BR 125 .S64 1897
Smith, Goldwin, 1823-1910.
Guesses at the riddle of
existence
No.
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE
OF EXISTENCE
•Thg2)<^o
GUESSES AT
THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
AND
OTHER ESSAYS ON KINDRED SUBJECTS
.. BY
y
GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L.
Author of " Canada and the Canadian Question," " The
United States," "Essays on Questions
OF TUE Day," etc., etc.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1897
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1896,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.
J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick St Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
PREFACE' ^
Of the papers in this volume three have
appeared before ; two in the North American
Review, one in the Forum, to the editors of
which, respectively, the writer's thanks are
due for their courtesy in permitting the repub-
lication. The writer has also once or twice
drawn on previous papers of his own.
For such of the essays as have appeared in
print some inquiries have been made. Those
who desire to read them again are probably
of the same mind as the writer, and with him
believe that there is no longer any use in
clinging to the untenable or in shutting our
eyes to that which cannot be honestly denied.
The educated world, and to a great extent the
uneducated world also, has got beyond the
point at which frank dealing with a tradi-
tional creed can be regarded as a wanton dis-
turbance of faith.
Vi PREFACE
Liberal theologians have at least half re-
signed the belief in miracles, rationalizing
wherever they can and minimizing where that
process fails. Liberal theologians, and even
theologians by no means ranked as liberal, if
they are learned and open-minded, have given
up the authenticity and authority of Genesis.
With these they must apparently give up the
Fall, the Redemption, and the Incarnation.
After this, little is left of the ecclesiastical
creeds for criticism to destroy.
If there is anything which, amidst all these
doubts and perplexities, our nature tells us, it
is that our salvation must lie in our uncom-
promising allegiance to the truth. It is hoped
that nothing in these pages will be found fairly
open to the charge of irreverence or of want of
tenderness in dealing with the creed which is
still that of men who are the salt of the earth.
If much is, for the present, lost, let us re-
member that there is also much from which by
the abandonment of dogmatic tradition we are
relieved. If, on the one hand, the old argu-
ments for theism and immortality have failed
us, and the face of the Father in heaven is for
PREFACE vu
the moment veiled, on the other hand we are
set free from the belief that all who go not in
by the strait gate, that is, the greater part of
mankind, are lost for ever ; from belief in the
God of Dante, with his everlasting torture-
house ; from belief in the God of Predestina-
tion, who arbitrarily rejects half his creatures
and dooms them to eternal fire. That which
in a good sermon has most practical effect will
probably survive its ecclesiastical or theological
form.
The spirit in which these pages are penned is
not that of Agnosticism, if Agnosticism imports
despair of spiritual truth, but that of free and
hopeful inquiry, the way for which it is neces-
sary to clear by removing the wreck of that
upon which we can found our faith no more.
To resign untenable arguments for a belief
is not to resign the belief, while a belief bound
up with untenable arguments will share their
fate.
Where the conclusions are, or seem to be,
negative, no one will rejoice more than the
writer to see the more welcome view reasserted
and fresh evidence of its truth supplied.
vui PREFACE
If, as our hearts tell us, there is a Supreme
Being, he cares for us ; he knows our perplex-
ities ; he has his plan. If we seek truth, he
will enable us in due time to find it. Whether
we find it cannot matter to him ; it may con-
ceivably matter to him whether we seek it.
The reader will look for no attempt to dis-
cuss recondite questions, documentary or his-
torical. Nothing is attempted here beyond the
presentation of a plain case for a practical pur-
pose to the ordinary reader.
It may be thought presumptuous in a layman
to write on these subjects, though his interest
in them is as great as that of the clergy.
Would that the clergy could write with per-
fect freedom.
Toronto, January, 1897.
CONTENTS
PAGE
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE . . 1
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT . . 47
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? ^T'
THE
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY . 135
MORALITY AND THEISM ^^^
ix
#
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF
EXISTENCE
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF
EXISTENCE
Never before has the intellect of man been
brought so directly face to face with the mys-
tery of existence as it is now. Some veil of
religious tradition has always been interposed.
