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Jiristlan ApolO'g:etics
A Series of Addresses
Henry Wace
and Others
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CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS
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CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS
A SERIES OF ADDRESSES
DELIVERED BEFORE THE CHRISTIAN
ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
LONDON
BY GEORGE HENSLOW, M.A. HENRY WAGE, D.D.
D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, D.Litt. R. E. WELSH, M.A.
GEORGE T. MANLEY, M.A. CECIL WILSON, M.A.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY W. D. McLAREN, M.A.
EDITED BY W. W. SETON, M.A.
NEW YORK
E. p. DUTTON «& CO.
31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
1903
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PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.
LONDON AND AYLESBURY
ENGLA^D
TO
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD REAY
G.C.S.I.
PRESIDENT OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
BY
THE MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION
00
X
CO
CONTENTS
PAGES
Prefatory Note by Mr. W. W. Seton . . xi — xii
Introduction
ON THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF CHRISTIAN
EVIDENCES By Rev. W. D. McLaren, M.A.
Aim of Christian Evidences— Classification of arguments :
(1) from experience ; (2) from self-consistency ;
(3) from harmony with universal knowledge — Mutual
relation of the addresses — Presentation and constitution
of evidences . . . . . xiii — xxii
Address I
PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM WITH AN EX-
AMINATION OF DARWINISM
By Professor G. Henslow, M.A., F.L.S., F.G.S., etc
Modern rationalism and natural selection — Experimental
and inductive knowledge — Quotations from extreme
Materialists who claim Darwin's authority — Counter-
quotations from Darwin — Evolution distinguished from
abused emphasis on natural selection — ITie registrar,
not the cause of evolution — Darwin's mistakes : (1) in
introducing question of structure ; (2) in treating '^ In-
dividual Diiferences " as source of variety — Inadequacy
of data drawn from domestic culture— Importance of
environment — " The True Darwinism " : (1) Variability
but with no indefinite result ; (2) Directivity or the
power to respond — How adaptation argument replaces
that from design — How true Darwinism consists with
Theism 1—24
Speech by Lord Kelvin 24 — 26
vii If
viii CONTENTS
PAGES
Address II
THE BOOK OF GENESIS. By Very Rev. H. Wage, D.D.
Unity of design, God's relation to world and race — Contents
reviewed — Justification by modern knowledge of
cosmogony — Astonishing approximation to science —
Genesis i. not Babylonian — Prompt passage from
man's physical to moral condition — Rise of early
civilization confirmed by history — also patriarchal
expectation of Jewish destiny — Distinctive importance
of covenant beyond revelation of monotheism — The
writing of the records — Irrelevancy of discrimination
between the several materials of the compilation 27 — 41
Speech by Sir Robert Anderson, K.C.B., LL.D. . 42 — 45
Address III
THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AS INDEPENDENT'
WITNESSES
By Rev. Professor D. S. Margoliouth, D.Litt.
Two negative works dealing with compilation of Gospels —
Inevitableness of subjective element in appreciation :
e.g. Myers and Podmore — " Gospel according to "
— " Gospel " what Jesus said and did — " According
to " paralleled by Moslem lives of Mohammed —
Reasons why oral record at first preferred to written
— Chiefly conformity to Jewish prejudice — Possible
accuracy of tradition for centuries — Start once made
in writing crystallises all floating matter : cf. Luke i.
1-4 — Survival of fittest record — Functions of tradi-
tionalists : (1) Transference to MS. ; (2) Arrange-
ment ; (3) Criticism of source and channel — Local
retentions — Conmiemorative verses and their age —
Documents of earlier collectors — Brevity and varia-
bility of first reports — Precedents and aphorisms —
The epitome used for proselytising — Apologetic value
CONTENTS ix
PAGES
of discrepancies — Uncertain eiFect of translation from
Aramaic — Absence of fabricative causes — W^hat if
Gospels second-century compilations? — Rays repeatedly
focussed : evidence of uncontradicted narratives —
Rigid conditions of traditionalism— Principles of gospel
selection undiscovered as yet— Results of searching
cross-examination — Subjective origin of different ap-
preciations. ....... 47 — 71
Speech by Sir Dyce Duckworth, M.D., LL.D. . 71—75
„ „ Colonel Williams, M.P. . . . 75—76
Address IV
THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
By Rev. R. E. Welsh, M.A.
Christianity known through writings, environment, and
experience — Professor James's "Religious Experi-
ence"— '^^ Immediate luminousness " of the Christ
portrait — Imperious demands of the moral nature —
Ellen Watson — " Criterion of moral helpfulness "
itself a Christian gift: (1) Collective application-
Quotations from independent historians — Christianity
distinguished from the Church — Significance of con-
tinuous protest of Christian minority — Christianity
guaranteed even if only the companion of civiliza-
tion— Its removal disintegrates — Delusion excluded by
universality of historical test ; (2) Individual experi-
ence— Tlie nature, bulk, and continuousness of phe-
nomena— Quotations — How far argument valid and
tested — Is experience mere personal caprice.^ — or
explained by medical materialism ? — or by psychic
analysis ? — or by high ethical standard ?— or by playing
on the heart strings ? — or by ^' truth in a tale " ^ —
or by idealising a dead Christ? — What of noble un-
believers ? — Single cases argument two-edged . 77 — 99
Speech by Sir T. Barlow, Bart., K.C.V.O., iM.D. 99—100
X CONTENTS
PAGES
Address V
MATERIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY^?
By Rev. G. T. Manley, M.A.
Double drift of non-Christian Theism : (a) to Pantheism—
A non-revealing God disappears — The universal non-
ethical— Points common to Pantheism wdth Material-
ism ; (h) To Agnosticism — Its origin in the diminish-
ing sense of God without Christ— and in impression
of sorrow in a Christless world — Inquirer distinguished
from agnostic — Practical pressure renders real Agnosti-
cism impossible — Renan cited — Origin of term
"agnostic" admits negative character — Spencer in
proof — Huxley's positive contents of Agnosticism
purely materialistic — Materialism not mere acceptance
of natural facts^ but refusal to admit God behind ;
i.e. Mechanics and Biology self-sufficient — Material-
ism examined as to (o) salvation^ (6) moral guidance^
(c) search for truth— Christianity a witness begging
a hearing— No obstacle but will — Difficulties of all
theories — Lower explicable by higher, not con-
versely . . . . '. . . . 101—113
Speech by Mr. Augustine Birrell, K.C. . . 113 — 115
Address VI
SOME EVIDENCES FOR THE RESURRECTION
By Rev. C. W. AVilson, M.A.
Limited design of address — The fact } or the belief ? —
Early belief now admitted by all— Theory of impos-
ture rejected — Swoon theory discussed — Hallucination
theory — Difficulty of the missing corpse — Manifesta-
tion theory — Gospel explanation alone sufficient —
Pauline evidence — Was Paul epileptic ? — Evidence
from Corinthians — Christ's post-resurrection teaching
— Its non-Judaic character — Evidence from obser-
vance of Sunday — Personal experiment . . 115 — 124
SUM3IARY 124—133
PREFATORY NOTE
The interest aroused by these Addresses on Christian
Apologetics, and more particularly by Lord Kelvin's
speech at the first meeting, followed by the controversy
in The Times ^ is, I hope, sufficient justification for
their publication in book form, apart from the fact that
many foreigners as well as Englishmen have expressed a
desire to see them in print.
They owe their origin to the Committee of the
Christian Association of University College, London, in
the Botanical Theatre of which they were delivered
during the Summer Term of the Session 1902-3.
Intended at first solely for the men-students of our
own College, when the scheme was further developed
it was determined to throw open the meetings to men
and women students from all London Colleges and
Hospitals.
It is our hope that other affiliated L^nions of the
British College Christian Union may in future pay
more attention to the development of this important
branch of College work ; and it is satisfactory to learn
that arrangements for similar courses are already being
xii PREFATORY NOTE
considered in Oxford, Liverpool, and other London
Colleges.
On behalf of the Committee, I take this opportunity
of thanking the speakers who have kindly consented
to the publication of their work, the gentlemen who
assisted by presiding at the meetings, and Mr. McLaren,
who has given valuable help by contributing not only
the Introduction but an Appendix containing a
summary of the Six Addresses, which will be found
useful by students. Each contributor is responsible
for his own portion only.
WALTER W. SETON,
Ho7i. Secretary.
University College Christian
Association.
October, 1903.
INTRODUCTION
ON THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF CHRISTIAN
EVIDENCES
By the Rev. W. D. McLaren., M.A.
It has been thought well, in introducing the following
addresses to the attention of students and of the general
public, to supply a bird's-eye view of the whole field of
Christian Evidences, in order that the reader may the
better see the proper place of each several address.
This should not only enhance their value, but also
suggest lines of further inquiry, and even help to
strengthen or create the conviction of the rational
character of Christian Faith as a whole.
The essential distinction of that Faith is that Jesus
Christ is a trustworthy deliverer from the rule and
consequences of evil, which in regard to God we call
sin and in regard to ourselves and our fellows wrong.
Personal faith is reliance on Him as such. Christian
Evidences are concerned with proofs of this trust-
worthiness. They are not immediately directed to
establish individual or systematised doctrines, which,
properly speaking, are the detailed applications of this
trustworthiness. Yet such doctrines or systems as
xiv INTRODUCTION
exhibit truly the mind of Christ may form matter of
evidence in commending His trustworthiness. Neither
are Evidences directed, as many suppose, to estabhsh
the divine origin or authority, truth or accuracy of
the Bible ; though it is obvious that a searching
examination and comparison of the contents of the
Bible must always be a large part of the matter and
method of Christian Evidences, and that whatever
confirms the Bible teaching generally will tend to
confirm the special records dealing with the trust-
worthiness of Christ. Nor yet (with one great excep-
tion) are they directed to the establishment of miracles
as such, nor of any special miracle. That one great
exception is the Resurrection of Christ, whose trust-
worthiness it expresses and seals. The removal,
however, of objections to miracles may well facilitate
the acceptance of direct evidence. Neither are the
Evidences immediately directed to faith in God, or the
acknowledgment of sin, both of these being rather
given in the discovery of a trustworthy Christ. Cer-
tainly, sense of the reality of God and of sin does tend
to induce faith in the trustworthiness of Christ, only
it is not the immediate goal of Christian Evidences.
Having thus defined their aim, we m.ay conveniently
consider their contents with reference to three questions.
(1) Is that trust justified by experience as a valid
working hypothesis.? (2) Is the story of its origin
self-consistent ? (3) Is it contradicted by other known
facts or truths ? For practicality, self-consistency, and
INTRODUCTION xv
general harmony, are the three tests of truth to the
ordinary mind.
(1) Applying the first, we find the Christian apologist
replying with a mass of data gathered from the alleged
effects of trust in Christ on the lives of men in every
variety of circumstance. To the individual who has
experienced such effects the evidence is usually com-
plete, at least for the time being ; and to a vast
number the effects in the changed lives of others, as
known by observation and testimony, afford sufficient
proof even where personal trust is not associated
immediately with conviction. This kind of evidence
is that on which the great bulk of Christian people
rely. It is treated in Addi-ess IV. by Mr. Welsh, and
in several of the appended speeches. The counter-
argument is usually the attempt to show either that
the good effects of Christianity are due to some other
element than trust in Christ, or that that trust would
be as effectual when exercised in an unreal as in a real
Christ — that Christianity is, in short, a huge hypnotic
delusion. The fact of the universality and variety of
Christian experience goes far to refute this unbelieving
explanation ; still, the element of doubt remaining in
the minds of many, who hesitate whether or no to
construe even their own supposed Christian experience
in a non-Christian light, forces inquiry as to the truth
of the story from which Christianity takes its rise.
And this is made necessary by consideration of Christian
experience itself. For that experience professes to
c
xvi INTRODUCTION
deal, not with a speculative or made-up Christ, but
with a living Christ whom it identifies with the Christ
of the story ; and in so far as it has been transmitted
from heart to heart, it likewise obliges an inquiry
into the original experience of the first Christian
disciples.
(2) The evidence from the self-consistency of the
Gospel story may be considered in regard to its form,
its substance, and its purpose. Under consideration
of form come undesigned coincidences between various
narratives, the value of a measure of discrepancy as a
test of the absence of collusion or artifice, traces of eye
and ear witness, and the like. Under consideration of
substance comes the difficulty of accounting for the
admitted facts otherwise than by the alleged causes
(e.g. the Triumphal Entry brought about by the
Raising of Lazarus), and of explaining the teaching
apart from the associated wonders ; but the culmination
of this part of the proof lies in the portraiture of the
Christ Himself, which has done more than anything
else to convince inquires that it exhibited a reality
and not a fiction. It is in this connection that the
supreme importance of such an address as that given by
Professor Margoliouth appears. Included in this class
come all the refutations of unbelieving explanations
of the story as due to Fable, Fraud, or Fancy, such
as we find in Address VL, as well as the contrast
afforded by the Apocr^^hal Gospels. Under con-
sideration of the purpose come the arguments from
INTRODUCTION xvii
the fitness of Christ's alleged words, works, example,
and history, to achieve the professed end of His mission
— namely, the deliverance of men from sin, and their
restoration to the favour and Image of God. A
subordinate part of this evidence from self-consistency
lies in the internal harmony of Christian doctrine, as
exhibiting the trustworthiness of Christ in His various
offices toward the soul and toward mankind. Such
considerations also form a natural transition to the
third class of evidences.
The importance of this second class lies in the con-
viction which it produces of the objective truth of the
Gospel story and its seeming separability from the ques-
tionings which arise as to the intei-pretation of alleged
Christian experience, one's own or others', and the study
of it has both led many to personal trust in Christ
and restored that trust in cases where it had been lost
in puzzled introspection and philosophic uncertainty.
But where the relation of the experience to the story
is taken into account, the combined evidence is felt
to be more convincing still : the Christ of the story
makes the Chi'ist of the heart intelligible ; the Christ
of the heart makes the Christ of the story credible ;
the experience professes the story as its origin, and
the story professes the experience as its aim.
(3) There still remains a class of mind unsatisfied
without the assurance which comes from perceiving the
place of any alleged fact or truth in the general system
of human knowledge. Even those who are usually
xviii INTRODUCTION
practically satisfied as to the reality both of the
Gospel story and of their own Christian experience
have intellectual inquiries and seasons of uncertainty
in which the question will force itself whether
Christianity be not contradicted by ascertained know-
ledge in other departments, and whether indeed any
room be left for it in the universe as we know it.
To such, Christian evidences assume the shape nega-
tively of refuting objections di'awn from other
knowledge and positively of showing the harmony of
Christianity with it.
The importance of the first Address, by Professor
Henslow, w411 be apparent at this point, and a con-
siderable portion of Dean Wace's Address touches on
this department of the subject. Professor Henslow
endeavours to set aside the alleged contradiction between
the Christian doctrine of a Creator and our knowledge
of the evolution of life, while Dean Wace indicates the
harmony of history with the first of those Jewish books
which the Christ of the Gospels has irrevocably endorsed.
Similar considerations deal with the coiTespondence of
the vital portions of Old Testament narrative, of the
Acts of the Apostles, and above all of the Gospels, with
the historical conditions of their respective ages. Here
we accordingly meet the evidence derived from the
fields of Old Testament and New Testament textual
and historical criticism, and the controversies thence
arising. Further, these considerations assume a philo-
sophical aspect in the attempt to show that the Course
INTRODUCTION xix
of History not only requires the admission of the Gospel
story as the rise of modern life, but that it acquires in
the light of Christianity a meaning and a goal supplied
by nothing else. Again we may take the Course of
Nature, and try to show that its ordinary sequences
indicative of the divine faithfulness, regularity, and
holiness, do not exclude the extraordinary occurrences
of the Christian's Faith which correlatively indicate
the superabundance of the divine mercy. Nature is
shown to be no rigid machine, but the plastic sacra-
mental material alike of its Maker s law and of His
grace. Similarly the Course of Philosophical Thought
may be shown to harmonise with the Gospel. Under
this head come such discussions as those in the fifth
Address, by Mr. Manley, as well as the consideration
of other religions and philosophic systems. We find
the undesigned combination of the best elements of
these in Christianity, and on the other hand a marked
contrast between their doctrines of self-deliverance and
despair and the doctrine of deliverance by Christ. The
moral fitness of the Gospel for human need and the
supreme knowledge of the heart alike of God and of
man which it affords constitute its ultimate philosophical
justification, and naturally lead the mind round again
to the question of indi\ddual experience of its power,
thus uniting the persuasion of the intellect with the
appeal to the conscience and the heart.
The Resurrection of Christ (dealt with in the sixth
Address by Mr. Wilson), may be said to focus and
XX INTRODUCTION
symbolise all the various forms of evidence and to
touch points arising out of each of the other addresses.
It is the beginning and origin of those supra-sensible
influences which constitute Christian experience. It is
the consummation of the Christian story in its form,
substance, and purpose. It is the supreme event in
the world's history — the seal of the divine origin and
serviceability of Nature, and the answer to the inquiries
of the philosopher and the cravings of the heart as
to the meaning and destiny of man and the character
of God. For in it Christ is seen as the Life and the
Life- Giver.
It will thus be seen that the addresses are given in
an order the reverse of that just set forth : they open
with the great question of Theism, proceed to the
written records first of the original and then of the
fully developed divine revelation, and next examine
the Christian experience which it has created, recurring
in Address V. to the Atheistic position as the true
alternative of Christianity. The sixth Address, by Mr.
Wilson, rebutting disbelieving explanations of the
Resun-ection, confronts us with the final question of
personal experiment.
From the comprehensiveness of this general scheme
it will appear how much the force of the Evidences
may depend upon the presentation to each individual
of that portion of the argument appropriate to his
temperament, condition, and need. Some Protestant
Christians might here wisely learn from their Jesuit
INTRODUCTION xxi
brethren. Exclusive emphasis on experimental evi-
dence, for example, will but irritate instead of helping
one who rightly demands or needs the historical ; while
the historical evidence cannot satisfy the philosophic
inquirer, nor the philosophic avail one bent upon
practical satisfaction. The wise apologist will adapt
his arguments to the need of his fellow rather than
to his own preference for a particular line of thought.
Christian apologists in special departments are even
found flouting each other's efforts instead of rejoicing
in them, and many earnest Christians under colour
of appeal to heart and conscience affect to despise
reasoning; altoecether. The remarkable successes of the
" evidential missions '' of the Christian Evidence Society
witness to the advantage of the acknowledgment of
the proper place of the intellect in Christian faith, and
the mutual dependence of the various departments
of Christian Evidences. On the part of students even
the most suitable presentation may be repelled by
prejudice, sometimes intellectual, as when some special
theory of Science or Philosophy is allowed to bar out
any counter considerations, sometimes moral, as from
an unwillingness to submit to the claims of Christ
if established. On the inquirers' part a keen sense of
the realities of God and of sin will on the other hand
dispose toward acceptance of the offered forgiveness,
renewal, and deathlessness : the hungry man is legiti-
mately ready to satisfy his craving when there is even
tolerable presumption that what is offered him is not
xxii INTRODUCTION
poison but good food. The determined seeker will also
do well to remember that the evidence he needs to
produce faith is perhaps to be found just in that very
department which he is prone to overlook, or has but
supei-ficially examined. Carelessness or prejudice here
prolongs dubiety in many cases.
The study of the aim and contents of Christian
Evidences leads us, in conclusion, to observe their
constitution. Their force is such as amply to justify
the experiment of a personal reliance on Christ for
deliverance as the supremely rational act of the soul ;
yet insufficient to compel intellectual assent without
the experiment. Otherwise, with too little evidence,
the venture would be irrational if not immoral,
and, with overwhelming evidence, the mere assent
would bear no moral significance. Christ Himself is
thus at once the subject and the object of Christian
Evidences, and becomes the test as He professes to be
the judge of spiritual character. He offers Himself for
individual acceptance, and it is in the expectation
that some may be led upon careful inquiry to make
this supreme venture that the Christian Association of
University College, London, has arranged and now
publishes these lectures.
August, 1903.
PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
WITH
AN EXAMINATION OF DARWINISM
By the Rev. Prof. G. Henslow, M.A., F.L.S., F.G.S., etc.»
Present-day Rationalism is presumably displayed in
the various publications issued by the "Rationalist
Press Association.""^ These cover a large field of
enquiry. It would be quite impossible to discuss all
the subjects treated by the various authors ; but there
is one which distinguishes present-day Rationalism
from the older Secularism of the "seventies," when
Mr. Bradlaugh was a conspicuous figure ; and this is,
that some, at least, of the wTiters attribute all
phenomena of living beings, including Man, whether
physical or psychological, to Natural Selection.
Darwin's Origin of Species hy Means of Natural
Selection was published in 1859 ; and the Secularists
of that day make no use of natural selection in their
writings on Free Thought, etc. ; which generally included
a refusal to accept any ecclesiastical dogmas of theology,
and an agnostic attitude towards a belief in God.
Thus Mr. Bradlaugh wrote : —
" An atheist does not say, ' There is no God ' ; but
he says, ' I know not what you mean by God. I am
^ Epitome of an address delivered May 1st, 1903.
2 Founded in 1899.
1 1
2 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
without idea of God. The word God is to me a sound
conveying no clear or distinct affirmation." " ^
The primary aim of modern rationahsm, as repre-
sented by the R.P.A., is as follows : —
" The chief objects of the Association are the
encouragement and dissemination of literature based
upon science and critical research, and tending at once
to the liberation of human reason from mere tradition
and to its proper exercise on the growing material of
knowledge, etc."*'
The following is given as a definition of Rational-
ism : —
" Rationalism may be defined as the mental attitude
which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason,
and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and
ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all
arbitrary assumptions or authority."
So far, this is a sound, scientific attitude, and no one
can find fault with these aims and this definition ; but
the question arises — Do the authors of the books issued
by this Association act up to these aims or conform to
this definition ? Do they never rest on " arbitrary
assumptions " or unquestioned " authority " ?
As the writers base their agnosticism — and in some
cases their pronounced atheism, as, e.g., Haeckel, upon
Darwinism — it becomes necessary to examine that
theory ; and that is why I have added it to the title
of this addi^ess.
The following are a few quotations from a typical
rationalistic writer who attributes everything to natural
selection.
^ A Plea for Atheism, p. 2.
VALUE OF INDUCTIVE EVIDENCE 3
The anonymous author of Mr. Balfour s Ajwlogetics,
speaking of " Science," says : —
" Science courts the most rigorous investigation," and
" lays bare the natural causes of all phenomena."
It has not succeeded in doing so for the cause of
terrestrial life, the cause of chemical affinities, and
many other things.
" Science remains firmly planted on the impregnable
ground of experience," for "knowledge can only be
gained by means of observation corrected and verified
by experiments."
I wish particularly to call attention to the fact that
knowledge based on Inductive evidence is, in the case
of this writer, conspicuous by its absence. If " observa-
tion and experiment" were the sole means of acquiring
knowledge, the greater part of recognised scientific con-
clusions would have to be abandoned. Thus, no one
now disputes the " fact " that the rotation of the earth
on its axis gives us day and night ; but " observation "
of the sun apparently supports the opposite conclusion.
It is solely accepted on inductive evidence, i.e. the
accumulation of probabilities of a very high order
which furnishes a moral conviction of the truth, and
is equivalent to a demonstration, rendering the alter-
native— that the sun and stars travel round the earth
in twenty-four hours — absolutely unthinkable. The
truth of the earth's rotation does not lie within the
range of " observation and experiment."
Similarly, when this writer asks for proofs of the
existence of God, he says : —
"Science neither affirms nor denies the existence of
God. . . . The so-called knowledge [of God] must be
4 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
submitted to the tests of observation and experiment.
If it is knowledge at all, it is capable of verification,
and the verdict of science on the subject must be
final."!
"No man hath seen God at any time.'*'' How can
the knowledge of Him be brought within the range of
observation and experiment ? But as science is per-
fectly satisfied with inductive evidence where these are
impossible, Rationalists are inconsistent in not accept-
ing it as a proof of the existence of a Creator ; for the
accumulation of probabilities of an Omnipotent Mind
behind nature is as great as or far greater than, say,
e.g.^ the coincidences between the absorption bands in
the solar spectrum and the coiTesponding coloured
bands of vapourised metals, etc. ; yet, all physicists are
perfectly willing to accept the probability of our metals
being in the sun itself as a fact, though they have not
a chance of submitting the incandescent vapours of that
luminary to observation and experiment.
It is said that believers have faith in God. " Faith
is the proving of things not seen,""* according to the
writer to the Hebrews (R.V.), and this is precisely what
is called inductive evidence in science.
