense the organ of revelation ? If the test of human
science is to anticipate, it should be still more the test
of divine science. A theology, a science of God,
which has to be kept straight, and often to be set
straight, by those who do not profess to derive their
knowledge in any degree from divine sources, is

V DEBTS OP THEOLOGY TO SECULAR MOVEMENTS 33

apparently almost as much of an imposition as a
meteorology which only finds out after a hard winter
is over that there was good reason for it, and which
can always descant on the causes of a hurricane it
had never predicted. Is there any sort of answer to
this ?

I think there is, and to some extent Mr. Davies \
gives it when he points out that most of these con-
clusions now adopted by theology under pressure .
from the world were anticipated in the Christian
revelation, though the state of the world was then ;
so little prepared for the complete application of these
truths to quite new attitudes of the human mind,
that they had been forgotten and neglected, — written,
as it were, in a sort of invisible ink, which only the
heat of unanticipated movements and conflicts would
one day render legible, and even conspicuous. Thus
our Lord's rebuke to His disciples when they asked
Him to call down fire on a Samaritan village, "Ye
know not what manner of spirit ye are of ; the Son
of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to
save them," is at least a clear indication of what He
would have said on persecution, — persecution by
miracle being at that time the only conceivable sort
of persecution to which so insignificant and defence-
less a sect could have had resort. The anticipation
of the great democratic principle that the rich and
powerful must regard themselves as servants of the
poor and weak is much more pronounced, — " He that
is greatest among you, let him be as the younger, and
he that is chief as he that doth serve," being the
great social doctrine both of the Gospels and Epistles.
The economical teaching of experience that you will \
generally injure the poor a great deal more by giving j
alms than by refusing them, is simply not in the
s D

\

34 DEBTS OF THEOLOGY TO SECULAR MOVEMENTS v

Christian revelation at all ; but then it is only a lesson
of experience, and not of principle, and the principle
that the aim of your benevolence should be not to
please, but really to serve, "not with eyeservice, as
menpleasers, but as the servants of Christ," is. Again,
the true law of sacrifice which makes divine suffering
the great remedy for sin, not by way of formal
substitution, but as a proof both of the infinite love
of God, and of the vastness of the disorder which all
sin introduces into human society and relations, is
not only anticipated in the Christian revelation, but
is there in full strength. And finally, " the higher
Pantheism," which, instead of obliterating the will of
man, only vivifies it by rendering it more profoundly
sensible to the mysterious control of God over all the
avenues by which that will is reached, — turning
Nature itself into a mode of the supernatural, — is, as
Mr. Davies says, the great doctrine of St. Paul.
, It must be admitted, however, that in all these

/ cases theology did not apprehend the true purport of
revelation sufficiently well to interpret it rightly when

. the moment of trial came. Theology did persecute ;
theology has not, on the whole, favoured the political
influence of the masses ; theology was against political
economy; theology invented an artificial and false
" system " of atonement ; theology proclaimed science
impious. In fact, theology could not master her own
brief. What, then, has theology done for the world
in these cases which the world could not have done
for itself? How shall we call a science divine which
had to be sent back to school by the world to learn
to read its own lesson aright ? The answer is sug-
gested, I think, by asking another, — How, if the
Christian theology is divine when it teaches the
existence of the light that lighteth every man that

V DEBTS OF THEOLOGY TO SECULAR MOVEMENTS 35

cometh into the world, could it fail to happen that
the history of human life would do as much towards
interpreting theology, as theology towards interpreting
the meaning of human life? If God reveals Him-
self in man as well as to man, how could the secular
world and its history help contributing a grand share
to the explanation of God's true meaning ? Kevela-
tion itself is always * asserting that theologians
are quite as sure, or rather more sure, to go wrong
in their own line as other men in theirs. As Dr.
Norman Macleod said the other day in that fine
sermon on " War and National Judgment,"" 1 which
the Queen had the good sense to admire and com-
mand to be published, — there was never any favour-
itism shown in God's lessons either to the people who
received the revelation, or to the class through whom
especially they received it. u i The priests,' they cried
in God's name to the so-called religious people of the
time, ' said not, Where is the Lord ? and they that
handle the law knew me not. The pastors also
transgressed against me, and the prophets prophesied
by Baal, and walked after the things that do not
profit/ " — surely a very distinct assertion indeed that
the theologians were quite as sure to go wrong in
interpreting the true meaning of God's revelation as
the world in discussing the true drift of His Provi-
dence. If there be any truth in revelation, the large
secular human experience is as entirely pervaded by
a divine guidance, though it be unconscious or less
conscious of it, as is the theological teaching, and
neither can really understand or do its own work
right without the full co-operation of the other.
Unless the teacher tries to sympathise with the
learner, and the learner tries to enter into the mind

1 Published by Strahan.

36 DEBTS OF THEOLOGY TO SECULAR MOVEMENTS V

of the teacher, neither succeeds. The difficulties of
the learner should give a new drift to the lessons of
the teacher, and the explanations of the teacher
should give a new drift to the inquiries of the learner.
Kevelation was in the main a record of the mind of
God in relation to a particular age, or succession of
ages, and a particular people, and a particular con-
dition of human morality and society. To divine
what it would have to say in relation to a perfectly
new class of moral and social conditions was to solve
a problem in which there were two distinct elements,
the full appreciation of the new tendencies at work
in human society, and the interpretation of the
spiritual bearing of the former revelation on those
tendencies. It seems perfectly clear that for both
these elements to concur successfully, the interpreters
of revelation must enter fully into the ' signs of the
times/ i.e. the signs of the divine agency in human
history, while the people must enter into the divine
character, the teaching of God as to Himself. The
growing necessity for 'toleration/ the increasing
power of the democratic currents in modern society,

' the lessons of political economy, the moral bearing of
popular justice, the drift of scientific discovery, are
all as much divine helps to the true interpretation of

\ theology as theology is a divine help to the true
interpretation of these secular facts.

Well — but, it will be asked, if it be admitted that
theology does need these external helps to prevent her
from going astray, what is there of independent
teaching that she can be said to contribute to the
lesson of secular movements ? If, in order to under-
stand the sacredness of spiritual freedom, theology
has to learn the commonplace lesson of ' toleration/
for instance, from the world, 'what can theology be

v DEBTS OF THEOLOGY TO SECULAR MOVEMENTS 37

said to teach to the world ? ) Why, just this, that
before you can ensure even * toleration ' you must go \
much deeper than toleration, and get at a spiritual j
justification for toleration, which is only to be found j
in the discovery that no allegiance to Truth or God !
is worth anything that is not really free and uncom- <
pelled. Eeligious persecution itself was founded on \
a higher spiritual basis than mere worldly toleration. /
Religious persecution did assert that if you could
save the higher part of man at the expense of mere
bodily pain and loss, you were bound to do it. In
practice, no doubt, that was the excuse for all sorts
of cruelty. But in motive it was higher than the
indifference of mere toleration, which would never
have got any real triumph without winning a spiritual
alliance, — the alliance of the conviction that the
allegiance of the spirit to G-od must be really free, or .
really worthless. So, again, the mere democratic
principle as a doctrine of equal rights would have
been almost mischievous; the enthusiasm it has
gained has been derived from the religious principle
that all men, — the rich and powerful especially, — owe
to the " dim, common populations " the ministry of
their lives. Theology transfigures the haggling
acquisitive motive of the man who demands his fair
share of the world's happiness into the generous
motive of the man who demands the right to give
himself up to the service of those who are most
miserable and helpless. And so in all the other \
instances, what theology contributes is a new, and ]
deeper, and nobler motive for tendencies which the >
world tries to justify on vulgar grounds. Where the /
world calls for a mere modus vivendi, theology makes
a demand on the heart which transforms the modus \
vivendi into a deeper principle of social harmony and I

O'

1

38 DEBTS OF THEOLOGY TO SECULAR MOVEMENTS v

disinterested duty. Falsely as theology has often
interpreted the meaning of God, it has always aimed
high, and blundered rather in the work of interpret-
ing the human facts of life, than in its motive. As
we have said, even the doctrine of persecution was in
theory a noble hind of error, far nobler than the
doctrine of indifference and ' toleration.' The
'corruption of the higher* was, as usual, infinitely
worse than 'the corruption of the lower.' Ecclesi-
astical persecution became a more venomous and
hateful thing than Laodicean indifference had it in
its power to become. But not the less the theological
contempt for bodily ease and pleasure in comparison
with spiritual health was of noble origin, and a fearful
practical evil only because it was a mistake to
suppose that spiritual health could ever be extracted
out of attempts to terrify and bribe the conscience
into actions which were not good unless they were
free. After all, theology has done as much to keep
the world from sinking into vulgar compromises with
expediency, as the world has done to keep theology
from cruelly trampling on the natural and the human,
in its effort after the supernatural and divine.

VI

THE WARDEN OF KEBLE ON DIFFICULTIES IN

RELIGION

1886

The Warden of Keble, in the first number of a very
useful and valuable series of popular and simple
papers on religious subjects, called " Oxford House
Papers," 1 intended, I imagine, for use by such com-
munities as those which are attempting to raise the
moral and spiritual level of society at the East End,
insists in a few very simple, pithy, and impressive
pages that difficulties about Christianity are no
reason for disbelieving it By this, as he is careful
to point out, Mr. Talbot does not mean that "the
more difficulties there are, the better ;" "or that
Christians do not mind how much the argument goes
against them ; " or that Christians " believe in spite
of their reason." He is quite ready to concede that
difficulties " must be considered and fairly met," and
that "each difficulty counts for something, at least
at first sight, in an argument against religion," — nay,
he concedes that "difficulties many enough or great
enough would serve to crush religion." All he
insists on is that a religion without difficulties is
1 Published by Messrs. Rivingtons.

40 THE WARDEN OF KEBLE VI

simply inconceivable, since religion is confessedly an
interpretation of human life and duty from a higher
and wider point of view than any which we can
occupy, an interpretation of that duty to which, of
course, we cannot even take up a submissive attitude
without exerting powerfully that part of our nature
which looks upwards, and more or less depressing
that part of our nature which pulls us downwards,
nor without feeling all the qualms which such de-
pression involves. Mr. Talbot points out very power-
fully that a revelation as to the nature of God must
involve infinitely larger conceptions than suit our
petty local ideas, conceptions which it must strain
our minds to the very utmost to grasp, conceptions
to which it is even much more difficult for us to
find the clue than it is for us to find the clue
to the thoughts of those human beings to whom
we look up as greatly above us, though that,
too, is difficult enough. Again, as revelation is to
be our guide, it must throw light on the hardest
, and most mysterious parts of our own nature ; and
that, as every one knows, is very difficult to under-
stand. Further, as the Christian revelation claims
to be historical, it must involve all the difficulties
1 connected with the evidence of historical events;
1 and finally, as a religion of conduct which, though
it shows us the right way, does not compel us to
take it, it involves all those most serious difficulties
which arise from the weakness and guilt and self-will
of those who call themselves Christians without really
following the guidance of Christ. Mr. Talbot, indeed,
shows most convincingly that it is not even a reason-
able objection to the truth of Christianity to say that
Christianity is in many respects difficult of belief.
Any religion that was true must be difficult in many

VI ON DIFFICULTIES IN RELIGION 41

respects to believe, only it must be in many more
and greater respects difficult to disbelieve.

I might, indeed, safely go further than Mr. Talbot,
and assert that in relation to all the higher problems
of our existence, difficulties are never solved except
by the acceptance of principles which involve higher
and more recondite difficulties of their own, though
they afford an explanation of the paradoxes with
which the mind had formerly been struggling. Thus,
many of the difficulties of the old astronomy were
explained and reconciled by the Copernican theory ;
but the Copernican theory, which made the sun the
centre of our system, was even less in accordance
with the motion of the moon than the old geocentric
theory, and the discrepancy was not really explained
till the law of gravitation was itself discovered. This
law reconciled the difficulties of both systems ; but
it introduced a difficulty of a much higher and
subtler order, — namely, the conception that every
particle of matter is attracted by every other par-
ticle of matter, far or near, in the whole universe,
in a degree varying inversely with the square of
the distance. That is a conception so utterly
beyond us, that though we can put it in words, we
can hardly realise it in thought ; and yet it is the
key to mysteries less mysterious than itself. Just
so it was with the theory of light The phenomena
of light could not be explained until it was assumed
that a vibrating ether of which our senses afford us
no trace, perfectly elastic and universally present,
permeates as completely what we call a vacuum as
it permeates the fluid and solid materials of the
universe. Indeed, it has been truly said that we
must suppose this ether to be, in its laws of vibra-
tion, much more like a solid than a liquid, since the

42 THE WARDEN OF KEBLE VI

wave vibrates through it with much more of the
kind of rapidity with which waves of sound pass
through solid bodies, than of that with which they
pass through liquid or fluid bodies. And this mar-
vellous vibrating medium of which we cannot find
any trace through our senses, but only through our
reason, is assumed to penetrate all the most distant
portions of the universe, even those so distant that
we cannot reach them by the telescope itself. What
difficulties and humiliations to the senses are not
then involved in this assumption which the reason
demands for the satisfaction of her claim to explain
the phenomena of light ! Take, again, the explana-
tion of the difference between chemical combinations
and ordinary mixtures. In order to explain this,
physicists have been obliged to assume the theory of
atoms themselves indivisible, but yet so strongly
attracted by specific affinities to other atoms, that,
when opportunity offers, they combine together in
specific proportions which are never varied. And
yet this astonishing conception of potent elective
affinities controlling hypothetic elements of matter
of which the senses give no kind of evidence, has
become the recognised explanation of all the laws of
chemistry. Nay, the same doctrine, namely, that
we usually find the explanation of difficulties of a
lower kind by the aid of hypotheses involving diffi-
culties of a higher kind, is even taught us in pure
mathematics. Every mathematician knows that
what have been called impossible quantities, — quan-
tities "less than nothing," as though any quantity
could be less than nothing, — and quantities that are
strictly inconceivable, like the square roots of nega-
tive quantities, though there is no quantity con-
ceivable which, when multiplied by itself, will yield

vi ON DIFFICULTIES IN RELIGION 43

a negative quantity, — are not only not rejected by
mathematicians, but are used with such effect that
they have started Dew developments of mathematical
science. Nay, the history of mathematics is full of
cases in which the confident use of functions and
methods that seemed at first to be quite incapable of .
rational interpretation has led to the discovery of new
functions and methods, in which the apparent absurdity
has become the starting-point of a new calculus.

What is true of the rational progress of man is,
of course, equally true of his moral progress. The
maxims that there is no change without an efficient
cause, and that the same causes always produce the
same effects, have become the very roots of physical
science. But the moment we come to ask what a
cause really means, and to note the phenomena of
our own nature, we find that we cannot explain our
own acts of causation, — nor the emotions accom-
panying actions which we attribute to ourselves as
their true cause, — without an entirely new depart-
ure, without assuming a cause which is not the
effect of any other cause, without rising above the
sphere in which so-called "efficient" causes had
been traced, and assuming the reality of an uncaused
cause, a volition. That assumption is, to the eye of \
mere science, simply inconceivable ; we can no more »
explain in its language that which causes but was
not itself caused, than we can explain in mathe-
matics the square root of a negative quantity. Yet
we cannot for a moment explain the phenomena of
right and wrong without it. We are compelled to
recognise it as the only solution of what we observe
^^^njjft; and when we have so recognisecTrt,~~we
discover that our only real conception of cause itself,
at least as distinguished from uniform antecedent

44 DIFFICULTIES IN RELIGION vi

and from energy, is will, and we find that, without
will, energy is the mystery of mysteries. But the
links of the mysterious chain by which we are
forced to explain that which is difficult to our lower
nature by some invisible and, to that part of our
nature, absolutely inconceivable hypothesis, which
yet recommends itself to our higher nature, does not
stop here. We have no sooner well grasped the
exercise of moral responsibility and referred it to
free-will, than we become aware that the meaning of
'sin' which we have thus explained is only half
explained by it ;— that there is some all-pervading
moral ether which permeates the society of moral
beings, and transmits through it innumerable waves
of evil and good influence, quite independently of
our wills, though not so as absolutely to overpower
and enslave them ; and that without the conception
of a "solidarity" of our race, through which alone
the transmission, on the one hand, of a taint from
man to man, and, on the other hand, of a spiritual
grace from some source above man, a spirit of sacri-
fice originating in a mystery of love far beyond us, is
rendered explicable, it is quite as impossible to explain
the moral phenomena of human society as it is to ex-
plain morality itself without the principle of free-will.
Well, surely this short and most imperfect summary
of the manner in which, from beginning to end of the

^history of human thought, men have always found the
explanation of one class of difficulties in assumptions
which involve another and a higher class of diffi-
culties, sustains in the most ample way Mr. Talbot's

• assertion that a religion without difficulties would
not be a religion at all, — would, indeed, be some-
thing absolutely beneath us, instead of something
infinitely above us.

VII

THE MATERIALISTS' STRONGHOLD

1874

The Guardian of Wednesday week contained a letter
from Professor Challis, the mathematician, in which
he contrasted the materialistic tendencies of the great
experimentalist philosophers with the deeper philo-
sophy of true theorists, whom he seemed to identify
with mathematicians like Newton or WhewelL
And the Guardian of this week follows up the hint
in a thoughtful article, in which it accepts the
mathematical test as a fair gauge of truly theoretical
as distinguished from empirical science, and points
out that many of the most distinguished of living
mathematicians, Professor Jellett, Professor Haugh-
ton, Professor Clerk-Maxwell — to whom Professor
Tyndall himself, in his Lucretian apology, paid such
a tribute of profound respect — Professor Stokes, and
others not less distinguished in the scientific world,
not to count Professor Challis, entirely reject Pro-
fessor TyndalFs materialistic tendencies. Now, it is
conceivable enough that a mathematician, who finds
the lowest departments of the natural world governed
by principles of order which it takes the highest
science in any degree to fathom, should be struck

46 THE MATERIALISTS' STRONGHOLD VII

with that fact, and be led by it to believe, what seems
to me in the highest degree reasonable, that what-
ever matter may be, it is at bottom the fruity rather
than the germ, ' of mind. Self -existent atoms
impressed with intellectually coherent laws of growth
and change, but not so impressed by any mind capable
of foreseeing that growth and change, are at least as
mysterious conceptions as any which theology could
produce, without accounting in the same way for the
phenomena of moral and spiritual life. But I confess
I do not like the notion of allowing our minds to be
greatly influenced by the views of any particular
school of science, and I suspect, not without some
ground, that if the process of counting begins, a good
many materialists might be counted amongst the most
original and distinguished mathematicians of our day.
Unless common report very much belies him,
Laplace, second, no doubt, in mathematical genius
to Newton, but still a mathematician of the first
order, was no Theist, and certainly it seems to me
pretty clear that the possession of mathematical
genius and the study of mathematical principles is
no adequate guarantee for the solidity or compre-
hensiveness of the moral and speculative judgment.
Moreover, I think it unjust and erroneous to confine
the name of 'theorist/ in the higher sense, to the
mathematicians. Of course, only mathematicians
can reduce the laws of the universe to quantitative
forms, but that is not> even in Professor Challis's
own sense, the criterion of a true theorist. He
illustrates the name 'theorist' by contrasting what
Newton did, when he considered a cause explaining
the minutest motions of the planetary system, with
what Kepler did in simply classifying rightly the
facts concerning those motions. Well, that is a fair

vii THE MATERIALISTS' STRONGHOLD 47

illustration of the distinction between an effort of
empirical philosophy and the work of a true theorist.
But have no true explanations of the most complex
phenomena been discovered which could not be
reduced to mathematical statement? What would
Professor Challis say to Goethe's discovery of the
radical identity of stalk, leaf, and blossom in the
plant ; or to KirchhofFs, of the meaning of the dark
lines in the spectrum, and their use in determining the
materials of stars and sun ? Were not these theories,
— exercises, and high exercises, of the speculative
intellect? Above all, what is Mr. Darwin's and
Mr. Wallace's theory of the effect of 'natural
selection' in modifying species? Can any better
illustration of the discovery of a true cause for a
mass of intricate and unexplained phenomena be
conceived than this ? If Mr. Darwin is not a
theorist, and a theorist in the highest sense of the
word, where is one to be found ? No doubt Mr.
Darwin cannot be charged with materialism. His
writings, though they seem to throw doubt on the
conception which makes the minutest phenomena of
Nature the expression of a Divine purpose, and harp
a good deal on the failures of the organic world,
seem to me full of belief in an ultimate intellectual
origin for the scheme of things. But what I am
concerned with now is the attempt to appeal from
theorists of one branch to theorists of another branch
of science, in relation to the great questions involved
in materialism, an appeal which seems to me hardly
fair. Surely the theorists who concern themselves
with the mode in which life is screwed up, as it were,
to a higher phase of intelligence and beauty, are not
to be shut out of the discussion, in favour of mere
manipulators of lines and symbols, measurers of

48 THE MATERIALISTS' STRONGHOLD VII

space, and force, and mass ! If, as I am inclined to
believe, the materialistic impulse which scientific
thought has lately taken, is in no small degree due
to a false interpretation of Mr. Darwin's great dis-
coveries and generalisations, it would be the most
unfair of artifices to appeal from a school of science
which understands and has weighed Mr. Darwin's
reasonings, to a school of science which knows nothing
about them, only because the latter can wield the
calculus and weigh the sun.
r No doubt the stronghold of the modern materialism
lies in the new display of the previously hidden
motive forces of physical evolution, and the dis-
appointment of ordinary thinkers at finding them,
as they think, rather negative than positive, rather
unfavourable to low forms of life, than actively
favourable to the higher. Mr. Darwin thinks he
has shown that Nature makes an indefinite number
of organic attempts, as it were, of which a vast
proportion fail to persist only because the few which
involve the possession of an accidental advantage
thrive at their expense. Both the tentative and the
negative characteristics of this organon of improve-
ment scandalise men. They ask how an omniscient
. mind which knows precisely what is wanted, can set
• Nature groping her way forward as if she were
'blind, to find the path of least resistance. And
again, they ask how, if bad only becomes good by
steady starvation of the worse, it is possible to see
in this process the cherishing love of a divine
, Creator? These difficulties seem to me to be the
, chief causes of the new materialistic wave which is
v passing over England. Now, with regard to the
tentative character of organic change, it is worthy of
remark that the whole force of the criticism lies not

VII THE MATERIALISTS' STRONGHOLD 49

in facts, but in the hasty construction which we put
upon the facts. There is nothing tentative about
the celestial motions, or the effect of either gravity
or chemical action on matter. In this region every-
thing is so sure that mathematical calculation can
tell you what will happen in great part, and the
chemist will predict with certainty the affinities and
changes of combination which will display themselves.
If there had been anything really tentative about
the ultimate constituents of Nature, we should have
found it here ; we should have had the showers of
atoms accidentally diverging, as Lucretius described
them, from their natural course; should have dis-
covered the signs of hesitation in the elements, and
found our human science too wavering to and fro
in inevitable sympathy. But notoriously this is not
the case, and Professor Tyndall at Belfast was, as
materialists usually are, very strong on the iron
chain of necessary connection which binds everything,
from the shooting meteor, up, I suppose, to the will
of man. I assume, then, that if every organic form
shows a tendency to vary in all directions, useful or
otherwise, at every moment, and especially if the
individuals of a family always diverge more or less
from the parent stock, it is not from any want of
steadiness in the ultimate constitution of Nature,
but from the necessary variety involved in greater
complexity of structure. Strictly speaking, there is
nothing really tentative in organic variations. They
are, in all probability, necessary changes, due to the
unperceived variety of circumstances in which they
originated. But if this be so, the appearance of
tentative and temporary forms is delusive, and what
scandalises our superficial reason is not the groping
of Nature at all, but the mixture at every step of
8 s

■/

50 THE MATERIALISTS' STRONGHOLD vir

worse and less useful forms with the better and more
useful ; whereas, people think, the circumstances lead-
ing to the poorer forms of life should have been sifted
away, and only the stronger forms produced, with-
out any of that ' setting ' of apparent failure, ranging
from positive monstrosity up to the very borders of
strong and durable types, which so perplexes the
lovers of the argument from design. But this criti-
cism really comes to a condemnation of variety itself.
There could be no variety except by sudden leaps
from form to form, if all that is inferior is to be —
not eliminated, but never to exist ; and the motive
force of competition — so great and valuable a force
in the lower phases of existence — would be vastly
diminished, even where it was not annihilated. The
more the so-called tentativeness of Nature is con-
sidered, the more it will be seen that it means simply
\ the minute variations due to varying circumstances
\ and operating, though within natural organic limits,
: still in all directions. But why, it will be asked, in
) all directions ? Why should variations of a degener-
/ ate character ever be admitted, if there be a Divine
Mind giving its law to natural change ? Of course
/ no complete answer can be given to such a question,
but considering the world as the stage on which a
/ moral freedom is to be disciplined, it is not inexplic-
| able why that liability to degeneration which is the
• greatest danger in moral growth is visible to man on
: every side, in natural things as well as moral, as one
of the catastrophes to which, both naturally and
^ supernaturally, he is liable. "Without the constant
sight of the tendency to degeneration in things
natural, without being daily taught that it needs, in
• some sense, a physical struggle not merely for Nature
to keep on advancing, but to keep from falling back,

WOTV

VII THE MATERIALISTS' STRONGHOLD 51

the meaning and risk of the same liability in things
moral and spiritual would not be half as vivid as it
is. It is, after all, by no means a matter for surprise
that Nature should not merely reflect back, but even
in a manner anticipate, the inertia, the indolence,
the degeneracy, as well as the activity, the industry,
and the refining transformations, of human trial.
There is no real tentativeness in Nature, only
variation, for worse, as well as for better.

But then comes the difficulty as to the method of j
natural selection, — that progress seems to be secured \
rather by starving out or killing out the worse, than
by accumulating the better. The imagination is ^
shocked by what seems the destructiveness of the j
process, rather than the benevolence which would be
expected. It is not rewards for the better, so much
as penalties for the worse, by which the results of
conflict are determined. It seems to be some
" devil " who is " taking the hindmost," rather than
a god who is smiling on the foremost Food becomes
scarce, and a race that cannot migrate perishes.
Wings give their possessors a great advantage in
obtaining food, and the wingless races find themselves
nowhere in the struggle, and soon become obsolete.
This seems more like stamping out the unimproved
than encouraging the improved species, — more like
extinguishing the conservatives than rewarding the
progressives. But here, again, it is metaphor which ^
deceives us. It may be that the individual of a /
lower and vanishing type has a somewhat shorter
and less enjoyable life than the individual of a higher
and multiplying type, but the difference is small at
best; it is the lower type which suffers, not the |
members of it, whose individual careers, though
there are fewer and fewer such careers year by year ;

52 THE MATERIALISTS 1 STRONGHOLD VII

belonging to the lower type, are probably hardly
: distinguishably shorter or less happy than those
i. belonging to the other.

Indeed, natural selection is not so negative as it
seems. It rests upon the tendency of hereditary
qualities shared by both parents, whether they be
advantages or otherwise, to accumulate in the
descent, and so to hasten the relative gain or loss of
advantage in every generation. The interest accumu-
lates, and the deficiency accumulates, till the one
becomes a new capital, and the other is wiped out
by extinction. The upward pressure, therefore, is
as true as the downward pressure. The gradual
development of the brain is as much the result of
natural law as the gradual extinction of creatures
with brain too small for their functions. In short,
as it seems to me, the evidence of a controlling mind
in organic laws such as these is still clearer than it
is in the region of mere heat, force, and motion.

But no doubt the tendency of such studies will
always be materialistic, if we forget that we must
not apply to them the guiding ideas gathered from
a very different region, — that of our own moral life.
There, completely new principles and laws begin.
Natural selection yields in man to pity and reverence;
the law of competition is qualified and partly merged
in the law of sacrifice. Yet to my mind this makes
the materialistic explanation only the more incredible.
It is hard enough to understand how gravitating
force should " develop " into chemical affinity, or
chemical affinity into the organic propagation of
/ definite characteristics and forms. But if the roots
' of our whole life were in material force and physical
competition, if we were the mere products of natural
selection, and had no access to any store of diviner

vii THE MATERIALISTS' STRONGHOLD 53

counsels, how could the Christian ideal of life ever
have developed itself from such roots as these ? The
materialist hypothesis, even if I exclude all reference
to the moral and religious life which it would treat
as a superstition, is guilty of the absurd attempt to
support an ever-spreading and broadening structure
on a mere atom as its base. Force could hardly
account for life at all, but still less for life that rises
above force, and makes it the most sacred of duties
to soften the severity of its own regime. Force
abdicating its throne, — competition appealing to the
conscience against the rude selfishness of competition,
— is a phenomenon which it might well exhaust the
inventive faculties of a materialist to account for,
even though he drew freely, as no doubt he would,
on ingenious moral resources, to which, of course,
every materialist has access, but has access only
because he cannot confine his faculties within the
stony limits of his own theory.

VIII

PROFESSOR CLIFFORD ON THE SIN OF CREDULITY

1877

Professor Clifford, continuing his ethical dis-
quisitions in the Contemporary Review for January,
dilates with much unction and more eloquence on
the sin of credulity. "If I let myself believe any-
thing on insufficient evidence," he says, " there may
be no great harm done by the mere belief ; it may
be true, after all, or I may never have occasion to
exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing
this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself
r credulous. The danger to society is not merely that
it should believe wrong things, though that is great
enough, but that it should become credulous, and
: lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into
' them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
The harm which is done by credulity in a man is
not confined to the fostering of a credulous character
in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.
. . . Men speak the_ truth to one another when
each reveres the truth in his own mind and in the
other's mind; but how shall my friend revere the
truth in my mind when I myself am careless about
it, when I believe things because I want to believe

VIII THE SIN OF CREDULITY 55

them, and because they are comforting and pleasant 1
Will he not learn to cry ' Peace ! ' to me when there
is no peace ? By such a course I shall surround
myself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood and
fraud, and in that I must live. It may matter little
to me, in my cloud-castle of sweet illusions and
darling lies, but it matters much to Man, that I
have made my neighbours ready to deceive. The
credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat, he
lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no
marvel if he should become even as they are. So
closely are duties knit together, that whoso shall
keep the whole law and yet offend in one point, he
is guilty of all." This is eloquent and almost evan-
gelical in its tone, but I think Professor Clifford was
hardly justifiable in illustrating his position of the
wickedness of credulity, as he does, by instances such
as that of the shipowner who persuades himself that
his old ship is still seaworthy, without satisfying
himself by evidence that it is so, and who, when the
ship goes down with all its crew, gets the insurance
on it paid, and contents himself with the reflection
that after all he acted on his own inner conviction,
though his conviction proved to be mistaken. The
weak point of such illustrations is that the self-interest
of the man is in this case engaged on the side of his
credulity, and not against it, — a circumstance which
should always put us morally on our guard against
not only credulity, but incredulity, or any other
attitude of mind which it would be for our own
interest for us to assume. Put the case the other
way. Your whole fortune is embarked in a given
enterprise. Some one gives you most unwelcome
but, on the surface, plausible information that the
enterprise is hollow, and founded on a cheat. You

56 PROFESSOR CLIFFORD VIII

know that if this be true you are ruined, and also
that if it be false, but be believed to be true, you
are ruined by the panic which it will excite among
others ; it is therefore your interest to be incredulous,
for by extinguishing the rumour at first you retain
the chance of sustaining others' confidence, while if
you give any credit to it> you create the panic by
which others indeed *nay be saved, but you must be
ruined. "Incredulity," therefore, is the prompting
of self-interest, and in such a case, incredulity is as
wrong as Professor Clifford's credulity, and for the
same reason. It is the tainted motive which makes
the credulity and the incredulity alike evil; while
with a better motive either might be generous and
noble. If instead of being a shipowner, you were
the frienjd of the shipowner, and intending to sail in
his ship, and from your absolute confidence in your
friend's assurances, had rejected at once as absolutely
incredible any question df the seaworthiness of the
ship, — then, instead of branding your credulity with
the character of a* superstitious self-deception, the
worst even Professor Clifford could say of it would
be that it was a generous mistake. And in like
manner, if the person informed of the false character
of the suppose^ Enterprise had been, not one whose
capital was already at stake, but one on the point of
investing, yet still able to withdraw his investment,
and if the motive of his incredulity had been, not
his selfish fears for his own property, but his com-
plete trust in the probity of another, I should have
said the same in his casa What I complain of in
Professor Clifford is that he has weighted his de-
nunciations of credulity by introducing an altogether
false issue into his illustrations. And I maintain, in
opposition to him, that if we free our minds from

▼Ill ON THE SIN OF CREDULITY 57

the misleading influence of his illustrative comment-
ary, and apply his doctrine to cases in which no such
taint of false motive is discernible, we shall find that
his doctrine is rejected by the concensus even of that
non- religious society to whose interests Professor
Clifford habitually appeals, as if they constituted the
true and only standard of ethics.

Let me take a sufficiently notorious case. The
biographer of Columbus makes it evident to us, on
the testimony of the son of the great navigator,
testimony carefully substantiated by reference to the
notes and memoranda collected by his father, that
the magnificent enterprise which Columbus conducted
to a successful issue was really the offspring of two
beliefs, for which he had hardly any evidence, and
which were, in fact, illusions. "It is apparent,"
says Mr. Washington Irving, " that the grand argu-
ment which induced Columbus to his enterprise was
. . . that the most eastern part of Asia known to
the ancients could not be separated from the Azores
by more than a third of the circumference of the
globe ; that the intervening space must, in a great
measure, be filled up by the unknown residue of
Asia ; and that if the circumference of the world
was, as he believed, less than was generally supposed,
the Asiatic shores could easily be attained by a
moderate voyage to the west. It is singular how
much the success of this great undertaking depended
upon two happy errors, — the imaginary extent of
Asia to the east, and the supposed smallness of the
earth." And again, when in his voyage, Columbus
and his pilots, to the latter's great dismay, found the
magnetic needle varying more and more from the
Pole star, Columbus explained it by assuring them
that the true direction of the magnetic needle was

58 PROFESSOR CLIFFORD VIII

not to the Pole star, but to the invisible Pole round
which it circled. Here, again, it is certain that
Columbus explained away most dangerous and para-
lysing terrors by a very ingenious but false guess,
for which he had no evidence worthy of the name.
Now, what language would Professor Clifford apply
to these two mistaken beliefs of Columbus ? Would
he use the language contained in this article, and
say he was guilty of a piece of mental gymnastic
which did " this great wrong to Man," that Colum-
bus "made himself credulous"? Would Professor
Clifford ask concerning him, how could his friends
revere truth in the mind of Columbus, when Colum-
bus was himself careless about it, when he "sur-
rounded himself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood
and fraud," cried " Peace ! " to his mariners when
there was no peace; when he "entrenched himself
in his little castle of sweet illusions and darling
lies"? — would Professor Clifford maintain that in
these acts of credulity Columbus was making himself
"the father of the liar and the cheat," so that,
"living in the bosom of this his family, it would
have been no wonder if he had been as they"?
Would he say that it matters not the least that
Columbus succeeded in his enterprise, since in acting
upon it, and carrying it through, he deceived himself
by illusions which might far more probably have led
him astray ? Would he say that Columbus was not
innocent in thus deluding himself and others, but
only not found out ? Would he assert, as he does
in relation to the subject of his own illustration, that
" the question of right or wrong has to do with the
origin of his belief, not the matter of it ; not what it
was, but how he got it ; not whether it turned out
to be true or false, but whether he had a right to

VIII ON THE SIN OF CREDULITY 59

believe such evidence as was before him." I take it,
Professor Clifford has too much good sense to say
any of these things. They are only applicable at all,
not to acts of pure credulity, — even though false j
credulity, — but to acts of interested credulity, when /
a man ought to have been put on his guard against /
himself by knowing well the swerve or bias given to
his interior beliefs by his own interests. Yet Pro-
fessor Clifford's argument, if it is worth anything at
all, is applicable to all acts of belief on evidence
which the believer, when in the exercise of his
coolest judgment, would have reason to think really
inadequate.

I take the case of Columbus, because I regard
that case as in a very high degree illustrative of the
sort of faith which is grounded not on what Pro-
fessor Clifford calls evidence, but on something
deeper and better. We have seen that Columbus's ^
principal assigned grounds for his belief that he \
would succeed in his enterprise were false grounds,
but no one could doubt that the general intuition »
of genius which gave him the pertinacity and the
sanguineness of conviction essential to success was j
nevertheless legitimate, — and was the true forecast \
of those tendrils of the reason which far oftener
originate the discovery of great and living truths
than what our Professor means by "evidence." >
Now, as it seems to me, there is even in ordinary
people who have no genius* some power of forecast
of the same sort, on matters, however, of a very
different kind ; — and that with them the true secret
of forecast is the affections. Love appreciates char- /
acter more rapidly and far more truly than the
intellect, and though it, too, like genius, may select
very erroneous grounds on which to base its con- /

60 PROFESSOR CLIFFORD vni

' fession of faith, — the intuitions of love, like the
1 intuitions of genius, are often true when the account
which it renders to itself of its intuitions is false.
Now it seems to me the great aim, as well as tend-
ency, of Professor Clifford's ethical writings to en-
courage, even in subjects most closely intertwined
with the conscience and the affections, that spirit of
severe incredulity which would not only extinguish,
as he desires, all the highest faiths, but also all the
deepest and noblest human ties. Nothing can be
less true than that the intuitions of a child, — some-
times, even of a dog, — respecting the qualities of a
character concerning which there is no experience to
guide us, are utterly untrustworthy, although they
are, and must seem to those who trust them, to be
founded in a deep credulity. How mischievous,
how credulous, how superstitious, according to the
dictum of Professor Clifford's paper, is the child's
indignation against one who accuses his father of
commercial dishonesty ! He has had no sort of
experience of the wide divergence between men's
domestic and professional consciences. He knows
hardly anything except that his father has often
told him what turned out to be true, and sometimes
done so when it was obviously a painful task. The
leap from such a little plot of experience as this to
the large generalisation that the same father would
not cheat a complete stranger, is, as we all know,
a tremendous leap in the dark. And yet who can
doubt that many a child makes it not in the dark,
but in the full light of a guiding affection; while
many another would shrink from making it from
equally good, but quite as mysterious, instincts,
which would tell him it was wrong. The ethics of
belief could scarcely have been more meagrely and

VIII

ON THE SIN OF CREDULITY

61

more misleadingly discussed than they are by Pro-
fessor Clifford. I venture to say that the best and
most trustworthy of all our beliefs are founded on
evidence of which we cannot give even a brief sum-
mary to ourselves, and that if we attempt this, we
shall wander as far from the true grounds of our
belief as Columbus himself did when he gave the
two false reasons on which he chiefly rested his
belief in the possibility of his enterprise.

When I compare with Professor Clifford's " ethics
of belief " such predictions as our Lord's, that He was
come to divide father from son, and mother from
daughter, to send not peace on earth, but a sword,
to bring persecution on His disciples, and yet to give
them a great and lasting victory over the world, I
cannot but wonder at the credulity of the man who
preaches the gospel of incredulity as the great corner-
stone of the new ethics. Why, if, as Professor
Clifford holds, a true ethic is the doctrine which fits
a human society to grow stronger, more united, more
fit to battle with the hostility of nature, and with
the perils of anarchy, then I should say that the first
requisite of a true ethic is a commanding faith which
goes far beyond the bounds of what Professor Clifford
means by " evidence," on the strength of the forecast
due to its conscience and its affections. It was what
Professor Clifford would call Christ's credulity which
gave a new bond to human society, and assured the
" little flock," whom He sent forth as " sheep amongst
wolves," of ultimate conquest. It was precisely the
same sort of credulity on a very much minuter scale
which gave to Augustine, to Savonarola, to Luther,
to all the great Eeformers, their confidence in the
divine character of their cause, and their power to
bring it to a triumphant conclusion. Without such

I

)

62 THE SIN OP CREDULITY vill

credulity there would have been little or no recon-
structive force in human society after the great
revolutions had spent their force. What draws
human beings together and makes them into an
organic whole is the great attraction of a common
faith, and if intellectual truth be essential, as it is,
to progress, moral and spiritual truth, — which is the
truth seized by the magic of the conscience and
affections, — is still more necessary to order and
1. unity of any sort. Professor Clifford strikes at the
very basis of his own ethics when he calls all belief
which is either not founded on producible evidence
at all, or when challenged, produces, as Columbus
produced, evidence for itself which is not worth the
paper on which it is written, — credulity, and brands
it as both mischievous and dishonest. The simple
fact is that the best and most binding faiths we have,
faiths not only at the basis of popular religion, but
also at the basis of domestic strength and peace, are
founded on precisely such evidence as this at which
Professor Clifford levels his most bitter shafts.

IX

PROFESSOR WACE ON BELIEF

1877

I drew attention rather more than three months
ago (January 6) to a striking but very misleading
essay of Professor Clifford's in the Fortnightly Beview
on the sin of Credulity, and pointed out the great
blunder of supposing that the structure of human
society could be held together at all on the assump-
tion that legitimate beliefs are founded solely on
adequate investigation of the evidence bearing upon
them, independently of those affections and half-
reasoned, but often not the less, rather the more,
trustworthy prepossessions of the mind, which are
at the root of our deepest, and I will venture to say
also of our truest, faiths. Professor Wace of King's
College, and Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, took up the
same subject a few days ago, in a very thoughtful
paper read at the Victoria Institute, in which he
showed that the fundamental methods of science,
though they may sometimes lead to beliefs first, and
then to knowledge, are not at all the most commonly-
used or available avenues to those personal trusts
which are, as I maintained in January, the binding
cement of our human society. Trust, he says very

64 PROFESSOR WAGE ON BELIEF ix

justly, is at best as much an efficient cause of truth-
fulness as truthfulness is a cause of trust. In other
words, instead of founding trust on careful intellectual
investigation, the need for such careful intellectual
investigation is often dispensed with altogether by
the blind power of trust. " If it is the. duty of my
neighbour to speak the truth, it is equally my duty
to believe that he does speak it. I have no right to
suspect him of violating this obligation, and to do so
is, in practice, to suggest the idea of falsehood to
him, and to sow the seeds of it. A corrupt society
is, above all things, marked by two characteristics,
— a ' universal* habit 'of questioning* all that is said,
and an equally universal habit of saying what is not
true. On the contrary, in a healthy society like
that of England, habits of trust and of truth equally
support each other; and it has now become, for
instance, a principle of education that the best way
to evoke truthfulness in boys is uniformly to believe
them, even when appearances are against them. In
place, therefore, of Professor Clifford's assertion that
'the credulous man is father to the liar and the
cheat, — he lives in the bosom of this his family, and
it is no wonder he should become even as they are,'
we should be much nearer the experience of practical
life, if we alleged this of the suspicious men." At
/least as regards human testimony, then, trust is natural
i and almost instinctive, distrust the harsh teaching of
\ special experience; and what we ought to feel is
l rather that it needs specific evidence of untrust-
/ worthiness to justify suspicion, than that it needs
specific evidence of trustworthiness to justify belief.
We do not, even in ordinary cases of well-grounded
confidence, believe because we have calculated the
probabilities, and find a great balance in favour

IX PROFESSOR WACE ON BELIEF 65

of the testimony we are weighing, but we accept
that testimony at once, so long as there are no
strong warnings of its positive untrustworthiness. It
is, in any wholesome state of society, unbelief on all
matters involving personal testimony for which we
need explicit evidence rather than belief. The •
instincts and affections are the true basis of trust. /
On all matters of personal confidence, recourse is
had to an intellectual estimate of probabilities, only
when there is some warning of experience given us
to distrust those instincts and affections, — i.e. that
they are in danger of being abused. The initiative
lies properly with those who would sap confidence ;
and unless that initiative be taken, trust once estab-
lished, whether by a long experience of trustworthi-
ness, or by the far more rapid process of personal
affinities and insights, remains legitimately in posses-
sion of the field.

Now, what I want to call attention to to-day is
the bearing of this principle on religious confidence.
The root of all religion is, of course, a personal trust
in God, founded on the teaching of the conscience
and those spiritual impressions of care and tenderness
which appear to pour in upon us from a source
beyond ourselves. The root of all Christian belief
is a similar personal trust in and affection for Christ
as the very incarnation of God's being and the illus-
tration of His attributes. Again, all historical belief
in the Christian story depends on a similar sort of
confidence in the evangelists and letter-writers of
the New Testament, — a confidence which may obvi-
ously be partly shaken without any breakdown of
moral trust, by anything which goes to show that
these witnesses were not intellectually qualified to
discriminate between what they had witnessed or
s F

66 PROFESSOR WACE ON BELIEF ix

derived from others, and their own inferences from
such testimony. How does all this affect the
absoluteness of religious trust ? Must we say that
till the whole armoury of scepticism has been turned
against that trust, and shown to be inadequate,
our trust can be only provisional, and therefore
I hesitating? Professor Clifford would say that a
faith is not good for anything, but even evil, unless
it represents well-calculated probabilities which yield
a strong balance of evidence in its favour. This is
clearly erroneous, but even substituting for it the
truer rationale of faith, religious belief turns out to
be this, — a trust in superhuman beings and in those
who had closer relations than we have with such
superhuman beings, which is either, in some import-
ant respects, only preliminary and provisional, or
else one which has not been successfully impaired
by, but has survived, a frank and full consideration
of the various objections and arguments in arrest of
belief forced on us by competent criticism. Is any-
thing like absolute confidence to be founded on
either state of mind, and especially on the former ?
May it not be said that, since we shall never be able
to anticipate the new objections which new ages and
new investigations may bring against our faith, even
those who have examined all they have fallen in
with, must* not regard their faith as anything more
than provisional? Still more, may it not be said
that those whose learning, time, and opportunity
have not enabled them to do even as much as that,
have no right to ignore the difficulties which they
have not even gauged ? Should not both classes
limit themselves to saying, ' Our mind is possessed
with a belief which further knowledge might weaken
or remove, and therefore, even while clinging to it,

IX

PROFESSOR WAOB ON BELIEF

67

we must never forget to remind ourselves that some
day it may vanish, and be succeeded by an equally
legitimate unbelief?' Perhaps the true reply to
these questions will best be indicated by first putting
another. Would it be right for one who feels the
deepest and most intimate love and reverence for a
parent or friend to try and qualify that feeling by
representing to himself the possibility that, under
certain circumstances, the impressions on which those
feelings are grounded might be wholly changed, and
his love and reverence be succeeded by complete in-
difference or even dislike ? Of course such changes
are always possible. What has happened to others
may happen to us, and in the case of feelings which
depend on the mutual conduct of two or more vari-
able creatures, no one can be absolutely certain that
they will never change. But is it true that the
habitual realising of this possibility, — the practice
of giving it a substantial weight in our minds apart
from any sign that the anticipation is likely to be
fulfilled, would make us better friends or better sons
and daughters 1 What I think any wise man would
say of such a proposal is this : ' These affections are
the best and noblest part of human nature ; they
lead to the life which is best worth living; they
cannot exist in an atmosphere of constant distrust
and suspicion ; therefore the habitual contemplation
of these abstract possibilities, even if it be solely due
to the desire for intellectual completeness and a full
survey of all contingencies, is a folly which endangers
what is best in us, for the sake of a fanciful width
of view which can never come near being a full
survey of the horizon of possibilities. It is a waste
of the highest life, — whether joy or sorrow, as the
case may be, — for the sake of a trivial diminution of

I

68 PROFESSOR WAGE ON BELIEF II

the intellectual inadequacy of a survey which cannot
^iii any case even approach exhaustiveness. Let,
then, the trust produced by the growth of the affec-
tions remain unchallenged by any habit of dwelling
on abstract possibilities of change simply because
they are possibilities. It would be just as wise to
diminish the energy with which you undertake any
one of life's duties by saturating yourself with the
fancy that if you were to die, as you might, in the
middle of it, it would not much matter how it had
been begun.' If that be good sense and good faith
too, as I think it is, the applicability of the con-
siderations it involves to the case of religious faith
is obvious enough. Of course, it is true that, as
there are many who, from passionately believing in
God, have come to be deniers of God, we, not fully
knowing ourselves, may come to be counted amongst
them. Of course, it is true that, as there are very
many who from passionate love for and faith in
Christ have come to hold the whole Christian story
a fable, we, not fully knowing the drifts and tenden-
cies of our own nature, may some day find ourselves
amongst them. But it is not wisdom, but folly, to
discount this bare possibility by dwelling on it, while
the love, and reverence, and trust are living affec-
tions within us, filling us with a loyalty to which
such anticipations are a treason. But then such
loyalty as this does not imply — indeed is as far as
possible from implying — that we should obstinately
refuse to take in and examine fully, so far as we are
competent to do so, all the facts, or even alleged
facts, which are advanced by men who have ceased
to be believers, as their reasons for ceasing to believe.
A man who was afraid to look into the reasons
alleged by another for his casting off a friendship

IX PROFESSOR WAGE ON BELIEF 69

with a common friend, would really have ceased to
be loyal in his heart to his own friendship. We
cannot retain our trust in God and Christ and yet
admit to ourselves that we are afraid to examine the
grounds of those who have ceased to put trust in
God and Christ, — unless, indeed, these grounds be
beyond our capacity for judgment. Of course it is
quite right to refuse to examine what we could not
understand. But even so, how should the knowledge
that certain statements which are quite beyond our
grasp are believed by many to be relevant to their
disbelief, affect our belief 1 So far as these statements
bear upon questions of scholarship and history, I think
they should always inspire a certain amount of real
reserve. It is an obvious rule that those who have
not examined and cannot examine the true issue of a
controversy, ought not to feel the confidence which
is the result of examination. They must necessarily
balance authority by authority, and keep room for
either conviction on matters which superior learning
must decide. But within all these questions of
scholarship and learning, the existence of the per-
sonal life of a divine inspirer of conscience, and of
the personal spell and imposing spiritual majesty of
Christ, remain as clear of either history or philosophy
as the existence of our own friends is clear of either
history or philosophy. Some people would tell us
that the existence of other beings than ourselves is
a question of philosophy, — that if we could disprove
the existence of an external world, we should have
no reason to believe in the existence of any conscious
being but ourselves. But we all know that this is
trash, — that certainty has no meaning at all, if we
are not as certain of our friends' existence as we are
of our own. Such philosophical cavils should weigh

70 PROFESSOR WAGE ON BELIEF IX

no more than the abstract doubts which may always
be suggested, that life may turn out to be an illusion
altogether, — a dream which we have been dreaming,
and from which we shall waken up to find that all
the assumptions on which we supposed we were '
acting were as fictitious as the actions themselves.
The true attitude, I take it, towards the arguments
by which we know others to have been made sceptics,
is to sound and gauge them thoroughly, if we can ;
and if we cannot, to hold our belief in reserve on
any point which we can see must be seriously affected
by considerations which are beyond us ; — but not to
concede for a moment that the attestations of our
conscience and affections to the existence of that
righteousness which is the ground of all righteous-
ness, and that love which is the fountain of all love,
and their highest manifestation in human life, should
be shaken by the mere knowledge that other men
exist who dispute that attestation, and who do not
feel these affections. That would be to paralyse the
life we have, in deference to those who have it not.

PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM

1875

Perhaps it is my own fault that the moment
Professor Tyndall leaves physical philosophy, and
betakes himself to the theologic or metaphysical
assumptions which underlie it, I never fail to be
bewildered as to what his meaning really is. He
contributes, for instance, an essay to the November
number of the Fortnightly, subsequently to appear, we
are told, as a preface to his forthcoming Fragments of
Science, which, clear as is the style of its individual
sentences, and clever as are certain of its sarcasms,
appears to me to remain one of the obscurest riddles
in modern literature, when, even after perusing it
two or three times, I lay it down, and ask what,
then, really is its drift and teaching ? I will attempt
to state its main positions in Professor TyndalPs own
words, and then to show the exceeding difficulty of
understanding what jointly they amount to. The
Professor is answering the various critics of his
Belfast address, — chief among them Mr. Martineau,
on whom he expends the main portion of his philo-
sophical ammunition. Now, if I understand him
rightly, he has two complaints to make against the

72 PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM x

ablest of these critics. In the first place, they
misunderstood him to say, without his having given
any excuse for such a misunderstanding, that he can
" explain " mind from matter. On the contrary, he
maintains and proves somewhat elaborately that he
has always said just the contrary, that even granting
you could know absolutely the physical conditions of
the molecules of the brain which correspond to each
condition of consciousness, — to each thought^ feeling,
hope, perception, imagination, etc., — you would not
be a tittle nearer towards bridging the impassable
chasm between a state of matter and a state of mind.
"You cannot," he quotes from himself, "satisfy the
human understanding in its demand for logical con-
tinuity between molecular processes and the pheno-
mena of the human mind. This is a rock on which
materialism must inevitably split, whenever it pre-
tends to be a complete philosophy of the human
mind." Well, then, here is Professor TyndalPs first
position. Whatever strength there may be in
materialism, here is one great and impassable flaw in
it. It cannot get out of itself. It cannot bridge the
gulf between matter and consciousness. If it pro-
poses to do so, it is making a vain boast which it
cannot sustain. So far, then, Professor Tyndall is
not a materialist. He apparently thinks it much
more promising to investigate physical phenomena
separately and mental phenomena separately, than
to try to explain the passage from the one to the
other ; but as there is a whole class of phenomena of
the most important kind for which he can find no
key in molecular causes, he so far admits, not specu-
lative materialism, but the speculative failure of
materialism. But this position is no sooner clearly
established in the reader's mind than, to his bewilder-

X PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM 73

merit, he suddenly finds himself overwhelmed by a
very different class of equally positive and even
tartly and dogmatically stated speculative opinions,
such as, for instance, the following: — "Were not
man's origin implicated, we should accept without a
murmur the derivation of animal and vegetable life
from what we call inorganic nature. The conclusion
of pure intellect points this way, and no other. But
this purity is troubled by our interests in this life,
and by our hopes and fears regarding the world to
come. Reason is traversed by the emotions, anger
rising in the weaker heads to the height of suggest-
ing that the compendious shooting of the inquirer
would be an act agreeable to God and serviceable to
men. . . . Our foes are, to some extent, they of our
own household, including not only the ignorant and
the passionate, but a minority of minds of high
calibre and culture, — lovers of freedom, moreover,
who, though its objective hull be riddled by logic,
still find the ethic life of their religion unimpaired.
But while such considerations ought to influence the
form of our argument, and ought to prevent it from
ever slipping out of the region of courtesy into that
of scorn or abuse, its substance, I think, ought to be
maintained and presented in unmitigated strength."
Here Professor Tyndall appears to maintain that
" pure intellect " has none of the speculative fault to
find with materialism, which he reproached his critics
so vehemently before for forgetting that he had
found with it. The only flaw, he now says, in the
materialistic argument is, not its inability to bridge
the gulf between molecules and consciousness, on
which he had previously insisted, but only man's
dislike to face the conclusions of pure intellect when
they are disagreeable to himself. Here, then, it is

74 PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM x

only "courtesy," not in the least an intellectual
sense of the inadequacy of materialism, which makes
Professor Tyndall tender with the anti-materialists.
The "objective" truth of their religion has been
positively riddled by logic, and if their position be
worthy of respect, it is not for any grain of specula-
tive strength in it, but solely because it is the source

\ of a certain * ethic life ' in themselves. That very
materialistic argument on the hopeless and ineradi-
cable flaw in which he had previously insisted, when
he overwhelmed his critics with reproaches for fail-
ing to recognise that he had seen and pointed out
its shortcomings, he now finds one of "unmitigated

\ strength."

These discrepancies are puzzling enough, but when

, I come to consider the sphere assigned by Professor
Tyndall in this relation to what he terms the
"potency of matter," I am more hopelessly out of
my depth than ever. "Think," he says, "of the
acorn, of the earth, and of the solar light and heat,
— was ever such necromancy dreamt of as the pro-
duction of that massive trunk, the swaying boughs,
and whispering leaves from the interaction of those
three factors? In this interaction, moreover, con-
sists what we call life" And then he goes on to
illustrate this " potency of matter " more elaborately
still :—

" Consider it for a moment. There is an experiment,
first made by "Wheatstone, where the music of a piano is
transferred from its sound-board, through a thin wooden
rod, across several silent rooms in succession, and poured
out at a distance from the instrument. The strings of
the piano vibrate, not singly, but ten at a time. Every
string sub-divides, yielding not one note, but a dozen.
All these vibrations and sub -vibrations are crowded

x PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM 75

together into a bit of deal not more than a quarter of a
square inch in section. Yet no note is lost. Each vibra-
tion asserts its individual rights ; and all are, at last,
shaken forth into the air by a second sound-board, against
which the distant end of the rod presses. Thought ends
in amazement when it seeks to realise the motions of that
rod as the music flows through it. I turn to my tree
and observe its roots, its trunk, its branches, and its
leaves. As the rod conveys the music, and yields it up
to the distant air, so does the trunk convey the matter
and the motion — the shocks and pulses and other vital
actions — which eventually emerge in the umbrageous
foliage of the tree. I went some time ago through the
greenhouse of a friend. He had feme from Ceylon, the
branches of which were in some cases not much thicker
than an ordinary pin — hard, smooth, and cylindrical —
often leafless for a foot and more. But at the end of
every one of them the unsightly twig unlocked the
exuberant beauty hidden within it, and broke forth into
a mass of fronds, almost large enough to fill the arms.
We stand here upon a higher level of the wonderful : we
are conscious of a music subtler than that of the piano,
passing unheard through these tiny boughs, and issu-
ing in what Mr. Martineau would opulently call the
' clustered magnificence ' of the leaves. Does it lessen my
amazement to know that every cluster, and every leaf —
their form and texture — lie, like the music in the rod, in
the molecular structure of these apparently insignificant
stems ? Not so."

Now, in that fine passage, Professor Tyndall seems i
to me to yield all, and more than all, that Mr.
Martineau asks, when he challenges the physicist i
really to explain the universe as a result of »
' material ' causes. ' Potency,' I suppose, is power ; '
and ' potency ' to do something in the future which
is not yet within the reach of actual energy is power I

r\

76 PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM x

to anticipate the future and to provide for its contin-
gencies. Preparation for conditions which are as
yet neither present nor, by such minds as ours, even
imaginable, implies, of course, a mastery of laws of
measure and laws of quality and laws of combination
and co-ordination, which involves not only what we
call mind, but infinitely more than we call mind.
' Potency of matter/ in Professor TyndalTs sense, is
matter with most elaborate conditions grafted on it,
which have reference to the most distant spaces and
the most remote times. Are such conditions con-
/ ceivable except as proceeding from a being who, in
some sense immeasurably higher, rather than lower
than ours, knows those distant spaces and distant
times for which these conditions are prepared. Take
the case of the electrised wire, which diners from
other wire only in physical conditions perfectly
invisible to any man surveying it, but which were
preconceived by him who sent the current through it
and by him who marks off its results. Here is a
'potency of matter' of which we know the precise
meaning, and it is a meaning which involves know-
ledge on the part of him who produced the potency.
So in the case of Professor Tyndall's sounding-rod ;
it contains now only potencies of sound, which, if
the sounding-board at the end be forgotten, may be
potencies of sound never likely to reach human ears,
and it must have contained once also those potencies
of leaf and verdure which Professor Tyndall so
eloquently describes in the case of the twig of fern.
In this case, then, one set of c potencies ' have never
reached their actual efflorescence to human eyes, and
have been succeeded by another set of 'potencies'
which may never wield their power of delight for
human ears. But is it conceivable that, in either

X PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM 77

case, the ' potencies ' were there without the power
which knew what was in them ? If it takes mind, \
and very refined mind, like Professor TyndalTs, even *
to discover these laws of adaptation of distant condi-
tions of space and time to each other, does it not \
take much more than what man calls mind to '
embody the laws and keep them at work ? It seems •
to me that in this talk about the 'potency' of ,
matter Professor Tyndall gives up entirely the
materialism for which he argues. Potency is an/
idea simply, without any meaning except for one who \
can see both ends of a long chain of complex condi- :
tions, and can see that the beginning makes provi-
sion for the end. But this is equivalent to mind'
plus matter, or rather something much more instead
of much less than what we call mind, plus matter,
and not matter alone. If it takes what we call mind,
and mind at a stretch, to adapt the conditions of
locomotion, say, to the conditions of the people who
desire to go about a day or two in advance, — it
must be something not less, but infinitely greater
than mind so stretched, which adapts the conditions
of a sun in space to the myriads of lives which will,
sooner or later, if scientific evolution be on the right
track, be evolved from the conditions so prepared.
In that word ' potency ' Professor Tyndall seems to "^

me to have assumed a mental, and excluded a purely
material, cause as conclusively, — and let me also say,
as unconsciously, — as his ' unsightly twig ' assumed
its beauty and put off its unsightliness when it burst
into that "clustered magnificence" of fronds of
which he speaks. 'Potency' assumes the capacity^
to see present and future at once, and prepare the \
present for the future. Matter, as such, can have
none but accidental 'potency,' — the potency of

j

f

78 PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM X

changing place when force is forthcoming to change
its place. But force acting under rhythmical laws
of specific and complex provisions, force moulding
and Constraining force, till matter gives out music,
and beauty, and consciousness, and suffering, and joy,
— this is all language without meaning, unless you
credit the force so at work with all, and much more
than all the qualities, which are combined in what
we call * mind/

And yet Professor Tyndall appears to make it his
main charge against Mr. Martineau, that all this
inference is a mere feat of * feeling,' for which there
is no sort of intellectual defence. After explaining
that the animal world is a distillation through the
vegetable world from inorganic nature, he goes on : —

" From this point of view all three worlds would con-
stitute a unity, in which I picture life as immanent
everywhere. Nor am I anxious to shut out the idea that
the life here spoken of may be but a subordinate part and
function of a higher life, as the' living, moving blood is
subordinate to the living man. I resist no such idea as
long as it is not dogmatically imposed. Left for the
tuman mind freely to operate upon, the idea has ethical
vitality ; but stiffened into a dogma, the inner force dis-
appears, and the outward yoke of a usurping hierarchy
takes its place."