English Rationalists seem to be mainly, like Bradlaugh,
agnostics. They do not say "there is no God," but
what are regarded by theists as sufficient " proofs " do
not seem to appeal to them as any evidence ; and the
reason, we shall see, is that they accept Darwinism as
accountable for everything.
Thus, when the author of Mr. Balfour''s Apologetics
is discussing human psychology, he uses natural
» P. 102.
HAECKEL AND MONISM 5
selection as a general instrument to explain all
mental phenomena. For example : —
" The capacity of the human intellect is in conformity
with what we might expect, on the theory that it has
been evolved for practical purposes by the process of
natural selection." ^
" Reason is the ' roof and crown of things ' ; it is
the final result of a long process of natural selection."
But it does not fall within the scope of " observation
and experiment."^
The latest writer on natural selection, however, says : —
" Man is an unsatisfactory organism in which to
determine either the existence or non-existence of
natural selection." ^
If it be asked why these rationalistic writers lay
so much stress upon natui-al selection, the answer seems
to be that — setting aside their own definition — they
accept Darwinism as an established fact, and Darwin
as an " authority," because they know no other source
of interpretation of all the phenomena of living
beings.
Let us now turn to Haeckel as illustrating the
materialistic or, as he calls it, the monistic position.
Unlike agnostics, he says : —
"Atheism affirms that there are no gods nor god-
desses. This godless world-system substantially agrees
with monism or pantheism. Dualism breaks up the
' P. 87.
2 P. 93.
^ Variation in Animals and Plants, by Dr. H. M. Vernon,
p. 349.
6 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
universe into two entirely distinct substances — the
material world and the immaterial God. . . . Monism
recognises one sole substance, which is at once ' God
and Natm-e."* Body and spirit or matter and energy
it holds to be inseparable." ^
In regard to materialistic monism, as do Rationalists,
he treats Darwinism as fundamentally the interpreta-
tion of all phenomena : —
"Darwin gave us the key to the monistic explana-
tion of organism. . . . Mechanism alone can give us
a true explanation of natural phenomena ; for it traces
them to their real efficient causes — viz. to blind and
unconscious agencies."' ^
" Kant said : ' It is impossible to explain the origin
of a single blade of grass by natural laws uncontrolled
by design."* Seventy years afterwards Darwin achieved
the task which Kant deemed impracticable." ^
Similarly, Biichner says : —
" Darwinism is the chief support of materialism and
monism." *
Was this Darwin's own view ? In the sixth edition
of the Origin of Specks, etc. (with additions and
con-ections to 1872, published in 1878) the final words
are as follows : —
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its
several powers, having been originally breathed by the
Creator into a few forms or into one ; and that whilst
this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed
^ Biddle of the Universe, p. 20.
2 Op. cit. pp. 264 and 265.
' Op. cit. p. 265.
* Last Words on Materialism, p. 139.
DARWIN^S POSTULATES 7
law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless
forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being, evolved.'^ ^
In his Descent of Man (1871) he also wrote : —
" The birth both of species and of the individual
are equally parts of that grand sequence of events
which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind
chance." ^
Compare these last words with those I have quoted
from Haeckel — viz. " blind and unconscious agencies."
A noticeable feature soon becomes apparent in the
writings of Darwinians and Rationalists, in that they
often far " out-darwin " Darwin himself in their appli-
cations of natural selection.
His works on the Origin of Species, etc., and Animals
and Plants under Domestication are solely concerned with
the evolution of living organisms, which he bases
on two postulates — (1) the original creation of a few or
one primitive being ; and (2) the existence of varia-
tions, without which, he says, natural selection can do
nothing.^ If these postulates be granted, natural
selection would be accountable for Evolution.
But some writers would endeavour to account for
the various internal tissues as resulting from natural
selection ; and not only man's mental phenomena, but
even death itself as coming under its sway.
M. Leon A. Dumont observed that on the acceptance
of Darwin's theory in Germany : —
"Non seulement on Fadopta pour les sciences
^ Oriyin of Species, p. 429.
2 Vol. ii., p. 396.
^ Origin, etc., p. 64.
8 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
naturelles, mais on essaya de Tetendre aux faits les plus
divers, a la science du langage, a la formation des
facultes intellectuelles, a la politique, a la morale, a
Fhistoire, a la theorie du progres. Le darwinisme et
ses applications ont donne naissance dans ce pays a
toute une litterature."'"' ^
With regard to man, Darwin''s work on his Descent
is mainly concerned with the evolution of his body
from the lower animals, and only observes of his
psychology : —
" The moral qualities are advanced, either directly
or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit,
the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, etc., than
through natural selection." ^
The author of Mr. Balfour''s Apologetics^ however,
refers man's senses, reason, aesthetic powers, etc., un-
hesitatingly to natural selection. But, besides basing
human psychology on natural selection we have seen
that Haeckel and Biichner base their atheistic
materialism on Darwinism, in spite of Darwin's own
express assertions of his belief in a Creator, as seen
in the passages referred to.^
We must now enter upon an examination of Darwin-
ism, from which Evolution must be carefully dis-
tinguished. The latter now stands on an iiTefra^jjable
basis. The evidence is largely inductive, but sup-
plemented by a vast amount of " observation and
^ Haeckel et la Theorie de rEvolution en Allemagne, p. 36
(1873).
2 The Descent of Man, vol. ii., p. 404.
' Origin of Species, pp. 140, 429 ; Descent of Man, vol. ii.,
p. 396.
DARWIN ON MALTHUS^ THEORY 9
experiment " ; so that any alternative is at the present
day unthinkable.
Darwinism was a theory to account for the process
of Evolution, and is expressed by the title of the book,
The Origin of Species hy means of Natural Selection.
Darwin tells us that it was suggested to his mind
by reading Malthus"* Essay on Population. In this
work the author observes that, as the human race
multiplies at a geometrical progi^ession, but their food
supply increases at an arithmetical one,^ a time must
come when some must die for want of food, in any
given limited area at least. Hence the weak and
sickly, the diseased and impoverished, etc., will go
first, as being, so to say, naturally eliminated, while
the strong and rich will be naturally selected.
Now applying this theory to animals and plants,
Darwin's first datum is that they have an enormous
birth-rate with a nearly equal death-rate ; because in
any definite area the average of its inhabitants is
annually maintained.
The causes of the deaths are various. A large pro-
portion of offspring, as eggs of fishes, are eaten by
others. Ill-luck, or, as Darwin calls it, "fortuitous
destruction," is accountable for many losses among the
offspring.
With regard to plants, well nourished seeds grow
^ It is beside my present question to enquire how he drew this
conclusion, but the process is not quite clear ; since cultivated
plants_, as wheat, and domesticated animals multiply in a high
geometrical progression, as well as man. But, in a limited area,
say England, which was supposed to supply its population
without any foreign assistance, the population will increase but
the area does not ; and if this be fully cultivated, it can only
supply a fixed quantity of animal and vegetable food.
2
10 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
into more vigorous plants and crowd out the weaker
ones. In fact, " the struggle for existence " is intense,
not only between competing animals and plants, but
with the surrounding physical conditions, etc. The
general consequence is that the average number only
survives.
But the survival of the strongest and luckiest has
nothing to do with the appearance of new Variations of
Structure which form the basis of a new Variety ; for
such are due to other causes than those which enable
the survivals to be the " fittest to survive."
If this process be natural selection, then natural
selection has no power or agency in the procedure
at all, as so many ^^Titers say. It is, as Darwin
insisted, only a metaphor. Thus he \vrites : —
"Some have even imagined that natural selection
induces variability, whereas it implies only the pre-
servation of such variations as arise and are beneficial
to the being under its conditions of life. . . . Others
have objected that as plants have no volition, natural
selection is not applicable to them ! In the literal
sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a
false term ; but who ever objected to chemists speaking
of the elective affinities of the various elements ? . . .
It has been said that I speak of natural selection as
an active power or Deity ; but who objects to an
author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling
the movements of the planets ? Every one knows what
is meant and is implied by such metaphorical ex-
pressions, etc."" ^
Darwin's first and fundamental mistake was to intro-
duce the element of Structure or Form into Malthus'
theory ; a feature with which he was not concerned at
^ Origin of Species, p. 63.
DARWIN AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 11
all. It has never been shown that slight changes of
structure or form, or what are called " Individual
Differences," have anything to do either with the death
or survival of individuals.^
Darwin's second mistake was to regard " Individual
Differences " ^ as a source of varieties in nature.
These differences arise from the fact, that no two
animals or plants of any species are absolutely alike.
For example, no two leaves on a tree are identical in
shape, as if they were cut out together like stamped
"fish-papers." No two peas in a pod are absolutely
alike. All such differences are neglected by systematists
because they are wanting in the two essential features
of varieties and species ; namely, a sufficient amount of
difference to justify the use of the terms " variation "
and " variety " ; and hereditary constancy.
Dr. A. R. Wallace distinguishes between " specific "
and " non-specific or developmental characters "" :
" The latter [corresponding to Individual Differences]
" are due to the laws which determine the growth and
development of the organism, and therefore rarely
coincide exactly with the limits of a species." ^
It is not difficult to see how Darwin came to look to
individual differences as a source of variations. It was
because he based his theory on observation upon plants
under cultivation and upon domesticated animals ; and
far less, if at all, upon wild plants and animals. Thus,
e.g.^ let us take the radish. We find that as a wild
plant it is constant in form and has no varieties,
^ I am not alluding- to malformations, but such changes as a
systematist requires for describing a new variety.
' Origin of Species, p. 34.
* Fortnightly Review, March^ 1895, p. 444.
12 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
but under cultivation in an artificially prepared soil,
the root has become spindle-shaped or globular ; and
by careful selection of the seed, several "forms'" are
now hereditary. All such may be called " exaggerated ""
individual differences, but not " varieties."" ^
CaiTots, cabbages, Shirley poppies, etc., supply
analogous instances. Hence Darwin said : —
" Seeing that variations useful to man have un-
doubtedly occuiTed, can it be thought improbable that
other variations useful ... in the great and complex
battle of life should occur . . . ? " ^
On the next page he observes, " Changes in the
conditions of life give a tendency to increased variability.
. . . Unless such profitable variations occur, natural
selection can do nothing."*"* The wild caiTot, cabbage,
field poppy, for example, have produced no wild varieties
at all ; although not a single individual plant, it may
be presumed, has not had individual differences. Let
the plant be transfeiTed to some markedly different
surroundings, or into "changed conditions of life,"*"*
then certain individual differences may become pro-
nounced. Thus the Lesser Celandine (Rammculus
Ficaria) never varies (in the systematist's eye) in
England, but it grows to a large size in Malta and
has been called var. CaUhcefolia ; but then, as the
Maltese plants are all alike, natural selection has had
nothing to select from.
Many observers, accepting Darwin"'s " individual
differences " as supplying materials for the origin of
^ I say this, though Darwin included mere individual diiferences
under the term ^^ variations " {Origin of Specieny p. 64).
* Op. cit. p. 63.
THE ORIGIN OF VARIETIES 13
species, have examined hundreds, in some cases thousands,
of individuals of the same kind, and represented the
differences seen in any selected organ, such as the sepals
and petals of the lesser celandine, length or breadth of
the carapace of crabs, earwigs, shrimps, etc., in curves
with maxima and minima. But these only show that
the processes of growth are never absolutely identical
in any organ, depending probably on accidental
differences in nourishment. The important question
arises, ivill they lead to the discovery of the Origin of
Varieties ?
As far as I can discover, the observers are not
always careful to look first for " changed conditions
of life " ; but collect their individual specimens from
one and the same locality. Secondly, they seem to
forget that no character is of any importance for
classification unless it has hereditary constancy. These
two fundamental conditions for varieties do not seem
to be sufficiently attended to in every case, if at all in
some instances.
A correspondent informs me that he has found that
the number of ray florets in the S. European species
of Marygold varies according to their habitats. Thus
21 is the typical number ; but near the sea it rises
to 26 (= 2 X 13) and 34. The ox-eye daisy has
generally 21 ray florets at Lake Como ; but at an
altitude of 400 to 500 feet it develops during the
height of the flow^ering season 34, reverting to 21
at the end of the season.
The changes are obviously due to " changed con-
ditions of life."" Of course, these numbers are readily
accounted for by the principles of phyllotaxis.
The second of Darwin's supposed sources of variations
14 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
was what he called " indefinite " variations. ^ He
thought that when seeds or young animals grew up
under changed conditions of life, the rule was, they
varied " indefinitely '" ; that is to say, in several ways,
some assuming favourable variations, others injurious
ones. The result was that a few were naturally
selected, and the rest died. Neither Darwin nor any
Darwinian has ever brought forward any illustration, to
the best of my knowledge, of such indefinite variations
among wild plants or animals in nature.
Moreover, supposing that there were such indefinite
variations, the struggle for existence occurs in infancy ;
that is, long before any varietal or specific characters,
as a rule, make their appearance, in plants at least.
Thus, if pear trees were raised from seed, the struggle
must take place and the survivors be determined years
before any varietal character can be seen in the
flowers of fruits ; so that this proves that it is not
points of structure or form upon which life and death
depend.
If it be asserted that there is some correlation
between the new varietal characters in the pears (which
may not be borne until ten years after the pips were
sown) and the survival during infancy years before, I
am not aware of any evidence ever having been brought
forward to sustain this idea.
Darwin would draw an analogy between man's
selection and natural selection ; but the two processes
are diametrically opposite in character ; for man selects
by isolating the individual he wishes to preserve, and
he does not allow it to have any struggle at all. In
^ Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii.^ p. 272 ;
Origin of Species, etc., pp. 6, 106.
NATURAL SELECTION 15
nature, the survival is supposed to result from an
intense struggle for existence. But nature has not two
methods of making varieties, as far as we know.
Again, natural selection is often spoken of, by
writers, as an " agent,'' or as possessing " power." ^ It
has really nothing of the sort. It is like a " natural
law," which is really no "law" at all, but only a
phrase indicating anything which always happens
under similar circumstances.
Natural selection stands for the following fact. Too
many creatures are born for all to be able to live.
That is a natural law, so the majority die and the few
survive. That is all. The causes of the death of the
many and the reasons why a few survive can be known ;
but natural selection is only, as Darwin insisted, a
metaphor to express that fact.
Thus, for example, when an epidemic seizes a district,
one in one family, two in another, etc., are attacked
and die. Others may or may not be attacked and
survive. Such is natm-al selection among human
beings. The cause of attack is pathological microbes.
The reason why some survive is that they possess
constitutions strong enough to resist the attack.
Natural selection is only the Registrar !
It has, therefore, yet to be shown that a change of
form which can be sufficient to be called varietal ever
causes death ; or, on the other hand, can be credited
with the power to secure survival.
It is necessary now to show how it came about that
D-^'-vinism is regarded as the main support of atheistic
monism. Darwin's illustration of the origin of species
* Darwin repudiated this idea, as we have seen.
16 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
by means of natural selection will quite account for it.
He said : —
" If an architect were to rear a noble and commodious
edifice, without the use of cut stone, by selecting from
the fragments at the base of a precipice wedge-shaped
stones for his arches, elongated stones for his lintels,
and flat stones for his roof, we should admire his skill
and regard him as the paramount power. Now the
fragments of stone, though indispensable to the
architect, bear to the edifice built by him the same
relation which the fluctuating variations of each organic
being bear to the varied and admirable structm-es
ultimately acquired by its modified descendants.^"* ^
It is impossible, however, to build a " noble edifice '"
out of such materials, especially as Darwin provides
nothing in the Avay of mortar. No one (as Mr. Herbert
Spencer says) except the most primitive men ever built
a house with undressed stone.
But the point to be especially noted is that the
stones bear, not " the same," but no relation at all to the
requirements of the house, since they are not prepared
in any way for it. Similarly, the " fluctuating favour-
able variations '" which happen to arise hear no relation
to the organism^s requirements, according to Darwin.
Hence there is no Natural Laio connecting such varia-
tions with the adaptive form of the being.
It is always the presence of "law and order '"* in
nature which appeals to man as evidence of Mind and
not " blind chance " ; and if Darwinism were true, then
monistic atheism might, perhaps, have some reasonable
basis for it.
Similarly, Darwin's elaborate explanation of how he
* Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii., p. 430.
DARWIN ON THE HUMAN EYE 17
supposed an eye might have come into existence by
means of natural selection, required something more
than a score of imaginary suppositions, all of which
have to be also accounted for, presumably by natural
selection. The following is his description, in which
I have italicised the suppositions : —
" If we must compare the eye to an optical instru-
ment (writes Darwin) we ought in imagination to
take a thick layer of transparent tissiie^ with spaces Jilled
with fluid, and with a nerve serisitive to light beneath,
and then suppose every part of this layer to he cmi-
tinually changing slowly in density, so as to separate
into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed
at different distances from each other, and with the
surfaces of each layer slowly changing inform. Further
we must suppose that there is a power represented by
natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always
intently watching each slight alteration in the trans-
parent layers ; and carefidly preserving each which,
under varied circumstances, in any way or any degi^ee,
tends to produce a distincter image. We must suppose
each new state of the instrument to he multiplied by
the million ; each to be preserved until a better one is
produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed.
Let this process go on for millions of years : and dui'ing
each year on m,illions of individuals of many kinds ; and
may we not believe that a living optical instrument
might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the
works of the Creator are to those of man ? "' ^
Huxley described Darwinism as a method of " trial
arr* error"; but such a description is totally inap-
plicable to all other departments of nature. There
is nothing of the sort in the laws of gi'avity, heat,
^ Origin of Species, etc., p. 146.
18 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
electricity, etc. ; why then should it occur when
the noblest efforts are made in the construction of
m)Tiads of living beings, in giving them perfect
adaptations to their conditions of life, including man
himself ?
It is scarcely to be wondered at that Darwin-
ism should have been regarded as a death-blow to
Theism.
Herein, then, will be seen the absolute necessity of
showing the ftillacies of Darwinism in any attempt to
expose the irrationality of Rationalists and Haeckelian
or materialistic monists.
What then is the alternative to Darwinism to account
for evolution ? I will call it the " True Darwinism,'^
because Darwin himself gave it us, as well as natural
selection.
Euclid bases his propositions on axioms, and True
Darwinism is founded on t^^o such axioms.
The first is " Variability ^' — that is, the capacity or
power in all organisms to vary in internal structure and
external form.
Secondly, there is a power residing in protoplasm
and the nucleus, which can respond to external influences.
They can by means of this power construct cells,
tissues and organs in response to, and direct adapta-
tion to the conditions of life.
Darwin thus describes the process : —
" The direct action of changed conditions leads to
definite or indefinite results. ... In the former case
the nature of the organism is such that it yields readily
when subjected to certain conditions, and all, or nearly
all, the individuals become modified in the same way." ^
* Origin of Species, p. lOG.
THE TRUE DARWINISM 19
" A new sub-variety would be formed without the aid
of natural selection." ^
The important point to notice is that we here have
a Natural Laio governing the relationship hetiveen the
variations which arise and the changed conditions of
life.
As all the individuals vary alike in response to them,
there is nothing for natural selection to do. The
" indefinite results "*' to which he alludes are really non-
existent. There are only defimte ones.
Of course, the majority of the individuals (that is, the
offspring of any species submitted to new conditions)
die, and the few survive. That may be called the
proper sphere of natural selection ; but this fact has
nothing to do with the new varietal characters, which
both the dead and the living possessed alike.
If Darwin was right in supposing the Creator to
have breathed life into a single form, or to have made
a speck of protoplasm with its nucleus — and it is, at
present, perfectly inconceivable how such a complicated
structure as that of a nucleus could otherwise have
come into existence^ — then that speck was sufficient
to evolve the whole of the vegetable and animal
worlds, inclusive of man, past, present and future. If
we reflect on this phenomenon, we discover that
protoplasm is endowed with a practically creative
omnipotence !
To most minds such an astounding fact would be
su.iicient of itself as an infallible witness to an Omniscient
Power behind nature.
^ Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii., p. 271.
^ There are plenty of theories to account for the origin of
protoplasm from pre-existing lifeless matter.
20 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
Coupled with this universal power there is as universal
a " Directivity "' which utilises the chemico-physical
forces by which all creatures are made ; but these alone
cannot account for adaptations in organic structures.
The whole of Evolution is thus worked out on those
two axiomatic principles or natural laws.
Darwin came to realise the great importance of the
"direct action "'' of the environment in 1876 as the
prime cause or interpretation of Evolution. He thus
wrote to Professor Wagner of Munich : —
" The greatest mistake I made was, I now think, that
I did not attach weight to the direct influence of food,
climate, etc., quite independently of natural selection.
When I wrote my book — and for some years later — I
could not find a good proof of the direct action of
the environment on the species. Such proofs are now
plentiful." 1
Of course, they were as " plentiful "' in 1859 as in
1876. But in fact they are universal. In other words,
it is a Natural Law.
It will now be seen that the " True Darwinism,'' or
the Law of Adaptation, is the true and only interpretation
of Evolution, and replaces the old argument of Design.
This presumed that the Deity proceeded on similar lines
to those of a manufacturer or artificer, who first conceives
an idea; he then designs and di'aws out a plan, and
finally constructs the mechanism in accordance with it.
Similarly, it was thought that all adaptations in plants
and animals were preconceived before their creation.
Evolution reverses this process. Nothing is ever
made, at first, in anticipation of its use or requirement.
^ Quoted by Biichner, Op. cit., p. 194 ; see also Darwiu's " Life."
THE LAW OF ADAPTATION 21
The necessary structure is evolved by the responsive
action of the being to its environment. In the case of
animals, effort and use are the means of securing
muscular and other organs ^ ; while the eye has been
slowly evolved by the direct action of light on sensitive
protoplasm under Directivity.
This universal process of self-adaptation to the
environmental forces — "without the aid of natural
selection,"' as Darwin says — appeals far more strongly
to one's mind as undoubted evidence of a Divine,
Creative Power or Mind, than Design could ever
possibly do.^
The belief, therefore, in a Creator is based on a vast
collection of individual probabilities, of so high an
order that, to any mind receptive of inductive evidence,
and not gratuitously limited to "observation and
experiment," the proofs are simply overwhelming.
POSTSCRIPI'.
It appears from a discussion in the Times and
elsewhere concerning Lord Kelvin's utterances at
University College, on May 1st, that while one writer
thinks his Lordship is not competent to speak on
^ An interesting case of "^ direct action " of use and " proto-
plasmic response " occurred in a patient of St. Bartholomew's
Hospital. A guard of the Metropolitan Railway had his elbow
crushed. The bones were excised^ and he returned to his duties.
As he often had to reach his compartment after the train had
St. i-ted^ he was in the habit of swinging himself along the foot-
board by means of the bars outside the carriages. In response
to this effort Nature provided him with a perfectly efficient joint
in lieu of the excised bones ; but what the actual structure was^
is unknown.
^ I would refer the reader for further particulars to my little
hook, The Argument of Adaptation : Williams and Norgate. (1*.)
22 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
Biology, others state that all references to a Deity
are beyond the province of science.
This latter is undoubtedly true in the ordinary
application of the word. Science observes, experi-
ments, and draws logical conclusions from inductive
evidence, when experiment is impossible, from the
purely physical and observable facts of nature.
Darwin's alternative theory to natural selection —
viz. the origin of variations by the definite action of
the environment — is deducible from a "plentiful""
supply of facts, to quote his word. That conclusion
was a purely scientific one.
But beyond all that science can teach, there are
obvious phenomena which, as other contributors to
the discussion point out, science cannot touch. Such
is the cause of the responsive power of protoplasm,
by means of which new variations come into existence.
There is " something " in living things which will
not apply to a crystal. The molecules of alum or
other mineral always have assumed and always do
assume the same forms. But it is not necessarily so
with animals and plants. There is a " Directivity " ^
in both cases, but with a difference.
^ I am indebted to Professor A. H. Church, F.R.S., for this
very useful and expressive word. It seems a better one than
Jas. Croll's " Determining Power," described in his paper.
What Determines Molecular Motion, the Fundamental Problem
of Nature? Professor Church writes me, '' I coined it many
years ago to avoid the use of '^ force,' '^ energy,' etc., when
describing in lectures on Organic Chemistry the parallelism
between the chemist directing in his laboratory physico-chemical
forces in the making of a true organic compound, and that
myvSterious " something " which employs the same forces to
make the same compound in the plant or animal."
DIRECTIVITY 23
It is this " something " in the hving world which is
superadded to the purely chemico-physical forces.