What Professor Tyndall means by * ethical vitality '
is one of the great mysteries of this beautiful but
mysterious paper. I should have said that if there
was a word wholly inapplicable to the conception he
is here describing it is the word ' ethical.' I suppose
he means by ' ethical vitality ' that the notion has a
charm for us which gives us new impulse, but that
it has no basis at all in our pure reason. I should

X PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON MATERIALISM 79

have said just the reverse. There is no 'ethical'
vitality in this or any other idea till you put some
moral or spiritual character into it, which hitherto
Professor Tyndall has not done. It is to the intel- \
lectual nature of man, and to that alone, that this I
notion appeals with irresistible force. Here is an /
infinite wealth of minute correspondence between
the most distant parts of space and time, which,
unless we assume mind, and much more than human
mind, operating in and through what Professor
Tyndall calls matter, is simply a miracle of harmo-
nious accidents, of happy rhythm in events which
no one ever intended to be linked together, of poetic
coincidences and convergencies of energies, the
rhyme and music in which no one ever preconceived.
And this the imagination of man refuses to conceive.
As far as I understand Professor Tyndall, what he
calls "feeling" I call "reason," and what he calls
pure reason I should call, if I did not feel so much
respect for him as a physicist, pure folly. Certainly
he is not happy in expounding ' materialism ' to his
readers, in spite of the fact that he possesses, as he
does, the ear of nature, and catches so much more
than most of us of her hidden secrets and inspira-
tions.

XI

MR. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM

1876

Professor Tyndall's reply in the November number
of the Contemporary Review to Mr. Martineau's criti-
cisms on some of the positions of his Belfast address
in 1874 has elicited a rejoinder from Mr. Martineau
in the new number of the same periodical, which in
the clearness of its positions and the precision of its
reasoning, should, at least, protect him against any
reiteration of Professor TyndalPs accusation of want
of lucidity in his style, and want of accuracy in his
apprehensions of the issues discussed between them.
Indeed, to those who look not so much at the descrip-
tions of physical phenomena referred to for purposes
of illustration, as at the exposition of the intellectual
assumptions involved in the scientific description of
these phenomena, and the rational inferences drawn
from them, it will appear, as I ventured to intimate
in commenting on Professor Tyndall's paper in the
November Contemporary, that the charge of vagueness
of conception and looseness of exposition may be
made with much more truth against his own presenta-
tion of the case than against Mr. Martineau's. Indeed,
I defy any one to apprehend clearly what it is that

XI MR. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM 81

Professor Tyndall meant to assert when he derived
all the various elaborate forms of life now existing
from what he called the " potency " of matter, and
what it is, on the other hand, that he was angry with
his opponents for supposing that he meant to assert
and earnestly protested that he refused to assert. If
I am not mistaken, he will find that Mr. Martineau
had a much clearer conception than he himself had
of the intellectual creed shadowed forth in the Belfast
address ; nor need he be much abashed by the dis-
covery, since it has been one of Mr. Martineau's chief
works in life to discriminate accurately between
the philosophical significance of various systems of
thought, while it has been his own duty chiefly to
push forward science rather than to analyse its logic,
or to distinguish sharply its fundamental assumptions
from the rationale of the methods it pursues and the
conclusions which it gathers. At the same time,
when the purport of a popular address such as that
given at Belfast is distinctly philosophical, as dis-
tinguished from merely scientific, when it deals boldly
with the great question of origin, and calmly relegates
religion to the sphere of emotion, bidding it beware
of meddling with the realm of knowledge, it is not
perhaps too much to expect that the thinker who
delivers it should have a clearer grasp of the belief
he is endeavouring to spread than Professor Tyndall
appears to have had in his Presidential Address at
the British Association. It will be, I believe, the
destiny of that picturesque survey of the achieve-
ments and claims of Science to make converts to a
system of Materialism which it is, to say the least,
doubtful whether Professor Tyndall has ever held,
and tolerably clear that he never accurately under-
stood

8 O

V

82 MR. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM xi

Materialism may be practically defined as the
philosophy which lavishes on the elementary material
agencies discovered to be at work in the universe,
the wonder and admiration which all religious creeds
reserve for the Mind by which the believers in these
creeds assume that those material agencies are
moulded and expanded till they produce the results
which we all see. Now, whether Professor Tyndall
really intended to imply that this wonder and admira-
tion ought to be lavished on those material atoms
which contain, according to him, " the promise and
potency of every form of life," or whether, as I some-
what incline to believe, he intended us to suspend
our judgments absolutely as to the proper object of
this wonder and admiration, — in fact, wished us to
indulge the emotion without defining any object for
it at all, while we studied the forms in which this
feeling would be apt to express itself, if the intellect
refused to come to any decision as to the proper
object of the emotion, — it would be a rash thing to
affirm with any sort of confidence. In criticising
Professor TyndalPs thesis that human emotion, not
knowledge, is the true foundation for a religious
philosophy, Mr. Martineau had replied that so soon
as emotion proved empty, he hoped we should stamp
it out, and get rid of it. On this Professor Tyndall
brought a charge against Mr. Martineau, that he was
kicking away the only foundation of his own faith.
Mr. Martineau, as I understand him, now rejoins that
he did not in the least intend to depreciate the
testimony which emotion may supply to the existence
of a real object for it, but that what he meant to say
was that if the emotion is felt without a real object
for it, if it makes us indulge in illusions as to an
object which does not exist, — if, in fact, it wraps us in

W—Btmmmmmmmmsmsmmsm&m

XI MR. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM 83

a world of phantasm, — instead of guiding us safely
amid the realities of life, then, and then only, he
hoped we might stamp it out. If, on the contrary,
it be only a sign of something real, though as yet ^
imperfectly apprehended, above and beyond us, then J
our effort ought to be to get a solid grasp, as far as I
our faculties admit, of the reality which arouses \
these emotions, but not to indulge them in the dark J
without any conviction that such an object really
exists.

" It is for ' emotion ' with a vacuum within, and float-
ing in vacuo without, charged with no thought and
directed to no object, that I avow distrust ; and if there
be an < over-shadowing awe ' from the mere sense of a
blank consciousness and an enveloping darkness, I can
see in it no more than the negative condition of a religion
yet to come. In human psychology, feeling, when it
transcends sensation, is not without idea, but is a type
of idea ; and to suppose ' an inward hue and temperature/
apart from any ' object of thought,' is to feign the impos-
sible. Colour must lie upon form, and heat must spring
from a focus, and declare itself upon a surface. If by
« referring religion to the region of emotion ' is meant
withdrawing it from the region of truth, and letting it
pass into an undulation in no medium and with no
direction, I must decline the surrender. In thus refusing
support from ' empty emotion/ I am said to * kick away
the only philosophic foundation on which it is possible to
build religion.' Professor Tyndall is certainly not exact-
ing from his builders about the solidity of his ' founda-
tion ; ' and it can be only a very light and airy architecture,
not to say an imaginary one, that can spring from such
base ; and perhaps it does not matter that it should be
unable to face the winds. Nor is the inconsistency
involved in this statement less surprising than its levity.
Religion, it appears, has a 'philosophical foundation.'

84 MR. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM XI

But 'philosophy' investigates the ultimate ground of
cognition and the organic unity of what the several
sciences assume. And a ' philosophical foundation ' is a
legitimated first principle for some one of these ; it is a
cognitive beginning — a daJtvm of ulterior qucustia — and
nothing but a science can have it Religion, then, must
be an organism of thought Yet it is precisely in denial
of this that my censor invents his new 'foundation.'
Here, he tells us, we know nothing, we can think nothing ;
the intellectual life is dumb and blank ; we do but
blindly feel. How can a structure without truth repose
on philosophy in its foundation ? "

To this I cannot conceive any reply, unless it be that
emotion may be properly aroused by even an unknown
cause, when we contemplate the magnitude of the
effects produced by it, — which is true so long as the
emotion is limited to one of pure surprise and desire
to sound what is nevertheless not to be sounded.
But then if it be so limited, it is quite certain that
no religion can ever be got out of it A religion, if
it be a religion in anything but name, implies moral
trust in something, but moral trust is wholly un-
warrantable, if all that we see can be even more
securely referred to matter as "the promise and
potency of every form of life," than it can to any
ulterior spiritual cause beyond matter which gave
matter this "promise," and implanted in it, so far
as it can be said to contain, this "potency." Mr.
Martineau's argumentation in his new essay is wholly
devoted to showing that in no sense can the higher
forms of life be really educed out of the lower, unless
you already assume as latent in the lower the fulness
of power which is eventually expressed in the higher.
He analyses with great force and precision the real
assumptions of the atomic theory, so far only as the

mmmi^^^m^

XI MB. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM 85

chemistry of the universe is supposed to be implicitly
contained in its mechanics, and shows, as it seems to
me unanswerably, that the only sense in which
qualitative differences are explicable by the assump-
tion of differences in the bare form and motion of
otherwise homogeneous atoms is a sense in which the
hypothesis does not in the least explain the qualities
thus resulting, but only finds for us a valuable
scientific test and measure of their existence and
their intensity, — just as the assumption as to the length
of different waves of light, while it gives us a test
and measure of the different colours, and enables us
to predict the results of interferences, does not in the
least explain the sensation of colour, any more than
the expansion of the mercury or the spirit in the
tube of a thermometer, while it measures for us the
intensity of heat, gives us the slightest explanation
of the sensations which accompany the various grada-
tions of that heat in our own frames. Show, if you \
can, that the chemical qualities of a substance might
be connected with the assumed form and vibratory
velocities of the atoms of which it is composed, yet
this only means that you have discovered certain
uniform criteria of the relation between mechanical
and chemical phenomena, by the help of which you
can predict the latter from the study of the former.
Does that make it at all more philosophical to say
that the latter are contained in the former ? Is the
quality which we call heat (of sensation) in any way
latent in the criterion which leads us to expect it 1
Is the beauty of the flower latent in the seed, even
in conjunction with the earth and air and moisture
which lend that seed the constituents of its growth ?
If so, as Mr. Crosskey of Birmingham finely put it
in the masterly sermon which he preached before the

86 MR. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM XI

f British Association last August at Bristol, 1 " in the
\ attempt to reduce ' spirit ' to ' matter/ matter is itself

transfigured and becomes spirit." Or to quote the

passage more at length —

" The words ' promise ' and * potency/ as used by
Tyndall, do not exclude intellectual action or describe an
imagined physical substitute for a 'Father in heaven.'
!' Potency' — for what] Power exercised according to
\ method is equivalent to power guided by controlling
'thought, — and where there is controlling thought, the
Lord of the Heavens and the earth is near at hand.
In the last analysis matter itself disappears in any
tangible sense, and force alone remains. What is force
restricted to definite combinations but the expression of a
determining will? When 'promise 7 is connected with
' potency/ there must be that forecasting of the future of
which we know nothing except as a mental act. If
qualities commonly described as mental are referred to
the ' promise and potency ' associated with ' matter/ mind
is not degraded to matter, but matter is uplifted to mind.
The tendency of philosophical materialism is not to
scepticism, but to idealism. The resolution of matter into
force, and the attribution to force of those mighty qualities,
connected with ordered intellectual action, render the
phenomena of the universe the manifestation of an
authority possessed of every characteristic the Christian
ascribes to his God. In the attempt to reduce ' spirit ' to
' matter/ matter is itself transfigured and becomes spirit."

To apply the same argument in a particular case, in
what sense can the " struggle for existence," which

1 The Religious Worth and Glory of Scientific Research. A
Discourse delivered in the Lewin's Mead Chapel, Bristol, on
Sunday, 29th August 1875, on occasion of the Forty -fifth
Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science. By Henry William Crosskey, F.G.S. London :
Whitfield.

XI MR. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM 87

Mr. Darwin has found to be so efficient a cause in
superseding lower by higher forms of life, — in other
words, in producing a " survival of the fittest," — be )
said to contain the "promise and potency," of the
higher forms of human pity and sympathy, except
only in this, that as a matter of fact, the one can be
traced back in lineal descent to the other, though it
so far transcends, and indeed disguises, the features
of its ancestor, that the two are more like deadly
antagonists than near relations ? You can trace the \
steps of the descent, but it is mere folly to say in
this case that the antecedent in any true sense carried
within it the essential life of the consequent. And
so, too, what spiritualists maintain, they maintain on
strictly rational grounds. Man, as a speculative
being, finds it reasonable to recognise in such trans-
formations as these the moulding power of a Mind
which sees the end from the beginning, rather than
the magic transformations of a force which is always
adding to its own conquests without any pretence of
being guided by the intellectual plan of a conqueror,
and which is always improving on its former achieve-
ments without any standard by which to measure the
better and the worse, or any goal at which its
endeavours are aiming. To go back once more to the
atomic theory, with which Mr. Martineau in this
paper has chiefly dealt, it seems to me that he has
really justified Sir John Herschel and Professor Clerk-
Maxwell in their assertion that even assuming the
atomic hypothesis to be so elaborated and established
as to account for the phenomena of chemistry, — which
as yet it is far from being, — the atoms so assumed
must be regarded as resembling much more closely
" manufactured articles," i.e. articles full of properties
carefully induced in them, than those bare and blank

\

88 MR. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM XI

units of solidity which the true materialistic hypothesis
i requires. In other words, the different atoms must
already be distinguished by such remarkable differ-
ences of form and capacity for vibration that it is
certainly not wonderful that they result in different
qualitative properties if they result in qualitative
< properties at all. Yet the fact that difference in
form and vibratory character is a note of some coining
difference of quality remains just as inexplicable, and
as in need of a philosophic assumption to explain it,
as the fact that the law of conflict and competition
ultimately results in a law of sympathy and com-
passion. "No connection," says Mr. Crosskey, in
the admirable sermon to which I have already
referred, " that may be established between the act
of thinking and the peculiarities of our bodily organ-
isation can alter the fact that to exist as beings
capable of thought and moved by passion, implies
relationships which the elements into which our flesh
and blood may be resolved do not share." And till
Professor Tyndall can show that it is not a more
legitimate intellectual inference to refer the less to
the greater than it is to refer the greater to the less,
he will hardly be able to justify his own strange
teaching that religion is concerned only with the
region of emotion, and that he who tries to evolve a
religious creed from the operations of all the higher
faculties of man, instead of from mere blind feeling,
is on a false scent, in which he will only mislead
mankind, and prepare for himself a heavy disappoint-
ment.

XII

DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT

1881

I HAVE always recognised in Dr. Ward — the author
of The Ideal of a Christian Church, which more than
a generation ago made such a stir at Oxford, and
till very recently the editor of the Dublin Review —
one of the ablest and clearest of the philosophical
thinkers of the day. Little as I agree with his not
merely Eoman Catholic, but peculiarly Ultramon-
tane theology, I believe that he has done more
service to the cause of true philosophy in England
than any thinker of the day, unless I except Dr. >
Martineau, who, indeed, has it in his power to do far /
more than he has actually done for English psychology
and metaphysics. But greatly as I esteem Dr.
Ward's writing, I question whether he has ever
published anything weightier and more effective
than a pamphlet which has just appeared, — repub-
lished from the Dublin Review of fourteen years ago,
— on Science, Prayer, Free-will, and Miracles. 1 It
would be impossible for me, of course, in a news-
paper article, to deal with the whole of this remark-
able paper ; and, indeed, I only contemplate touching

1 Burns and Oatea.

90 DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT XII

what Dr. Ward says of the scientific view of the uni-
formity of Nature in relation to that Providential
view of the Universe with which it is supposed to be
more or less inconsistent. No one can deny that Dr.
Ward states the primd facie view of the unreason-
ableness of prayer with sufficient clearness and
energy, in the following hypothetical argument
against it : —

'Your country is visited with famine or pestilence,
and you supplicate your God for relief. Your only
child lies sick of a dangerous fever ; and as a matter of
course you are frequent in prayer. You are diligent,
indeed, in giving her all the external help you can ; but
your chief trust is avowedly in God. You entreat Him
that He will arrest the malady and spare her precious
life. What can be more irrational than this] Would
you pray, then, for a long day in December? Would
you pray that in June the sun shall set at six o'clock ?
Yet surely the laws of fever are no less absolutely fixed
than those of sunset ; and were the case otherwise, no
science of medicine could by possibility have been called
into existence. The only difference between the two
cases is, that the laws of sunset have been thoroughly
mastered ; whereas our knowledge as to the laws of
fever, though very considerable, is as yet but partial and
incomplete. The ' abstract power of prediction/ — as Mr.
Stuart Mill calls it, — this is the one assumption, in every
nook and corner of science. All scientific men take for
granted — when they cease to do so they will cease to be
scientific men — that a person of superhuman and ade-
quate intelligence, who should know accurately and fully
all the various combinations and properties of matter
which now exist, could predict infallibly the whole series
of future phenomena. He could predict the future
course of weather or of disease, with the same assurance
with which men now predict the date of a coming

m

XII DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT 91

eclipse. Pray God all day long — add fasting to your
prayer, if you like, and let all your fellow-Christians add
their prayer and fasting to yours — in order that the said
eclipse shall come a week earlier : do you suppose you
will be heard ? Yet the precise date of an eclipse is not
more peremptorily fixed by the laws of nature than is
the precise issue of your daughter's fever. You do not
venture to doubt speculatively this fundamental doctrine
of science ; in our various scientific conversations, my
friend, you have always admitted it But, like a true
Englishman, you take refuge in an illogical compromise.
You assume one doctrine when you study science ; and
another, its direct contradictory, when your child falls
ill. And yet I am paying you too high a compliment :
for you do not profess that this latter doctrine is true;
you do not profess that your prayer to God is reasonable,
or can possibly be efficacious : your only defence is, that
your reason is mastered and overborne by the combined
effect of your religious and your parental emotion. As
though you could please God — if, indeed, there be a
Personal God at all — by acting in a manner which your
reason condemns."

Well, the answer to this difficulty is given in a
passage of some humour, — and my readers may be
surprised to hear that there is a good deal of humour
in Dr. Ward, — in which he propounds for us the
view which philosophical mice imprisoned in a
piano, or some more complicated instrument of the
same kind, might be likely to take of " the laws of
Nature," as represented by the sounds and vibrations
of these instruments.

" We begin, then, with imagining two mice, endowed,
however, with quasi-human or semi-human intelligence,
enclosed within a grand pianoforte, but prevented in some
way or other from interfering with the free play of its

92 . DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT III

machinery. From time to time they are delighted with the
strains of choice music. One of the two considers these to
result from some agency external to the instrument ; but
the other, having a more philosophical mind, rises to
the conception of fixed laws and phenomenal uniformity.
' Science as yet,' he says, * is but in its infancy ; but I
have already made one or two important discoveries.
Every sound which reaches us is preceded by a certain
vibration of these strings. The same string invariably
produces the same sound ; and that louder or more
gentle, according as the vibration may be more or less
intense. Sounds of a more composite character result
when two or more of the strings vibrate together ; and
here, again, the sound produced, as far as I am able to
discover, is precisely a compound of those sounds, which
would have resulted from the various component strings
vibrating separating. Then there is a further sequence
which I have observed : for each vibration is preceded by
a stroke by a corresponding hammer ; and the string
vibrates more intensely, in proportion as the hammer's
stroke is more forcible. Thus far I have already prose-
cuted my researches. And so much at least is evident
f even now : viz. that the sounds proceed not from any
external and arbitrary agency — from the intervention,
e.g. of any higher will — but from the uniform operation
of fixed laws. These laws may be explored by intelli-
gent mice ; and to their exploration I shall devote my
life.' Even from this inadequate illustration you see the
general conclusion which we wish to enforce. A sound
has been produced through a certain intermediate chain
of fixed laws ; but this fact does not tend ever so dis-
tantly to establish the conclusion that there is no human
( pre-movement acting continuously at one end of that
chain. Imagination, however, has no limits. We may
very easily suppose, therefore, that some instrument is
discovered, producing music immeasurably more heavenly
and transporting than that of the pianoforte; but for

XII DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT 93

that very reason immeasurably more vast in size and
more complex in machinery. We will call this imaginary
instrument a 'polychordon/ as we are not aware that
there is any existiog claimant of that name. In this
polychordon, the intermediate links — between the player's
pre-movement on the one hand, and the resulting sound
on the other — are no longer two, but two hundred. We
further suppose— imagination (as before said) being bound-
less; — that some human being or other is unintermittently
playing on this polychordon ; but playing on it just what
airs may strike his fancy at the moment. Well : suc-
cessive generations of philosophical mice have actually
traced one hundred and fifty of the two hundred pheno-
menal sequences, through whose fixed and invariable laws
the sound is produced. The colony of mice, shut up
within, are in the highest spirits at the success which has
crowned the scientific labour of their leading thinkers ;
and the most eminent of these addresses an assembly.
* We have long known that the laws of our musical uni-
verse are immutably fixed ; but we have now discovered
a far larger number of those laws than our ancestors
could have imagined capable of discovery. Let us redouble
our efforts. I fully expect that our grandchildren will
be able to predict as accurately, for an indefinitely pre-
ceding period, the succession of melodies with which we are
to be delighted, as we now predict the hours of sunrise
and sunset. One thing, at all events, is now absolutely
incontrovertible. As to the notion of there being some
agency external to the polychordon, — intervening with
arbitrary and capricious will to produce the sounds we
experience, — this is a long-exploded superstition ; a mere
dream and dotage of the past The progress of science
has put it on one side, and never again can it return to
disturb our philosophical progress.'"

The reader may infer very easily what that reply
really amounts to. It comes to this, — that a very

94 DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT xii

considerable power of tracing out the order of
phenomena, and even of predicting the future order
of phenomena from the past, may be acquired by
creatures who are liable, nevertheless, to be entirely
misled by the knowledge they so acquire, as to the
most important of all the causes at work in pro-
ducing these phenomena. Just as the mice were
certainly wrong in supposing that, because 150 steps
in the phenomenal order had been discovered, the
remaining fifty would lead to no new kind of cause
— no true initiative — so scientific men may be just
as wrong in supposing that because they have dis-
covered so many of the uniform links in the order
of Nature, there is no divine hand beyond, which
moves the whole network of physical agencies as it
will, so as to produce this or that result. The
player outside the order of Nature counts none the
less in determining that order, even though men who
confine their minds to groping about within it,
convince themselves that the chain of second causes
is literally endless. Some one will at once ask
whether, then, Dr. Ward means that it would be as
rational (if there were any excuse for it) to pray for
the lengthening of the day at Christmas or the
hastening of an eclipse, as to pray for the recovery
of a sick child? Does the hand outside the great
instrument really select all its melodies absolutely
arbitrarily, or are there some which so underlie all
others, that to expect their arrest is to expect that the
musical instrument itself shall cease to be ? It is clear
that Dr. Ward would answer the two first questions
'in the negative, and the last in the affirmative. He
regards what he calls the cosmical laws as consti-
tuting a permanent framework for our Universe,
and though, of course, no less subject to the will of

XII DR. WARD ON TJIE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT 95

God than the others, yet as so framed that changes
or modifications in them can neither be necessary
nor desirable for the purpose of man's education in
religious trust. What happens by cosmical law
cannot be inconsistent with any such special guid-
ance of human lots, as is needful to teach men to
lean on God. Within the fixed framework of these
laws there is plenty of compass for such a play of
special providence on the one side, and of trust on
the other, as the religious life requires. Hence, J
though it is, of course, to be assumed that the
Divine pre-movement does determine the courses of
the stars, there is no reason why the laws deter-
mining them should be pliant, since their pliancy is
not needful to teach man the necessity of trust in
God, and therefore there can be no sense or piety in
praying that they should be altered. The whole
compass of human fate depends on combinations of
a much more variable and composite kind —

" By cosmical phenomena we mean such as the hours
of sunrise and sunset; of moonrise and moonset ; the
respective apparent position of the heavenly bodies, etc.
By earthly phenomena we mean such as the weather ;
the violence and direction of the wind ; the progress of
disease ; and others of a similar kind. The discovery of
Copernicanism placed these two phenomenal classes in
far more striking contrast. It appears that cosmical
phenomena are produced by an incredibly vast machinery,
in which this earth plays a very subordinate part ;
whereas earthly phenomena are due in great measure to
agencies, which act exclusively within the region of our
planet. From the very first, therefore, there was a real
presumption that these latter agencies were subject to a
pre-movement, quite different in kind from any which
influenced the former ; and this presumption would be

96 DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT xil

very greatly increased by the discoveries of Galileo and
his successors. Now it is most remarkable, and bears
thinking of again and again, that the only power of
indefinite prediction which science has procured concerns
cosmical phenomena, and not earthly."

Nay, more, Dr. Ward might have added, had he
been writing now, that even the latest investigations
into cosmical laws suggest the intervention of causes
existing on a very grand scale, and analogous, in
some respects, to human volition, which do not seem
to be immanent in these laws as they are at present
known. All the great physicists regard the gradual
diffusion and equalisation of heat throughout the
universe as the running-down of a mechanical pro-
cess, of which they cannot present to themselves the
winding-up. The sun will in a certain number of
millions of years burn itself out, and all its concen-
trated heat will be scattered throughout solar or
stellar space. But when you ask how that heat —
which will then, in its diffused and equalised state,
be no longer a cause of motion, but a condition of
rest — can be again concentrated, so as to become
once more the source of new life and motion, no
answer is given, and we are told that to create such
a store of energy there must be the intervention of
some new cause, of which at present we cannot even
guess the nature. That is merely another way of
saying that however uniform cosmical phenomena
may be throughout long periods of time, there is yet
in existence some cause, of which we know nothing,
which, if it did not initiate an absolute beginning,
yet could do what is quite as inconceivable — so
change the phenomena as to reverse the order of
things as we see it, — could play, as it were, the

XII DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT 97

cosmical tune backwards, and concentrate that which
■is now always in course of diffusion, or diffuse that
which had previously been in course of concentration.
Take even the cosmical laws as they are, and you \'
find in them the necessity for some external control,
which can reverse their order and revolutionise their /
tendency.

But, of course, if this "divine pre-movement" of
which Dr. Ward speaks exists, it must be much
more observed in the sphere of mind than in that of
matter. Men certainly, in the exercise of their
volition, cause almost as many obvious changes in
the physical order of the universe as they do in the
moral order ; but then, all their modifications of the
physical order of the universe begin in their own
purposes and intentions, and may, therefore, be said
to be of moral origin. And, of course, we should
expect that those divine pre-movements of the physi-
cal order of the universe which alter the character
of the melody or the harmony, would also begin very
often at least, in the minds of men. And so, no
doubt, the Bible represents it. It makes the call of
a man — the divine pre-movement of his will — the
commencement in the history of religion. It makes
the call of a nation by its greatest prophet, the
starting-point of the most important of all national
histories, at least if we think that the most important
which is intended to give a moral and spiritual ex-
ample to the whole. It makes the call of one man
after another the starting-point of one new era after
another in that history, and it makes the pre-move-
ment of an absolutely perfect human nature by God
the central point of human destiny. In all these
cases, a number of secondary and human causes,
which spend their force as secondary causes in the
s H

y

98 DR. WARD ON THE DIVINE PRE-MOVEMENT xn

usual manner, are, as it is asserted, set in motion by
the "divine pre-movement," which Dr. Ward assumes
as the explanation of all providential interferences
with the lot of man. Even in secular history, the
same importance attaches to the first entrance of a
new and unaccountable moral force on the scene, — a
force which I at least should find it more difficult to
ascribe to any human cause, than to a definite impulse
by the hand of Providence itself. Take such an
impulse as that given by Socrates to Greek thought,
— which he himself expressly ascribed to the teaching
of a superhuman power; take such an impulse as
that given to the Arabian intellect by the career of
Mahommed ; take such an impulse as that given to
the spiritual affections and the rebellion against
ecclesiastical conventions by the conversion of Luther,
• — and in all these, and a thousand other cases, we
should see the direct modification of the order of
\ human events, by a divine pre-movement of the
Vmind of man. Not more certain is it that to account
for the motion of the planets, you need to assume an
original force of " projection n as well as a source of
centripetal attraction, than it is that to account for
the destiny of man, on the national, no less than the
individual scale, you need to assume a constant
" pre-movement," from some source of which no man
who rejects revealed religion can assign the origin.
Dr. Ward has done the world of thought a real
service, by the hypothesis of his " philosophical
mice ; " for he has cleared up by it a branch of his
subject on which thought is very apt to become
hazy, and even to lose its way.

XIII

THE GREAT AGNOSTIC

1895

Professor Huxley has not lived to conclude his
reply to Mr. Balfour's book on "The Foundations
of Belief " in the Nineteenth Centwry for March. He
had proposed to himself to conclude it in the month
of April; but no sooner had his first indignant
denial that his Agnosticism could properly be
identified with the "Naturalism" of Mr. Balfour's
essay been completed, than he was struck down by
the fatal illness which, though it often gave us hope
of its passing away, has at length terminated that
eager and opulent life. There has not often been
an Englishman of more brilliant gifts, of richer
energies, of higher courage, and more thoroughly
English combativeness. He had in him, too, all the
qualities of a leader of men, though his studies and
researches led him into fields of knowledge where
there were but few men to follow him with any dis-
criminating judgment. Had he ever taken to the
political field, he would have been as distinguished,
perhaps, as Mr. Gladstone himself, though distin-
guished as a benevolent Conservative rather than as
a champion of democracy. He had much of the

100 THE GREAT AGNOSTIC Ml

charm of manner, of the ready humour, and almost
tender loyalty to his friends, which makes a great
captain. And he certainly possessed that gift for
r popular exposition and making plausible presumptions
seem a great deal more adequate and satisfactory
than they are, that gives life and confidence to those
who attach themselves to a leader, and who desire
to tread in his footsteps. He had a rich fund of
humour, and a great resourcefulness in battle. And
if there were any Church to which he could properly
be said to belong, it was certainly a Church militant.
But none the less, there was so much of human
kindliness and geniality in him that he had many
more eager friends than he had eager foes, and there
were probably as many sincere English mourners
when it was known that the long four months' illness
had ended fatally, as there were when the last Poet-
Laureate died, and not a few of the same distinguished
band. Indeed, it is curious that of the group which
found the very unaccustomed medium of verse
necessary to express their grief for Lord Tennyson's
death, Professor Huxley himself was perhaps the
most distinguished and the least unsuccessful, though
it had been Tennyson's great purpose in life to teach
men that they might much more than " faintly trust
the larger hope," while it was Professor Huxley's to
persuade them that they should rather frankly utter
and even foster the larger doubt. Yet strangely
enough, it was Professor Huxley who eagerly pro-
claimed Tennyson's right to a place in that grand
Abbey which had grown " stone by stone : "

" As the stormy brood
Of English blood
Has waxed and spread

F^^g^^J*- Mn I Q^^M

XIII THE GREAT AGNOSTIC 101

And filled the world

With sails unfurled ;

With men that may not lie ;

With thoughts that cannot die."

And yet the "thoughts that could not die" in
Tennyson's great verse were certainly not the thoughts
which were uppermost in Professor Huxley's mind.
For he, though he denied being a champion of
Naturalism in Mr. Balfour's sense, gloried in being
an Agnostic. It was he, indeed, who first popu-
larised the word, and made a sort of creedless creed
of Agnosticism. He held, and held to the last, that /
though it is not the part of any true Agnostic to
deny God's existence, it is certainly not his part to
affirm it; that the dominant idea of Tennyson's
poetry is as questionable as it is fascinating ; and we
conclude that he would have held that if Tennyson
was great for having put the deepest human and
even Christian faith into immortal words, he would
have been still greater if he had made suspense of
faith the true ideal of a lofty mind. Here is Pro-
fessor Huxley's deliberate confession of faith in his
own words, — words which are very divergent indeed
from those which he had so warmly extolled in his
friend, —

" As regards the extent to which the improvement of
natural knowledge has remodelled and altered what may
be termed the intellectual ethics of men, — what are
among the moral convictions most fondly held by bar-
barous and semi-barbarous people ? They are the con-
victions that authority is the soundest basis of belief;
that merit attaches to a readiness to believe ; that the
doubting disposition is a bad one, and scepticism a sin ;
that when good authority has pronounced what is to be
believed, and faith has accepted it, reason has no further

m

^■^"•^p^^p^

102

THE GREAT AGNOSTIC

Xin

\

duty. There are many excellent persons who yet hold
by these principles, and it is not my present business, or
intention, to discuss their views. All I wish to bring
clearly before your minds is the unquestionable fact that
the improvement of natural knowledge is effected by
methods which directly give the lie to all these convictions,
and assume the exact reverse of each to be true. The
improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to
acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is
the highest of duties ; blind faith the one unpardonable
sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance
in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection
of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the
annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most
ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not
because the men he most venerates hold them ; not
because their verity is testified by portents and wonders ;
but because his experience teaches him that whenever he
chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their
primary source, Nature, — whenever he thinks fit to test
them by appealing to experiment and to observation, —
Nature will confirm them. The man of science has
learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by
verification."

J. Professor Huxley, as he often and eagerly pro-
claimed, was no materialist or Atheist. He thought
a mental origin of the universe a great possibility,
but nothing more. The most celebrated passage in
his most celebrated essay described human life as
something like a great game of chess between men
and a hidden player who always plays on the same
rules, but who, as Huxley himself admitted, leaves
men to find out by the use of their own wits what
those rules are, — a kind of game at which no man,
I suppose, would be willing to play without some
sort of guidance and help from his unseen antagonist.

XIII THE GREAT AGNOSTIC 103

The passage to which I refer is a very powerful and
characteristic one ; and it seems to me so memorable
that, profoundly as I differ from its drift, I should
like, now that we are mourning this great student's
death, to recall it to the memory of its first readers,
and bring it to the notice of a generation which may
never have read it.

" Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and
fortune of every one of us would, one day or other,
depend upon his winning or losing a game at chess.
Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a
primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves
of the pieces ; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen
eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check ?
Do you not think that we should look with a disappro-
bation amounting to scorn upon the father who allowed
his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow
up without knowing a pawn from a knight ? Yet it is a
very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune,
and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less,
of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our
knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more
difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which
has been played for untold ages, every man and woman
of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her
own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the
phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are
what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the
other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is
always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our
cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the
smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays
well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of over-
flowing generosity with which the strong shows delight
in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated, —
without haste, but without remorse. My metaphor will

104 THE GREAT AGNOSTIC XIII

remind some of you of the famous picture in which
Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for
his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that
picture, a calm, strong angel who is playing for love, as
we say, and would rather lose than win, — and I should,
accept it as an image of human life. Well, what I mean
by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. 9

There you see Professor Huxley in his full forte.
But whence was that force derived? At least as
much from the want of logic with which his emotions
coloured his conceptions, as from the courageous
scepticism in which that passage abounds. Professor
Huxley professed to know that the hidden antagonist
who does not even hesitate to checkmate his human
opponent for not knowing the rules of a game which
he has generally had no opportunity of learning is
"always fair, just, and patient." How could Pro-
fessor Huxley be an " Agnostic " if he knew as much
as that ? Is it true Agnosticism to assume anything
of the kind? What can be less like Agnosticism
than to depict the unseen antagonist as " an angel
who plays for love, as we say, and would rather lose
than win." A clearer case of that faith which justi-
fies without "verification," I cannot imagine. The
whole idealism of the picture would have vanished
if Professor Huxley had held to his Agnosticism, and
had told us that we do not know whether the hidden
player is a fair player or even a player at all, or
only an automaton without a mind and without a
purpose, — perhaps fair, just, and patient, but quite as
probably incapable of so much as a thought or feeling
of its own, — a thing to which fairness, justice, and
patience are qualities as inapplicable as they would
be to the stone wall against which a man breaks his
head, or the prussic acid by which he stops the

«l-j* im

XIII THE GREAT AGNOSTIC 105

action of his heart. Nothing seems to me cleareK
than that Professor Huxley borrowed from a religion \
which he .thought wholly unproved, his description /
of the unseen player in this great game of life. And I
it was because he did so, in his heart, though not
consciously, that he could welcome Tennyson's body
to Westminster Abbey in those touching lines wherein
he expressed his own secret sympathy with the lead-
ing thoughts of a poet against whose belief his
criticisms had so often levelled the accusation that it
was unproved and unprovable.

It was the same when, about twenty years earlier,
Professor Huxley served on the London School ,
Board, and acquiesced in the reading of the Bible as
the best book for the moral education of the children.
It is true, of course, that he was one of the most
eager of the adversaries of any definite theological
commentary on it. But how could the Bible itself
be a proper influence for children if its greatest
lesson, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with
all thy strength, and with all thy mind,"- were
a leap in the dark which a true Agnostic could
not so much as excuse? In my belief, Professor
Huxley had a half-unconscious craving, to which he
thought it wrong to give way, for that passionate
faith which he said that he desired to undermine in
all cases in which there was, in his opinion, no possi-
bility of what he termed verification. Indeed, his
heart often rose up in insurrection against his
scientific genius, and compelled him to feel what was
entirely inconsistent with the logic of his thoughts.
For he was a very lovable man, and no man is lov-
able who cannot deeply love. That he was a man
of true scientific genius I do not doubt. All who

106 THE GREAT AGNOSTIC XIII

knew his career as a biologist agree that he added
greatly not only to the exposition, but to the develop-
ment, of Darwin's doctrine. But from that point
of view, I cannot speak of him with the smallest
authority. To me he is the great Agnostic who
has tried, and, as I hold, tried in vain, to regard
physical science as the one sure guide of life, and
has yet betrayed in some of the most critical utter-
ances and actions of his career, that his Agnostic
creed did not cover the whole of the legitimate
evidence, and that he coveted for the children of his
country a kind of teaching which he nevertheless
proudly rejected for himself.

XIV

A PROBLEM ARISING OUT OF THE DECALOGUE

1884

In the extremely thoughtful and able address which
Canon MacColl delivered at the International Con-
ference on Education, concerning the theological
teaching of the Universities, — an excellent report
of which is to be found in the Guardian of last week,
— he dropped a hint which deserves, I think, to be
developed and followed out more elaborately, since
it appears to me to contain impressive evidence of
the reality of a Divine Eevelation. While insisting
on theology as the true centre of the sciences — the
science which contains the key to the purpose and
order and relations of all the subordinate sciences —
he remarked : — " What a different meaning physical
science has for those who suppose it to be the
puzzling-out of riddles of which no living person has
the key — nay, to which, for aught we know, there
may be no key — and for those who suppose physical
science to be the knowledge of natural laws which
had been providentially withheld from us till the far
more important knowledge of moral laws had been
thoroughly impressed upon us. If the revelations
of physical science had preceded those of moral law,

J

108 PROBLEM ARISING OUT OF THE DECALOGUE XIV

what a Pandemonium the world would have been.
Surely the remarkable fact that a law like the Deca-
logue far preceded a sound knowledge of the laws
and forces of nature, shows that there was a Power
above to impress itself upon the world, before the
powers which are below our own highest level had
had any serious attention paid to them." Now, let
me follow out a little that line of thought. Mr.
Herbert Spencer, we know, maintains that the ghost
theory, originally suggested by dreams of the dead,
is the origin of all belief in God. If so, how extra-
ordinary it is, that in the most coherent and strictly
developed of all ancient religions there is hardly a
\ vestige of this ghost theory, — indeed, hardly a clear
indication, till very late in history, of any belief in
the existence of departed spirits as powers at all, —
Saul's vision of Samuel in the witch of Endows house
is the only one I can at present recollect, — while
nevertheless the enunciation of an authoritative moral
law, far in advance of the intellectual stage of culture
which would appear to correspond to it, takes place
in the very nursery of the race, and in the very
centre of its first great scene of trial ! Is it conceiv-
able to any one that the ghost of a great ancestor
could have originated the Decalogue ? Whence did
these severe restraining precepts come, if they did
not come from a real power above man? To one
who assumes the view of the purely physical origin
of man, how should so early an outbreak of what
would, on that hypothesis, be the pure superstition
of a spiritual and rigidly restraining power, be ac-
counted for ? It has often been maintained that the
conflict for existence necessarily developed a com-
petition amongst the various tribes of early history,
a competition to determine which of them should act

XIV PROBLEM ARISING OUT OF THE DECALOGUE 109

with the most solidarity, and that this competition ]
gave a great physical advantage to the one which
earliest developed a strict social morality. That
would explain how the aptitude for discipline, self-
restraint, fortitude, and courage displayed by the
Eomans secured them so long a reign, but would
not explain at all the very early inculcation of the
conscious principle involved in such qualities, found *
among the Jews, unaccompanied, as I must certainly I
say in the case of the Jews it was unaccompanied, '
by any strong practical disposition to embody those
qualities in actual life. Besides, as a matter of fact,
the moral law of the Decalogue is altogether based
on a spiritual law of which" the condemnation of
idolatry is the key-note. So far is it from true that
the moral conditions which secure the cohesion of a
race come out most prominently in the Jewish Deca-
logue, that that which there comes out most promi-
nently is the worship of a Supreme Will, — the very
centre and essence of the whole moral law, — the kind
of law which that Will imposes being, in one sense
at leasts secondary to the worship of that Will. In
other words, it is because the moral law is God's '»
law, and because it unites those who obey it to the J
Divine nature, that it is so strenuously enjoined. It
is not true that the Jews developed anything like
the same capacity for carrying out the conditions of ,
moral co-operation which their lawgiver had certainly |
displayed for apprehending those conditions. The )
Decalogue implies the inculcation of a conscious prin- ,
ciple long before the development of any adequate j
capacity for embodying that principle in life; and /
not only that, but for developing it expressly as the
will of an invisible power which, according to the
materialistic theory, did not exist, and does not exist,

110 PROBLEM ARISING OUT OF THE DECALOGUE xiv

except in the imagination of a superstitious people.
Can anything be conceived more unnatural than that
a pure falsehood should be conceived as the guarantee
of a set of moral truths, and these, too, moral truths
which, so far from being the reflections of moral ex-
perience, were far in advance of that experience —

, the presages, as it were, of creative genius ? Surely
the moral genius which could lay down such truths
could never have superfluously imagined a fictitious
Supreme Will by which to sanction them. And

. surely the superstition which would have laid a

i mighty falsehood as the pillar and ground of the
moral and social law, would never have anticipated

. the true moral and social law, but would have
wandered as widely from the mark in declaring that

/ law as it had in insisting so solemnly on a false
sanction for it? If the supposed lawgiver were a
phantom, is it not certain that much of the law
would have had on it the impress of a phantom
origin ?

Again, as Canon MacColl says, if the true origin
of man be found in physical and material forces, how
is it that the discovery and proclamation of the moral
law seems to have run ahead so much of the dis-
covery and proclamation of physical laws? If the

' physical constitution is the root of man, why did not
the growth of the curiosity of the senses precede the

v growth of the curiosity of the conscience? Indeed,
- why should there have been any conscience, or any
curiosity of the conscience at all, if man is the growth
of material conditions, and if the mastery of those
conditions be really the key to his earthly salvation ?
If the moral nature be a mere secondary thing, and
the first and chief thing about man be his physical
organisation, how is it that the problem of civilisation

XIV PROBLEM ARISING OUT OF THE DECALOGUE 111

was not primarily a problem of the adaptation of
physical means to physical ends — a problem prim-
arily of the sciences and the arts, instead of a prob-
lem of the conscience and the will ] What one would
expect from the development of an intellect founded
on the senses, would have been the steady growth of
the effort to deal with the difficulties of human ex-
istence from the intellectual side, — to manoeuvre the
passions rather than to control or subdue them ; to
utilise the resources of external nature, and to strain
to the utmost the elasticity of man's tastes and
capacities, in order to increase the range of the con-
ditions within which he could enjoy existence. Some-
thing of this type of character we see shadowed forth
in early Greece, where the crafty, the resourceful, the
pliant man seemed to be at one time likely to take
precedence of the true, the good, and the great man,
until other and nobler ideals won upon the suscep-
tible Greek imagination. If the intellect had been
really developed merely out of the physical constitu-
tion, we should have seen such a type of character
as this, gaining on all others. Shame at poverty of
resource would have taken the place of that nobler
shame which men feel at easy and adroit concession
to the importunity of circumstance. The man of
elastic intelligence, of many shifts and wiles, would
have been valued ten times as much as the man of
dignity, fortitude, constancy — in one word, character ;
for character only means that there is a standard of
inward life to which men must adhere even at the
cost of the outward life itself. That implied assump-
tion, however, is everything. It is equivalent to the
assumption of a moral law for man, which anticipates,
and overrides, and moulds his dealings with physical
law. We can, perhaps, in part imagine what a great

112 PROBLEM ARISING OUT OF THE DECALOGUE xrv

curiosity and a pliant intellect, exerted chiefly to in-
terrogate the outward conditions of our life, and to
adapt, as the phrase is, our wants to our " environ-
ment," and our environment to our wants, would
have made of man, — a sort of potent mental chame-
leon, now shrinking to external conditions, now
bending external conditions to his needs, without a.
dream or thought of any absolute internal standard
to which it is needful to conform himself. Instead
of that, we find that at one of the earliest of the
epochs of human history an inflexible standard of
character was laid down, and laid down as the com-
mand of the invisible God, a standard which was not
to be trifled with and moulded and bent to suit the
exigencies of the hour. The inquisitive mind itself
was to pursue its ingenious questionings under the
restraints of this law; what was called civilisation
was declared sound only so far as it observed this
law; it was this law which kept discovery from
transforming not only the realm of knowledge, but
the very ends and aims for which the realm of know-
ledge was to be used, just as opportunity might
dictate. It was this which made man man, and
prevented him from passing through an earthly
metempsychosis of adaptation to the universe, which
would have eliminated all the unity from human
history, and all the definiteness from human progress.
Without a fixed background of conscience, the shuttle
of events, manipulated by an ever active and elastic
intelligence, would have made the man of one age a
totally different creature from the man of another.
And this bapkground of conscience was not only
given us, but it was given by an asserted revelation
before the development of scientific intelligence had
reached any high level. The moral law was scored

^

XIV PROBLEM ARISING OUT OF THE DECALOGUE 113

deep in human nature before science had fairly begun
its lively career. We were told in many respects
what we ought to be, long before we found out what
we were. Now, could that be conceivable, if (1)
there were no character in existence higher than our
own to impose its law upon us, and if (2) there
were nothing, and never had been anything in ex- ,
istence, except an endless chain of cause and effect ./
under the shadow of which an " ought " becomes im- /
possible since nothing could ever be otherwise than l
as it is ? It seems to me perfectly certain that the
early incorporation of such a law as the Decalogue
in human history is an incontrovertible proof, first*
that physical law is not the root of human character,
but moral law ; and next* that the moral law was
revealed to us, and in us, long before the intellect
had begun to stride forward with anything like its
full power ; in other words, that, instead of being the
mere fruit borne by that power, it was the ultimate
guide and ruler and director of that advancing in-
telligence which now claims to be its master. That
seems to me, I confess, utterly inconsistent with a
merely physical and material constitution of things.

XV

SCIENCE AND MYSTERY
1896

Professor Burdon Sanderson, in the lecture
which he delivered at the Koyal Institution yester-
day week on Ludwig and the doctrine which he
called Neo-Vitalism or New Vitalism (to distinguish
it from the old assumption of a vital force which
was called in to explain anything which the older
physiological science failed to reduce to consistency
with the older physical and chemical explanations),
drew a very useful distinction between falling back
on vital force as a formal but very useless master-
key, — really no master-key at all, — to all difficulties
which could not be otherwise resolved, and the
proper admission that, after comparing accurately
and specifically the processes which can be reduced
to consequences of the older physical and chemical
laws of force and combination, and those which
cannot be so explained, but leave a certain residuum
of phenomena inexplicable on the old physical and
chemical principles, that residuum represents an
absolutely new region of science. That is a very
just distinction ; but I think the Professor would
have made it clearer, and have interested his audi-

•BVVP

XV

SCIENCE AND MYSTERY

115

ence more, if he had frankly acknowledged that
science, properly conceived, really makes no attempt
to explain away the manifold mysteries of the
world at all, but only endeavours to sort the various
wonders of the universe into those which are of the
same kind, and whose methods or processes may be
described on the same principles, by calling some of
them physical, as being reducible to the principles
which govern mechanical and dynamical laws ; others
of them chemical, as being reducible to the laws of
elective affinity; and others, again, vital, which
appear to be complicated by that distinct kind of
influence which organic cells, when once they have
come into existence, exert on the forms of matter
submitted to them. All these various regions of
phenomena are equally inexplicable in themselves,
but it is obvious that the processes by which they
are distinguished are all of one kind in one region
and all of another kind in another region, and the
immense value of science is not that it explains away
the mystery of any one of them, but that when it
can distinguish with which region it is dealing, and
what the data are, it can predict with fair accuracy
exactly what is likely to take place as a conse-
quence of the general laws which prevail in that
region.

For instance, what can be more accurate than the
predictions of physical astronomy? But what can
be more mysterious than its fundamental assumption
that every particle of matter attracts every other
particle with a force of which you can define the
exact magnitude, — that every hair of one's head,
for instance, pulls at every hair on the head of any
being on the planets of the great Sun Sirius (if there
be planets of Sirius and beings with heads of hair on

\
\

116 SCIENCE AND MYSTERY IV

them), with a force varying inversely as the square
of the distance ? It is impossible to imagine a more
mysterious fact than this. And two centuries and a
half ago a man would have been thought a madman
who pretended to know such a fact as that. Yet
we do know it, and know the kind of reasoning by
which we demonstrate the fact. Yet who can say
that we can explain it? We can methodise all the
phenomena which are due to this physical law, but
we can do no more. The assumption itself is as
much a mystery and as profound a mystery as ever
It is only pseudo-science which professes to explain
it. And so again when you come to chemical laws.
All the principles of elective affinities can be
methodised and sorted, but cannot in any way be
explained. They are mysteries, and mysteries which
are not of the same kind as those of physics. The
law of gravitation will not furnish the principle in
which they are rooted. You cannot deal with them
as you deal with the facts of physical astronomy.
Oxygen and hydrogen fly together in one way,
oxygen and iron in another, hydrogen and chlorine
in a third. The mysteries of chemical affinity are
mysteries of a new kind which are to be described
and studied on quite new methods. But the
" embracing force," as one of our poets has called it>
relating to the various simple elements, — or what
are supposed to be the various simple elements, — of
the natural world, is quite a different embracing
force from that which the force of gravitation exerts
all over the universe. The mystery is as great as
ever, but it is one which is to be methodised on new
principles, and the processes of which can only be
described in quite new language. So, again, when
we come to magnetic and electrical phenomena. It

XV SCIENCE AND MYSTERY 117

is impossible to describe the leap of the iron filing
towards the magnet, or of the straw to the excited
amber, in terms of any of the physical or chemical
laws which have methodised the principles of purely
physical or chemical science. We are in the presence
of a new region of mystery, the phenomena of which (

must be classified or sorted by its own methods.
And so it is, as Professor Burdon Sanderson tells us,
with physiological laws when you have exhausted
the methods of physical and chemical classification.
The diffusion of the blood you can explain in great
measure by mere hydraulic laws. The constitution
of the blood you can explain in great measure by
chemical laws ; but when once you come to the
study of the distribution, say, of lymph in the build-
ing-up of the body, you find that neither chemical
laws nor hydraulic laws will suffice. The cell which
is placed at the door of many of the passages acts in
a fashion of its own, which neither hydraulic nor
chemical principles will explain. The cell stationed
in one man's body at a particular point will play the
porter and admit the lymph in one way, and the cell
stationed at the same place in another man's body
in another way, and so even the most accurately,
and perhaps we might say the most pedantically,
scientific of genuine investigators have come to admit
a principle of life (neo-vitalism) which accounts for
the difference on some quite new principle depend-
ing on the constitutional energy which the cells of
each body put forth. There is certainly nothing \
unscientific in such a suggestion, when by close com-
parison it has been determined that there is some
residual phenomenon which cannot be referred to any
method known to either physics or chemistry. But
would it not be simpler and much less mystifying

i

\

118 SCIENCE AND MYSTERY XV

' instead of more mystifying if the new region of
, mystery were frankly admitted, without so much
oracular pretence of solving all mysteries, whereas
every new department of science is rooted in
I mystery, and rooted in a mystery which is as pro-
1 found and inexplicable as creation itself 1 At every
separate stage of scientific development we come to
some new method, though it may be quite true that
regions which- were once regarded as distinct may be
simplified and brought into one and the same pro-
vince, just as the phenomena of eclipses have been
really reduced to the same principles as those of
motion when the shadows cast by any of the bodies
of the planets are taken into account. The utmost
that science can do in the way of simplification is to
reduce two or more systems to one. But when it
attempts to explain away all mystery it simply,
betrays itself. How can science, for instance, explain
consciousness, or memory, or will ? How are succes-
sive fields of new mystery, every one of which opens
out problems deeper and more mysterious than the
last, — fields of thought which cannot even be studied
by the same method by which the processes of
physics, or chemistry, or physiology, or organic
assimilation can be studied with any prospect of
success, — to be explained away ? What science does
is to generalise the order and process of different
classes of phenomena, and sometimes to show that
phenomena which at first seemed to be different are
really the same under a new aspect. But science
brings great and most unnecessary discredit on itself
by professing to explain too much. It shows us
what in a given region we may expect, what revolu-
tions of the planets, what returns of the tides, what
chemical effects light will produce on various chemi-

HH—

xv SCIENCE AND MYSTERY 119

cally prepared tissues, what distributions of blood
take place in the body under the action of the
pumps in the heart, what nerves are necessary to
sight and hearing, what are the laws of association,
what are the motives which operate most powerfully
on character, and what are the ordinary limits of
self-control; but in none of these separate regions
can we solve the -ultimate mystery, or in any true
sense explain chemical affinity from force, or life
(why call it Neo-vitalism ?) from chemical affinity, or
consciousness from life, or memory from conscious-
ness, or will from memory. We know the methods
of many mysteries, but the ultimate mystery we can-
not fathom at all. I

XVI

INSTINCT AND DESIGN

1885

M R. MiVART, in the interesting article on " Organic
Nature's Riddle," which he contributes to the March
number of the Fortnightly Review, puts, in what seems
to me a completely unanswerable form, the objection
to Professor Haeckel's contention that the organs
and organisms with which our world is peopled have
not been produced or guided by anything resembling
intelligent purpose. Mr. Mivart discusses at some
length the operation of instinct and the operation of
organic processes which, not being accompanied by
any sort of animal consciousness (or " consentience,"
as he prefers to name the inferior forms of conscious-
ness), cannot be called instincts, though they certainly
produce results quite as remarkable as the most
elaborate instincts; and he shows that in neither
case is it possible to give any rationale at all of what
occurs, without assuming the organisation of these
processes by some power which deliberately adapts
means to ends. Let me take his two most remark-
able illustrations, the first from the well-known
instinct of the sphex-wasp, — which is by no means
a solitary case of this sort of instinct, Mr. Mivart
showing that the mother pole-cat has been known tc

XVI INSTINCT AND DESIGN 121

provide for the wants of her offspring in a precisely
similar manner, — and the second from the wonderful
healing agencies which have been known to restore
completely the elaborate apparatus in a human elbow,
after it had been removed by amputation. Here is
the case of the pure instinct : —

" The female of the wasp, sphex, affords another well-
known but very remarkable example of a complex instinct
closely related to that already mentioned in the case of
the pole-cat. The female wasp has to provide fresh,
living animal food for her progeny, which, when it quits its
egg, quits it in the form of an almost helpless grub, utterly
unable to catch, retain, or kill an active, struggling prey.
Accordingly the mother insect has not only to provide
and place beside her eggs suitable living prey, but so
to treat it that it may be a helpless unresisting victim.
That victim may be a mere caterpillar, or it may be a
great, powerful grasshopper, or even that most fierce,
active, and rapacious of insect tyrants, a fell and venomous
spider. Whichever it may be, the wasp adroitly stings
it at the spot which induces, or in the several spots
which induce, complete paralysis as to motion, let us
hope as to sensation also. This done, the wasp entombs
the helpless being with its own egg y and leaves it for the
support of the future grub. . . . Even the strongest
advocate of the intelligence of insects would not affirm
that the mother sphex has a knowledge of the comparative
anatomy of the nervous system of these very diversely-
formed insects. According to the doctrine of natural
selection, either an ancestral wasp must have accidentally
stung them each in the right places, and so our sphex of
to-day is the naturally-selected descendant of a line of
insects which inherited this lucky tendency to sting
different insects differently, but always in the exact situa-
tion of their nervous ganglia ; or else the young of the
ancestral sphex originally fed on dead food, but the off-
spring of some individuals who happened to sting their

122 INSTINCT AND DESIGN XVI

prey so as to paralyse but not to kill them, were better
nourished, and so the habit grew. But the incredible
supposition that the ancestor should have accidentally
acquired the habit of stinging different insects differently
but always in the right spot, is not eliminated by the
latter hypothesis."

( Still less, of course, can the explanation of instinct,
' as a transmitted habit originally due to intelligence,
i apply to such a case as this, unless the ancestral
v sphex-wasp be credited with a far better knowledge
i of anatomy than uneducated man has now, — in
which case the sphex-wasp would probably be in the
place of man, at the head of civilisation, and man
would be his slave. Again, in the case of the heal-
ing agencies at work in Nature, — which are, indeed,
only inferior forms of the original formative agencies
which first made those parts of our frame that they
are not always able to restore, — Mr. Mivart shows
' what it is which is really effected, without even the
dimmest consciousness on our part of the nature of
, the agency at work : —

" In the process of healing and repair of a wounded
part of the body, a fluid, perfectly structureless substance
is secreted, or poured forth, from the parts about the
wound. In this substance, cells arise and become abund-
ant ; so that the substance, at first structureless, becomes
what is called cellular tissue. Then, by degrees, this
structure transforms itself into vessels, tendons, nerves,
bone, and membrane — into some or all of such parts —
according to the circumstances of the case. In a case of
broken bone, the two broken ends of the bone soften, the
sharp edges thus disappearing. Then a soft substance is
secreted, and this becomes at first gelatinous, often after-
wards cartilaginous, and finally osseous or bony. But not
only do these different kinds of substance — these distinct

XVI INSTINCT AND DESIGN 123

tissues — thus arise and develop themselves in this neutral
or, as it is called, " undifferentiated " substance, but very
complex structures, appropriately formed and nicely
adjusted for the performance of complex functions, may
also be developed. We see this in the production of
admirably-formed joints in parts which were at first
devoid of anything of the kind. I may quote, as an
example, the case of a railway guard, whose arm had
been so injured that he had been compelled to have the
elbow with its joint cut out, but who afterwards developed
a new joint almost as good as the old one. In the unin-
jured condition the outer bone of the lower arm — the
radius — ends above in a smooth-surfaced cap, which plays
against part of the lower end of the bone of the upper
arm, or humerus, while its side also plays against
the side of the other bone of the lower arm, the ulna,
with the interposition of a cartilaginous surface. The
radius and ulna are united to the humerus by dense and
strong membranes or ligaments, which pass between it
and them, anteriorly, posteriorly, and on each side, and
are attached to projecting processes, one on each side of
the humerus. Such was the condition of the parts which
were removed by the surgeon. Nine years after the
operation the patient died, and Mr. Syme had the oppor-
tunity of dissecting the arm, which in the meantime had
served the poor man perfectly well, he having been in
the habit of swinging himself by it from one carriage to
another, while the train was in motion, quite as easily
and securely as with the other arm. On examination
Mr. Syme found that the amputated end of the radius
had formed a fresh polished surface, and played both on
the humerus and the ulna, a material something like
cartilage being interposed. The ends of the bones of the
forearm were locked in by two processes projecting down-
wards from the humerus, and also strong lateral and still
stronger anterior and posterior ligaments again bound
them fast to the last-named bone. 7 '

124 INSTINCT AND DESIGN xvi

Now that is but the imperfect repetition in later life
of the process which first produces the elbow in every
human frame ; but it is impossible to account for it
either by " natural selection M or by " lapsed intelli-
gence." The former explains Nature as stumbling
accidentally upon her greatest and most wonderful dis-
coveries, and then persevering in and perfecting them
by similar stumbles into a long series of improve-
ments ; and what could be more miraculous than such
a knack of stumbling into a happy succession of
stumbles ? And why, if that be the explanation,
should not a second attempt at an elbow on the part
of the same organism which succeeded with the first,
be even more likely to achieve success ? The second
view would explain the marvel of Nature as it is,
only by assuming the intelligence of Nature as it
was; and if we are to assume intelligence as the
origin of structural laws, it is much easier to suppose
that it is at work still, than that it has perpetuated
and stereotyped itself in some organic habit, and
then completely disappeared.

I hold, then, that Mr. Mivart has proved his case \
but I must go on to ask what light his proof throws
on the scope of design in Nature 1 What we have
undoubtedly in such cases of instinct, and such cases
of structural origination and renovation, as Mr.
Mivart puts before us, is a very limited adaptation
of means to ends, — limited, because, as he himself
shows us, a very slight disturbance of the ordinary
circumstances will suffice to put the agency at work
entirely out of gear. For example, one of the species
of wasps visits her grubs to provide them with fresh
food, and finds her way with unerring instinct,
though they are carefully covered up, to the place of
concealment. But if the entrance is uncovered for

TTr^^mm

XVI INSTINCT AND DESIGN 125

her by man, the wasp is put out, instead of helped
by the apparent assistance, and no longer recognises
her young. Thus it is clear that the instinct is a
general apparatus with which the species is furnished
for adapting means to ends under such circumstances
as are ordinarily to be expected, but is not, in any
sense, a guidance vouchsafed to each individual insect
by an intelligence prompting it at each instant to
do that which would serve its purpose best. And
again, in the case of the reparative functions of the
human system, if the animal be young and strong,
the injury is repaired effectually ; if the animal be
old, and the vital functions more or less exhausted,
the injury is repaired much less effectually or perhaps
not at all. Here again, then, it appears to be a
strictly limited reservoir of resources for adapting
means to ends with which the organism is supplied.
No demands upon it in excess of these narrow limits
will be honoured. What is pointed at, then, is not
the immanent action of that unlimited store of force
and design which we represent by the word Pro-
vidence, but rather the existence of small, well-
defined stores of organic capacity for adapting means
to ends, easily defeated, easily exhaustible, though
marvellous enough within their definite limits, and
only intelligible at all as the handiwork of a larger
intelligence. Just so the late Mr. Clerk Maxwell
used to speak of the atoms of the chemist as highly
" manufactured articles/' full of specific quality and
relation. Well, the qualities which Mr. Clerk Max-
well ascribed to the chemical atom, it seems that we
must ascribe in a still higher degree to the animal
organism, whether instinctive or merely structural
It is a manufactured article of a higher kind than
the chemical atom, fuller still of compressed specific

126 INSTINCT AND DESIGN xvi

quality and of elastic power to adapt itself to a very
considerable range of circumstances, and this power
is only intelligible on the assumption that it is pro-
vided by a higher intelligence, though it does not in
any way represent the full resources and flexibility
of that higher intelligence, since it is a power the
/ limits of which are very easily reached. Mr. Mivart's
' argument seems to me to prove design to demon-
stration; but it proves design of a limited kind,
design intended apparently to provide for only ordi-
,' nary events, and not to be in any sense what instinct
\ is sometimes called, — a lower sort of inspiration.
And when I come to the consideration of design in
its higher theological aspects, I am not sure that all
these elaborate paraphernalia of stings and poisons
and predatory instincts, and reparative forces more
or less equal to what is wanted of them, — often
rather less than more, — are at all easier to reconcile
with the conception of a directly acting omniscience,
than those unbending physical laws themselves, of
which I suppose that these instincts and organic
apparatus are more or less the outcome. As it
seems to me, those highly " manufactured articles,"
— the ultimate atoms, — are at least as unintelligible
without a creative intelligence as animal instincts
i themselves; while animal instincts, though they
witness to some intelligent creator in every feature
of their existence, suggest rather a limited than an
/ unlimited store of resource behind them. After all,
. we have to fall back on the evidence of man's moral
j and spiritual nature for our belief in God the creator ;
and no evidence of organic nature, such as that
insisted on by Mr. Mivart, would take us beyond a
very secondary sort of " demiurgus." Design proves
^intelligence of a limited kind, not of an infinite kind.

w

XVI INSTINCT AND DESIGN 127

And, therefore, natural theology will never be of
effectual use for any purpose beyond the bare re-
futation of the Materialist and the Atheist. After
they are refuted, the great problem of theology /

begins. '

XVII

MR. FOWLE ON NATURAL RELIGION

1872

In a remarkable article in the new number of the
Contemporary Beview, the Eev. T. W. Fowle takes up
a somewhat striking position in relation to Natural
and Revealed Religion. He argues that the tendency
of modern science to lay more and more weight on
objective facts as distinguished from the subjective
hopes and aspirations of the mind, really tells in
favour of what is called ' revealed ' as distinguished
from l natural * religion — at least if the two are con-
trasted and not taken in conjunction, — because it
makes appeal to fact as distinct from human dreams
and hopes, and because historical revelation rests on
such fact, if it has any solid basis at all. Mr. Fowle
does not, however, deny, but justifies the great
weight which intellectual and moral prepossessions
or prejudices have in moulding our estimates of
evidence. Indeed, his position is this, — that though
the desires and hopes, and moral needs on which
natural religion is apt to rely as the chief evidences
of immortality, are worthless as evidences, in the
face of the new philosophy, without such a fact as
the resurrection of Christ to which to appeal, they

XVII MR. FOWLE ON NATURAL RELIGION 129

have a most legitimate effect in determining how far
we shall admit the credibility of a supernatural fact
at all. He holds that, on the one hand, it is
perfectly natural for an intellect educated solely in
the spirit of the modern science to deny, with Hume,
the credibility of any event which seems to run
counter to the laws of Nature, and to demand for
such an event as the resurrection of Christ evidence
which it would require as great a miracle to dis-
believe, as the miracle involved in the event itself ;
but that, on the other hand, to a heart which has
always felt within itself the thirst for spiritual im-
mortality, and the predisposition to believe in it,
this miracle, miraculous though it be, is not a priori
incredible, but perfectly credible, and credible on the
same kind of evidence on which a surprising, but
otherwise unmiraculous, event would be accepted.
Mr. Fowle holds that if the resurrection of our Lord
were an event short of the miraculous, nobody would
think of rejecting it on the recorded evidence ; and
that it is rejected or accepted, and, as I understand
him, legitimately rejected or accepted, according as
the previous experience of the individual soul has
led it to find an antecedent impossibility in a super-
natural event or an antecedent probability therein.
He thinks both kinds of previous mental experience,
— that which renders such an event incredible, and
that which renders it even probable, — likely to be
associated with virtues of their own. The tempera-
ment, incredulous of any but natural events, will be
associated, he thinks, with the virtues of strict and
even austere intellectual scrupulousness, and that
power to renounce the pleas of the affections which
the highest intellectual sincerity seems to require.
" Kationalism," he says, " will uphold the need of
8 K

I

130 MR. FOWLE ON NATURAL RELIGION XYII

caution in our assent, the duty of absolute conviction,
the self-sufficiency of men " (what, by the way, does
he mean by that 1) " the beauty of love, the glory of
working for posterity, and the true humility of being
content to be ignorant where knowledge is impossible. "
On the other hand, the predisposition to believe in
the supernatural will be associated with large insight
into the affections of men, with a keen sense of sin,
with " a passion for life and duty which death cuts
short " ; in a word, with the emotional virtues rather
than the intellectual virtues. Mr. Fowle holds, then,
that the scientifically sceptical and the religiously
believing temperaments will have to contend together
till it appears which of them, on the whole, is the
more completely in accordance with man's nature
and destiny ; and that whichever of the two proves
itself, on the whole, the better and the stronger will
sway men to accept or reject the evidence for Christ's
resurrection, which is sufficiently proved for all who
live in the supernatural, and insufficiently proved for
all whose minds are trained solely by the study of
natural laws. I need hardly add that Mr. Fowle
himself evidently thinks that the naturalistic class of
prepossessions, though they have been unfairly sup-
pressed in former ages of the world, are now taking
a position which would lead to a distortion of human
nature and a cultivation of the intellectual at the
expense of the highest moral virtues; — that the
spiritual aptitude of man for a divine revelation is
such that, with the historical evidence of the resur-
rection of Christ before it, this faith will take firmer
root, as the great scientific reaction of the present
age subsides, and the equipoise between the human
intellect and the affections is re-established.

With the general tendency of Mr. Fowle's doctrine

wmmm^mBmmmmmmaaBmmBaaBmBmtm^mBm

XVII MR. POWLE ON NATURAL RELIGION 131

I heartily agree. Nothing is clearer than this, that
our estimate of specific evidence must vary according
to our antecedent assumption of what is probable or /
improbable, — that a man with a deep sense of duty
and sin, for example, will entertain a very different
presumption as to the existence of God and the
immortality of the personal life from one who has a
difficulty in realising what sin is, — and that a man
whose mind is saturated with the principles of the
laws of nature will entertain a very different pre-
sumption as to an asserted resurrection from the dead
from one who has studied man much and natural
laws little. Nor can I doubt for a moment that a
true balance of mind must owe much to both these
elements of experience, and not rest exclusively on
either. But for all that, I hold that Mr. Fowle, in
asserting that 'revelation' alone furnishes any
objective fact sufficient to justify a rational belief in .
immortality, and that the so-called evidences of /
natural religion weigh only in preparing the moral
temperament by which the truth of revelation is to
be judged, has been quite unjust to natural religion,
— the case of which he has stated to my mind most
inadequately.

In the first place, he deals with the widely-spread
religious desires, hopes, and presentiments of man-
kind exactly as he would with the once widely-spread
desire, hope, and presentiment of the alchemists that
some process could be discovered for transmuting all
substances into gold. Such interior prepossessions
are of importance, he thinks, directly an actual fact
with adequate objective evidence for it is produced
which answers to them, because then they obtain a
legitimate opportunity for their exercise, but not
before; till then, you have no right to deny that

132 MR. FOWLE ON NATURAL RELIGION XVII

some other purely subjective explanation of their
origin may not be the right explanation. Admit
that men in general, when past the savage stage and
short of the scientific stage, have yearned after im-
mortality and after communion with God, still that
would only show, — in the absence of any historical
proof that the gratification of their yearning was
possible, — that the mysterious question of origin and
destiny interests men deeply, and that the answer
of the mind to it, in the absence of specific evi-
dence, is apt to be that which would be least alien
to our present experience and most agreeable
to our feelings. But Mr. Fowle does not seem
in this matter to have done any justice to the
f scientific character of the facts. Would he, or any
naturalist, deny for a moment that the possession of
a physical organ by a race, even though in some
members of that race it were deficient, was the best
possible evidence either that it has a real objective
use, and serves the body's welfare now, or that at
any rate it has done so at some time or other, in the
, case of the ancestors from whom we have inherited
it? No doubt there are organs, as Sir W. Gull
suggested the other day, with regard to which it may
perhaps some day be decided that they are physio-
logically obsolete in the human race as it exists at
present; but no physiologist even of the most
thoroughly Darwinian school would doubt for a
moment that organs common to the great majority
of any race either are or formerly were correlated
with external uses, and would not have existed but
for those external uses. I say that such an argument
is strictly scientific. Admit if you please that the
spleen (say) has no visible use now in the human
body. Yet any physiologist, however sceptical, will

^^SBHMi^l^W^

XVII MR. FOWLE ON NATURAL RELIGION 133

be ready to maintain vigorously that it must formerly,
if not now, have had some objective use, or it would
not exist. As the eye is correlated with light, so is
every specific organ correlated with some external
arrangement without which it would not have existed.
Now apply this doctrine to that moral or spiritual *
faculty which in the majority of men acknowledges
the presence of a spiritual observer and judge of ,
absolutely secret thoughts and motives. Can we '
suppose that this sense of shame without the presence
of any bodily observer, this sense of peace and even
joy which streams in from outside just as it would
do, though in larger measure, from the sympathy of
a friend, is a mere imaginative overflow from the
conception of ourselves as we should feel if our mind
were transparent to the eye of those we wished to
please? Surely the quiver of the whole nature to
observation from withm bespeaks as distinct an organ
of our minds, as the sensitiveness of the eye to light
bespeaks an organ of our bodies. If the structure
of the eye implies light, if the structure of the ear
implies sound, then the structure of our conscience
as certainly implies a spiritual presence and judgment, /
the access of some being to our inward thoughts and
motives. Of course, it is open to the sceptical
psychologist to try and explain this experience in
some other way, by the laws of association, or how
he will. Of course I do not maintain that such an
argument, without any examination of the possible
replies to it, is final and unanswerable, though I
believe that it will hold water after all the multitude
of replies to it have been heard and strictly exam-
ined. All I maintain is, that when Mr. Fowle speaks
of the argument as coming simply to this, — that
because we wish something to be true, therefore it is

134 MR. FOWLB ON NATURAL RELIGION xvn

true, he is grossly understating the case of natural

religion. As a matter of fact, ' hunger/ which is no

more than one of the desires, does practically attest,

' not certainly that the particular pereon who feels ft

. can find food to satisfy his hunger, but certainly that

the race from which he has descended have had food

1 to eat. Hunger could not have benefited the body

unless there had been food to which it had prompted

our ancestors to have recourse, and therefore could

not, even on Darwinian principles, have grown into

a steady accompaniment of the need of food. So,

, too, unless there had been usually milk for the child,

\ the instinct of sucking would not have been one of

i the primary instincts of human nature. In' like

manner, I maintain that though nothing can be less

^scientific than to say that every man's wishes are

/ prophecies of fruition, nothing can be more scientific

: than to say that the existence of any generic appetite

or desire is a clear evidence of the former existence,

at all events, of conditions that satisfied that appetite

or desire. It' is possible, of course, that an appetite

/may survive the conditions which gratified it, as we

' see in the case of savage or brutal desires surviving

the states of society in which they had habitual

nourishment But no one will apply this explanation

to the structure of the conscience. No one will say

that it is an heirloom derived from ancestors for

whom it had an objective use which it has lost with

us. From all we know of the lower animals, and

even of the lower races of men, this apprehension

of a spiritual presence to which their thoughts and

hearts are open, is certainly not an inheritance

derived from them, but an acquisition of man himself

in his higher stages of being. If then it is a real

function of the mind, if this sense of not being alone

XVII MR. FOWLE ON NATURAL RELIGION 135

with our thoughts, but of being judged by a higher
Being than ourselves, is generally a characteristic $>f
the human race at all, there is a scientific case for the
existence of some real ground for the impression. It
would be surely very wonderful if this deep-rooted
apprehension of spiritual observation and interference
had grown up without any cause at all. The natural
thing for a being of merely physical organisation
would be to believe in life only where there was
evidence of another physical organisation ; and the
almost uniform response of the conscience to the
presence of an invisible and intangible Being seems
as good a scientific ground for believing in such a
Being, as the response of an yEolian harp to the wind
is for believing in the wind. Certainly the truths of
natural religion, — of the existence of some righteous
and invisible Being ever present with us, and of the
existence of a spiritual part of us which may at least
be quite independent of our physical organisation,
and must be so if that invisible relation is to continue,
— are quite as scientific a kind of inference from
the facts of conscience as the existence of iron in the
sun would seem to be from the facts of the spectro-
scopic analysis. I do not say that there is no
adequate reply to the argument, though I think that
all the replies may be effectually replied to, but I do
say that Mr. Fowle confounds a fallacy with a very
sound argument, when he identifies the hasty infer-
ence from a wish to the necessary gratification of the
wish, with the inference from a specific function
(whether *bf mind or body) to the reality, either in
former times or now, of a real object of the function.
In the case of the conscience, the possible obsolete-
ness of the function is not one of the alternatives ;
and hence, unless it can be maintained that a false

136 MR. FOWLE ON NATURAL RELIGION XVII

superstition has indefinitely benefited the race, —
\^Jiich Mr. Fowle does not seem inclined to admit, —
I think, while agreeing with his able paper on many
points, that he has done great injustice to the strength
of the argument for the truths of natural religion.

XVIII

MR. JUSTICE FRY ON MATERIALISM

1882

It is a pity that the interesting and thoughtful
lecture of Sir E. Fry on the Victorian era has been
so poorly reported. There was at least one passage in
it which I should have liked to have had in full, and
which contains an argument that has always seemed
to me of the greatest possible force against what is
called the materialistic view of Creation. " There is,
of late," said Mr. Justice Fry, " a tendency towards
Materialism in many minds, a tendency to exalt
matter beyond intellect or soul. For himself, the
lecturer felt at least as certain, if not more so, from
his own consciousness, of the reality of intellect, as
of that of matter. Scientific men talked about mole-
cules and atoms — things, by the way, which even to
them were, so far, matters of simple faith, that they
had never seen an atom, though he (the lecturer) did
not deny their existence. But he felt it a striking
fact that he, like others, was conscious of the same
personality, the same individual consciousness, now
that he had thirty years ago, although, meanwhile,
according to the physiologists, the material portion
of his N being had completely changed every seven

138 MR. JUSTICE FRY ON MATERIALISM xvill

years. Hence, there was to be experienced a being
within us separate from matter." That sense of
personal identity in man has always been insisted on
as one of the great strongholds of the spiritualist's
case, and very justly ; but I doubt if anything like
as much has ever been made of it, as the strength of
the case really requires. Even the greater Germans
— like Dr. Weismann, for example, whose valuable
and lucid book, Studies in the Theory of Descent, with
a preface by the late Mr. Darwin, has recently been
translated into English, — admit freely that the
materialistic explanation of the universe only applies
to its external forms; that unless you assume the
ultimate atom or molecule to have some inner qualities
analogous to those which we call mental, — qualities
such as the late Professor Clifford used to speak of
as those of mind-stuff, — there is no explaining how
the mental universe is developed out of the physical.
And Dr. Weismann himself goes so far as to say that
/ the whole process of evolution, the whole mechanism
of the universe, may well be conceived as having an
interior and mental aspect, corresponding to its
j external and self-complete framework, which interior
\ aspect is probably nearer to what we mean by
1 " purpose " than to anything else of which we can
conceive. Therefore, though he earnestly protests
against the insertion of purpose as a modifying link
between any of the external changes in the process
of evolution, and maintains that the method of
physical Creation is wholly explained by strictly
physical laws, yet he grants, and even seems to con-
tend, that there is a mental aspect to the whole, as
there is a mental aspect to every part, — a mind-stuff
for the whole, as there is a mind-stuff for the parts,
— the interior view of which may correspond, more

XTIII MR. JUSTICE FRY ON MATERIALISM 139

or less, closely to the general conception of a ruling
intellect. But though I quite understand the point
of view from which this is granted by evolutionists,
— it is the only way, indeed, in which it is possible
for physical evolutionists to explain the extraordinary
intellectual and moral flowering of so much physical
mechanism, — I believe that it suggests a very much
less reasonable, and, indeed, very much less scientific,
key to the riddle of the universe, than the key on
which Mr. Justice Fry lays his finger, when he speaks
of the evidence afforded by the consciousness of
personal identity that there are some things besides
our bodies which are concerned in the administration
of the life we live.

The fact to which Mr. Justice Fry appeals, — that
in some real sense a man who has lived for thirty
years can pronounce himself with absolute certainty
to be the same being, who has gone through an
infinite number of changes, bodily and mental, of the
greater part of which he can recall nothing whatever,
though both the many and quite different bodies, and
the many and very different states of mind and
character, to which he thus lays claim as his own,
could be identified as his own by no material test in
the world, indeed by no test except the test of his
own profound conviction of having passed through
them, does seem to be explicable only on a spiritual
theory of the origin of Man. The mere assertion of
personal identity of any kind is an assertion not even
expressible at all in terms of material things, nay, so
positively inconsistent at first sight with the facts of
change and variation which are also implied in this
assertion, that it sounds more like a paradox than a
truth, though it is a truth so true, that without it
as a starting-point, there would be no possibility of

140 MR. JUSTICE FRY ON MATERIALISM XVIII

paradox. What does it imply 1 As I maintain, it
/ implies this, — that the spiritual laws of the universe
are far deeper rooted in the universe than they could
be, if they were either the mere reflex or the mere
evolution of physical laws. Physical objects cannot
i establish their own identity with the physical objects
: of other days, still less with quite different physical
; objects of other days, and even if they could they
j certainly would not get their claim at once allowed,
^and made the ultimate basis and starting-point of a
whole world of action. The power of our spirits to
achieve this magic feat of memory, and identify our-
selves with the children of a generation ago, is a
wonderful assertion of the supremacy of mind over
matter, but an assertion not by any means of the
supremacy of any human mind over matter, but only
of that Mind — for only a mind it could be — which
so regulates the laws of the universe as to compel us
all to make about ourselves this assertion, which we
do not half understand, which we cannot explain, and
which yet is at the root of all our actions, and part
and parcel of the structure of every human society.
If man's intellect were the highest intellectual pheno-
menon of our world, it is inconceivable that a truth
so startling and so paradoxical could force itself upon
us. Paradox is the partial glimpse which a lower
mind gains of the truths strictly comprehensible only
, to a higher mind. The very firmness and absolute-
ness with which we grasp a paradoxical truth, and
make it the light of all our being, is evidence that it
; is really imposed upon us by a higher Mind, to which
it is a truism. We should be unable, by our own
'unassisted light, quite to believe in our own personal
identity, so intrinsically paradoxical is it, were it not
pressed down upon our minds by the final authority

XVIII MR. JUSTICE FRY ON MATERIALISM 141

of the creative laws themselves. Nor can it be pre- ^
tended that mere material forces could create any sort
of belief at all, much less a belief in spiritual things
almost contradicted by the evidence of the senses.
This marvel of unquestioning faith, which every sane
man carries from his childhood to his grave, that he
is identical with, though different from, himself at all
previous stages of his own career, is utterly incon-
ceivable as a result of physical evolution, or as a
result of pre-established harmony, or as a result
of anything but spiritual laws far wider and
deeper than any which we can comprehend, but
which, none the less, so completely control our
thoughts, as to hide entirely from the greater number
of us the seeming contradictions which lurk beneath
the truth, and to impress on us, as irresistible
certainty, what the senses alone would declare to be
nonsensical and incredible fictions.

Now, let me turn to the hypothesis which repre-
sents mind as never interfering in the course of
physical events, but at best representing a mere inner
aspect of the outward frame of things, a sort of back-
water from the stream of physical laws and forces.
It is of the very essence of that evolutional explana-
tion of mind which assumes either, with Professor
Clifford, that " mind-stuff" is one aspect of all matter,
but that the highest mind-stuff in the universe is, so
far as we know, the human mind-stuff, — or more
reverentially, with Dr. Weismann, that there is a
mind-stuff on the great scale, consisting in the whole
mechanism of the universe, and bearing the same
sort of mental fruit which our mind-stuff on its small
scale, i.e. the human body, bears in what we call the
mental life, — it is of the very essence of this theory
of mind, I say, that mind is a phenomenon which

142 MR. JUSTICE FRY ON MATERIALISM XVIII

varies in exact parallelism with the magnitude and
scale of physical organisation, but which does not
interfere between one link and another of the physical
development, though it corresponds to it. Now, is
that, so far as we have the means of judging, in any
sense true ? I should say, judging by that portion
of the universe which is within our own observation,
that it is absolutely untrue. I am conscious, say, of
being in a true sense the very person who was at a
given school on a given day, translating a particular
passage from Homer, thirty years ago. But amongst
the occurrences of those thirty years, for how few
can I still answer. How little real parallelism is
there between the mind-stuff and the mental flower
or fruit of it» Of the events of nearly one-third of
the time, — the time occupied in sleep, — my memory
is probably a total blank ; for a very great proportion
of the rest of the time, — of the mechanical acts of
walking, dressing, perhaps eating and drinking, — I
am as little able to give any personal account as I am
of my sleep. Of the few points of bright or intense
consciousness, indeed, distributed over those thirty
years, I can almost always explain the secret. Either
a joy, or a sorrow, or a hope, or a fear, or a great
effort of resolution, or some exciting cause which
fixed attention vividly on the momentary attitude of
my own mind, accounts for my personal self being so
absolutely identified with that instant of life. But
wherever attention was deficient, there memory, and
consequently the power of self-identification, is certain
to be deficient too. I can run back, even over my
own history, only from point to point of lucid
memory, knowing little about the intervals, except
that there did live through them, somehow, a being
whom I now identify as myself, and who gradually

XVIII MR. JUSTICE FRY ON MATERIALISM 143

came to think as I think now, and feel as I feel now.
But it is as far as possible from being true either^
that the mind varied precisely with the development
of the physical organisation, i.e. the " mind-stuff," or
that it never directly interfered in that development.
On the contrary, the mind, so far as I can represent
it by consciousness at all, was often most vivid when
the "mind-stuff" or physical organisation was most
exhausted ; and again, great changes in the physical
organisation or mind-stuff were due, and due entirely,
to the direct interference of the mind. One illness,
for instance, was directly caused by an ambitious
attempt to do something beyond my powers ; another,
by running deliberately a risk of infection ; a third,
by overstraining my eyesight. Well, then, the self-
consciousness on which alone we rely for our know-
ledge of our own identity absolutely assures us, first,
that through a great part of our past lives the fulness
of the development of our bodies was no index at all
of the vividness of our mental life ; next, that very
great changes indeed in the development of our
bodies were brought about solely by the direct inter-
ference of our minds in the circumstances of our
bodily development. In other words, instead of
that perfect correspondence or "pre-established
harmony " between physical and mental development
which is the only resource of the mere evolutionist
who starts from a physical basis, the most critical of
all the facts of our spiritual consciousness, — that which
insists on connecting together with a thread of per-
sonal identity a long series of different bodies always
in a state of flux and change, — asserts that it is only
through our acts of attention, that is, voluntary states
for which we have no physical names at all, that we
can recognise ourselves surely as having existed in the

144 MR. JUSTICE FRY ON MATERIALISM XVIII

past, and, further, that many of these acts were the
causes of very great and sudden transformations of
the physical conditions of our bodily life, which
altered altogether the order and conditions of our
physical development. Nothing, then, can be less
like the theory of a mind -stuff exhibiting mental
phenomena corresponding exactly to the elaborate-
ness of physical organisation, but which only run
parallel with it, and never intervene in the chain of
physical causes which mould it, than this. Our
minds, we find, have had crises of their own which
were certainly not determined solely, or even chiefly,
by bodily crises, but rather by the intensity of the

I feelings and the will; and further, those crises have
constantly produced crises in the development of our
bodies of the most important kind ; so that neither
does the development of the mental life reflect in any
way the development of the bodily life, nor is the
latter independent of the former, but is very greatly

- indeed influenced and modified by it. Indeed, it is
clearly false to say either that the mental life is a
function of the bodily life, or that the bodily life is a
function of the mental life, or that there is a pre-
constituted harmony between the two. Each acts
and reacts powerfully on the other, but neither is
independent of the other. Instead of showing us
any exact parallelism between the physical organisa-
tion and the mental life, the curious consciousness of
personal identity, on which the whole structure of
our life is founded, presents us with the story of a
few vivid memories linked together by a mysterious
conviction of sameness, of which we can give no
account without involving ourselves in contradictions.
Does not this suggest most powerfully that so far
from the Mind, which is in the truest sense the Mind

XVIII MR. JUSTICE FRY ON MATERIALISM 145

of the universe, being in any sense a reflex of the
physical structure of that universe, it controls and
overrides it, giving us this strange and fitful insight
into ourselves which we find it so difficult to reconcile
with the facts of our external existence ; lifting us
by glimpses of the unseen world into a certain limited
command over the seen ; and, in short, maintaining
the order of this physical life by flashes from the
illumination of a higher and larger life ?

XIX

PROFESSOR STOKES, M.P., ON PERSONAL IDENTITY

1890

I HOPE that the President of the Koyal Society
intends to publish at length the lecture delivered at
the Finsbury Polytechnic Institution on Sunday, of
which the Times gave a short report in its Monday's
issue. It is obvious that the lecture was one of
great interest, though a great part of its drift has
been so much condensed in the Times 1 notice of it as
to diminish very much its value for those who were
r not present. Professor Stokes's main thesis seems
to have been that neither is the intellectual part of
man the mere product of molecular changes in the
brain, nor, on the other hand, is physical organisa-
tion the mere cage or prison of the soul. Professor
V /Stokes holds both the materialist hypothesis which
makes the consciousness a blossom of the material
organisation, and the psychic hypothesis which makes
\ the material organisation a sort of bondage or con-
\ finement for the free spirit, to be inconsistent with
the facts of life. He illustrated the error of the
former view by remarking that after a great physical
shock, such as a bricklayer is said to have received
who was struck down and rendered unconscious for

XIX PERSONAL IDENTITY 147

a time by a falling brickbat, the first thought on
recovery of consciousness has been to complete the
sentence which had been begun before the blow was
received. Now, said Professor Stokes, the blow
must have caused a great variety of important
physical changes in the brain, yet the moment con-
sciousness returned, the mind went on working in
precisely the same groove of continuous purpose in
which it was working before the blow fell. Could
this be if the mind were nothing but the product of
the molecular action of the brain? On the other
hand, the notion that the body is rather a dead-
weight than otherwise, which limits and confines the
action of the soul, was regarded by Professor Stokes
as subject to difficulties quite as great as the material-
istic theory. We are not told in the report what
these difficulties are, but I think I could suggest
some of Professor Stokes's objections. If it were so,
there would, one would think, be a greater approach
to freedom and activity of mind during the decay of
bodily power which precedes the dissolution of the
tie between soul and body, than there is in the full
vigour of the mature body ; yet this is found not to
be the case. The health and strength of the body
implies a more favourable condition for the vigorous
action of the mind than its frailty and decay. It is
not in extreme old age nor in illness that the mind
usually acts with most freedom and power, but, on
the contrary, in the maturity and highest vitality of
the body. The mens sana is found more perfect vn
corpore sa/no, than in any decadent state of the body ;
nor have we any evidence worth mentioning that at
the approach of death the mind can take a more
lofty and stronger flight. All this suggests that the
relation between mental power and physical power is

148 PROFESSOR STOKES xix

not one either of mental effect to physical cause, or
of a spiritual cause in a phase of conflict with an
obstructing agency, but rather is the relation result-
ing from some deeper agency which contains in it, if
I understand Professor Stokes's drift rightly, the
principle of individuality, and determines both the
form of character and the physical frame as well as
the connection between them. Professor Stokes said
that there were indications in Scripture " of a sort
of energy lying deeper down than even the mani-
festation of life, on which the identity of man, and
his existence, and the continuance of his existence,
depended. Such a supposition as this was free from
the difficulties of the two theories he had previously
brought before them, the materialist theory and
what he had called the psychic theory. It repre-
sented the action on the living body as the result of
an energy, if he might say so, an energy which was
individualised; and the process of life, thinking
included, was the result of interaction between this
fundamental individualised energy and the organism.
The supposition that our individual being depended
on something lying deeper down than even thought
itself, enabled us to understand, at any rate to con-
ceive, how our individual selves might go on in
another stage of existence, notwithstanding that our
present bodies were utterly destroyed and went to
corruption." It would be impossible, I think, to
doubt that our individuality, that is, our character,
depends on something "lying deeper down than
thought itself," for all that determines the direction
and the drift of thought, the passions, the affections,
the purposes, the will, must be conceived as preced-
ing, or at all events as coexisting with, thought, and
giving it, so to speak, its sailing orders. It is not

XIX ON PERSONAL IDENTITY 149

thought which usually determines character, but, in
an immense majority of cases, character which deter-
mines thought ; and it is impossible to conceive that
which determines otherwise than as preceding that
which is determined. And I quite agree with Pro-
fessor Stokes that the individuality includes more
or less the physical organisation. The desires, the
tastes, the ambitions, the affections, the spiritual
yearnings, are more or less profoundly involved in
the character of the senses and the physical organisa-
tion. It is impossible to make the individuality
depend solely, or even chiefly, upon the will itself,
though that is the one element of character which is
self-determining, and which can more or less modify
and change the set of the whole stream of tendencies
and aspirations. Let any man consider in what the
individuality of himself or any of his most intimate
friends chiefly consists, and he will very rarely find
that it is solely, or even mainly, the set of his pur-
poses, the attitude of his will. That enters very
deeply, of course, into his individuality, but it is
very seldom the most conspicuous feature, and never
the only conspicuous feature in it. The individuality
depends still more on the bias of nature, the pro-
portion between a man's feelings and his intellect,
the vividness of his sensations, the tenacity of his
memory, the vehemence of his passions, the eager-
ness of his curiosity, the depth of his sympathies, —
all matters which are more or less determined for
him, and which his will, though it has the power to
regulate and guide, has no power to revolutionise.
Thus individuality is something far wider than
thought* or even " will ; " and though " will " enters
into it, almost as the direction of the helm enters
into the course of the ship, nobody can deny that

150 PROFESSOR STOKES XIX

individuality includes elements which involve deeply
the physical organisation no less than elements
which are purely mental. Hence I agree with Pro-
fessor Stokes that individuality lies deeper than
either the purely mental or the purely physical
elements of life, and I should be very willing to find
reason to think that the individuality moulds both
the mental and the physical organisation and the
relation between them, rather than that it is the
1 product of the mental and physical organisation and
of the relation between them. But as no one was
ever conscious of the moulding of his own or any
other mental and physical organisation, and of the
relation between them, it must be more or less
matter of inference from more general considera-
tions, whether the individuality was first conceived
so as to precede and determine the mental and
physical conditions under which life commences,
with the relation between them, or whether these
conditions, and their reciprocal influence on each
other, constitute the individuality. Of course those
who believe that there is something more in human
life than any materialist hypothesis will account for,
— especially those who believe in free-will, — will be
very much more inclined to take the former view,
than those who accept evolution as explaining not
only the method but the absolute causation of human
life. It is impossible to believe in free-will without
believing in a divine mind, for it is clear that
material forces could never have broken loose from
their own fetters and blossomed into freedom ; and
the moment you believe in a divine origin for the
will of man, it is impossible not to believe that the
divine purpose has placed the evolution and training
of human character as a whole above all the other

XIX ON PERSONAL IDENTITY 151

purposes of our human life. So much, I think, then,
may safely be said, that if the human will is free, as
Professor Stokes evidently believes, the evolution of
the physical part of our life must have been more or
less subordinated to the evolution of the moral and
spiritual part of our life ; so that it is not unreason-
able to conclude that there is some individualised
energy, deeper than life itself, which has more or
less controlled the development both of the mental
and the physical organisation of every man, and the
relation between them. I say "more or less con-
trolled," because no one, of course, can say how far
the laws which regulate the evolution of social rela-
tions may not interfere with, or even supersede,
what we should regard as the evolution of individual
character. No man in his senses denies the lineal
transmission of good and evil tendencies from parent
to child, or even the contagion of good and evil
between mere companions and friends, which has so
astounding an effect as well on the regeneration as
on the corruption of social groups; and our know-
ledge of this truth renders it quite impossible to say
that the divine purpose contemplates the evolution
of individualised characters as a thing apart from
the evolution of the whole social character of which
they will form a part. Professor Stokes therefore
would not dream of regarding the individualised
energies in which he finds the probable basis both of
mind and of physical organisation, as formed with-
out reference to the ancestors from whom those who
were about to be brought into existence had sprung,
and the society and nation in which they were to be
developed. Still, I think it may be said by all who
believe in the free will of man and the providence of
God, that human character cannot be regarded as the

152 PERSONAL IDENTITY XIX

mere product of circumstances and organism, but
must be treated as stamping a new individuality on
the life and the organism, by which in no small
degree the character of that life and the power and
elasticity of the organisation are controlled and
directed. Professor Stokes believes that this indi-
viduality more or less evolves the bodily organisa-
tion, and cannot be left without a bodily organisa-
tion, even after our present bodily organisation falls
into ruin or decay. To him the body is a con-
stituent element of the individual, which will ex-
press itself in another, perhaps a less imperfect
body, so soon as the old body disappears. That is
certainly the suggestion of revelation, and appears to
be quite consistent at least with reason, not to say of
something which looks rather like the beginning of
experience.

XX

THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY

1895

I perceive with some surprise that many of the
correspondents to the Spectator believe that the body
which is to clothe the soul after death is identically
the same as that which clothes the soul in this world,
and is not) what St. Paul calls it, a spiritual body, —
as different from that which died, as that which
springs from the germinated seed is from the seed
which gave many of its constituent parts to the soil
and the air and the water with which it was watered,
— but in some sense as much the body which passed
through death as the soul is the soul which passed
through death. One of the Spectator correspondents,
whose letter is published to-day, declares this ex-
pressly, and makes light of the difficulty as to which
body it is of the multitude of those with which in
the course of life we have been clothed, by asking
whether the soul too does not equally change in the
course of a long life, and whether the soul or ego
with which an old man dies is not very different
from the soul or ego which he had as a child or a
youth or a man. Undoubtedly it is ; but that surely
is an answer to his own assertion that there can be

\

154 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY XX

any physical identity between the dying body and
the resurrection body. Does he suppose for a
moment that because in some sense there is an iden-
tity of nature and character between the dying man
and the man who survives death, there is no great
spiritual change and sublimation of the mental powers
which survive death ? Does the memory survive in
the same enfeebled state as that in which the failing
powers of the brain leave it at death? Is it the
exhausted and flagging imagination, the faltering
^nd weakened judgment, the relaxed and hesitating
purpose, the blanched sympathies of the aged, which
survive death, or mental powers all transformed and
exalted in the glow of a true resurrection ? If the
latter, as I suppose all men believe, and as St. Paul
certainly believed, then surely it is neither the
material body, — if, indeed, any body is properly
speaking purely material, — which we bore in youth
or in middle age, or at the moment which preceded
death, which survives death, but something quite
different, though it springs from the same origin
and is governed by the same law of personal develop-
ment by which the character of the renewed and
restored life is connected with the character of the
submissive and disciplined yet enfeebled and ex-
hausted life. What St. Paul describes as the body
of the resurrection can by no possibility be the very
body of any previous time of life. " It is sown a
natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." The
man dies with all sorts of diseases upon him. The
soldier dies with all his scars, with perhaps an arm
lost and an eye blinded by a splinter of shell. The
paralytic dies with his power of controlling his own
motions gone. Nine aged men out of ten die with
enfeebled sight and hearing, and other great traces

XX THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 155

of the destruction which time brings to a frame never
meant to survive for more than a century at most
Does any one suppose that these marks of gradual
decay survive after death 1 If so, Death is indeed the
conqueror, and not the conquered. And if they do
not, if the life that renews all the functions of both
spirit and body be a spiritual life, is not the body
even more fundamentally changed by the resur-
rection than the spirit itself? Does not our Lord
say distinctly that in the spiritual world there is no
marrying nor giving in marriage, but that the life
of the immortal is as that of the angels in heaven ;
and does not that imply some great transformation
of the physical into the spiritual body ? Indeed, is
not such a change involved necessarily in the de-
scription repeated many times of Christ's own resur-
rection-body as passing easily through closed doors
and appearing at will, now in one place and now in
another? It seems to me perfectly certain that
though character survives death, and survives it in
the very attitude and form into which life and \
responsibility had moulded it, a great spiritual
change must pass over both the failing mental and
the failing physical powers, and that the physical
are even more vitally changed than the mental, for
the very reason that they were less spiritual at the
moment of death, and that the baptism of a great
spiritual change brings them therefore a greater
access of new vitality. It is simply childish to talk
of any more physical identity between the body
which breathes its last breath in pain and weakness,
and the body which responds easily to the renewed
and immortal soul, than there is between the appar-
ently rotting seed and the flower or tree which
springs from it into beauty or even majesty. There

156 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY XX

is a vital connection between the two, no doubt.
The mustard-seed yields a different herb from the
mignonette-seed, and the acorn from the beech-mast.
But the "body that shall be" is just as different
from, as impossible to identify absolutely with, the
body that withers and dies, as the mind which
expires in all its mortal weakness is different from,
and impossible to identify absolutely with, the mind
that begins its new career in the eternal world. The
spiritual renewal beyond the grave is needed for
both, and certainly even more for that side of man's
nature which is least spiritual and most thoroughly
used up in the " sundry and manifold changes of the
world," than is the moral and spiritual essence of his
character. It is impossible for us to analyse what
makes the sameness between the child and the man.
Partly, no doubt, it is a particular principle and law
of self-generated mental evolution, partly a particular
principle and law of involuntary physical evolution ;
but whatever it be, it is not the sameness of the
physical atoms constituting his body which consti-
tutes that identity. If it were, millions of men
would have to compete for the same atoms which
have at various times passed through millions of
different bodies, and constituted parts of millions of
different personalities.

. The simple truth is that we are not in a position
to say what is body and what is soul, or what is the
distinction between them. No man feels that he
has lost any of his personality when he loses even a
hand or an eye, to say nothing of a foot or a lock of
hair, yet he has doubtless lost something which was
very intimately connected with his bodily life, and
which more or less affects the impression which he
makes on others. We cannot say with confidence

XX THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 157

whether there may not be something essentially
material in a finite soul, nor whether there may not
be something essentially spiritual in a human body.
The only distinction we know with any certainty
between the two is that the soul is more essential to
the personality, and the body less so ; but we cannot
deny that there is much of the soul in the habits of
the body, nor that there is a good deal of the body
in the affections and emotions of the soul. What
St. Paul seems to teach, and what it seems reason-
able to believe, is that the whole nature of the
change which we call death, is in the direction of
making the dispositions of the soul and will rela-
tively more important to the whole personality, —
whether their dispositions be good or evil, — that
death involves a change in the direction of giving
new life to those dispositions which we have, our-
selves by our own habits and actions, fostered and
formed within us ; and that when God " giveth us a
body as it pleaseth him/' that new body will be
more under the control of the soul, — whether good
or evil, — and more perfectly expressive of its inward
dispositions than the body which we leave behind
us here. But that the constituent particles of the
body which we leave behind us here, will be reas-
sembled in the body of the resurrection, seems to be
inconceivable, in the face of what we know both of
what we call physical law and of what we mean by
moral personality. If there is and can be no physical\
or atomic identity between the body of the child and
the body of the aged man, there is no conceivable
reason why there should be any such identity between
the body of the aged man and the body of the
immortal. The identity lies hidden somewhere in
the law and principle of growth, not in the material

158 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY xx

identity of the atoms of which we are at each suc-
cessive moment made up. As the identity of the
book does not depend on the identity of the paper
or the binding, so the identity of the body does not
in any sense depend on the chemical elements which
constitute it, but only on the general drift of that
expression and those powers which it conveys and
commands.

XXI

THE MODERN EASTER DIFFICULTY

1891

Dean Bradley, in his Easter Day sermon at West-
minster Abbey, put his finger on the very centre of
the contrast between ancient and modern feeling
concerning Easter, when he said that while it was
the crucifixion of Christ which was to " the Jews a
stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness" in
the great day when Christianity first came into the
world, it is no longer the Crucifixion but the Resur-
rection, — which to both Jews and Greeks, though a
great marvel, was a marvel which attracted rather
than repelled them, — that seems to modern pride
and scepticism a stumbling-block and foolishness.
We feel no difficulty where the early believers felt
most difficulty, in accepting the tremendous humilia-
tion and sorrow and shame of the cross. On the
contrary, as Dean Bradley told his hearers, the story
of the Man of Sorrows is wholly credited by the
sceptical world of to-day, and is accepted with even
eager reverence and gratitude. It is the suffering,
the forgiveness, the resignation, the peace, the calm,
the fortitude, the sympathy, the "Daughters of
Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves

160 THE MODERN EASTER DIFFICULTY XXI

and for your children," the " Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do," the "Peace I
leave with you, my peace I give unto you ; not as
the world giveth give I unto you; let not your
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid," in which
we all believe, — even sceptics and those who are
more than sceptics, who assert positively that
" miracles do not happen." The shame does not
humiliate us ; we can see through it to the infinitely-
greater glory behind ; whereas the Jews found it a
sore stumbling-block to their pride of race, and the
Greeks looked down upon it as radically inconsistent
with that intellectual caste to which they ascribed the
sole possession of " the good and beautiful " in all
its perfection. To them the asserted resurrection
seemed that which alone gave a glimmer of proba-
bility to the bold assertion that God had manifested
Himself in human nature only to die upon the cross,
and submit to the jeers and scoffs of Jewish and
Roman ridicule. To us there seems something in-
trinsically convincing in the assertion that this great
death was died, that that majestic calm and that
magnanimous sympathy prevailed even over the
torture of the cross ; we only come to our difficulties
when we come to the assertion that He who died
that supernatural death really lived again to be
recognised by those who saw Him die and heard Him
foretell their own discomfiture and dispersion. The
early disciples found it all but impossible to believe
that a divine nature could go through physical and
moral humiliation. Our difficulty is not in the least
in believing in that which is divine enough to over-
come any combination, however overwhelming, of
physical and moral humiliation. What we find
difficulty in believing is, that that which is morally

XXI THE MODERN EASTER DIFFICULTY 161

and spiritually supernatural, involves even any
power at all of controlling or overruling what we
suppose to be the fixed necessities of physical law.
Our minds are jaded and hag-ridden, as it were, by
the physical fatalities of modern science, and yet
modern science itself might, if we only used our eyes,
warn us of the extraordinary blunder we are making
in thus depreciating the true power of mind over
matter. It is generally supposed that physiology is
the one department of modern science which has
done most to shake the belief of man in the resur-
rection from the dead; and certainly Professor
Huxley has used its teaching with extraordinary
skill for that end. But let any one who thinks that
modern physiology has disposed of the supremacy of
the mind over the body, turn to the last Lancet, and
read the review of a great German physician's (Dr.
Albert Moll's) book on hypnotism; and what will j
he find there ? Such sentences as the following : —
"It is quite impossible to assign any limit to the
influence of mind upon body, which is probably much
more potent and far-reaching than we are usually
prepared to admit." (Lancet, 28th March 1891,
page 722.) And this is not an assertion due to any
a priori theory, but to the hard facts of actual
observation, — an inference drawn from such evidence
as this, for example, that real blisters, — to take a
very petty detail, — will rise on a patient's skin as a
consequence merely of persuading him to believe
(when it is not true) that one has been applied to
him. And this is one of the least remarkable of all
the phenomena of what is now called hypnotism. I
do not hesitate for a moment to say that the super-
stition which modern physical science has promoted,
that the mind cannot seriously alter the effect or
s M

/

162 THE MODERN EASTER DIFFICULTY xxi

, modify the operation of the physical laws of the

i universe, science itself, carefully interrogated, has

i swept away ; and that physiologists do not exaggerate

when they say, as the Lancefs reviewer said last

Saturday, that "it is quite impossible to assign any

limit to the influence of mind upon body."

Yet we cannot well recognise with the Dean of
Westminster that the modern world no longer sees
any "stumbling-block," any "foolishness," in the
story which so deeply offended both Jjfes an d
Greeks, of the death on the cross of the mostldivine
of human beings, without also recognising the truth
of the Dean's assertion that the resurrection from
the dead has become a much greater stumbling-block,
a much greater depth of foolishness, to that same
modern world, than the Crucifixion itself appeared
rto the world nineteen centuries ago. There seems
to be no capacity at all left in us to measure the
power of the morally and spiritually supernatural
against the power of the physically customary and
habitual. We can believe in what we have never
seen the least hint of in the one region, and yet
cannot believe what we have seen many hints of in
the other region. Where can we find any trace of
experience to render it possible for us to conceive
the nature which could spend the last hours of sus-
pense before approaching death, and the first hours
of the keen anguish of betrayal, in strengthening
others for the shock and the suffering they were
about to undergo, and which could lose all sense of
the injustice and cruelty and cowardice and terror
around, and the torture within, in the passion of
pity and the might of forgiveness? Surely no
experience that this generation has had has rendered
it easy to conceive of supernatural goodness such as

""^^■»^^^^^"^^^^"*^™^^^WWH«?S^«H

XXI THE MODERN EASTER DIFFICULTY 163

this. And yet we do not stumble at it ; it is not a
stumbling-block to us ; it is not " foolishness " ; it is
not even difficult to believe. So much as this the
modern world will believe without even asking to
see anything like it. Yet to me it seems far more
wonderful, a far more inconceivable marvel in human
life, than any which is involved in the Eesurrection.
Look at the way the very best men pass through
the little trials and struggles of this world. Eead
Dean Church's account of the Oxford Movement, of
the bitterness, the jealousy, the alienation, the sore-
ness, the resentment which followed on both sides the
very natural and excusable excitements of that great
movement, and then ask how far this age has had
any experience of the kind of suffering through
which our Lord passed on the cross without mani-
festing any trace of any of these feelings, and yet
with all the physical agony to bear which must have
intensified the pain and shame and sorrow to an
extent which it is impossible for us even in the least
degree to measure. To my mind, the spiritual
miracle of the Crucifixion was an infinitely greater
miracle than the physical miracle of the Eesurrection,
— a much more impressive evidence of the actual
mingling of the divine with the human. It is strange
that a world which can accept heartily the one
should find it so difficult, and in some cases so im-
possible, to accept the other. This implies, I think,
that what it does accept it accepts without any true
insight into the wonder and majesty of the personal
manifestation the reality of which it professes to
recognise. Certainly ours is a superstitious age, \
though superstitious rather in the excess of its respect \
for the physical energies of the universe, than in the /
excess of its respect for the spiritual. Only on the

164 THE MODERN EASTER DIFFICULTY XXI

day before Good Friday, there appeared in the Echo
this wonderful letter, which seems to me as astound-
ing an evidence of the physical superstition of our
age, as any belief in table-turning or witchcraft could
be of superstitions of another species : —

« OXFOBD AND THEOLOGY

" TO THE EDITOR OF THE * ECHO '

" Sir — Is it after all true that the only sane folk live
in Colney Hatch ? That question is apt to arise when
we read of the public subscribing £10,000 to endow
three studentships 'in order to stimulate the study of
theology in Oxford.' (See the Dean of St. Paul's letter
in yesterday's Echo.) Just think ! The idea of devoting
the laborious fruits of human industry to the ' study of
theology,' when the very existence of a God is a matter
of yes or no, whichever you please ; not the faintest
gleam of light being available, or even possible, upon the
subject. And this while the burden of life becomes
more insupportable day by day for the great majority,
owing to the lack of the merest bodily necessaries. When
I look at that £10,000 given for the * study of theology,'
and think of the empty bellies that want filling, I am
ashamed of the weakness of my indignation which saves
me from a fit or something. Upon my word, there would
be more reason in endowing a chair for the c study ' of
the habits of the man who resides on the ( off' side of
the moon. — Yours, etc., J. Francis.

" Comberwelly %bth March"

\

Could that intensity of superstition be easily sur- \
passed ? For a thinker who knows what faith has
done, and has done for the poor, to ridicule the ex-
penditure of £10,000 on theological education as

-JI.J^JM. gBC^g— gggqag

XXI THE MODERN EASTER DIFFICULTY 165

compared with its expenditure on doles of bread and
meat, — which for the most part go to increase the
number of hunger-ridden paupers,— does seem to me
a bewildering depth of superstition. Of course I do
not say that this gentleman is wrong in being pro-
foundly sensible of the difficulties which stand in the
way of our highest theological beliefs. That is a
totally different matter. But that any man of the
world even, should suppose that these difficulties are
so overwhelming as to render the prosecution of all
theological studies a simple absurdity, appears to me
to show that he has never had the capacity to enter
into the foundations of religious belief, or even to
measure the significance of the latest evidence of
science on the subject of the relations of the mind
to the body. That a small mind, under the influence^
of dkfalse belief, can be made to suffer all the effects
of a physical burn, without any application that
physical science recognises as adapted to produce (
such consequences, and yet that a mighty mind <
possessed by a true belief could not be conceived as
controlling the issues of life and death, — though we
have quite as good evidence that it did control those \
issues as we have for what are termed the phenomena I
of modern hypnotism,— seems to me a paradox I
which far exceeds the paradoxes of the great medi-
aeval superstitions. That there is a mind expressed -
in the order of the universe, and that that mind
controls the order which it constituted, is surely far
more certain than that the influence of belief, — true
or false, — over physical life, is a fact of daily scientific
experience.

XXII

DR. ABBOTT ON NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL

1879

In another column of the Spectator an interesting
criticism by Dr. Abbott is published on the remarks
made in that journal last week concerning his con-
ception of Liberal Christianity. To a good deal
that he says in that letter I have no reply to make.
I do not know that I differ from him substantially
in relation to his definition of worship, and am glad
to find that he wishes to express by the term some-
thing much deeper and larger than that purely
spontaneous and instinctive sentiment to which
some of the language of his book appeared to con-
fine it.

But as regards the latter portion of his letter, I
fear that the better I understand him, the more
widely I differ from him ; and as there can be no
doubt but that Dr. Abbott's view is widely spread,
and perhaps becoming more widely spread every
day, I do not think it amiss to offer a few more
remarks on the subject which he there touches. I
had questioned how far a thinker who denies alto-
gether what is called miraculous power to Christ,

XXII NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL 167

could consistently attribute to Him the " divine
power " which is a condition, of course, of human faith
and worship. If I understand aright Dr. Abbott's
reply, it is this, — that there is no real connection
between control over the outward physical processes
of nature, and divine power, — that he attributes to
Christ all the divine power which is usually attri-
buted to God, except the power to alter these uniform
relations of physical phenomena, — and that even this
exception is not in any sense a limit on Christ's
power, since, in the same sense, he would attribute
the same positive changelessness, the same fixed will
against change, to God Himself, so that there is no
denial of the so-called power of miracle to Christ,
which he would not, in one sense, be willing to
extend to God Himself. His words are these : —
"We believe (in a sense) that Christ could have
turned the stones to bread, just as we believe (in a
sense) that Christ could have listened to the voice of
the Tempter ; but, as a matter of fact and history,
we believe that He did not thus ' mould nature,' and
hence we infer that it was not His will to do so.
Perhaps we may go still further, and say that as He
could not commit sin, go neither could He mould
nature contrary to nature's recognised laws." Take
this in connection with Dr. Abbott's assertion that
Christ had "power enough to redeem a seemingly
fallen world; to introduce and keep current among
men the hitherto non-existent or latent faculty of
forgiveness ; to discern the deepest needs of human
society and the fittest and most natural means for
satisfying them, to foresee and plan the triumph
of life over death by self-sacrifice, of righteousness
over sin by repentance ; and to purify by His spirit
not only the comparatively insignificant fraction of

168 DR. ABBOTT XXII

mankind called the Christian Church, but ultimately
the whole human race " ; and I suppose it means that
Dr. Abbott attributes to Christ all the moral omni-
potence needful to hear and answer human prayer
in the only sense in which, in his belief, it ought to
be answered, — and of course, therefore, without any
deviation from the strict uniformity of physical
nature, — including the omnipresence necessarily
implied in such omnipotence. If this interpretation
of mine be correct, Dr. Abbott holds that Christ has
access to every human heart and every human will
in every age, knows all our wants and wishes, inspires
us in proportion to our needs, and is gradually reno-
vating the whole universe of spiritual being in His
own likeness. If such be his meaning, he has suffi-
ciently answered my doubt as to the foundation he
would lay for the worship of Christ. If he really
holds that whatever God can do for men, Christ
can do, and that whatever limits there are on what
Christ will do, there are also on what God will do, —
namely the moral limits of what is fitting, and no
others, — then, however much he may differ from
me in ascribing to the physical uniformities of
nature a sort of spiritual sacredness which makes it
morally impossible even to God to change them, he
undoubtedly has in his own faith an ample justifica-
tion for using of his attitude towards Christ, the word
" worship."

But then, by this explanation, Dr. Abbott has
only shifted the ground of my difficulty concerning
his view of Christianity. He earnestly asserts that
what he ascribes to Christ is an infinite moral power,
involving that omniscience without which even such
power would be all but impotence ; and yet the
evidence on which he believes this is precisely the

XXII ON NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL 169

same, and no other, than the evidence which he finds
wholly worthless when it is brought to prove certain
physical facts far less marvellous. If Christ forgave
the paralytic's sins, He coupled His forgiveness with
the saying, — " But that ye may know that the Son
of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, — Arise,
and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine
house." Dr. Abbott, if I rightly understand him,
accepts the unverifiable half of the story, the insight
into the paralytic's repentant heart and the forgive-
ness of his sins, and casts the other half, the half
that was within the observation and verification of a
human witness, away. Again, in the case of the
multiplication of the five loaves to feed five thousand, ,
and the seven loaves to feed four thousand people, 1
Dr. Abbott rejects both stories as pure myth or
legend ; but accepts with enthusiasm the statement
that Christ is still feeding, by His direct, personal,
spiritual influence, the hearts of millions who never
heard His name uttered by any human being. If I
have understood him rightly, he thinks our Lord's
prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem unhis-
torical, and regards it as an interpolation after the
event ; but he thinks His prediction of the complete
triumph of His teaching over the world perfectly
historical, and accepts it, though as yet ages from
its fulfilment, as one of the evidences of Christ's
divinity.

Now, this state of mind is to me hardly intelli-
gible. I do not say it is wholly unintelligible, for I
do not believe, as the old writers on the Evidences
used to assert, that the evidence of the physically
superhuman is so much easier to get and to test
than the evidence of the spiritually superhuman,
that in the absence of the former we have no measure

170 dr. abboit

XXII

of the latter. On the contrary, I hold with Dr.
Abbott that the evidence of the spiritually super-
human is the first step, and the clearest ; but then
it does seem to me most unreasonable that when
you have satisfactorily established the spiritually
superhuman character of Christ's life and work,
you should be greatly offended and surprised at
miracle, and induced to regard with great distrust
" the element of the physically superhuman closely
combined with it. On the contrary, it would be
rather reasonable, in the absence of any direct evi-
dence on the matter, to expect the manifestation of
physically superhuman power in the person of Him
who has already manifested spiritually superhuman
power. Dr. Abbott, so far as I understand him,
declares that he is not in any way prejudiced against
the evidence of physically superhuman power in
Christ, if it is forthcoming (though he is quite clearly
not prepared to expect it), but that it is not' forth-
coming. And his reason for this very curious
statement is, — that the more you examine the
structure and growth of the Gospels, the more
I you see that the miraculous element in it is of
I later growth. I can only say that I have given a
! considerable portion of my life to this study, and
^ that I cannot conceive a proposition which seems
to me more utterly without foundation. Why, two
most stupendous miracles, — the two multiplications
of the loaves, with the conversation with the disciples
in which our Lord refers to each separately, and
reminds His disciples of the number of baskets of
fragments taken up in each case, — are both recorded
in what Dr. Abbott regards as the earliest of all the
Gospels, St. Mark's, and both recorded without the
smallest suggestion of any mode of explaining them

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XXII ON NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL 171

as an event that might have occurred in the ordinary
course of nature. The rebuke to the storm on the
Lake of Galilee, and the impression produced by the
sudden sinking of the wind and waves on the minds
of the disciples, are also recorded by the same Evange-
list, with the same brief and earnest simplicity. So
is the walking on the sea. And if there be several
miraculous events not recorded in St. Mark which
are recorded in the other Evangelists, the explanation
lies in the extreme' compression of the Gospel, not in
the slightest evidence that St. Mark told in germ
what the other Evangelists expanded into leaf and
blossom. It seems to me that the natural effect of \
rejecting as untrustworthy the story of the visible
side of Christ's life, is to inspire a great doubt of the
higher interpretation of the invisible side of that life. /
And that this will be the practical effect on those :
who accept Dr. Abbott's view of the Gospels, I feel
entirely assured. It is impossible to conceive the
discrediting of something like one -quarter of the
story of our Lord's life, as it is now given to us,
without the discrediting in an almost equal degree of
the other three-quarters.

But then Dr. Abbott will tell us that the teach-
ing of science runs directly counter to the story of
miracle, and that unless we accept God's teaching
humbly on the physical side, we shall not succeed in
getting His teaching humbly accepted by physicists
on the moral and spiritual side. I quite agree ; but
what I utterly dispute is that the teaching of science
concerning the uniformity of nature, properly studied,
goes to discredit miracle, any more than it goes to
discredit the spiritual divinity of Christ. There is a
direction in which the teaching of science goes to
discredit both, — the direction in which it confines the

172 DR. ABBOTT

XXII

attention to a class of purely physical phenomena in
intimate conversance with which a habit of mind is
apt to be formed far from favourable to the admis-
sion of any sort of superhuman power, either physical
or spiritual. There is a direction in which the
teaching of science goes to discredit neither, — the
direction in which it discovers the secrets of new
powers which it can neither explain nor deny, and
which are totally inconsistent with the theory of an
ultimate control exerted by physical agencies over
the moral and spiritual agencies of the universe.
Keep to the science of the intermediate links between
the well-established physical phenomena of the
universe, and you will contract the former habit of
mind ; immerse yourself in the science of controlling
causes, of such phenomena as mesmerism, somnam-
bulism, and all the strange phenomena of specially
stimulated and so-called clairvoyant states — what
Dr. Carpenter and others have rather audaciously
included under the term " mental physiology " — and
you will have no reason to complain that your belief
in the uniformity of natural laws seems in any degree
inconsistent with that belief in the complete sub-
servience of matter to spirit which is all that is in-
volved in miracle.

For what is implied in miracle, as it is brought
before us in the Bible, is not, of course, any caprice
in nature, but a subservience of physical to spiritual
agencies in exact proportion to the closeness of com-
munion between man and God. Even Dr. Abbott
appears to believe in this so far as it concerns the
healing agency of faith, and Dr. Carpenter and other
great physiologists go so far as to say that the power
of emotion over the body is even sufficient to pro-
duce from natural, but as yet entirely hidden, causes

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XXII ON NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL 173

the "stigmata" as seen, for instance, on the body \
of St. Francis of Assisi and many of the modern
Extaticas. Well, if that be possible, — as men of great
authority tell us it is, — what more would be needed
than such divinity as Dr. Abbott attributes to Christ, j
to involve mental control over physical nature of an I
immeasurably higher kind, — a power rising to what
we have hitherto called miracle, — a power of convey-
ing signs of specific meaning, that is, of divine pur-
pose intelligible to finite minds, through phenomena
which usually embody only a mere fragment of an
infinite purpose? Establish as you will the moral
divinity of Christy but however you establish it, your
conclusion will imply the strongest possible proba-
bility that Christ must have also had a spiritual con-
trol over physical nature. Undermine as you will
the belief in the spiritual control of Christ over
physical nature, and your result will imply the
strongest possible probability that the moral divinity
of Christ, so far at least as it implies omnipotence or
omnipresence, must have been a dream. Dr. Abbott
apparently thinks physical miracle, though a question
of fact, one of complete moral indifference to spiritual
faith. I cannot agree with him. I believe that A
there is but one step from thinking the system of
physical law so absolutely fixed by divine will that
it never has been, or ought to be, "violated" as
the phrase goes, to doubting whether it was a divine
will at all, or anything like it> to which that rigidity
of system is due. The people who believe to-day
that God has made so fast the laws of His physical
universe, that it is in many directions utterly impene-
trable to moral and spiritual influences, will believe
to-morrow that the physical universe subsists by its
own inherent laws, and that God, even if He dwells

174 NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL XXII

within it, cannot do with it what He would; and
will find out the next day, that God does not even
dwell within it, but must, as M. Kenan says, be
" organised" by man, if we are to have a God
at all.