Whence did it come? Thus, when we run through
the history of life on this world, we see, not merely
individual differences or even variations, but wonderful
adaptations of all sorts, as the result of this responsive-
ness under directivity.
Then we look to ourselves, and discover that man
makes adaptations, too, for his wants ; sometimes copy-
ing the contrivances of nature, sometimes finding out
afterwards that nature has forestalled him.
He knows that his works are the result of intelli-
gence ; therefore he concludes that nature's are also
the issue of intelligence ; but hozv they come about is
a mystery past finding out.
But while Man is obliged to conceive and design
before he begins to make his works of art, nature's
works come by a process of self-adjusting evolution ;
but only when the " direct action " of the environment
calls forth the responsive power of protoplasm, which
then sets to work to build up the structure required.
This is a strictly logical conclusion, based on " plentiful "
inductive evidence.
The whole of the phenomena of living stiiictures
may be conformable to natural laws, and by natural
mi ais — chemico-physical, if you like ; but, try to
ignore it as much as they can, biologists are bound to
admit that certain phenomena of life escape their
powers of " observation and experiment " ; and the
origin of variations is one of them.
There is nothing "abnormal," as a wi-iter hints,
in "directivity,'' from the behaviour of a nucleus
in a protoplasmic cell to the Evolution of Man.
24 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
Directivity is a universal natural law, everywhere
present. It is even a matter of experiment as well as
observation ; for it at once becomes evident under
cultivation and domestication.
Titles are of little account, but what is meant by
them is of importance. The old terms " vital spirits,"
" anima animans," " vis medicatrix," etc., were no doubt
defective ; but there is a certain truth underlying them
which Biology cannot reach. Take vis medicatrix : can
biology explain by purely chemico-physical forces zahi/
a wound heals at all.^
" Forces " are unknowable in themselves, and can only
be recognised by their individual effects, as electricity,
magnetism, etc. Then — as Jas. Croll said of the
phenomena of life, which are also only recognisable
by their peculiar effects — it is as justifiable to regard
them as due to " vital " force, as to speak of electrical
or magnetic forces. Here Lord Kelvin agrees with him.
, If you cannot bring reproduction with heredity under
chemico-physical forces alone, why hesitate to call them
" vital " forces, acting under a Directivity which guides
the protoplasmic molecules so as to consti-uct a baby ?
Scientists may say that all this is outside their
province. It may be so ; but why may not philosophy
enter the field which science will not inv^ade ?
The following were Lord Kelvin's remarks which gave
rise to the numerous comnmnications to the Times and
elsewhere.
LORD KELVLVS SPEECH.
With reference to Professor Henslow's mention of
ether-granules, I ask permission to say three words of
LORD KELVIN'S SPEECH 25
personal explanation. I had recently, at a meeting
of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, occasion to make
use of the expressions ether, atoms, electricity ; and I
was horrified to read in the Press that I had put
forward a hypothesis of ether-atoms. Ether is abso-
lutely non-atomic ; it is structureless, and utterly
homogeneous where not disturbed by the atoms of
ponderable matter.
I am in thorough sympathy with Professor Henslow
in the fundamentals of his lecture ; but I cannot admit
that, with regard to the origin of life, science neither
affirms nor denies Creative Power.^ Science positively
affirms Creative Power. It is not in dead matter that
we live and move and have our being, but in the
creating and directing power which science compels us
to accept as an article of belief. We cannot escape
from that conclusion, when we study the physics and
dynamics of living and dead matter all around. Modern
biologists are coming, I believe, once more to a firm
acceptance of something beyond mere gravitational,
chemical, and physical forces ; and that unknown thing
is a vital principle. We have an unknown object put
before us in science. In thinking of that object we
are all agnostics. We only know God in His works,
but we are absolutely forced by science to believe with
perfect confidence in a Directive Power — in an influence
other than physical, or dynamical, or electrical forces.
Cicero, by some supposed to have been editor of
Lucretius, denied that men and plants and animals
coulr'' come into existence by a fortuitous concourse
of atoms. There is nothing between absolute scientific
belief in a Creative Power and the acceptance of the
theory of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Just think
of a number of atoms falling together of their own
^ Lord Kelvin has inadvertently attributed to me what I
was quoting from the author of Mr. Balfour s Apologetics (see
page 3).-(G. H.)
26 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM
accord, and making a crystal, a sprig of moss, a microbe,
a living animal. Cicero's expression, " fortuitous
concourse of atoms," is not wholly inappropriate for
the gi'owth of a crystal. But modern scientific men
are wholly in agreement with him in condemning it
as utterly absurd in respect to the coming into exist-
ence, or the growth, or the continuation of molecular
combinations presented in the bodies of living things.
Here scientific thought is compelled to accept the idea
of Creative Power. Forty years ago I asked Liebig,
walking somewhere in the country, if he believed that
the grass and flowers that ^ve saw around us grew by
mere chemical forces. He answered, " No ; no more
than I could believe that a book of botany describing
them could gi'ow by mere chemical forces." Every
action of human free will is a miracle to physical and
chemical and mathematical science.
I admire the healthy, breezy atmosphere of free
thought throughout Professor Henslow's lecture. Do
not be afraid of being free thinkers. If you think
strongly enough you will be forced by science to the
belief in God, which is the foundation of all religion.
You will find science not antagonistic but helpful to
religion.
In conclusion, I have the pleasure to move a hearty
vote of thanks to Professor Henslow for the interesting
and instructive lecture which we have heard.
THE BOOK OF GENESIS
By the Dean of Canterbury (Very Rev. Henry Wacb^ D.D.)^
There is one point respecting the Book of Genesis, on
which I have the honour of addressing you, which is
practically agreed upon by all writers, whatever their
critical views may be. That point is the unity of the
design with which the book is written. It is probably
composed, or rather compiled, out of a number of
documents, some of them of a very brief and almost
fragmentary character ; but these have been so brought
together, so aiTanged and so connected, as to constitute
a complete whole, with one character and one purpose.
That purpose is to reveal God, in His relation to the
world as a whole, and to the human race. The Book
does not provide us with a mere disjointed set of
memorials of the history of the world and of man in
distant ages. It is not a mere collection of scraps of
history, such as those which at this day are being slowly
dug uut of the earth in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and
Crete. It does not throw these fragments of history
before us, leaving us to piece them together and con-
struct some sort of history out of them. It recounts, in
a connected series, such portions of that past history as
exhibit the action and intervention of God in creating,
guiding, and controlling the whole. It starts from
^ An address delivered ou May 7th, 1903.
27
28 THE BOOK OF GENESIS
the beginning, in which God created the heavens and
the earth, and goes down to the death of Joseph, or,
roughly speaking, to a period not quite so far before
our Lord's day as we are now after it. On the same
rough calculation we may perhaps say that we are now
at about the same distance after our Lord''s day as
Abraham was before it. The book surveys this immense
period of time in one masterly grasp, passing by
most of the details in the history of the world and
of man which are not of importance for its object,
but dealing fully with the great facts which concern
God's action and purposes. One will and one purpose
are revealed to us as guiding the whole course of the
long history. We see unrolled before us in a great
drama the work that God was working from the
beginning to the end.
Let me remind you briefly of the main facts thus
unrolled before us. We begin in the first chapter
with an account of the creation by God, and the gradual
development by Him of the universe in which we live ;
and w^e are told that everything in that universe was
created by Him for a distinct purpose, and received a
definite commission, and was appointed for a good end.
All is created to be under the dominion of man, to be
subdued by him and turned to a good purpose. Man's
office is to increase and multiply, to replenish the earth,
to subdue it, and to have dominion. That is man's
function, but in order to fulfil it he is warned against
one danger — he is forbidden certain pleasures which, he
is told, will be fatal to him. He disregards the warning,
disobeys the voice by which it had been given to him,
and consequently, as he had been told would be the
case, the task of subduing the earth becomes vastly
UNITY OF DESIGN IN GENESIS 29
more difficult to him, and he becomes subject to death.
Above all, he loses the full communion with his Divine
Master and Guide which he was intended to enjoy, and
in consequence he falls rapidly into the deepest moral
crimes, into lust and murder, which render life intoler-
able. God, accordingly, interposes to sweep away from
the face of the earth a race which had become hope-
lessly corrupt, and gives, as it were, a new start to the
one branch of the stock which had escaped the general
corruption. But even out of this stock a further
selection is made, and a new method is adopted to bind
this select race to the God without whom they were
sure to fall again into corruption and decay. Out of
the descendants of Noah the family of Terah and
Abraham is chosen to receive special revelations, and to
hand down from generation to generation those intima-
tions of God's will which had from time to time been
made to them. God is revealed as entering into a
definite covenant with this family, claiming from them
absolute obedience to his will and guidance, but in
turn making certain definite promises, not only to the
patriarchs themselves, but to their whole family to all
time : —
" God appeared unto Abraham and said unto him, I
am the Almighty God : walk before Me and be thou
perfect. And I will make My covenant between Me
and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly. . . . And
in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed
because thou hast obeyed My voice."
This family of Abraham accordingly becomes the
subject of special guidance and protection, and the
remainder of the book narrates the education of
the patriarch's descendants; until, in the person of
so THE BOOK OF GENESIS
Joseph, we have a character exhibited who lived
with a single heart in the love and fear of God, and
who is employed under a mysterious Providence in
preparing the way for the discipline of the whole
people of Israel. As the book closes they are settled
in Egypt, where they are to stay for some four hundi'ed
years, and where they enter upon that prolonged series
of relations with all the civilisations of mankind, which
has continued down to the present day. Such, in brief
review, are the contents of the book.
Let us now observe that the development of
human history and human knowledge has tended to
justify, step by step, the account of God's action and
of the course of history, thus revealed in the past and
predicted in the future. Consider, in the first place,
the opening chapter of the book. The greatest man
of science of the present day. Lord Kelvin, declared,
at the close of a lecture recently delivered in this
college, that science had established the main principle
which is asserted in the chapter. " Science," he said,
" positively affirms creative power. It was not in dead
matter that men lived and moved and had their
being, but in the creating and directing power which
science compelled them to accept as an act of belief.
They only knew God in His works, but they were
absolutely forced by science to admit and to believe
with perfect confidence in a Directive Power, and in
an influence other than physical, dynamical, electrical
forces. They had a spiritual influence, and in science
the knowledge was granted to them of that influence
in the world around.'' Since the days, whatever they
were, when the first chapter of the Book of Genesis was
M'ritten, through what mazes of speculation has not the
GENESIS AND MODERN SCIENCE 31
human mind passed as to the origin of nature, and as
to the mode in which the world has been developed and
its present condition evolved, before the prince of
science, as he was justly called by the chairman of that
meeting, could declare without hesitation that this
was the result of the scientific study of the universe ?
Yet thousands of years before this scientific result was
obtained, the Hebrew writer recorded the truth that
"in the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth,^"* and that He proceeded gradually, and by an
orderly process and for a good purpose, to create the
infinite constituent elements of that universe, and
finally to make man as the lord and ruler of the whole.
It is unnecessary, for such a purpose as the present,
to enter into the disputes which have prevailed as to
the exact correspondence of the order of creation as
recorded in the first chapter of Genesis with the
discoveries of modern astronomical and geological
science. The wonderful thing is that that account
should be, at the very least, so near the truth, that there
should be any possibility of dispute about the matter.
Take all the other cosmogonies that have been found
in other ancient records, including in particular those
Babylonian records which are at present attracting so
much attention, and which of them is there, respecting
which the idea could be for a moment entertained, that
there was any material correspondence between them
and the records of modern science ? Yet it was possible
for a man of science, sufficiently distinguished to have
been the President of the British Association, to state,
less than ten years ago that " it would not be easy even
now to consti-uct a statement of the development of the
world in popular terms so concise and so accurate "" as
32 THE BOOK OF GENESIS
the first chapter of Genesis.^ Remember, that when this
chapter was written, nothing had been revealed by
science respecting the course of the world's development.
There was no natural source from which the knowledge
could have been derived. From whence could have
come this marvellous approximation, to say the least,
to the facts which science has been slowly revealing,
but from the Divine wisdom which alone was cognisant
of them, and could alone make them known to
mankind ?
Even if there were any reason for believing that the
original source of this chapter is to be found in
Babylonian myths — the Babylonian myths which have
been lately brought to light — there would still be no
natural explanation of the means by which the Hebrew
writer was able to purify these myths, conceived, as
Professor Driver himself has said, in a spirit of "an
exuberant and gi'otesque polytheism,'' and mould them
to the expression of these great cardinal truths, and to
the declaration, at least in general terms, of the great
law of development. But as a matter of fact there
is no good reason whatever for supposing that the
narratives in this chapter were derived from those
Babylonian sources. All that has been shown is that
there are certain resemblances between the two, and
the resemblance is as well accounted for by supposing
the Hebrew narrative to be the earlier, and the Baby-
lonian to be a perversion either of the narrative itself,
or of the traditions which it embodies. Accordingly,
one of the leading critics of Germany (Professor Kittel,
of Leipzig), in a little treatise on the Babylonian
excavations and early Biblical history which has just
^ Sir William Dawson, in the Krpositor for February, 1894.
BABYLONIAN MYTHS 33
been translated and published by the Society for the
Promotion of Christian Knowledge, observes that
" this much is certain : the Biblical conception of
the universe which constitutes a part of our faith,
and in so far as it does so, is for us not a Babylonian
conception, but extremely ancient knowledge, partly
the result of experience, and partly revealed by God
to man and preserved among His people."" The more
this chapter of Genesis is considered in its relation to
the monstrous myths and dreams respecting the creation
of the world which have prevailed elsewhere, the more
will it be seen to be one of the strongest evidences of
the miraculous and Divine inspiration of the writers
of the Bible.
But proceeding to look at the subsequent parts of
the narrative, observe, in the first place, the description
which is given of man's function in the world — to
increase and multiply and replenish the earth, to subdue
it and to have dominion. It was in those words that
Lord Bacon discerned the best description of the office
of man in n\ttion to nature, embodying a reference to it
in the very title of the great work which gave a new im-
pulse to science, his " Novum Organum,'*' or " Aphorismi
de Interpretatione Naturag, et Regno Homhm.^'' It
is because the English and kindred races are fulfilling
that function at the present day more fully and earnestly
than any other race, that they hold so leading a position
in the world.
From this statement of man's worldly destiny,
observe how the sacred writer or compiler passes at
once with unerring instinct to the one point on which
the fulfilment of that destiny depends — I mean to man's
moral position. He describes man as placed in a world
5
34 THE BOOK OF GENESIS
full of all manner of trees, pleasant to the sight and
good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the
garden. INIen are bidden to use them all, subject to
one condition — a moral obligation laid upon them by
their Creator to abstain from certain enjoyments which
are allegorically described as the knowledge of good
and evil. So it is this day. Every child starts in the
world amidst a paradise of things pleasant and good ;
but the first thing it has to learn is, that it is under
a moral obligation to abstain from some of those
pleasures ; and if a man indulges in them his higher
life, his real life, will be destroyed. He will find a
curse attaching itself to all his work and all the results
of his labours. The first great lesson, in short, that a
man has to learn is, that his material happiness entirely
depends on his recognition of his moral obligations, and
his obedience to that voice of his conscience which is
the voice of God. A great nation and a great city like
this may have in it all things that are pleasant to the
sight and good for food, mental and physical, but
history bears witness in the loudest tones that they will
all turn to dust in our mouth — " Vanity of vanities " —
unless they are used under that sense of moral restraint
which the Divine voice has impressed upon them. Is
it not childish to be wasting time in disputing about
some slight resemblances in this penetrating picture of
human experience to a few Babylonian records, when
the lesson and the moral is, that this ancient writer,
speaking out of the dim and distant past, should pass
from the only accurate description ever given of man's
physical position in the world, to tell us in a vivid
story, ti-ue to this day in the experiences of human
nature — a story which may be allegorical, . or which
EARLY HISTORY IN GENESIS 35
may, as Coleridge said, be both histoiy and allegory —
that the whole of man's position, his very life, depends,
not on the good and pleasant things around him, but on
his moral obedience to the will and law of his Creator ?
How are we to explain such a marvellous revelation
in the infancy of our race and history but by the
explanation ascribed to the patriarch Job : —
" God understandeth the way thereof, and He knoweth
the place thereof. For He looketh to the ends of the
earth, and seeth under the whole heaven ; to make
the weight for the winds ; and He weigheth the waters
by measure. When He made a decree for the rain and
a way for the lightning of the thunder, then did He
see it and declare it ; He prepared it, yea, and searched
it out. And unto man He said, Behold, the fear of
the Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil is
understanding."
As to the few chapters which immediately follow,
dealing with the earliest history of mankind, I will
only observe that they have recorded for the Jewish
and Christian Churches that which neither Greece nor
Rome nor any other literary historical sources have
preserved to us, but M'hich the excavations now pro-
ceeding on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris
have partially revealed to our own generation — namely,
that the origins of civilisation are to be found in the
Mesopotamian valley and in the ancient cities of
Babylonia and Assyria. Every Christian child, who
has read those early chapters of the Bible, has known
more about the early history of our race than until
lately could be found in any other writer, ancient or
modern. Nor will I dwell further upon the story
of the flood, except to observe that the existence of
36 THE BOOK OF GENESIS
kindred narratives in the Babylonian sources is a strong
independent corroboration of the fact that a great
convulsion in the nature of the flood did actually occur.
The narrative in the Bible is simple and natural,
compared \\dth the form which the traditions assume
in the Babylonian and Assyrian legends. There is no
evidence whatever that it was derived from those
sources ; and we may confidently believe that it will
prove, like the narratives of the Creation and the Fall,
to be a tiTie record of the most ancient traditions on the
subject, even if it be not, as has been suggested with
some reason, a contemporary narrative of the event.
But for the purpose of a brief lecture we must pass
from these interesting though, in some respects, obscure
parts of our book, to the patriarchal naiTatives of
which the general course has been described to you.
And in respect to that, what can be more extraordinary
than their truth to the broad facts of history ? Is it
not the most patent fact of history, that its whole
course has been determined by the influence and the
action of the Jewish race, culminating in the life and
death of the Son of David ? Is not the key to all
history to be found in the opening verse of St.
Matthew's Gospel : " The Book of the generation of
Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham'" ?
Have not our Saviom-'s life and death and resuiTCction,
and the Church which He founded, been the central
influence of history ? and does not the course of
history at this moment depend more upon the action
and the influence of the Christian nations than upon
any other factor? Can we, as Christians, fail to
recognise that we see before our eyes the realisation
of the promise preserved in this ancient record : " In
THE DIVINE COVENANT 37
thy seed shall all nations of the earth be blessed " ? But
if this be so, who told that ancient writer that pro-
found historic verity? Who revealed to him before-
hand the fact that this lonely patriarch was the
beginning of an influence which would permeate the
world, which would transform its laws and mould
its civilisation ; that forty centuries after that time
Abraham would be the very type of religious faith ;
that the Psalms of his descendant David, and of the
other sweet singers of Israel, would mould the religious
life and thought of the leading races of mankind ; and
that his greatest descendant would be known by the
name of the Saviour of the world?
There is one other thing about these patriarchal
narratives which deserves our special attention. They
not merely record the origin of the great historical
influences which we have been considering ; they also
record the establishment once for all of the greatest
of all the facts of religion — the establishment, namely,
of a covenant between God and man. When men
speak, as is very often done in the present day, about
the monotheistic character of the Jewish religion, when
they dwell upon that as the element of chief importance
in the matter, they are leaving out of account the
most momentous point of all. That point is not
merely that there is but one God, but that that God
has definitely and distinctly entered into moral re-
lations with men ; that in the persons, first of Noah,
and then of Abraham and Abraham's seed, he has
established between himself and man the most sacred
of all relations — the relation of a covenant. It is by
covenants, and the mutual faith which they involve,
that civilisation is mainly characterised. It is by
38 THE BOOK OF GENESIS
covenants that mamages and families and armies and
states are created ; and God Himself entered as a
living personal force into human life, when He chose
out, first one man, and then one nation, and then one
Church, to be bound in covenant with Him, to enter
into mutual pledges, confirmed by definite signs — by
circumcision and the Passover, by Baptism and the
Lord's Supper; so that every Jew carries the mark in
his flesh of his personal relation to God, and every
Christian bears on his forehead, and receives in the
symbols of bread and wine a perpetual witness, not
merely of his belief in one God — not merely of his
devotion to his Sa\aour — but of the personal relation
in which that God stands towards him, and of his
being as directly in covenant with his God and his
Saviour as he is with his wife or with his earthly
Sovereign ; with the sole difference that the bond is
infinitely more vital, more penetrating, more permanent,
or rather, that it is eternal. There is nothing more
precious in the Book of Genesis than that it reveals
this system of covenants as the basis of God's dealings
with mankind, and as the central influence by which
He disciplines and guides them. The roots of the
Gospel, as St. Paul clearly asserts, were thus laid in
the history of Abraham ; and the rest of the Bible,
both the Old Testament and the New, is but a history
of the manner in which that method has been applied,
maintained, and continuously developed. God's char-
acter and God's ways began to be revealed in these
patriarchal histories. They are an essential part of
the whole Revelation, because they are its starting
point and its germ ; and we can no more dispense with
these naiTatives, if we would understand God's will and
INTERNAL EVIDENCE 39
God's ways, than we can neglect the roots of a tree if
we would understand its growth.
But the question is asked whether we have sufficient
reason to believe that these narratives are what is now
commonly called historical. Have we reason to believe
that they narrate real matters of fact ? In answer to
this question, it must first of all be said that there
are naiTatives — and that these are amona' them —
which by their internal character bespeak their own
veracity. It is difficult to understand how any one
can really suppose that naiTatives so instinct with
life and human nature, bearing traces in numberless
details of the most vivid and touching experiences —
take, for instance, that exquisitely touching exclama-
tion : " There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife ;
there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife ; and
there I buried Leah '"* — that narratives such as these
should be due, as some would say, to the artificial
idealising of a later age. But it is a more reasonable
question to ask. How could they have been preserved
in those ancient times ? Less than thirty years ago it
was very difficult to give a satisfactory answer to that
question. Read the most learned commentator of that
time — such an eminent writer, for instance, as Ewald —
and you find him treating as a doubtful point how far
writing; was known in the Mosaic ao;e. But within the
last few days you have been brought face to face in the
daily press with a wonderful discovery which has at last
removed all difficulty upon that point. You know that
a long inscription has been discovered, containing a
code of laws enacted by a king who was contemporary
with Abraham, the very Amraphel of whom we read
in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. If we have, as
40 THE BOOK OF GENESIS
no scholar doubts, a whole code of laws which was
committed to writing in the time of Abraham, it is
clear that writing must have been familiarly practised
long before his day, for it is inconceivable that such
a code of laws should be inscribed in such a permanent
form, unless the use of writing was familiar and
customary. This at once explains the striking fact
that you have in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis
the names correctly recorded of kings contemporary
with Abraham — names which have been preserved
upon monuments, to be a witness to these days of
the possibility of authentic records being kept in his
time. This being the case, it becomes not only
possible, but probable, that important events — above
all, momentous occurrences such as the revelation
made by God to Abraham and the establishment of
a covenant with him — would be recorded at the
time. And when we further find that the records
of that time were so carefully and so thoroughly made,
that they have descended to us in perfectly legible
form through a lapse of four thousand years, we have
palpable proof that the means existed of preserving the
historic and patriarchal records contained in the Book
of Genesis. All that the compiler of the Book of
Genesis had to do was to take the records which were
ready to his hand, and to select and arrange. He had
only to do, under Divine guidance and inspiration,
exactly what St. Luke describes himself as doing at the
outset of the Gospel — to take the records and narratives
which were available, and, under the "inspiration of
selection," to throw them into the form of that continu-
ous history which has come to us under the title of
" The Book of Genesis."
DOCUMENTS IN GENESIS 41
Let me observe then, in conclusion, that it is quite
a secondary matter when some critics tell us that this
book is composed out of various documents, and when
they propose by methods of linguistic analysis to
dissect these documents, and to describe them separ-
ately. So does the anatomist, when he has before
him the human eye, dissect it out into its muscles
and nerves and veins, and lay its innumerable parts
separately before us. But, as Coleridge observed,
when you have all these parts in detail before you,
is that the human eye ? Does that dissection explain
to you the mystery of the marvellous vital process, by
which all those lifeless elements are combined into
that wonderful organism which our Saviour describes
as the light of the body ? Just so with all these
dissections and analyses of this marvellous book. Look
upon it in the light of the truths we have been
considering, and does it not fascinate you like an
inspired eye, a Divine eye, penetrating into the secrets
of the creation of nature, of the moral constitution of
man, of the primary forces of history ? Do not these
revelations beset you behind and before, and lay their
mysterious hand upon you, revealing to you at once
yourselves and nature and history and religion ? Do
you not seem to hear the Divine demand to the
patriarchs, " Where wast thou when I laid the founda-
tions of the earth ? Declare if thou hast understanding" ?
The same hand and spirit that laid those foundations
must have recorded the history of them in this book ;
and there is, perhaps, no book in the Scripture of which
it is more evident that the prophetic narrative came not
in old time by the will of man, but that holy men of
God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
6
42 THE BOOK OF GENESIS
SPEECH BY
SIR ROBERT ANDERSON, K.C.B., LL.D.
Ladies and Gentlemen, — It was my privilege to be
here last Friday, and I came here to-day under the
belief that my part in the chair would be as formal as
was that of the distinguished President of this College,
Lord Reay. But I find I am expected to say some-
thing upon the subject of the lecture. First, however,
as I am not aware that there is any provision made
for a formal vote of thanks to the Dean of Canter-
bury, I may associate myself with you in expressing
our great obligation to him for coming here this after-
noon and delivering to us the lecture to which we have
just listened. These obligations are all the deeper, and
I am sure we feel them all the more keenly, because
of the exceptional circumstances in which, after having
been compelled to avoid other engagements made be-
fore his recent promotion, he has fulfilled his promise
to come here to-day.
Now, if I am to speak upon this subject, please
remember that it will be only a few desultory words.
I am sure I am speaking with the full sympathy of the
Dean of Canterbury, when I say that his lecture was a
remarkable proof that in this controversy, if I may so
describe it, we are not defending traditional beliefs
based upon the Bible, but we are defending the Bible
itself. I congratulate this Union upon having evoked
from that prince of scientists, as Lord Reay described
Lord Kelvin, these words : " Science positively affirms
creative power." It is, as it were, a last word upon
a great controversy that has been raging for half a
century. We cannot expect a last word upon this
other controversy that is now before us, but we can
expect some advance to be made upon it. I repeat
that it is not a question of defending traditional
beliefs about the Book of Genesis, but defending
the Book of Genesis against attacks that have been
SIR ROBERT ANDERSON^S SPEECH 43
made upon it. In my early life I was taught to
believe that Moses wrote the Book of Genesis in
the sense in which Shakespeare wrote his plays. The
critics discovered that there were documents in the
Book of Genesis, and it was supposed that this raised
the question whether the Book had Divine authority.
But believing, as I do — and Professor Fairbairn, of
Oxford, has stated it with great definiteness — that
belief in a personal God involves belief in a written
revelation, it is incredible that thousands of years should
have passed before the days of Abraham without God
having given a revelation to His people. If criticism
has led us to discover that the Book of Genesis is a
divinely accredited record of earlier revelations, this,
instead of impairing its authority, seems to me only to
confirm that authority.
May I say one passing word about the cosmogony ?
Most of us remember the great encounter between Mr.
Gladstone and Professor Huxley in the pages of the
Nmeteeiith Century upon that subject. Now this is a
matter that I have gone into very closely, and the only
point upon which Professor Huxley seemed plainly to
show that there was a conflict between the clear results
of scientific research and the first chapter of Genesis
was shown afterwards to be a mere blunder. In the
pages of the Nineteenth Century he expressed his ad-
miration for Professor Dana and his willingness to sit
at his feet upon this subject, and Professor Dana wrote
to the Nineteenth Century that he agreed with Mr.
Gladstone, and not with Professor Huxley.
Well now, upon this question of Genesis, we have
to deal first with the Hebrew, and then with the
archaeology. In both these respects I am as much a
learner and an outsider as anyone else in this theatre.
We turn to the Hebraists, and all agree that the Book
of Genesis does not afford materials which justify a
decision that it is a late book. Upon this next question
of archaeology, will anyone in this theatre to-day tell us
44 THE BOOK OF GENESIS
of one single discovery in archaeology that is against the
Book of Genesis ? The Dean of Canterbury has referred
to Amraphel, mentioned in the fourteenth chapter of
Genesis. Not long ago, in studying that chapter, I took
down Smith's Bible Dictionary in order to find what
I might learn about Amraphel. The article was by
Dr. Pinches, and it was to the effect that we know
absolutely nothing about Amraphel, but it might be
hoped that future research would bring something to
light. Dr. Pinches has recently published a book upon
these subjects, and the frontispiece to that book is a
portrait of Amraphel !
I pass to the question of the evidence upon which
we are asked to reject the Book of Genesis. I do not
think that I can be fairly charged with presumption if
I venture to say that I have some fitness to deal with
a question of that kind, for I am not quite a novice
in dealing ^v4th intricate questions of evidence, or in
seeking to discover fi'auds ; and when I consider the
grounds upon which we are asked to reject the genuine-
ness of the Pentateuch, I am filled with blank amazement.
The Dean of Canterbury has refeiTed to AmraphePs
code of laws ; he has told you how but yesterday the
Pentateuch was set aside because it was deemed an
anachronism to suppose that there could be such litera-
ture in the days of Moses. Now the critics discover
that there was a literature belonginff to the acre of
Abraham. But what use do they make of it ? In this
Babylonian code there are laws akin to those embodied
in the ^Mosaic code — two especially, laws relating to an
unfaithful wife, and to the ox that gores. But no one
need be surprised to find that laws, which are common
to the code of every civilised nation, should be found in
both the Babylonian and tlie Mosaic codes. Anyone
\\ ho knows anything about evidence would look to see
whether tlie penalties are the same ; and in not one
single case has this been shown.
Before I sit do\^Ti I should like to say a word of
AMRAPHEL: KENOSIS 45
another kind. I cannot consent to give up my place
as a Christian, and a Christian does not hold the Old
Testament by permission of the critics ; he has received
it from the hand of his Divine Master and Lord. The
only answer to this is the theology of the Kenosis, a word
borrowed from the second chapter of Philippians, by
which the higher critics mean that our Divine Lord
so emptied Himself, with a view to His mediatorial
work, that He took His place as a Jew among Jews,
and slowly felt His way to the light in the apprehension
of truth. But the Lord had communications with His
disciples during those mysterious forty days before the
Ascension. I turn to the twenty-fourth chapter of the
Gospel of St. Luke, and find that, in the most definite
and emphatic manner. He adopts all His teaching of
the period of His humihation, and accredits all that is
said to them on that subject ; and there He says to His
apostles : " These are the words which I spake unto
you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be
fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and
in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning Me.^^
That means the Hebrew Scriptures ; these were the
Scriptures which testified of Him. And now, standing
after the Resurrection, with full Divine knowledge of
all these things. He sends out His apostles to proclaim
this to Church and world, and for nineteen centuries
our Divine Lord has permitted Church and world to
be deluded with these " superstitions "' and. " falsities " !
It seems to me that this is an awfully solemn position
to take up.
THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AS
INDEPENDENT WITNESSES
By the Rev. Professor D. S. Margoliouth, D.Litt. *
The negative criticism of the Synoptic Gospels is best
represented in English by two popular works, both of
which for some reason appeared anonymously. One of
these, called The Fmcr Gospels as Historical Recoixls,
attracted no great amount of attention, partly because
the author's tone left something to be desired, and
partly because he committed the serious mistake of
directing his attacks mainly on antiquated works. His
attitude was not distinctly anti-Christian, but in
accordance with the principle held by many, that the
miraculous narratives are not a support on which
Christianity rests, but a weight which drags it down.
He therefore endeavoured to show, from a careful
collection and collation of the discrepancies in the
Gospels, that none of these narratives rest upon trust-
worthy evidence; and he assumed as his principle of
criticism that, where two narratives of the same event
differ, one must be false, and the other not necessarily
true. That doctrine of course appears to be sound ;
but it would be possible, by applying it rigorously, to
dispose of most ancient history, and also of much
modern history.
^ An address delivered on Thursday, May 14th, 1903.
47
48 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
To the other work, which is called Supernatural
Religion, much more importance has been attached,
and it is indeed possible that it has secured a permanent
place in our national literature. In what it says of
the Gospels, this m ork endeavours to deprive them of
the character of contemporary witnesses, by showing
that their authority was not recognised till late in the
second century, and that when writers earlier than
that date quote the Gospel or mention either the
sayings or doings of the Founder of Christianity, they
preferably employ other sources. And the permanent
value of Supernatural Religion is probably to be found
in the care and accuracy M'ith which these quotations
are tabulated, and the learning that is brought to bear
on them. Having thus deprived the Gospels of their
authoritative character, the author infers that they
cannot be employed as evidence for the occuiTence of
supernatural operations.
To one who reads this work it will be easily apparent
that what we may call the subjective element cannot be
banished from discussions of this kind : in many cases
the unprejudiced reader will certainly agi-ee with the
author against his opponents ; in others, where the
wi'iter is no less positive, it will be found difficult to
follow him. And the fact that he has a definite case
to prove, probably deprives the book of some of the
value which it might have for the settlement of that
difficult problem, the date of the reduction of the
Gospels to their present form. And the fact that
unprejudiced persons will estimate the same evidence
quite differently from each other, shows that we cannot,
even in historical criticism, keep quite outside the region
of psychology.
OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE TRUTH 49
The same fact, the subjective character of certain
parts of knowledge, strikes us still more forcibly when
the question is raised, What amount of evidence, con-
temporary and independent, would suffice to prove the
occurrence of a supernatural or supernormal event ?
Perhaps this question has nowhere been treated so well
as by Mr. Frank Podmore in his recent history of
Spiritualism, in which the fact is rightly emphasised
that the trained observer is exceedingly rarely to be
found, and that the evidence of the untrained observer
is open to objection. In the Nineteenth Century for
this month an astronomer gives an elaborate history of
the canals in Mars, of their first discovery and of the
series of persons who confirmed that discovery by
independent observation, all of these persons trained
and experienced in that particular style of observation.
And his conclusion is that, in spite of the number and
character of the observers, probably the canals are
not in Mars at all, but entirely in the eyes of the
astronomers. The limits between objective and sub-
jective truth would appear to be a problem which may
receive some light in the future, but which in the
present state of knowledge constitutes a serious difficulty
in the way of the handling of supernormal occuiTences.
For of those which are recorded in the Gospels, many
can easily be paralleled from modern experiences which
are excellently attested, but which will probably have
little effect on the minds of those who assume an
unalterable attitude towards what they see and hear.
Thus, in order to show that the w^arning of Joseph by
God in a dream was not a supernormal occurrence, we
might quote the newspapers of April 18th of this year,
where a man who found a dead body said it was owing
7
50 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
to a di'eam the night before, that he visited the spot
where he found the corpse, and this statement attracted
the attention of the coroner. Yet probably the attitude
of those who regard the dream of Joseph as a rehc of
an exploded superstition will not be altered by the
evidence of the daily papers of April 18th. We are,
however, spared the trouble of searching the daily
papers for supernormal occurrences similar to those
recorded in the Gospels, for in a very recent work
which has justly attracted much attention, we have as
many as can be required. I refer to the posthumous
work of F. W. H. Myers on the Sui'v'ival of Human
PcrsonaViUj^ in which occurrences supernormal in
character, and often exceedingly analogous to the
contents of the Gospel records, are collected on a gi'eat
scale, and in most cases the attestation seems to be as
good as that which could be got for any historical fact.
Affida\ats were demanded, and in many cases obtained,
from all the persons who were either present or had
any share in the occurrence, and these affidavits are
often dated and full names and addresses given. But
if we consult the reviews which capable persons have
written, it does not appear that the weight of evidence
adduced by Myers has altered the opinions of those
who had previously made up their minds about the
survival of human personality. Those M'ho had
previously attached importance to statements about the
reappearance of the dead and their continued interest
in human affairs, will find their opinion confirmed ; but
to those who attached no importance to them, and to
whom the survival of human personality in the manner
contemplated by Myers seemed incredible, the attesta-
tions and dates and addresses will be of little moment.
EVIDENCE FOR MIRACLES 51
And indeed, in collating the work of Myers with that
of his friend and colleague, F. Podmore, to which
reference has been made, the reader is confirmed in his
opinion of the subjectivity of knowledge in all such
questions ; for frequently what seemed to be of vast
importance to the one, seemed insignificant to the
other.
Hence I doubt whether the question, What amount
of contemporary and independent evidence would be
sufficient to establish a miracle ? can in the present
state of knowledge be answered, and it is not my
present intention to polemise against either of the
writers whom I mentioned before. It has, however,
come in my way to study literature which, externally at
least, bears some resemblance to the Synoptic Gospels,
and to read what has been made out about its genesis,
and the canons by which its credibility can be ascer-
tained. From this, light, perhaps of a rather dim kind,
is thrown here and there on the problems with which
the two authors are occupied. And the fairness will
scarcely be questioned of applying to matter which is
naturally approached with some prejudice the canons
that are derived from matter which is approached
with no prejudice whatever.
The text on which I propose to speak consists of the
words, " The Gospel according to." And of these, " The
Gospel" will not delay us long. The word which it
represents is a Greek compound invented for the
purpose of rendering some Semitic equivalent for the
expression " Good news." And there are places in the
New Testament where the sense is obscured by the sub-
stitution of the word " Gospel " for " Good news." When
by the side of such miracles as the restoration of sight
52 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
to the blind and walking to the lame, we read that
to. the poor the Gospel is preached, we should gain
something in clearness by the rendering " to the miser-
able good news are proclaimed." Yet at an early period
the phrase Evangelion clearly acquires a technical sense
as descriptive of the elements of Christianity. Those
elements consisted partly in a body of rules for life and
doctrine ; but it is impossible to separate law entirely
from history, and even the most elementary Gospel was
a combination of precept and narrative. The definition
of the Gospel given by the writer called St. Luke, as
the things which Jesus said and did, is therefore
accurate.
But the phrase " according to "' takes us into a region
which is not easy to explore — the region of oral
tradition and of books based upon it. A book can be
by one or at most a limited number of authors ; but it
may be according to an unlimited number of authorities.
The literatures in which oral tradition can best be
studied are those of the Jews and the Moslems ; indeed,
the whole notion of oral tradition was with the latter
people the subject of such minute study, of such acute
analysis, and of such elaborate technicalities, that we
can have no better guides than their manuals of oral
tradition, when we would form to ourselves some idea
of the course which it took with other nations. For
though the study of tradition with no other race
appears to have developed into a science, human nature
is so similar all the world over that many of the
phenomena attending the process of the evolution of
religious books from oral tradition will quite certainly
have repeated themselves.
The Gospels then, as we learn from the word
"THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO" 53
" according to,'' existed as oral tradition before they
were compiled in writing. And indeed, the signs of
oral tradition, too, are everywhere the same. In works
which embody traditions belonging to the same cycle,
much of the matter is likely to be identical ; but while
characteristic and striking phrases are preserved, there
is regularly considerable variation, both in the form
and substance of what is told. There is usually also
great variety in the arrangement. Since a narrative
can be drawn up by one person only in a particular
form of words, identity of phrase is proof of identity of
source.
That the phenomena presented by the Synoptic
Gospels agree with this description, is apparent to any
one who considers their contents when put in parallel
columns. It is moreover attested by the circumstance
that early quotations of matter contained in them are
usually made from either the Gospel in the singular,
implying that separate recensions of the Gospel were
not yet extant, or at any rate not yet distinguished, or
from Gospels which have perished, though their names
have remained ; and in some cases fragments of such
documents have come to light. The case which is in
every way parallel is that of the life of the Founder of
Islam. The earliest life of him which we possess is not
earlier than the year 140 of his era, and we are by no
means sure that it was committed to writing at so early
a date. But that biography, when collated with other
works on the same subject, exhibits differences and
identities which are closely parallel to those which the
Synoptic Gospels display. Whole pages are word for
word the same, or differ merely in occasional expressions
or occasional details of the narrative ; but the order in
54 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
which the events are arranged is not always the same,
and indeed, at times, widely different. There is some
variation in even Avhat appear to be official lists,
compiled for some grave reason and at the instance of
the supreme authority in the state. The same narra-
tives in almost identical words are to be found in Morks
that are considerably later than the first biography ;
and then they are not always quoted from the first
biography, but from some parallel and independent
source. The reason for this is that although written
literature in the long run ousts oral literature, the
latter has a tendency to survive, owing to the reasons
which at the first led men to prefer to hand down
narratives orally rather than commit them to ^^'riting.
The author of the Third Gospel attests this in that
short preface which is so rich in contents. The person
to whom he dedicated his book had been taught the
Gospel orally before the author gave him in writing
the means of knowing the accurate truth about what
he had heard. Let us try to enumerate the reasons
which have led men to preserve matter orally or
mentally instead of committing it to ^mting. We
can easily think of several such motives.
The first is the existence of a sacred literature in
writing which will tolerate no rivals. To any one who
considers the style in which the Books or the Writing
or Writings are quoted in the New Testament, it will
seem doubtful whether any other writings besides the
Bible can have been in existence at the time ; at
least, the Jewish movement which culminated in a rule
forbidding the writing of anything besides the Bible was
started long before New Testament times. What was
tolerated besides the Scripture was a collection of oral
ORAL TRADITION 55
tradition, of which the amount was never precisely
fixed. Had the Gospel at the first been written, the
charge of endeavouring to oust the Old Testament,
which in any case was levelled against the early
Christians, would have had an obvious ground. For
it certainly is the tendency of new sacred books to oust
the old ones.
But secondly, literature is kept unwritten when the
possession of it is fraught with danger. It can be
ascertained what books a man has in his library, but
not what books are lodged in the recesses of his mind.
So long, then, as a sect is liable to persecution and has
to maintain itself in secrecy, it is a measure of pre-
caution to write no official treatises. And indeed, to
many persons in all ages the possession of heretical
books has been synonymous with holding heretical
opinions.
But there is a third reason, less honourable than
those which have been suggested, and that is the desire
to give knowledge factitious value by rendering it
difficult of access. So long as knowledge is lodged
within the breast, it can be procured only by communi-
cation with its possessors. Those, therefore, retain an
authority which they lose when the information becomes
easily accessible. Hence there is ordinarily a class of
persons, who have a special interest in retaining know-
ledge in the memory and forbidding its being committed
to wi'iting.
Other reasons that prevail in poor and humble
communities are the dearness of wi-iting material, and
therefore the cheapness of oral, as opposed to written,
circulation ; the want of the literary training necessary
for the composition of a continuous nari'ative, whereas
56 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
little if any is required for the mere putting together
of an oral anecdote or repetition of a striking saying
— especially where the introduction of a religion does
not, as sometimes, raise a vernacular for the first time
into a literary language ; for the want of training
which will not prevent many a man from speaking,
will prove a serious obstacle \\hen he would compose
in writing.
Which of these reasons was most effective with the
early Christians cannot perhaps be determined ; but
the fact that the literature of the New Testament
begins with letters, is rather in favour of the notion
taken over from the Jews having been the most potent.
For we find, and indeed naturally, that the objection to
the composition of books among them did not apply
to that of letters, which they expressly permitted.
Hence the expression " like a letter ^' is occasionally found
signifying a form of literature of which the permissi-
bility was not open to question. Letters might indeed
naturally contain traditions, if it so happened that a
question had been addressed from a distance concerning
one ; and thus there is, of course, a well-known case
in which one of St. PauPs epistles coincides with the
matter contained in the Gospels ; but this would not
appear to violate the notion of the impropriety of
committing traditions to books, since the letter would
naturally be supposed to have an ephemeral existence.
And yet one other reason, which was often of gi'eat
weiglit, was a belief in the living voice as opposed to
the dead letter. Plato was one of the first who taught
men to rate the wiitten book, which always says the
same, and can solve no difficulties, far below the voice
of the living teacher, who possesses a stock of knowledge
ORAL TRADITION 57
beyond that which he can communicate in a single lesson,
and who can vary the character of his teaching so as to
suit the needs of each learner. And, indeed, in one of
the classical passages about the origin of the Gospels,
the evidence of Papias, the author quoted declares
himself of this opinion with regard to the teaching of
Christianity. It was the living voice whence he pro-
fessed to derive the material that he valued, and not
the dead treatise. In process of time, when everything
which the living voice could have to communicate is
committed to some ^viiting material, the belief in the
living voice is something of a superstition or of a senti-
ment ; it is, however, one which even in these days is
not quite extinct. In the second century of the
Christian era it would have had many a rational
ground.
Experience shows that these motives may continue
to work either separately or together for a very con-
siderable length of time. The only cases in which
that length of time can be satisfactorily tested are
those in which there are parallel streams of oral and
of written tradition ; and from the few cases of this
we can infer the possibility of the retention of matter
with tolerable accuracy for at least some centuries.
When, however, some one has broken through the
rule against Avriting and put into book form that
which had till that time been preserved orally, many
others are emboldened to do the same. These works
are not necessarily dictated by any feeling of rivalry
to the first work in the field, but by consciousness of
the value of collateral series of traditions. Each man
who has had access to a collection of oral traditions
which he finds to vary considerably from that which
8
58 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
has begun to circulate in writing, is desirous of seeing
the form in which he himself heard them preserved.
And since it is the tendency of written literature to
oust oral literature from the field, the written collections
are apt to be nearly contemporary, the possessors of
the less known traditions being anxious to obtain for
them the same sort of popularity that has accrued to
those which, being embodied in popular books, are
accessible to every one and become canonical.
The valuable Preface to the Third Gospel takes us
to the time in which the writing down of the oral
collections had begun, and affords us the important
piece of information that the number of Gospels then
published was already considerable. It is only to be
regretted that this author did not conceive it desirable
to name his predecessors, since such information would
have been of the highest value to posterity. The
ordinary history of literature renders it probable that
in such cases the fittest are certain to survive. The
fittest will be the collections of which the matter is
acknowledged by the best informed persons to be
accurate and important. Serious mis-statements will
weaken the authority of a work which has many rivals,
and lead to its being neglected and eventually perishing.
The phrases employed in the Preface to the Third
Gospel speak of the originators of the tradition as
belonging to a past age, without stating precisely what
difference of time separated them from the author.
That point can, of course, be settled only by external
evidence, which it is not proposed to discuss at this
time. Where, however, a series of narratives are
orally perpetuated in a fixed form of words, connnitted
to memory and handed from generation to generation,
MOSLEM ORAL TRADITION 59
a nucleus of history is sure to be preserved. It is
not preserved so well as pen and ink or their equivalent
can preserve it ; but it is the best known substitute.
We may now consider the functions discharged
by the authors of the written collections ; they are
three. They have to transfer the matter from their
memory to the parchment or papyms. They have to
set in some sort of permanent order traditions which,
so long as they existed in the memory only, had no
chronological succession. And they can also criticise
the material which they employ, selecting out of a
variety of accounts those which are best attested. To
all three functions there is allusion in the Preface to
the Third Gospel.
The difference in the contents of the collections
will arise in the first place from local conditions. At
different centres of Christianity different traditions
will assuredly have been preserved, and each Evangelist
will have been limited to some extent by this circum-
stance. Experience shows that the communities
resident in particular places may retain for centuries
the memory of traditions which are not known else-
where. Hence both in the Jewish and the Moslem
books we read of persons travelling from one country
to another for the purpose of hearing traditions ; this
practice in the case of the Moslems went on for many
centuries, implying that not everything known about
their Prophet was registered ; it is possible that this
travelling in search of tradition among them is not
obsolete even at this date. Only one who visited and
studied with every community of his co-religionists
could, during the time when the tradition lived, be
certain of getting access to all that was to be known.
60 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
Hence we have merely to suppose the Gospels to have
been composed at different places to understand why
their contents differ.
The criticism of the material of M'hich the Third
Gospel speaks, with the Moslems invariably means one
thing. The traditionalist should know exactly through
whom the tradition comes ; if he can also state the
date and place at which each one of them heard it, so
much the better. Hence we get a difference between
books of tradition, according to the strictness or laxity
of the conditions on which narratives are admitted.
But even where the conditions are equally strict,
accident may often determine whether a tradition will
or will not be admitted. For the same tradition may
be known to one collector by a trustworthy, to another
by an untrustworthy source ; the second collector will
in consequence omit from his collection a narrative
which is perfectly authentic, and which is known to
him, but which, owing to the weakness of a link in
the chain of authorities by which he knows it, fails
to satisfy the conditions of admittance.