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XXHI

MR. LLEWELYN DAVIES ON CHRISTIAN MIRACLE

1888

In the new number of the Fortnightly, Mr. Llewelyn
Davies has written a thoughtful and impressive article
to explain what he holds to be the true avenue to
Christian faith as it was understood by Christ Him-
self, though he has laid himself open to various mis-
understandings by saying at the very opening of it,
what is certain to mislead many readers as to its
true drift : — " I believe that it will be entirely to the
advantage of Christianity that we should dismiss the
idea of ' the miraculous ' from our contentions and
our thoughts. The claim made in the name of
miracles has had a pestilent effect upon the Christian
cause." From this it will be inferred by those who
do not carefully study the latter part of Mr. Llewelyn
Davies's article, that he thinks that the highest kind
of belief in Christ can exist without belief in the
Christian miracles, and I am quite sure that no more
mistaken inference could be drawn. Mr. Llewelyn
Davies only wants to express strongly his belief that
Christ discouraged, and even severely condemned
those who were drawn to Him not by the spiritual
spell of His own character, but by the wonder and

176 MR LLEWELYN DAVIES xxm

awe with which they were impressed by His super-
human cures, or by His control of winds and waves,
— to emphasise his deep conviction that the one
great miracle in which all Christians are bound
to believe first, and which if they believe, they will
have but little difficulty in believing any other, is the
stupendous miracle that Christ was given authority
to declare to man the nature and character of
the Eternal Power to which we owe our existence,
and especially the will of that Power to forgive us
our sins, and to renew us with a spirit which will
reconcile us to Himself. Mr. Da vies asserts that it
was not Christ's plan "to announce Himself as a
supernatural being, and to perform miracles as His
credentials; on the contrary, He was deeply dis-
pleased by the demand for miracles, and repelled the
support which men were willing to give to a miracle-
worker. But from the beginning to the end He
assumed authority as having come from the Father ;
He taught, and gave commands, and organised His
followers, and made plans for the future as one
having authority. The adherents He desired, and
whom alone He expected to win, were those who
were childlike and ready to believe in a heavenly
Father. To these He offered pardon, guidance, grace,
and help of all kinds. The Galileans He selected
and appointed as His envoys were simple, truthful
men who believed in Him because they could not
doubt His assurance. And when these envoys went
forth after His death to proclaim Him as Lord, they
still made the same remarkable offer, — that of for-
giveness and reconciliation to the Father. He was
exalted, they said, to give repentance to Israel and
remission of sins. The word committed to them was :
'God forgives mankind, — be ye reconciled to God.'

\

xxin ON CHRISTIAN MIRACLE 177

And St. Paul, the chief founder of the Church, was
accustomed to protest that he stood on the self-
commending power of this message, which was as
light to those of his hearers who had eyes to see."
In other words, Mr. Llewelyn Davies, so far from
dismissing "the idea of 'the miraculous' from our
contentions and our thoughts," as one which has had
"a pestilent effect on the Christian cause," begins
from the true miracle, the supernatural in Christ
Himself, and His authority to declare the very mind
of the Eternal. " If we are to believe," as he puts
it in a subsequent page, "that the man Jesus of
Nazareth had a special commission to reveal the
heavenly Father, we are admitting what every
agnostic would repudiate as a stupendous miracle ;
and I cannot imagine that if an agnostic were per-
suaded to believe this, he would obstinately stumble
at smaller miracles as incredible." Very true. Then
why does Mr. Llewelyn Davies give room for mis-
understanding by professing to wish " to dismiss the
idea of 'the miraculous ' from our contentions and
our thoughts," when what he is really aiming at is to
get men to see that it is easier to leap at once to the
belief in the supernatural life of Christ, that is, in
the greatest of all miracles, the miracle which assumes
the moulding power of the spiritual over the natural,
and the revealing power of the natural, when so
moulded, than to begin by believing in one or two
astounding interferences with the natural order, and
to build up on this, inductively, a belief that Christ
must have derived this power to interfere with the
natural order from his command of supernatural
resources ? What Mr. Llewelyn Davies really main-
tains is that we must be prepared by the spiritual
power working in our own minds to accept the divine

8 N

178

MB, LLEWELYN DAVIES

XXIII

I

r

authority of Christ, before we pass any judgment on
His physical miracles, and that it will be easier to
believe His physical miracles because we believe in
His divine nature, than it ever could be to believe in
His divine nature because we are convinced that He
effected astounding changes in the order of Nature.
I heartily accept his position as a whole that, — man
being what he is, — faith in the spiritually super-
natural justifies belief in the physically supernatural,
much more effectually and permanently, than any
amount of astonishment at the physically supernatural
is ever likely to justify faith in the spiritually super-
natural. I believe, with Mr. Llewelyn Davies, that
this was, on the whole, our Lord's own teaching, and
that we should be rash and presumptuous in attempt-
ing to exchange His doctrine for what looks like, —
though it is not, — a humbler and more inductive
process. But though I accept Mr. Llewelyn Davies's
position as a whole, and think it a matter of no little
importance that this method should be followed, I
cannot at all agree in Mr. Llewelyn Davies's strong
assertion that "it was not His [Christ's] plan to
announce Himself as a supernatural being, and to
perform miracles as His credentials." That is pre-
cisely what He did, though He did it only as verifying
by actions of infinitely less moment than those which
warranted the great faith He demanded, the convic-
tion that there was that in Him which did not merely
impose on the imagination of His disciples, but
which wielded real forces, and forces quite outside
the region where illusion was easy. When He said
to the paralytic, " Thy sins be forgiven thee," and
the standers-by asked who it was that assumed a
power to forgive sins, He added, — " But that ye may
know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to

XXIII ON CHRISTIAN MIRACLE 179

forgive sins, Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine
house." This is surely exactly what Mr. Llewelyn
Davies denies, a claim to supernatural power of the
highest order; and then, in order to prevent men
from thinking that the power to which they had
surrendered themselves, could be founded on mere
illusions of the imagination, He gave evidence that
He could thrill the body, — a much less wonder, and
yet one less liable to imaginative misapprehension, —
with the same health-giving power with which He
claimed that He could thrill the soul. And it is just
the same when John the Baptist sends his disciples
to ask if Jesus were "He that should come," or
whether they were to look beyond Him, and our
Lord replies, — "Go, and show John again those
things which ye do hear and see ; the blind receive
their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed,
and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the
poor have the gospel preached to them ; and blessed
is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me." How
could Christ have said more plainly, — ' Yes ; I claim
to be the true and ultimate object of your hopes and
expectations, and though I can only appeal to your
spirits to prove that great claim, I can give you these
further evidences that I am not* bewildering your
imaginations, for I will do in the physical world what
I claim to do in the spiritual world, — fill you with
new life ? ' Christ's rebuke to the mere craving for
signs seems to me to be directed not to the very
natural and human self-distrust which was expressed
by the two disciples in the walk to Emmaus when
they confessed that the crucifixion had shaken their
hope that Christ was He who should fulfil the desire
of Israel, but to the state of mind which had no
disposition to believe in the spiritual origin of the

180 MR. LLEWELYN DAVIES XXIII

natural, unless that disposition could be engendered
by the contemplation of a number of preternatural
occurrences which they would not be able to account
for except by some sort of omnipotent interference.
Even the passage which Mr. Llewelyn Davies refers
to, when our Lord says, " Except ye see signs and
wonders, ye will not believe," appears to show this.
For when the nobleman answers simply, " Sir, come
down ere my child die," Christ accords to the implicit
belief in Him so expressed what He would not have
accorded to the mere craving for a sign, and yet makes
it a sign as well, as is shown by the exact accordance
of the hour of the crisis in the disease with the hour
of Christ's assurance, " Thy son liveth." There was
here, therefore, a distinct purpose to let the sign
produce its effect on a mind which had already felt
^the attraction of our Lord's goodness. It was only
to those who, while they asked for signs from Him,
were apt to ascribe them, when they saw them, to
evil powers, that Christ sternly refused to show any
sign. To those who could understand, and trust in,
the physical " signs of the times," but who could not
understand or trust in the spiritual signs of the times,
He refused to exhibit His divine power. But to
those whose hearts were stirred deeply by His in-
fluence, but who hardly knew whether they ought to
trust the deeper impulses within them or not, He
seems to me to have been most willing and anxious
to prove that it was no illusion of the imagination
[ to which they were giving way. " The wicked and
adulterous generation" which sought after a sign,
and to which no sign was to be given but the sign of
the prophet Jonah, were not those who were yearning
to believe in Christ, but who, like the Apostles them-
selves, found their faith oozing out with every dis-

XXIII ON CHRISTIAN MIRACLE 181

couragement. He denounced those who yearned for
prodigies only, and even when they had prodigies,
saw no spiritual meaning in them, but rather an
unspiritual meaning. But even St. Paul insisted that
if the great sign of the Besurrection were untrust-
worthy, the whole Gospel which he had declared was
a dream.

I cannot but regret that Mr. Llewelyn Davies has
put his protest against the old and unspiritual use of
miracles to force belief on sceptical hearts and con-
sciences, with what appears to me more energy than
discrimination. For while I heartily agree with his
main drift, I am quite sure that the physical miracles
of the New Testament add a majesty of their own to
the whole effect of the great spiritual miracle in which
Mr. Llewelyn Davies very justly demands our faith,
and are not, as it has lately been the custom to
represent them, a mere dead weight on the spiritual
grandeur of the Gospel, rendering it more difficult to
believe than it would have been without them. Yet
there are passages in this interesting and powerful
article which, if taken alone, would certainly convey,
this false impression, though I do not think that Mr.
Llewelyn Davies in the least intended to convey it.

r

XXIV

CARDINAL NEWMAN ON INSPIRATION

1884

Cardinal Newman, in the very interesting paper
which opens the February number of the Nineteenth
Century, has carefully defined what Eoman Catholics
mean by the inspiration of Scripture, so far as an
individual Eoman Catholic can define what the
Church to which he belongs has not yet fully drawn
out. He only glances at the difficulties to which
Protestants are liable, when they accept a divine
revelation on the one hand, but deny, on the other
hand, that there is any sure and unerring external
guide in the discrimination of what the limits and
scope of that revelation really are, for his subject is
not in any degree controversial, but solely expository
of the obligations to which, as he understands, every
one who joins the Eoman Catholic Church subjects
himself. But he does glance at the difficulties of our
side of the case, and it is worth while to recall what
these are before dealing with those which appear
; to me to attach to the hypothesis of an infallible
l Church. The difficulty of accepting as divine, a
revelation of which the books of Scripture contain

xxiv CARDINAL NEWMAN ON INSPIRATION 183

the history, but a history which may be understood
in one way by one interpreter and in another way
by another interpreter, and a considerable portion
of which may be rejected on external or internal
evidence as inaccurate by a third interpreter, is
obvious enough. As the Cardinal justly enough \
says, nothing is more difficult than to combine the ^
belief in a divine superintendence of the whole
history with the admission that its record is con-
tained in miscellaneous fragments by all sorts of
different persons, some of whom tell you that they
have constructed their narrative out of previous
documents of which they say nothing more, and do
not tell you that they have been divinely guided in
their selection ; while others are given with either
wrong notes of authorship, or, at least, notes of an
authorship so difficult to reconcile with the known
facts, that the most orthodox scholars profess their
belief that the authorship assigned is mistaken. It \
is no easy matter, I say, to combine a profound '.
belief in a communication by God of matters the
most important that can be imagined to the soul ot
man, with the recognition of this fragmentary and
apparently almost accidental record. Cardinal New-
man, for instance, lays it down as more than probable
that the original Scriptures of the Jews suffered
much loss and injury during the captivity and under
the persecution of Antiochus, so that even of the I
divinely inspired record some portion has been per-
mitted by Providence to be lost. It is clear, then,
that this divine treasure is preserved to us in
earthen vessels, which are liable to be broken and
the contents spilled. If this be so, what is to pre-
vent these documents from being regarded even by
believers in the Kevelation, as other works of litera-

v..

184 CARDINAL NEWMAN ON INSPIRATION XXIV

ture are regarded, — as something quite unfixed, to
which one man may assign one drift and another
another, so that even of the believers in Revelation
no two shall entirely agree as to what that revela-
tion really is? Cardinal Newman argues that, —
r" Surely, if the revelations and lessons in Scripture
are addressed to us personally and practically, the
presence among us of a formal judge and standing
expositor of its words is imperative. It is antece-
dently unreasonable to suppose that a book so com-
plex, so unsystematic, in parts so obscure, the
outcome of so many minds, times, and places, should
be given us from above without the safeguard of
some authority; as if it could possibly from the
/nature of the case interpret itself. Its inspiration
\does but guarantee its truth, not its interpretation.
How are private readers positively to distinguish
what is didactic and what is historical, what is fact
and what is vision, what is allegorical and what is
literal, what is idiomatic and what is grammatical,
what is enunciated formally and what occurs obiter,
what is only temporary and what is of lasting obliga-
tion? Such is our natural anticipation, and it is
only too exactly justified in the events of the last
three centuries, in the many countries where private
judgment on the text of Scripture has prevailed.
The gift of inspiration requires as its complement
the gift of infallibility." Of course, that does state
a great difficulty. Protestants and Anglicans alike
admit that as a matter of fact, men who are equally
impressed with the belief that God exists, and has
revealed Himself in the story of the Hebrew people,
differ in the most startling way, where they accept
no final human authority on the subject, as to what
the burden and drift of that revelation is. Some

XXIV CARDINAL NEWMAN ON INSPIRATION 185

reject one book of Scripture, and some another;
some one doctrine which appears to be assumed in
Scripture, and some another ; some believe our Lord
to be God, and some a mere human being with
supernatural endowments; some believe Him a
human being without supernatural endowments;
some reject the Old Testament miracles, and some
reject all miracles; and very many reject a large
proportion of the history with which these miracles
are interwoven, and there is no authority amongst
us who can say, ' There you are wrong ; you are
rejecting revelation itself ; you have no right to be
called a believer in divine revelation, and ought to
associate with those who reject it' This is all quite
true, and no honest Protestant or Anglican will deny
the fact that this is strange and mysterious, and does
threaten the very existence of the Christian Church
as an institution formed to spread the knowledge of
God.

But now look at the difficulties on the other side,
which seem to me to be still more, I might truly say
far more, overwhelming. What has the Eoman
Catholic believer to hold? He has to hold that
though the Church is infallible, it has to gather its
first evidences of what Revelation means from the
testimony of those fallible Christians whom it calls
"the Fathers." "Though the Fathers were not
inspired," says Cardinal Newman, "yet their united
testimony is of supreme authority." Well, but
what does united testimony mean? The Cardinal
has himself told us, in another place, that on the
question of baptism some of the weightiest Fathers
of the Church took for generations together the
wrong side, the side that Borne afterwards adjudged
to be erroneous, and contrary to Revelation. So

/

186 CARDINAL NEWMAN ON INSPIRATION xxiv

that the first duty of the infallible Church, in
deciding on what is and what is not Revelation,
is to go over the evidence of a number of fallible
witnesses, some of the weightiest of whom may be

' wholly in the wrong. In the next place, the Church
has decided that writers are inspired who, if inspired,
have been inspired to suggest to all ordinary judg-
ments that they are not inspired, — surely a very
difficult conception, which almost presents to us the

\ inspiring spirit as directly tempting us to doubt.
" Ecclesiasticus " is one of the inspired books of
Scripture, according to the Roman Catholic Canon.
But Cardinal Newman himself quotes the author of
Ecclesiasticus as entreating his readers to "come
with benevolence" to his work, and "to make
excuse for coming short in the composition of
words." "Surely," says Cardinal Newman, "if at
the very time he wrote he had known it, he would,
like other inspired men, have said, 'thus saith the
Lord,' or what was equivalent to it." That seems to
me unanswerable. And yet the Roman Church is

; bound to hold that the author of Ecclesiasticus was,
because really inspired, inspired to suggest to those
who should read him, doubts of his own inspiration.
Again ; — the Church has never decided that the
accuracy of all the smaller items of fact, such as
what concern the dog of Tobias, or the cloak of St
Paul, or the wine recommended to Timothy, is
guaranteed, and some of the best Roman Catholic
authorities, though they will not justify the suspicion
of error even in such minute facts, do not incline to
condemn all who regard these minutiae as purely
human enclaves in an inspired book But what can

; better represent the difficulty of the position than
that after insisting on the inspiration of Scripture as

XXIV CARDINAL NEWMAN ON INSPIRATION 187

regards all matters of fact which touch faith and
doctrine, the Church should admit that Scripture
may err on smaller matters of fact which may or
may not involve either 1 For the difficulty of this
position is that it must be extended even to chrono-
logical order, — which may very well involve faith*
and doctrine. Cardinal Newman admits that the
order of events in St. Matthew's Gospel is not gener- \
ally regarded by Catholic critics as the true order ;
in fact, they suppose that St. Matthew, though
inspired, paid little attention to the order of the
events which he narrated, and often massed them in
groups which would mislead us as to the chronology.
Surely that is a very great concession, indeed, as
regards the difficulty of maintaining the inspira-
tion of the book in any sense, as distinguished
from the inspiration of the author; yet Cardinal
Newman admits that the Church has ruled that the
books, no less than the authors, are in some sense
inspired.

On the whole, is there not far less difficulty in
assuming that God, in revealing Himself to fallible
beings, has left us with no human guide better than
our own consciences, our own judgments, our own
collective efforts, as they are overruled by Him, in all
sincere efforts to reach His truth and to find out
what He has and what He has not revealed, and that
gradually He will overrule those efforts so as to
enable us to attain a sufficient clearness and certainty
for all purposes of duty and trust, — than in assuming
that there is a human power which has final
authority in these matters, but which has so exerted
that authority as to rule that the most glaring
apparent contradictions have been separately in-
spired? For, on this assumption, it must be the

188 CARDINAL NEWMAN ON INSPIRATION xxrv

very first principle of a true interpretation of Scrip-
ture to lay down that divine inspiration may inten-
tionally put the most serious difficulties in the way of
unsophisticated minds, otherwise eager and anxious
to submit themselves to its guidance.

XXV

LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY

1881

Dr. Martineau, whose genius has done more to
mould the religious philosophy of the present day,
especially in its conflict with empiricism and material- j
ism, than that of any other thinker of our time, has/
just delivered an address to the students of Man-
chester New College, in which he estimates, from his
own point of view, the " Loss and Gain yi in recent
Theological developments. His title reminds me of '
a very different book, Cardinal Newman's estimate
of the " Loss and Gain " which the hero of his re-
markable tale had to balance when he left the
English Church for that of Eome. Dr. Martineau,
of course, in a very brief address, cannot go over
the ground which his own mind must have travelled
with anything like the elaboration of Dr. Newman,
and only touches the heads of the great subject with
which he deals. But it is obvious that the two
estimates of " Loss and Gain " made by these two
very different men of genius are nearly opposite;
that nearly everything which Dr. Martineau re-
gards as gain, Dr. Newman would have regarded as
loss, and that nearly everything that Dr. Newman

r

(
\

I

190 LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY xxv

regarded as gain, Dr. Martineau would have regarded
as loss. It is curious enough to contrast the general
conclusions of the two men. "Englishmen," said
Dr. Newman, through the mouth of one of his
characters more than thirty years ago, when near
his summing-up of the loss and gain of conversion,
" have many gifts ; faith they have not Other
nations inferior to them in many things still have
faith. Nothing will stand in place of it; not a
sense of the beauty of Catholicism, or of its useful-
ness, or of its antiquity ; not an appreciation of the
sympathy which it shows towards sinners ; not an
admiration of the martyrs and early Fathers and a
delight in their writings. Individuals may display
a trusting gentleness or a conscientiousness which
demands our reverence; still, till they have faith,
they have not the foundation, and their superstruc-
ture will fall. They will not be blessed, they will
do nothing in religious matters till they begin by an
act of unreserved faith in the word of God, whatever
it be, — till they go out of themselves ; till they cease
to make something within them their standard, till
they oblige their will to perfect what reason leaves
sufficient indeed, but incomplete. And when they
shall recognise this defect in themselves and try to
remedy it, then they will recognise much more ; they
will be on the road very shortly to be Catholics."
That, of course, is the form in which the case against
the tendencies visible in recent theology would be
presented by a Roman Catholic, but the Romanising
element in it is not that with which I have any
concern. Of course, Dr. Newman regarded the
Catholic Church as the representative on earth of
God's revealed will, but the argument I have quoted
was not an argument for trusting that or any other

XXV

LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY

191

Church, but for trusting God's revelation as some-
thing higher and worthier than man's own sense of
fitness, for fixing the mind on something outside
men, and ceasing to make " something within them
their standard." Dr. Martineau's estimate of loss
and gain in recent theology is a computation con-
ducted on the most opposite principle conceivable as
to what is loss and what gain. He congratulates
his former pupils on " the disappearance from our
branch of the Reformed Churches, of all external
authority in matters of religion," — and what he means
by external authority, he tells us clearly enough.
He goes so far, indeed, as expressly to condemn the
attempt " to extract a proof of eternal life from the
records of Christ's resurrection," which he speaks of
as one of a class of mistakes justifying a feeling
of moral "humiliation." And he explains himself
further as follows : —

\

" The Catholic prediction, bo often made when Luther
threw off the restraints of ecclesiastical Tradition, has at
last come true ; and the yoke of the Bible follows the
yoke of the Church. The phrases which we have heard
repeated with enthusiasm, — that 'the Bible and the Bible
only is the religion of Protestants/ that ' Scripture is the
rule of faith and practice,' — are, indeed, fall of historical
interest, but for minds at once sincere and exact, have
lost their magic power. I need not remind you how
innocently, and how inevitably, this has come about;
how completely the conception of a Canonical literature
that shall for ever serve as a divine statute-book, belongs
to a stage of culture that has passed away ; how widely
discrepant are the types of doctrine and the conceptions
of morals and the recitals of fact, in different parts of this
supposed uniform manual ; and how, if you disown these
human inequalities and insist on artificially filling up its

192 LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY xxv

valleys and levelling its hills, you destroy a region glori-
/ ous in beauty, and doom its running waters to stagnate
,' in unwholesome fens. It is simply a fact that dictated
faith and duty are no longer possible, and that, by way
> v of textual oracle, you can carry to the soul no vision of
; God, no contrition for sin, no sigh for righteousness.
1 The time is past when a doctrine could save itself from
1 criticism by taking refuge under an apostle's word, or a
' futurity authenticate itself by a prophet's forecast, or a
V habit become obligatory by evangelical example. To our
function, as witnesses for divine things, this seems at
first a disastrous change, little short of a loss of both the
credentials and the instructions which legitimate our
message. We naturally think how easy was the preacher's
task when he had only to exhibit the sacred seal, and
make clear the sentences it covered, and the reason of
men would accept them as truth and the will would bow
before them ; when doubts of Providence fled from the
sufferer at the mere sound of the words, ' The hairs of
your head are all numbered ' ; and the shadows of death
vanished before the voice, ( This mortal must put on im-
mortality ' ; and the guilty conscience shuddered to hear,
' There shall in nowise enter therein anything that is
unclean, or that maketh abomination and a lie.' In our
I moments of weakness, when we cry, c Ah, Lord God,
behold I cannot speak, for I am a child 1 ' we may long
for some infallible support which may bear our burden,
and relieve the strain of thought and love. But it is just
in order to bear this burden, to sift out the eternally true
and good from transient and tempting semblances, and
make the divine light glow amid human things, that we
have girded up our wills and set apart our lives for
( spiritual service. And if there were a book-theology
ever so perfect, the verbal quintessence of all transcend-
ent truth, the more we spared our own souls and depended
i upon it, the less should we pierce to the seats of convic-
\ tion, and rekindle sight for the blind. Eeligion is not

XXV LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY 193

the truth of any stereotyped propositions, but the highest
life of the moving spirit, nor can it be conveyed from mind
to mind, except by the vibration of harmonic chords."

So that the very tendency which Dr. Newman, when
he left the Anglican Church, selected for special
condemnation, — the tendency, I mean, to lean on a
purely human and subjective standard of truth, Dr.
Martineau selects, thirty-three years later, as a matter
for special satisfaction, — and, if so, no doubt one in
respect of which the modern Unitarians are justly
entitled to very special congratulation.

How are we to explain this absolute and violent
contradiction between two men of high religious \
genius, each of whom has done much to fortify the
religious spirit of the age against the materialism of
the day, in Churches far removed from the sphere
of their own special influence 1 Or shall we infer y
that one at least of the two was entering on a wholly
false and misleading track % No doubt, the one had
entered definitively on the track which led to a
recognition of an infallible authority for the definition
of divine truth, while the other has long ago chosen
that track which leads to an ideal and religious
rationalism indeed, but still to pure rationalism, — in
other words, the recognition of the human conscience
and reason as the final and only index of the law
and reason of God. But what I want to consider is
this, whether either of them is, so far as I can judge,
wholly wrong or wholly right. And the answer I
should give is this, — that while Dr. Newman and
the Catholics go much, — I might almost say demon-
strably, — too far in assuming for those elements of
revelation which stretch beyond the verge of our
utmost "verifying faculties," whether of reason or
s

"\

194 LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY XXV

conscience, the same degree and kind of authority

which belongs to those elements reflected and echoed

in our own minds, Dr. Martineau goes quite as much

too far in congratulating himself and his brethren

on their having thrown off the yoke of external

, authority altogether, and having learnt to limit reve-

\ lation by the area of the strictly natural religion in

/ their own hearts and minds, and to deny it all

I extension and all authority beyond that which those

\hearts and minds can give. I will explain my

meaning rather more at length.

The Catholic Church, as it seems to me, accus-
/ toms her children to look habitually for a degree of
; certainty in relation to the most incidental and, as I
1 may say, arbitrary regions of religious speculation,
which is not really to be got, if only for this reason,
; — that if you lay down your dogmas in these matters
so absolutely, they react on you so as to suggest
t doubt as to the authority of the organisation which
speaks so confidently and precisely on questions on
\ which our reason and conscience do not speak con-
v ' fidently at all. For instance, in the very conversa-
tion from which I have quoted, Dr. Newman makes
his Roman priest say, " I understand what a Catholic
means by going by the voice of the Church ; it means
practically, by the voice of the first priest he meets.
Every priest is the voice of the Church." Now,
that view is, I think, a very natural consequence of
the excessive importance attached by the Catholic
Church to external authority. But the effect of it
is that the Church in all ages has spoken through
priests what in the next age it had to correct as
false. In one of the earliest centuries, numberless
I priests of high authority maintained that no layman,
still less a heathen, could baptize effectually; and

XXV LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY

195

yet soon that opinion was formally condemned. In
century after century, up to our own time, priests of
the highest authority have preached, with the most
earnest belief in their own absolute authority to
declare divine truth, and have even published to the
world " consensu superiorum," doctrines of hell
which are now declared by equally high authorities
to be quite unauthorised by the Church, and which
it is at least not impossible that within our own
time the Pope may ex cathedra condemn. No wonder,
then, that Protestants distrust a Church which has
so accustomed her children to rely on infallible ex-
ternal tests of truth, that the very organs of the
Church preach century after century, without in the
least doubting their own right to do so, dogmas which
the Church herself, on reflection, finds herself com-
pelled to modify, to soften, to limit, in reality and
substantially, to retract and deny. Full of the sense
of her own infallibility, the Eoman Church thinks
that on all points of theology she ought to have
a clear judgment, and the consequence is that her
priests have often declared as truths of revelation
what were not even decisions of the Church, but
only their own private opinions, moulded in the
atmosphere of a particular country and particular
age. This results, in my opinion, from relying too
much on the Church's power of understanding and
interpreting those aspects of revelation which range
far beyond the scope of the reason and moral appre-
hension of man.

On the other hand, I cannot in the least enter
into Dr. Martineau's position that there is, and can
be, nothing in revelation worthy of our reverence
and acceptance which does not demonstrate itself to
our moral and religious intuitions, — in other words,

/

./

\

196 LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY XXV

/ that natural and revealed religion must in effect

V mean the same thing, since a truth once revealed to

the reason and conscience becomes virtually a truth

of natural religion, while a truth not so revealed

cannot be, to the man whose moral or intellectual

faculties have not grasped it as truth, a truth at all.

What I should say is this, — that all who believe in

God at all as a Being whose ways are not as our

ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts, ought to

expect to find, in His revelations to us, first, that

v which we can discern to be absolutely true ; next,

I that which we can discern to be full of difficulty, but

[ still, on the whole, impressing us as coming from

' above, and not from beneath us ; and lastly, that

which we could not discern to be true at all, did it

not come in close connection with truths which

\ encompass and overwhelm us, and from that close

connection derive an authority of its own, to which

it is only right to accord a definite share of influence

on the conduct of our lives. I do not think that

the authority of these different classes of truths can

ever be identical, for this simple reason, — that the

moment we get out of our depth in the world of

truth, that moment we are in danger of defining

wrongly, if we define too much at all, — are in danger,

in fact, of undermining the very evidence on which

we accept all divine truth, if we insist on translating

into our definite human dialect the mysteries of God.

That revelation which reason and conscience clearly

understand and accept, is necessarily of the highest

possible authority, because we know exactly what it

\ is, where it begins and where it ends. That which

f reason and conscience only recognise as coming from

1 above, though lying, more or less, beyond our grasp,

is of less authority, so far, and only so far, as there

XXV LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY 197

are a great many different ways of interpreting its
significance, and the character of its divine origin.
That which derives its authority solely from its close
association with what really controls and rules us,
has necessarily an authority of a vaguer and less
definite kind. But it is to me almost unintelligible '
how a theologian who believes as strongly as Dr.
Martineau in a self-revealing God, should seem to
identify all authority in religion with that which has /
fully and finally incorporated itself with human }
nature, so that it involves a direct disloyalty to /
reason and conscience to doubt of it at all. This seems >
to me just as unreasonable as for a child to take
nothing on its father's authority, except what that
father can demonstrate to the undeveloped reason
and conscience of its tender age. When, for instance,
Dr. Martineau writes as follows, he seems to me to
take for granted at one and the same time, first,
that Christ was so immeasurably our moral and
spiritual superior as to be able to regenerate our
nature ; and next, that we are so immeasurably His \
intellectual superiors, that we can disentangle all His
illusions from His truths, can see through His dream
of supernatural power, and strip Him of all the
disguises in which partly His own and partly his,
disciples' imagination dressed Him : —

" Take the measure of another great change which,
though gradual and timid in its advance, has for us
reached its completion within > our own memory, — the
disappearance from our faith of the entire Messianic myth-
ology. I speak not merely of the lost * argument from
prophecy/ now melted away by better understanding of
the Hebrew writings, or of the interior relation, under
any aspect, of the Old Testament and the New, but of the
total discharge from our religious conceptions of that

198 LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY XXV

central Jewish dream which was always asking, ' Art thou
He that should come, or look we for another ? ' and of all its
stage, its drama, and its scenery. It no longer satisfies
us to say that Jesus realised the divine promise in a sense
far transcending the national preconception, and revealed
at last the real meaning of the Spirit which spake in
Isaiah. Such forced conforming of the Jewish ideal to
the Christian facts, by glorifying the one and theorising
on the other, was inevitable to the first disciples, and
could not but colour all that they remembered and thought
and wrote ; and the imagination of Christendom, working
with undiscriminating faith on these mixed materials,
has drawn upon its walls a series of sacred pictures, from
which art has loved to reproduce whatever is tender and
sublime, and which have broken silence in the Divina
Gommedia, in the Paradise Lost and Regained, in plaintive
Passion Music, and the kindling popular hymn. All
this is of intense interest to us as literature, as art, as the
past product of devout genius ; nor will I too rigorously
question those elements of it which fairly admit of
symbolic use in setting forth the truths we really mean
and the affections we deeply feel. But, as objective
reality, as a faithful representation of our invisible and
ideal universe, it is gone from us ; gone therefore from
our interior religion, and become an outside mythology.
From the person of Jesus, for instance, everything official,
f attached to him by evangelists or divines, has fallen
away : when they put such false robe upon him, they
were but leading him to death. The pomp of royal
( lineage and fulfilled prediction, the prerogatives of King,
, of Priest, of Judge, the Advent with retinue of angels on
the clouds of heaven, are to us mere deforming investi-
tures, misplaced like court-dresses on * the spirits of the
just ' ; and he is simply the Divine flower of humanity,
blossoming after ages of spiritual growth, — -the realised
possibility of life in God. And if he is this, he has no
consciously exceptional part to play, but only to be what

xxv LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY 199

he is, to follow the momentary love, to do and say what
the hour may bring, to be quiet under the sorrows which
pity and purity incur, and die away in the prayer of
inextinguishable trust. And, to see him thus, we go to
his native fields and the village homes of Galilee, and
the roads of Samaria, and the streets and courts of Jeru-
salem, where the griefs and wrongs of his time bruised
him and brought out the sublime fragrance of his spirit.
All that has been added to that real historic scene, — the
angels that hang around his birth, and the fiend that ;
tempts his youth ; the dignities that await his future, —
the throne, the trumpet, the great assize, the bar of i
judgment ; with all the apocalyptic splendours and terrors '
that ensue, Hades and the Crystal sea, Paradise and the
Infernal gulf; nay, the very boundary walls of the
kosmic panorama that contains these things, — have for
us utterly melted away, and left us amid the infinite I
space and silent stars." J

If all this Messianic side of Christ is mythology, \
where is His truth 1 M. Havet is far more reasonable /
from this point of view than Dr. Martineau. He
strips off all that Dr. Martineau strips off; but then,
after doing so, he does not hesitate to speak frankly
of the narrow and ignorant Judaism which he finds
beneath. Those who see what Dr. Martineau sees
in Christ are surely marvellously rash in assuming
that no true supernatural power over nature, and no
true vision of the eternal past from which, in our
Lord's own belief, He issued, and of the eternal
future into which He passed, was combined with that
marvellous spiritual might. It seems to me one of \
the most wonderful characteristics of religious ration- '
aligns that while it finds what it truly finds in our {
Lord's history, it is so much offended as it is at
finding other tokens of divine life and power, and i

200 LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY XXV

other visions of truth which are not accorded to
, ordinary men. To pare away revelation to the
: dimensions of natural religion, seems to me to imply

something like a latent doubt that it is revelation, —
l^i.e. truth revealed to us by one above us all, — and
z not rather the spontaneous divination of the human

mind, opening by its own intrinsic energies to a
v sudden augury of its origin and destinies.

XXVI

DR. MARTINKAU ON SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY

1890

Dr. Martinkau's new book on The Seat of Authority
in -Religion, published by Longmans, is not one that
it is easy to read and master in a few days, or even
in a few weeks. It has compressed into it the
laborious studies of a long lifetime, all skilfully
marshalled with the sharply outlined and masculine
vividness, and the imperious confidence of a historical
judgment singularly decisive, singularly keen, and,
I should add, singularly and quite unreasonably
sceptical. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable than\
the contrast between the vividly sceptical bias of j
Dr. Martineau's historical judgment and the still I
more vivid devoutness of his spiritual nature. In {
the region of conscience, there is no more truly
religious writer in England, and certainly none at ;
once so powerful and so devotional. In the region
of historical criticism, there is hardly any with so ;
iconoclastic a bias towards pulling to pieces all that J
the religious sentiment of mankind has slowly built /
up. The scorn with which Dr. Martineau treats the
beliefs of all the Christian ages is, I suspect, expressed
with a force that he himself has no power to realise.

202 DR. MARTINEAU XXVI

It has never occurred to him, I should think, that
the same spirit which inspired the spiritual and
moral revelation of which he thinks so highly, may-
have guided with as much providential care the
impression produced on the mind of the universal
Church by which that revelation was received. Is
it not a very arbitrary treatment of history, to
insulate the divine revelation as Dr. Martineau

1 supposes it to have been given through Jesus Christ,
and to ignore entirely, as if it were quite irrelevant
and without any bearing on the divine meaning and
purpose of that revelation, the impression produced
by it on the minds of generation after generation, as

, if that were really no essential part of the phenomena
of Christianity ? To me it seems an essential part
of the supernatural course of the Christian religion
that the theology of St. Paul took so profound a
hold of the Church, and that the theology of St. Paul
was so soon developed into the theology of St. John.
It is about as strange a feat for a thinker of Dr.
Martineau's force and rank to treat all these fresh
and natural testimonies to the character of Christ's
nature and teaching in the Church, as if they were
mere refractions and exaggerations of human loyalty
to an exceptionally pure human being, — a mere
nimbus, as Dr. Martineau calls them, encircling his
head in their imagination, — as it would be for an
astronomer to treat the corona and the red promi-
nences of the sun as if they were mere subjective
phenomena that had no interest except as throwing
light upon the mind of the observer. I can under-
stand such a contention on the part of those who do
not believe in Jesus Christ as a special revelation of
God at all ; but for those who, like Dr. Martineau,
do so believe, to treat the steady development of

XXVI ON SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY 203

the mind of the Church concerning Him as a mere
growth of human error that bears no likeness at all
to the divine significance of the real figure concern-
ing whom all this halo of illusion (as Dr. Martineau
holds it) sprang up, is like giving an explanation
of the rainbow which dispenses with the sun. The^
real difference between Dr. Martineau's conception
of spiritual authority in these matters and my
own, is this, that Dr. Martineau attributes to God's
revelation only the very few residual phenomena of
Christ's life which his destructive and very arbitrary
analysis leaves us after it has done its fatal work ;
while I attribute to it not only the great majority
of the facts of our Lord's life as recorded in the
Gospels, but the great majority of the impressions
produced upon the minds of His disciples and
followers as they grew and shaped the traditions of
the apostles and the disciples who constituted the '
Church of the primitive age. Dr. Martineau regards l
the divine revelation as limited to the life of Him
who first removed the veil. I regard it as extending
to the minds and lives of those from whose eyes the
veil was removed, and as shaping the growth of their
faith and love. Nor can I conceive an authority .
limited as Dr. Martineau would seem inclined to
limit it. He brings us to a great tree, tears away
its leaves, hews down its branches, strips off its
bark, and then tells us to regard the naked and
fatally injured wreck as the true life of the whole.
I say that we must look for the life of the whole in
the collective phenomena ; not only those of Christ's
life (though I regard Dr. Martineau's analysis of that
life as one of the most wonderful achievements of
destructive criticism with which, from a man of
great genius, and, — in a sense too, — of great religious

204 DR. MARTINEAU XXVI

genius, I ever met), but also in the life of the com-
munity chiefly affected by it, in the faith in which
it flowered, in the actions in which it bore fruit, in
the devotions which it generated, in the institutions
to which it gave birth, — in a word, in the whole
results which it evolved, though not in any thing
which can be shown by reasonable criticism to be a
mere excrescence on, or a parasitic growth upon,
that life. It seems to me that Dr. Martineau's
conception of authority, as limited to the conscience
/^alone, is infinitely too narrow. The conscience, no
- doubt, is the centre of authority over the life of
' man. But the conscience lays hold, by all sorts of
delicate filaments, of the tastes, of the imagination,
of the affections, of the social system; and in
all these its manifestations, the divine inspiration
appears to me as real a shaping power while it
moulds the confessions and attitudes of the whole
society towards Christ, as it is even when it first
manifests itself through Christ Himself. It would
be as easy for a child to pick out everything in the
conduct of its parents that it might safely disregard,
and so to lay bare the only justification for true filial
reverence, as for a critic to discharge historical
Christianity, as Dr. Martineau does, of nine-tenths
of its actual contents, and to fix upon the one-tenth
which is supposed to give all its vitality to the
remainder. He seems to forget that the same
"authority" which appealed to the conscience of
man through Christ, spoke no less in the gradual
i development of the Christian worship and the
i gradual growth of the confessions of the Christian
l creed. I can hardly understand how a thinker so
great as Dr. Martineau was capable of writing down,
for instance, such a canon of criticism as the follow-

XXVI ON SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY 205

ing, which he calls "the rule for separating the
divine from the human in the origin of our religion" :
— " The former will be found, if anywhere, in what
Jesus of Nazareth himself was, in spiritual character
and moral relation to God. The latter will be found
in what was thought about his person, functions, and
office. It was the Providence of history that gave
us him : it was the men of history that dressed up
the theory of him : and till we compel the latter to
stand aside, and let us through to look upon his
living face, we can never seize the permanent essence
of the gift." That is a canon conceived just as if
God did not kindle the faith, as truly as present the
object of faith. There is no real antithesis corre- )
sponding to Dr. Martineau's. No doubt we must
look, as earnestly as we may, at the living face, but
does it appear a likely mode of doing so, to pre-
possess ourselves, as Dr. Martineau does, with the
strongest possible prejudice against the legacy left
us in the life and teaching and traditions of those
who were the earliest gazers on the living face ?
And if looking at the living face means, as it means ^
in Dr. Martineau's book, looking at a Christ who
never once predicted His death and resurrection,
though it is admitted that He must have had sad J
forebodings of the former, who never claimed to be I
the Messiah at all, but only imposed a stern veto !
on Peter's disposition so to proclaim Him, instead of j
solemnly pronouncing Him blessed in having received
God's own revelation of the truth, who, in fact, claimed
nothing further than to continue John the Baptist's
message of an approaching kingdom of God of which
He Himself was not to be the central figure, who
never worked a miracle, and after His death on the
Cross, never communicated to His disciples anything

206 DR. MARTINEAU xxvi

, but a spiritual impression of His resurrection, who
( had no sort of connection with the mythical Christ,
as Dr. Martineau regards Him, of the Fourth Gospel,
. — a figure, according to Dr. Martineau, first con-
ceived in the middle of the second century, — and,
1 in a word, who can be safely credited only with
such acts and words " as plainly transcend the moral
level of the narrators," — if this is wh&t " looking at
i the living face " is to signify, I would just as soon
i look at the living face in a dark room, and fancy
myself after doing so vastly more familiar with its
features than those who had only studied them in a
well-lighted mirror.

As a specimen of Dr. Martineau's scepticism, I
may take his reasons for believing that Christ only
professed to repeat and continue the message of
John the Baptist, an assumption contradicted by
every Gospel we have, and of which Dr. Martineau
persuades himself on the slenderest conjectural
evidence which it is possible to imagine. This
evidence is derived from the statement in the Acts
of the Apostles that upwards of twenty years after
the Crucifixion, a body of disciples was found at
Ephesus under the teaching of Apollos, who had
" taught carefully the things concerning Jesus,
knowing only the baptism of John." This Dr.
Martineau interprets as meaning that "for neither
prophet did the Baptist's sect assert a higher claim
than that of herald of the kingdom, but regarded
both as warning messengers to prepare the world
for meeting its Judge." That is a fair conjecture,
though it is little more, and the fact might be
susceptible probably of twenty different explana-
tions, if we had fuller knowledge of the history;
but how does it show that the Baptist sect which

XXVI ON SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY 207

held this, if they did hold it, knew anything adequate
of the teaching of the disciples of Christ? We
know, if we know anything, that John the Baptist,
before his own death, either for his own sake or for
that of his disciples, sent messengers from his prison
to elicit from Christ what His own claim was ; and
it is easy to suppose that disciples who had been
separated from- John the Baptist by his imprison-
ment, and who had afterwards migrated to Ephesus,
would have gone on teaching that, as Jesus had
accepted John's baptism, He was merely one of the
greatest of his followers, and had never even claimed
to be the Messiah. Yet Dr. Martineau builds upon
it the astounding inference that all the express
assertions of the Gospels in a different sense are
ex post facto inventions, and that before the vision-
ary appearance of Christ to His disciples after His
crucifixion, they had never heard from Him of any
claim to be the founder of the new kingdom, and
that that claim rested wholly on the inferences which
they drew from their newly-formed impression of
His spiritual existence and restored energy. Surely
it is hard to find an instance of any great man's
more credulous incredulity. What would Dr.
Martineau have put into the mouth of Jesus as the
reply to John's messengers ? Surely it would have
been this: 'Go and show John again the things
which ye do hear and see : the blind do not receive
their sight ; the lame do not walk ; the lepers are
not cleansed ; the deaf do not hear ; the dead are
not raised up ; and least of all have the poor had
the Gospel preached to them'? — for such an
edition of the Gospel as Dr. Martineau alone
authenticates, a Gospel of beauty without power,
of promise without performance, would have had

208 SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY XXVI

no chance of startling, or eliciting blessings from,
the poor.

To my mind at least, Dr. Martineau's conception
of divine authority as manifested in the whole
development of the Jewish and Christian revelations,
seems a conception of failure to express itself ade-
quately, instead of a conception of revealing power.
If there is one thing more certain than another in
that history, it is that the belief in God's super-
natural power, as manifested both in the sharp
struggles and conquests of the inner life and in the
wonderful signs given in the external fields of history
and nature, was the one connecting thread of their
history, and moulded the steadily expectant character
of their anticipations of the future. If Christ's life,
death, and resurrection did not fit into this long line
of supernatural manifestation, it was not the future
for which the people of Israel had been disciplined
and prepared ; it was only a half-and-half super-
naturalism, and not of a piece with the long tradi-
tional development of which, in almost all Christians'
belief, it forms the consummation and the crown.
Divine authority which is shut up in the conscience
exclusively, and extends to no other part of life, may
suit a purely philosophical system like Dr. Martin-
eau's, but it does not represent in any sense the
• drift of the teaching of either the Hebrew or the
Christian Church.

XXVII

THE HEAD MASTER OF CLIFTON COLLEGE ON THE
THEORY OF INSPIRATION

1883

The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
has seldom done either a better or a bolder thing
than its publication of two remarkable lectures by
the Head Master of Clifton College, — the Rev.
J. M. Wilson, — on The Theory of Inspiration. It has
never done a bolder thing, because these lectures
face the difficulties of the Bible in a much freer
and franker spirit than the Councils of our various
Religious Societies can usually persuade themselves
to sanction and approve. It has never done a
better thing, because these lectures do not rationalise
and explain away Revelation into a mere human
evolution, but are well calculated to vindicate the
faith in a divine power in almost the only way in
which in our day it can, as I believe, be triumph-
antly vindicated, as a faith justified and even
required by the study of history — which contains
constant proofs of a power perpetually conversing
with man, and sustaining, indeed, as one of the
minor prophets terms it, " the Lord's controversy "
with him, — a power especially reflected in the
s P

210 THE HEAD MASTER OF CLIFTON COLLEGE XXVII

history of the Jewish people, and receiving at last
its perfect human embodiment in the life of Christ.
Mr. Wilson begins by contrasting the extreme reti-
cence not of one Christian Church only, but of
nearly all the greater branches of the Christian
Church, as to the true definition of Inspiration, with
the desire of Secularists and Agnostics so to define
it that they may confute the Christian revelation, as
it were, out of its own mouth. He contrasts impres-
sively the language of two different authorities on
this question. One of these says, "The purely
organic (i.e. mechanical) theory of Inspiration rests
on no Scriptural authority, and, if we except a few
ambiguous metaphors, is supported by no historical
testimony. It is at variance with the whole form
and fashion of the Bible, and it is destructive of all
that is holiest in man and highest in religion." The
other authority says, " It will not do to say that it
[the Bible] is not verbally inspired. If the words
are not inspired, what is 1 " And then Mr. Wilson
explains that the former authority, who protests so
strongly against verbal inspiration as inconsistent
with historical testimony and fatal to what is
highest in religion, is Canon Westcott, of Cam-
bridge, one of the most learned of our living Biblical
critics ; and that the latter authority, who is eager
to tie the Bible down to verbal inspiration, is the
well-known American Secularist, Colonel Robert
Ingersoll, who really contends for verbal inspiration
as the only intelligible kind of inspiration, in order
that he may explode all inspiration altogether.
"Do you, then, ask me," says Mr. Wilson, "can I
become a Christian without having first believed in
the divinely-guaranteed accuracy of the Bible ? A
thousand times I answer, 'Yes.'" And then he

wa

XXVII ON THE THEORY OF INSPIRATION 211

proceeds, in a passage of great beauty and wisdom,
to explain himself : — " The truth is, that the belief
in inspiration is not the portal by which you enter
the temple : it is the atmosphere that you breathe
when you have entered. You may become a Chris-
tian—most men do become Christians,— from find-
ing in the life and sayings and death of Jesus Christ
something that touches them, something that finds
them, something that is a revelation of divine love
to the human heart. Men find that there is some-
thing in them dear and precious to God. And then
love springs up in them, and a new life begins.
They look out on the world with larger and more
loving eyes. They see God in their brethren, God
in Nature, and God in their Bibles. In their Bibles
they read of the Christ whom they love. Those
pages are filled with power that moves the soul;
never man spake as this man ; never book spake as
this book. And this, and this only, is the theory
of inspiration that Christians must needs possess.
It is primarily an internal question among believers,
not an external question with the world. It has
little or no relation to the convictions which make
and keep a man a Christian. It is not a question
which I or any one would care to talk about to one
who is not already drawn to Christ. It is prema-
ture to talk with others of the exact limits of
inspiration. Let them first read the Gospels, read
them as they would read any other book, with any
theory of inspiration or with none, with the one aim
of learning the truth about Jesus Christ, of finding
in the book what is pure, and noble, and elevating ;
let them first learn to admire, to love, to copy, to
serve Jesus Christ, and I care not what theory they
may form of inspiration ; they will have got the /

212 THE HEAD MASTER OF CLIFTON COLLEGE XXVII

thing, and then they will not be over -anxious to
define it." In a word, to be a Christian, all you
have to believe is that a real power infinitely higher
than man manifested itself to man through the
series of historical causes which prepared the way
for Jesus Christ, and most perfectly of all in Jesus
Christ himself. Believe this, and the antecedent
improbability of miracle vanishes at once, while the
mind is prepared to accept as historical events,
physical marvels which are plainly asserted to have
happened in close association with what is super-
human on the spiritual side; but as regards all
individual miracles, you are free to weigh the
evidence for them individually and on their own
basis ; they do not all " stand or fall together," but,
— so, at least, I should interpret Mr. Wilson's mean-
ing, though I am now speaking for myself, and not
for him, — those miracles which are most closely
implicated, most absolutely in harmony, with the
spiritual marvels of revelation, will stand most
firmly ; while those completely separable from
those spiritual marvels, and standing in what may
seem accidental relations with them, will remain on
a distinct plane of evidence of their own, and we
shall feel perfectly free to say in our own minds,
* Whether that really happened exactly as it is
there declared to have happened, is a question on
which we do not feel called upon to profess any
decided opinion, nor are we even capable of forming
such an opinion. We can only say that the suffi-
cient evidence on which we should be ready to
believe it is hardly in existence ; and that whether
it was a miracle or a natural event glorified by the
halo of popular tradition makes absolutely no differ-
ence to the substantial truth of the history of the

XXVII . ON THE THEORY OF INSPIRATION 213

divine education of Israel, or to the culmination of
that education in the life and death and resurrection
and ascension of Christ and in the descent of the
Holy Spirit on His disciples.'

Thus far goes the drift— as I understand it— of
Mr. Wilson's first lecture. The second lecture, on
the moral difficulties of the Bible, insists on the
view that the divine inspiration of man is neces-
sarily relative to the actual historical condition of
the race by whom that inspiration is received. All
that is needful to compel the belief that a divine
agency external to man is engaged in his education
and purification, is the evidence that whatever his
actual condition, he finds within him, and especially
within the hearts of his best religious teachers, a
power which constrains him, against the grain of his
nature, to become holier and purer than he is ; — no
matter whether that which to one century is far
holier and better than the spiritual life of that
century, seems to us looking back, after the better
experience of thirty or forty centuries more, less
excellent than the best spiritual life of our own
day. " We must judge of a divine command in the
Old Testament by the following considerations.
The voice spoke in the heart, not outside it, and
was but the voice of the conscience enlightened up
to its then standard, and receiving from the ever-
present, ever - acting Spirit of God, such fresh
enlightenment or inspiration as it could bear. Did
the voice seem wrong to them? Was it not in
general a call to something higher, to some fresh
duty ? Could it have been intelligible, if given in
the modes of thought of this century, so widely
separate as they are? and why of this century
rather than of any other, past or to come ? To my

214 THE HEAD MASTER OF CLIFTON COLLEGE XXVII

mind, the only intelligible revelation is the gradual,
historical, accommodated revelation. Such com-
mands or permissions are only so far given to us as
they are applicable to our conditions of society and
morals; and here is the function of intellect, an
ample sphere for our keenest moral judgment and
most trained insight." And Mr. Wilson illustrates
his meaning by saying of the command to Abraham
to take his son Isaac and to offer him as a burnt
offering : — " I, for one, can only interpret this as in
any sense a command from God by the help that I
get from the historical view of revelation that I
have been setting forth. The inner voice of God in
our hearts and later revelation, tell us this command
is wrong to us ; if the outer voice tells us that it is
right to us, the contradiction is intolerable, and
even maddening. But the question is not what the
inner voice in our hearts now says, but what it said
in Abraham's, nearly four thousand years ago.
And to understand this we have only to reflect that,
strange as it may seem, the offering of the first-born
was then common; that it was no moral shock,
only a sorrow and trial to Abraham ; and that the
command was used, — its importance is that it was
used, — not to sanction, but to abolish human sacri-
fices, and to look forward by a long series of types
to the perfect sacrifice of will and life that Christ
made on the Cross." That is finely put, and I
wholly agree with the view expressed, but I should
like to add to what Mr. Wilson says, that the only
reason, so far as I can judge, why the command
addressed to Abraham is " wrong to us," and would
be simply incredible to us as a divine command, is
not in the least because we may not be required
rightly, and in numbers of cases, to give up to

XXVII ON THE THEORY OF INSPIRATION* 215

death at least as certain as ever Abraham destined
for Isaac, those who are as dear to us as ever Isaac
was to Abraham, but solely because in His revela-
tion of Himself as a father, God has taught us to
cherish the deeper human affections, and what they
suggest to us, as truer and more decisive revelations
of Himself than any sort of external voice which
would merely and blankly command the severing of
those relations. We may be, and often are, com-
manded by the interior voice of duty to do what
hazards the continuance of these relations on earth,
and what ends, perhaps, in as complete a severance
of them as that for which Abraham showed himself
to be willing at God's command. But the difference
is that since Abraham's time anything like a direct
outrage on the sacredness of these affections has
been forbidden, and that we have been taught, what
Abraham till then had never been taught, that God
reveals to us more of Himself through the life of
these affections, — and by that reverence which the
Fifth Commandment especially enjoined, — than
through any outward teaching of any other kind.
Instead of representing, — as the religion of the
Phoenicians represented, — the jealousy of God as if
it were a jealousy felt by Him of the existence of
human affections, as if it were a jealousy felt by one
who regarded Himself as competing with human
love for the exclusive devotion of His worshippers,
— His revelation has explained the true divine
jealousy as requiring the highest fidelity and purity
in human relations, for the very purpose of educating
us towards fidelity and purity in our relations to
God. The relations of father and son, and of wife
and husband, instead of being depreciated as in
rivalry with religious worship, have been surrounded

216 , THE THEORY OF INSPIRATION XXVII

by His revelation with infinite mystery, and treated
as training us to the truest conceptions of what our
love for God Himself ought to be. It is not that
Abraham's lesson as to God's claim upon us for the
willing surrender even of our dearest earthly treasure
has ever been cancelled or reversed, but that it has
been taught in a different manner, — first, by the
careful forbidding of everything which outrages
those deeper affections and tends to lower and
degrade them ; and next, by teaching us to conse-
crate these affections with all the mystery and glory
of religious associations. The sacrifice of Isaac,
seemingly accepted, but really forbidden, and
thenceforward made the starting-point of a new
teaching as to the fatherhood of God and the reveal-
ing character of the higher affections of man, — a
teaching developed till, as Mr. Wilson says, it
culminated in the sacrifice of the Cross, — seems to me
to furnish one of the noblest illustrations in history
of the evolution of the highest religion out of a
creed which, once significant but rude, was rapidly
falling into a corrupt and cruel superstition when it
was suddenly rescued from that degradation and
expanded into the highest of all religions, by the
supernatural providence of God.

XXVIII

PROFESSOR JOWETT'S QUESTION

1890

Professor Jowett concluded his Sunday evening
lecture at Westminster Abbey on Kobert Browning
and Professor Hatch by the remark: "If asked
where, among all the Christian Churches of the age,
the Gospel was to be found, he would answer,
' Where it always has been found, in the Christian
life.' " That this is a large part of the answer is
perfectly true ; that it is the whole of the answer is
certainly false. It always has been true, and always
will be true, that the "good news" of the most
thoroughly Christian life actually lived in this
world is the tidings best adapted to spread in the
world the fascination of the Christian life ; but it is \
certainly not true that the Christian life could be
actually lived without the help of any other tidings
to sustain it except the tidings of other lives actu-
ally so lived. One might almost as well say that
the life of a plant which is propagated by the drop-
ping of its own seed, is dependent on nothing else
for its propagation except the formation of its own
seed. Now, we know perfectly well that a plant
which thrives and flourishes in the most luxuriant

218 PROFESSOR JOWETT'S QUESTION XXVIII

manner in one soil and one climate, will dwindle to
the poorest and most meagre vegetation in another
soil and another climate, and will absolutely die off
and vanish altogether in a third. The inherent
vitality of the plant is enormous under one set of
conditions, feeble under another, and completely
disappears under a third ; and yet it is no less true
that even under the conditions under which it
flourishes best, the growth of the plant is needed to
spread the plant, and that it will be impossible to
spread it except from a living germ of its own kind.
( Just so it is, I take it, with the Christian life : with-
, out the Christian life, the Christian life will not
spread ; but under one set of conditions the Chris-
tian life will spread itself freely and rapidly, and
under other sets of conditions the Christian life will
spread itself slowly and meagrely, and under other
. sets of conditions again, it will not spread itself at
■. all, but will die out altogether. Now the Gospel
has usually been taken as the name of those good
tidings which promote its growth and vitality most,
apart from the inherent force of its own organic
structure. It is quite as true that until you get a
germ of Christian life there can be no propagation
of that germ, as it is that until you get a germ of
physical life there can be no propagation of that
germ. But even when you have got a germ of
physical life, there is no free or luxuriant repro-
duction of that germ without favourable conditions,
and this is equally true of the spiritual life of Chris-
tianity. As Christ himself said, you may strew it
on the hard ground, where it lies perfectly unfruit-
ful till it is carried off by some accident ; or you
may strew it on a light and stony soil, where it can-
not make root enough to grow ; or you may strew

XXVIII PROFESSOR JOWETT'S QUESTION 219

it amongst thorns, where it is choked by the greater
vitality of the thorns ; or you may strew it on good
ground, and yet even on the good ground there will
be differences of condition which show themselves in
the rate of fertility, some bringing forth thirty, some
sixty, some a hundred-fold. It has been usual to ^\
regard the Gospel, " the good news," as describing
not so much the Christian life itself, as the revela- t
tion of truths which tend to foster and guard and j
stimulate the Christian life ; and it seems to me a J
great mistake to suggest that there are no such in-
tellectual and spiritual conditions without the general
acceptance of which the Christian life will cease to
spread at all events with any freedom and luxuriance,
even if it does not vanish altogether. We must re-
member that the Christian life, in a very limited
and maimed sense, is the subject of enthusiastic
praise even among the Positivists. The late Mr.
Cotter Morison, in his book on The Service of Mem,
spoke with the utmost appreciation and admiration
of the highest type of character which Christianity
had produced, though he thought that it had failed
in greatly raising the level of the character of the
average Christian. He held that the conditions
under which the saintly character had been nour-
ished, involved the acceptance of a series of spiritual
and intellectual illusions which tended, however, to
foster a high kind of idealism in the finer and more
sensitive natures, though they failed to impress
deeply the coarser and tougher specimens of human
nature. Yet even Mr. Cotter Morison did not, so
far as I can judge from his book, imagine that the
spiritual type of the Christian saint could have been
fostered and developed merely through the charm
which it exerted, — which it exerted, indeed, even

220 PROFESSOR JOWETT'S QUESTION XXVIII

on those who regarded the faith under the influence
of which it was produced as a mere dream. Nothing
in the world is more certain than that the Christian
saint could never have existed at all without the
Christian faith and hope on which his character
was nourished, — that his detachment from worldly
motives, for instance, and his heartfelt exultation
in suffering for his devotion to Christ, would have
been utterly inconceivable without his absolute
belief in the " things above," where his heart " was
hid with Christ in God." Some fragments and
scraps of the Christian morality might, indeed, re-
produce and multiply themselves without the belief.
Apparently there is something in what is now
affectedly called the " altruistic " doctrine that fasci-
nates men on its own account, and without relation
to the beliefs and hopes with which it is connected
in the minds of Christians. But the altruistic
agnostic is separated by as wide a chasm from the

v. Christian saint, as the Buddhist or the Pantheist.
The life of worship is for him a folly ; the inward
scrutiny and purification of motive is a waste of
power ; the humility, the submission, the obedience,
the gratitude, the patience, the aspiration, are all
unmeaning to him. If he spends himself in labour
and care for others, it is with a restless heat and
urgency which are not trained to await God's slow
and sure processes of preparation. Not working for
God, but for man, he cannot see beyond the bitter
disappointments which work for man too certainly
involves; he cannot escape the pessimism, the
cynicism, the despondency, the exhaustion which
fruitless work for a finite creature who seldom
understands, and hardly ever repays it, almost in-

/ evitably produces. If the Christian life itself is the

XXVIII PROFESSOR JOWETT'S QUESTION

221

whole Gospel, then the Christian life must include
the Christian creed as part and parcel of the Chris-
tian secret of success in living it. You might as
well plant in your vineyard the wild vine in place
of the vine which has been cultivated for centuries,
and then expect grapes from which you could distil
a fine wine, as plant mere altruism for Christianity,
and look for Christian fruits. Matthew Arnold
tried to show that the wild grape and the cultivated
are essentially the same ; that we might get rid of
the very idea of God and yet possess " the secret of
Jesus " ; but he failed lamentably, and left in the
world to which he appealed a strange impression of
spiritual Quixotism applied to a field in which he
had no real experience, and had,, of course, never
attained even a partial success.