Of the existing Gospels, the third one employs a
form of tradition which often plays an important part
in the beginnings of history. I allude to commemorative
verses. Three times in the early portion of the
naiTative, characters are represented as commemorating
events of importance in their lives by the composition
of poems. If these poems were in any sort of Greek
verse, we could have no hesitation in assigning them to
the compiler of the Gospel, in which case we should
compare them to the speeches put by most ancient
historians in the mouths of the persons whose history
they narrate : speeches which, though sometimes based
COMMEMORATIVE VERSES 61
on actual reports, are more ordinarily fictitious. In
the case of the poems in the Third Gospel the evidence
is strongly in favour of their having been originally in
Hebrew verse, whence the question of their authenticity
becomes far more complicated. The closest parallel to
them in literature is to be found in the commemorative
verses, which the earliest biographers of Mohammed
introduce very freely into their narratives. These are
often commemorative of events which were regularly
thus celebrated — of battles and defeats, or in general
of deeds which were in some way extraordinary. Some
others, however, commemorate emotions occasioned by
particular and unusual situations. Some of these
commemorative verses are of unquestioned genuineness,
while others are open to suspicion.
The importance of the commemorative verses in the
Third Gospel seems to lie in the fact of their going
back directly to the Hebrew tradition, and therefore
belonging clearly to an earlier stage than the Greek
tradition which the Synoptic Gospels in the main em-
body. In two of the three cases, these commemorative
verses have clearly preserved the names of persons
whose existence would otherwise have been forgotten.
Of course, from being ancient to being authentic is a
long distance. But still these commemorative verses
give us an interesting glimpse of the conditions of an
early stage of Christianity.
The other documents used by the compilers of the
Gospels were doubtless in prose. What we find to
have happened in the case of Mohammed is that, shortly
after his death, certain persons made it their special
business to collect information about him, and to these
the curious naturally had recourse. They, as it were,
62 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
focussed the available inforaiation, and gave it the
form in which it afterwards was ordinarily communicated.
Persons were still living who had been present at the
most important occasions of their Prophet's career ; who
were ready, when asked, to tax their memories as to
the order and nature of the occurrences which they had
witnessed. Although then no written record was made
of their naiTations, at the most an occasional note
being taken, the collectors of whom we are thinking
did posterity a good service in bringing together
under the head of the Life of Mohammed narratives
which might easily have been lost. They, of coui'se,
had no monopoly of the information, which could
be as readily communicated to others so long as its
authors were alive; but living in the most accessible
places, they were more easily to be approached by
questioners.
That St. Matthew occupied a place of this sort in
the history of the biography of Christ seems to be
attested by the tradition, and is not inherently im-
probable. Supposing him to have written nothing,
nevertheless a story repeatedly told soon becomes
stereotyped, and while its hearers endeavour to make
as few variations as possible when they repeat it, even
the author is unlikely to take any great license in the
matter of revision.
The greater number of traditions, however, are not
likely to have been lengthy, but composed of single
sentences or short paragraphs. Such are, in the first
place, most easily remembered by those who heard
them, and are also the easiest to teach ; for when we
remember that the oral instructor had at times to
repeat the same matter a bundled times before the
APHORISTIC TRADITIONS 63
disciple had committed it to memory, the shortness of a
tradition would be a help towards its perpetuation.
Of these short traditions we should fancy there must
have been a very great store in early times. If at the
time of the Resurrection the number of Christians
already reached five hundred, as we are told by St. Paul,
each one of these would assuredly have remembered
something or other which he had heard from the
Master, or which he had been told by some actual
eye-witness. Slight differences in the form of a
particular saying are doubtless often to be attributed
to the different degree of accm-acy with which these
hearers remembered what they had heard.
Of the ways in which these sayings came to be
perpetuated, the Mohammedan parallel affords some
suggestions. A number of sayings must surely have
been preserved, because they threw light on questions
of conduct. Where the theory prevails that for rules
of conduct men should go, not to reason, but to
authority, pronouncements on such subjects by an
authoritative speaker are eagerly treasured up, to be
utilised when occasion arises. The greater number of
traditions, however, were not of this sort, but were
homiletic or aphoristic in character. In Moslem com-
munities a saying was often treasured up in a particular
family, as a special honour that had been bestowed on
the member of the family to whom it had been uttered ;
and it is probable that the origin of some of the
sayings recorded in the Gospels is similar.
But the framework into which the Evangelists worked
whatever material they could collect, was doubtless that
sketch of events which had to be communicated to
every proselyte, and which began with the Baptism
64 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
of John and ended with the Resurrection and Ascen-
sion.
The variations in the accounts are probably in the
main due to the forms in which the isolated traditions
were preserved by different reporters. Every one is
aware that even trained reporters of speeches introduce
a certain amount of variety into their reports ; and in
the accounts of sayings of Mohammed which are
recorded on the authonty of different witnesses, there
is usually some variety, at any rate in the expression.
Where the same scene is being described by different
witnesses, naturally the variety is exceedingly great. The
differences between the accounts of the same event which
the Synoptic Gospels contain, would seem ordinarily
to be of this sort, the sort which everyday experience
can illustrate. And it is probable that in some cases
at least these differences are evidence of the same event
having been witnessed by several persons, or the same
saying having been heard and reproduced with varieties
occasioned by the understanding of different hearers.
In the case of the Gospels an element of variety
enters, which is illustrated neither by the Jewish nor
by the Mohammedan tradition : that is, the variety
caused by differences of translation. While those to
whom the traditions ultimately go back are likely in
some cases to have communicated them in Greek, it is
probable that in a greater number of cases the trans-
lation was done by secondaiy authorities. And, indeed,
in every case in which sayings as opposed to actions
were reported, the translation must have been performed
by some intermediate authority. Highly interesting
attempts have been made by various scholars to trace
the original that underlies various reports of the same
SOURCES OF FABRICATION 65
saying ; and in a few cases, this process leads to results
that are both satisfactory and convincing. Those by
which fragments of the Lord's Prayer have been
reconstructed are of considerable interest. Owing,
however, to the number of mouths through which the
matter of the Gospels passed before reaching the shape
in which we know it, this process can only be attempted
in a few cases with success. It can be executed with
the greatest certainty where it is a case of a passage
of the Old Testament being quoted, in which different
reporters have resorted to different sources for interpre-
tation ; and thus, behind the Evangelists, we get at the
intermediate authorities, and from them obtain the
verse in the form in which it was actually quoted by
the speaker.
The Evangelists did not think fit to communicate to
posterity the names of the persons through whom their
matter had reached them, and thereby historical
students have been deprived of a critical instrument,
which is always at their disposal in the case of the
Moslem traditions, and sometimes in the case of the
Jewish. On the other hand, it should be noticed that
the causes which most frequently led to the fabrication
of traditions in the case of the Moslems, were ordinarily
absent in that of the Christians.
The first and main cause of such fabrication was the
need for legal precedents. No other source of law
being known save their sacred book and the example
set by their Prophet, when cases occurred for ^^•hich
provision had not been made, it was a common practice
to invent a naiTative which should provide the requisite
precedent. The early Christians were saved from the
necessity for this, and, indeed, there is exceedingly little
9
66 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
in the Gospels which could even be supposed to have
had such an origin. They were saved from the
necessity, because in the first place their society had
for some centuries little political importance, and
indeed, does not appear to have aimed at political
independence. The sphere, therefore, in which the
possibility of applying precedents was to be found, was
exceedingly limited, and it was remembered that the
Founder of Christianity had distinctly repudiated the
office of judge or arbiter between disputants. And
secondly, even where cases were not settled by the law
of the state, Christianity did not at first undertake to
provide a wholly new system, but rather glosses upon
an old one. The emancipation of Christianity from
Judaism is agreed to have been a process that took
time, and the new sect started with a guide of ac-
knowledged authority in the Old Testament. Having
already a broad basis of law, they were under no
compulsion to invent precedents for emergencies.
The second cause for the fabrication of traditions
was also wanting. That cause lay in the needs of
preachers. For it must be remembered that no one
sect or nation has a monopoly of persons who feel
called upon to endeavour to better their fellow-creatures,
by diverting them at times from their ordinary pursuits
to the thought of things eternal. Such preachers need
a stock of authoritative maxims and promises, whereby
the responsibility for their statements is thrown upon
authority such as their hearers will recognise, which
therefore they will claim the right to repeat and
emphasise, without professing to have discovered them
themselves. In the case of Islam, traditions which
contain matter of this sort are in numerous cases
INDEPENDENT EVIDENCE 67
suspected of spuriousness, owing to their general dis-
agreement with the spirit and character of its founder,
and to the fact that the chain by which they are quoted
ordinarily contains some weak links. In the case of
the Gospels, the genuineness of texts of this sort is
rarely suspected even by those who would deprive the
narrative statements of most of their historical value.
Indeed, in one of the works cited before. The Four
Gospels as Historical Records, the author seems to
be thoroughly satisfied that the true character of the
Founder of Christianity and of His teaching is given
in the contents of such chapters as the Sermon on the
Mount, whatever may be the historical value of the
setting. Supposing, then, that the genuine teaching
of Christianity lay in inculcating the higher morality,
these writers would rather make the loftiness of the
saying evidence of their genuineness. The need, there-
fore, of the preacher being supplied from the original
character of the doctrine — this second source of the
fabrication of traditions would also be wanting.
If, therefore, we assume that the Synoptic Gospels
were ordered collections made at some time in the
second century of the matter current in the Christian
communities, what should we infer from the analogies
that have been adduced as to the independent character
of their evidence ? We should in the first place admit
that the question is a highly complicated one, because
the rays, if the expression may be used, are likely to
have been repeatedly focussed. The number of original
authorities was certainly great ; but by the time of the
writing of the Gospels it was enormously increased by
those to whom the traditions were handed down, and
who are likely to have received the same tradition from
68 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
various sources, as well as handed it down to various
persons. Some force must be allowed to the negative
evidence of those who permitted statements to remain
uncontradicted, when it would have been in their power
to contradict them : witnesses who, having been present
at a scene afterwards distorted, would have been in a
position to circulate a true report instead ; or who, from
general knowledge of the sort of scenes described, would
have been able to put the right gloss upon narratives
of them which had a tendency to produce false im-
pressions.
But the most important point appears to me to be
the fact that a traditionalist in compiling a narrative
has before him a set of conditions which a narrative
must satisfy before he will admit it. That fact seems
to me to give the answer to the difficulty so constantly
ui'ged in the work of Strauss and those \\'hich are based
upon his — Why were the miracles recorded in the Fourth
Gospel neglected by the Synoptic Gospels ? The answer
suggested by the analogy which has been considered is
that to those who compiled the Gospels the matter
contained in St. John's Gospel may not have been
known bv a continuous chain of credible witnesses, such
as they required before entering a record in their com-
positions. It seems to us, indeed, who get our knowledge
from books, a strange thing to be unable to quote, let
us say, ]\Iacaulay, without being able to name the series
of persons who come between us and Macaulay — without
beinff able to miarantee the trustworthiness of each link
in that chain. But that is the principle which oral
tradition suggests, and which in the passage of Papias
to which reference has been made is expressly attested
as having been cuiTent in early Christian communities.
SURVIVAL OF THE SYNOPTICS 69
That naiTative of which I know the authorities I may
tell ; that which has not come down to me personally
by a tiTistworthy chain I may not tell, however certain
it may be. The absence, then, of a narrative from a
particular Gospel implies nothing more than that the
chain by which it came to the compiler was not techni-
cally perfect. This principle is ridiculed in a story of
a Moslem traditionalist to whom wine was offered, and
who was then reproached for drinking it by the offerer.
" How," asked the traditionalist, " do you know that
it is wine ? "" " I was told so by the Jew of whom I
bought it." " How did he know ? " " He was told so
by the Christian from whose winepress it came." " I,"
said the traditionalist, " do not admit the evidence of
Jews or Christians ; so I will continue to drink what
you call wine on their testimony." Where history was
preserved orally, the rigid adherence to the principle
of testifying only to what one personally knew was
probably the best guarantee against the falsification
of the record.
The steps which led to the survival of the present
Synoptics out of a number of contemporary compositions
of similar scope, have not hitherto been traced satis-
factorily, and for the ultimate solution of that question
further discoveries must be awaited : probably the soil
of Egypt, which has preserved so much that was deemed
irretrievably lost, will deliver up material for the
prosecution of that enquiry also. Till then, the analogies
which M^e have been considering would justify us in
supposing that the factor which led to their survival
was a widespread belief in the soundness of the chains
by which the traditions had reached those who ultimately
put them together in the form which we know. The
70 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
task of tracing each tradition to its source, which the
author of the Third Gospel declared that he performed,
was probably executed in all three cases ; and the
belief in the thoroughness with which it was executed
was probably the determining factor in the survival of
these particular Gospels out of many.
With regard to the value of their testimony, we
cannot, I think, do better than constantly remember
that the same has been weighed and examined repeatedly
by the best-balanced and least-prejudiced minds, and
that the results of these examinations have been
exceedingly varied ; from the firmest and most un-
swer\'ing confidence in the absolute accuracy of every
statement which they contain, coupled with the belief
that all apparent differences admit of being harmonised
or explained, to the intermediate position which
assumes the general accuracy of the statements without
excluding the possibility that errors of a variety of
sorts have crept in ; and thence to the negative position
that resolves the whole into myth or even conscious
fabrication. At one time these differences were settled
by religious disabilities, and far severer measures ; a wiser
age, having abandoned these methods and their like,
still leaves no stone unturned with the hope of obtaining
material that may lead to their ultimate solution ; and
while this hope receives occasionally some justification,
it is probable that still more is to be hoped from the
scientific analysis of the mental process and of the data
of consciousness. The reason why, in the search after
truth, different enquirers have reached such contradictory
results will be clearer when rather more is known of
what Mr. Myers has called the psychic spectrum, and
the consequent chances of different sorts of truth
VALUE OF TESTIMONY 71
being perceptible by different minds. Many of the
differences which are to be found both in the original
testimony and in its subsequent valuation, will thus
reduce themselves to difference in the subject rather
than in the object. The very question on which older
generations of sceptics spoke so positively, whereas
modern critics speak so modestly, the possibility of
miracles, is likely to resolve itself into the study
of operations of the consciousness and of individual
receptivity.
It would be easy to quote passages from the New
Testament in confirmation of the opinion that the
nature of truth must vary with the subject to whom it
is presented ; but it would appear to have been left to
the present age both to study the meaning of that
proposition, and to deduce therefrom consequences
which will be favourable to charity and concord.
SPEECH BY SIR DYCE DUCKWORTH,
M.D., LL.D.
Ladies and Gentlemen, — My duty, I think, is to
express in your name, and certainly for myself, our
sense of the great value of the address which has been
made this evening. In coming from so great an
authority on so great and important a subject, and
being in itself of a nature so subtle and so difficult, I
think that nobody would be prepared, immediately after
hearing the delivery of this address, to get up and
debate it or consider it at any length. The subject
demands that we should have it in print before us, and
read it carefully and ponder over it, because I take it
as a very important document contributed on this
question, which no doubt attracts attention nowadays
more than ever (a fact for which we may be thankful)
72 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
amongst the most learned theologians and students all
over Europe. We have had a contribution, as I say,
from a great master on the subject, which will well
repay the most careful perusal, and which I venture to
think hardly anybody present is reallv fit to criticise
in detail. In reference to these meetings, I think that
the presence of so many as I see here before me to-
day must certainly be gratifying to those who have
organised these assemblies. It has come w^ithin the
knowledge of all of us that the first of this series has
attracted wider attention than was perhaps anticipated
at the time it was carried out, and I see no reason for
regi^et in the attention which has been thus directed to
that particular lecture, and to this course of lectures.
We may be quite sure that good will come of it. I
think some of us were sorry to see a man whom we
consider to be one of the greatest masters of science in
this country, and perhaps in Europe, attacked as he
was by other men, when we might have expected
that a controversy arising on such points would be
conducted with even-mindedness, and certainly more
courtesy. But for myself I am quite content to rest in
the shadow of so great a man as addressed you on that
occasion, and would say at once very humbly that I
would take his side in the controversy which came up
then. In these days there is a great unsettling of
faith — in fact, I am almost prepared to say a great
absence of faith — and therefore it is that Associations
such as this are bringing these matters forward, specially
before young minds before they have come to conclu-
sions on these very vital subjects. Especially is it
important, in an Institution like this, that questions of
this kind should be brought forward.
I do not know why I have been particularly selected
to occupy this chair to-day. I take it as indicating
that I, as a representative of the great profession of
medicine, am interested in Christianity, in the Christian
faith. I have no hesitation in declaring myself a
SIR DYCE DUCKWORTH'S SPEECH 73
convinced Christian, and I think I may say, for certainly
the greater number of the members of my profession in
England, that that is the faith which they hold. That
is not the case in many parts of the Continent,
I remember giving an address in the East End of
London some years ago. At the end of it a German
doctor came up and spoke to me, and said he was
perfectly astounded to hear an English doctor express
himself dogmatically upon matters relating to the
Christian faith. He said, " In my country we have no
faith, we doctors.""* The statement was not new to me,
for we know that the Christian faith is largely divorced
on the Continent from the beliefs of scientific men.
Amongst scientific men generally there are many who
may be regarded as freethinkers or agnostics, and
who profess not to see their way to hold the simple
faith which Christians hold, and who apparently do
not care very much about the matter. There have
been great scientists who have had various difficulties
on the subject, and we have a large number of less
eminent scientific men who have adopted the state of
mind of those great men as a kind of cult, and who
think it becoming and almost necessary to follow the
example of some of those men who have had their own
difficulties. With regard to those who are uncertain
in their beliefs on the subject of Christianity, the result
is sometimes the effect of what I may call a kind
of colour-blindness. These people are honest — they
cannot see. They wish for absolute demonstration and
emphatic certainties, without which their habit of
mind prevents them from accepting the tenets of
Christianity, or holding what we call the faith. They
cannot see their way in the same direction as you and
I can see it. Further, I would add that to have faith
is not a matter of experimental proof, or of experimental
demonstration. In the matter of Christian faith, I
think it is too often forgotten that it is as well an
affair of the heart as of the mind. It is impossible to
10
74 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
hold the Christian faith Mdthout having the heart
engaged in the matter, and at the basis of all you must
have perfect humility and a recognition of the limits of
human penetration. These limits, no doubt, are being
narrowed as years roll by. The limits to human
penetration are not what they were two thousand years
ago. Many things are being revealed and made known
to us by science, day by day, year by year. But I for
myself see no contradiction and antagonism between
science and revealed religion. Belonging to a great
profession, the knowledge of which is based upon all
the sciences, we are ready to receive anything brought
before us at any time, we are prepared for any revela-
tion of truth, nothing will astonish us, nothing is too
wonderful for us ; but these will have no effect in
shaking our faith in Divine things. We believe, on
the other hand, that, as a result, our faith will be rather
built up than lessened and destroyed. I firmly believe
that that is the mental condition alone in which our art
can be best practised. I should feel soiTy for any man
practising my profession who went to the bedside of
the sick or dying without Christian faith. I am free
to say, after many years of experience now, that the best
and happie^^t death-beds I have ever seen were those of
Chi'istians — and I have seen many die in all lands and
under all conditions.
What I think we want at the present time is an atti-
tude of greater humility. We should recollect, as I
have said, that to hold the faith is not to demand an
absolute demonstration. We know that faith is the
evidence of things unseen, and that the gift of it
comes to those who will try and believe and
reverentially seek aid that their hearts may be
opened to see and believe. After all, Christianity is a
thing of practical proof On a great occasion one of
my greatest friends in the profession, Sir Andrew Clark,
addressed an assembly like this, and after a long
discourse said, " Let me recommend you to try the
COLONEL WILLIAMS^ SPEECH 75
Christian faith." No doubt, therein lies one of the
greatest secrets in this matter as to the building up of
ourselves in the faith. " He that believeth on the Son
of God hath the witness in himself." Let a man try
and practise the Christian cult, and as he does so and
works it out day by day, so will conviction come to him
and come absolutely in no other way than by trying
it — to copy the life of the Divine Master. In that
way alone, I believe, can people put themselves into
the right attitude to find and hold faith. That is
the reverential, humble attitude which will believe that
there are many things hidden from us, but that many
of those things will be revealed by those who come
after us, and that over all, and behind all, is the great
All in All, the director of all affairs, with all power,
the Master of all hearts, our great and Divine Father.
SPEECH BY COLONEL WILLIAMS, M.P.
I HAVE great pleasure in proposing a cordial vote of
thanks to Professor Margoliouth for the very able
address he has given us. I cannot tell you what a
great privilege it has been for me and, I am quite
certain, for others on the platform, with grey beards
and older minds, to come to such an assembly as
this — of young women and young men — not gathered
together by compulsion but voluntarily coming to
listen to an extra University lecture, and to study
such a subject as this. It is important for all of us
to get into our minds some of the greater reasons
for the faith that is in us ; something which may not
only establish us in the faith, but still more — and here
is the value of these lectures — something which we may
pass on to others ; because there is no one in this room
who does not constantly come into contact with other
minds, and who will not in a short time hear some of
the scoffs at religion which come from careless minds
and lips. Having spent this time together, we are
76 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
better fitted for going out and doing that which our
Christianity and our humanity lay upon us — doing all
the good in the world we possibly can, mentally and
spiritually, for the cause of our common Christianity.
Professor Margoliouth has treated a very difficult
subject in a very masterly and yet very simple manner
— in a manner which has given us very distinct lines of
thought upon which we can complete for ourselves
investigations into this great subject. There are two
remarks that he made in his lecture that very much
struck me. First of all, he said that it was the function
of religion to turn an oral tradition into a written
tradition, an oral language into a written language.
That is just what we find at the present time. There
are many languages, good strong languages, languages
with a history and traditions of their own, of which we
knew nothing and heard nothing until the missionaries
went amongst the people who speak them ; and when
the missionaries went and found the need for trans-
lation of the Scriptures into those languages, we found
out what those languages were. The Professor made
another remark — that it is the tendency of a new
religion to drive out an old one. Some people tell us
that Christianity is a new religion altogether, that the
New^ Testament and the Old Testament have no con-
nection -sfith one another. Had that been the case,
according to that law mentioned by Professor Margo-
liouth, the New Testament would have turned out the
Old Testament. But it has been proved that the New
Testament is only a complement to the fulfilment of
the Old Testament, and therefore the New Testament
has not driven out the Old Testament ; they are shown
to be two parts of one and the same revelation.
THE WITNESS OF HUMAN
EXPERIENCE
By the Rev. R. E. Welsh, M.A.^
Christianity comes to us in three ways. (1) It comes
through hterary records, survivals of primitive literature
which the new religion created. These documents and
their value do not fall within the scope of my subject.
(2) It comes as a factor in our environment. Born in
Chi'istendom, we find it round us, and it finds us, when
we arrive here — an institution, a tradition, an influence,
a complex web of elements woven into social and
national life. And (3) it comes to individuals as a
personal experience, of which a man can never altogether
convey the secret to his fellow. Before it was either a
literature or a history, before it had exhibited itself on
the wide fields of community-life, or worked itself into
writings, it was a personal experience. And probably
the first and the last attestation of its truth that a man
receives is something intimately personal — although
many other evidences may come in to give it con-
firmation.
Christianity is one of the imperial and imperious
factors in human life as lived by us. Its operations,
alike in numberless individual experiences and in social
and corporate life, have produced an enormous mass of
materials to be analysed and appraised.
* Au Address delivered on May 21st, 1903.
77
78 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
With what criteria shall we put it to the test ?
Professor William James of Harvard — latest and
freshest of trained psychologists — in his recent notable
book, Varieties of Religious Eocperience^ treated on
scientific lines, lays down two criteria for our use as
tests — (1) " Immediate luminousness,"' and (2) " Moral
helpfulness."'
The first criterion, "Immediate luminousness,"" is
scarcely within the field of my subject ; but a word
about it, to point a path for thought.
It is itself an experience, very intimate and difficult
to reproduce, but such as helps us to overleap the
intervening ages and leagues which seem to put us at
so grave a disadvantage in estimating all that clusters
romid the name " Christ.""
For the moment assume nothing regarding the
authenticity of the Gospels, except of course that they
descend from early times. Now open these four panels,
and let the portrait look out into our eyes. Whether
everything in them be reliable or not, the Face that
looks out at us from these portraits has something
immediately luminous and instantly convincing, com-
bining strange colours and extraordinary elements, yet
self-consistent and harmoniously unique. Intellectual
questionings are ready to intervene and raise difficulties ;
but let these be left aside for the moment. Let the
Face produce its own immediate and unqualified imprint,
and mark how our intuitions receive the swift impression
of living reality ; there is something that goes home to
the childlike in us. And we can never cast that Face
out of our eyes ; and, no matter what literary or
scientific problems may arrest belief, we can never lose
IMMEDIATE LUMINOUSNESS 79
the singular appeal He makes to something inarticulate
and fine in our deeper nature. Meet Him just as He
appears there — let Him look out at you, into you —
and, however singular He seem and almost incredible
the story, there is an impression of veracity and mystic
power left on your spirit.
These intuitions in men of many times and conditions
are a swift judge of trueness, and are not in the long
run deceived. You may safely accept the " authority of
the optic nerve,"" answering the " immediate luminous-
ness "' of Christ.
From the very nature of the case we are bound to
take into account the witness of the inner consciousness,
of the persistent phenomena in the human heart.
Renan was asked, in regard to his theories, " What do
you do with sin ? " "I suppress it," he airily replied.
But it is there all the same. And we cannot measure
Christianity without taking account of the sore evil
that infests human life, of the needs and persistent
instincts that will insist on making themselves the
largest factor in experience. Christ exists — it is the
motif to which His story is set — just to deal with these
sore disorders and meet these intuitions of " the organ
of spiritual discernment," and it is vain to estimate the
truth in Him apart from these irrepressible demands of
the heart. When heart and conscience awake, they
have something to say towards the verdict, something
as scientifically valid as intellect and science itself.
Before proceeding to discuss the central problems of
our proper subject, let me, by the way, mention a case
in point, which ought to interest students here in
University College — the case of the first woman to gain
for women students admission to its classes. She,
80 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
Ellen Watson — I can but outline her story — won the
Rothschild Exhibition and the principal prize in
Applied Mathematics and Mechanics. She profoundly
revered and was influenced by Professor W. K. Clifford
of this College, enthusiastically calling him " the
Master.'"* He, once a High Churchman, had thrown
Christianity to the winds ; to his eyes it evaporated
under scientific tests. With frantic, pathetic candour,
he admits and deplores the loss : —
" We have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty
heaven to light up a soul-less earth ; we have felt with
utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead.
We are all to be swept away in the final ruin of the
earth. The thought is a sad one ; there is no use in
trying to deny this. But, like All-Father Odin, we
must ride out gaily to do battle with the wolf of
doom."
Strange, chill, ironic " gaiety "" !
Ellen Watson started from a similar position. " I
do not need religion,'' she used to say then ; " science
thoroughly satisfies me. I stand far below many
humble Christians. But I do not reject Christianity
because it seems to me unlikely or defective morally,
or for any such reason. Only I feel it is not M'hat I
need." She frankly admitted that " of the whole
mass of Christian evidence she was in total ig-norance."
Enlightenment came from an unexpected quarter.
Her hero-professor, like herself, showed symptoms of
that disease, consumption, which kisses the body before
it kills it. Her heart was appalled as she saw him fade.
" This moi'uing I said Good-bye to him, I fear for the
last time. It is difficult not to despair and ask what
good there is in living when this is all." Soon he died
ELLEN WATSON'S LIFE 81
in a distant land, and the shock roused the dormant
heart in his pupil. " Is this all ? '*' was the question
that dominated her thinking. Was she a mere atom
in the soul-less universe, a mere victim of universal
laws ? She could not believe, yet, " I wish your life
were mine,"' she wrote to a Christian friend. This
heart-hunger became more imperious, whetted by the
study of " In Memoriam,'' intensified further by the
sudden loss of another student in whose researches she
was interested. These shatterings of love and hope
stirred an aspiration which rose above the limits of
science,
'^'^And like a man in wrath^ the heart
Stood up and answered, ' I have felt.' "
Taking part of her B.Sc. degree, she had to flee for
health to Cape Colony, where I visited the school in which
she taught and saw the place where she was laid at her
early death. But already she had come to write, " I
believe in God because I have felt the Divine Presence.
And if to love and adore is to believe, I believe in
Christ. Yet I struggled against it for a long time."
In the act of repeating the words, " O Lamb of God,
Son of the Father, that taketh away the sins of the
world,'' her voice and her life ceased. To the last she
retained her reverence for science. But a change had
come over her, she said, " like an awakening from a
dream to a reality, and the sense that we have been the
dreamers."
I give the case — because it was one of yourselves —
to show that the waking of the instincts of the inner-
most life may bring experiences which carry evidence
and conviction not to be denied. Christ must be
11
82 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
sufficiently authenticated in outward fact ; yet the spirit
within must have its " say "'"' also.
" I wish I could believe that beautiful religion of
yours,'" was the wistful exclamation to me of one who
formerly was a distinguished teacher of science in this
college. Tliat " wish '' tells of the intuitions which
bear witness to Christ even when science dries up belief,
and such witness has its scientific value.
II.
Now take the second criterion named.
The moral product of Christianity, the effect pro-
duced in individual experience and in the history of
communities, must be one of the various witnesses in
the case. Professor James has a way of putting the
case crisply. " The true,'"* he says, " is what works
well, over the whole "" — i.e. over a large field of ex-
perience.
How, then, has Christianity " worked "" — Christianity
not necessarily as identified with Churches and pro-
fessional ecclesiasticism, but in its ruling spirit and its
original purity ? What have been its characteristic
products ?
By the way, this moral test is itself largely a product
of the Christian spirit, which has affected our standards
and implanted an ethical factor in our measurement of
truth. The moral outcome of a system or a faith is
not a criterion among pagan religions ; it is largely
a creation of Christian influences, and is itself a sign
of their quality, of the ethical element contributed by
Christianity.
1. Apply the criterion on the scale of History.
MORAL HELPFULNESS 83
Just because the field is so overwhelmingly extensive,
I must not even begin here to delimit its bounds, but
shall ask you to give weight to what independent
students have said in summarising the conclusions to
which their special studies have led.
The late Professor Romanes — long an agnostic, but
swinging back to convinced Christian faith towards the
end — declared : —
" It is on all sides worth considering (blatant ignorance
or base vulgarity alone excepted) that the revolution
effected by Christianity in human life is immeasurable
and unparalleled by any other movement in history."' —
Thoughts on Religio7i, p. 162.
With more poetic license, Jean Paul Richter recog-
nised the world-influence of the Majestic One, Who, he
said, " being the Holiest among the mighty, and the
Mightiest among the holy, has lifted with His pierced
hand empires off their hinges, has turned the stream of
centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages."
And Emerson speaks of " the unique impression of
Jesus on mankind, whose name is not so much written
as ploughed into the history of the world."
Both Gibbon and Mr. Lecky (in his great book,
History of European Morals) — neither of them writing
from an ecclesiastical standpoint — have sufficiently
exhibited the outburst of new life when primitive
Christianity entered and conquered imperial Rome.
I need not describe the luxury and the corruptions and
shameless vices which darkened Roman society — human
life cheap ; virtue, chastity, domestic unions, a fig for
them ! Women and slaves and children held at the
whim and passion of masterful men ! The worst
84 THE WITxXESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
passions of the people glutted by gladiatorial shows of
blood — even gentlefolk gloating over the sensations of
wounded victims i?i artkulo mortis ! There certainly
were good men and good elements at the heart of it
all; but the Stoics, with all their wisdom and high
moral insight, were impotent to leaven the community
for its recovery.
Into this debased paganism Christianity entered, and
in spite of cruel misrepresentation and sufferings, spread
and gradually poured new moral life into the community.
The new religion regenerated a decadent society.
What it did for woman, the home, the slave, the useless
folk, and the wastage of society, let Mr. Lecky be left
to tell, and " Quo Vadis '' to illustrate in a tale. Max
Miiller said, " Humanity is a word which you look
for in vain in Plato or Aristotle ; the idea of mankind
as one family, as the children of one God, is an idea of
Chi'istian growth." Yes, and that Humanitarianism
which sceptics often nowadays seek to substitute for
religion is itself a spirit infused into them and all of
us by Christianity. The great body of altruistic feeling
and service of humanity which has worked as the salt
of society, its good Samaritan, is the outcome of the
Christianised heart, as Dr. Benjamin Kidd has been
showing. The Romans would have been astonished to
see our modern engines of warfare, and not less
astonished to see the Red Cross Brigade at the rear of
the fighting forces for the relief of the wounded.
Christianity has passed to some extent into the very
code of laws of the European nations and the roots of
the corporate life, contributing their finer elements.
It has been the originator of ideals, creative of an
elusive spirit, which, though impalpable and during
SOCIAL REGENERATION 85
certain periods checked and overborne, survives all
decay and rises again to animate the ruling public
mind. Not always in the Church — official Christianity
has often been a mixed quantity, and the Christian mind
you might find sometimes outside the ecclesiastical
pale more than within it. It may not have been the
Church which promoted the movement for the abolition
of slavery in modern times. But those who led the
campaign had drunk deep at Christian springs. You
cannot shut up the Christian spirit within the walls of
an organisation. Deal as you like with the official
organised religious system — its merits and demerits
form another question, not vital to the case of
Christianity ; but this remains true, that the spirit of
the Founder has always risen from its tomb of
corruptions again, and become a wholesome, fertilising,
and elevating force, like ozone in the air and actinic
rays in the light. There are staggering evils in the
civilisation of so-called Christendom — which is not half
Christian in tone and character ; but against these there
is always a deep and wide protest, such as was not
known in ancient Rome, and is not known in pagan
lands to-day ; there is a strong Christian mind that
bans these sinister disorders, and that is prophetic of a
victory yet to be won over them.
Is Christianity the cause, or is it the effect, of the
moral ascent in western civilisation ? It came first in
time, in Rome's decay, before the renascence of civilisa-
tion, and it operates before our eyes in barbaric lands
to-day as the spring of a new regenerate society. Even
if it just rose and survived among the highest races and
marched in combination with the most advanced civilisa-
tion, that in itself would stamp it with the imprimatur
86 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
of time and experience, giving it " the warrant of the
ages." But it is more than a mere mechanical com-
bination ; it is in chemical combination Avith the best
elements in social and public life. There are many
good factors in the community besides those that spring
out of Christianity — God is in His world in many ways.
Yet, when Christianity disappears or loses hold, the
visible effect is, as it always has been, social disin-
tegration. This is so well recognised by disbelievers
that, while they deny or doubt for themselves, numbers
of them wish to uphold the superstition as a useful
police force.
I shall have to ask the question in our next circle of
enquiry — I merely hint it as the imperative question
here : Could such humane and beneficent results be the
outcome of a fortunate delusion ? Has a fiction done
more than anything else to save the community ? Could
something historically false be the factory of social
regeneration and permanently the inspiration of the
best in corporate life ? Would it be a public calamity
if this fortunate fiction were lost, if the truth, the
truth as the sceptic knows it, were to become known
to the people ? If the calamity of social disintegration
follows, it is a sign that the unfortunate " truth '" is,
after all, a deleterious error. Nothing but what is
fundamentally true can permanently and on the large
scale of history serve the highest interests of mankind.
2. Apply this criterion, " How it works," to
Personal Experiexce.
It is beyond dispute that, in the experience of
numberless individuals, and these among the sanest
and best, the gi'eatest moral dynamic that they have
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 87
known has come to them under the name of Christianity
and its Founder. Interpret the signal facts as we
may, we see men whose hves and character have been
completely changed for the better, their settled natural
habits overpowered, their dispositions reversed, a new
stream of tendency started and setting back the old
stream. Here is a dynamic that has proved itself
stronger than the opium-habit, the di'ink-habit, the
lust-habit, stronger than the forces of self-love. It
seized Augustine, conquered his vices, and reconstructed
him like a new man. It turned the wild scapegrace
sailor John Newton into the devout writer of Christian
hymns. In Colonel Gardiner, Raymond Lully, and
multitudes of whom these are but a few signal speci-
mens, we witness the same change of character and
life — sometimes in a dramatic revolution, more fre-
quently in the unostentatious rise of a regenerated
spirit and the development of a type of manhood
whose best is rooted and nourished in Christian soil.
Here is "Mark Rutherford" (Mr. Hale White),
himself a disbeliever in the creeds, saying: —
" I can assure my incredulous literary friends that
years ago it was not uncommon for men and women
suddenly to wake to the fact that they had been sinners,
and to affirm that henceforth they would keep God's
commandments by the help of Jesus Christ and the
Holy Spirit. What is more extraordinary is that they
did keep God's commandments for the rest of their
hves."
Professor Romanes was constrained, on scientific
principles, to take account of these phenomena of
experience — experience which, he said, "has been
repeated and testified to by countless" numbers "of
88 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
civilised men and women in all nations and all decrees
of culture. ... In all cases it is not a mere change
of belief or opinion ; this is by no means the point :
the point is that it is a modification of character, more
or less profound. . . . To pure agnostics the evidence,""*
he says, from these changed lives, " lies in the bulk of
these psychological phenomena, shortly after the death
of Christ, with their continuance ever since, and their
general similarity all over the world.'''
Would all doubts have vanished if we had witnessed
a miracle of nature in Galilee ? I question it. These
changed lives and regenerated characters have all tlie
appearance of moral miracles ; and, let me ask. Which
is easier, which is a profounder measure of Divine
power — to bid a lame man rise and walk, or to trans-
mute a bad man and his settled habits into sterling
goodness of character ?
The moral miracle is more of hind with Christ's own
teaching and aims, and really a higher test than material
wonders.
One of the earliest sceptical assailants of Christianity,
Celsus, wrote contemptuously of the Christians for
inviting and hospitably dealing with " bad men '' and
the like — implying that the ethical philosophers showed
their superiority in drawing the reputable and finer
minds. But the " bad man '' laid at the wise man's
door is just the test-case^ is the last of all the world's
problems : Who or what can di-aw him and re-make
his character ? Celsus said : —
" Those who are disposed by nature to vice, and
accustomed to it, cannot be transformed by punish-
ment, much less by mercy ; for to transform nature
is a matter of extreme difficulty."
CELSUS AND ORIGEN 89
Yes, indeed ; but Origen answered well : —
" When we see the doctrine Celsus calls foolish
operate as with magic power, when we see how it
brings a multitude at once from a life of lawless ex-
cesses to a well-regulated one, from unrighteousness to
goodness, from timidity to such strength of principle
that, for the sake of religion, they despise even death,
have we not good reason for admiring the power of
this doctrine ? ""
In fact, to speak after the manner of Ritschl and
his influential school to-day, Christ is certified as a
fact of consciousness. And wherever the experience
of that consciousness has been quick and original, and
not merely conventional, it has shown itself the dynamic
ever tending to regenerate or mature good character,
or to become the artist of the graces.
But this personal experience, it is urged by J. S.
Mill and others, is valid only for the individual himself,
and can certify nothing to the bystander. Yet, al-
though it carries its full convincing power only to the
subject himself, it may be a secondary experience to
those in close enough touch to receive the subtle
impression and scintillations of the changed life and
Christian cult. The Christ-consciousness shows through
in open character, and its verifiable products may be
studied objectively.
True, these interior impressions and experiences are
open to capricious interpretations. You cannot rely
on what each man declares he has felt or knows in his
soul. This evidence is often the " asylum ignorantiae,'"
the refuge of fanatics, obscurantists, and esoteric
enthusiasts who are victimised by the projected shadows
of their own abnormal impressions. Many of the
12
90 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
things vouched for by individual consciousness have
to be sifted out as unscientific.
But take a wide range of these experiences of the
Christian dynamic ; see what occurs on the scale of
large numbers, under different conditions, in different
ages and races, in history and experience, what is
constant as a power for good, what is certified by men
sane and reliable, what " works well " in visible life :
and such experience cannot be discounted as personal
caprice. Here we have experiences which recur, which
show persistence under all sorts of conditions, and a
marked moral solidity in positive products. Nature
does not deceive us in these persistent and lasting
experiences. Are not the signal, varied, recurring
experiences associated with Christ, and working out
in life and character, valid and strong presumption in
favour of Christianity as vital truth ? Mr. Lecky, as
detached historian, has reason to say that it (Chris-
tianity) has been " the most powerful moral lever ever
applied to the hearts of men.''
We must not forget, however, that all these religious
experiences and revolutions in personal life are accounted
for by some as the illusions of mere physiological
change. Paul's vision on the way to Damascus is
called " a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he
being an epileptic." As Professor James puts it, this —
" Medical materialism snuffs out Saint Teresa as
an hysteric. Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary
degenerate ; George Fox's discontent with the shams
of his age and his pining for spiritual veracity it treats
as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-
tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal
catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are,
MEDICAL MATERIALISM 91
when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere
affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably),
due to perverted action of various glands which
physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism
then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such
personages is successfully undermined."
But if we must apply the principle to these cases,
we must apply it all round. In that case, as Pro-
fessor James shrewdly answers, the liver must be
supposed to " determine the dicta of the stm^dy atheist
as decisively as it does that of the Methodist under
conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in
one way the blood that percolates it, we get the
Methodist, when in another way we get the atheist
form of mind." Even the sceptic's disbeliefs, the
medical materialist's scientific doctrines on the matter,
are under this theory as much a product of glands and
auto-intoxication as the experiences of the Christian !
So reason itself is reduced to pathology, and this
instrument of intelligence with which we are trying to
interpret life is mere functioning of matter, and we
are left looking in each other's faces, wondering if we
are chattering automata, talking gibberish ; and so we
had better go home and ask no more questions ! It
is the reductio ad absurdum of all attempts to find an
intelligent interpretation of human life.
These moral miracles and Christian experiences are
not mere spindrift on the river's surface, " bubbles on
the foam which coats a stormy sea, floating episodes
made and unmade by the forces of the wind and
water " — what Professor Clifford called " epiphenomena."
They are too constant, typically identical, (while various
in mode), sane and tested, to be aberrations and illusions.
m THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
It is equally true that psychological analysis, such
as Professor James himself offers us in so fresh and
skilful a form, does not dissolve the significance of
these moral miracles, and, as he confesses, does not
evaporate their authority. If these spiritual crises and
changed lives arise as, say, the eruption of the sub-
conscious self, we have only thrown the problem back
one step farther. When we t?'ace the phenomena and
the modes in which changes emerge and crystallise, we
do not account for them. To tell " How " does not
answer " Why ? " and " Whence ? " It is possible to
carve the human trunk and dissect the brain until one
loses conviction of the reality of a living spirit that
inhabited all ; and it is equally possible to grub at
the roots of beliefs and experiences and superstitions
until one loses the confidence that there is sure tiTith
at the heart of them — loses, indeed, the sense of the
vital force and beauty which strike the common
bystander. We have to sift all for the sake of sound
discrimination, but again to stand back and get the
broad impression of the living whole. Analyse and
trace the method and course of it all with the aid of
the surest psychologist ; still there remain the broad,
solid, lasting experiences which cannot be dissipated by
mere analysis. "Wliile theorists are refining and dis-
secting till to their eyes the whole thing is evaporated,
the Christian dynamic is going on working those same
moral miracles in greater or less degree, and the thing
is " working *" — solvitnr amhila^ido.
Now, do these experiences and moral miracles imply
a supernal power in their source in Christ ?
It is remarkable that paganism, even the wise among
SUPERNAL POWER IN CHRIST 93
the ancient pagans, could work no moral miracle on
the bad man. Carlyle wrote (in Sartor Resaiius, II.) :
" The Old World knew nothing of conversions ;
instead of Ecce Homo they had only some Choice of
Hercules.""
Ethical culture, for all the good service it renders
on its own field, lacks the dynamic to produce these
moral revolutions and this spiritual type of manhood.
Like the Stoic philosophy of Seneca and Marcus
Aurelius, it is for the wise, and has no seizing appeal
for the lost man. This new power for good burst into
activity, as Professor Romanes saw, under and after
Christ, and has been a distinctive feature of His activity
through succeeding times.
Is it the explanation of the peculiar potency of
Christ, that He touches, exploits, works with things
so intimately and intensely human and universally
appealing as conscience, with the fears of guilt, love,
life, death, the mystery of the unseen — the raw elemental
materials and primary constituents of man's life ? That,
however, by itself would rather show that Christ had
grip of the ultimate facts of existence, and had unique
mastery over the springs of human nature. But
further, Ibsen and Zola and Tolstoi have worked with
the raw materials of human nature, dealt in the
elemental contents of life ; yet they can only expose,
and do not heal. Whence the unparalleled regenerating
power in Christ's treatment of the human case ? There
is something more than intimate handling of vital
emotions and fears of human nature ; there are actinic
rays in His light that tell ; a supernal element of power
that is cui'ative and purifying.
94 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
Is it something latent in human nature waiting to
be " tapped " by some happy ideal embodying our
deeper instincts ? But whence the special power of
Christianity to " tap "" these latent instincts, to di-aw
that subconscious life ? What gives the differentia to
Christ, producing results which no other has produced ?
Or, when we point out the ineffectiveness of moral
teaching by itself — with Matthew Arnold for witness —
does this mean merely that men are still so undeveloped
that they need some fiction to give vivid impersonation
to ethical truth, some concrete ideal in a tale to wing
the moral element into the imagination and set it
warmly in the human heart ? But, even then, if partly
true, is not that a proof of reality rather than of
illusion ?
"Wisdom dealt with mortal poAvers
Where truth in closest words shall fail^
When truth embodied in a tale
Shall enter in at lowly doors."
"And so the Word had breath." The ideal of
goodness needs to be made personal and embodied,
incarnated in personality ; and, in a universe so full of
scientific wonders, is it so very strange if the universe
of which our spirits are a part has its own wonders in
that embodiment of the Divine ?
But may it not be only the ideal, floated into our
thoughts in the traditional name of Christ, that tells
for good.? In that case the historical reality of the
story does not matter. So argued the late T. H. Green,
who said that, more than two generations after Paul,
a spiritual interpretation was given to the ethical
teacher, Christ, which lifted Him out of the region
of history, and fixed Him as a Divine ideal in the
CONTEMPORARY CORRESPONDENCE 95
purified conscience. — Thus men pathetically try to
retain Him in some form, and cling even to a ghost !
To this there are answers of two kinds.
(1) The literary evidence, although outside our
present field, may be briefly suggested — one item, at
least. We have authenticated records of Christian
experience so close upon the time of Christ as not to
leave an interval sufficient for the development of such
a legendary ideal.
The earliest documents relating to Christianity — four
letters in the correspondence of a contemporary of
Christ — are pronounced indisputably genuine by
practically every sceptical authority worth considering.
These letters take us up close to the very verge of the
days of Christ. They were written within twenty-five
to thirty years after Christ's death. Dui'ing the intervd
their author, who had been a disbeliever and a persecutor
of the first Christians in the Holy City, had become an
ardent missionary of the faith, and had been proclaiming
the Gospel round the Mediterranean. These documents
are his letters to groups of converts who had been won
and changed by the same agency some twenty-eight
years before ; and these letters show that already
in years past Christianity has been proclaimed and
experienced in Corinth and Galatia and Thessalonica.
These documents, acknowledged to be authentic,
exhibit a current conception of Christ as super-normal,
miraculous, a Divine Saviour, and a solid and settled
Christianity. And the interval between the events
reported and the date when the letters were wTitten is
altogether too brief for the rise of a fond legendary
illusion, much too brief a space of time for a myth to
form into such a close-knit story as these letters reveal.
96 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
The theory of a slowlj-woven ideal as the dynamic of
goodness breaks down under this test alone.
(2) Our experience yields a second answer to the
theory that a glorified ideal, floated into our life in
the name of Christ but without full historical reality,
is the eflfective power of Christianity, namely — Try it,
try it in life, and see if it works out moral achieve-
ments like those we know under a livincp historical
Christ Divine. The ideal looks fine to the imao^ination :
but it is difficult to retain hold of a disembodied soul
of Christianity. It is feeble in actual human dynamics ;
and while it may elevate the rarer individuals, it tends
to grow thinly vapoury and vanish under the hard
pressure of human struggle. To be morally potent
and appealing the ideal must show the scars of living
actuality upon it ; in Luther's phrase, it must have
hands and feet — aye, it must be objectively there, there
all through the night, with the print of the nails in
its hands.
Yes, the very soul of the dynamic in Christ lies in
the red-stained actuality of it. Could an ideal clad
in illusion hold its ground, and achieve what Mr.