And nothing can be plainer than that the Gospel,
as it was originally preached, was a message which
put new power and life into man, by enabling him
to believe in a new power and life outside him. It
was the proclamation of a kingdom, — of a king who
could enable the blind to see, the lame to walk, the
deaf to hear, the dead to live, which was the gospel
preached to the poor. Without the proclamation
of a new kingdom, there would have been no spring-
ing of a new life. It was the advent of a new power
in the world, and the belief in that new power, that
constituted the conditions of the new life. The
announcement that both the outward and the in-
ward man was subject to the new power, that sin
could be forgiven by Him who could command the
palsied limbs to rise and walk, was of the very
essence of the new life. What account does St.
Paul give of the Gospel ? — " I am not ashamed of
the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God

I

222 PROFESSOR JOWBTT'S QUESTION XXVIII

unto salvation to every one that believeth." So
St. Peter blesses God for having inspired in him
" a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from .the dead." And St. John makes the new
power to consist in the belief that " Jesus Christ is
come in the flesh," and that whatever He com-
manded, man has the power through faith in Him
to do. Nothing can be plainer than that the answer
to Professor Jowett's question in the first age of the
Church was something more than Professor Jowett's
answer to it now. The early Church did not deny
that the Gospel was to be found " where it always
i has been found, in the Christian life," but it did
proclaim that what rendered the Christian life pos-
sible, what alone rendered it possible, was a new
belief as to the power by which it was sustained, as
to the divine nature which had revealed itself in the
order and principles of that life. And what was
true of the earliest age of Christianity is quite as
true of the latest. The Christian life is not suffi-
cient to itself now, any more than it was then. It
/ is a life which can only be lived by those who have
! living faith in the divine strength which supports it.
Its intrinsic beauty, its intrinsic fascination, are not
; enough, because its intrinsic beauty and fascination
! depend on its reality, and there is no reality in it,
' unless the promise of spiritual support from within
[ is a true promise, a promise that can be verified by
the actual experience of life. There never was a
time in which a genuine belief in spiritual aid to
live the Christian life was more needed than it is
now. There is a sort of nihilism in the air which
shows itself nowhere more plainly than in the desire
to represent the Christian life as its own strength
no less than its own witness, whereas nothing is

XXVIII PROFESSOR JOWETT'S QUESTION

223

more certain than that the Christian faith has always,
and from the first, repudiated the notion that the
Christian life is its own strength, and has exulted in
reiterating with St. Paul, that when we are weak,
when we trust ourselves least, then we are strongest,
and have most reason to hope the very best. The
Christian life is its own witness, but what it wit-
nesses is that the power which sustains it comes
from beyond itself, and that the whole faith is a
delusion of delusions, unless such power flows freely
into the soul from beyond.

^

4

XXIX

MR. GLADSTONE AND DR. LIDDON ON THE BIBLE

1890

In Good Words for April, Mr. Gladstone has begun
a series of papers in which he proposes to give
popular reasons for the belief that the inspiration
of Scripture will hold its ground, even if the
specialists who are now attacking the different
books of the Bible, and especially some of the most
important books of the Old Testament, from the
critical side, should establish their case. " It appears
to me," he says, " that we may grant, for argument's
sake, to the negative or destructive specialist in the
field of the ancient Scriptures all which as a
specialist he can by possibility be entitled to ask
respecting the age, text, and authorship of the
books/, and yet may hold firmly, as firmly as of old,
to the ideas justly conveyed by the title I have
adopted for this pa|>er, and may invite our fellow-
men to stand along with us on ' the impregnable
rock of Holy Scripture. , " Dr. Liddon, who has
published a very eloquent sermon, 1 probably directed

1 The Worth of tlie OUSL Testament, A Sermon preached in
St. Paul's Cathedral on the Second Sunday in Advent, 8th

XXIX THE BIBLE 225

against the view taken of the Old Testament by
one of the writers in the volume called Lux Mundi,
a sermon which has just reached a second edition,
to one brilliant passage in which Mr. Gladstone
refers, does not apparently at all agree with Mr.
Gladstone ; for he manifestly thinks that almost all
the objections directed by the modern critics against
portions of the Old Testament would, if accepted, be /
fatal to Christian faith, partly on the ground that J
the Apostles gave a general sanction to the teaching i
of the Old Testament as they knew it, and still more
on the ground that our Lord Himself referred to the
Jewish Scriptures as a final authority for their own
time and place, and especially that He drew certain
inferences of His own from statements made in the
Old Testament Scriptures as if their evidence was un-
answerable. Of course I am unable to judge from
Mr. Gladstone's preliminary paper what he regards
as the limits of that which a specialist can, " as a
specialist, by possibility be entitled to ask respecting
the age, text, and authorship of the books " of the
Bible ; and it may turn out that he assigns to this
limit so narrow a significance, that destructive
criticism would hardly be entitled to its name at
all, since he might deny it all substantially destruc-
tive power. But of course this is not a very prob-
able view. No one knows better than Mr. Glad-
stone that if the Fourth Gospel could havfc been
relegated to the middle of the second century, as
many of the destructive critics have maintained, it
would have had no authority at all as expounding
the theology of the Incarnation; nor even that if
the Book of Daniel could be shown to have been

December 1889, by H. P. Liddon, D.C.L. Second Edition,
revised, with a new Preface. London : Rivingtons.

s Q

226 MR. GLADSTONE AND DR. LIDDON XXIX

written in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, after
many of the events predicted had really taken
place, the prophecy, as a prophecy, would, as Dr.
Liddon intimates, have been utterly untrustworthy,
and, in fact, a deception. I feel sure that Mr.
Gladstone cannot refer to such destructive criticism
as is here involved, when he says that Christians
could afford to " grant, for argument's sake, to the
negative or destructive specialist all which as a
specialist he can by possibility be entitled to ask
respecting the age, text, and authorship of the
Bible, and yet may hold firmly, as firmly as of old,
to the ideas justly conveyed " by " the impregnable
rock of Holy Scripture." Destructive criticism of
the kind I have mentioned may, and in the case of
the Fourth Gospel I believe that it does, utterly
break down ; but if it did not utterly break down,
if it could establish anything like what it professes
to establish, I believe that it would, as Dr. Liddon
maintains, go to the root of the Christian reve-
lation, — at all events, as the Christian revelation
has been understood by nine-tenths of all existing
Christians.
, On the other hand, if we take Mr. Gladstone's
' qualification of the limits of havoc which the destruc-
tive critical specialist may possibly work, as signifying
tha limits within which there is at the present time
any weighty reason to suppose that the destructive
' critical specialist may succeed, I should be much
; more disposed to agree with Mr. Gladstone that he
\ cannot really strike any serious blow at Christian
faith, than with Dr. Liddon's more alarmist view.

I hold, indeed, that the historical school might very
possibly succeed in upsetting the view that the
Book of Daniel dates from a period long before

^m—^*-*3Z*^g*'

XXIX

ON THE BIBLE

227

Antiochus Epiphanes, — a point on which Hebraists
tell us that the philological evidence of the language
itself is virtually decisive, — and yet that no serious
blow would be struck at the truth and power of the
chief part of the historical revelation contained in
the Bible. Again, if the view of such critics as
Robertson Smith as to the date of Deuteronomy in
its present form were regarded as established, I do
not think that any serious blow would have been
struck at the truth and power of the chief part of
the historical revelation contained in the Bible.
So far as I can judge, the whole weight of Dr.
Liddon's argument depends on one assumption, that
our Lord in taking a human nature, and in speaking
from the centre of that human nature, was yet
virtually so dominated by the divine omniscience,
that except on one subject, His human knowledge,
— the knowledge derived from His human nature,
— was unlimited. "Our Lord has told us," says.
Dr. Liddon, "that on one subject His knowledge
was limited. We have no reason for supposing
that it was limited on any other. But if our Lord,
as Mem, did not know the day and the hour of the
Judgment (St. Mark xiii. 32), He did not as Man
claim to know it. Had He told us that the real
value of the Books of the Old Testament was hidden
from Him, or had He never referred to them, tfiere
could have been no conflict between mode'rn so-
called ' critical ' speculations and His divine author-
ity." Surely this is going a great deal beyond the
true significance of the evangelists' teaching as to
Christ's human life. It seems to me that that life
implies the limitation of His human knowledge on
various different occasions. What is the meaning
of " How is it that ye sought me ? wist ye not that

228 MR. GLADSTONE AND DR. LIDDON XXIX

I must be about my Father's business," if our Lord
was perfectly aware all the time that Joseph and
Mary were searching for Him for parts of three
whole days, while He was attending in the Temple
to ask questions of the doctors of the Jewish law ?
What, again, was the meaning of His " asking them
questions " at all, if all the time He not only knew
the answers far better than those who answered
Him, but knew also what the answers He was to
receive would be, before those whom He interro-
I gated had opened their mouths ? Surely our Lord
did not " as man " claim to know the answer to any
\ question which He appeared to ask for the sake of
; instruction. I cannot even conceive the scene of
our Lord's boyhood as described by St. Luke, except
on the hypothesis that our Lord's human nature
was genuinely human, that He really desired to
know the interpretation put by the Jewish doctors
on the Jewish Scriptures, and that He had not
anticipated the anxiety felt concerning Him by His
mother and her husband. Again, take the prayer
in Gethsemane. What is the meaning of the prayer,
" If it be possible, let this cup pass from me, and
yet not as I will, but as thou wilt," if He in His
human nature knew perfectly well that it was God's
will that He should drink the cup? The whole
meaning of that hour of anguish, the whole depth
of that spiritual cry, depended on the human limita-
tions of the nature the agony of which escaped in
that cry. And the same impression is derived from
the Gospel which may be called the Gospel of the
Incarnation, in its account of what I may fairly
speak of as the foretaste of the agony. When our
Lord says : " Now is my soul troubled, and what
shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour.'

*&^^*^^^^p~^^^^^tm

XXIX ON THE BIBLE 229

But for this cause came I to this hour. Father,
glorify thy name,* — can any one doubt for a
moment that such a deliberation as that with
Himself, was a deliberation simply impossible to
divine omniscience conscious of its omniscience,
and that its profoundly touching and impressive
character is derived only from its frank expression
of human determination to accept as God's will
what He would fain have deprecated? I admit
and assert, of course, that our Lord's human nature
was frequently pierced by flashes of divine insight
and divine power ; that, as St. John says, He knew
"what was in man," as none other could have
known it ; that He stilled the tempest and multi-
plied the loaves as none other would even have
attempted to do in His place. But even His power
as man was limited, as His rebuke to the disciples
who would have used force to resist His capture
shows, where He speaks of His power to " pray to
his Father" for angelic aid, had He thought it
right to offer such a prayer, not of any power in-
herent in His human nature to summon such aid.
The mystery of the two natures in one person is
seen, indeed, at many points in His career ; but *
Dr. Liddon's view of our Lord's human intellect as *
absolutely unlimited in all but a single direction,
appears to me to solve this mystery in a sense
which almost destroys the humanity, instead of
taking it up into God. And why, if it be admitted,
as every one admits, that our Lord suffered all the
grief which lacerated human affections suffer, all
the sense of desolation which human weakness
involves, all the consciousness of an almost intoler-
able burden under which unassisted human effort
so often succumbs, should it be thought necessary

230 MR. GLADSTONE AND DR. LIDDON xxix

; to deny that He also suffered in His human ex-
perience from the limitation of His human know-
ledge ? It is surely not reasonable to suppose that
even that constant communion with God which
theologians express under the name of the beatific
vision, could have removed from the genuinely
human nature which He had assumed on our
behalf, the human limitations which are of its very
essence.

But if Dr. Liddon is mistaken in thus disposing
f of almost all the limitations of our Lord's human
intellect, if this would falsify the very deepest
pathos of the Gospel narrative, then surely it
would be right and natural to assume that our
Lord's human knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures
was just the knowledge which the best teaching of
; His time, linked to true spiritual perfection, would
1 confer, and was not the sort of knowledge which
. modern philology and modern studies would secure,
— was, in short, consistent with such a view (say)
of the Book of Daniel as the best Jewish doctors
of His time could have imparted, even if that view
were erroneous. So far as I can see, Dr. Liddon's
conception of our Lord's nature tends as much in
the direction of denying His humanity, as the
Unitarian view of our Lord's nature tends in the
direction of denying His deity. But if I am right
the force of Dr. Liddon's argument disappears, and
then I should certainly hold with Mr. Gladstone
that whatever (within reason) the negative school
of criticism may establish, it will not really injure
the essence or diminish the impressive historical
effect of the revelation so wonderfully and so
gradually communicated to the Jewish race. Even
if some of our canonical books turn out to have

XXIX ON THE BIBLE 231

been rashly accepted, and some that are deutero-
canonical prove to be more authentic and more
weighty than those supposed to be of the highest
authority, the Anglican Church at least is com-
mitted to no view of inspiration that will make it
difficult to confess the errors of the past and to /
rectify the teaching of the future.

/

XXX

THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE

1872

The judgment of the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council in Mr. Bennett's case has given rise
to the usual amount of small witticisms on the
delicacy and evanescence of theological distinctions,
— witticisms of that type of which Gibbon's ironical
description of the vowel -modification which dis-
tinguished the Arian from the orthodox doctrine of
Christ's nature as " this important diphthong," is
perhaps the best specimen. One able writer has,
with unnecessary coarseness, described the difference
between Mr. Bennett's latest expressions about the
consecrated elements and those for which he would,,
by the admission both of the Judge of the Court of
Arches and of their Lordships of the Judicial Com-
mittee, be censurable, and if not willing to retract,
liable to deprivation, as the difference between say-
ing " hocus-pocus," and declaring that he had only
meant to say " ocus-pocus " and that if he had pro-
nounced the aspirate, it was rather from unfortunate
habits of articulation than from real intention.
That is a forcible though, as I have said, a coarse
expression of contempt for the minutiae of distinc-

xxx THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE 233

tions which the writer apparently regards as dis-
tinctions not only without a real difference, but
also without, what is still more important, a sincere
belief in any difference. And for my part, I confess
that I cannot at all grasp Mr. Bennett's distinction
between " adoring and teaching the people to adore
the consecrated elements, believing Christ to be in
them," which was admitted to be a flat contradiction
of the Anglican teaching forbidding any adoration*
of the consecrated elements, and "adoring and
teaching the people to adore Christ present in the
Sacrament under the form of Bread and Wine, be-
lieving that under their veil is the sacred Body and
Blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ," which
is now declared by the Judicial Committee to be
dangerous and rash language, but not expressly
contradictory of the Church's statements, and there-
fore of course entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
I should have thought that any evidence which
would justify the former statement, — supposing
there to be such evidence, — would better justify
the latter, and that the two are hardly practically
distinguishable to ordinary human intellects. But >
for all that, I feel no sympathy at all with the i
spirit of the * hocus-pocus ' witticism, which really f
means that the Sacramental principle is pure non-
sense, and the various refinements of which it has
been made the theme are mere variations in the
mode of expressing nonsense, — in other words, non-
sense of a higher order, nonsense in form concerning
nonsense in substance. Nothing seems to me less \
surprising than that all religions with any vitality
in them should show that vitality in an attempt to
help the spiritual through the material life, as well
as to transform the material life through the spiritual.

234 THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE XXX

And whatever ought in point of fact to be surpris-
ing or otherwise, certainly no one can have the
smallest acquaintance with the teaching of Christ
and His Apostles without seeing that thoughts of
this kind lay at the very basis of their doctrine,
that in that teaching the material world is often
j treated as spiritual, and the spiritual world as
[ material ; that spiritual food is spoken of as
| Bread, and physical Bread is treated as the means
of spiritual health; that water is treated as the
instrument of regeneration, and spiritual teaching
is called living water ; that sometimes the physical
touch is regarded as healing the spirit, and some-
times the spiritual touch as healing the body ; in
short, that Christ discerned a most intimate alliance
between physical and spiritual agencies, in virtue of
which the physical were often spiritual and the
• v spiritual often physical ; that He claimed the power
to make the most ordinary constituents of the
human body channels of spiritual life, and the most
marvellous spiritual teachings equivalents for ordi-
nary rest and nutrition. He recognised not only
the working of the spirit on the flesh, but of the
flesh on the spirit, and promised not only spiritual
aid to overcome physical passions, but physical aid
to overcome unspiritual passions. And in so doing,
Christ did but follow the track of the natural life
of man. What is more common than to find pure
air restoring health to the spirit as well as pure
social influences restoring health to the body ? Does
not the beauty of mountain scenery give a new zest
to the very food we eat, and make it go further in
nourishing the bodily tissues ? Does not pure food
give a new activity to the mind, and make it keener
even in the life of prayer and of duty ?

XXX THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE 235

But most men will admit at once that the re-
ciprocal action of the spiritual on the material and
of the material on the spiritual is the most certain
and, perhaps some will say, the least mysterious of
human phenomena, since if Mind creates matter, all
material forces are but mental energies in disguise ;
and if Matter constitutes mind, mental energies are
but material forces in disguise. In such apparently
reciprocal influences of material and spiritual
agencies, then, it will be said, there is not the
vestige of the alleged Sacramental principle, which
is not supposed to consist in the natural influence
of the material on the spiritual, but in a super-
natural transformation of material agencies which,
while leaving them to act in their old material way,
yet infuses them with a new life that not only
affects the mind directly, but affects it also by
purifying or refining the bodily organs. What
rationalists deny is not the effect of material agencies
in stimulating the spirit, — which they would of
course steadily assert, — nor the effect of spiritual
agencies in exciting the spirit, — but the possibility
that by any spiritual process whatever a material
agency could have its material effects so modified as
to make the body a more pure and perfect organ of
the spirit, in other words, as to make it respond
more easily to the government of the higher
Christian impulses. They would admit that the
habit of self-control would make the body a more
manageable organ for the spirit ; and again, that
healthy physical habits would make it a more
efficient instrument of every kind ; but they would
deny that the particles of food could be made to
have any different effect, as particles of food, through
any conceivable religious rite which might be per-

236 THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE XXX

formed, though they might concede that any high
excitement of the nerves would probably disturb the
bodily functions, and make their action different, —
probably not healthier, — than it otherwise would be-
But is not that mere attempt to state the case
accurately, as it is conceived by the rationalists, full
of evidence that it is exceedingly difficult so to state
it as to exclude all room for the proper sacramental
principle? They have to admit frankly that the
same material substances act in most different
i fashions under different spiritual conditions ; — only
they would maintain that the changed spiritual
, conditions act through the nervous system of the
\ recipient, and not through any transformation of
\ the elements which pass into the body. Admitted,
1 but is not this in its turn a distinction as refined
! and intangible as almost any theological distinction ?
v Could any physiologist distinguish between an
effect produced on the assimilation of food by the
higher tension of the nerves due- to spiritual feeling,
and an effect produced by the modification of the
substance received ? An element once in the body,
the discrimination between what is due to its
action on the bodily organs and what is due to the
action of the bodily organs on it, is surely almost
inapprehensible, and quite evanescent ? Supposing
the body be really made a finer organ for the spirit
by any internal change, suppose the inflamma-
bility of evil passions were diminished, and the
impressibility to spiritual impulses were increased,
is it not almost as childish and as unverifiable a
refinement as any of which theologians have ever
been guilty, to maintain that you can distinguish
between what is due to the physical action of the
food on the body, and what is due to the nervous

XXX THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE 237

action of the spirit or spirits on the food? No
doubt it may be very fairly said that if anything of
the sacramental influence supposed to be exerted
were really due to the bread and wine received, it
would be only reasonable to assume that that in-
fluence would depend, as it does in the case of the
air breathed in beautiful scenery for example (which
doubtless has a more salutary effect on the body
than equally good air breathed in uninteresting
scenery), in great measure on the physical amount
so received, whereas, as everybody knows, most of
the believers in the Sacramental principle regard
the minutest portions of the sacred elements as
amply adequate to convey the new stream of
spiritual life, and hold, therefore, that even though
no material substance were taken at all, if the
recipient believed that he had received the symbols
of Divine life, the rite would have precisely the
same physical and spiritual effect upon him as if he
had really received them. Nor can I, of course,
doubt that this is true. But the question which '
suggests itself is this, — whether, supposing it to be
true, as of course it is, that it is not the elements
received which effect anything, but only the divine
influence of which they are such vivid symbolic
channels, it may not yet be quite as much a physical
as a spiritual change through which that divine in-
fluence operates. If beauty both of sight and sound
acts, as it does, on the body by modulating the
organs of sense, why may not the highest divine
life mould the body directly, as well as through the
slow influence of the mind upon it ? The real
essence of the Sacramental principle is, I imagine,
contained in the assumption that the divine life
enters us by physical as well as by spiritual channels ;

238

THE SACRAMENTAL PRINCIPLE

XXX

* and for this purpose, of course, jt matters not at all
whether the sacred elements be but living symbols
to our minds of that belief, or the actual channels
of it. There seems to me, at all events, no sort
of superstition in holding that, — independently of
course of all sacerdotal conditions, — the rite which
treats Christ's body as the bread of life, does exert
a very strange and spiritually-renovating influence

\ on the human body, — does make the body, that is,

a more perfect and delicate instrument of the human

spirit. It is quite certain, at all events, that no

Church, in which the Sacramental principle, — the

principle that the spirit is spiritualised throu gh the

divine influence acting on the body as well as on

the spirit, — has been deficient, has ever avoided at

f once the dangers of too exciting and fanatical a

doctrine of conscious "conversion," and also the

danger of too cold a reliance on "good works."

i The Sacramental principle and it alone has brought

/ home to religious people the many different avenues,

• involuntary and unconscious as weir as voluntary
[ and conscious, physical as well as spiritual, by
1 which the Spirit of God must enter man, if the

character is to be really pervaded with divine in-
fluence. That principle alone guards adequately
against morbid Calvinist broodings over the evi-
dence of special grace, and cold Pelagian reliance
on moral goodness. That exaltation of the common
/ things of nature, which results from the teaching that
f divine life enters through the daily bread into the very
tissues of the body, no less than through the Spirit of
God into the conscience, prevents the relative over-
rating of the Spiritual life as such, besides exerting
a unique influence on the affections by the strictly
. personal relation to Christ into which it brings us.

XXXI

PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD

1884

In Mr. MacColl's paper, published in the Fortnightly
for July, on the Princess Alice, — the depth of pathos
in whose letters, by the way, he brings out with
singular success, — he touches a weak article in the
theology of some of the Reformed Churches, —
namely, the condemnation of prayers for the dead.
This has always seemed to me to admit of only one
kind of justification, and that a justification which
it cannot plead, — I mean the plea that the condition
of the dead is unchangeable, that by death they are
turned, as it were, to stone. The Princess records
in one of her letters, after the loss of her youngest
boy, that the eldest "always prays for Frittie" ;
and as Mr. MacColl justly remarks, this is simply
natural, and is even shown to be so by the practice
of the unsophisticated child. Mr. MacColl declares
that " to forbid prayers for the dead is to undermine
the doctrine of prayers for the living." And there
I agree with him most completely, since the dead, if
their spirits are what they were at all, cannot be
unchangeable, cannot be beyond the power of God,
cannot be beyond the reach of prayer. Of course I

v

240 PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD XXXI

know the sort of ground on which prayers for the
/ dead have been held to be superstitious and heretical.
/ This is held by those who think that " probation "
\ is strictly limited to this life, and that an alternative
V of absolute blessedness or absolute misery is here-
after certain. Such persons hold that the habit of
praying for the dead cannot even be innocent, since
it must take the form either of a prayer for what is
already granted, — which implies distrust of God, —
or else a prayer for what is already refused, which
1 implies rebellion of heart against Him. The answer,
of course, is that we have no assurance in Revelation
that probation is absolutely limited by this life for
all alike; — the subject is not even explicitly dealt
with in the New Testament. And even if that were
so, and nothing seems more unlikely, none the less
we could not be in any way assured that the state
of those who are beyond the veil is unchangeable,
that the blessedness of those who are blessed admits
of no increase, and the misery of those who are
miserable of no decrease. Except in the presence
of a positive divine revelation to the contrary — of
which no one even pretends to produce evidence —
the natural assumption is, that whatever prayer
tends to do for one who is living on earth, it equally
tends to do for one who is living in the stage
beyond. As Mr. MacColl says, those who make
light of the efficacy of prayers for the dead are in a
fair way to make light of the efficacy of prayers for
the living. If it is argued that they are useless
r because God may be absolutely trusted to do the
! best for the dead without our prayers, why, that
: applies just as much to the living as to the dead.
, And if it is argued that after death their state is so
absolutely unalterable that no prayers can avail

XXXI PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 241

them anything, the natural inference is that long \
before death that crystallisation of their destiny ]
must have set in which turned to petrifaction after- I
wards. If the positive instruction to pray for each /
other is to apply to this life only, why was it not
carefully limited to the domain of this life by those
who taught us to pray? Is it not obvious that
what was intended was to foster in man's heart the
habit of pouring forth all his desires and wants freely
to God? And if those desires and wants do not
stop short at the grave, if they affect as much those
who have passed beyond it, as those who are on this
side of it, it can be nothing but the most artificial
and unnatural of arrangements to teach us to divide
our desires into two strictly separated classes, of
which those belonging to one are never again to be
breathed to God, while those belonging to the other
are to be poured forth with all the old fervour.
What teaching could be better adapted to make the
invisible world unreal to us than this complete
ignoring, in our intercourse with God, of all the
affections which connect us with the world beyond,
— this sedulous restraining of our thoughts to those
who are still with us in the visible frame of things ?
If men once ignore the dead in their prayers, those
who are gone will become dead to them in a quite
new sense, — nay, the world of the highest life will
become dead to them also. As it is the very highest
effect of prayer to connect the unseen with the seen \
world, and to convince men that God has regard to r
the cry of man, when it is in accordance with His ;
spirit, nothing seems to me more fatal to that
highest use of prayer than to represent it as strictly '
limited in its scope to those who are still with us,
and entirely without possible result on those who

8 R

242 PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD xxxi

are gone from us. How could the conception of
" the whole family in heaven and earth " be a true
one, if the members of it who are on one side of the
grave may properly pray only for those who are on
the same side as themselves, but should treat those
who are on the other side of it as beyond the range
even of their intercessions ? That is not one family,
half of which may not even pray to God for blessings
on the other half.

The horror felt of prayers for the dead in some
theological circles is justified, I believe, by the
argument that, if once we begin to think of the
condition of any one who is beyond the grave as
changeable at all, we shall get into the habit of
thinking that even if we are as evil and selfish as we
please in this life, even if we delay repentance till
after all the evil enjoyments of life have been
exhausted, we may yet rescue ourselves, or be
rescued by others, from that misery we deserve, by
change of heart in the world beyond. But the true
answer to this is, not to assume a single arbitrary
point like the moment of death, as the point when
change for all alike becomes hopeless, — a doctrine
which seems to me as little founded in Scripture as
it is in the evidence of human nature, — but to show
that whether on this side of the grave or on the
other, a character once matured is so obstinate in its
habits, so difficult to change, so moulded by its own
former acts of choice, that the hope of any sudden
revolution in its tastes and preferences is far more
of a dream than of a reasonable expectation. It
simply cannot be that a child who dies at ten or
twelve has a character as formed as a man who
lives to fifty or sixty ; and if so, even the
selfish child who dies at ten or twelve must

XXXI PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 243

be much more open to the higher spiritual in-
fluences which affect the next life than the man
who lives to fifty or sixty, after a long career
of steady resistance to those spiritual influences,
can be conceived to be. The true teaching
surely is, that prayer for others can never hurt, and
may often help them ; but that it can never help as
much those who have set the grain of their own
characters steadfastly against doing that for which
we pray on their behalf, as it can those who are yet
in the stage of growth in which every influence tells.
Prayer for those who, with numberless faults, have
died young, must, I should think, always be far
more hopeful than prayer for those who, though
they are still living, are living with all their faults
hardened into the rigidity of habitual sins. Neither
prayer may be wasted ; both may do good ; but the
reasonable thing certainly is to hope more from the
prayer for those, — whether living or dead, — who are
not yet confirmed in evil, than for those, whether
living or dead, who are so confirmed. It is not
death that makes the difference. If the earnest
prayer of a good man avails much, it yet avails
more for those who have not hardened their hearts
against the drift of such a prayer, than for those
who have; and this even though he who is so
hardening his heart to the influence of such prayers
be still in the body, while he who is opening his
heart to the influence of such prayers has been
delivered from the burden of the flesh. It is not
death which makes the difference : it is the life
of him for whom the prayer is breathed. On the
life which is growing more and more intractable
to such prayers, whether it be embodied or disem-
bodied, the prayer can have little effect, just as a

244 PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD xxxi

touch will have but little effect on the course of
a landslip. On the life which is growing more
and more sensitive to the influence of such
prayers, whether it be embodied or disembodied,
a prayer may have, under the providence of God,
great effect, and may even form the turning-
point of a career. But that is a doctrine which
does not open any very sanguine hope of the effect
of intercessory prayer on the future of those who
have used ill a long probation here, though it may
open much hope of the effect of prayer on those who
have had here the mere shadow of a probation, with
hardly any experience of the fascination of good,
and with the fullest experience of the attractions of
evil.

But the great danger of forbidding prayers for
the dead is, as Mr. MacColl says, that it must tend
to discourage prayer altogether. If the heart may
not pour itself out to God freely, it will soon cease
to pour itself out at all. And clearly it cannot pour
itself out freely unless it can say its say about both
worlds, about those who are wholly in the one world,
as well as about those whose life is partly in the one
and partly in the other. "Where the treasure is, there
will the heart be also ; " and if the treasure is in the
other world, to forbid the heart to be there too is
fatal. And how can any one pray to God except
for that for which his whole heart craves 1

xxxn

CANON KINGSLEY ON REASONABLE PRAYER

1873

Canon Kingsley preached last Sunday at West-
minster Abbey on a part of the subject which seems
to have agitated so much the Presbyterians of
Dundee, — the right we have to expect an answer
to prayer. If I may argue from the imperfect
report of his sermon which I have seen, it must
have been a very fine one. At least he put with
very great force one point which people in their
worldly and corrupted view of spiritual things
almost always lose sight of, and that is, that when
prayer means, and is, nothing but a selfish wish
launched into the invisible spaces around the heart,
on the chance, as it were, of its over-persuading a
spiritual listener who has power to give that wish
effect, there is no kind of reason, on either Christian
or natural grounds, for hoping that it will be
granted. The first condition of prayer is that it
shall be really offered to God ; and God can mean
nothing less to any one who prays than the highest
and purest Will of which he can form any appre-
hension. Now the very meaning of prayer to that
Will is that the being who offers it desires to be

246 CANON KINGSLEY xxxil

brought closer to him to whom it is offered, does
not desire to overrule, but to be overruled by him.
Hence the launching of a selfish wish into the un-
seen world, in the dim hope that it will become
operative through the good-nature of a Being who
has infinite power to do as he will, is not in any
sense prayer at all, for it is not offered to God as
God; — it does not seriously profess to desire that God
should be more and more in the universe, and selfish
creatures less and less ; it is not, in short, addressed to
the perfect righteousness and perfect love, but only
to the most potent of all administrative agencies ;
it is directed, not to the infinite purity, but to a
mighty Executive of the universe, and would be
addressed to that mighty Executive much more
hopefully if infinite good-nature instead of goodness
were his essence. Now this is certainly not, in
Christ's sense, prayer at all. In His sense, it is of
the very essence of prayer that it aims at the
establishment of the Divine will, and the annihila-
tion of all that is inconsistent with that will. It is
not to God's omnipotence primarily, but to His
spiritual nature, that Christian prayer is addressed ;
the whole purport of it being that the unity of the
Divine Kingdom may be asserted and its laws
established. If this be not the first condition of
any petition, then in the Christian sense that petition
r is not prayer at all. Prayer is not a short and
easy cut to the thing next your heart; but the
chief method by which the eager and shortsighted
and imperfect mind gradually learns to purify
\ itself in the flame of divine love. People talk and
/ think as if prayer only meant bringing pressure to
' bear for private purposes on the power which touches
the secret springs of life. Certainly, in Christ's

XXXII ON REASONABLE PRAYER 247

teaching, it does not mean that at all. It means, on
the contrary, bringing divine influences to bear on
these private purposes, so as to extinguish or trans- '
form them ; — to obtain the means of giving full effect,
not to the latter, but to the former. " If ye then, (
being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your
children, how much more shall your Heavenly
Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him."
In other words, the central idea of all prayer is the
Holy Spirit, and all other petitions are to be asked
and are likely to be granted only in strict subordi-
nation to that. The disciples were to believe that
if they had " faith in God," they might say to the
mountain on whi<5h the Jewish Temple was built,
" Be thou removed and cast into the sea," and that
it should be done, — as it virtually was done, — but
only because that faith of theirs was faith in God,
because its essence was the belief in the kingdom
of God as revealed in Christ, not because the drift
of it coincided with a private wish of their own, so
that the request would be, if granted, an astounding
example of the power accorded them to pull the
invisible strings by which the universe is moved.
All this Canon Kingsley evidently must have ex-
plained with his usual force. He told his hearers
very plainly that most men who cry to God to save
them are expressing a mere selfish desire to be saved
from pain and discomfort, which there is no reason-
able hope that God will grant. They do not want
to be blest, but to be comfortable. And God, who
wills to bless, but by no means wills to make us
merely comfortable, is much more likely to refuse
to save, in their sense, what only cumbers the earth,
and promises, here at least, no good fruit. " Why
should Christ save you ? What use is your life to

248 CANON KINGSLEY XXXII

God or to any human being ? Why should Christ
keep you alive, if you are not doing your duty ?
Why should He not take you away, if you are an
offence, an injury, nay, a nuisance to Him and His
kingdom, and put some one else in your place 1 "
The only conceivable answer is that there may be,
perhaps is, something in every man which admits
of saving in the higher sense, which admits of being
united to God, and of being expanded till it swallows
up all that is evil and selfish in the man, — which is
therefore really worth salvage, and in the infinitely
minute and tender economy of God will not be
allowed to perish in the wreck of the lower nature.
But may it not be said that this doctrine is too
high for the simple, affectionate, and, so to say,
confidential character of prayer, as illustrated by
revelation, and would have prevented Abraham's
praying for Sodom on condition that ten righteous
men could be found there, and St. Paul's praying
for the lives of those who were in the ship with
him on his voyage to Eome ? How could either of
these know that the divine law did not require the
prayer to be rejected, and how could it be right to
attempt to sway the infinite Good away from its
perfect purposes, for the sake of a mere sinking at
the heart which distressed a shortsighted man
when he contemplated the apparent tendency of
those purposes ? If all prayer is in essence a
yearning for the triumph and prevalence of the
divine Will over life, where is the room for those
specific petitions which embody little but the natural
and kindly feelings of a tender-hearted man, ex-
pressed, perhaps, in wishes that may be the blindest
in the world ? The answer seems to be that though
the highest prayers are prayers for the fulfilment of

XXXII ON REASONABLE PRAYER 249

God's will, whatever it be, even by the drinking of
the cup that human nature shrinks from, there is so
much of spiritual education in the habit of intimate
communion with God, — that is, of constantly bring-
ing our human desires into a presence in which
nothing merely selfish can long remain, — that we
are induced to pour out our hearts even to their
most childish wishes before Him, by the assurance
that it is often His will to give what we ask because
we ask it, even where it would not have been God's
purpose. to give it, had we not asked it. Is there
anything necessarily inconsistent between this
belief, — that there are some human prayers which
God grants in order to draw closer the tie between
Him and man, which He could not grant if they were
never prayed, — and the belief that the true object
of prayer is to lift man up to God, to subdue the
human will to the Divine, to dissolve the arbitrary i
dictation and ignorance of our self-will ? Does the /
belief that God grants to prayer what is not so
necessarily good in itself that He would grant it
without prayer, really lend any sanction to the
petty interference of human caprice in the provid-
ence of the universe, or restore under the form of a
divine compromise what had been virtually forbidden
by the teaching that all true prayer centres in the
divine will, and demands the perfect surrender of
the anarchy of human wishes ? I do not think so,
and for the following reason. The whole purpose
of Christian teaching is to impress upon us not that
man must be extinguished in God, but that he must
be utterly willing and desirous to surrender himself
to God. Hence he is to have a self to surrender, a
permanent self, which he is to mould more and
more into the divine image, but never to lose. The

250 CANON KINGSLEY xxxit

f very difference between Christianity and the various
! Pantheistic systems is that in it this human self is
\ sedulously respected, even, so to say, by God. One
great reason, according to the Christian teaching,
why God became man in Christ, — emptied Himself
of divine glory to take up human infirmities, — was
to make man feel that he really is more than a
mote in the divine sunlight, that he has a life and
freedom of his own which is the object of God's
infinite love, and if not worthy, at least treated as
if it were worthy, of divine suffering and sacrifice.
Now this same doctrine seems to me to be virtually
repeated and reaffirmed in the teaching that there
are things which God will grant to prayer which He
would not have granted without prayer, though
they must be of course perfectly consistent with
the overruling laws of His holiness. It is not
Christian to regard even redeemed humanity as a
mere inner circle of the divine life. Man is to have
affections of his own, the independent life of which
God approves, and to which He gives what He would
not give without the cry of human love imploring
it. Granted, that this really involves the admission
that the prayers of other men may make our own
lots other than they would have been had they been
moulded by God's will without relation to those
prayers; that some men may live, for instance,
longer, and wearier, and lonelier lives than they
would have lived had none prayed for the prolonga-
tion of their lives, just because God chooses that
human affection and human prayer should have a
real weight in His providence, when they are sub-
/ ordinated to His will. Is there anything terrifying
in that ? So long as we are within the divine rule,
and live under its love, is it so terrible to think

XXXII ON REASONABLE PRAYER 251

that the prayers of shortsighted mortals may make
our lives other than they would beVithout them ?
Why, that is what we all believe as to each other's /
outward actions. No one doubts that our lots are /
in matter of fact altered materially by the actions
of those amongst whom we live ; and so long as we
believe the government of God to be over all, we
do not shrink from the conviction that human
wrong often makes our lives sadder, and human
goodness sweeter, than they might otherwise have
been. And if we hold that God thus gives human
freedom of action a real moulding influence over
our lives, why fear any the more the secret influence
freely conceded to prayer by the divine love ? It
is as severely regulated, as much under control, in
the one region as in the other ; indeed it is hardly
possible to believe in the real influence of human
freedom over the lot of man in the outward sphere,
unless it has a similar influence in the inward. I
wish Canon Kingsley would add to his very fine
sermon on the " reasonable " influence of prayer
over the petitioner's own lot, another on the reason-
able influence of intercessory prayer over the lot
of others, — that is, over the divine government of
society.

XXXIII

CANON LIDDON ON PRAYER AND MIRACLE

1874

In the second edition to his thoughtful lectures on
Some Elements of Beligion, 1 reviewed in the columns
of the Spectator a year and a quarter ago, 2 Canon
Liddon has replied, in a very clear, careful, and inter-
esting preface, to my criticism on his doctrine of
prayer as sometimes at least involving prayer for a
miracle, and so far as it does so, as being really
open to the scientific objections which are so
often unreasonably directed against all prayer. Dr.
Liddon's reply makes it evident that he regards aU
answer to prayer as miraculous, in any sense in
which he can attach an intelligible meaning to the
word * miraculous ' : — " It may perhaps be ques-
tioned," he says, "whether every real answer to
prayer is not miraculous. Or, to speak more accur-
ately, every such answer involves a certain departure
from what, as we presume, would otherwise have
been His mode of working who works everywhere,

1 Some Elements of Beligion. Lent Lectures, 1870. By
H. P. Liddon, D.D., Canon of St. Paul's. Second Edition.
Rivingtons.

2 On the 21st September 1872.

XXXIII PRAYER AND MIRACLE 253

in the physical as in the moral world. The difference
between a resurrection from the dead at a prophet's
prayer, and the increase of clearsightedness or of
love, through the infusion of grace in the soul of a
cottager, is a difference of degree. It is not a /
difference of kind. Each result is the product of
a Divine interference with the normal course of
things." And it is, I suppose, a development of the
same idea, when he tells us in a subsequent page
that he regards the reign of Law as extending to all
regions of the universe equally, in all senses in which
it extends to any, and not to be in the least in-
consistent with the existence of free-will, though
unquestionably "the activity of free-will in the
moral sphere makes the laws which govern that
sphere much more intricate and difficult to trace
than are physical laws." Free-will, says Dr. Liddon,
" cannot be held to annihilate all law in the highest
region of created life, and therefore, if the presence
of law be an objection to prayer anywhere, it is an
objection to prayer everywhere. If it is an im-
pertinence to ask God to vary His ordinary working
in the lower regions of physics, it must be an
impertinence to ask Him to do so, in the higher
region of spiritual being, — of morals." >

I cannot" agree with this view of the matter, which
seems to me not to be built on a distinct apprehen-
sion of the word " law " in its scientific sense. I
understand the region of Law to be the region of
practically invariable successions of phenomena, —
phenomena in the order of which, when that order
is discovered, thousands or millions of experiments
have failed to discern any variation, and the order
of which, so far as it is unknown, is assumed to
present equally invariable lines of succession to the

254 CANON LIDDON xxxm

penetration of the investigator. Of course, I do not
for a moment deny to God the power to vary, if He
will, even the most uniform of all natural succes-
sions. I take the uniformity of Nature to be the
sign and result of His will, not a controlling power
of fate overruling His will ; but the distinction is
clear between successions in phenomena the order
of which is assumed to be not only independent of
every will but God's, but as a result of God's will
fixed and knowable by man unless a miracle change
it by way of sign to man, and successions in pheno-
mena the order of which depends more or less directly
on human wills, and varies constantly with human
volitions. I quite understand necessarian thinkers,
who hold that there is no such thing as free-will in
man, asserting that the reign of law extends as much
to moral as to physical phenomena. That has a
definite meaning. It means that if we could but
analyse the laws of character and circumstance, as,
according to that conception, we may one day be
able to analyse them, we should be able to forecast
human actions of all kinds with as much certainty
as that with which we now predict the revolutions
of the planets or the results of chemical combination.
But how can a man who believes in any human free-
will hold this ? Such a belief implies that much, or
at least something important, probably in every day
of every human life, is left absolutely free to a man's
choice \ that his will determines the order of succes-
sion in all such cases, and, so far as there is freedom,
that nothing external to his will determines his will.
Of course, even in human life every rational man
admits that the sphere of circumstance and necessity
is large, and the sphere of freedom and real choice
comparatively small. But so far as that sphere

XXXIII ON PRAYER AND MIRACLE 255

extends, to talk of the reign of law being still para-
mount seems to me to be using the same word in
different and inconsistent senses. I mean by the
reign of law the existence of an order so invariable,
that given the proper antecedent, we can infer the
consequent with as much confidence as we infer that
if we place our hands near the fire we shall feel
its warmth, or that if we divide an artery the blood
will flow. But so far as free-will really obtains, how
are we to conceive of such an antecedent phenomenon
as will enable us to infer with certainty the moral
consequent ? Whenever the consequent comes, the
cause of it, so far as the will was free, was an act
which, by the very conditions of the case, might
have been otherwise, not only without a miracle,
but without a reason for surprise. If the will is
ever really free to take either of two alternatives,
compelled by no preponderant motive, by no in'
voluntary inclination, in its choice, it is impossible
to say that, given all the antecedents of the choice,
the consequent could have been inferred as you infer
that fire will warm the hands. To be suspended in
anticipation between one of two or more consequents
is not to be dealing With what comes under the
" reign of law ; " not to be so suspended, to be able
to declare with certainty which of the two or more
consequents will succeed, is to be dealing with the
reign of law, but then it is also to deny real free-
will. If God leaves anything really dependent on
human will, so far He denies, even to the fullest
knowledge, the certainty of scientific inference ; — if
more than one alternative is really open, no know-
ledge, however wide and minute, of human ante-
cedents would enable us to select the inevitable
consequent, and without an inevitable consequent )

256 CANON LIDDON XXXIII

there is no reign of law. God, who knows the
inmost will, may foresee how it will act without
controlling its freedom, but that is not after the
manner of human foresight ; it is not the anticipa-
tion of a consequent from a knowledge of such
antecedents as are visible to human minds, but is
due to a knowledge that goes far beneath anything
that men can observe. Admit free-will, and you
admit a number of cleavages in the rules of the
uniform succession of phenomena which throw out
science, in the human sense, altogether. Once admit
that we may be able one day to predict volition
absolutely from a knowledge of the laws of circum-

| stance and motive, and you practically admit that
volition is not a true self-determining power at all,
but a mere name for one link in the chain of ordained

\ successions.

And this is more than abstract theory. If free-
will is more or less woven into the very substance
of every day of every human life, and if prayer,
being intended and declared by God to be the
highest and most fruitful exercise of free-will, is also
of the very substance of human life, resulting in
answers to prayer, which involve, as Dr. Liddon
justly says, " a certain departure from what, as we
presume, would otherwise have been God's mode of
working," then clearly such modifications and altera-
tions of the order of life as that order would be
without prayer, cannot be rare or wonderful — must>
on the contrary, be among the most constantly
recurring of human events, i.e. cannot be miracles,
but must be a part, if not of the order of Nature in
the limited sense, yet of human life as including
something beyond Nature, namely, the regular and

V intelligible order of the supernatural. Now what I

XXXIII ON PRAYER AND MIRACLE 257

want to ask Canon Liddon is, whether there is any
analogy between such regularly ordained alterations,
introduced into what would be the merely secular
or unreligious order of life, under the dispensation of
prayer, and miracles, the very essence of which is
something rare and stupendous, a deviation from
God's ordinary rules of action ? " The increase of
clearsightedness and love, through an infusion of
grace in the soul of a cottager," to use Dr. Liddon's
own illustration, is, as I suppose he holds, in a
Christian country at least, an event of every hour
of every day. If that differs only "in degree," and
not at all in any intelligible principle, from " the
raising of a dead man at the prayer of a prophet,"
then surely there is no use in studying the divine
order at all. It seems to me to be the most obvious
teaching of constant experience, i.e. of science, that
there are certain rules of succession among pheno-
mena over which, as a matter of fact, our wishes and
our prayers are not, as such, allowed the least con-
trol, or rather have never been allowed this power
except in the great crisis of a divine revelation, when
it was necessary to show once for all that God's
power, even in the physical order, is guided by free
love, and not by fate. On the other hand, in the
sphere of free-will, in the sphere in which the sense
of duty and of affection to God grows, there is a
very large reserve of divine power which answers
freely to human yearning and petition, — not joi
course always in the sense demanded, but always in
some sense which makes us feel that human yearning
and petition to God are not vain, but fruitful. Is
it wise to ignore this difference ? Does Dr. Liddon
himself doubt that when death, for instance, has
once happened, to pray for the resurrection of the

8 s

/

258 CANON LIDDON xxxiil

dead in this world, however pure and pious the

motive of the prayer, is to pray for what God has

shown us by millions of proofs, through centuries of

His government, that He will not grant? Is it

pious to pray for what God has thus shown us that

it is His better will not to grant ? Can we for a

moment let evidence of the uniformity of the divine

action go for nothing, even in the sphere of prayer ?

Is it not all but certain that what God has never

done but in one or two moments of unveiling, He

has some great and divine purpose in refusing to do,

which it is anything but pious in us to attempt to

gainsay ? Dr. Liddon says that my argument goes

further than I intend, — that if we are to argue from

what God does to what He wishes, we ought to limit

' ourselves to acts of resignation and praise, and not

ask for any specific gift at all. But this is a com-

, plete misinterpretation of my position. I hold with

Dr. Liddon that God does, both by the conscience

and by revelation, teach us that prayer is both in

1 the highest sense natural and also fruitful, — that

1 He does habitually answer prayer for moral and

spiritual help, and constantly also grants petitions

for other blessings which perhaps we might have

, spared without any real spiritual loss, simply for the

sake of encouraging the habit of communion with

\ Him, and teaching us that there is a real sphere of

/ life not beyond the moulding power of our requests,

in which He meets us half-way, though He often

i denies what would hurt us. But I hold also, not,

1 apparently, with Dr. Liddon, that this sphere is

strictly limited, and that it belongs chiefly to the

neighbourhood of that moral freedom in which the

law of uniform antecedents and consequents fails.

As a matter of fact, most men believe that they can 4

XXXIII ON PRAYER AND MIRACLE 259

more or less, mould their own lots by their volitions.
If they can mould them by their volitions in any
real sense at all, it is clear also that they can mould i
them by the prayers which influence volitions. And |
that, also, all who habitually pray, believe. But it
does not follow in the least that because ther^ is a *
real sphere within which the will is free, and prayer x
is efficient, there should be no sphere within which
the will is not free and prayer not efficient. I may
know that I have the power to do either this or
that, but I know also that whichever I do, I cannot
avert the natural consequences of the choice I make.
I may believe that I shall obtain power to choose
right, even though otherwise I should not have the
power to choose right, by prayer. But I do not
believe that if I pray that I may do wrong and yet
suffer no ill moral result from it, the prayer will be
answered. Just so, it may be of the greatest profit
to pray that death may not come till a given work
is done, and of no profit at all to pray that death
may not come at all. When Dr. Liddon contends
that, for a sufficiently high spiritual purpose, we are
just as right in praying for a miracle as for an event
which involves, indeed, supernatural gifts, but no
miracle, because it involves nothing which is not
asked and given every day, he seems to me to
maintain that God does not teach us His true "Will /
through the order of Nature at all. Suppose a man
earnestly believed, as one of the Apostles, for instance,
very well might have believed, that by continuing
to live through all the centuries, he could give a
witness to the facts of revelation such as would
otherwise have been impossible, would he have been
justified in praying for such an aeonic life ? Dr.
Liddon would say yes, for he says that for a

260 PRAYER AND MIRACLE XXXIII

sufficiently high spiritual purpose, it would be legiti-
mate to pray that an eclipse which was just on the
point of beginning might be delayed. I should say
no, on the distinct ground that to pray for miracles
is to pray for what God has taught us by the
simplest sort of teaching to believe contrary to His
will ; and I do not doubt that whenever prophets or
apostles did pray for miracles, they did so only
under the special illumination of a higher knowledge
than any which ordinary men possess. My position
is that the laws of the natural world, so far as they
are known, are distinct lessons on the limits within
which God's laws are practically immutable, and
within which, therefore, our duty is absolute acquies-
cence, and not even humble petition. I should
think a prayer for the restoration of the dead to
life, as David apparently did, a prayer that God's
will might not be done. So, too, I should think a
prayer that fire might not burn, that a river might
suddenly run dry, that the sun might not rise, or
that gunpowder might lose its explosive power, a
prayer that the Creator's laws might fail. If it is
not permissible to judge of the divine purposes from
uniform physical succession, in the absence of any
higher illumination, these laws have no moral teach-
ing for us at all. This is an error of the opposite
extreme to that of science, which regards the physical
laws as more really characteristic of God than His
moral or spiritual laws. That, no doubt, is very
false. But it is a bad remedy surely to teach that
the physical laws of God are so little divine that
every well-intentioned human wish may so far impugn
their wisdom, as to beset God with entreaties to
change the principles of His government and repent
the never-varied decrees of generations and of ages.

XXXIV

MAURICE AND THE UNITARIANS

1884

The early portion of Colonel Maurice's Life of his
father contains what has been regarded in many
quarters as the most interesting section of the
book, — the story, I mean, of the break-up of a
heartily pious Unitarian family into its elements, v
some turning to the Church of England, some to i
Calvinistic Nonconformity, all except its head re- ;
jecting the Unitarian interpretation of the Bible,
and he contemplating with a pathetic dismay, and
an equally pathetic resignation, the sudden tumult
of heart and intellect around him. The " notes," —
I use the word in the diplomatic rather than the
homely sense, — in which the daughters conveyed
to the elder Mr. Maurice their inability to worship
in his chapel, — the tenderly-regretful tone in which
the wife confided at length to her husband her
change of faith, and her ardent desire to give effect
to it in the way which would be least painful to
him, — the perplexity of the old man at a state of
mind which he so little understood, and the eager-
ness with which he evidently clung to the hope \
that his son, — of whose elevated nature they were

262 MAURICE AND THE UNITARIANS xxxiv

all proud, — would adhere to what he regarded as
i the more reasonable faith, and vindicate him in his
i loneliness, are all so vividly laid before us, that
\ even the reader who holds with Maurice, and not
>with his father, cannot help feeling a pang when
he, too, confesses that if Revelation be a true name
at all for the light given in the Bible, it must mean
a great deal more than his father thinks ; while if
it be not a true name, the Bible cannot be made
the foundation of a potent faith. Yet, undoubtedly,
the change of faith, as it took place in the son,
caused very much less of estrangement than the
previous changes of the other children had caused ;
and for this reason, that the change in Frederick
Maurice was in great measure the offspring of a
yearning after a principle of unity, while the
change in the other members of the family was,
in form at least, little more than the substitution
of one interpretation of Scripture for another in-
terpretation which they had abandoned as poor
and inadequate.

What, then, is meant by saying that Maurice's

rejection of Unitarianism was the result of an

j ardent yearning after a centre of more perfect

\ unity with others,— others generally differing from

\ himself, — than he had ever been able to find in

Unitarianism? It means just this, that Maurice

/ regarded the self-revelation of a God within whose

eternal nature there is something more complex

and more mysterious than mere lonely will and

lonely power, as the best guarantee of which he

could conceive for the mutual affections and the

\ mutual forbearances of a human society ; and

[that he believed that such a gradual revelation

was actually made to man in the Providential

XXXiv MAURICE AND THE UNITARIANS 263

story of Jewish history as it culminated in the
life and death and resurrection of Christ. It
did not trouble him beyond measure that so
many good men failed to recognise the truth of
this revelation. It did not even trouble him
beyond measure that so many failed to recognise
any revelation, failed even to recognise the exist-
ence of any God at all. So long as he was sure
that the history of the Jewish race was the history
of a divine guidance tending steadily, and with
ever increasing clearness, to the manifestation of
the eternal Son of God in human nature, of one
who knew and spoke the mind of the Father to the
world, and came to reconcile the world to the
Father, so long he regarded the blindness of those
who recognised the truth inadequately, or who did
not recognise it at all, as a very limited kind of
calamity — one fairly comparable with the calamity
of popular ignorance in relation to other beneficent
agencies, — healing agencies like those of light, and
air, and water, which are, of course, less beneficent
while they are unrecognised than they are after
they are recognised, but are beneficent in every
phase, and so beneficent that the blessings they
confer are sure to be recognised at last. The
reason he was dissatisfied with Unitarianism was
simply this, — that Unitarianism, even as his father
understood it, explained away a great part of the
actual revelation made by God to man, and therefore
attenuated its importance and the trust and hope
with which it inspired him. It was not that he
thought himself any holier than Unitarians. On
the contrary, he thought many Unitarians much
holier than himself. But he held that the history
contained in the Bible pointed to something much

264 MAURICE AND THE UNITARIANS xxxiv

more mysterious and much more adequate to the
need, and guilt, and passion of human nature, in
the character of the divine life which it revealed,
than anything which the Unitarians could find in
that history, and therefore he held the Unitarian
interpretation of that history to be a pallid one,
which missed a good part of its true burden, and
especially that part of it which is most essential to
promote the true unity of men, and to add depth
V and intensity to the social relations. He admits in
a letter to his father that Unitarianism is a much
simpler account of the revelation given in the Bible
than his own faith. But then, what it gains in sim-
plicity it loses in adequacy, both as regards the
actual language of Scripture, and also as regards
that actual life in man in its appeal to which the
language of Scripture is so potent. " It is simpler,"
he says, "to believe in a Great Spirit with the
North American Indians, it is simpler to worship
wood and stone ; but what is the worth of sim-
plicity, if it does not satisfy wants which we feel,
\ if it does not lead us up to the truth which we
\ desire ? " The prophecies of the many predecessors
/ of Christ were to Maurice unintelligible, if they
represented nothing but the foreshadowings of a
great "exemplar," and the life of Christ was still
less intelligible as the mere life of that great
\ exemplar. Either this long history, with its great
/catastrophe, meant something a great deal more
, expressive of that groaning and travailing of crea-
' tion to which St. Paul referred, than the coming of
an exemplar, or else a great deal less even than
; the Unitarianism of the elder Maurice represented
• it to be. Maurice believed that it meant a great
deal more, and not a great deal less, than his father

XXXIV MAURICE AND THE UNITARIANS 265

and the Unitarians generally understood by it;
that it meant the deliberate unfolding of the nature
and life of God with such power and passion as to
inspire in man a transforming trust and a uniting
love. Maurice did not, of course, expect that any
theological belief could be the centre of unity ; but
he did expect that, if God were what he held that
Scripture declared God to be, God Himself would
be that centre of unity, because it showed God to
be spending on the reconciliation of men to Himself
the infinite stores of that divine passion of which
we find our only adequate type in Gethsemane and
on Calvary.

It is impossible to read Colonel Maurice's book
without feeling that Maurice's change of faith was
almost as much due to a passionate desire to find
some centre of unity beneath the religious feuds of
the world, which might prove to be an antidote to
the poison of opinionative self-love, as it was due
to the impression made upon his mind by the
Scriptures themselves. And he held that he had
discovered this centre of unity when he had dis-
covered the evidence of a growing divine purpose,
prosecuted for centuries, to draw man closer to
God, a purpose effected not by any unnatural con-
vulsion of human nature, but by the descent of
God into human nature, and the taking -up of
human nature into God. If such a purpose had
been entertained and revealed to us, those who had
caught a glimpse of it might, he thought, very
safely trust Him who had entertained and revealed
it to accomplish His own work in all good men,
however little they might see what they were
about, however much they might misunderstand it.
He thought no worse of his father for remaining a

266 MAURICE AND THE UNITARIANS xxxiv

Unitarian, nor of his mother for believing herself
beyond the reach of divine grace, nor of his sisters
for their different and too vehemently -expressed
religious convictions ; he felt quite assured that in
all of them, by different processes, the same divine
work was going on which had engendered the new
trust in himself ; and that whether they saw it, or
failed to see it, the God who had revealed Him-
self in the agony of the Cross and the glory of the
Resurrection would reveal Himself through faith or
doubt, through hope or despondency, through scepti-
cism or dogmatism, to all who did not repel Him
when they felt His prompting in their hearts. He
did not think that Unitarianism could engender the
same confidence, simply because he did not think
that Unitarianism recognised the divine passion of
love for man in the same clear and potent form —
because he held that Unitarianism ignored the most
significant and impressive of all the features of the
V divine life and character. Confidence must depend
on the clearness of your vision of the power on
which you lean. God is the same to the Unitarian
as to the Trinitarian, but the confidence felt in God
by Maurice when he was a Unitarian, and by
Maurice when he became a Trinitarian, could not
i be the same, for this plain reason, that in the latter
\ phase of his life he saw evidence in God of a much
^deeper sympathy with man, and of a nature more
assuredly capable of being engrafted on that of
man, than he had seen in the former phase of his
life. Maurice always said of the Unitarians that
in their deep belief in the fatherhood of God they
were founded on a rock. But he held that that
belief would be in danger of fading away, if it were
held, as it was by Unitarians, to affirm only the

XXXIV MAURICE AND THE UNITARIANS 267

relation of the Eternal Being to finite creatures,
and not rather to affirm a relation intrinsically
belonging to the divine nature, and extended to
include man only because the Son of God is the
organic head and redeemer of the human race.
And has not the development of Unitarianism, \
since the time when Maurice ceased to be a Uni- ^
tarian, done much to verify his fear that the \
profound belief in the fatherhood of God for which '
Unitarians were once remarkable would fade gradu-
ally away into something like the faith or no-faith \
of modern Agnostics, — the disposition to worship
laws of Nature, and vaguely adore the Unknown )
and Unknowable? Unless I greatly misread the
recent story of the Unitarian Church, the ardent
belief in the fatherhood of God entertained by Uni-
tarians fifty or forty years ago has faded away in a
great many of their congregations into Theism not
always of a Christian type, or even into an ethical
variety of scientific Agnosticism.

XXXV

MR. MAURICE AS HERESIARCH
1872

THOSE of my readers who may have known nothing
of Mr. Maurice except what they found said of him
in the columns of the Spectator last week, will prob-
ably have asked themselves the question how such
a religious teacher as I have described could have
been feared as he was, — could have been regarded
as a great heresiarch, could have been condemned
in these loose -thinking latter days by an obscure
college council, and even to the last always held as
a dangerous man unfit for Church promotion by the
official scrutineers of Church opinion. I should be
disposed even to think that the Dean of West-
minster has been far less feared by those curious in
the arts of safe ecclesiastical navigation than Maurice.
The reason no doubt is, that while the Dean of
Westminster is regarded as a latitudinarian whose
teaching ignores all the finer distinctions of theology
as not worth the study, Maurice teaches nothing
that he does not teach intensely, and that his mind
was so spiritual that when he seems to the anxious
theologian to err at all, his error is a sunken rock
on which the unwary voyager may not only strike,

XXXV

MR. MAURICE AS HERESIAROH

269

but stick. Even the Guardim, cordially as it writes
of Maurice this week, is profoundly permeated by
this feeling. It speaks of him as something high,
and deep, and sweet, but for all that dangerous, —
to be held a little in awe and fear for the depth of
his errors, as well as in love for his noble personal
qualities. " It is the work of the future to pro-
nounce on his influence and teaching ; at the present
moment, almost over his grave, we shrink from the
task ; " — " there was much, very much in his teach-
ing with which we could not sympathise, which we
think unsound in itself and dangerous in the infer-
ences which more logical minds will draw from it.
But his career was remarkable, and in some sense
so entirely unique in its influence on English thought
and life, and the character of the man himself stands
out so nobly, that," etc. Evidently the fear he in-
spired, as of a not only great, but deep heresiarch,
whose fervour and intensity constituted the very
danger of his fascination, survives him. The safe
men still think of him as a sort of theological mael-
strom, by which it is pretty certain that you will
be sucked in if you go too near it. What is the
warrant for this half -fearful wonder with which
Maurice is still regarded by 'sound* Churchmen?
No one ventures for a moment to deny the pro-
found humility which made so striking a feature in
Mr. Maurice's character, yet humility has never
been the characteristic of any heresiarchs. No one
denies the extreme and shrinking aversion whicfc he
felt to admitting the existence of actual error in
Scripture, yet a deep and even mystical faith in the
literal divinity of Scripture has certainly never been
the characteristic of modern heresiarchs.