Lecky, who is open to no suspicion of religious bias,
says Christianity achieved : —
" It was reserved for Christianity to present to the
world an ideal character which, through all the changes
of eighteen centuries, has filled the hearts of men with
an impassioned love, and has shown itself capable of
acting on all ages, nations, temperaments and con-
ditions ; has not only been the highest pattern of
virtue, but the highest incentive to its practice, and
has exerted so deep an influence that it may be truly
said that the simple record of three short years of
LECKY ON CHRISTIANITY 97
active life has done more to regenerate and to soften
mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers, and
than all the exhortations of moralists. This has indeed
been the wellspring of whatever has been best and
purest in the Christian life. Amid all the sins and
failings, amid all the priestcraft, the persecution
and fanaticism which have defaced the Church, it has
preserved in the character and example of its Founder
an enduring principle of regeneration." — History of
European Morals^ chap. iv.
Is it credible that an illusion of ideals woven by
unenlightened Galileans could have hit the mark so
surely and permanently, and could be the gi-eatest
effective energy for good in the world, in history, and
in individual experience ? Fortunate illusion, if it
rose by the chances of a dreaming age, and created
new men in holy character and revolutionised society !
A composite, made up of a man and a fortunate
delusion about him, could never survive and accomplish
so much. The false could never lastingly serve the
interests of the highest manhood, of truth and virtue.
Some men think it so fortunate a delusion under a
" fortuitous concoui'se " of happy coincidences, that,
like the sceptics of ancient Rome, they want to preserve
the public faith in it as a moral police, as the best
existing dynamic for good. Strange, incongruous testi-
mony to the virtue lying in the lost dream ! But the
power of it visibly dies as soon as people suspect that
it is being kept up as a useful make-believe.
Those who lose grip of Him lose visibly and con-
fessedly a source of power and life. Even the enlight-
ened and the emancipated suffer loss in many cases.
Our eyes cannot be blinded to the signs in the Shelley
and Godwin and Byron sceptical circles, nor to the
13
98 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
relaxing symptoms seen in Goethe and George Eliot.
If these signs are visible in the mighty ones, we can
infer what would happen in the mass of the common
people if Christianity lost its veritable historicity and
its hold. And I do not think it credible that what
is re^eneratinoj when believed — and the loss of which
is demoralising when dissolved in vapour or doubt —
can be false. The true, be sure, is of one piece with
the helpful, with what creates virtue and holy character.
Even if you should be mistaken as to some details of
fact, you are somewhere near the central point of truth
when you are planted in what breeds the best in human
Hfe.
Character is one of the ultimate mundane tests of
truth, in so far as trath is related to human life.
Is not that measure somewhat perilous for Chris-
tianity, for are there not good men and women outside
the pale — good and noble-spirited disbelievers ? The
more the better ! There are surely elements of good
in the world lying in human nature and working in
life outside any religion. Yet most of the best among
unbelievers owe the best in them to the Christian
ethics and influences which they, like all of us, inhaled
from their birth. Huxley had a Christian parentage ;
Comte and George Eliot fed richly on the Imitatio
Christl They and the class they represent had the
sap and blood of the old faith in them. Christian
principles and influences are woven into their and our
life, as Saxon is part of the language we all speak
by custom. In the strength of the Christian bread
eaten by our fathers and our race we and they may
be able to go fasting in the wilderness forty days and
forty nights, and still display some of the old virtues
SIR T. BARLOWS SPEECH 99
and energies. It takes long to get Christian morality
into the blood, and it takes long to get it out. Single
cases of good disbelievers, like single cases of bad
churchgoers, are no final measure of what they profess.
You must see it tried independently on large numbers,
and on society as a whole. ^ A negation — any dis-
belief— can never create positive gain ; it can sift and
cleanse over-beliefs, but it takes a positive conviction
of truth to produce positive character. And (as we
discover in our own working experience) it is when we
are at our best that we believe the best, and I think
we ought to go by what we see clearest when we are
at our best, not by what falls darkly on our brooding
minds when we are down in the intellectual dumps !
SPEECH BY SIR T. BARLOW, BART., M.D.
Ladies and Gentlemen, — The numerous points to
which the lecturer has referred were so rapidly stated
that I am sure every one of us must have felt that we
should like to ponder over them again, quietly reading
them. At different periods of our life, and at
different phases of our intellectual outlook, different
sides of Christian evidence affect us very variously,
but I am quite confident that all through our lives
there is one kind of evidence which, if we ponder over
it, never ceases to operate powerfully upon us ; that is,
our remembrance of the best people that we have
known. I would ask each one of us here to-night to
try to think of the best people, to recollect what we
can recall of the very best men and women whom we
have known. In many cases, no doubt, these will be
our parents. If we consider how they gradually over-
came weaknesses, failings, and actual faults, amid
disaster and trouble of every kind, and then reflect as
^ See the author's In Relief of Doubt.
694671 A
100 THE WITNESS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
to what was the guiding pole-star of their hfe, we
shall not fail to gain most valuable information upon
points which concern us. We may be quite certain
that in the case of the very best people whom we have
known, some portion, at any rate, of Christian truth
was the motive power of their lives. It is perfectly
true that in our experience we can recall, as the
lecturer has remarked, the experience of good sceptics,
but the more we know of these people — and far be it
from me to disparage them — the more we know of
their inner history and antecedents, the more we learn
that they were under the abiding influence of an
early Christian environment.
Now besides this reflection upon the best people we
have known, there comes to us, as we go on through life
— and it gradually increases, the nearer we come to
its bourne — there comes back to us our own personal
experience, and we gradually come to see that in
proportion as we follow, as we really absorb, the
principle of the Christian religion which we prize so
much — ^just in proportion as we have taken in the
spirit of Christianity, our life has become more and
more satisfactory, or, shall I say, less and less unsatis-
factory. And so from the experience of those we have
known and from our own experience, there grows, day
by day, week by week, year by year, the increasing
conviction that the best of all evidences of the Christian
verity is the evidence that the lives of those good
people and our own lives bring to us. This is the
only observation that I will make to-night, because I
should like that each one of us should concentrate our
view upon these two kinds of Christian evidence.
MATERIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY?
By the Rev. G. T. Manley, M.A.i
In this lecture I shall endeavour, first of all, to prove
that the practical alternative which lies before most
Englishmen who really desire to believe something is,
Materialism or Christianity ; and I shall then give some
of the intellectual reasons which have led me to the
rejection of the former and the acceptance of the latter.
It may seem a bold statement that the alternative
is between these two alone. I am well aware that the
number of religious systems is great, but I do not
imagine that a large percentage of us would reject
Christianity in order to become either Mohammedans
or Confucianists, and for this practical reason I do not
propose to enter into a discussion of these or similar
systems.
Then there are those who say, " I believe in a
personal God, but not in Jesus Christ as the Saviour
of the Avorld."" I am inclined to think that those who
hold this view form a very small class, nmch smaller than
is sometimes believed. I think the position is generally
found to be an unstable one, and it becomes necessary
to drift further and further in one of two directions.
The first direction is that of pantheism. It is soon
felt that God's personality is very difficult to reconcile
^ An address delivered on May 28th, 1903.
101
102 MATERIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY?
with their assumption that He has made no revelation
of Himself to us His personal creatures, excepting
through nature, and consequently the personality of
God becomes more and more of a mere intellectual
dogma, and less and less of a reality of thought.
They find that either they must give up altogether
any attempt to recognise God in their lives, or they
are forced to seek the expression of His will in the
natural forces around them, which constitute the only
revelation they \dll admit.
The next step of the process is to identify God with
His manifestation in nature, and having no outstanding
proof of God's love (like that supplied by the Cross
of Chi'ist), the whole of nature, good and bad, and
especially the evolution of the human race, is laid hold
of as being the expression of the Divine. And this is
practically pantheism.
In practice the efPect of this creed is so nearly that
of Materialism, that there is no need to give it a
separate treatment. It certainly escapes the more
glaring philosophical absurdities of the latter creed,
but it is like Materialism in three main features —
namely, its denial of any essential distinction between
right and \\Tong, its denial of the power of free will,
and its complete failure to supply any motive for the
love of God or man. All that is said against Material-
ism in these connections will equally apply to pantheism
— at any rate, as seen in this country.
I do not believe that this view of life is at all
common, and I think that the large majority of those
who have no faith in Jesus Christ, and yet believe in
a personal God, tend in the other direction, that of
Agnosticism.
PANTHEISM AND MATERIALISM 103
As long as belief in a personal God is practical and
vivid, we shall yearn for some proof of His love upon
the plane of our experience. I appeal with confidence
to all who still cling to a belief in a personal God to
say if this is not so ? To men in such a frame of
mind, the appeal of Christ must come with great force,
" Let not your heart be troubled : ye believe in God,
believe also in Me."" My experience has taught me
that those who retain a practical faith in God, generally
become Christians in the end ; whilst those who reject
the appeal of Christ drift more and more towards
unbelief in God also.
If God is not revealed in Christ, and if God is not
identified with nature, there is a tendency, of which the
experience of all must furnish numerous instances, for
the belief in God to become vague and indefinite, and
to fade more and more out of our everyday life and
thought.
Another force at work in this direction is the exist-
ence of sin and suflPerincj in the world. As lona; as
we are assured that there is salvation and sympathy
in Christ, we can dare to look the awfulness of sin in
the face, and even to go forth to fight and conquer
sin in His name. But where faith in Christ is absent,
what an intolerable nightmare the misery of the world
must be !
" How can God allow it all ? " is a cry going up
from hundreds of hearts ; and in face of this question
the one who does not be^'-v^e in Christ finds that his
God grows more and more of an abstraction, out of
touch with the world ; a mere philosophical toy, of no
assistance in practical life.
This process is constantly to be seen going on around
104 MATERIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY?
us, and excepting where selfish indifference causes all
speculation to stagnate, hundreds of mere theists are
drifting into Agnosticism.
I want now to consider at length the position of
the Agnostic, the man who says, "I am neither a
materialist nor a Chi'istian. I am unwilling to commit
myself to either side ; I simply say, ' I do not know."* "'
Now, if this statement be made as a humble con-
fession of ignorance, together with an earnest desire
to learn — to study the words of Christ, for instance,
in order to learn more about God — I should call the
man who made it rather an " enquirer "" than an
" Agnostic."" Such is the position of hundi^eds of
thoughtful Indians at the present time who are
studying Christianity for the first time ; and it is the
position of many a young Englishman at the stage
when he first begins to think, and discovers that his
faith up to the present has not been strictly " his,"
but his parents' faith, and when he determines to
investigate the great questions of life for himself.
For the position of the enquirer I have nothing but
respect and sympathy. But it is a stage of belief
only, and not a resting-place ; it is not a city where
men settle, but a parting of the ways where they rest
for a moment before deciding upon their destination.
I turn from this to the consideration of Agnosticism
as a creed. Here ignorance of God is no longer
humbly confessed as a shortcoming, but paraded as
a necessity, and sometimes even as a virtue ; it is the
very apotheosis of ignorance ! It is the position of the
man who says aloud, " God is unknowable ; no one can
know about God " — and, alas ! often adds in an under-
tone, " and I do not want to know about Him, either."
AGNOSTICISM AS A CREED 105
It is easily observed that this does not constitute a
refusal to decide the question. It may parade under
this foiTii, but in fact, this is one of those questions
that it is impossible to evade ; and if we do not decide
it in one way, we thereby decide it in another. In
the same way a man may say to the tax-collector,
" Income-tax ! Why, sir, you must be aware that this
involves very serious issues ; I must assure myself first
that the Government is spending the money as they
profess, and I must investigate all the departments,
etc., etc. Then, if everything is satisfactory and
without a flaw, I will pay.'' If we could only per-
suade the Government that such a position was not
a refusal to pay, but a justifiable suspension of
judgment, I fear there would be a great increase of
Agnostics on this question.
Christ comes to us, not demanding a tax, but offering
us a free salvation from sin and the gift of eternal life ;
and to say to Him, " We know nothing of You, nor
of the God Whom You say has sent You," is not a
refusal to decide, but a decision to reject Him.
I wish to make this point clear — that Agnosticism,
as a creed, is upon this side nothing but a rejection
of Christianity ; and I will quote to you upon this
subject the words of that brilliant French writer and
unbeliever, M. Ernest Renan. He says : —
" Apart from all disputed points of criticism, no
one practically doubts that our Lord lived and that
He died on the cross, in the most intense sense of
filial relation to His Father in heaven, and that He
bore testimony to that Father's providence, love, and
grace towards mankind. The Lord's Prayer affords
sufficient evidence upon these points. If the Sermon
14
106 MATERIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY?
on the Mount alone be added, the whole unseen world,
of which the agnostic refuses to know anything, stands
unveiled before us. There you see revealed the Divine
Father and Creator of all things in personal relation
to His creatures, hearing their prayers, witnessing their
actions, caring for them and rewarding them. There
vou hear of a futui-e Judgment administered by Christ
Himself, and of a heaven to be hereafter revealed, in
which those who live as the childi'en of that Father,
and who suffer in the cause, and for the sake of Christ
Himself, will be abundantly rewarded. If Jesus Christ
preached that sermon, made those promises, and taught
that prayer, then any one who says that we know
nothing of God, or of a future life, or of the unseen
world, says that he does not believe Jesus Christ.'' ^
M. Renan is right. The Agnostic does not leave
the matter open ; he decides against Jesus Christ.
This is the negative side of the subject. But Pro-
fessor Huxley, the inventor of the term " Agnosticism,"
waxes very indignant if any one suggest that it is a
mere negation. Of course, he admits the negative side,
for in his account of his invention of the name he
refers to the members of a certain Society, and says : —
" The one thing in which most of these good people
were agreed was the one thino^ in which I differed from
them. They were quite sure they had attamed a
certain "gnosis,'' had more or less successfully solved
the problem of existence ; whilst I was quite sure I
had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the
problem was insoluble." ^
But whilst in this place he defines Agnosticism as a
mere negation, in another place he sets forth what he
^ Quoted by Dr. Wace, On Agnosticism, p. 15.
^ Huxley, Science and Christian Tradition, p. 238.
RENAN, HUXLEY AND SPENCER 107
is pleased to call the positive side of his belief in a
series of propositions. It may surprise you to be told
that these propositions merely contain the better-known
laws and hypotheses of biology.^ They are entirely
materialistic in conception. Curiously enough, Mr.
Herbert Spencer divides his creed in the same way
into the unknowable and the knowable ; and, again,
under the latter head he puts certain laws of biology
and mechanics : possibly Huxley simply boiTowed from
Mr. Spencer's earlier work.
I am not concerned here to criticise Mr. Herbert
Spencer's philosophy, nor to show^ the process of false
reasoning by which he speaks of science first as all
classified knowledge, and then narrows it do\\Ti to
mechanical or biological knowledge, to the neglect of
history or philosophy ; but my object is to point out
that his ultimate analysis of the positive part of his
creed is, like Huxley's, purely materialistic.
There is a phrase in his First Principles which he
speaks of as the most general formula of evolution,
and in another place as the "theory of things,'' as
his " philosophy." When he comes to enunciate this
fornmla he gives it the double honour of italics and
inverted commas. Here it is : —
" Evolution is an integratiori of matter and con-
comitant dissipation of motion ; during ivhich the matter
'passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a
definite coherent heterogeneity^ and during which the
retained motion undeigoes a parallel transformation.'''' ^
I do not quote this in order to make fun of his
phrasing, which is slightly worse than that of the
1 md., pp. 44-54.
^ Spencer^ First Principles, p. 396.
108 MATERIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY?
Athanasian Creed, but to point out its absolutely
materialistic character.
I think I have said enough to prove abundantly my
present contention : namely, that Agnosticism, as ex-
pounded by its official sponsors, is upon the one side
a denial of Christ's claims, and upon the other side a
purely materialistic presentation of human knowledge.
Having shown, then, that Agnosticism and Material-
ism are for all practical purposes identical, I propose
to examine this as a view of life upon which we may
found our guiding principles.
But first I must guard against a possible mis-
conception. I do not mean by Materialism the mere
acceptance of the laws of mechanics, the permanence of
matter and force, natural selection, and heredity. All
educated people accept these, and Christian men have
always been in the front rank of educated people. The
difference between the Christian and the Materialist
is that the former believes in a Father behind them
and in Christ's revelation of that Father, w^hereas the
Materialist either denies this or neglects it, ruling it
out of the sphere of knowledge, and turns to these
material facts and laws as self-sufficient.
This self-sufficiency of mechanics and biology to
originate and account for all things is the distinctive
tenet of modern Materialism.
I now ask the question, How far can Materialism
satisfy three of the most permanent needs of man —
salvation from sin, moral guidance, and a knowledge
of the truth?
Upon the first and deepest need of our nature,
salvation from the guilt and from the power of sin,
Materialism stands as dumb as an idol of wood or
"CONSULT NATURE" 109
stone. The only reply that has ever been given, except
by Jesus Christ and His followers, is, " Save yourself."
A young Indian Christian in Allahabad was recently
told by a theosophist : " You do not need a Saviour ;
you must save yourself." To which he replied by
the pertinent question : " Then, sir, have you saved
yourself ? " But he got no answer.
We next ask what moral guidance for our actions we
can derive from the same source. I will not detain
you long upon this subject. Professor Huxley sums
up his teaching in two words, " Consult nature."
Others give elaborate reasons for this advice. They
tell us that originally there was no such thing as
virtue, but only a number of animals struggling for
existence. In the course of their struggles to preserve
themselves or the race, certain habits, such as temper-
ance, were found conducive to self-preservation, and
hence came to be regarded as virtuous. And thus,
lower material nature being the sole fount and source
of virtue, the best moral guidance is summed up in
this advice, "Consult natui'e."
I hesitate to think what would be the result if these
good theorists ever thought of practising what they
preach. We see the white ant preserving itself by the
ruthless destruction of all that comes in its path ; we
see the eagle selecting for its attack animals too feeble
or too young to defend themselves ; or we may see
the jackal pursuing its cowardly and disgusting thefts
under the cover of the darkness. And, alas ! all these
methods of ruthlessness, of cowardice, oppression and
deceit, can be seen practised by man in the cause of
self-preservation, with much show of success as far as
this world is concerned,
110 MATERIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY?
We may thank God that Professor Huxley did not
derive his moral code from that lower nature which he
professed to believe as its cause and origin, but from
the Christian society in which it was his good fortune
to be born and to spend his life.
There would be many Materialists who would sadly
admit that they have no help for sinners, and but few
directions for those who would be saints ; but who
would say, " Our creed is a dark one, but it is the
sad ti-uth and we must follow it."
But why, in the name of matter, should a consistent
Materialist care about the truth ? What, upon his
theory, is truth ? If evolution alone accounts for all,
or is co-extensive with human knowledge, what can
we know of tiTith, except that it is a very curious
delusion which is part of a bye-product which we call
speculative reason, caused by the evolution of that
superior cunning which fitted man to survive in his
struggle with the lower animals ? Tmth and untruth,
reason and folly, rapine and honesty, have all been
developed in the struggle for existence ; they are all
merely psychological sensations of certain motions of
cerebral matter, induced, not to improve, but merely to
perpetuate the species. They all stand on the same
level, blind effects of blind causes, which we have the
unpleasant opportunity to contemplate without the
slightest power to interfere with.
Materialism is thus intellectual suicide, for it reduces
truth to the beggarly elements of organic or inorganic
matter, out of which it was aimlessly evolved. Once
again we may thank God that the flesh-and-blood
Materialist is better than his creed, and that he often
has a desire for truth, strong and insistent — a voice
THE WITNESS OF CHRISTIANITY 111
from that other eternal world which he denies, and the
very proof within himself of the folly and falsity of
the Materialism he professes but does not follow.
I turn, lastly, to Christianity — the faith of Newton,
of Faraday, and of Kelvin. The very mention of these
names is a sufficient proof that Christ's teaching is not
contrary to science. Christianity is the friend of a
ti-ue and broad view of science, but an opponent of
those materialistic theories which would try to make
us believe that there is no knowledge beyond the
narrow limits of biology and astronomy.
The Materialist is like a man in a coal-mine, getting
the precious coal indeed, but also maintaining that
there is nothing else but the coal-mine and its dark-
ness. Above in the free air stands the Christian, living
in the light of the Sun of Righteousness. He acknow-
ledges the existence and the usefulness of the coal-mine,
but he begs his friend to accept his witness that the
world is not bounded by the walls of the mine, and
to believe that there is a sun whose light and power
can be felt, even though the sun be beyond his present
power of reach.
Thus it is that Christianity stands to Materialism,
not as an opposing philosophical system, but as a
witness asking to be heard, a witness borne first by
Jesus Christ to God His Father and our Father, and
then, by the Evangelists, Apostles, and all Christians,
borne to the person and revelation of Jesus Christ.
The question that lies before you is this : Will you
believe the witness of Jesus Christ ? Will you listen
to and investigate patiently His claims and our Christian
experience ?
I have tried to show that the barriers raised against
112 MATERIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY?
this investigation by Agnosticism or Materialism are
artificial and based upon self-contradictory theories,
which, if carried to their logical conclusion, would mean
moral or mental suicide.
Science does not raise any barriers against belief in
Christ. I do not intend to reopen the question as to
whether science inclines a man to religion, as Newton
and Kelvin think, or whether it is dumb upon the
question ; but I put before you this claim, that the
witness of Jesus Christ and His followers does incline
men to religion, and that the conclusions of astronomy
or biology can never tend to exclude His words from
our consideration.
Believe me, if you refuse to hear Jesus Christ, it is
not because of your scientific learning, but by the
deliberate choice of your own free will. And to those
of you who are trying to hear all that Jesus Christ
and His followers say, let me add. Do not be afraid
of difficulties.
We Christians do not pretend to have solved com-
pletely the riddle of existence. We have much to
perplex us, but our difficulties are only such as are
common to all knowledge. The difficulties in recon-
ciling the Synoptic Gospels are no greater than those
which Darwin found in reconciling the apparently
contradictory testimony of certain fossil remains ; and
our ignorance concerning much of the future life is
paralleled or surpassed by our ignorance of the ultimate
constitution of matter.
But whilst admitting the imperfection of our know-
ledge, we do know that Jesus Christ died for our sins
and rose again for our justification ; and we do know-
that we who believe on Him receive peace in our souls
TRUTH AND RIGHTEOUSNESS US
and power in our lives ; and we are not willing that
our knowledge of the material world should make us
either forget or despise our knowledge of the spiritual
world. On the contrary, we regard all knowledge
as one, and all tmth as one ; and we hold the one
foundation of all truth and knowledge to be the eternal
righteousness and wisdom of our God, the Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
We will not let the lower forms of existence drag
us down to their level — we would rather raise them
up to ours ; we will not judge the highest by the
lowest, but the lowest by the highest ; and we do not
believe that matter and motion can do so much to
explain the existence of Christ, as Christ can help us
to understand the reason for the existence of matter
and motion.
In conclusion, may I urge upon you here present
to undertake this study of the claims of Christ, and to
study them to a conclusion, and ask you to bring to
your help two watchwords — Truth and Righteousness.
Do not analyse them, but believe in them, and you
will find they do not fail ; and as you lean on them,
your faith will be strengthened — " Solvitur ambulando.''''
And as far as in you lies, practise them. Tell the
truth, do what is right ; and if in the effort you find
yourself unable to do this of yourself, then happy are
you, for, just when you feel your own weakness, Jesus
Christ will take you by the hand and say, " I am the
Way, the Truth, and the Life."
SPEECH BY MR. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, K.C.
Ladies and Gentlemen, — Upon the subject which
Mr. Manley has presented to you with so much lucidity
15
114 MATERIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY?
and force, it would not be becoming in me to say
anything. I am quite satisfied, in my own mind, that
science and religion can never come together, unless
and until science is willing to recognise the religious
experiences of mankind as something which enters into
the account ; and that view has been presented to us
this afternoon, with great force, by the lecturer.
Religious experience has as old a history as mankind
itself; and, although incapable of the proof and the
demonstration which belong to external matters, never-
theless it is, in its own way, far more convincing than
anything else. Therefore religion must always be based
upon personal experience ; and it must consequently
always be open to the retaliation, " That experience
is not mine." It cannot be got rid of, it cannot be
disputed ; nor can it be forced upon any person who
remains impervious to its influence. Were men to rise
from the dead, that would prove nothing of the ti-uth
or the morality of a revelation. An omnipotent God
might, for aught we know, be an immoral God ; and
the miracles with which He enforced the creed He
desired mankind to accept would not prove the morality
of the revelation, but would only prove the onniipotence
of the Creator. Every man, therefore, has to decide
for himself, and within the realm of his own mind,
whether a ti-uth appeals to his nature or whether it
does not ; whether it makes for righteousness or whether
it does not ; whether it assists him in his outlook upon
life, in his path through life, and in his relations with
his fellow-creatures ; and therefore we have now
collected a huge possession of religious experience.