I believe that the real foundation for this fear of

\

270 MR. MAURICE AS HERESIARCH XXXV

Maurice as a great distracting force in the world of
theological thought is caused by that intense in-
wardness of his spiritual faith which almost snatches
away theology from the purview of the mere in-
tellect, and makes men who are hardly capable of
approaching it from any other than an intellectual
side sensible that they are nowhere, as it were, in
his writings ; — nay, that the very essence of their
mode of thought is almost branded by Maurice as
" of the nature of sin," as something which he has
often been " tempted " to acquiesce in, but which in
the depth of his reverence for God's revealed truth
he never " dared " to acquiesce in. Theologians of
the ordinary type coming to the study of Maurice
are not only apt to be bewildered as to his real
meaning, but to feel themselves reproached for that
external and " notional " view of things divine which
they find him rebuking as the lowest element in him-
self, whereas they had rather taken a pride in their
masterly speculative apprehension of matters so
transcendental. Now this sort of impression that
the intellectual and systematic view of theology
was denounced by Maurice as a moral danger was
very trying to men whose theological conceptions
were saturated with speculative and logical ideas.
They hardly knew how to deal with such a point of
view. It embarrassed and it alarmed them. They
thought theology would not often be studied by
"such beings as we are in such a world as the
present," if it was not to be learnt as a system and
connected together by intellectual generalisations.
Mystics, they did not deny, have their place in
relation to any faith of which the whole cannot be
adequately grasped; but here was a mystic who,
not contented with his own province of thought,

XXXV MR. MAURICE AS HERESIARCH 271

invaded theirs and made them feel unspiritual
because they approached theology from the intel-
lectual and not from the spiritual side. This is, I
believe, in a great degree the real account of the
distaste and fear with which safe Churchmen regard
Maurice's teaching; but it was of course greatly
increased and brought to a focus by his special
heresy, as it was thought, in relation to the Eternal
punishment of the wicked, — a point on which his
doctrine was both profoundly misapprehended, and,
so far as it was apprehended, dreaded and con-
demned. Mr. Haweis endeavoured the other day,
in a letter to the Pall Mali, to define Maurice's true
position on that subject ; but as I have heard it
remarked that the explanation was as difficult as
the teaching itself, I will in my turn try my hand
at elucidating the most critical point of this great
religious thinker's teaching.

When Mr. Maurice was asked what he meant by
' eternal ' as distinguished from ' endless ' or ' ever-
lasting/ he always replied in effect that it was re-
lated to 'everlasting* as the spiritual source is
related to the outward form ; as, for instance, the
depth and truth of a principle are related to its
durability and influence on human society ; as the
vital germ of a tree that lives for centuries is related
to its length of days ; as the inward character of a
great man is related to his age-long ascendancy over
human thoughts, — in a word, as the constitution
of anything is related to its outward duration.
'Eternal' he held was properly applied solely to
God. 'Everlasting' is simply our translation of
the divine essence into the language of time. It is
impossible for us to conceive God, if we conceive
Him in time at all, as ever having had either begin-

272 MR. MAURICE AS HERESIARCH xxxv

ning or end ; He is at the heart of everything, so
> that nothing whatever is conceivable without Him ;
\ hence, if we do translate ' eternal/ which is applic-
able only to Him, into the language of time at all,
we must translate it as 'everlasting,' as having
neither beginning nor end. He preferred the wor<i
'eternal/ because he did not think the time- view
,- the original one, but a derivative one. 'Eternal'
took you, he held, into the depths of the invisible
life behind the world, — while 'everlasting' only be-
\ wildered the imagination with a futile attempt to
\ strain back into the past beyond our reach, and
forward into the future beyond our ken. Still, if
time-language were to be used at all, 'everlasting'
was the right translation for ' eternal.' He did not
/think it a very instructive translation; he thought
we lost by not keeping to the qualitative essence of
x God, rather than insisting on the quantitive duration.
But the word 'endless' he repudiated altogether,
because it is applicable to things clearly not divine,
— signifying duration which, though it has begun,
\ will never cease, — and so losing the necessary refer-
ence to God which he regarded as embodied in the
word 'eternal,' and not lost in 'everlasting,' since
'ever' goes back as infinitely as it goes forward,
and is only applicable therefore to Him without
whom all existence is inconceivable. Such being
i Mr. Maurice's view of these three words, he main-
1 tained that ' eternal life ' and ' eternal death ' meant
nothing more or less than 'life in Him who is
eternal,' and ' death from Him who is eternal,' — life
i in God, and death from God. His great Scriptural
^ authority of course was St. John's report of our
Lord's prayer, "This is life eternal, to know thee
the only true God." If ' eternal life ' were know-

xxxv MR. MAURICE AS HERESIARCH 273

ledge of God, ' eternal death/ he inferred, must be
loss of the knowledge of God. If, therefore, any
attempt were made to translate ' eternal life ' and
' eternal death ' into the language of time, we must
remember that the everlastingness is only the attri-
bute of God, not of the relation between the in-
dividual and God. A man may have ' eternal life '
even in this world, and may again lose it, may fall
from eternal life into eternal death, may cease to
live in the divine righteousness, and be immured
again in the hell of self. Mr. Maurice's most em- '
phatic teaching was, that to be immured in self, — \
to have no vision of the source of life and redemp-
tion, — is hell, the worst conceivable hell, the most
terrible of all tortures. In this world indeed he
would say this hell can never be quite complete ;
there is always the sensible world at least to draw
one out of oneself ; but if any one gives way to the
tendencies which make self supreme, the time may
come when the self has not even this distraction,
when, after death, it is immured wholly in its own
ugly and impotent thoughts, when its perfect soli-
tude becomes intplerable anguish. This was his
notion of 'eternal death.' It did not mean ever-
lasting death, it meant the loss of life in God. So J
eternal life did not mean everlasting life, it meant
life in the everlasting, — in God, — but which might
yet assuredly be severed from the everlasting, —
from God. As to the duration of this death, Mr.
Maurice would never express any opinion, except
that it must last till the evil will was overcome,
and that as God had expressed His will that all men
be saved, he would not dare to affirm that the will
of God would fail to triumph over all the evil wills
that resisted it. Still he felt no wish to measure

8 T

V

r

274 MR. MAURICE AS HERESIARCH xxxv

the enormous power which might be contained in
the evil will of man. He admitted that God Him-
self could not triumph over that power without the
willingness of man to submit, and he did not "dare"
measure the power of resistance. His whole mind,
however, revolted against the conception that God
Himself ever casts any man's soul into the hell of
self-imprisonment. He was horrified at that inter-
pretation of our Lord's words in the Sermon on the
Mount, which supposes him to represent God as
killing and casting into hell. " I say unto you, my
friends, be not afraid of them that kill the body,
and after that have no more that they can do ; but
I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear : Fear him
which, after he hath killed, hath power to cast into
hell ; yea I say unto you, fear him." " We are
come," said Mr. Maurice, " to such a pass as actually
to suppose that Christ tells those whom He calls
His friends not to be afraid of the poor and feeble
enemies who can only kill the body, but of that
greater enemy who can destroy their very selves,
and that this enemy is, — not the Devil, not the
spirit who is going about seeking whom he may
devour, not he who was a murderer from the begin-
ning, — but that God who cares for the sparrows;
they are to be afraid lest He who numbers the hairs
of their head should be plotting their ruin." This
interpretation horrified Maurice. He always asserted
that ' eternal ' life, — life in God, — was never with-
held from any one who would give up the evil will
which his own sin, or a tempter more powerful than
his own will, had corrupted ; that eternal death was
never God's decree, but the doing only of evil powers
resisting God.

How far this teaching is, in an ecclesiastical sense,

XXXV MR. MAURICE AS HERESIARCH 275

heretical, the present writer is hardly theologian
enough to know, especially in relation to the very
fluid and variable standards of the English Church.
A great deal in very orthodox writers comes very
near to it. Dr. Newman, for instance, in his beauti-
ful story of the martyr " Callista," represents eternal
death from very much the same point of view, as
not inflicted by any decree of God, but simply the
natural result of an immersion in self so habitual
and complete that the vision of God, if it could be
granted, would be more exquisite pain than even
the loss of it. Only he does not recoil as Maurice
did from the thought that God's will to save every
man could ever be finally defeated by the powers of
evil. If Maurice were an heresiarch, he was so from
his inability to piece together the spiritual truths
he had so powerfully grasped, by a tissue of in-
tellectual system in which he could not feel any
spiritual force ; from his inability to let intellectual
tradition dominate his direct spiritual apprehensions.
It was a ground of heresy, if heresy it was, which
he shared with F6nelon, — the teacher of the past
whose spirit was most like his, though in fire and
force of personal conviction he was greatly Maurice's
inferior.

XXXVI

DR. GEORGE MACDONALD ON HELL

1884

Dr. George MacDonald, in the interesting preface
which he has appended to the Letters from HeU, 1
just translated into English from the German
version of a Danish book, — originally published
eighteen years ago, — expresses at least one convic-
/ tion of great importance. It is the conviction that
we make our own misery, after death, — our own
future, as well as occasionally our own present^
hell, "in unmaking ourselves." Dr. MacDonald
amplifies this terse and remarkable phrase, by
explaining his meaning to be " that men, in defacing
the image of God in themselves, construct for them-
selves a world of horror and dismay; that of the
outer darkness, our own deeds and characters are the
informing or inwardly creating cause ; that if a man
will not have God, he never can be rid of his weary
and hateful self."

It would be hard to find a finer expression than
that which I have quoted as Dr. MacDonald's con-
densation of the process of moral disintegration,
the "unmaking of ourselves." But is it always

1 Published by Messrs. Bentley and Son.

1 ,.>:.*...., -I] «J- JB-i^U-,.— _

XXXVI DR. GEORGE MACDONALD ON HELL 277

applicable to those who are really living in " the
outer darkness " ? No doubt it suggests a perfectly
true account of all that can involve moral guilt, and
of all that therefore entails moral despair. It is,
however, only right to remember that that vmmaking
of man which is guilt in those who are the causes of
it, is often really effected by ancestors, and not by
the existing beings in whom its effect is now chiefly
seen. One of the gravest of the difficulties in the
ordinary teaching about the future state is the
failure to distinguish between the condition of those
who have been unmade by themselves, and those
who have been unmade by the guilt of their fore-
fathers. Our Lord, indeed, tells us that the dis-
tinction ought to be insisted on, that from those to
whom little has been given little will be required,
that it is only those who have known their Master's
will, and failed to do it, who will be beaten with
many stripes, while those who have more or less
unwittingly failed in doing it, will be beaten only
with few. Still, that teaching has not been taken
up as it ought to have been, for it involves the
further teaching that the process of remaking in
man what has been " unmade " by the sins of his
forefathers, and not by his own, will be much less
painful and terrible than the process, — if ever it
can be performed, — of remaking the image of God
which it has been a man's own doing to deface.
This very book, which Dr. George MacDonald asks
us to admire, — and which certainly deserves a
certain amount of admiration for its occasional
imaginative vigour and lurid intensity, — appears to
draw no substantial difference at all between those
who are expiating the sins of others, whose conse-
quences they inherited, and those who are really

278 DR. GEORGE MACDONALD ON HELL ' xxxvi

expiating their own. Surely, if that "unmaking"
of the divine image in which man was created, is
the doing not so much of the offspring, as of
parents and parents' parents, — if the atmosphere
into which any being is born is one of moral evil,
and the character inherited by that being is one
almost specially adapted, as it were, for the assimi-
lation of that moral evil, — then, though the apparent
spiritual condition may be the same, the penalty
ought not to be, and cannot be, the same, while
V God is just. Those who unmade the image of God
in themselves must be held responsible for having
transmitted to others a nature in which that image
was hardly recognisable. And no account of that
evil condition into which the unclothed spirit falls,
when it finds itself alien from God, and trying in
vain to be satisfied from itself, can be a reasonable
, one, unless it discriminates in the broadest *way, not
1 only between different degrees of incapacity for
seeing and loving God, but also between the
different causes of that incapacity, some of them
, being absolutely involuntary, others wholly volun-
, tary, and others, again, a compound of voluntary
and involuntary elements.

Dr. MacDonald's main principle evidently is that
the state of misery into which men fall when the
interests of earth are taken away, is not of God's
decreeing, but wholly of their own making, or
rather unmaking ; that God wills us all to live in
Him, and creates our nature so that its onlv
perfect satisfaction is in Him, as the Psalmist
implied when he said, " All my fresh springs
shall be in thee " ; but that we unmake our-
selves whenever we detach ourselves from these
spiritual aims, and try to put other and smaller

XXXVI DR. GEORGE MACDONALD ON HELL 279

ends above the only aims for which it is possible to
live always and with an ever-increasing volume of
life. But is that assumption of the full responsi-
bility of every mind* living in the outer darkness,
for its own misery when it loses its hold of earth,
true? Is not the disintegrating process in which
Dr. MacDonald truly regards guilt as consisting,
begun for us all more or less in the evil tendencies
we inherit, and more than begun, — well-nigh com-
pleted, — for some of those who are born into a
world from which God seems almost to have dis-
appeared ? Surely that is a kind of incapacity for
true life which ought to involve far less misery to
the individual who suffers from it, than an incapa-
city which he had himself freely made for himself ;
and yet it leaves him for the time in " the outer
darkness" all the same. This is why I cannot .
absolutely endorse Dr. MacDonald's view that the \
state in which man lives without God is always one
of self-inflicted misery. It arises, more or less,
surely, from the guilt of others, and not always
from man's own. And where it arises from the
guilt of others, and not chiefly from the guilt of
those who suffer from it, it must, I believe, be a
very different kind of misery, — one much more
easily removed, one much more permeable by divine
grace, — than the incapacity which is strictly self-
made. It is one of the dangers, as I think, of |
the new school of theology — which explains all
misery as a natural state, and not as the conse- '
quence of divine judgment — that it does not distin-
guish between a naturally-inherited and a person-
ally-incurred blindness to things spiritual. The .
naturally -inherited blindness must, if we are to
believe fully in God's justice, find another probation

280 DR. GEORGE MAODONALD ON HELL XXXVI

in the future state, a probation which it has never
had in this. Of the personally-incurred blindness, 1
could not say the same. I should judge of it even
/less hopefully than Dr. MacDonald. I might admit
; virtually Dr. MacDonald's premiss that "it would
» be nothing less than injustice to punish infinitely
7 what was finitely committed " ; but I should deny
v that this assumption is involved in every theory of
eternal suffering. No doubt, to justify unceasing
suffering, you must assume unceasing guilt; you
must hold that there is no divine barrier ever
placed between the sinner and repentance; that if
he does not turn away from his own evil heart with
loathing, it is his own act; that he is always
• "unmaking" himself, to use Dr. MacDonald's ex-
pression, if he continues to cling to his own evil;
and that so, and so only, he earns, — if he does earn,
— unceasing suffering. But then, is not such a con-
/ ception perfectly justified by the experience of life f
If any one ever voluntarily sinks further and
further into evil, knowing what he is about, where
is the evidence that he will ever turn back ? What
happens for months may happen for years; what
happens for years, may happen for centuries. It is
essential, to the conception of the divine goodness
and mercy, no doubt, to believe that God never
leaves any one without some witness of Himself, to
believe that He will be to all eternity willing to
receive the penitent. But where is the evidence
that that which goes on in many hearts, in spite of
that witness, for a lifetime, may not go on in some
of them for ever ?

The book to which Dr. MacDonald. gives such
praise, is a book of extremely unequal power, and
parts of it are really vulgar and contemptible,— I

xxxvi DR. GEORGE MAODONALD ON HELL 281

allude especially to the passage as to the consulta-
tions of Satan with his granddam concerning the
best means of destroying man's soul. Its strength
consists in the vivacity with which it represents the
nakedness and emptiness of the soul, — the emptiness
of all desire, the nakedness of the miserable self, —
in the condition to which death reduces the sinful
heart. Its weakness consists in the absolute dead-
level to which it appears to reduce all who are not
saved by their faith in and love for Christ. Now,
as we know perfectly well that the absence of that
faith and love at the moment of death may be due
to very different causes, and that some of these
causes need not be moral causes at all, the reality
of the writer's thought is greatly injured by his
very conventional view of this subject. Of course,
there are many theologians who, with the author of
this book, would not shrink from saying that souls
often suffer eternally, and without hope of any
alleviation, who have never done anything in this
world for which they felt the sting of conscience.
I can only say that if that be so, eternal suffering is
unjustly awarded to those who have never had a
chance of true salvation. Dr. MacDonald, of course,
would be as eager to repudiate such a notion as I
am ; but even his teaching seems to make the suffer- \
ing of the spiritual state too much of a natural con- \
sequence of alienation from God, instead of depend- \
ing, as I maintain on our Lord's principle that it must
depend, on the causes of that alienation. Alienation
from God must, no doubt, always involve either
suffering, or the blankness of heart which is worse
than suffering. But it does not, and cannot involve,
in the case of those who have not themselves
brought about that alienation, a suffering of the

282 DR. GEORGE MACDONALD ON HELL XXXVI

same kind as it involves when it comes as the con
sequence of voluntary sin. I hold that no theory
of the final character of future sufferings can be
just at all which does not give in the next life a
genuine probation to all who have not had it here,
and which does not hold open, even for those who
have had and have rejected it here, the power of
repenting at any time, if at any time those who
have so often refused to repent are willing to turn
their back upon themselves, and the evil into which

/ they have been slowly hardening. Hell may be,
and no doubt is, a state, and not a place ; but it is a

i state which must differ infinitely in hopefulness or
hopelessness, for every one who is conscious of it,
according to the character of the moral antecedents
which ushered in that state.

XXXVII

BISHOP MAGEE ON THE ETHICS OF FORGIVENESS

1884

" Do you not see," says the Bishop of Peterborough,
in the course of an Oxford University sermon on
the Ethics of Forgiveness, which he has just re-
published, — and with important extensions if I am
not mistaken, — in the remarkable volume called
The Gospel arid (he Age, — "Do you not see that
all this magniloquent and windy talk about a
merciful and compassionate God, so facile and easy >
in His forgiveness, is a mere conception of modern '
Theism ? — that it is, after all, the poorest and lowest
idea we can form of God? that it does not rise
above the low thought of the savage, which pictures
Him merely as an angry and offended man 1 Rise
but one degree above that, rise up in your thought
to the idea of Him as the judge of all the earth ;
rise one degree higher to the idea of Him as the
author and controller of the moral universe, and all
this talk about easy, good-natured forgiveness
vanishes in your nobler but more awful conceptions
of God, as the cloud- wreath vanishes at the rising
of the sun 1 " Now, I can imagine that passage
having been written with a drift with which I

284 BISHOP MAGEE xxxvn

should heartily agree, and I believed at the time
the sermon was first published by a Missionary
Society which hoped, by the help of it, to remove
some of the difficulties which stand in the way of
the reception of the Christian doctrine of the atone-
ment, that the drift of the Bishop was one with
which, in the main, I did agree. But that hope is
greatly diminished by the form in which the sermon
is now republished, and I fear that the Bishop's
sermon will do more to throw new difficulties in the
way of the understanding of the Christian doctrine
of the sacrifice of Christ, than to remove any.
r What the Bishop seems to be aiming at is not to
show how great, how infinite almost, is the difficulty
of moving man to a true abhorrence of sin, and of
\ reconciling him to God by infusing into him the
/ divine abhorrence of sin, but how impossible it is,
, even after that difficulty is surmounted, to conceive God
as forgiving sin, except by the help of something
which the Bishop calls a " moral miracle " to enable
\ Him to do it. Now, far as my conception of God
— far as the Christian conception of God — is from
that of a Being who is " easy and good-natured " in
His forgiveness of sin, not even that view seems to
me less like the Christian view than one which
would tell us that a " moral miracle " is required to
\ enable God to forgive even those sins which are
Y truly and earnestly repented. And though the
Bishop of Peterborough does not always appear
to distinguish between the saving of the sinner from
the " consequences of sin " and the divine forgive-
ness of sin itself — two totally different matters, as
f it appears to me — yet I regret to think that the
, main drift of his sermon is that, even assuming true
', repentance on the part of man, it takes some special

XXXVII ON THE ETHICS OF FORGIVENESS 285

suspension of the ordinary moral laws of the uni-
verse in which we live, to enable God to forgive the
sin thus heartily repented of. At least, if this be
not the preacher's drift, I do not know what can be
the meaning of this passage, the earlier part of
which is, as I believe, new in the sermon as Dr.
Magee now republishes it. " Is it alleged, however,"
he asks, " that God forgives, not of mere compassion,
but on condition of penitence, and that he who
truly repents has thereby satisfied His requirements,
and may, therefore, claim to be forgiven ; while he
who remains impenitent* does so of his own act and
choice, and therefore deserves his fate V 1 I should
have supposed that nothing could be plainer than,
the apostolic affirmative to that question, which,
however, the Bishop, as we shall soon see, answers
in the negative. " If we say that we have no sin,"
says St. John, " we deceive ourselves, and the truth
is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful
and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us
from all unrighteousness" But the Bishop does not
appear to agree with St. John that the matter is so •
simple as that. It takes something more than \
fidelity and righteousness, he evidently thinks, in \
God, to justify the forgiveness of the penitent, j
" Surely the answer to this is obvious," he continues.
" The refusal of the impenitent to repent is either
a sin or a defect ; either he will not or he cannot
repent. If it. is a sin, why not forgive it like any
other sin? If it is only an imperfection, why
punish it at all ? Is it not clear, moreover, that if
God forgives only the penitent He is less com-
passionate than He bids us to be, when He tells us
to forgive all our debtors whether penitent or impeni-
tent? And if, on the other hand, penitence is a

286 BISHOP MAGEE XXXVII

necessary antecedent condition of forgiveness, arising
out of the nature and constitution of things, then
equally so, for aught we can tell, may atonement
and mediation be such conditions too. Then there
is this further difficulty. God is the author of that
very constitution of things, of those inexorable and
unalterable laws, under which, as we have seen," —
let me say parenthetically that if I rightly under-
stand the sermon, we have seen nothing of the kind,
— " forgiveness is scarcely conceivable. Are we to
suppose then, that He will deflect those laws at
our bidding ? " No, we aifc to suppose nothing of
r the kind. But all that the Bishop has shown is
i not in the least that under the moral laws of the
universe " forgiveness " is scarcely conceivable, but
| a very different thing indeed, that under the moral
laws of the universe, it is hardly, or not at all, con-
! ceivable, that the consequences of sin in disturbing and
j undermining society should cease with repentance ;
\ that it is next to impossible either that we can regard
ourselves as free from responsibility for the evil that
we have done, even when we have repented it, how-
ever heartily ; or that others should regard us as
having finally and fully expiated that evil. But
this is surely a totally different thing from saying
that forgiveness is hardly conceivable. If there be
f~any meaning in Christ's Gospel at all, true peni-
; tence is as sure of true forgiveness, as sin is sure of
punishment. The Bishop's attempt to represent the
breaking of the divine law, and impenitence for the
breaking of the divine law, as distinct sins, the
latter of which is as much entitled to forgiveness as
the former, is surely a very forced march in logic
. How is it possible that if true penitence be the
necessary condition of God's forgiveness, impenitence

XXXVII

ON THE ETHICS OF FORGIVENESS

287

should be as much entitled to forgiveness as any
other sin ? Can an impenitent man be penitent for
his impenitence ? If so, he is not impenitent. If,
on the contrary, he is impenitent for his impenitence,
he has no claim for forgiveness. God forgives only
him who resolutely separates himself from the evil
he has committed, and abhors himself for it ; but
once assume the will to do that, and as I understand
Christ's teaching, not only God, but all good beings
rejoice, and feel no longer alienated in heart from
him who has thus put the evil away from him. As
for its requiring a " moral miracle " to forgive such
a one, it would seem to me to require a moral
miracle, and the most astounding of all moral
miracles, for any good Being not to forgive him ;
but by forgiveness I only mean the removal of all
alienation of spirit, and by no means the restoration
of the penitent to the same position in the moral
world in which he stood before he did what he
knew to be evil.

What I dread in the attempt to make of the
atonement a miracle primarily essential to the
granting of God's forgiveness even to the truly
penitent, is this, that it appears to present God as
divinely averse to that which Christ assures us to
belong to the very essence and constitution of His
nature. It seems to me the very denial, not only
of Christ's revelation, but of all that the prophets
had taught, to represent the obstacle to forgiveness
as being in the reluctance of God to restore the
penitent to His own love and favour. Doubtless
the mystery of the doctrine of sacrifice is magnified
even in the prophets, and grew constantly before
the minds of all the great Hebrew teachers till it
culminated in the life and death of Christ. But

288 THE ETHICS OF FORGIVENESS XXXVII

that mystery consists in the infinite sacrifice needed
to bring hatred of sin home to the hearts of men,
not in the infinite magnitude of the obstacle pre-
sented by the Divine mind to the forgiveness of
evil, in cases where it had once been so brought
home to the heart, and hated as it deserved to be.
Surely the mystery in the doctrine of sacrifice, great
as it is, is a mystery because it measures the diffi-
culty which an infinite Being has in bringing a
finite being to his senses, and not because it measures
the difficulty which an infinite Being has in finding
a sufficient excuse for doing that which love and
\ righteousness alike prompt Him to do. I agree
with the Bishop of Peterborough in thoroughly
rejecting the shallow doctrine of a "good-natured
God " ; but I do not agree with him in thinking, —
as he leads us to believe that he does think, — that
the mystery of evil lies in the difficulty of according
true divine forgiveness to the penitent ; for I hold
that the only mystery in this matter is the mystery
of evil itself, — the strange difficulty of producing
in not merely finite, but even very weak creatures,
that penitence which alone perfect righteousness can
possibly forgive.

XXXVIII

MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ATONEMENT

1894

It seems to me a great pity that Mr. Gladstone's
interesting and thoughtful article on the meaning of
vicarious redemption should have been connected
with the criticism of such a book as Mrs. Besant's
Autobiography, which really only shows how a
thoroughly undisciplined mind can go off at a tan-
gent from one superficial mode of error to another,
more because the thinker has exhausted one false
mode of apprehending the glimpses permitted us of
the infinite purposes of our life, than because she
has gained any truer or more steady vision of it.
It is like choosing the most unmeaning of all the
accidents of human caprice as the text for a discus-
sion of the most profound of all the purposes of
divine goodness, to associate Mrs. Besant's sudden
and unbridled freaks of religious or irreligious con-
viction with the mysterious but at the same time
inspiring theme of divine sacrifice. Except by way
of illustrating the contrast between the arbitrariness
of human excuses for rejecting truth and the slow
and steady development of divine teaching, there
s u

290 MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ATONEMENT xxxvni

is no natural connection at all between Mrs.
Besant's revolt against the doctrine of Christ's
vicarious suffering and Mr. Gladstone's reason for
holding fast to it.

I think, then, that it would be best to dismiss
Mrs. Besant at once as a writer who must evidently
be allowed to exhaust herself in a series of spasmodic
feats of intellectual acrobatism before she has any
chance of gaining a position of calm and peaceful
trust. But Mr. Gladstone's paper is worth a great
deal more than its • accidental starting-point. To
; m y judgment, he takes a very sound and luminous
\ course when he starts from the assumption that
i pain, " though it is not lawfully to be inflicted
\ except for wrong done, is not in itself essentially
evil. It has been freely borne again and again by
good men for the sake of bad men ; and they have
borne it sometimes with benefit to the bad men,
but always with benefit to themselves." The only
question is whether there is anything in the divine
/ character and omnipotence which renders it impos-
/ sible to acquiesce, in relation to the voluntary
acceptance of pain by a divine mind, in a view
which we have no difficulty at all in taking, of the
willing human endurance of it for the sake of
others. When one man consents to suffer acutely
in order that he may lighten the burden of another
who has brought his misery upon himself, we are
not scandalised, but subdued into genuine reverence
by the spectacle. Is there anything in the mystery
of infinite power and purpose which renders it
impossible to reconcile with the righteousness of
God, what we so eagerly associate with righteous-
ness in man ? I think that Mr. Gladstone omits to
notice one of the most conspicuous links in the true

XXXVIII MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ATONEMENT 291

interpretation of a divine atonement, when he
passes over this question, which I should answer
simply in the sublime words of St. James, — " Every
good and every perfect gift is from above, and
cometh down from the Father of lights with whom
is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
That surely is the master-principle of divine revela-
tion. What is good and perfect in man, has its
origin and starting-point in God, who is the
prompter of all good. This does not imply, of
course, that what is good but painful in human
action is not only good but also painful to the
divine prompter, for, as Mr. Gladstone truly says,
God prompts us to do what is to us painful because
we are imperfect, because our human nature is
made up of more or less incompatible instincts and
desires, and what must therefore wound and gall
some of our cravings, while it gratifies and exalts
others. " If we are told," says Mr. Gladstone, that
" God in His perfection could receive no good from
pain," as men who take upon themselves the burden
of others' sufferings certainly do, the answer is that,
"by the Incarnation, Christ took upon Him a
nature not strictly perfect but perfectible, for He
grew in wisdom and stature and in favour with
God and man"; and that, therefore, the divine
prompting to take up and bear the infirmities of
human nature, and to endure the stripes by which
we are healed, though it came down from "the
Father of lights with whom there is no variableness,
neither shadow of turning," did not imply anguish
in Him who prompted the renunciation, but only in
that human nature which at that prompting the
Son of God assumed. Once grant that " every good
and every perfect gift cometh from above," and we

292 MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ATONEMENT XXXVIII

must grant that the willingness to assume the
burden of others' sins came from above ; and that,
however mysterious it may be, the wish and the
power to suffer the most terrible of the agonies of
human sympathy, is a gift from above, even though
it proceeds from a nature which, on its divine side,
is as incapable of anguish as on its human side it
is infinite in its capacity for a kind of passion of
which ordinary human beings are utterly unable to
measure the grandeur and the scope. This capacity
for infinite passion in a divine humanity seems to
me the very central light of revelation. Without
it I should be tempted to say that the capacity for
vicarious suffering in man would in some sense put
man above God, did we not learn from revelation
that the very root of that capacity in man is of
divine origin, and that it rises to its highest flood
in the mystery of that divinely human nature
which by its organic union with our own gives us
all the little power we have for sharing and lighten-
ing the burdens of others. If Christ had been man
alone, we might have been moved to the deepest
reverence by His example, but we could not have
recognised, what we now recognise, that it is by
virtue of our spiritual union with Him, and by that
alone, that we derive the impulse to suffer for
others on which we might otherwise pride our-
selves. The mysterious union of a divine life led
within all the cruel pressure of human limitations
seems to me the only explanation of the joy in
bearing "the heavy and the weary weight of all
this unintelligible world," on which our greatest
spiritual poet descants as transmuting sorrow
into —

XXXVIII MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ATONEMENT 293

" Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight ;
And miserable love that is not pain
To hear of, for the glory that redounds /

Therefrom to human kind and what we are." /

Mr. Gladstone puts what is called the " forensic "
analogy for the " scheme " of atonement, with great
delicacy and discrimination, showing where it fails,
and how far it may be regarded as well founded ;
but I think with him that the directions in which it
fails are far more conspicuous than those in which
it holds good. " Pardon," as I understand it, is not
so much a magnanimous concession of God's pity to
human repentance, as a necessary and immediate
consequence of all true penitence, though Mr. Glad-
stone is certainly right in saying that pardon to the
truly penitent in no way involves the remission of
all the shame and suffering which are the necessary
consequences of sin ; for the extinction of that
shame and suffering would really imply not the
reality, but the unreality of the penitence. To my
mind, indeed, the " forensic " analogy for the Atone-
ment, with which Mr. Gladstone deals so subtly and
delicately, has been from the first a great theo-
logical mistake, which has done far more to cloud
the true meaning and grandeur of the vicarious
sacrifice of Christ, than to illustrate or explain it.
I am grateful to Mr. Gladstone for using his great
influence to clear away this cloud of false analogy,
and to restore the grandeur of the great truth that \
without a regenerating impulse from the divine \
mind, man would never have been able to appre- ,
ciate the true glory of vicarious suffering; in other !
words, that the divine justification and the begin- -
ning at least of sanctification in man, are not the

294 MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ATONEMENT XXXVIII

consequences but the conditions of a pardon which
is sometimes gravely represented as preceding and
causing, instead of following and involving, peni-
tence. The slowly crystallised doctrine of Atone-
' ment not only affords us a measure of the infinite
evil of sin, but also evidence of the growing antici-
pation visible in the prophetic writers of the only
event which could have brought us any healing for
' the magnitude of the evil it had disclosed.

XXXIX

PRINCIPAL TULLOCH ON SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION

1876

Principal Tulloch delivered on Sunday, March 19,
in Edinburgh, the first of a series of lectures on the
Christian doctrine of Sin, and dwelt in his opening
address chiefly on the bearing which the recognition ^
of the fact of sin should have on the modern theory /
of evolution. He pointed out that there is nothing*
in Christian teaching in the least inconsistent with
the theory of development of which Mr. Darwin, for ,
instance, is the chief exponent. What is inconsistent /
with it is the notion, he said, that everything can
be accounted for as a mere growth out of antecedent
states, and that all divine agency is excluded ; that'
Nature is not merely a sphere of action, but the
acting power itself, beyond which there is nothing. f
That the doctrine of evolution, by natural selection ;
or in any other way, may describe the true method
in which life rises from the lower to the higher ,
levels, Principal Tulloch not only did not deny, but -
held it to be in every sense consistent with the
evolution of conscious life, as we know it ourselves,
on those higher levels. It is no longer supposed, as
he very justly remarked, that theology is merely

296 PRINCIPAL TULLOCH XXXIX

the classified arrangement of Scriptural teachings
properly interpreted, it is held by all the better
thinkers to be the vital growth of the moral and
spiritual experience of man as enlightened by Scripture,
and its business is to trace the various links in the
organised structure of Christian history and thought.
Now, if this be true, so far is a doctrine of gradual
evolution of the forms of life from being inconsistent
with Christian teaching, it is but the anticipation in
lower stages of creation of the highest application
of that teaching. Only, just as in interpreting the

) gradual development of Christian doctrine and
Christian thought, we never think of assuming that
the later stage is nothing but the earlier stage in
transformation, but rather assume that the later
stage is a fuller unfolding of that divine mind which
was less perfectly seen in the earlier stage, so with
regard to physical evolution, the assumption of the
Christian faith is that it is the divine power which
is seen in evolution throughout all the stages of the
gradual growth of life, only more fully manifested
in the more complex organisms of the higher creation
than in the simpler organisms of the lower. Christian
faith has not only nothing to say against evolution,
but recognises evolution as one of the most important

\phases in the method of revelation itself. But such

, faith is wholly inconsistent with the radical idea domin-

ating materialistic conceptions of evolution, — namely,

that the process of growth really explains the cause

\ as well as the history of life on the earth, — and also

I with the radical idea dominating the view of Matthew
Arnold and the modern Dutch school of divines, —
that there is nothing but an abstract ideal which is
higher than man, that religion is only "morality

^ touched with emotion," and God an expression for

XXXIX ON SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 297

"a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes
for righteousness," in other words, not the founda-
tion of our life, but its visionary goal. Now with i'
both these conceptions, as Dr. Tulloch showed, the
Christian teaching as to sin, — a teaching which, like \
all other similar lessons of the Church, had its history
of gradual growth, and was no more fully developed
at first than the doctrine of divine grace, — is entirely I
inconsistent. If sin represents a fact at all in human \
experience, it is a fact which cannot be explained ,
on the principle of finding in every new phase of
existence nothing but the transformed shape of
some antecedent state of existence. If sin were
to the previous condition of circumstances and
character what the blossom is to the bud, or the
fruit to the blossom, then though it might be a
morbid growth, a parasitic growth, a growth tending
to disfigure and ruin the character out of which it
grows, it would no more call for remorse, or peni-
tence, or judgment, than the gall-apple on the oak,
or water on the brain. Yet the attempt to eliminate
the sense of sin from human consciousness is just as
ineffectual as the attempt to eliminate the sense of
cause and effect, or the sense of hope and fear. The '
" historical method," as it is called, which recognises
everything as having some real right to an appro-
priate commemoration in the life of man which is
found alike in all ages, and developed as the life of
the race is developed, demands that the sense of sin
should be recognised as a constituent part of human
history, no less than the feeling for art, or the thirst
for knowledge, or the life of imagination. Indeed,
it is far more pervading than any of these. While
they are developed by only a portion of the com-
munity, the moral feeling of deep self-reproach and

298 PRINCIPAL TULLOCH xxxix

remorse for voluntary evil is shared by all, not least
by the most ignorant who do not participate at all
in the life of culture or of abstract thought.

In the early history of every people, it is indeed
remarkable how uniformly the nation feels that all
its guilt or goodness is shared by all, that the penalty
of impiety will light upon all alike, even when it
seems to be due only to the acts of a few. As the
Jews recognised that Egypt suffered for the tyranny
of its king, and themselves expected that, in the
long wanderings of the wilderness, all would incur
the penalty of acts committed only by a few, — as
the Athenians regarded their whole city as liable to
a curse for the acts of desecration committed by a
few thoughtless youths, — so the early literature of
all nations is full of the Nemesis which descends on
one member of a family for the sins of his ancestors,
a conception of which the earliest dogmatic trace is
probably found in the story of the Fall and the
wide extermination which followed it in the Flood.
It will be said that this fact only proves that, origin-
ally at least, sin is no more distinguished from the
antecedent conditions from which it is "evolved,"
than other human characteristics or qualities ; that
the peculiar remorse attending it, whatever it may
i be due to, is not due to any keen sense of personal
responsibility. But it might be as well said that
because in a dim light we cannot distinguish from
each other the shadows of contiguous objects, we
have no impression of the true meaning of a shadow.
The line of discrimination between the range of the
, suffering, and the exact range of personal or tribal
' responsibility for the suffering, is necessarily a
\ delicate line to draw. Society is so constituted,
especially in its earlier stages, that it sins and suffers

XXXIX ON SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 299

collectively, — that it is often impossible to distinguish
who is and who is not responsible for a calamity
which overshadows all alike. Early tribes were
units, rather than collections of units. What they
did was done perhaps by the chief, but then the
chief carried the whole tribe with him, and what he
did, they consented to. In such cases, the sense of
sin was necessarily almost as collective as the suffer-
ing which came of it. No one was in the same way
separately responsible as in more individualised
societies, but no one was in the same way distinctly
innocent of the guilt. It is only in later stages of
society that it is possible to distinguish effectually
between the range of the guilt and the range of the
suffering caused by that guilt, which last necessarily
spreads far beyond the limits of the guilt itself.
When a whole city trembles because one or two of
that city have done something impious, as Athens
trembled at the mutilation of the Hermes, it is probable
that all feel, though not perhaps responsible for the
impiety, yet accountable for the moral recklessness
and selfish audacity which caused the impiety.
Athenian awelessness seemed almost the contradic-
tion of Athenian superstition, but the Athenian mob
felt in some dim way, I presume, that the cruel
awelessness of the young scapegraces, and the cruel
superstition which cried out for vengeance on them,
were somehow a growth of the same stock. And to
us, looking back at the history of Judaea and Athens,
the real identity between the impiety of individual
offenders, and the cruel vindictiveness which asked
for vengeance on them as a mode of absolving the
people from the consequences of such offences, seems
plain enough. But as the history of a race develops,
the time inevitably comes when finer distinctions

300 PRINCIPAL TULLOCH XXXIX

are rendered necessary between sin and suffering,
and when the notion of expiation is connected rather
with the voluntary disinterestedness of more than
human love, than with the compulsory suffering of
arbitrarily chosen victims. The notion of sin is
individualised, the range of the collective suffering
which comes from it is better defined, and the
conception of the intense and yet willing suffering
which is its only adequate cure, comes out in its
full grandeur in the doctrine of atoning love.

Thus, as Principal Tulloch truly urges, the history
of the sense of sin is the truest example of the sort
of 'evolution' which should be our standard in
interpreting the sense to be attached to lower kinds
of evolution. In the first instance, the ideas of

^ guilt, responsibility, punishment, expiation are all
more or less confused in a vague notion of common
evil, common penalty, and common hope of some
sort of penance and purification. Then gradually
the guilt is discriminated from the penalty, and the
penalty from the expiation. It is seen that the
doers of evil cannot suffer alone, but that they suffer
differently, and in a much more permanent way,
than those who only share the evil consequences
and not the evil of the cause ; and again, it is felt
that those who only share involuntarily the evil
consequences are in no way helping to remove the
evil cause, while the divine love which accepts

, voluntarily, and for the sake of the guilty, that
pain, of the origin of which it was quite innocent,

\ is restoring the moral order which the guilty broke.

" Now, can ' evolution ' of this sort be in any sense

. the mere growth of more organised out of less
organised structures? Does not the whole story
imply the conception of a divine horror of sin, and

XXXIX ON SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 301

a more and more complete discrimination of its
origin, its consequences, and its remedy, every step
in which renders the divine groundwork of creation
more evident ? Surely Principal Tulloch is right in
saying that the Theistic and Christian conception of
evolution excludes the idea of the growth of the
higher forms of life out of the lower, and requires
that of the gradual revelation of divine purposes
which in the earlier stages of human life are only
roughly and dimly discerned.

XL

MR. J. S. MILL'S RELIGIOUS CONFESSION

1874

I have just received more posthumous confessions
of John Stuart Mill's. I do not pretend to have
studied or even completely read as yet the Essays
on Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism,
which Messrs. Longman have just published. But
the fragments of these Essays which unaccountably
leaked out in the Northern papers, .with the fuller
expositions of the book itself, are, a> all events,
sufficient to give a very clear general impression of
his point of view. And it is obvious that the moral
and intellectual authority for which, in future, his
name will be quoted in theological controversy, will
be one of a very complex, hesitating, and ambiguous
character. No one could have anticipated, at the
time when Mr. Mill published his Logic and his
Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political
Economy, that when his career came to an end, he

' would have influenced his age chiefly as a kind of
potent intellectual yeast or ferment, instead of as
a great inculcator of definite truths. He began life
chiefly as the antagonist of the a priori school of

, philosophy and as an advocate of the empirical

XL MR. J. S. MILL'S RELIGIOUS CONFESSION 303

school which found the germs of all our knowledge
in particular sense - impressions and the law of
association ; partly also as one of the most severe
disciples of the great teachers of ' the dismal science/
— Malthus and Ricardo. But we of the present '
generation shall now look upon these elements of
his teaching as mere infinitesimal constituents in the
powerful stimulus which he gave to the various
conflicting tendencies of the seething and distracted
thought of our times. The general effect of his-
writings will not be any definite teaching at all, but \
a sort of impregnation of the waters of a cold and \
empirical school of thought with foreign sources of {
agitation and ebullition rendering them apparently j
ardent and exciting. His experience - philosophy /
was soon saturated with at least the deepest admira- <
tion for the methods, if not for the results of Cole-
ridge's speculations ; his political economy was modi- /
fied by the warmest sympathy with the peasant and
the labouring class, and the profoundest desire to
mingle moral with economical motives in the distri-
bution of wealth and industry. In politics his
abstract democratic principles soon exhibited a
strong deflection in the direction of Conservative
scorn for the vaunted omnipotence of Radical
machinery; and then afterwards, during his short
political career, displayed a strong reaction towards
" heroic measures " and popular sympathies. And
in the region of ethics and religion his name is
likely to be remembered chiefly for the heterogeneous
character of the intellectual germs which floated
about his mind like the light seed-vessels of plants
of the most mutually incompatible habits of growth
and nutrition. It will be said of him that while he
was a strict Utilitarian, finding the sanctions of all

304 MR. J. s. mill's RELIGIOUS CONFESSION XL

the ethical principles he admitted in their tendency
to promote the happiness of the race, he yet thought
it not only right, but obligatory on a high-minded
man to defy even an omnipotent being who should
threaten men with eternal sufferings for refusing to
surrender their finite notions of virtue to his own
arbitrary will and law ; that he regarded the direct
pursuit of happiness — i.e. of the only final end of
life — as fatal to the happiness pursued ; and that
he felt far more reverence for the enthusiastic
emotions which arise incidentally during the pursuit
of benevolent objects, than even for those benevolent
objects themselves. And now that the posthumous
Essays on Nature, Religion, and Theism have ap-
peared, it must be added, that while he doubted
everything, from the existence of God and the
divine mission of Christ to the immortality of the
soul, he distinctly rejected nothing, except the
divine omnipotence , nay, that he preached the duty
of saturating the imagination with possibilities of
religious truth which he did not rate high, rather
than stint the elastic force of hope by a rigid ad-
herence to a rational standard of intellectual expec-
tation. In short, Mr. Mill professed his wish that
human nature should feed itself, consciously and
deliberately, on very dubious, not to say slender
hopes, — without, however, disguising from itself
the slight character of those hopes, — by way of
reinforcing its otherwise too small resources of
aspiration ; that it should store up for itself new
impulses through the habitual contemplation of
spiritual contingencies the prospect of ever realising
which would hardly exceed the chance of a prize in
a very hazardous lottery, and this solely on the
ground that all the anticipations in which men may

XL MR. J. S. MILL'S RELIGIOUS CONFESSION 305

indulge themselves with real confidence, are inade-
quate to the work of providing sufficiently inspiring
and elevating themes. The following are his/
words : —

" To me it seems that human life, small and confined
as it is, and as, considered merely in the present, it is
likely to remain, even when the progress of material and
moral improvement may have freed it from the greater \
part of its present calamities, stands greatly in need of
any wider range and greater height of aspiration for itself
and its destination which the exercise of imagination can
yield to it, without running counter to the evidence of
fact ; and that it is a part of wisdom to make the most
of any, even small, probabilities on this subject which
furnish imagination with any footing to support itself
upon. And I am satisfied that the cultivation of such
a tendency in the imagination, provided it goes on pari
passu with the cultivation of severe reason, has no neces-
sary tendency to pervert the judgment ; but that it is
possible to form a perfectly sober estimate of the evidences
on both sides of a question, and yet to let the imagination
dwell by preference on those possibilities which are at
once the most comforting and the most improving, with-
out in the least degree overrating the solidity of the
grounds for expecting that these rather than any other
will be the possibilities actually realised " (pp. 245-6).

Thus, Mr. Mill was an empiricist who attached more %
importance to the secondary than to the primary
forms of pleasurable satisfaction ; a Utilitarian who
was more of a believer in the sacredness of disin-
terested emotion than transcendentalists themselves ;
an economist who carried sentiment with a high
hand into the very heart of questions affecting the
accumulation and distribution of wealth; a neces-
sarian who was the most passionate advocate of
s x

306 MR. J. s. mill's RELIGIOUS CONFESSION xl

liberty ; a democrat who eagerly defended the rights
of culture and the full representation of independent
thought ; nay, he was a sceptic who held the char-
acter of Christ all but divine, and who wished men
to cling to the belief in even a slender hope of
divine guidance and personal immortality for the
sake of the new moral resources such a hope must
give; — and in practical matters, he was the enthusi-
astic advocate of a change which would tend to
deprive women of the highest influence they have,
while gaining for them a power for which they
seem to most of us little suited. Of course, the
mind which threw so much ardour into such para-
doxical positions must appear to future ages as one
of the most incalculable of the intellectual influences
of his day, — one who fostered enthusiasms rooted
in doubt, and revolutionary changes founded on
visionary hopes, — one who acted like a ferment on
almost all schools of intellectual tendency, develop-
ing rapidly all the floating germs in their authors'
minds, and yet which robbed even that which it
stimulated most, of anything like the firmness and
stability of a steady conviction.

And no doubt the total influence which John
/ Stuart Mill will exercise on the development of
English thought will be rather this, — that he will
have rendered it difficult for sceptics to shut them-
selves up in a shell of repellent theory, — that he
will have taught them to sound all the doubtfulness of
doubt, to enter into all the paradoxes of an empirical
philosophy, to appreciate the religious enthusiasm
J consistent with a utilitarian belief, — than that he
.' will have made any fundamental truth or any funda-
! mental denial clearer than it was before. He will
have given an ideal tone to political economy, and

XL MR. J. S. MILL'S RELIGIOUS CONFESSION 307

grafted a Conservative vein into democratic theory.
He will have persuaded not a few of the disciples
of Bentham that they ought to delight in emotions
which it is impossible on Bentham's principles to
justify, and to flush with joy at the prospect of
changes the advantageous results of which are as
yet visible only to the most sanguine eye. He will
have convinced many Materialists that, though there
can be no omnipotent God of perfect holiness, there
may be a very powerful, invisible Being who is help-
ing us to struggle against impossible conditions, not
much more or not much less mighty than himself.
And he will have induced certain Rationalists who
smile at revelation, to believe that it becomes a
sceptic to reserve the possibility at least that Christ
actually was exactly what in the first three Gospels
He declares Himself to be, — i.e. not, in Mr. Mill's
belief, God at all, but a divine messenger of God's,
sent into the world to declare the will and unveil
the nature of the Being who sent Him. No doubt
the effect of all this, not only on Mr. Mill's philo-
sophical allies, but on their opponents of all schools,
must be to increase very much the sense of
ultimate uncertainty; — on his allies, because it
shows them how much a negative thinker could
sympathise with tendencies which his philosophy
went to undermine ; on his opponents, because be-
wildering them with the vision of sympathies where
they looked for prejudices, and yet sympathies
which only permitted their subject to throw them
the crumb of comfort involved in a ' perhaps.'

But even that is not the most curious feature
of his total moral effect as a thinker. The most
curious seems to me to be that, while mediating
to some extent between opposite tendencies, and

308 MR. j. s. mill's RELIGIOUS CONFESSION XL

increasing the sense of ultimate uncertainty about the
foundations of things, Mr. Mill was the very apostle
of noble emotions, panegyrising the disinterested
feelings generated like phosphoric flames by the
decay of the earthly objects of desire, and making
a sort of religion of personal enthusiasm, without
much relation either to the calculable advantages of
the course he advocated, or to the hopefulness of
the campaign. This gives something of a hectic
effect to the character of his teaching. The enthu-
siasm looks more like the enthusiasm of fever than
the enthusiasm of health, when one considers how

! it derives its origin from selfish sources which fail

I to justify its existence, and how it flames upwards
towards objects, the very existence of which is

^ expressly stated to be involved in a haze of doubt.
One cannot but admire and even reverence the
nobility of the mind which felt so keenly the sacred-
ness of the glow of disinterested enthusiasm, alien
as it was to his philosophy of things, as passionately
to welcome it, and eagerly to dwell on the ambigu-
ous and shadowy hopes on which it was most likely

^to gain strength. It is impossible to feel anything
but profound admiration for the delicate love of

' truth which makes Mr. Mill array so carefully all
the half-tangible grounds of the hope to which he

^clings, and yet sadly confess how small individually
they seem. Still how strange it is to contrast
what Mr. Mill has written concerning the genius
and character of our Lord, with his own view of the
slender probability of Christ's own beliefs ! —

" And whatever else may be taken away from us by
rational criticism, Christ is still left, — a unique figure,
not more unlike all his precursors than all his followers,

XL MR. J. S. MILl/8 RELIGIOUS CONFESSION 309

even those who had the direct benefit of his personal
teaching. It is of no use to say that Christ, as exhibited
in the Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not
how much of what is admirable has been superadded by
the tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers
suffices to insert any number of marvels, and may have
inserted all the miracles which he is reputed to have
wrought. But who among his disciples or among their
proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed
to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed
in the Gospels ? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee ;
as certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyn-
crasies were of a totally different sort ; still less the early
Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than
that the good which was in them was all derived, as they
always professed that it was derived, from the higher
source. . . . But about the life and sayings of Jesus
there is a stamp of personal originality, combined with
profundity of insight, which, if we abandon the idle ex-
pectation of finding scientific precision where something
very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of
Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no
belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank of the
men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast
When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the quali-
ties of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr
to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion
cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching
on this man as the ideal representative and guide of
humanity ; nor even now would it be easy, even for an
unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue
from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavour so
to live that Christ would approve our life. When to
this we add that, to the conception of the rational sceptic,
it remains a possibility that Christ actually was what he
supposed himself to be, — not God, for he never made the
smallest pretension to that character, and would probably

\

310 MR. J. s. mill's RELIGIOUS CONFESSION XL

have thought such a pretension as blasphemous as it
seemed to the men who condemned him, but a man
charged with a special, express, and unique commission
from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue, we may
well conclude that the influences of religion on the char-
acter which will remain after rational criticism has done
its utmost against the evidences of religion are well worth
preserving, and that what they lack in direct strength
as compared with those of a firmer belief, is more than
compensated by the greater truth and rectitude of the
morality they sanction."

Now what is the very stamp of the genius or origi-
nality on which Mr. Mill so justly insists in this
estimate of Jesus ? Is it not precisely that certainty
of insight into divine things which Mr. Mill decides
to be wholly unjustified and unjustifiable by his
review not merely of Christ's own career, but of all
that happened previous to and all that followed that
career ? Not to refer to the Gospel of John, of which
Mr. Mill's estimate is so strangely contemptuous, was
he not thinking as he spoke of the profundity and
originality of Christ's genius of the calm confidence
of " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God," " Every plant which my heavenly Father
hath not planted shall be rooted up," " Be ye there-
fore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven
is perfect," " Who is my mother, and who are my
brethren ? Whosoever shall do the will of my Father
which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and
sister, and mother." Now, where is the ' genius ' in
such sayings, if they represented not insight into
the truth, but the overmastering might of a potent
delusion, — if the true state of mind on these sub-
jects should be that which Mr. Mill delineates in
these remarkable essays, the anxious hoarding -up

XL MR. J. S. MILL'S RELIGIOUS CONFESSION 311

of a number of doubtful indications of the super-
natural influence of a Being of limited power, —
" evidence insufficient for proof, but amounting only
to one of the lower degrees of probability " for the
existence of any God at all ? If this be so, surely
the certainty and simplicity of Christ's insight
would be a mark, not of genius, but of hallucination, —
unless, indeed, the sceptic takes the view hinted at
by Mr. Mill, that Christ may have really been what
He assumed Himself to be, i.e. may have had evidence
which we cannot recover of the divine life in which
He lived. Only from any confident belief of this
kind Mr. Mill is wholly shut out, for if he held it
confidently, he must hold with precisely equal con-
fidence the existence of the supernatural being whom
Christ revealed. Yet if he thought it a mere pos- \
sibility that Christ spoke of what He knew, when \
using the language of knowledge instead of the
language of surmise, — surely he ought to think of
the ' genius ' of Jesus, as he calls it, only as of a
very small possibility of the same order. On Mr. ,
Mill's view, Christ was either a great genius, or had
a wonderful aptitude for grand hallucinations, the
last being to him much the more likely of the two,
otherwise Mr. Mill's own slender ' hope ' would take
the form of a firm belief. Anyhow, nothing is
stranger than the contrast between the language of
the admirer, and the language of him whom he so
profoundly admires, on divine subjects. The former
is the language of hesitating feeble hope, hope of
a low order, but which nevertheless warrants the
attitude of enthusiasm and the glow of a poetic
aspiration. The latter is the language of an abso-
lute vision, of calm certainty, which warrants no
such feverish emotion, but only undoubting trust

312 MR. J. s. mill's RELIGIOUS CONFESSION XL

and happy devotion. Will not the potent ferment
which Mr. Mill has cast into the boiling cauldron of
modern thought, end in making it seem far more
reasonable to accept the quiet language of implicit
faith, than the impassioned language of an idealising
ydream at once excited and despondent ?

V

XLI

MR. JOHN MORLEY ON RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY

1874

The new chapter of Mr. John Morley's Essay on
Compromise, to be found in the July number of
the Fortnightly, is as wholesome in doctrine as it
is able and thoughtful in expression. Of course it
is written from a point of view intellectually and
religiously almost the opposite of my own, but I am ^ \
not ashamed to feel far more sympathy with the
nobler aspects of unbelief, than with the ignobler
and shiftier aspects of so-called faith. A diplomatic
Churchman, who has borrowed hardly anything from
the Christian spirit except St. Paul's boast that he
had been all things to all men, is a phenomenon
which seems to me far more threatening to the
Christian faith of our own day than the sturdy and,
as far at least as this essay goes, the charitable 'I
believe not ' of such men as Mr. John Morley. To
those who apply our Lord's universal test, ' By their
fruits ye shall know them/ a religion which has not
made a man religious must, in the form it has taken
in his mind at least, be inferior to the want of
religion, or if you please, even irreligion, of the man
who shows as high a morale and as earnest a sense

314 MR. JOHN MORLEY xli

of duty as Mr. John Morley. What the explanation
may be of the appearance of so keen a sense of
obligation and so frank a tenderness for what Mr.
Morley, not, we think, in intellectual pride, but
apparently in downright conviction, calls Christianity,
— " that sovereign legend of Pity," — in combination
with so sharp a denial of what seems to me the
transparent personal background of the moral law,
is no doubt puzzle enough, a puzzle which I am not
at the present moment attempting to resolve. But
this, at all events, is true ; it is quite easy to confess
God and Christ in a spirit much more pernicious
and fatal to the growth of faith ill God and Christ,

Ithan that in which others deny them. False visions
may be much worse than no visions. The babble of
imaginary voices may be much more perverting to
the mind than the aching of an intense silence. Mr.
Morley's present essay is a grave and earnest protest
against the conventional conformity of men to creeds
they sincerely and thoroughly disbelieve, and for my
own part, I not only heartily agree with Mr. Morley,
but think that true Christianity has much more to
lose by the falsity which Mr. Morley attacks than
Uias unbelief. A conformity which makes the inner
life of the most intimate affections a hollow and
conventional affair, is a conformity which is destruc-
tive of religion, not conservative of it. Directly we
begin to act a part, we leave the region in which
faith is possible, and what is worse, we infect all
those for whose sake we act the part we do, indeed
all who are concerned with us in the histrionic affair,
with something of our own utter unreality. There-
fore I have nothing to say to the substance of Mr.
Morley's essay except to echo its teaching, with all
my heart, from the opposite point of view. I should

XLI ON RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY 315

indeed refuse to acquiesce in Mr. Morley's exceptions
to his doctrine of the duty of social frankness on
the subject of any firmly-rooted and fixed denial.
Mr. Morley seems to think that because children
have not had anything to do with the selection of
their own parents, they may owe it to their affection
for those parents not to confess their rejection of the
faith in which they have been brought up, though a
similar reticence cannot be justifiable in wives, with
whom men's relation is a voluntary one. "If
parents are not wise," he says, "if they cannot
endure to hear of any religious opinions except their
own, if it would give them sincere and deep pain to
hear a son or daughter avow disbelief in the inspira-
tion of the Bible, and so forth, then it seems that
the younger person is warranted in refraining from
saying that he or she does not accept such and such
doctrines. This, of course, only where the son or
daughter feels a tender and genuine attachment to
the parent. Where the parent has not earned this
attachment, has been selfish, indifferent, or cruel,
the title to the special kind of forbearance of which
we are speaking can hardly have any existence. In
an ordinary way, however, a parent has a claim on
us which no other person in the world can have, and
a man's self-respect ought scarcely to be injured, if
he finds himself shrinking from playing the apostle
to his own father and mother." It shows how oddly
other differences of opinion are connected with differ-
ences of moral theory, that I should just have
inverted Mr. Morley's qualification. He seems to
think that to the parents you love you may fairly
shrink from giving pain. I should have thought
that from the parents you love you should shrink
from withholding your true confidence on a subject

316 MR. JOHN MORLEY XLI

that goes very near to their hearts, and that your
obligation to let them know your true heart on such
a subject, whether it give pain or not, is far more
imperative than your obligation to spare them pain.
No doubt this difference of view is one of the results
of a difference of moral creed. To the Utilitarian,
— and Mr. Morley is, I believe, a Utilitarian in Mr.
Mill's sense, — the giving of pain must always assume
what seems to me to be a thoroughly factitious
importance in the moral conduct of human life.