We have it in this country ; and I have no doubt that
Mr. Manley finds it in the North- West Provinces of
India. People have their religious experiences ; and
that is the witness to which they must appeal in
support of their religious faith. Therefore it is that,
of necessity, the apologists of Christianity make what
are called personal appeals. They cannot put anything
MR. AUGUSTINE BIRRELKS SPEECH 115
under the microscope ; they cannot, by figures upon a
blackboard, work out the salvation of anybody's soul ;
and therefore it is that they appeal to experience.
Hence is it, too, that they are open to the reply,
"That experience is not mine."" However, they have
the centuiies behind them, and they have the centuries
in front of them. One thing that we may be perfectly
certain of is this : that to the end of recorded time,
men and women, in dealing with these vast problems
of futurity, with the great mystery of life and the
certainty of death, will be found — whatever may be
the dogmas of science, whatever may be the revealed
truths and demonstrations of science — they will be
found hereafter, as Mr. Manley has been found to-day,
appealing to the evidence of the human heart.
SOME EVIDENCES FOR THE
RESURRECTION.^
By the Rev. C. W. Wilson, M.A.^
The purpose of this address is to set forth some
evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We
do not attempt in this short space to give a full and
complete proof of that great fact, but only to suggest
some thoughts which make it possible reasonably to
believe in it. A great writer has said that the
Resurrection is one of the best authenticated facts in
history ; and, believing this to be true, our intention
is to examine a portion of the evidence which makes
it so. It is upon the one great miracle of the Resurrec-
tion that the apostolic writers stake the truth of
Christianity (I. Cor. xv. 14).
If the Resurrection is a fact it carries with it all
other miracles ; while if Christ did not rise, no amount
of other evidence will prove that he is the Christ.
Modern scepticism has grasped the truth of this. It
refuses to admit the fact, but recognises that belief in
the Resurrection has been the mainspring of Christianity,
and of incalculable importance in advancing its cause.
Many theories have therefore been adduced with a
^ An address delivered on March oth^ 1903.
' I am greatly indebted for the matter of this address to
notes of Lectures given by the Rev. G. A. Schneider_, M.A.,
on Apologetics at Cambridge in 1897. — C. W. W.
117
118 EVIDENCES FOR THE RESURRECTION
view to explaining it away. Let us examine some of
them.
It has been suggested that the first teachers were
impostors, and that they gave out that Christ was
risen when tliey knew He had not.
Paley, in his " Evidences,"" shows how absurd is such
an idea. What motive could they have ? Is it likely
that men would undergo voluntary poverty, untold
sufferings and painful death for a tale which they
knew to be a lie ? At least, that which we know
of their after-life proves that they ^^•ere honest men.
Another theory advanced by the rationalists briefly
is as follows. Christ did not really die. He was only
six hours on the cross, and fell into a deathlike swoon.
He recovered in the grave, came forth, was seen by
His disciples, kept away from His enemies, and died
quietly afterwards, and this was mistaken by His
disciples for a Resurrection.
There are several objections to such a theory. In
the first place, the Roman soldiers were experienced
in crucifixion, and knew well the symptoms of death.
We are told that they marvelled that He was already
dead, which suggests the assembling of the band before
His Cross, when one with a spear pierced His side,
and it is not likely they would be deceived. We are
also told, on the other hand, that the thieves were
not dead, but brutally despatched. Secondly, is it
likely that His disciples could mistake a man just
recovering from a deathlike swoon for one risen from
the dead and the conqueror of death ? This is what
they did believe, for it was this they preached and
for this they suffered. And if this were the case, then
it is impossible not to accuse either Christ or His
THEORIES OF THE RESURRECTION 119
disciples of fraud. If He declared to them that He
was risen when He had only recovered from a state
of unconsciousness, He Himself must have kept at a
safe distance while they ran the risks of proclaiming it.
If He said nothing, and His disciples only imagined
it, then they must have learned later what had really
happened. For if he lived like other men, it must
have been possible to trace His career. Yet they gave
out that He had ascended.
We turn next to the theory which Renan held,
that it was a vision of Jesus which the disciples fancied
they had seen, and which caused them to teach and
preach that He was risen. In this theory the vision
was a purely subjective phenomenon — a mental pro-
cess. The disciples expected He would rise ; they
longed so much to see Him that they thought they
had seen Him, and mistook the creation of their
own imagination for a sight of their Master actually
risen from the dead. No question is raised as to their
honesty and sincerity, but it is suggested that hallucina-
tion and imagination can account for their enthusiastic
proclamation of the gospel which they preached.
There are several objections to this theory. According
to the principles of psychology, even the most credulous
will not mistake the creatures of their own imagination
for realities unless there is either a prepossession or an
expectation.
The gospel narrative shows us plainly that there are
no grounds for assuming this in the case of the disciples.
They, like the rest of the Jews, expected the Messiah
to be a great King upon the earth, and when they saw
their Master die on the Cross all hope left them. The
expression of the two on the road to Emmaus, " We
120 EVIDENCES FOR THE RESURRECTION
trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed
Israel"' (Luke xxiv. 21), may be fairly taken to represent
the feeling of the main body of the disciples. They
thought all was lost, and they did not expect Him to
rise.
But it is suggested the priests remembered His pre-
diction. Why not the disciples ? To this our answer
is that a guilty conscience always expects the worst,
but men who have lost all hope do not readily expect
or accept good news. Again, even Strauss admits that
it needs some time to develope that state of mind in
which such visions are seen. And yet only three davs
passed before they saw the Lord. Further, all the
appearances were over in forty days, and by this theory
they should have lasted much longer.
And now we have a question to ask. If Christ died
but did not rise, what became of His body ? It is
futile to suggest that in the East a body would be
unrecognisable even in so short a time, for the nail
marks would still have been discernible. If the Jews
had it in their possession, why did they not produce it ?
If the disciples had stolen the body the secret must
have been known to numbers, and sui^ely would have
leaked out ; and even if not, we must accuse them of
fraud. And that Christianity should be built on the
delusions of a few credulous fishermen who mistook
their own fancies for facts is a greater miracle than
Christianitv itself.
Another theory, propounded by Kein, states that
our Lord died on the Cross, but His body did not rise.
ITie appearances, however, were not purely subjective,
but had an objective cause. In other words the
glorified spirit of Jesus produced manifestations to
EVIDENCE OF ST. PAUL 121
prove to His followers that He still lived. These were
mistaken by the disciples for bodily appearances. This
theory carries us outside the range of what science and
history teach, and is no more acceptable than the
orthodox view. It is absurd to suppose that, although
Christ could send messages to His followers, He could
not give them the right impression. Surely He should
have told them that His Spirit lived with God, while
the message they received was that His body was risen
from the grave.
So we find on careful examination that theory after
theory breaks dowTi, and we are compelled to admit
that the most satisfactory explanation is that recorded
in the Gospels. The strongest evidence, however, is not
that of the Gospels, but of St. Paul. The general facts
of St. PauFs life are not denied by any one, and
even the severest school of German criticism admits
the genuineness of his four epistles, Romans, I. and
II. Corinthians and Galatians. We have therefore the
advantage of being on ground uncontested even by our
opponents. There was no doubt in St. PauPs mind
that he had seen the risen Christ (I. Cor. ix. 9).
Either he had, or else it was a delusion. Clearly on
the road to Damascus he had no expectation or pre-
possession, and in the first chapter of his epistle to the
Galatians he refers to the sharp break between his earlier
and later life, and attributes it to the vision he had seen.
But, say our opponents, St. Paul was of an en-
thusiastic and excitable temperament. We reply by
pointing out the calm judgment and cool-headed
reasoning displayed in I. Corinthians xii., xiii. and xiv.,
which mark him out as a man of unswerving purpose,
altogether free from excitement or fancy.
16
122 EVIDENCES FOR THE RESURRECTION
Strauss suggests that St. PauFs thorn in the flesh
was undoubtedly epilepsy, and that the vision was a
manifestation of this condition. In II. Corinthians xii. 7
St. Paul distinguishes between his visions and his stake
in the flesh, and distinctly states that the latter was
sent lest he be over-exalted by the former.
And again, was hallucination likely to account for
so remarkable a change in life ? He had stood by while
Stephen was stoned, and remained unmoved by his
splendid heroism. He had vigorously persecuted the
Christians, " being exceedingly mad against them," and
then suddenly and unexpectedly he himself becomes
a devoted follower of Jesus, the Teacher whom he had
despised.
From the epistles to the Corinthians we get, in-
directly, much positive evidence. In I. Corinthians ix.
St. Paul claims equality with the other apostles to
defend his teaching. They do not challenge his claim,
but admit that he has seen the risen Christ. In
I. Corinthians xv. he enumerates the various appear-
ances of Christ after His resurrection, and every one
admits that the Gospels are of a later date than
this epistle, so he could not possibly have copied.
Here he challenges his readers to verify the fact
for themselves, for Christ appeared to five hundi'ed
brethren at once, and the greater part of them are
still alive. It must be remembered tha,t he was writing
to a very critical and sceptical community, and
therefore would naturally have made very sure of his
facts before he used them in argument. Still fm^ther,
the whole of the teaching of the epistle is based on
the Resurrection. It is the foundation of its morality
(I. Cor. XV. 3, etc.), the proof of its veracity (I. Cor.
THE SABBATH AND SUNDAY 123
XV. 17), and the great cause of its buoyant hope
(I. Cor. XV. 20), and this may justly be added to
St. Paul's testimony.
We next turn to the words of Christ after His
Resurrection. If Christ did not rise, who composed
those sayings ? If they are the product of ordinary
Jewish minds, we should naturally expect them to
bear some traces of the Jewish ideal, such as is laid
bare in the words of the two on the road to Emmaus
(Luke xxiv. 21). But instead of narrowness, bigotry,
and limitation, they are the grandest of all sayings —
not falling below the standard of the other words of
the Master, but, as it were, setting a crown upon them
all. Not Judea only, but the whole world, is the field
for operation : " Go ye into all the world and preach
the Gospel."
Another witness to the Resurrection is furnished by
the existence of the Christians'' Sunday. How came it
about that Jews — for they were Jews — when they had to
choose between keeping the Jewish sabbath and the first
day of the week, chose the latter. At first both days were
kept by Christians, but when the great division came
between Christian Jews and the supporters of the old
faith, the Christians gave up keeping the sabbath, the
seventh day with its three thousand years of custom,
and dedicated to the worship of God the first day
of the week. Why ? Because Christ rose on that
day, and appeared on that day to the disciples, and
thus had marked it for them as the special day of
thanksgiving and praise. And in our own time, more
than eighteen hundred years after, the day bears
witness to the great fact.
The existence of the Christian Church in all ages,
124 EVIDENCES FOR THE RESURRECTION
in spite of persecution, opposition, and oppression,
plainly asserts the fact that it could not have been
founded on a lie. Its progress and expansion, especially
in modern times, proclaim the truth of the Gospel
message, while the change in the lives of men and
women speak volumes for its power. After all, the
surest test of genuineness is result, and resurrection
from a life of sin to a life of righteousness add their
testimony to the fact of Chi'ist's Resurrection.
Finally, there is another proof, differing from those
already considered in this — that it is capable in the
case of any one individual of experimental verification.
It is not easy to explain. It is almost impossible
for one who does not know to understand the reality
and power of it. Perhaps it can be best explained as
follows. The scientist invents a theory, and testing it
again and again and finding it invariably true, he comes
to recognise his theory as a fact. In like manner, but
in a much surer sense, the individual who acts upon
the theory of Christianity comes to know with a certain
knowledge the fact of the Resurrection. " He that
doeth . . . shall know,'"* is the oft-repeated cry of the
apostle St. John, and this is but the echo of the
Master's words, " He that followeth Me shall not walk
in darkness, but shall have the light of life.''
SUMMARY
Professor Henslow's Address is on Present-day
Rationalism, with special reference to Darwinism. In
it he points out the prominent part played by natm-al
selection in modern unbelief, and the falsity of the
assumption that Darwin is the authority for the modern
view of natural selection. After pointing out how
much of modern knowledge {e.g. the rotation and
rotundity of the earth) is matter of inductive reference
rather than of observation and experiment, the Pro-
fessor quotes examples from certain modern writers who
" out-darwin Darwin " in the attempt to attribute to
" blind and unconscious agencies ""' the results of natural
selection. This he shows to be opposed to Darwin's
own view of the evolution of the world — " that gi'and
sequence of events which our minds refuse to accept as
the result of blind chance.'' Distinguishing evolution
as a doctrine past dispute from Darwinism in its em-
phasis upon natm-al selection, and especially from the
modern use made of the term, the lecturer proceeds
to describe and discuss natural selection. He regards it
as merely a registrar and in no sense a cause of the
appearances and disappearances of which evolution is
made up ; and while he cites Darwin as being, unlike his
modern followers, in substantial agreement on this point,
he indicates what he regards as the two mistakes made
by that scientist upon the subject : these are (1) the
introduction of structure or form into the question of
survival, and (2) the opinion that " Individual DifFer-
I2S
126 SUMMARY
ences "" are a source of variety in nature. These errors
he attributes to Darwin's observations being confined to
animals and plants under domestic culture. Reiterating
Darwin's disclaimer of atheistic inference, and indicating
the importance which Darwin came to see must be
attached to environment, the Professor describes what
he calls the "True Darwinism,'' viz. (1) Variability, but
with no indefinite result, and (2) Directivity or the
power of response to environment. He then endeavours
to show how the new argument from adaptation replaces
the old argument from design, and how the abundant
evidence of " directivity," if it does not prove a directing
creator, at least must allow the entrance of the ordinary
process of inductive inference, under whose guidance
we are led to a definite theistic faith. Lord Kelvin's
utterance in thanking the lecturer, in which he stated
that "science positively affirms a creative power," is
commented upon by Prof. Henslow.
II
In the second address Dean Wace treats of the Book
of Genesis. Starting with its admitted unity of design,
he indicates this to be the exhibition of God's relation
to the world and the race, and traces the contents,
whencesoever selected, from the story of creation to the
establishment of the chosen people in its relation to the
other nations whom it was to bless. These contents
he shows to be corroborated by modern knowledge,
emphasizing {a) the remarkable approximation of
Genesis i. to the results of modern science, and its
equally remarkable divergence from the polytheistic
Babylonian myths to which it bears some literary re-
semblance. He repudiates the idea that Genesis i. is
drawn from Babylonian sources, though the purification
of these woidd be equally a proof of divine inspiration.
He quotes Bacon as regarding the function of man in
SUMMARY OF SECOND ADDRESS 127
relation to the world as exactly described in the closing
words of the chapter, and shows how immediately the
writer passes from the physical position to the moral
condition upon which it depends. The story of the
Fall he seems to treat as combined allegory and history.
He shows (5) how the early chapters have acquainted
every Jewish and Christian child with information as to
the rise and progress of early civilisations hitherto else
inaccessible, but now corroborated by Mesopotamian
discoveries. Passing (c) to the patriarchal narratives, he
first calls attention to the manner in which history has
justified the predestined function of the chosen people
as the channel of blessing to mankind, and insists in
this connection on the supreme importance not only of
monotheism and revelation, but of Covenant Relation
as the distinctive feature of Jewish and Christian faith.
The discovery of preserved contemporary writings he
uses to justify belief in the historical character of the
narratives, and condemns the attaching of importance
to the discrimination of the several som-ces of com-
pilation as irrelevant to the great moral purpose of
the writer.
Ill
In the third address Professor Margoliouth deals with
the compilation of the Synoptic Gospels. He begins
by referring to two representative unbelieving works
of last century, both of which attempted to discredit
the historical character of the gospel narrative, specially
the miraculous, by an analysis of their composition, and
he indicates the large part played in estimating facts of
this kind by subjective differences (e.g. the treatment
by Mr. Podmore and Mr. F. W. Myers respectively
of the data collected by the Society for Psychical
Research). Taking for his text "The Gospel according
to;' and understanding by "Gospel'' "What Jesus
128 SUMMARY
said and did,'' the Professor devotes his attention to
explaining by analogy of Moslem traditions the growth
of such collections as we have in the first three Gospels.
The reasons are set forth which probably led to the
preference of oral over written record, of which the
chief was probably avoidance of Jewish prejudice
against all, and especially against rival, writings save
their own sacred Scriptures. Such traditions he re-
gards as possibly accurate at least for centuries, and
points out how a start in writing once made crystallises
all floating matter, not from motives of rivalry, but
from desire to preserve omissions or more correct form.
The process by which the fittest collections survive is
then seen by reference to the first verses of St. Luke,
in which the three functions of the traditionalist com-
piler are specified — viz. (i) transference of oral matter
to writing, (ii) arrangement, (iii) criticism. This last
term the lecturer understands as applied to the sources
and channel from and through which the tradition has
come. Differences in matter and omission may thus
arise from special local retentions, or again from one
compiler's dissatisfaction with the soundness of the
chain of tradition, though the same story might have
come quite soundly to another. Besides, in the use
of oral tradition, discrimination is also made from the
works of earlier collectors. The commemorative verses
probably indicate original Aramaic matter ; while homi-
letic and aphoristic sayings and a few precepts for
conduct {e.g. Matt, xviii. 15), the reports of which
would be characterised by brevity and variability, would
form an early portion of written matter, the bulk would
undoubtedly consist from the first of the matter taught
to proselytes regarding Christ's story. Discrepancies
here attest the multiplicity of witnesses. Attention is
called to the element of indefinite uncertainty in regard
to the translation of the didactic matter from the
Aramaic, and our ignorance of the number of trans-
lations. The absence is noted of causes of fabrication —
SUMMARY OF THIRD ADDRESS 129
the need of legal precedent, with which Christians were
already supplied either by civil or Jewish code, and of
authority for the moral and religious exhortations which
is allowed by even the severest critics to be given in the
lofty character of the original matter. In summing up
the Professor affirms that even did our present Gospels
belong to the second century and represent, as it were,
rays repeatedly focussed, they would still be trustworthy
accounts preserved by the rigid canons of oriental
tradition, as known not only in Moslem rule, but as
professed by St. Luke, and in the well-known statement
of Papias on St. Mark's Gospel. Light as to the exact
principles on which our present collections are compiled
the speaker looks for from Egyptian discovery. He
calls attention to the value of the repeated cross-
examination by the best intellects, and believes that
difference in the results (varying from the belief in
absolute reconciliation of seeming discrepancies, through
confidence in substantial truthfulness, notwithstanding
errors of detail, to the reduction of the whole to a
myth) will be ultimately explained by the doctrine
of the " psychic spectrum" or subjective differences of
opinion such as those already cited.
IV
The fourth address, by Mr. Welsh, opens with a
reference to the threefold, manner in which we meet
Christianity, — through writings, traditional environment
and individual experience, — and to Professor James's
double criteria of immediate luminousness and moral
helpfulness. Applying the former, the speaker briefly
touches on the self-verifying character of the Christ-
portrait in the Gospels and notes the logical importance
of the demands of the moral nature, citing the well-
known case of Ellen Watson, one of the first women
students of University College. The moral criterion he
17
130 SUMMARY
notes as itself the outcome of Christianity, and quotes
many authors not professed Christians as to the effect
of Christianity on a collective scale in the story of
European advance and in missionary achievements.
He distinguishes between Christianity and the official
church. He admits present social corruption, to which,
however, the powerful protest of the Christian minority
is a standing witness for right miknown outside the
Gospel. Even if Christianity be not admitted as the
cause of moral improvement, but only as the companion
of civilisation, its value would be thus assured, and the
disintegrating effects of its loss make even unbelievers
unwilling to part with its public acceptation. To
account for the collective experience as a great delusion
the lecturer considers impossible in the face of the
constancy of the results mider widespread variety of
conditions. Passing to individual experience, the lecturer
indicates the bulk, nature and continuousness of the
phenomena as the data from which the Christian con-
clusion as to the power and reality of the living Christ
is drawn, and a-sks how far it is valid for persons
not the subjects. Dealing then with non-Christian
explanations, the lecturer dismisses (1) the theory of
medical materialism, which would equally explain the
phenomena of disbelief and so answers itself; (2) the
theory of personal caprice, which is refuted by the
permanency, constancy, and universality of the data;
(3) the theory of explosion from the sub-conscious self,
which but throws the problem a step farther back and
does not give the secret of the dynamic itself; (4) the
theory of raised ethical standard, for this is non-existent
in pagan lands, and is powerless to enforce itself in our
own day ; (5) the theory of playing upon the heart-
strings of the fundamental emotions and passions, for
this is done by modern realistic writers who expose what
they cannot heal; (6) the theory that it is the mere
embodiment of " truth in a tale '' that touches the
emotions, for this would go to show that the Incarna-
SUMMARY OF FOURTH ADDRESS 131
tion is powerful because the story is true; (7) and
lastly, the theory that it is the idealised Christ who
saves without any necessary reality in the story, for there
was neither time historically for the idealising process
to take place, nor has the ideal been operative when
faith in the story has failed, the moral wrecks of sceptics
known for their noble writings being adduced as indica-
tions of the tendency of such a condition. To the
challenge that the noble lives of many unbelievers dis-
prove the claims made for the living Christ, the speaker,
allowing that there is much good outside the Gospel,
points to the Christian environment and heredity
from which these lives have sprung, and insists that
individual instances are inadequate for proof on the
unbelieving as on the Christian side, and require
the test of a universal scale. Christian conclusion is
then affirmed.
The fifth address, by Mr. Manley, puts the alter-
native between Christianity and Materialism, other
historical systems being out of court. The position
of the non-Christian theist is first examined, and is
affirmed to force him into one of two directions : either,
in the absence of a personal revelation, moral guidance
is sought in the course of nature and the evolution of
humanity, after a system which may be pantheistic in
theory but is materialistic in practice ; for the universal
is non-ethical, and both systems deny ultimate moral
distinctions and free-will, and lack sufficient motive
power : or else (2), much more commonly, refuge is
sought in professed Agnosticism ; for as, on the whole,
a vivid sense of God will gradually lead to Christ, so
the rejection of Christ becomes denial of any adequate
knowledge of God. The Christless contemplation of
the world's sin and sorrow also leads to Agnosticism.
132 SUMMARY
Against this theory, carefully distinguishing it from
the position of the provisional inquirer, the speaker
directs his attack. Here he first shows that, in all
matters of practical pressure, indecision is negative
decision, and cites Renan to show that Agnosticism
means rejection of the claims of Christ. Huxley admits
that he invented the term as a negation of the con-
fidence of his neighbours, and while indignant at the
charge of mere negation, offers nothing positive beyond
the laws of Mechanics and Biology. Corroborative
evidence is quoted from Spencer, and Agnosticism is
pronounced covert Materialism. Having tracked the
non-Christian theist through pantheism and Agnosticism
into Materialism, Mr. Manley defines this creed, not as
the acceptance of natm^al facts and laws, but as the
affirmation of these data of Mechanics and Biology as
a self-sufficient explanation of the world, and man,
without a Father and a Saviour behind them. This
creed is then cross-examined (1) on the possibility of
salvation, to which it replies " save yourself" ; (2) on
moral guidance, to which it replies " consult nature " —
answers which are riddled by the speaker. As to (3)
the search for truth, Materialism is intellectual suicide,
truth being but a by-product, a fragment of human
imagination. Christianity, the creed of many great
scientists, is then represented as asking only to be heard,
there being no obstacle save the will. As with all
theories, difficulties remain to Christianity also, but
they are insufficient to justify disbelief in Christ. The
higher must explain the lower — not conversely. Christ
may explain matter, but not matter Christ.
VI
The sixth addi*ess, by Mr. Wilson, is epitomised and
avowedly limited to a few suggestions on the ResmTec-
tion. Starting from the now universal admission of
SUMMARY OF SIXTH ADDRESS 133
the apostolic belief in the miracle itself, and the
absurdity of the theory of imposture, the lecturer
reviews other imbelieving explanations — the swoon
theory, the hallucination theory, and the theory of
psychic manifestation. The first he considers impossible
without fraud, the second without greater lapse of time
and proved conditions of expectancy, and the third he
regards as meeting no difficulty, and involving in-
consistent and inadequate conceptions of the power
of Christ. There is also the difficulty of the missing
body. The gospel assertion alone explains the admitted
facts. The Pauline evidence from the four admitted
epistles is then reviewed, and the sanity or epilepsy
of the apostle discussed. The non-Judaic character of
Christ's post-resurrection teaching, and the obser-
vance of the Christian Sunday, are also adduced as
evidences of importance. The personal realisation of
the living Christ is finally thrown back on individual
experience.
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