But while I concur with Mr. Morley's doctrine
without concurring in the exceptions by which he
here qualifies it, I do not at all accept one leading
view of his essay, by which apparently he hopes to
minimise the social shocks and jars likely to result
from the candour in relation to fundamental denials
recommended by that essay. That view is that the
Positivism (which means, of course, Negativism) of
Mr. Morley's creed is to be the heir of Christianity,
in the same sense in which Christianity was the heir
of Judaism. "Whatever form," says Mr. Morley,
" may be ultimately imposed on our vague religious
aspirations by some prophet to come, uniting sublime
depth of feeling and lofty purity of life with strong
intellectual grasp and the gift of a noble eloquence,
we may, at least, be sure of this, that it will stand
as closely related to Christianity, as Christianity
stood to the old Judaic dispensation. It is com-
monly understood that the rejectors of the popular
religion stand in face of it, as the Christians stood
in face of the pagan belief and rites in the Empire.
The analogy is inexact. The modern denier, if he
is anything better than that, or entertains hopes of
a creed to come, is nearer to the position of the
Christianising Jew. Science, when she has accom-

XLI ON RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY 317

plished all her triumphs in her own order, will have
to go back, when the time comes, to generate a new
creed, by which man can live; will have to find
material in the purified and sublimated ideas of
which the confessions and rites of the Christian
Churches have been the grosser expression. Just as
what was once the new dispensation was preached
a Judceis ad Judceos apud Judceos, so must the new,
that is to be, find a Christian teacher and Christian
hearers. It can hardly be other than an expansion,
a development, a readaptation of all the moral and
spiritual truth that lay hidden under the worn-out
forms. It must be such a harmonising of truth with
an intellectual conception as shall fit it to be an
active guide to conduct. In a world ' where men sit
and hear each other groan . . . where but to think is to
be full of sorrow? it is hard to imagine a time when
we shall be indifferent to that sovereign legend of
Pity. We have to incorporate it in some wider
Gospel of Justice and Progress." Mr. Morley writes
with feeling, and with not more of benignant conde-
scension to the moral and intellectual weakness of
Christians than is perhaps inevitable from his point
of view, but he will not be easily able to persuade
any one who enters in the least into the drift and
meaning of the Gospel, to see anything but an
amiable, yet groundless dream in his hope that the
new religion of humanity without God, can succeed
in establishing any sort of historical heirship to the
gospel of the divine humanity. A new religion
which should stand in the same relation to historical
Christianity as that in which historical Christianity
stood to Judaism, can hardly be even imagined, just
because historical Christianity claims to find its
perfect and ideal life in Christ, while Judaism con-

318 MK. JOHN MORLEY XLI

f essedly looked forward into the future, and was but
anticipating that completion and fulfilment of which
Christ's gospel declared itself the harbinger. But
even if that point be waived, how is any religion to
bear the same relation to Christianity which Christi-
__ \ anity bore to Judaism, if it begins with denying the
\ common root of both, the fact of a divine revelation
to man ? nay, more, if it denies, as Mr. Morley
expressly affirms that it must, even the possibility of
such a revelation. The essential life and form of
Judaism was belief in the call of God to men, and
the personal rule of God over men. That belief, so
far from being diluted or softened down by Christ
in the direction of "a religion of humanity," was
made by Him indefinitely more explicit and absolute.
The belief that man was nothing apart from God,
that his whole good and his whole happiness lay in
union with God, was of the very substance of the
Jewish faith, but by Christ it was vivified with a
totally new principle of emotion such as it never had
before. That which dropped off from Judaism was
forms and ceremonies, which were originally intended,
but which had latterly quite failed, to express the
sense of the perpetual penitence, obedience, and self-
sacrifice due from man to God. But everything that
expressed the depth of the personal relation, the
passion of loving humility, of unquenchable trust, of
exulting hope towards God, was not only retained
and developed in Christianity, but exalted and
glorified by the light of the new revelation. . To
talk of " developing " such a faith as that into a faith
whose great boast it is that its root is in man, and
in man alone, which begins by terming revelation a
legend, and God a power at once unknown and
unknowable, which brings as its special indictment

XLI ON RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY 319

against the Christian faith that " it tends to divert
and misdirect the most energetic faculties of human
nature," and which, if it could, would concentrate
on man all the life of affection now wasted, as it
holds, on God, — is to talk of developing a tree into
a lichen, or the language of Shakespeare into the
starved speech of a tribe of Esquimaux. Judaism
had its knowledge and fear of God, where Christi-
anity has its love of God ; Judaism had its fore-
shadowings of a man who should be " as a hiding-place
from the wind and a covert from the tempest, as rivers
of water in a dry place, and the shadow of a great rock
in a weary land," where Christianity has its Christ
and Redeemer; Judaism had its hope that there
should be a satisfying awakening after the likeness
of God, that when " the flesh and the heart failed,
God should be the strength of the heart and its
portion for ever," where Christianity has its sure
and certain hope of " the life that is hid with Christ
in God ; " — but how all these developments are to
be further developed into the purely "agnostic"
state of mind towards the Cause of the Universe,
into active disbelief in all mediating love, and into
the gospel of an altruistic immortality to consist in
the tiny driblet of consequences contributed by each
human life to the future of the race, — so long as the
race may happen to last, — it would puzzle even the
conjuring of the Hegelian logic to suggest. It is
said of Mr. J. S. Mill, that when assured by some
physicist that the sun must burn itself out, and that
long before that happens the earth must pass into
the sterile condition of our moon, and become per-
fectly lifeless, he turned pale at the mere thought,
for in that prediction sentence was passed on the
"religion of humanity" and the gospel of earthly

\

y

y

320 MR. JOHN MORLEY xli

" Progress " which Mr. John Morley preaches. And
surely Mr. Mill was right, from his point of view.
A religion which depends on the eternity of astrono-
mical conditions now existing, is not a religion at
all, and most certainly is not a " development " of
\ any form of faith in an eternal God and an immortal
') life for man. Development at least demands the
preservation of the seminal idea, and even the most
negative of the students of comparative theology
would admit that the seminal idea of Judaism and
Christianity is the idea of a divine descent into
humanity, of light and love, from above, seeking out
humility and faith beneath. Give up that idea, and
it is about as wise to talk of the prophet of the new
religion developing its teachings out of the heart of
his own Christianity, as it would be to talk of
Copernicus and Newton c developing ' the Ptolemaic
astronomy, or Bishop Butler ' developing ' the ethics
of Hobbes. I suppose that what Mr. Morley
means is, that there ought to be some vestige of the
sublime disinterestedness of the Christian ethics in
the new ' religion of humanity/ But if so, it will be
apparently disinterestedness of the Utilitarian sort,
ignoring with holy horror any mystery of origin, —
disinterestedness which feeds itself on a totally
different class of reflections, and which aims at a
widely different class of ends, from those of the
faiths which it aspires to supersede. If Mr. Morley
and his friends could succeed, they would not
diminish the jar or shock of their new ideas even in
the very least degree, by their kindly consideration
for "the sovereign legend of Pity" which they
propose to dissipate. It is something, no doubt, to
be able to say of each other, as Mr. Morley admits
that he can of believers, that mutual moral respect

XLI ON RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY 321

is easy, even while fundamental belief is so pro-
foundly different. But beyond that it seems to me
childish to attempt to go. To try to develop a ^
humanitarian religion out of one grounded in God,
is to attempt an intellectual juggle, not a philo-
sophical reconciliation. After all, the jars and /
shocks which Mr. Morley wishes to minimise may '
be wholesome things. We may get far more truth
out of them than out of the tentative adjustment of
radically incompatible convictions. Indeed I had ''
hardly expected such mere wistfulness of sentiment,
such impracticable though kindly endeavour at the.
impossible conciliation of mutually destructive creeds,
as this new chapter shows, from so robust a thinker
as Mr. John Morley.

s

XLII

MR. ARNOLD'S LAY SERMON
1884

Mr. Arnold's lay sermon to " the sacrificed classes "
at Whitechapel contrasts doubly with the pulpit
sermons which we too often hear. It is real where
these sermons are unreal, and frankly unreal
where these sermons are real. It does honestly
warn the people to whom it was addressed, of the
special danger to which " the sacrificed classes " are
exposed, whenever they in their turn get the upper-
hand, the danger of simply turning the tables on
the great possessing and aspiring classes. " If the
sacrificed classes/' he said, " under the influence of
hatred, cupidity, desire of change, destroy, in order
to possess and enjoy in their turn, their work, too,
will be idolatrous, and the old work will continue
to stand for the present, or at any rate their new
work will not take its place." It must be work
done in a new spirit, not in the spirit of hatred or
cupidity, or eagerness to enjoy and appropriate the
privileges of others, which can alone stand the test
of time and judgment. So far, Mr. Arnold was
much more real than too many of our clerical
preachers. He warned his hearers against a tempta-

xlii mr. Arnold's lay sermon 323

tion which he knew would be stirring constantly in
their hearts, and not against abstract temptations
which he had no reason to think would have any ,
special significance to any of his audience.

On the other hand, if he were more real in what
was addressed to his particular audience than pulpit- ^
preachers often are, he resorted once more, with his A,
usual hardened indifference to the meaning of words
and the principles of true literature, to that practice
of debasing the coinage of religious language, and ^
using great sayings in a new and washed-out sense
of his own, of which pulpit-preachers are seldom J
guilty. This practice of Mr. Arnold's is the only ,
great set-off against the brilliant services he has
rendered to English literature, but it is one which I
should not find it easy to condemn too strongly.
Every one knows how, in various books of his, Mr.
Arnold has tried to "verify" the teaching of the
Bible, while depriving the name of God of all per-
sonal meaning ; to verify the Gospel of Christ, while
denying that Christ had any message to us from a
world beyond our own ; and even, — wildest enter-
prise of all, — so to rationalise the strictly theo-
logical language of St. John as to rob it of all its
theological significance. Well, I do not charge this
offence on Mr. Arnold as in any sense whatever an
attempt to play fast-and-loose with words ; for he
has again and again confessed to all the world, with
the explicitness and vigour which are natural to
him, the precise drift of his enterprise. But I do
charge it on Mr. Arnold as in the highest possible
sense a great literary misdemeanour, that he has
lent his high authority to the attempt to give
to a great literature a pallid, faded, and artificial
complexion, though, with his view of it, his duty

V'

tm. V> LL. .— 1 J, -_«._

324 MR. ARNOLD'S LAY SERMON XLII

obviously was to declare boldly that that literature
teaches what is, in his opinion, false and supersti-
tious, and deserves our admiration only as repre-
senting a singularly grand, though obsolete, stage in
man's development. Mr. Arnold is as frank and
honest as the day. But frank and honest as he is,
his authority is not the less lent to a non-natural
rendering of Scripture infinitely more intolerable
than that non-natural interpretation of the Thirty-
nine Articles which once brought down the wrath
of the world of Protestants on the author of " Tract
90." In this Whitechapel lecture Mr. Arnold tells
his hearers that in the " preternatural and miracu-
lous aspect " which the popular Christianity assumes
Christianity is not solid or verifiable, but that there
is another aspect of Christianity which is solid and
verifiable, which aspect of it makes no appeal to a
preternatural [i.e. supernatural] world at all. Then
he goes on, after eulogising Mr. Watts's pictures, —
of one of which a great mosaic has been set up in
Whitechapel as a memorial of Mr. Barnett's noble
work there, — to remark that good as it is to bring
home to " the less refined classes " the significance
of Art and Beauty, it is none the less true that
"whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst
again," and to suggest, of course, by implication,
that there is a living water springing up to everlast-
ing life, of which he who drinks shall never thirst
Then he proceeds thus : —

"No doubt the social sympathies, the feeling for
Beauty, the pleasure of Art, if left merely by themselves,
if untouched by what is the deepest thing in human life
— religion — are apt to become ineffectual and superficial
The art which Mr. Barnett has done his best to make
known to the people here, the art of men like Mr. Watts,

^^9ammam^f^smB^^^^^^m^^mm^m^mmmmmmfm^^mmmmmm

xlii mr. Arnold's lay sermon 325

the art manifested in works such as that which has just
now been unveiled upon the walls of St Jude's Church,
has a deep and powerful connection with religion. You
have seen the mosaic, and have read, perhaps, the scroll
which is attached to it. There is the figure of Time, a
strong young man, full of hope, energy, daring, and
adventure, moving on to take possession of life ; and
opposite to him there is that beautiful figure of Death,
representing the breakings -off, the cuttings short, the
baffling disappointments, the heart -piercing separations
from which the fullest life and the most fiery energy can-
not exempt us. Look at that strong and bold young man,
that mournful figure must go hand in hand with him for
ever. And those two figures, let us admit if you like,
belong to Art. But who is that third figure whose scale
weighs deserts, and who carries a sword of fire ? We are
told again by the text printed on the scroll, ' The Eternal
[the scroll, however, has 'the Lord'] is a God of
Judgment ; blessed are all they that wait for him. 1 It is
the figure of Judgment, and that figure, I say, belongs to
religion. The text which explains the figure is taken
from one of the Hebrew Prophets; but an even more
striking text is furnished us from that saying of the
Founder of Christianity when he was about to leave the
world, and to leave behind him his Disciples, who, so
long as he lived, had him always to cling to, and to do
all their thinking for them. He told them that when
he was gone they should find a new source of thought
and feeling opening itself within them, and that this new
source of thought and feeling should be a comforter to
them, and that it should convince, he said, the world of
many things. Amongst other things, he said, it should
convince the world that Judgment comes, and that the
Prince of this world is judged That is a text which we
shall do well to lay to heart, considering it with and
alongside that text from the Prophet More and more it
is becoming manifest that the Prince of this world is

326 MR. ARNOLD'S LAY SERMON XLII

really judged, that that Prince who is the perpetual ideal
of selfishly possessing and enjoying, and of the worlds
fashioned under the inspiration of this ideal, is judged
One world and another have gone to pieces because they
were fashioned under the inspiration of this ideal, and
that is a consoling and edifying thought"

Now, when we know, as Mr. Arnold wishes us all
/ to know, that to him " the Eternal " means nothing
more than that " stream of tendency, not ourselves,
which makes for righteousness," that "Judgment"
means nothing but the ultimate defeat which may
await those who set themselves against this stream
of tendency, if the stream of tendency be really as
/ potent and as lasting as the Jews believed God to
be, I do not think that the consoling character of
this text will be keenly felt by impartial minds.
\ Further, we should remember that according to Mr.
Arnold, when Christ told His disciples that the
Comforter should " reprove the world of sin, and of
righteousness, and of judgment ; of sin because they
believe not on me, of righteousness because I go to
the Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment
because the prince of this world is judged," we
should understand this as importing, to those at
least who agree with Mr. Arnold, only that, for
some unknown reason, a new wave of feeling would
follow Christ's death, which would give mankind a
new sense of their unworthiness, a new vision of
Christ's holiness, and a new confidence in the power
of that "stream of tendency, not ourselves, which
makes for righteousness," in which Christ's own per-
sonality would then be merged ; and further, that
this powerful stream of tendency would probably
sweep away all institutions not tending to righteous-
ness but opposing an obstacle to that tendency.

XLir MR. ARNOLD'S LAY SERMON 327

i

Well, all I can say is that, in watering-down in this \
way the language of the Bible, Mr. Arnold, if he is
doing nothing else, is doing what lies in his power
to extinguish the distinctive significance of a great
literature. The whole power of that literature
depends from beginning to end on the faith in a
Divine Being who holds the universe in His hand,
whose will nothing can resist, who inspires the good,
who punishes the evil, who judges kingdoms as He
judges the hearts of men, and whose mind mani-
fested in Christ promised to Christ's disciples that
which His power alone availed to fulfil. To substi-
tute for a faith such as this, a belief — to my mind
the wildest in the world, and the least " verifiable "
— that " a stream of tendency " effects all that the
prophets ascribed to God, or, at least, so much of it
as ever will be effected at all, and that Christ, by
virtue merely of His complete identification with
this stream of tendency, is accomplishing post-
humously, without help from either Father, Son, or
Spirit, all that He could have expected to accom-
plish through the personal agency of God, is to
extract the kernel from the shell, and to ask us to
accept the empty husk for the living grain. I am
not reproaching Mr. Arnold for his scepticism.
I am reproaching him as a literary man for trying
to give currency in a debased form to language of
which the whole power depends on its being used
honestly in the original sense. "The Eternal"
means one thing when it means the everlasting and
supreme thought and will and life ; it is an expres-
sion utterly blank and dead when it means nothing
but a select " stream of tendency " which is assumed,
for no particular reason, to be constant, permanent,
and victorious. "Living water" means one thing

328 mr. Arnold's lay sermon xlii

when it means the living stream of God's influence ;

it has no salvation in it at all when it means only

that which is the purest of the many tendencies in

human life. The shadow of judgment means one

thing when it is cast by the will of the supreme

righteousness ; it has no solemnity in it when it

i expresses only the sanguine anticipation of human

virtue. There is no reason on earth why Mr. Arnold

should not water-down the teaching of the Bible to

his own view of its residual meaning ; but then, in

/the name of sincere literature, let him find his own

language for it, and not dress up this feeble and

^superficial hopefulness of the nineteenth century

in words which are undoubtedly stamped with an

I ardour and a peace for which his teaching can give

\us no sort of justification. " Solidity and verifica-

Ytion," indeed ! Never was there a doctrine with

[less bottom in it and less pretence of verification

than his ; but be that as it may, he must know, as

well as I know, that his doctrine is as different from

the doctrine of the Bible as the shadow is different

from the substance. Has Mr. Arnold lately read

Dr. Newman's great Oxford sermon on "Unreal

Words " ? If not, I wish he would refer to it again,

and remember the warning addressed to those who

"use great words and imitate the sentences of

others/' and who "fancy that those whom they

imitate had as little meaning as themselves," or

"perhaps contrive to think that they themselves

have a meaning adequate to their words." It is to

me impossible to believe that Mr. Arnold should

have indulged such an illusion. He knows too well

the difference between the great faith which spoke

in prophet and apostle, and the feeble faith which

absorbs a drop or two of grateful moisture from a

\

xlii mr. Arnold's lay sermon 329

"stream of tendency" on the banks of which it
weakly lingers. Mr. Arnold is really putting
Literature, — of which he is so great a master, — to
shame, when he travesties the language of the pro-
phets, and the evangelists, and of our Lord Himself,
by using it to express the dwarfed convictions and
withered hopes of modern rationalists who love to
repeat the great words of the Bible, after they have
given up the strong meaning of them as fanatical
superstitions. Mr. Arnold's readings of Scripture
are the spiritual assignats of English faith.

\S

XLIII
matthew Arnold's new christian catechism

1885

Mr. Arnold's comment on Christmas in the April
Contemporary is a very patronising one. He is very
thankful for what he terms the Christmas legend.
He thinks the belief in the miraculous birth a
striking testimony to the universal feeling for the
purity of Christ, and he rejoices that it embodies
that feeling in a poetical form better calculated to
impress the world than any pedantic inculcation of
purity by those who have learnt the worthlessness
of the legend, could pretend to be. Consequently,
Mr. Arnold does not attempt to re-state the Chris-
tian teaching with regard to purity with any
affectation of being able to enforce it the better
for not associating it with supernatural sanctions.
He even admits that the giving -up of all these
supernatural sanctions, — which he chooses, not very
candidly as I think, to speak of collectively as
" miracles," — is a matter of danger. " Undoubtedly
the reliance on miracles is not lost without some
danger ; but the thing to consider is that it must be
lost, and that the danger must be met, and, as it can
be, counteracted. If men say, as some men are likely

XLIII NEW CHRISTIAN CATECHISM 331

enough to say, that they altogether give-up Christian
miracles, and cannot do otherwise, but that then
they give-up Christian morals too, the answer is,
that they do this at their own risk and peril ; that
they need not do it, that they are wrong in doing
it, and will have to rue their error. But for my
part, I prefer at present to say this simply and
barely, and not to give any rhetorical development
to it." And here surely Mr. Arnold is very wise,
for as we want to know what will be left of Chris-
tianity, after all that is not mere human quality
has departed, "a rhetorical development" would
rather confuse than help to enlighten us. And I
suppose that we get as near as possible to the heart
of what Mr. Arnold discerns in Christianity, when
all that is legendary and " un verifiable " has been
ignored in it, in the following terse catechism, —
certainly much nearer than we could get by the help
of any kind of " rhetorical development " : — " There-
fore, when we are asked : What really is Christmas,
and what does it celebrate ? we answer, the birth-
day of Jesus. What is the miracle of the Incar-
nation ? A homage to the virtue of pureness, and
to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What
is Lent, and the miracle of the temptation ? A
homage to the virtue of self-control and to the
manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What does
Easter celebrate? Jesus victorious over death by
dying. By dying how? Dying to re-live. To
re-live in Paradise, in another world ? No, in this.
What, then, is the kingdom of God ? The ideal
society of the future. Then, what is immortality ?
To live in the Eternal Order, which never dies.
What is salvation by Jesus Christ? The attain-
ment of this immortality. Through what means ?

\

/

I

332 MATTHEW ARNOLD'S XLIH

Through means of the method and the secret and
the temper of Jesus."

Now, to get to the bottom of the drift of the
answers here suggested to Mr. Arnold's catechumens,
I should like to put to the distinguished author of
the Catechism a few more questions intended to
bring out its meaning. In what did the blessing
of pureness, as enforced by Jesus, consist ¥ Mr.
Arnold himself tells us, "Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God." What do you mean
by God ? Mr. Arnold has told us that, so far as the
word " God " conveys a verifiable reality at all, it
means, " A stream of tendency, not ourselves, which
makes for righteousness." Did, then, Jesus hold that
the blessedness of purity consisted in discerning " a
stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for
righteousness " ? May not the impure see that just
as well, and see that it makes for their misery?
Again, what was the secret of resisting temptation
" as manifested in Jesus " ? We are told by those
who learned the story of the temptation from
Christ that it consisted in realising fully that " Man
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Now,
if you substitute here for " God," " a stream of
tendency, not ourselves, that makes for righteous-
ness," would you attach any meaning at all to the
words of our Lord ? Would it mean anything to
say, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by
every word which proceedeth out of the stream of
tendency that makes for righteousness " ? Again,
when Mr. Arnold says that Easter celebrates Jesus
victorious over death by dying, and by dying to
re-live, what is the account which Jesus Himself
gives of this re-living ; is it Mr. Arnold's — that He

XLIII NEW CHRISTIAN CATECHISM 333

is to re-live "in the Eternal Order which never
dies"? No; it is that He is to re-live in His
Father, even as His disciples are to re-live in Him.
"Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no
more ; but ye see me : because I live, ye shall live
also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my
Father, and ye in me, and I in you." Does not
Mr. Arnold see that to substitute for " my Father "
" a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes
for righteousness," makes the purest nonsense of
these promises, and yet that in these promises
centres the celebration of Easter, and the essence
of that "victory over death," which the death of
Jesus was to bring 1 What Mr. Arnold truly calls
" the secret of Jesus," the secret of dying in order
to re-live, is a secret the whole significance of which
is contained in the life in God. This life in God *1
was assigned, not only as the special blessing of
purity, and as the special source of strength in
temptation, but as the infinite spring of joy which
eye has not seen nor ear heard, and which it has
not entered into the heart of man to conceive. Mr. ^
Arnold's catechism has but this one defect, — it
leaves out God. And if God be only a stream
of tendency, Jesus Christ, instead of being One
whose birth we ought to celebrate with imperish-
able joy, would be One who had misled mankind
into believing in the wildest and most blinding of
human illusions.

Mr. Arnold will now understand why I re-
proached him with lumping together all that is
supernatural in Judaism and Christianity under
the general head of " miracles." For my own part,
I am no less sure that miracles occur, than Mr.
Arnold is sure that they do not occur. But it is

334 matthew Arnold's xliu

not on the occurrence or non-occurrence of miracles
that the essential truth of Christianity hinges ; it is
on the reality or unreality of our Lord's personal
life in God. And when I speak of God, I need
hardly say that I do not use that great word in
Mr. Arnold's sense of an "eternal order," — which
without God may be eternal or not, and may be
order or not, for without Him it might be either
temporary order, or temporary disorder, or eternal
order, or eternal disorder, and no human being
could tell us which. I mean by God, what Jesus
Christ meant, not "a stream of tendency, not our-
selves, which makes for righteousness," for without
God such a stream of tendency, if it existed, might
be very much weaker than the stream of tendency,
not ourselves, which makes for unrighteousness, but
God in the only sense in which Christ ever uses the
term, namely, a being who both gives and asks the
purest love of which the heart can form any con-
ception, and who is wholly " unverifiable " by us
unless He verifies Himself in us. Without such a
being, Christ's beatitudes have no ground and no
meaning; without such a being, Lent and Easter
are but the mirage of the desert ; without such a
/being, there is no re -living for dying saviours,
except in that very idle and empty forrn^— fclie
posthumous fife ; and even of that re-living a very
large part would be mischievous, since it would
consist in leading others to wander about after the
same will-of-the-wisps which the exaltation of these
dying saviours' hearts had led them to follow.

What I press is this : — Mr. Arnold's criticism of
the Bible goes a great deal further than the exor-
cism of the miraculous from its pages, — it goes to
the exorcism of the supernatural, the exorcism of

XLIII NEW CHRISTIAN CATECHISM 335

God. Now, if the Bible is not a revelation of the \
charajcter^of God, it is nothing in the world but a
book the whole source of whose inspiration is
illusion. And if it be, as I hold, the true revela-
tion of the character of God, then the supernatural is
real ; and the questions as to the truth or falsehood
of individual miracles is as nothing compared with
the great fact that a source of spiritual power exists
beyond what we call Nature, and independent of
what we call natural laws, and that that power has
revealed itself to us. Mr. Arnold's fond desire to
keep the Bible without God, seems to me even
wilder than the Nihilists' desire to protect liberty
by destroying Governments, — for it is at least just
conceivable that all men should consent to respect
each other's liberty when government had dis-
appeared ; but if God be not a being to obey and
love, the Bible becomes a bewildering chaos of false
dreams and fancies and of distracting promises, on
which no real and sober life can be built-up.
Grant the supernatural, however, and Mr. Arnold
well kriows that he grants so much, that whether
we accept all the rest or not is comparatively a
detail. It is the supernatural with which he must \
dispense, if he wants to get back to scientific
naturalism of any sort or kind. It is the belief )
that the soul can commune with God, can make
itself heard by Him, can hear His word and obey
it, can feel His love and return it, which is so out
of keeping with the physical science of the day,
and so subversive of scientific maxims and exhorta-
tions. If Mr. Arnold, in deference to the modern
science, gets rid of that, he gets rid of the very
stock of which miracle is the fruit. If he retains
it, he retains that stock, and must not be surprised

u

336 NEW CHRISTIAN CATECHISM XLIII

to hear men saying that what are usually called
miracles, — results which really are due to the power
of spirit over physical nature, — have happened in
all ages, happen now, and will happen hereafter,
though not of course with the frequency and the
power with which they have happened in the wake
of a few divinely-gifted natures. The truth is that
Mr. Arnold wants to retain the right to strike-out
both right and left, — to pity the credulity which
revolts the science of the day, and to depreciate the
science which revolts the credulity. He is very
adroit in dealing blows at both ; but none the less
he does not prevail over either, for the simple
reason that he cannot make his own choice between
them. It is childish to give-in his adhesion to the
spiritual world, and yet to empty that world of all
which men have worshipped in it. It is childish to
give-in his adhesion to the scientific world, and yet
invest it with an atmosphere that physical science
utterly repudiates. Christ revealed God ; and

/without God, His teaching would be baseless.
Physical science reveals only law ; and if there be
•anything beyond law, its teaching is inadequate.
Mr. Arnold will accept neither the gospel of Christ
nor the gospel of Science, without excluding just
that which is characteristic of it as a gospel ; and
y so he falls between the two stools. His catechism
of Christianity without God will be accepted when-
ever agnostics begin to take to gnosis, and Christians
begin to ignore the one thread on which every
lesson of Christ's teaching is strung, — not sooner.
At present, Mr. Arnold fights " as one beating the
air."

XLIV

AGNOSTIC DREAMERS
1884

Nothing is more surprising than the extravagances
z of Agnostics. After taking all the pains in the
world to destroy the idols, as they think them, of
Christian worship, after carefully demonstrating that
a living God in the Christian's sense of the term is
a contradiction in terms, and that the life everlasting
cannot rationally be attributed to beings deprived
of their bodily existence in any sense but that of
posthumous activity, they immediately proceed to
substitute for these idols mere dolls of their own
fashioning and dressing, — dolls which they make no\
secret of having deliberately fashioned and dressed
up for the occasion, and which, nevertheless, they
dandle enthusiastically in their arms, and hold up
f to a sort of make-believe adoration, as the true and
" rational substitute for the old religions. Here, for
instance, is Mr. Frederic Harrison, the President
of the English Committee of the Positivist Society,
delivering a long address on the last night of the
old year, on " the Choir invisible " of the departed,
by the pious contemplation of whose posthumous
energy he seeks to kindle the gratitude of the living
s Z

338 AGNOSTIC DREAMERS xliv

to something more of "depth, and breadth, and
glow " than is usually accorded to them under the
influence of " the old sentiment and practice," — in
other words, I suppose, to deeper gratitude than is
usually accorded them by those who believe in " the
communion of Saints." As no one could suppose
that the mere dropping of a belief in the continued
spiritual life of these benefactors of the human race
would of itself add " depth, and breadth, and glow "
to the gratitude with which we recall their services,
I naturally turn with some curiosity to the elo-
quence of Mr. Harrison, in the hope of discovering
from what source he expects to draw these new
stores of deeper, broader, and more glowing grati-
tude. And even he does not affirm that those who
believe in the complete cessation of personal exist-
ence with death, feel additional gratitude to former
/ benefactors for having ceased to be. But as that is
apparently the whole of the intellectual and moral
difference between the ground of the Positivists 1
attitude towards the dead, and of our own, I am
puzzled as to the source of Mr. Harrison's hopes.
In point of fact it soon appears that Mr. Harrison
trusts for his fresh stores of enthusiasm about the
dead to rhetorical extravagances of language, and
nothing else. He declares that Positivists see the
dead " as still living around them, and as active as
they ever were in their life," — the activity, re-
member, being in his belief purely posthumous, and
therefore passive, — not activity of their own at all.
Nay, afterwards, Mr. Harrison goes, further still.
"We live by one another, we live again in one
another ; and often, indeed, much more after death
than before it " ; so that death not only need not, in
his opinion, diminish the amount of influence exerted

XLIV AGNOSTIC DREAMERS 339

over others, it may often positively increase it. Mr.
Harrison would, I suppose, explain himself as mean-
ing that where any one's characteristic influence on
his generation has been great, it grows and is multi-
plied with the growing number of persons to whom
it is transmitted, — Shakespeare's poetry, for ex-
ample, influencing the imaginations and feelings of
thousands of persons in this generation, for every
person so influenced in his own lifetime. That is
not only true, but a perfectly irrelevant truism.
Indeed, it is equally true of course, to say that the
posthumous influence of rays of light and heat radi-
ated by the sun in the ages of the past is at work
now in the organism of a larger number of living
people than ever in the past ; but we do not pre-
tend, on that account, that if the sun were ex-
tinguished to-morrow, it would be exerting greater
influence over our earth than ever before ; on the
contrary, we regard the sun's past light and heat
as blended indissolubly with the organisations into
which it then entered, and through which it has
been transmitted to our day. What should we
think of a man who gratefully recognised the energy
of the sun of the past, and the stars of the past, and
the burned coal and wood of the past, and kindled
himself into a " deeper and broader and more glow-
ing " gratitude for their past services than anybody
could feel who was actually warmed or lighted by
them now ? Would not some one at once say, —
' If life is to be spent in acts of homage towards all
the antecedent conditions of our present life, we
shall have no life left for ourselves to live ' ? And
yet how do individuals who once lived and have
absolutely ceased to live any personal life — who
enter into the life of the present only through their

340 AGNOSTIC DREAMERS xliv

influence on the people of the past, or through those
contrivances by which the people of the present per-
petuate the literature of the past, — differ from those
rays of the sun which first generated and then burnt
, up the fuel of our ancestors, and which exist for us
only through the transformations of energy by which
the generations are prepared? Where Christians
commemorate and are grateful to those who have
done great things for them, it is because they feel
gratitude not to the dead, but to the living, — to
those who are living with God, even if they are
not living with us, and who will once again be living
^with us when we pass from the visible scene. But
1 to be grateful to the used-up intellectual and moral
elements of the ancient world as they are trans-
formed in our modern world, to the manufactured
equivalents of the past as they are now found in
; combination with the present, is about as easy as
. to be grateful to the ancient forests which make our
modern coal-beds. The difference between the
Positivists* attitude towards the great dead and the
Christians' is this, — that while the former think of
them as the used-up materials of present-day life,
the latter not only recognise what they owe them
in the past, but think of them as still living an in-
tenser life than before, and as looking back on their
good and evil deeds in the past with that humble
gratitude or that bitter self-reproach which good
f and evil excite in ourselves. It is clear that there
is no fresh store of gratitude to be got out of the
,. belief that the objects of that gratitude have ceased
: to live a personal life, and have become only part
of the moral amalgam of history. The attempt to
f lash such artificial emotion into existence is an in-
trinsically absurd one ; and so the Positivists really

/

XLIV AGNOSTIC DREAMERS 341

feel it, for by way of enhancing the artificial grati-
tude which they desire us to feel towards the dead,
they tell us — for what reason, I know not, for
they never offer any — that the worthless and the
evil have no posthumous life, their worthlessness
and evil dying away, in " the tide of progress and
good." A more extraordinary doctrine was never
propounded by so-called philosophers. If worthless-
ness exist where worth might have existed, does it
not neutralise so much worth ? Does not worthless-
ness reproduce itself, as well as worth? Are not
the children of the bad apt to be bad too? Are
not the companions of the bad corrupted 1 Is not
the posthumous influence of falsehood, and hypocrisy,
and lust as certain in its extent as the posthumous
influence of truth, and candour, and purity ? I do
not hesitate to say that the Positivists, in their very
scant materials for a religion, and their deep con-
viction that mankind needs one, dress up excuses
for emotion at least as artificial as the dressed-up
dolls which are supposed to stimulate piety in
foreign churches. The ruined storehouses of the
intellectual and moral materials embodied in the
modern world can no more be permanently regarded
with gratitude after they are really ruined, than the
old shaft of a worked-out mine can be regarded with
gratitude after all the ore it contained has passed
into our manufactures. If, to use the favourite
sociological metaphor, the teaching of Socrates has
been assimilated by the tissues of our modern society,
and Socrates be only the name which denotes the
first spring of that teaching, why should Socrates be
regarded with more gratitude than that with which
we regard the sources of the Ehine, or the fossil
ancestor of the modern horse ?

^

1

I

342 AGNOSTIC DREAMERS XLIV

But even Mr. Frederic Harrison excites in me
less wonder than Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, in the
new number of the Nineteenth Centwy, after carefully
explaining to us how the belief in God began out of
superstitions about ghosts, and how even the purified
conception of God, as it is held by the highest minds
to-day, involves contradictions in terms, goes on to
explain to us that, nevertheless, the religion of the
Agnostic is a much nobler thing than the religion of
the Christian, and must become even nobler and
nobler, as Agnosticism comes to be built on a higher
and higher level of positive science. We must
admit, says Mr. Spencer, an unknowable energy,
which manifests itself alike in consciousness and in
the external world; but we must also admit that
human " explanation," when applied to that ultimate
reality, "is a word without a meaning," and this
even while we are compelled to think that there
[ must be an explanation. Well, all I can say is that,
I if this be so, religion is a dream. Not at all, says
Mr. Spencer ; on the contrary, religion will always
grow in its object-matter, and "the sphere of the
religious sentiment " will always increase. We ask
why, and we are told that this must be because
scientific wonder is deeper than ignorant wonder;
because the geologist is capable of realising better
how long it took to denude the rocks than any mere
rustic, or any traveller in search of the picturesque ;
because the astronomer who knows how big the spots
on the sun are, can wonder at the energy of solar
K heat to better purpose than the Psalmist who talked
of the heavens as declaring the glory of God and the
^firmament as showing His handiwork ; finally, be-
cause the thinker who knows the necessarily finite
character of intelligence, as he himself demonstrates

XLIV AGNOSTIC DREAMERS 343

it, must be much more deeply convinced of the
absolute insolubility of the great enigma, than the
credulous Christian who supposes that behind that
great enigma is an infinite Being, capable of reveal-
ing Himself, if He will. Well, suppose all that to be
so, how does that show that religion under such con-
ditions has a future ? Eeligion, to mean anything,
must mean worship, must mean an influence " trans-
figuring" — to use Mr. Spencer's pet phrase — the
will, and not merely puzzling the intellect. What
is it to me, to be able to realise how many thousands
of years the rocks were in getting themselves de-
nuded; how many earths would go into one solar spot; /
how utterly insoluble the great enigma is ? Even
if I could realise these things better than any geolo-
gist alive, better than the most original of the

jkstronomers, better than Mr. Spencer himself, I ,
should be no nearer a religion. If "the Infinite/
and Eternal Energy " is simply beyond the reach of
either vision or thought, and I can hope for no more
living aid from it than from the unknown quantity j
of an insoluble equation, the " sentiment " which it
must excite in me cannot but be the most barren
and empty in the world. It comes very much, so
far as I can see, to the old Oriental notion of " Om,"
— as absolute being and also absolute nothingness.
If God is righteous in any sense in which .1 may
be righteous, however humbly, then religion means
something, and worship a great deal. If God is
love in any sense in which I can love, however
feebly, then religion means something, and wor-
ship a great deal. But as for the emotion which
I should feel towards the inexplicable, when I try

. in vain to find for it an explanation, it must be an
emotion of a purely paralysing kind, if it is to

344 AGNOSTIC DREAMERS XLIV

have any characteristic influence at all. So far
as religion is worth a farthing, it is founded on
a real vision of what is far above us, and, never-
theless, more or less within our reach, and on an
intense yearning to reach after it. But as for the
emotion springing out of the vision of a mighty
mist, and the conviction that a mighty mist it must
always remain, it is a pure confusion of language to
call it religious emotion at all. It is at best a state
of dreary amazement at the infinitude and eternity
of a blank, — without influence on the will or the affec-
tions, on the individual or society, on the present or
on the future. Positivists and Agnostics at least
are bound not to be dreamers, yet few dreamers
seem to me to dream dreams so wild as the Posi-
tivists and Agnostics of the present day.

XLV

GOD, AND IDEAS OF GOD

1880

•

Dr. Carpenter, in a letter published three weeks
ago, on the 24th of July, maintained with much
vigour that " every believer's God is neither more
nor less than his own idea of God," and that growth
in religious life is nothing in the world but such
growth in man's own conception of moral good as
enables him gradually to " project upon infinity " a
higher and higher conception of himself. In two or
three remarkable letters which have since been pub-
lished, especially in that of Mr. Moggridge, published
on the 31st of July, this opinion was challenged,
and so limited and modified as to be reconciled with
a belief with which, in the strong form in which
Dr. Carpenter stated it, it appeared to me to be quite
inconsistent — though, of course, in Dr. Carpenter's
opinion, it was perfectly consistent with it, and is
proved to be so by the letter published on August
the 14th — I mean, the belief in the reality and
independence of the divine agency. For, of course, \
if God be for us nothing more than our own idea of \
God, there is nothing acting freely upon us from
outside our own finite understanding which tends to

t

346 GOD, AND IDEAS OF GOD XLV

widen and elevate that idea, — a conception fatal to
true Theism. I was from the first very sure that
this was not what Dr. Carpenter meant. And he
now clearly admits, as freely indeed as the corre-
spondent of last week, that if a child's father were
not something very much above the child's idea of
its own father, the child would be very badly off for
a father indeed. And so, too, the difference between
an infinite Being whom man only faintly takes in,
and man's faint idea of Him as "projected on infinity,"
is the whole difference between God and Ludwig
Feuerbach's gigantic, .shadow of man. The one is an
inexhaustible life^ which besets us behind and before,
and is constantly pressing in on our own, so as to
compel us to open our hearts wider and wider ; the
other is a notion of our own making, which will
only grow as we grow and if we grow, and which, in
any case, cannot do for us anything beyond what in
reality we do for ourselves. It is all the difference
between a living being who is constantly helping us
to apprehend, what unassisted we could not appre-
hend, and a philosophic view, which may indeed
widen from time to time, but only as we get time
and leisure and capacity to reconsider and extend it.
Dr. Carpenter, of course, will say that he never for
a moment intended to deny that it is God Himself
whose agency modifies and expands our human
" ideas " of Him, nor that our ideas should always
be kept open and elastic, so as to be recast at once
under every new experience which God may provide
for us. Aid I am quite aware, as no one doubts
Dr. Carpenter's earnest Theism, that the issue between
us, momentous as it is, is at bottom rather one as to
the best form of expressing what we mean, than as
to the thing itself. But then, sometimes a great

XIV GOD, AND IDEAS OF GOD 347

deal of truth of belief is involved in choosing the
best mode of expressing our belief. What at one
time led physical science more astray than the mis-
taken antithesis between heat and cold, heaviness
and lightness, as though either of these opposites
expressed something of a kind essentially antagonistic
to the other ? — yet this was at bottom an inexact
mode of expressing actual observation. And so, too,
what has led our religious life more astray than the
notion that God is for each of us only what we have
recognised Him to be, and that the stress of our
religion, therefore, should be thrown upon clearing
up our own finite notions of God rather than on
practically following His mysterious inward guidance,
a guidance of the true rationale of which even the
most lofty intellects can give themselves so inade-
quate an account ? The great difference, I take it,
between the mode of looking at things which starts
from " the idea of God " formed by each man as if it
were the equivalent of God Himself, and that, on
the other hand, which recognises that the divine
agency is infinitely wider and more various in its
influences and its pressure upon us than anything
of which our finite intelligence can give an account,
is this : that the former tends to a purely self- %
conscious religion, which never takes a step until the \
mind has given itself a clear account of the principles I
which justify that step ; while the latter tends to a i
faith that often goes in advance of what it can see, j
because it believes in a guidance higher than the
human intellect can at present grasp, drawing us I
towards what the human intellect will creep slowly ;
after, and perhaps, for ages more, rather throw J
doubts upon than verify.

Of course, it will be said, as it always has been

348 GOD, AND IDEAS OF GOD XLV

said, that this conception of God as acting upon us
by a great many more influences than we can appre-
hend or analyse, tends directly to fanaticism, pietism,
and all kinds of dangerous mysticism. As Dr.
Carpenter has well pointed out, there is hardly any
religious mischief going, which has not been justified
by insane intuitions of divine commands; and, of
course, it is no news to anybody that those who allow
themselves to be guided by influences which they
cannot clearly define and explain, are, so far as that
goes, and if they know nothing more of these in-
fluences than that they cannot explain them, more
likely to be guided in the wrong direction than in
the right. But then no one who believes in divine
revelation at all, thinks that, because we are unable
clearly to discriminate what it is which assures us of
the divine hand, there is nothing which can so assure
us. The child cannot discriminate in the least what
it is which teaches him to rely on his father, but,
none the less, he is quite right in so relying ; and
if he did not so rely, it would be all the worse for
)iim. What I maintain is, that every great religious
advance has been due to following some guidance
which went far beyond what the people so guided
• could at the time clearly comprehend or rationally
"justify, and yet which, acting upon the teaching of
/ their whole inward nature, they felt to be a guidance
^better than their own, and worthy to be trusted, as
proceeding from a higher source. Take the Jewish
legislation, for instance, which so carefully provided
against idolatry in the midst of idolatrous instincts
of the most potent kind, — which so carefully provided
strict limitations on the accumulative instincts of the
Jews in relation to property, accumulative instincts
which have always been stronger amongst the Jews

XLV GOD, AND IDEAS OF GOD 349

than amongst other nations, — which so early and so
solemnly forbade covetousness, as a sin of the first
order, and that among a people peculiarly exposed
to covetousness. Now was not the Jewish legislation
in all these cases quite beyond the rational justifica-
tion, in any clear intellectual sense, of the people
who were called upon to obey it ? And yet was
there not enough in the heart and mind of the people
to make it inexplicably certain to them — though by
no means explicably clear — that they ought to obey
these laws ? It was the same with the later prophets,
when they protested so powerfully against holding
by the letter of the sacrificial law, and demanded
instead the divine spirit of self-sacrifice, — the sacrifice
of the will, instead of the mere sacrifice of expensive
external dues and of conventional earthly observ-
ances. Was not the teaching of Isaiah far in advance
of the mind of the people whose obedience Isaiah
demanded ? But though far in advance of their
mind, was there not enough in their hearts and minds
to justify that demand, even though they could not
explain how it was justified ? And so, too, with the
teaching of Christ. Do not His Apostles tell us
expressly that they misunderstood His language,
that they often did not even follow what He was
driving at in His teaching, that they put the most
earthly interpretations on His promises, and pro-
tested passionately against His purposes f Yet they
followed Him, and though in a sense blindly, yet in
a much better sense not blindly at all, because though
they knew not what they did, there was something
in them, and that the highest thing in them, which
assured them that what they did was good. Well, \
what I say is that the power to trust to this spirit of ,
God which leads men in advance of their " ideas of

350 GOD, AND IDEAS OF GOD xlv

( God," is of the very essence of religious develop-
V rnent ; that if men had not felt that they must obey
jB, voice which prompted them to break through the
i limits imposed by their " ideas of God," we should
, never have had religious advance at all. Every
religious reformation has broken through the best
and most approved notions of the day about religion,
and has broken through these without its own
characteristic ideas having first mastered the intel-
lects and enlarged the understandings of those who
made up the bulk of the reforming party. Religious
advance has always consisted in moving onward to a
divine beckoning, and that before the rational justi-
fication of that movement had presented itself to the
people. Patriarch, prophet, apostle, — not one of
them, if we can trust history at all, could be said to
have acted in conformity with his " idea of God " ;
every one of them was startled by what he was
prompted to do, as by a novelty which involved
falsehood to his most sacred traditions and concep-
tions of God ; and though he knew he ought to do
it, he did it, shrinking and wondering, and at a loss
to justify to his own intellect what he was about.
This is just the difference between trusting in God,
and trusting in your own " idea of God " : the man
who trusts in the former is ready to move out
beyond the field of his own ideas, at the impulse of
the living Power who is greater than those ideas,
and who is always trying to show us the insufn-
* . ciency of them ; while the man who trusts only in
the latter, is kept a prisoner in the vicious circle
of his own inadequate notions. God can enlarge
our ideas of Him, can show us how imperfect they
are, by gently leading us beyond them, as when
He taught St. Peter, while priding himself in his

XLV GOD, AND IDEAS OF GOD 351

horror of what was "common and unclean," that
what God had cleansed he was not to regard as
common ; but an " idea of God " can never enlarge x
itself, and has in itself no principle of life and /
movement.

If it be said that this view leads directly to a *\
superstitious and fanatical trust in imaginary " calls"
and " voices," I utterly deny it. Such fanaticism or
superstition always consists in the false emphasis laid
on some fanciful coincidence, such as an illusion of '
the senses, or the wording of a text of Scripture that
the eye alights on in a moment of indecision, or a
dream, or vision, or anything that is specially im-
pressive to some susceptible part of our lower nature.
What I maintain is that all such dispositions to
attach vast importance to a minute aspect of mere
circumstance is unhealthy, morbid, insane. But, on
the other hand, it is clearly false to suppose that we
can safely trust our whole nature to the guidance of
our clearest " ideas." There is much more in man
than he has ever understood, and those have never
been the greatest men who have acted solely on the
light of their " ideas," instead of trusting in a guid-
ance which led them upwards, even in despite of the
fixed protest of some of their ideas. Only you must
feel, by the evidence of your whole nature, that it is
upwards you are being borne, and not sideways or
downwards by a mere caprice of unhealthy instinct.
And of what constitutes such evidence there is, of
course, no abstract test whatever. It is just the
difference between true wisdom and poor self-con-
fidence, that the one recognises what is highest, —
recognises true revelation, — even when it draws us
away from our preconceived notions ; while the other
adheres obstinately to its own fixed ideas, — and will

352 GOD, AND IDEAS OF GOD XLY

not give them up even for a nobler life. The differ-
ence between trusting in God and trusting in an
" idea of God," is the difference between waiting for
guidance from above, and preparing carefully for
your own ascent from beneath.

/

;

XLVI

THE LIMITS OF FREE-WILL
1892

The case of the " Conscious>Automaton," if he can
be said to have a case, does not certainly consist in
the conspicuously false analysis which he makes of
the phenomena of volition, but in the tendency of
the free-willist to exaggerate greatly the sphere
within which there can be said to be moral freedom.
It is perfectly true that nothing can be conceived
that is more important and more significant than
the part which free volition plays in the drama of
human life. It represents the woof where the con-
stituents of our life over which we have no control
represent the warp. It impresses more or less of
deliberate purpose on the whole wealth of human
faculty, and stamps with its seal even the passive
sufferings of which our existence is partly made up.
The voluntary efforts by which we mould what would
otherwise be the drift of our characters, whether in
doing or in enduring, to our higher purposes, are all
unintelligible without free-will. And yet it is true
that probably of all the minutes of an average life,
barely one in a day dates a fresh volition, though,
of course, very many date the direct consequences
s 2 a

354 THE LIMITS OF FREE-WILL XLVI

of former volitions which have long been incorpo-
rated in our habits and assimilated into the very
\ tissue of our active or passive moods. It is effort,
and effort only, which betrays free-will. A mind
that is the sport of its various desires, and that
yields itself witHbut a struggle to the resultant of
its contending desires, is no more conscious of effort
than a straw which dances on the eddies of a whirl-
pool, and is borne hither and thither as those eddies
may determine, is conscious of effort. We may all
of us satisfy ourselves of this by carefully watching
ourselves during the conflict of various desires and
emotions, when we deliberately give ourselves up to
the spontaneous operation of those complex feelings.
We are conscious of the vehemence of some, of the
steady persistence of others, of the submergence and
disappointment of those which are overwhelmed, of
the victory and gratification of those which carry
the day. But we are not conscious of effort, unless
we ourselves bring out of our own will and purpose
some new force which allies itself with one or more
of our desires, and which forcibly suppresses, or at
least subdues and mortifies, those which rage against
/our deliberate purpose. Effort is self-created force
\ from within, — from within the very innermost source
\of personality. It often gives the victory to the
desire which is intrinsically the weakest, and defeats
the passion which is intrinsically the richest in
v spontaneous vigour. But efforts of this heroic kind
are rarely, perhaps, as numerous as the years of a
human life ; and even genuine but much less costly
efforts are numbered rather by days than hours or
minutes. Of those vital conditions over which we
neither have, nor even so much as imagine that we
have, any control, we can enumerate a host without

XLVI

THE LIMITS OF FREE-WILL

355

even a moment's hesitation. No man supposes that
he is responsible for his own physical constitution,
for his own keenness or defectiveness of sight or
hearing, for his height or his descent, or for his
hereditary tastes and prepossessions. Nobody sup-
poses that he can be independent of the climatic
influences in which he was born, or the scenery and
human associations which have moulded his habits
and expectations. No man supposes that by the
exercise of his own free-will he could have supplied
all the defects of a bad education, and cancelled all
the evil influences of vicious companionship. No
man supposes that he could have made his original
faculties and instincts different from what they
were, or that he could have warded off all the
attacks of disease, or materially altered the character
of his earliest affections. All these influences are of
the very warp of our nature, and are conditions as
determinate as the solar light and heat and the
atmospheric and magnetic currents by which our
bodies are affected, and our perceptions and sensa-
tions developed. Free volition starts and sustains
many a new exercise of energy, alters essentially
many a habit of thought, and many a sphere of
practical activity ; but it can only work on ' a
mighty web of determinate conditions so numerous
and so complex, that it is safe to attribute the
actual complexion of any man's mind and character
to a thousand potent influences over which he has
no control, for every one which he either has
actually moulded or might have moulded by his
own free-will.

And I may note especially that the most con-
spicuous parts of character, those on which the
charm or repulsiveness of character depends, are

\

j

*/

356 THE LIMITS OF FREE-WILL xlvi

very seldom completely, or even in any large
degree, under the control of the will. The sweetest
and most affectionate persons are usually sweet
and affectionate by nature rather than by virtue of
any self -education or self-control. No man who
was naturally secretive and self- occupied ever be-
came characteristically frank and ingenuous by any
amount of effort that he could apply in the period
of this brief existence, though, of course, many a
one of this type has become far less secretive and
self-occupied, far more nearly of the type at which
he aims, than he was in his childhood and youth.
No man who was by nature timid, and even
cowardly, ever succeeded in making himself dis-
tinctly bold and remarkable for courage within the
period of this life, though such a one may and often
does succeed in stifling his timidities, and forcing
his naturally cowardly impulses into the back-
ground, — into the suppressed and conquered region
of his life. Still, it remains true that most of those
/ who particularly attract and fascinate their fellow-
men, attract and fascinate them not by any qualities
which the exercise of free-will has given them, but
by the beauty of inborn and inherited dispositions,
and that most of those who repel us by their hard-
ness and dryness and self-consciousness and vanity
and pride, repel us by virtue of dispositions which
they could no more extirpate than they could extir-
pate the faults of their physical constitution or raise
the temperature of their blood.

How, then, it may be asked, is the part which
free-will plays in the life of man so all-important, if
it can only modify, and that not always with very
much visible effect, the original constitution which
nature and circumstance and inheritance combined

™^~mr^^*^^^^—^sm^9wws^^^mm—^

XLVI THE LIMITS OF FREE-WILL 357

to confer ? It is all-important, because it is the one
helm by which we guide our course, by which we
impose the tendencies which change our characters
for the better or the worse, by which we arrest
degeneration and stimulate aspiration, by which we
determine whether the higher or lower impulses of
our nature shall have their way, whether we shall
serve the desires and aims which most exalt us, or
the desires and aims which most debase us, — in a
single word, by which we become responsible beings.
It is quite true that in the case of so short a life as
that which men pass on earth, they cannot revolu-
tionise entirely the very grain of their character.
If that grain is coarse, they may render it somewhat
finer ; if it is fine, they may make it finer still ; but
they can only work on the conditions into which
they are born, and can neither eradicate all that
they find faulty, nor, as a rule, even transfigure the
surrounding influences and circumstances which
tend to aggravate those faults. Still, everything is
saved if responsibility for the limited changes of
which life admits is saved, and that is precisely
what the gift of free-will really saves. We are not
responsible for the conditions, favourable or un-
favourable, with which we start in life ; but we are
responsible for the full use and development of the \
favourable conditions, and the attenuation and j
repression of the unfavourable. The petty mind
cannot suddenly spring into grandeur and magna-
nimity ; but the petty mind may become fair and
open to the knowledge of its own stiffness and
limitations. The ambitious mind cannot suddenly
abolish the temptations which spring from its own
restlessness and audacity, but it may force itself
to see the manifold snares and sins to which these

358 THE LIMITS OP FREE-WILL XLVI

audacities lead, and so bank up its eagerness and its
insatiable cravings, as to control and turn to a
nobler use the imprisoned force of which it can dis-
pose. The strict limitations of free-will are visible
on every side. Free-will is no magician to trans-
form by a wave of the wand sullen passions into
exalted affections, or plodding industry into flashing
genius, — a hut into a palace, or a rusty knife into a
Damascene scimitar. But it is free-will, and free-
will alone, that can transmute mere graceful disposi-
tions into high and steadfast character ; that can
imbue the finer feelings with the depth and con-
stancy of deliberate purpose; that, in short, can
saturate the automatic spiritual vitality of childhood
and youth with the full personality of those fixed
intentions and motives which lift instinct and im-
pulse into the loftier region of divine life.

XLVII

THE LIMITS OF DIVINE POWER

1897

A correspondent to the Spectator suggests that the
enigma of the terrible catastrophes which so often
eclipse the faith or startle the consciences of men,
like the earthquake of Lisbon in the last century,
or that of Krakatoa in this, or such disasters as the
great fire in the church at Santiago, when so many
hundreds of women perished, or the gruesome tragedy
in the Roman Catholic bazaar the other day in
Paris, may practically have no solution beyond this,
— that the Creator, in forming man out of the dust
of the earth, may have set limits to His own power,
and accepted for Himself a set of conditions which
render it necessary for Him to choose between alter-
natives either one of which involves what seem to us
enormous* evils and even horrors, so that which-
ever alternative He actually selects must appear
an act which a loving and omnipotent being would
have rejected as absolutely inconsistent with His
character as Revelation presents it to us. I cannot
say that this seems to me at all an applicable ex-
planation of such tragedies as I have named, though
I fully admit, and even maintain, that such an

360 THE LIMITS OF DIVINE POWER XLVII

/ idea as that of unqualified omnipotence is inconceiv-
able as involving the most absolute contradictions.
Thinkers who suppose that God can overrule the
laws of thought, and create a being for whom even
moral or mathematical contradictions are perfectly
reconcilable, for whom two and two make either
four or five, as God pleases, or both four and five, if
He so rules it; for whom evil is good and good
evil, if God chooses; thinkers who suppose that
God, if He will, can both bring into existence a
human being, and yet not bring him into existence,

1 seem to me to confound all the distinctions without
which life would not be life at all. Indeed, they
both assert and deny in the very same breath
assumptions which any sort of communion between

^God and man absolutely involves. Omnipotence does
not and cannot mean that it is in the power even
of the Creator of the Universe to mean and not to
mean the very same thing at the very same time. If
it were so, Omnipotence and the absolute extinction
of all power would be perfectly compatible. How
could a Revelation be possible at all if the very
contents of Revelation were born of a mere breath
of caprice which the very next act of the revealer
might dissipate ? God would not be God if there
were any "variableness or shadow of turning" in
Him, much more if at His own choice He could, as
it were, annihilate Himself for us by showing us
that He can unteach us all that He has taught, just
because it is His arbitrary pleasure so to do. A
God who could be holy or unholy at His own
pleasure would in no sense whatever be God, but
would be more than incomprehensible, inappre-
hensible, a mystery of self-contradiction. Any
being who could profess to unveil to us his own

XLVII THE LIMITS OP DIVINE POWER 361

nature, and then unveil to us that it had never been
unveiled, would be the very opposite of divine, — a
bewilderment, not the author of light. So far I
entirely go with the correspondent to the Spectator
that the divine nature does not cease to be neces-^
sarily definite only because it is infinite. When /
our Lord tells us that to God "all things are
possible," He certainly does not mean that it is
possible for Him to make Himself impossible, to be
at once good and evil, light and darkness. The\
sense in which Christ declared that to God all \
things are possible, was the sense in which it is
easy for God to do what is in full accordance with I
His own nature but far beyond the possibilities of [
man's ; not the sense in which it is possible for I
Him both to be Himself and not to be Himself ; in J
other words, so absolutely omnipotent as to have
no definite nature of His own to communicate or
reveal.

But I cannot go with the Spectator's correspondent
when he appears to suggest that God may have
submitted Himself to limits which really place the \
attribute which has been specially called His Provi-
dence in relation to man's life, utterly beyond His
own reach. If in any sense God could not have
prevented such a disaster as the Santiago or the
Paris tragedy, even if He would, then such teaching
as our Lord's, that "not a sparrow falleth to the
ground without him," and that the hairs of our
heads are all numbered, is, if not erroneous, at least
thoroughly misleading ; for its obvious drift and its
actual effect have been, and still are, to inspire the
most absolute trust in God's personal love and care.
And if in choosing to subject us to material laws
He has put it beyond His power either to guide our

362 THE LIMITS OF DIVINE POWER " xlvii

wanderings in the world, or to inspire us with the
courage and presence of mind requisite to prevent
such tragedies as the frightful horrors to which I
have referred, surely all our Lord's teaching as to
the both mighty and minute Providence of God is
a teaching the natural and actual effect of which
cannot be justified. Practically speaking, all that
is essential to justify these lessons is the existence
of real communion between God and man, so that
the divine voice which instigates and controls our
actions is to be recognised as a real influence of
the first magnitude in the ordering of our life. If
that is a real influence, then the great doctrine of
Providence is true, and is at the very foundation
of all human religion. If it is a mere illusion,
the assumption of almost all the greater religions of
the world is a false assumption, and we can no
longer venture to believe that in God "we live
and move and have our being." In that case we
are shut out from intercourse with Him by the very
laws of the material bodies that He has given us.
Now, as it appears to me, it is of the very essence
of the teaching of Eevelation, and. not only of the
highest ultimate Eevelation, but of that earlier
Eevelation which is contained in the songs of the
Psalmists and the declarations of the Prophets, that
whatever may be the riddle of the material universe,
it is one which can be far better solved by the
divine half-lights which penetrate its obscurities
than by the scientific keys with which human study
and observation furnish us. "The Lord is my
shepherd, I shall not want," "His name shall be
called wonderful, counsellor, the mighty God, the
everlasting father, the Prince of Peace, and the
government shall be upon his shoulder," are teach-

XLVII THE LIMITS OF DIVINE POWER 363

ings in which the mind that attends to the inner
voice, settles down, even after all that study can
do to classify and search out the secondary causes
at work in our universe has been done, and done
successfully. It is the teaching of the conscience
and of the spiritual insight, which shines through
all the obscurities of the outward framework by
which we are enveloped. Nothing can be more \
certain than that the whole course of the develop- J
ment of the Jewish conception of God fully recog-
nised the difficulty of reconciling the physical order
of creation with the spiritual testimony of the
conscience with reference to God's immanent inter-
course with the soul of man, and yet insisted that
the two could and must be reconciled. The very
subject of the Book of Job was that, and that alone.
And many of the Psalms and large passages in the
greater Prophets concern themselves with the same
problem. " Oh that thou wouldst rend the heavens,
that thou wouldst come down, that the mountains
might flow down at thy presence," says the later
Isaiah, as though he were overwhelmed by the
opaque though feebly translucent veil with which
the physical universe often seems to hide the pres-
ence of God and to weaken the testimony of the
conscience and spirit of man to the divine authority.
But none the less that testimony is constantly re-
peated with greater and greater emphasis, till at
last we are told plainly that the divine light
" shineth in darkness and the darkness compre-
hendeth it not," — the darkness being of our own
making, not of God's. I heartily believe that there
is no omnipotence which can at once reveal the
divine nature and yet ignore the very characteristics
which make it divine. An omnipotence that can at

\

\

364 THE LIMITS OF DIVINE POWER XLVII

will establish the great foundations of all mental
and moral order, and yet at will dissolve them only
to demonstrate its own arbitrary power, would be
an omnipotence that exploded the essential meaning
of divine power. But none the less, divine power
without divine providence, divine power which
found itself so fatally manacled by the physical
conditions of the universe that it could not inspire
in men the deep sense of divine love and grace,
would be rather divine weakness than divine power.
And it seems to me remarkable that it is the very
catastrophes which most amaze and paralyse mere
lookers-on, that also elicit specimens of that highest
kind of piety and heroism best fitted to awaken our
wonder and awe. Such examples as those set by
the Duchesse d'Alencon at one end of the social
scale, and the poor plumber who rescued so many
victims from the burning Paris bazaar at the other
end of the social scale, and who nearly lost his
reason in the effort, are the best possible proofs
that it is not those who are really full of piety and
enthusiasm who lose their religion in the moment
of supreme peril. The very terrors which paralyse
the faith of mere onlookers, stimulate the trust
which has been fostered in the hearts of true
piety.

XLVIII

HUMAN SYMPATHIES AND RELIGIOUS CAPACITY

1892

In discussing last week the distinct character of
religious capacity, I assumed that there is a close
analogy between the effect of human sympathy in x
quickening the insight of those who possess it into
human character, and the effect of divine sympathy,
— of what' I may with reverence term sympathy
with God, — in quickening the insight into the
spiritual meaning of the divine ordinances and the
various paradoxes of human life. Indeed, the only
theologian, properly so called, among the twelve who
received the commission to preserve and publish the
teaching of Christ, gives the best possible authority
for the assumption that there is a very close analogy
between the effect of human and divine sympathy.
" He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen,
how can he love God whom he hath not seen ? "
And yet there is a good deal in human life which
seems to tell just the other way. I believe that \
there is no more fertile source of religious scepticism
than what I may truly call a tender and passionate
love for man. How many cases have we not had
of late years of a philanthropy like Eobert Owen's, ,

366 HUMAN SYMPATHIES XLVIII

which was all the more generous from his complete
rejection of any sort of individual life or spiritual
judgment beyond the grave? That attitude of
' mind is really systematised in the teaching of the
\Positivists. The more they reject as an altogether
baseless assumption the faith in God, the more
lavishly they pour out on Humanity the rapture of
feeling which they no longer render to the Creator. It
might almost be said of many of our modern philan-
thropists, that it is the very depth and earnestness
of their love for the brother whom they have seen
which renders them indignant at the suggestion that
there is any being in whose image they are created
who has the power to save man from the manifold
sufferings to which he is subjected, and who yet in
multitudes of instances refuses to wield that power.
How can any one, they ask, who truly loves the
brother whom he hath seen, manage to love the God
whom he hath not seen, but who, if He really has
the omnipotence ascribed to Him, permits, — nay,
brings about by His own agency, — all these horrors
of earthquake, and volcano, and flood, and avalanche,
and innumerable tragic destinies of other kinds,
• which it almost breaks human hearts to contemplate,
and yet which it does not apparently even grieve
the divine heart to bring about? If love of one's
brother be the first condition for true love of God,
how is it that God does so much, which if it were
deliberately done by men, would be most simply
described as being a manifestation, not of love but
of hate, not of mercy but of cruelty ? Surely it is by
no means difficult to understand why sympathy with
men so often eclipses and extinguishes sympathy with
God. Yet St. John tells us that without the former
the latter is simply impossible. And yet without

XLVIII AND RELIGIOUS CAPACITY 367

the latter the former seems to be not only possible
enough, but not unfrequently unusually vivid and
impetuous. What was Shelley's atheism but a
passionate protest against the inexorable severity \
of the divine government? What even was such
ordinary and commonplace atheism as the late Mr.
Bradlaugh's but a more materialistic and less refined
protest of the same kind. There is surely a sense
in which sympathy with men, far from leading
directly to sympathy with God, renders this sym-
pathy difficult, and in some cases all but impossible.
Such a sense there certainly is, and yet it is none
the less true that a sympathy with God which is not
founded on sympathy with men is a spurious and
irreligious, not a genuinely religious, emotion. It
is, of course, in the human character of the Divine
Son that we must look for the true kind of sym-
pathy with God, and what do we find there ? The
tenderest human sympathy, the sympathy which
vibrated to every pang of human nature, which felt
the hardness of the fate of those eighteen upon
whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, just
as we feel the hardship of the fate of those who
perish in the scalding water of an exploded boiler,
or the scores who are swept to destruction by a
bursting glacier. Indeed, this sympathy was so
strong, that it led Him to forbid His disciples to
regard such a fate as a divine judgment on excep-
tional sin. Yet far from shrinking at these
mysterious and unearned sufferings, He predicted
the steady multiplication of such mysterious calami-
ties amongst His own people unless they should
repent of the hardness of heart which rendered them
inaccessible to His appeals. There was nothing
which He condemned more severely than the readi-

/

368 HUMAN SYMPATHIES XLVIII

ness to see the vengeance of God in the sufferings
of His countrymen, — for example, in the exceptional
privations of the man born blind, and in the sudden
death of those whose blood Pilate mingled with the
sacrifices. His heart thrilled with their pangs, just
as His heart thrilled with delight at the self-sacrifice
of the poor widow who cast two mites into the
treasury, or with the grief of the widow who was
following her only son to the grave. But these
sufferings, though they moved His tenderest com-
passion, did not appal Him. He felt no disposition
to arraign the goodness of God because these mys-
terious pangs fell upon His people. On the con-
trary, He foresaw their increase, their gathering
into tempests and hurricanes of darker and deadlier
omen, if the effect of them should not be to soften
the hearts of His people towards God. His sym-
pathy with God was a mightier form of His sym-
pathy with man. He entered deeply into the
sufferings of the blind and the halt and the palsied
and the insane, and was ever ready to heal them ;
but He entered more deeply still into the love of
Him who inflicted these sufferings with the purpose
of bringing human nature back into the attitude in
which it could receive most humbly and simply the
impress of the divine mind. It never even appears
to have occurred to His human nature that what, if
purposely inflicted by man, would have implied the
deepest malignity in man, implied, when inflicted
by God, anything but the purpose to turn the hearts
of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just. For
He knew that though he who inflicts suffering,
seeing nothing beyond the suffering which he inflicts,
is evil-minded, there is a prophetic knowledge in
the government of the world which transforms, and

XLVIII AND RELIGIOUS CAPACITY 369

indeed transubstantiates, its most fearful calamities
into possibilities and even promises of a totally new
kind of blessing, a blessing which reverses the
apparent significance of pain, and stimulates the
latent core of goodness, even where happiness only
acted on it like an opiate, or stifled it in the vivid
ripples of distracting sensation. " Blessed are ye
when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and
do all manner of evil against you, falsely, for my
sake," was not the saying of One whose foresight
was limited to the immediate pangs which He knew
that His followers would be compelled to endure.
His sympathy with the good in man was too keen
to render it possible that He should overlook that
greater good lurking in the heart of the mighty
calamities of the world, which makes of overwhelm-
ing and even overawing anguish a transfiguring,
power competent to elicit the highest elements of
the human character. He who could see through
the temptation and even the temporary fall of Peter,
the growth of something higher and sterner and
steadier in St. Peter's character, could see, of course,
through the shock of national or even of terrestrial
catastrophes the gleam of brighter and more constant
and nobler qualities in man. In Christ, at all
events, it was not for want of the more transient
and, so to say, superficial sympathies, that the
human tragedy so completely failed to blind Him to
the light beyond. He showed by almost every one
of His mighty works how tenderly He entered into
the immediate pang when He beheld it, and how
ready He was to assuage it. All the more, however,
He felt, as it is impossible for mere man to feel,
the beneficence latent in the most heart-rending
calamities, the secret meaning in the most prolonged
a 2b

I

370 HUMAN SYMPATHIES XLVIII

and enigmatic sufferings. His sympathy with man
was so deep, that it contained the prophecy of what
man should become under the purifying and strength-
ening fire of divine discipline. What Matthew
Arnold called " the secret of Jesus," was simply the
knowledge that willing acquiescence in any weakness
of divine origin is in itself a source of strength, that
willing acquiescence] in suffering of divine origin is
i in itself a source of blessing. This was not a secret
which any human being not created entirely in the
divine image, and not fully conscious of having
been so created, could have guessed. For no philo-
sophical attempt was ever more disastrous than
Matthew Arnold's to divorce that "secret" from
the permanent and immanent divine inspiration
which could alone have breathed it into any human
ear, and to make it the mere lesson of human " ex-
perience." A lesson of human experience, no doubt
it is, but a lesson which is inextricably bound up
with that other lesson, that the weak things of the
world, and the things which are not, are so moulded
by the power of the creative spirit as to bring to
naught the things which are, and that without the
vivifying touch of that creative spirit, they remain
just as inert and dead as are human genius, pride,
and presumption in their splendid failures, their
magnificent imbecilities.

XLIX

THE CHRISTIAN ETHICS OF FORBEARANCE

1894

In a very interesting little book on Christian Ethics,
by Professor Knight, of St. Andrews, which Mr.
Murray has just published, I find an admirable

\

description of the virtues and the sins on which ]
Christ's teaching lays most stress, and especially, of '
course, on that contrast between Pantheism and that
assertion of the interpenetration of the human with
the divine, — of the coexistence in real humanity of
a vivid human life with the divine nature which
enfolds it, — which is, of all the characteristics of
Christ's teaching, the most characteristic. " Hebraic
theism," says Professor Knight, " pure and simple,
looking upon the Divine and the human as two
natures standing apart, with a wide chasm between
them — natures between whom a contract could be
made, or a covenant adjusted — did not fully recog-
nise the counter truth of the unity of the two.
Pantheism threw emphasis on that truth, but it
accomplished the union of the two natures — the
finite and the Infinite — by silencing one of them, or
extinguishing it. If the finite disappears and is lost
to view, there can be no reconciliation of the one

372 THE CHRISTIAN ETHICS OF FORBEARANCE XLIX

with the other." But, while Professor Knight recog-
nises fully the great contrast between the Pantheism
which practically extinguishes human limitations,
and that sympathy of God with man which main-
tains, enforces, and refines without extinguishing
them, I do not think that he lays enough stress on
one of the most impressive of the aspects of Christ's
teaching and practice, namely, that which I may
perhaps call the duty not merely of recognising the
infinite tenderness of God for man, and His divine
sympathy with our limitations, but in some feeble
and germinal fashion of entering into sympathy with
God's large forbearance with human wilfulness, and
recognising frankly that there is that in the large
tolerance of the divine nature which in some sense
claims our sympathy even while it far transcends
.our powers of complete comprehension. What can
be more remarkable than the element in the Sermon
on the Mount which has given it its paradoxical
character, — the command, for instance, not to resist
evil, but if any man will sue thee at the law and
take away thy coat, " let him have thy cloak also,"
— if any one would compel another to go a mile, to
go with him twain, — if any man should smite thee
on one cheek, to turn to him the other also ? This
thread of teaching, which runs through the whole
discourse, and which insists that man should emulate
God in allowing His sun to shine and His rain to fall
alike on the evil and the good, on the just and the
unjust, is surely not so much a series of literal prac-
tical injunctions, as a series of efforts to inculcate
sympathy with the amazing tolerance and forbear-
ance of divine providence, which so often, when it
meets with the grossest ingratitude, turns as it were
the other cheek to that ingratitude, which so often

XLIX THE CHRISTIAN ETHICS OF FORBEARANCE 373

resists not evil, but allows us to fill up to the brim
the measure of our wilfulness that we may the better
enter into its true spirit, and which, in short, yields
purposely to our waywardness only that it may
conquer it. It seems to me that half the paradox of
the Sermon on the Mount is due to our interpreting
as literal precepts of human conduct what are really
intended to give us an insight into, and put us in
sympathy with, the largeness of divine purpose.
Of course, in the vast majority of ordinary human
cases, the practice of letting an unjust man see that
the more greedy and unjust he is, the more he will
gain, would not benefit but harm him. That is just
the difference between the human order and the
divine, that if you let explicit reward follow explicit
transgression, human society becomes a chaos, and
human life impossible; indeed, the moral law, the
Ten Commandments, are all opposed to any such
bestowing of rewards on the evil and of penalties on
the good ; and Christ came not to abolish the law,
but to fulfil it. But what is impossible in human
society is often not only possible, but beneficent,
when embodied in the half-hidden principles of the
divine order. Christ is always teaching this. The
tares are not to be rooted up, lest the wheat that
grows with them should also be rooted up. The
wheat and tares are to grow together till the harvest. ,
Evil is to be suffered long in order that it may be \
the more effectually destroyed. God's providence
is far more long-suffering than human society can
afford to be, simply because its motives, being hidden
in mystery, take their time in ripening, and do not
therefore directly encourage, but only permit, the
evil heart to indulge its evil passions till they over-
flow in conspicuous and open sin. But none the

374 THE CHRISTIAN ETHICS OF FORBEARANCE xlix

/

less it is true that God's providence yields freely to
human wilfulness, giving it free scope in order that
it may recognise its own character, and that Christ
in His Sermon on the Mount claims to point this
out to His disciples as a characteristic of the divine
government which demands their sympathy, and, so

, far as is consistent with the established order of

' human society, their own practical concurrence.

But what this sympathy and concurrence with
the largeness of the divine purpose practically means,
no one can understand by merely studying Christ's
precepts without also studying His life. Nothing in
that life seems to me half so remarkable as the
detached way in which our Lord looked at His own
human destiny and sufferings as if they were in
some sense external to Himself and had to be
regarded, not as if they concerned in any way the
divine judgment on His own human life, but solely
what would bring out more fully the wider purposes
of the divine mind. It does not so much as occur

' to Him that there was hardship to Himself in being
tried, and scourged, and condemned, and crucified.
What His mind seems always full of is the danger
that His disciples would be betrayed into false views
of God's providence by this apparent collapse of the
divine justice. He is always seeking to prepare
them for the true interpretation of the great paradox
of the triumph of the world over God, and to pre-
pare the Jewish people in general for the catastrophe
which was at hand in their history, and which they

* could not construe rightly unless they understood
that the suffering of the Son was essential to
the carrying out of the purpose of the Father.
"Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but
weep for yourselves and for your children."

XLIX THE CHRISTIAN ETHICS OP FORBEARANCE 375

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killest the prophets
and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often
would I have gathered thy children together, as a
hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and ye
would not. Behold, your house is left unto you
desolate." Nothing seems further from His mind
than any consternation at the shame and disaster of
His own destiny. It is with the largeness of the
divine purpose that He sympathises, and seeks to
lead His disciples to sympathise. How, otherwise,
as He is always asking, could the Scriptures, the
oracles of that divine purpose, be fulfilled ?

And it is just the same even in the case of the
stumblings and falls and betrayals into which His
disciples are led by their weakness and cowardice.
In their case, too, He knows when it is a mistake to
resist evil, when He must let them learn the depth
of their own evil before that evil can be purged
away. "All ye shall be offended because of me
this night " ; and yet He does not plead with them
not to be offended. " I tell thee, Peter, before the
cock crows twice, thou shalt deny me thrice " ; but
He addresses no passionate reproach even to His
most trusted apostle, no entreaty not to fall under
the power of darkness, but calmly enjoins upon him,
so soon as he has recovered himself, to strengthen
his brethren. He turns to Judas, and says : " What
thou doest, do quickly." There is no trace in Him
of any effort to avert the agony as it approaches.
He is simply possessed with the divine view of the
catastrophe. To Pilate He says : " You could have
no power at all against me unless it were given you
from above." He regards Himself with perfect
equanimity as simply fulfilling the divine purpose
in His sufferings, and does not address a word to

376 THE CHRISTIAN ETHICS OF FORBEARANCE xlix

His judges or the Roman Governor which might
tend to bias their judgment in His favour. "As
the sheep before her shearers is dumb, so opened he
not his mouth." It is His sympathy with God's
largeness of purpose, not with the shrinkings and
tremblings of His mortal nature, which determines
His whole action during the very crisis of His fate.
Professor Knight sketches briefly and vigorously
the characteristics of the human ethics which made
Christ's teaching the very flower and completion of
all the earlier ethical teaching which had ever
moulded human conduct; but he seems to me to
pass by too much that strange and perfectly un-
earthly sympathy with God, which transformed His
life into a living embodiment of the Sermon on the
Mount, with its calm surrender to evil, which He
yielded to only that He might the better overcome
it, and only yielded to when He saw, with a divine
prescience, that it must overflow before it could be
subdued. There is a deep vein of prescience in
Christ's ethics, which gives them their peculiar tone
of divine equanimity, and reduces the sense of storm
and conflict in them to a minimum. No purely
human mind could have delivered the Sermon on
the Mount. It is the teaching of one who foresees,
by virtue of His sympathy with God, as much as
He discerns of the temper of the immediate present.
j That interference of our wishes with our judgment
which disturbs our human vision never troubled the
! clear depths of that divine equanimity.

THE MODERN POETRY OF DOUBT

1870

Some fine anonymous stanzas in the February num-
ber of MacmUlan's Magazine, written on occasion of
the meeting of the (Ecumenical Council on the Feast
of the Epiphany, give us a fresh illustration of one
of the most curiously marked and constantly recur-
ring features of the unbroken succession of English
poets between Shelley's day and our own, — the
always bitter and sometimes almost tragic cry of
desolation with which one after the other, as they
gaze eagerly into the spiritual world, they nerve
themselves to confess what they have not found and
cannot find there. It is true that the Laureate,
with that comprehension of grasp, that deliberate
rejection of single strands of feeling, which always
distinguishes him, has rarely allowed himself to echo
the mere wail of agonising doubt without shedding
some glimpse of faith, some ray of light from Him y
whom he " deems the Lord of all," upon the dark-
ness, but even Mr. Tennyson's gleams of light have
rarely quite equalled his " shadow-streaks of rain."
There is no lyric in all his volumes quite equal to
that which tells us how

378 THE MODERN POETRY OF DOUBT L

" . . . the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill ;
But for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still ! *

If the greatest of our living poets is unequalled in

^ touching the dreariest landscape with some beam of
living hope, he is even greater in creating the pas-
sionate need and craving for it, the almost unspeak-

, able fear that we may be left alone with that
Nature utterly careless of the "single life," and
almost equally careless of "the type," — of Nature

/ " red in tooth and claw " ravening on the lives she
sacrifices in millions, in that process of selection
which science has so triumphantly established, but

\which only a poet can picture to us in all its terror.

Yet no one can fairly deem the Poet Laureate one

who takes any pleasure in depicting such moods of

v desolation as Shelley abounds in. He has saved the

/higher poetry of our generation from despair, and it
is remarkable enough that every other poet of note
has so far felt either his influence, or some influence
which he and they have felt in common, as to mingle
with even the most profound expressions of un-
satisfied longing, a tacit assumption that it is some-
thing of the nature of faith — as surely it is — which
confers the power to pour out doubt so truthfully

\ and yet so sadly to the silent skies. There was
nothing of this in Shelley's song as he shuddered on

' the edge of the void he thought he saw. The Eng-
lish language does not contain lines of despair at

/ once so calm and so poignant, as those with which
he closed the unequal but marvellous poem of
" Alastor," and painted the immeasurable emptiness,
the piercing vacancy, which so often robs the whole

L THE MODERN POETRY OP DOUBT 379

universe of its meaning when one mortal life dies
out: —

" It is a woe ' too deep for tears ' when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind not sobs or groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope,
But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were."

Nor was it, of course, only in a passage here and
there that this vivid sense of unutterable desolation
of spirit, boldly faced and confessed to himself, found
expression in Shelley. It was a thread of pain run-
ning through his whole poetry, though now and then,
as in " Adonais," it was replaced for a moment by
flashes of almost triumphant hope. Passionate but'
hopeless desire wailed like the wind in an iEolian
harp in more than half his lyrics. When will any
chord be struck of a despair deeper than this*? —

u When the lamp is shattered

The light in the dust lies dead ;
When the cloud is scattered

The rainbow's glory is shed ;
When the lute is broken,

Sweet notes are remembered not ;
When the lips have spoken,

Loved accents are soon 'forgot.

lt As music and splendour

Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart's echoes render

No song when the spirit is mute : —

\

380 THE MODERN POETRY OF DOUBT L

No song but sad dirges

Like the wind in a ruined ceU,

Or the mournful surges

That ring the dead seaman's knell."

No doubt, the two modern poets who have most

nearly taken up the same intellectual ground as

Shelley in gazing into the spiritual world, Mr.

Clough and Mr. Arnold, have, as has been already

, intimated, interwoven with his tone of utter desola-

, tion a thread of manly and solemn conviction that

" there is more faith in honest doubt," as Tennyson

^imself says, than in all the creeds. The student of

their poetry is not unnerved by their boldest con-

l v fessions as he is by Shelley's desolate cry. Even

when Mr. Clough paces about the "great sinful

streets of Naples," murmuring to himself, — in order

to relieve the wonder and the heat with which his

heart burns within him as he gazes on all that

fermenting mass of evil, —

" Christ is not risen. No,
He lies and moulders low ;
Christ is not risen,"

f — there is an under-current of faith in the power
which enables him to confess his doubt. Nay, even
as he goes over the familiar old ground of those
' evidences ' which he had imprinted on his heart in

/ his intense desire to believe in the Gospel, and link
by link declares them all untrustworthy, there is
a burning remnant of hope, very different from
Shelley's thrilling desolation, in the ascetic minute-
ness of the vigilance with which he^cuts^a way his
own hope from under him : —

L THE MODERN POETRY OP DOUBT 381

" What if the women ere the dawn was grey,

Saw one or more great angels, as they say

(Angels or Him Himself) ? Yet neither there nor then,

Nor afterwards, nor elsewhere, nor at all,

Hath He appeared to Peter and the ten,

Nor save in thunderous terrors to blind Saul :

Save in an after Qospel and late Creed,
\ He is not risen indeed,—

Christ is not risen. ,,

Nor are we surprised to find this wonderfully fine
piece of spiritual asceticism, in which a great mind
filled with a passionate love for Christ flings away
one after another the grounds of hope which he
thought he could net honestly retain, followed by
one — of far less poetical intensity, indeed, — but of
evident sincerity, in which the poet asserts his con-
fidence that, —

" Though He be dead, He is not dead,
Nor gone though fled,
Not lost, though vanished ;
Though He return not, though >
He lies and moulders low ;
In the true creed,
He is yet risen indeed,
Christ is yet risen."

For of Mr. Clough it is plain that though the doubt
and difficulty and denial were immense, though the
intellect of the poet sternly denied his heart many
a once cherished and still longed-for faith, yet be-
neath the doubt and difficulty and denial there was
a residuum of victorious trust which alone, — if we
may so express it, — gave him heart to doubt. And r^
so again in some true sense it is with Mr. Arnold./'

382 THE MODERN POETRY OP DOUBT l

His poetry indeed is not so full of bitter and almost

heart-rending resolve to surrender every grain of
f belief its author cannot justify. And as the con-
| fession is the confession of a milder pain, so the

reassertion of the faith behind the doubt is less
[ triumphant. But there is nothing in our modern

poetry more touching in its quiet sadness than
. this : —

u While we believed, on earth He went
And open stood His grave ;
Men called from chamber, church, and tent,
And Christ was by to save.

•

" Now He is dead. Far hence He lies
In the lorn Syrian town,
And on His grave with shining eyes
The Syrian stars look down.

" In vain men still, with hoping new,
Regard His death-place dumb,
And say the stone is not yet to,
And wait for words to come.

"Ah, from that silent sacred land
Of sun and arid stone,
And crumbling wall, and sultry sand
Comes now one word alone !

" From David's lips this word did roll,
"lis true and living yet ;
i No man can save his brother's soul
Nor pay his brother's debt'

•' Alone, self-poised, henceforward man
Must labour ; must resign
His all too human creeds, and scan
Simply the way divine."

L THE MODERN POETRY OF DOUBT 383

Yet here, too, — and it is a fair specimen of a whole ,
thread of feeling penetrating everywhere Mr. Arnold's
poetry, — this confession of a great doubt is mellowed
by the confession of a fainter yet deeper trust.

And it is just the same with the fine poem just
published in Macmillan, which gives out evanescent
flavours of many other poets, — of Clough, of Arnold,
even of Morris. The author describes first, in a far
from Roman Catholic spirit, and with something of
the Chaucerian pity of the last-named poet, the pro-
cession of the Bishops : —

" Thereby the conclave of the Bishops went,
With grave brows, cherishing a dim intent,
As men who travelled on their eve of death
From everywhere that man inhabiteth,
Not knowing wherefore, for the former things
Fade from old eyes of bishops and of kings."

And then after a very picturesque passage on the
various elements of the conclave, and a digression in
eulogy of St. Francis and his Franciscans, he draws
a picture of two figures seen by his, though not by
every eye, in the great Council Hall. One of them
is but a faint vision, a vision, as the prophet says,
"neither clear nor dark :" —

* To my purged eyes before the altar ]ay
A figure dreamlike in the noon of day ;
Nor changed the still face, nor the look thereon,
At ending of the endless antiphon,
Nor for the summoned saints and holy hymn
Grew to my sight less delicate and dim : —
How faint, how fair that immaterial wraith !
But looking long I saw that she was Faith."

i

384 THE MODERN POETRY OF DOUBT l

But the other figure is neither delicate nor dim. It
is the figure of some Oriental seer, who for a hundred
years had sought passionately for truth and rejected
dreams : —

" His brows black yet and white unfallen hair
Set in strange frame the face of his despair,
And I despised not, nor can God despise,
The silent splendid anger of his eyes.
A hundred years of search for flying Truth
Had left them glowing with no gleam of youth,
A hundred years of vast and vain desire
Had lit and filled them with consuming fire."

And it is this eager and angry seer who first stamps
his mark on the assembly, addressing them in lines
of which we extract the greater part : —

u Better for us to have been, as men may be,
Sages and silent by the Eastern sea,
Than thus in new delusion to have brought
Myrrh of our prayer, frankincense of our thought,
For One whom knowing not we held so dear,
For One who sware it, but who is not here.
Better for you, this shrine when ye began,
An earthquake should have hidden it from man,
Than thus through centuries of pomp and pain
To have founded and have finished it in vain, —
To have vainly arched the labyrinthine shade,
And vainly vaulted it, and vainly made
For saints and kings an everlasting home
High in the dizzying glories of the dome.
For not one minute over hall or Host
Flutters the peerless presence of the Ghost,
Nor falls at all, for art or man's device,
On mumbled charm and mumming sacrifice,—
But either cares not, or forspent with care
Has flown into the infinite of air.

L THE MODERN POETRY OP DOUBT 385

Apollo left you when the Christ was born,
Jehovah when the Temple's veil was torn,
And now, even now, this last time and again,
The presence of a God has gone from men.
Live in your dreams, if you must live, but I
Will find the light, and in the light will die."

But while his speech still paralyses the Council,
Faith rises in the likeness of the Virgin Mary, and
is rapt away, — her "translation" to heaven, — the
poet's equivalent for the assumption of the body of
the Virgin, which it is supposed that the Council
will decree, — being thus described in some fine lines,
containing more than an echo of Mr. Clough's : —

" And yet, translated from the Pontiff's side,
She did not die, say not that she died !
She died not, died not, the faint and fair !
She could not die, but melted into air ! "

And with that hope that Faith had only become in-
visible, had not died, — a hope weaker than Mr. /
Clough's, less definite than Mr. Arnold's, but yet
containing no echo of Shelley's poignant wail, the
poet leaves us to content ourselves as we may. '

Is there not something striking about this con-
sensus of the higher poets of our day in this frank /
and sad confession of Doubt with an undertone of I
faith, — an undertone that varies with the individual /
strength of the poet, — rising in Mr. Tennyson to{
the assertion that " the strong Son of God, immortal \
Love," will unquestionably prevail even over all those
doubts which he sings in so unflinching and yet sad a
strain, — falling in the poet of these new and beautiful /
stanzas, as he records the disappearance of Faith from
mortal sight, to the trembling entreaty, " O say not
s 2c

386 THE MODERN POETRY OF DOUBT L

that she died ! " It seems to me to show one of two
things, — either that we are on the eye of a long and
uncertain era of spiritual suspense, — scepticism quali-
fied by a yearning hope, — or that the way is prepar-
ing for a day of clearer and more solid trust than

v the world has yet known. And for which issue of
the two it is that " the generations are prepared,"
every man will decide according as he perceives, or
ails to perceive, that when the great controversy
between faith and suspense has been pleaded to its
last plea, a supernatural Power steps in which fastens
upon every really candid and open heart a final com-
pulsion of faith, enabling the soul to beat up against
the strongest head -winds of sceptical theory, and
"flee unto the mountain" where from all these troub-

\ lings there is rest.

LI

browning's theology

1891

Mrs. Sutherland Orr has not the art of per-
spicuous exposition. Her new contribution to the
discussion concerning Browning's religious attitude
makes vagueness vaguer and mysticism more mys-
tical. Probably Mrs. Sutherland Orr is right in con-
tending that Browning, — in this respect resembling
other poets, even Wordsworth, for example, — was
very jealous of its being supposed that he accepted
literally the cut-and-dried formulas of any Christian
Church. Great idealists see farther into the signi-
ficance of the spiritual faith they adopt than the /
ordinary catechists, and very naturally shrink from
binding themselves by dogmatic phrases which may
very inadequately represent the insight of an elevated
imagination. In "Saul," in "Christmas Eve and
Easter Day," in The Ring and the Book, and fifty
other poems, Browning has endeavoured to depict
the very heart of his own faith, and of course he
prefers his own mode of indicating that faith to that
of the narrow-minded Evangelical preacher, or the
technical scholastic theologian, or the cold ration-
alistic critic. No doubt he told Mr. Buchanan that

\

388 BROWNING'S THEOLOGY U

in his (Mr. Buchanan's) sense of the term, he did not
profess to be a Christian ; but, as Mrs. Sutherland
Orr puts it> we want to know exactly what meaning
Mr. Buchanan had put upon the term, before we can
attach any great importance to this asserted denial.
It is as plain as vivid imaginative expressions can
.make it, that if Browning was not in some very deep
and true sense a Christian, — a believer even in the
divinity of Christ, — his language is elaborately
\ adapted rather to conceal and misrepresent his mind,

vthan to express it. Nor do I know at all what Mrs.
Sutherland Orr means by distinguishing between
belief in Christ and belief in Revelation, and even
asserting the former belief strongly on Mr. Brown-
ing's behalf, while denying the latter. Belief in the

/divinity of Christ is absolutely inconceivable without

y the belief in Revelation. Such a belief implies not
only the hearty acceptance of Christ's humanity as
our ideal, but of Christ's humanity as setting forth
and embodying the mind of God. What does
Revelation mean except the unveiling of God, the
lifting of the veil from the otherwise inscrutable
nature of the Creator? Yet Mrs. Sutherland Orr,
in her new Contemporary article, while she declares
Browning to have been a hearty Christian in the

f sense of holding, and holding with more and more
confidence as life advanced, the divine love to have
been manifested in Christ's cross and passion, declares
that "the one consistent fact of Mr. Browning's
heterodoxy was its exclusion of any belief in Revela-
tion." I do not hesitate to say that whatever a
" consistent fact " in the abstract may mean, such a
\ fact as this is, not at all consistent with the definite
Christianity she has conceded to him. If Mr.
Browning believed (as he did) in Christ as manifest-

li browning's theology 389

ing God's love to man, he believed in Him as reveal-
ing God. If he did not hold that Christ revealed
God, he did not believe in His divinity at all, — the
one reality in which he evidently did believe. Mrs.
Sutherland Orr asserts, indeed, that the possibility
of Browning's belief in the Christian Kevelation is
practically " excluded " by the fact that he insists on
the uncertainties of faith, and that he speaks as
follows in one place of the relation of Christ to our
belief : — " The evidence of divine Power is every-
where about us ; not so the evidence of divine Love.
That love could only reveal itself to the human
heart by some supreme act of hvman tenderness and
devotion; the fact or fancy of Christ's cross or
passion could alone supply such a revelation." Here,
as Mrs. Sutherland Orr triumphantly points out, we
find Mr. Browning declaring that even if the story
of Christ's cross and passion be a fancy, it still seizes
on the human heart, and accounts for the hold taken
upon human faith. And again, Mrs. Sutherland Orr
points out that in The Ring and the Booh, Mr. Brown-
ing makes his meditative Pope deplore the dog-
matic certainties in which men rest too idly; and
further, that he represents the evangelist John as
predicting that an age of doubt, — of receding cer-
tainty, — will quicken men's spiritual life, which has
been too much petrified by mechanical clinging to
ossified creeds. Besides, says Mrs. Sutherland Orr,
Browning's whole attitude towards the belief in
immortality is an attitude not of confident assurance,
but of lively hope. And lively hope implies at least
some uncertainty of the thing hoped for. Well, if
Mrs. Sutherland Orr will extend that reasoning, she
will be able to prove that the Apostles -did not
believe in any revealed Immortality. "We are

\

390 browning's THEOLOGY lt

saved by hope," says St. Paul ; " if in this life only we
I have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable."
" Be ready always," says St. Peter, " to give an answer
to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope
that is in you." St. John, speaking of the prospect
of seeing God as He is, says : " Every man that
hath this hope in him, purifieth himself even as he
- is pure." Hence it seems to me ridiculous to argue
that because Mr. Browning spoke of immortality as
a hope, and, I may truly say, as a more and more
confident hope as life drew on, he could not have
believed in Christ's revelation in a sense closely
similar to that in which the Apostles themselves
believed in it. If his hope was not strictly apostolic
in degree, it was apostolic in kind. As for the
phrase, " The fact or fancy of Christ's cross or passion
could alone supply such a revelation," I think the
context shows that Browning regarded the need of
man as so deep that even the fancy, if it had been a
mere fancy, would have proved itself a revelation of
the divine love which had inspired such a fancy.
There is what may seem a still stronger passage
quoted by Mrs. Sutherland Orr : — " I know all that
may be said against it [the Christian scheme of
salvation] on the ground of history, of reason, of
/ even moral sense. I grant even that it may be a
fiction. But I am none the less convinced that the
: life and death of Christ, as Christians apprehend
them, supplies something which their humanity
requires, and that it is true for them." That means
surely that Mr. Browning conceives the possibility
that Christians may have misunderstood completely
the theology implied in the life and death of Christ,
but that whether they have misunderstood it or not,
— and he only puts the possibility that they may

LI BROWNING'S THEOLOGY 391

have misunderstood it, — the very misunderstanding
involves a glimpse of the deep, tender, and inex-
haustible love of God. Such a conception is
doubtless what is called heterodox. It is not the
conception of the Christian Church. But it is a
conception leading men to the Christian faith (just
as a sign-post leads a man to the place to which it
points), since it points to a great revelation, —
"revelation" is Mr. Browning's own word, — of the
love of God such as the Christian faith was intended
to announce. Even on the chance that the scheme
of Revelation was a fiction, Browning certainly held
that it was a fiction based upon a great subjective
truth ; and even had he thought it a fiction, he would
have agreed more with those who held it to be a fact,
than he would have agreed with those who simply j
ignored it as an idle fable. And, as a matter of fact, .
these hypothetical admissions were only hypothetical.
No one who reads Browning's greater poems can
doubt for a moment that the whole drift and tendency
of his mind and life went in the opposite direction, /
towards a deeper and deeper value for the Christian
Bevelation, and not towards a more decided distrust
of it.

I do not doubt in the least that Browning was
not what could be called an orthodox disciple of any ^
Christian Church. To my mind, he often verges on /
Pantheism in his optimistic treatment of all forms of
evil as in some sense necessary and of divine causa- '
tion. No doubt his mind held to what is called
universalism, and to optimism generally. He never
laid any hold of the notion that there was a tradition
and a Church which might be a safer guide to
Christian truth than the individual instincts of each
separate soul. He was an individualist to the core, .

392 browning's theology li

> and believed much more in the guidance of the
affections to which his heart inclined, than in the
guidance* of the reason. Still, the one deepest belief
of his life was that Christ revealed the divine mind
. and the divine purpose in a sense so profound, that
the doctrine of the Incarnation was to him a real
-word of God. He was not an Athanasian. Perhaps
even he did not hold theologically the whole of the
Nicene Creed. But he held to the Incarnation in a
sense much more eager and much more progressive
and much more constant, than he held to any of
the doubts or hesitations which the opponents of that
doctrine had suggested to him. Browning had no
faith in any ecclesiastical guidance, sectarian or
otherwise. Though brought up a Dissenter, all that
he retained of Dissent was his intense individualism,
his inability to submit himself to any mediate guide
to God. But certainly I may say this of him, that
his hypothetical doubts had far less part in him than
his growing and passionate belief. Mrs. Sutherland
' Orr has not made things much plainer by her dis-
I quisitions on the obscure passages in Ferisktah's
J Fancies and La Saisiaz, or any other of Browning's
J crude transcendentalisms of later years. These half-
j baked compositions, which mark rather his later
\ impatience of the difficulty of expressing thought in
t adequate speech, than his earlier power to mould for
himself a rough but most effective and impressive
form of speech, will never count much for the exposi-
tion either of his faith or his genius. But they at
^ least show that he became more and more convinced
^ that Christ is the great revelation of God, as he grew
older, incoherent as many of his attempts to affirm
this were. To the world in general, " Saul," " Christ-
mas Eve and Easter Day," the story of the Arabian

li browning's theology 393

physician concerning the resurrection of Lazarus, and
The Ring and the Booh, will remain Browning's high-
water mark as a religious poet, though not perhaps his
high-water mark as a Christian believer. He was a
heterodox Christian, no doubt, with certain pan-
theistic leanings, but he was a Christian of the
utmost intensity. He believed, from his heart, that
Christ revealed God, and was personally the divine
Son of God, in a sense a great deal deeper and a
great deal more vivid and personal than most
orthodox Christians.

LII

THE HUMILITY OF SCIENCE
1889

Mr. Aubrey de Verb had not, in all probability,
read the discussion on " Astronomy and Theology ,;
which appeared in the columns of the Spectator a few
months ago, when he wrote the fine poem on Coper-

: nicus which appears in the September number of the
Contemporary Review ; but if he had read it, he could
hardly have put more impressively than he has,
the true criticism on such a view as Mr. Frederic
Harrison's, that the moment you establish the helio-
centric view of the solar system, you disprove that
conception of Kevelation which makes the Incar-

v nation its central fact. Mr. de Vere supposes
Copernicus, — who wrote, by-the-way, nearly a cen-
tury before Galileo's brush with the Papacy, and
who is said to have got a Pope's personal authority
for his publication of his treatise on the heliocentric
view of the planetary system, — on the eve of his
death to be musing on the effect of the new doctrine
on the religious belief of the age ; to be anticipating
that it may produce some consternation, and yet
confident that it will in the end prove to be not
only reconcilable with the theology of the Church,

LII THE HUMILITY OF SCIENCE 395

but even that it will give new significance to that ^
theology, — or at least that it will give a new em- J
phasis and a new illustration to the meaning of the \
word "humility" as it applies to the attitude of
men of science towards that infinite world of know-
ledge on the margin of which, as Newton has since \
said, they are permitted, like children on the sea-
shore, to pick up a few shells. What does humility '
in men of science really mean ? Does it mean an
inveterate belief that, to the mind of such a being
as man, the unknown will always be immeasurably
vaster than the known 1 Such an inveterate belief
is consistent not only with intellectual pride, but
with intellectual pride of the worst type, — the pride
that consists half in rash but confident inferences
derived from its own knowledge, and half in still :
rasher and more confident inferences derived from ;
its own ignorance. The true humility proper to /
science means something very different. It means
the docility of learners towards a teacher infinitely
above them not only in the knowledge to be im-
parted, but in the wisdom which recognises the true
relations between the different kinds of knowledge
and the great danger of undermining the founda- ,
tions of moral knowledge by showy physical know-
ledge. Humility really means keeping low, keeping
on the ground, not walking on stilts, not delighting
in a position of advantage over other men. And
science is humble only when it uses its knowledge
and its ignorance alike to help other men, and not
to lord it over them. Mr. de Vere makes Coper-
nicus say that to his mind the heliocentric view
which makes so little of the earth is a revelation
made rather to the soul than to the intellect of man,
one that gives us a vivid lesson as to what we mean

396 THB HUMILITY OF SCIENCE LII

when we call God Infinite. And yet, he adds, that
lesson might have misled if it had come before we
had gained a sufficiently deep conviction of the
spiritual essence of God's nature, and while we were
still in danger of thinking only of the grandeur of
His architecture : —

•' The Stars do this for men,
They make Infinitude imaginable :
God by our instincts felt as infinite,
When known, becomes such to our total being,
Mind, spirit, heart, and soul. The greater Theist
Should make the greater Christian. Yet 'tis true
Best gifts may come too soon.

No marvel this :
The earth was shaped for myriad forms of greatness,
As Freedom, Genius, Beauty, Science, Art,
Some extant, some to be : such forms of greatness
Are through God's will greatness conditional :
Where Christ is greatest these are great ; elsewhere
Great only to betray. Sweetly and safely
In order grave, the maker of the worlds
Still modulates the rhythm of human progress ;
His angels, on whose song the seasons float,
Keep measured cadence : all good things keep time
Lest Good should strangle Better."

/And the drift of his poem is that Good vxmld have
strangled Better, if our knowledge of the scientific
scale and wonders of the universe had preceded
instead of succeeded the revelation of God's purity
and righteousness and love. But having once well
learned that these characteristics of His, — purity,
righteousness, and love, — are even more essentially

', divine than physical infinitude, the lesson as to
what physical infinitude really includes, becomes
one of incalculable value, since it gives definiteness

Ml THB HUMILITY OF SCIENCE 397

to our mind when we repeat the words, " My thoughts
are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my
ways, saith the Lord ; for as the heavens are higher
than the earth, so are my ways higher than your
ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." In
that passage it is almost asserted in so many words
that the astronomical scale of the heavens, as com-
pared with that of the earth, is a mere hint to us of
the infinitude of God's moral and spiritual world
as compared with our moral and spiritual world,
and that, if we are to feel humbled when we reflect
on the inconceivable grandeur of the celestial archi-
tecture, we are much more to feel humbled when
we reflect on the inconceivable grandeur of God's
purity, righteousness, and love. And this is how
Mr. de Vere works out that thought as regards
the objection that the earth, being so poor a fraction
of the infinite universe, the Incarnation could not
have taken place for the redemption of such a race
as ours : —

" This Earth too small
For Love Divine ! Is God not Infinite ?
If so, His Love is infinite. Too small !
One famished babe meets pity oft from man
More than an army slain ! Too small for Love !
Was Earth too small to be of God created ?
Why then too small to be redeemed ?

The sense
Sees greatness only in the sensuous greatness :
Science in that sees little : Faith sees naught :
The small, the vast, are tricks of earthly vision :
To God, that Omnipresent All-in-Each,
Nothing is small, is far.
• •••••

They that know not of a God
How know they that the stars have habitants ?

398 THE HUMILITY OF SCIENCE LII

'Tis Faith and Hope that spread delighted hands
To such belief ; no formal proof attests it
Concede them peopled ; can the sophist prove
Their habitants are fallen ? That too admitted,
Who told him that redeeming foot divine
Ne'er trod those spheres ? That fresh assumption granted
What then ? Is not the Universe a whole ?
Doth not the sunbeam herald from the sun
Gladden the violet's bosom ? Moons uplift
The tides : remotest stars lead home the lost :
Judaea was one country, one alone :
Not less who died there died for all. The Cross
Brought help to vanished nations : Time opposed
No bar to Love : why then should Space oppose one ?
We know not what Time is, nor what is Space ; —
Why dream that bonds like theirs can bind the Un-
bounded ?
If Earth be small, likelier it seems that Love
Compassionate most and condescending most
To Sorrow's nadir depths, should choose that Earth
For Love's chief triumph, missioning thence her gift
Even to the utmost zenith ! "

That seems to express adequately the true humility
of science, which consists not merely in acknow-
ledging the vastness of its ignorance, — for in that
it often takes a genuine pride, as in the use of a
weapon wherewith it can browbeat not only the
unwise but even the wise credulities of man, — but
in recognising that while science, such science as
\ the inductive astronomy at least, stands on the
common ground of slowly accumulated experience,
and even mathematical science stands only on the
commanding heights of necessary truth dictating
within what limits our experience must be confined,
there is a sort of truth which is higher than either,
because it comes with a force of moral authority

LII THE HUMILITY OF SCIENCE 399

that proclaims its origin in a higher nature, and
that, without forcing us to obey it, compels us to
own that disobedience is full of the anguish of self- I
condemnation. The humility of science consists in /
this recognition of a higher kind of knowledge than
any which pure science, whether inductive or de-
ductive, can convey, — a kind of knowledge which is
not knowledge of things at all, and not mere know-
ledge of men, but which announces itself as know-
ledge strong enough to bind man to some Being
who is to human nature a lawgiver and an inspira-
tion. Copernicus, in this fine poem, is made to •
recognise with awe, — nay, as matter of history, he /
did recognise, — the danger that the knowledge /
which he had painfully accumulated concerning the
motions of the heavenly bodies, might be made the
means of subverting the knowledge which he recog-
nised as something far higher, because it regulated
the living principles of he«rvenly minds, — minds to
whose authority ours are in a voluntary though
wholesome subjection, which we may, if we will,
repudiate. He saw that the popular teaching in
which the highest illumination vouchsafed by God
to man is necessarily contained, was not teaching con-
cerning the motions of the heavenly bodies at all, and
was teaching which did not imply any special study
of the motions of those bodies ; so that what that
teaching did bring home to us as to the power and
purposes of God, might seem to be more or less
invalidated by the special inferences which the work
of astronomers had enabled him to gather concerning
astronomical laws. And he felt that any such rash ^
inference would involve the human race in far
greater loss than his science could procure it gain.
That was true scientific humility, the humility of a

*

f

400 THE HUMILITY OF SCIENCE LI1

man who, though he had learned something new,
and something new which was of magnificent pro-
portions, yet recognised that it was nothing at all
in comparison with the higher knowledge conveyed
in terms suggesting false impressions as to the
science of astronomy, though true impressions as
well as impressions of the most infinite value as to
the character of God. " He hath made the round
world so fast that it cannot be moved," was not
true if it meant that God did not move it, and was
not constantly moving it through space at an almost
inconceivable velocity; but it was true in its real
meaning, — namely, that God had put it beyond the
reach of any power but His own to interfere with
its destiny, and to prevent the ripening of His
purposes for those who dwelt on it. And that
meaning is a meaning of infinitely higher value to
the children of men than any knowledge which
astronomers could give us, even though it enables
sailors to sail the sea with comparative safety : for
without moral law and reverence for the divine
spirit in the heart, every ship might be a little hell
of anarchy, and every crew beyond the power of
astronomical knowledge to help or save. Without
the benefit of the law which binds man to God, and
therefore also to man, and sets his self-will bounds
which it can only pass at the cost of becoming
hateful to itself, students would not only be desti-
tute of the tranquillity of mind requisite for the
accumulation of scientific observation, but deficient
in that confidence that they are under the sway of
a great and righteous character, seeking to reveal
itself, which is at the root of all hope of progress.
What we call " faith " is, indeed, moral knowledge,
though knowledge of a very different kind from that

•1

'D

lii THE HUMILITY OF SCIENCE 401

which the perception of the senses, when preserved
by memory, stores up for us. It is knowledge of
the better and the worse, knowledge that obedience
to the teaching of the light we have, is better even
than the increase of that light without obedience to
its teaching. Inductive science is humble (or humilis
is the true sense), when it consciously works on the
ground of common experience, that is, on a level
below that of mathematical science, for the latter
compels us to recognise that it can lay down the
law to experience ; but even mathematical science,
though it may claim to provide us with the very
conditions of experience, is of the earth earthy
compared with the moral revelation which preceded
both the one and the other in the order of human
development, and laid down the rule of man's duties
almost before science, properly so called, had begun
to train man's eyes and hands to discriminate duly
between appearance and reality. This is what
Copernicus had more or less dimly recognised, and
what Mr. Aubrey de Vere at least makes him
effectually proclaim.

\

g 2d

LIII

TENNYSON'S THEOLOGY
1892

The posthumous volume of Lord Tennyson's poetry *
' contains two, at least, of his most characteristic and
vigorous poems, — " Akbar's Dream " and " The
Church-warden and the Curate." The latter is one
of the series of those poems in dialect in which he
shows his great and humorous dramatic insight,
1 though not what dramatists mean by dramatic power.
I shall not refer to it further, for I wish to draw
attention chiefly to the considerable series of poems
f in which Tennyson has treated definitely ethico-
; theological or strictly theological subjects from his
own individual point of view as a reflective poet.
"The Two Voices," "The Vision of Sin," "The
Palace of Art," "St. Simeon Stylites," "In Me-
moriam," " Will," " The Higher Pantheism," " The
Ancient Sage," " Vastness," and " Akbar's Dream,"
all of them deal principally with theological prob-
lems, to say nothing of the thread of theological
' idealism which runs through all the " Idylls of the
1 King," and, indeed, many others of his poems. Let
me try and sketch, so far as I may, the theology of

1 Macmillan and Co.

LIII TENNYSON'S THEOLOGY 403

Tennyson. In the first place, Tennyson is no pan-
theist. He does not dream, like Shelley, that the
personality of man is a mere temporary manifesta-
tion of the anima mundi. In " The Higher Pan-
theism " he expressly distinguishes the spirit of man
from the God whom he is born to worship, and
treats the spiritual and moral limitations of man,
whether voluntary or involuntary, as the real causes
why we cannot adequately discern God : —

" Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ?
Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the reason why ;
For is He not all but that which has power to feel ' I

Tennyson's conviction of the direct relation of
the soul to God, and of the chasm between the soul
and God, is as deep as that of Cardinal Newman.
In the next place, his profound belief in the freedom
of the human will, and, consequently, of the reality of
both virtue and sin, is conspicuous in almost every one
of the poems to which I have referred. In the poem
on_" Will," he pictures the backslider as gazing back
on some Sodom he would fain turn to : —

" But ill for him who, bettering not with time,
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,
And ever weaker grows thro* acted crime,
Or seeming-genial venial fault,
Recurring and suggesting still !
He seems as one whose footsteps halt,
Toiling in immeasurable sand,
And o'er a weary sultry land,
Far beneath a blazing vault,
Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,
The city sparkles like a grain of salt."

i

\

404 TENNYSON'S THEOLOGY LIU

And in the still more impressive poem called " The
\ Vision of Sin," though he will not admit that the
cynical and hardened sinner who loathes the world in
which, by his own default, he finds himself, is beyond
all hope, still he treats the hope as dim, distant, and
dubious in the highest degree.

I Tennyson's Christian ethics are shown in nothing
so much as his profound belief that humility is the
only true and healthy attitude of the soul. This he
expressed early in the fine poem called " The Palace
of Art," and he expressed it last of all in the poems
which chiefly distinguish his new book, "Akbar's
,'Dream," and the pieces which conclude the volume.
' The sin of self-idolatry was, in Tennyson's mind, the
v - deepest of all sins. The soul which builds itself a
/^'Palace of Art," as a stronghold in which it can
rejoice in its own grandeur, is brought to the most
signal despair : —

" Deep dread and loathing of her solitude
Fell on her, from which mood was born
Scorn of herself ; again, from out that mood
Laughter at her self-scorn."

And at length she had to shriek her misery, and to
confess, "I am on fire within!" And the same

.' deep abhorrence of all self-worship penetrates the
" Idylls of the King."

Again, Tennyson is no despiser of that anthropo-
morphism, as its opponents call it, which maintains

r that the highest revelation of God which is possible
to us must come through the incarnation of the
divine spirit in a human life. No theologian ever

f held more earnestly than Tennyson that if we are
to have a clear vision of God at all, we 'must have

Lin TENNYSON'S THEOLOGY 405

it under the. conditions of our human life and action. •
He has expressed this conviction in many poems, ,
and never more powerfully than in " Akbar's j
Dream." Religious " forms," Akbar says, are " a
silken cord let down from Paradise, when fine
Philosophies would fail, to draw the crowd from
wallowing in the mire of earth," and then he
goes on, —

" And all the more, when these behold their Lord,
Who shaped the forms, obey them, and himself
Here on this bank in some way live the life
Beyond the bridge, and serve that Infinite
Within us, as without, that All-in-all,
And over all, the never-changing One
And ever-changing Many, in praise of Whom
The Christian bell, the cry from off the mosque,
And vaguer voices of Polytheism
Make but one music, harmonising ' Pray.' "

But while Tennyson certainly held that what sceptics
call Anthropomorphism is really the highest view of
God that man can reach, and that anything which
is not more or less anthropomorphic is not above,
but below anthropomorphism, he shows no trace of^
any disposition to follow Christian teaching into '
its more dogmatic and elaborate distinctions. He j
affirms that in the " strong Son of God, immortal
Love," we have our highest glimpse of God. He
declares : —

" Thou seemest human and divine,

The highest, holiest manhood, thou ;
Our wills are ours, we know not how ;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine."

406 tennyson's theology mi

But then he immediately goes on : —

, M Our little systems have their day ;

They have their day and cease to be :
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they."

And that describes, I imagine, Lord Tennyson's atti-
tude, not only towards the religious philosophies,
but the dogmatic creeds of the Christian Church.
It would hardly be possible for him to have spoken
as he did of " The Shadow cloaked from head to
foot, who keeps the keys of all the creeds," if he
had felt that any Church gave him the full certainty
he desired of the revealed will and nature of God.
here was an agnostic element in Tennyson, as
perhaps in all the greatest minds, though in him it
may have been in excess, which kept reiterating:
" We have but faith, we cannot know," and which,
I should say, was never completely satisfied even of
the adequacy of those dogmatic definitions which
his Church recognised. Tennyson insists, from first
to last, on the inadequacy of our vision of things
xdivine. He finds no authoritative last word such as
many Christians find in ecclesiastical authority. On
the contrary, he dwells again and again on the dim-
ness and faintness of the higher hope, and draws
even no broad line of distinction between that which
revelation appears to forbid our hoping for, and
that which it encourages us to hope for : —

" Behold, we know not anything ;

I can but trust that good shall fall
At last — far off — at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

LIII TENNYSON'S THEOLOGY 407

So runs my dream : but what am I ?
An infant crying in the night :
An infant crying for the light :

And with no language but a cry."

That tone of wistful faith, of tender, beseeching con- ^
fidence, of humble but tenacious resolve not to be i
repelled by any accumulation of doubts and diffi-
culties, — though without ignoring for a moment the f
sometimes, to him at least, overwhelming character '
of these doubts and difficulties, — is perfectly charac- \
teristic of Tennyson's religious poems. He certainly /
held that without faith life was not worth living, but .
he certainly held also that faith falls immensely short
of certainty, — indeed, so short of it that faith itself I
must always utter itself with a sort of sob, with a j
thrill of pity for the tremulousness of its own daring. /
To him certainly faith was a venture, a venture
which he held to be far better worth making than it
would be to aim at anything more clearly within
his grasp, though worth infinitely less than the less
certain prize for which he strove : —

" If death were seen
At first as death, Love had not been,"

he wrote. And he argued, — not quite confidently,
— from the audacity of love to the unreality of
death, but only with that resolute determination to
act on the one assumption which made life noble,
with which a man goes into battle with his life in
his hand. It is clear, I think, that though Tennyson
clung to Christ with all the ardour of an ardent
nature, he did not regard any Church as the authori- .
tative interpreter of Christ's teaching and meaning, '
but rested chiefly on the profound attraction for the

408 TENNYSON'S THEOLOGY LIU

/' souls of men, which goes forth from the record of
\ Christ's life on earth. And this was a great part
of the secret of the popularity of his poetry.
/For the age has, like Tennyson, felt much more
" wistful faith than clear conviction. It " faintly
trusts the larger hope." It refuses to act on the
assumption that we are all ephemeral phantoms
in an ephemeral world; but it cannot, except in
rare instances, conquer all dread that that assump-
tion may not be groundless and unreasonable. The
/generally faltering voice with which Tennyson ex-
/ presses the ardour of his own hope, touches the heart
/of this doubting and questioning age, as no more
x confident expression of belief could have touched it.
The lines of his theology were in harmony with the
great central lines of Christian thought; but in
coming down to detail it soon passed into a region
where all was wistful, and dogma disappeared in a
N haze of radiant twilight.

LIV

THE LATE LORD TENNYSON ON THE FUTURE LIFE

1893

Mrs. Weld, in the short but interesting paper which
she entitles " Talks with Tennyson," in the March
number of the Contemporary Beview, tells us that, in
his conversations with her, — she is his wife's niece,
— he always loved best to talk "about spiritual
matters," and that " no clergyman was ever a more
earnest student of the Bible " than the late Poet- '
Laureate. " The Ancient Sage," she says, " sets forth
his own views more fully than any of his other
poems." This I doubt, — though it may set forth
the views which he would have held had there been
no Christian revelation, more accurately than any ,
other poem. But as " The Ancient Sage " declares /
itself the picture of a sage's faith " a thousand
summers ere the time of Christ," I cannot suppose
that Tennyson, with the passion that he has ex-
pressed for Christ, the "Strong Son of God,
Immortal Love," could image his own convictions in
the dim anticipations of an ancient seer, as ade-
quately as he images them in the " In Memoriam," /
or " The Idylls of the King," or " Crossing the Bar," /
where he writes frankly out of the very heart

410 THE LATE LORD TENNYSON LIT

of Christian faith. Indeed, Mrs. Weld entirely
admits this when she records Tennyson's confession
of faith in Christ in the following remarkable words :
— "I believe that beside our material body we
possess an immaterial body, something like what the
ancient Egyptians called the Ka. I do not care to
make distinctions between the soul and the spirit, as
men did in days of old, though perhaps the spirit
is the best word to use of our higher nature, that
nature which I believe in Christ to have been truly
divine, the very presence of the Father, the one
only God, dwelling in the perfect man. Though ,^
nothing is such a distress of soul to me as to have
this divinity of Christ assailed, yet I feel we must
never lose sight of the unity of the Godhead, the
three persons of the Trinity being like three candles
giving together one light. I love that hymn, ' Holy,
holy, holy, Lord God Almighty/ and should like to
write such a one. We shall have much to learn in
a future world, and I think we shall all be children
to begin with when we get to heaven, whatever our
age when we die, and shall grow on there from
childhood to the prime of life, at which we shall
remain for ever. My idea of heaven is to be
engaged in perpetual ministry to souls in this and
other worlds."

What Mrs. Weld means by saying that Tennyson
expressed his own faith better in "The Ancient
Sage" than in any other of his poems, is rather
that he explained his philosophy of faith better
in it than even in "The Two Voices," or "The
Idylls of the King." And the lines she quotes
from "The Ancient Sage" do express, with ad-
mirable precision, the secret of the power which
faith bestows : —

LIV ON THE FUTURE LIFE 411

" Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith !
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ' Yes ' and ' No/
She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro' the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wailed ' Mirage ' ! "

Without forecasting the harvest, no man could %
deliberately sow his seed. No man whose heart had \
not passed fully into the effect, could painfully and
laboriously bring about the cause. But still, the
deliberate choice of " the sunnier side of doubt " is
one thing, and the "distress of soul," with which
Tennyson contemplated the assaults on the divinity
of Christ, was quite another and a higher thing.
And nothing could better prove it to be another
and a higher thing, than the great explicitness with \
which Tennyson confessed to Mrs. Weld his belief !
that the heavenly state would consist in the "per-
petual ministry to souls in this and other worlds," •
as compared with the extreme vagueness of that )
hope which " the ancient Sage " is made to express /
as to the possibility of another world : —

" My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,
So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.
Who knows but that the darkness is in man ?
The doors of Night may be the gates of Light ;
For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then
Suddenly heal'd, how would'st thou glory in all
The splendours and the voices of the world !
And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet

412 THE LATE LORD TENNYSON liv

No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore
Await the last and largest sense to make
The phantom walls of this illusion fade,
And show us that the world is wholly fair."

That is an anticipation worthy of a noble nature
a thousand years before Christ, but it is not nearly
so adequate an expression of faith for nearly two
thousand years after Christ, as Tennyson felt that he
could personally avow without exaggerating in the
least the depth of his conviction.

There is certainly something singularly inane,
and, I might also say, even un-English, in the
ordinary idea which English believers in immortality
so often seem to accept, — that it will consist in
mere rest and praise, in repose and expressions of
wonder at the goodness of God. The notion appears
to be derived from the passage in Scripture in
which it is briefly said that the good who die in the
Lord may " rest from their labours, and their works
do follow them," which certainly does not promise
them any indolent repose in the satisfaction of
already achieved and rewarded effort, but would
rather seem to convey, on the contrary, a restora-
tion of energy in the next life which will fall into
the same grooves with the energy of this. The
vision in the Apocalypse of exalted beings who are
perpetually ascribing glory to God, has no doubt
given rise to the feeblest of all conceptions of the
character of that doxology. As human beings do
not show their true reverence for men by indolent
cries of admiration, but by throwing their whole
hearts and energies into the attitude which they so
/ much admire, so what Catholics call the "beatific
vision," is certainly far less to be construed as

LIV ON THE FUTURE LIFE 413

passive and supine rapture, than as an exalted form
of the same state of mind in which human beings
show their human reverence. Who is it that best
indicates his reverence for the great travellers, or
the great biologists, or the great mathematicians, or
the great astronomers, or the great philanthropists
of the past ? Surely, he who treads in their foot-
steps—who explores Africa with the patience and
fortitude of Mungo Park, or follows up the clue of
evolution with the humble assiduity of Darwin, or
extends the calculus of number with the masterly
concentration of Newton, or explores the heavens
with the patient search of Herschel, or alleviates
human misery with the self-sacrifice of Howard or
Elizabeth Fry. And it is almost childish to suppose
that it can take less energy and less effort to enter
into the glory of the Creator than it takes to enter
into the glory of the creature, — to follow in the
footsteps of the Infinite Wisdom and Righteousness
than it takes to follow in the footsteps of finite
curiosity and finite goodness. The sense in which
men rest from their labours while their works follow
them, is surely not the sense in which human beings
fall asleep in glad fatigue with a feeling upon their
hearts of having earned their rest, for that would
imply a cessation rather than an expansion of life, —
a long night of half-conscious or unconscious repose,
instead of a great increase of divine power. It
seems almost monstrous to regard the initiation into
divine life as implying a cessation of all that we ,
most closely associate with life here, — as the happy /
trance of languid ecstasy instead of the new glow or
creative vigour. Clearly, the " beatific vision " must
there, as here, be the vision which makes happy;
and the vision which makes us happiest is never a

I

V

414 THE LATE LORD TENNYSON LIV

vision of indolent contemplativeness, but a vision to
which we lend all our powers and all our vitality.
It is, in fact, a vision in which the will is as much
alive as the intellect, the sympathies as the imagina-
tion ; in which the whole nature springs into a new
vividness of activity as well as insight. The ordinary
anticipation of the blessedness of the future is of a
kind of happy trance. But a trance is not the ful-
ness of life, rather, on the contrary, a kind of half-
death, half -life, in which the mind catches a glimpse
of something beyond the verge of its ordinary
horizon. Heaven, we may be sure, produces not a
trance but a steady growth in the knowledge of God ;
and growth in the knowledge of Him whose very
> Sabbath of rest is glad work still, cannot be mere
contemplation. "My father worketh hitherto and
I work," said our Lord, when justifying on the
Sabbath, the restoration of power to the paralytic
And the " beatific vision," however free it may be
from the sense of exhaustion, which really means the
inadequacy of our powers to the work they have to
do, can certainly never be free from the sense of
growing life and strength and of that divine energy
which we call creative. No wonder Tennyson could
not endure that conception of Heaven which made
/ it a mere contrast to the very best life of earth,
^ instead of a transfiguration of that very best life.
If we cannot really do honour to men without
catching something of their power, — and surely this
is self-evident, for how are we to know what they
were without appreciating the difficulties they have
overcome and the triumphs they have achieved ? — it
is infinitely more true that we can only ascribe glory
to God in any true sense, as we slowly and humbly
learn to understand the infinitude of His life, and

LIV ON THE FUTURE LIFE 415

the infinitude of His gifts of life to others. Divine
life, whatever else it is, is one immeasurable gift;
and even to strive to enter into the secret of one
immeasurable gift without at least measurable
giving, is simply impossible. The " beatific vision "
is a vision of giving ; but a vision of giving can
only grow into truth, as the life of giving grows
into reality. It is not more certain, I take it, that
we cannot spring at one bound into purity without
purification, than that we cannot spring at one
bound into beatitude without slowly learning that
which is of the essence of beatitude, — the infinite
munificence and passion of the divine generosity.

THE END

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