At the beginning of this century most minds
still rested in the Mosaic cosmogony and the
Noachic deluge. Greek speculation was free,
and its freedom makes it an object of extreme
interest to us at the present time. But it was
not intensely serious ; it was rather the intel-
lectual amusement of a summer day in Academe
beneath the whispering plane.
No one who reads and thinks freely can
doubt that the cosmogonical and historical
foundations of traditional belief have been
sapped by science and criticism. When the
crust shall fall in appears to be a question of
time, and the moment can hardly fail to be one
3
A GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
of peril ; not least in the United States, where
education is general and opinion spreads rapidly
over a level field, with no barriers to arrest its
sweep.
Ominous symptoms already appear. Almost
all the churches are troubled with heterodoxy
and are trying clergymen for heresy. Quite as
significant seems the growing tendency of the
pulpit to concern itself less with religious
dogma and more with the estate of man in
his present world. It is needless to say what
voices of unbelief outside the churches are heard
and how high are the intellectual quarters
from which they come. Christian ethics still
in part retain their hold. So does the Church
as a social centre and a reputed safeguard of
social order. But faith in the dogmatic creed
and the history is waxing faint. Ritualism
itself seems to betray the need of a new stimu-
lus and to be in some measure an aesthetic sub-
stitute for spiritual religion.
Dogmatic religion may be said to have re-
ceived a fatal wound three centuries ago, when
the Ptolemaic system was succeeded by the
Copernican, and the real relation of the earth
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 5
to the universe was disclosed. Dogmatic reli-
gion is geocentric. It assumes that our earth is
the centre of the universe, the primary object
of divine care, and the grand theatre of divine
administration. The tendency was carried to
the height of travesty when an insanely ultra-
montane party at Rome meditated, as, if we
may believe Dr. Pusey, it did, the declaration
of a hypostatic union of the Pope and the Holy
Ghost.
The effect of the blow dealt by Copernicus
was long suspended, but it is fully felt now
that the kingdom of science is come, and the
bearings of scientific discovery are generally
known. When daylight gives place to star-
light we are transported from the earth to the
universe, and to the thoughts which the con-
templation of the universe begets. " What is
man, that Thou art mindful of him ? " is the
question that then arises in our minds. Is it
possible that so much importance as the creeds
imply can attach to this tiny planet and to the
little drama of humanity ? We might be half
inclined to think that man has taken himself
too seriously and that in the humorous part of
6 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
our nature, overlooked by philosophy, is to be
found the key to his mystery. The feeling is
enhanced when we consider that we have no
reason for believing that the evidence of our
senses is exhaustive, however much Science,
with her telescopes, microscopes, and spectro-
scopes, may extend their range. We cannot
tell that we are not like the sightless denizens of
the Mammoth Cave, unconsciously living in the
midst of wonders and glories beyond our ken.
Nor has the natural theology of the old
school suffered from free criticism much less
than revelation. Optimism of the orthodox
kind seems no longer possible. Christianity
itself, indeed, is not optimistic. It represents
the earth as cursed for man's sake, ascribing
the curse to primeval sin, and the prevalence
of evil in the moral world as not only great but
permanent, since those who enter the gate of
eternal death are many, while those who enter
the gate of eternal life are few. Natural theol-
ogy of the optimistic school and popular reli-
gion have thus been at variance with each
other. The old argument from design is now
met with the answer that we have nothing
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 7
with which to compare this world, and there-
fore cannot tell whether it was possible for
it to be other than it is. Mingled with the
signs of order, science discloses apparent signs
of disorder, miscarriage, failure, wreck, and
waste. Our satellite, so far as we can see,
is either a miscarriage or a wreck. Natural
selection by a struggle for existence, protracted
through countless ages, with the painful ex-
tinction of the weaker members of the race,
and even of whole races, is hardly the course
which benevolence, such as we conceive it,
combined with omnipotence, would be ex-
pected to take. If in the case of men suffer-
ing is discipline, though this can hardly be
said when infants die or myriads are indis-
criminately swept off by plague, in the case
of animals, which are incapable of discipline
and have no future life, it can be nothing
but suffering ; and it often amounts to tor-
ture. The evil passions of men, with all the
miseries and horrors which they have pro-
duced, are a part of human nature, which
itself is a part of creation. Through the
better parts of human nature and what there
*
8 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
is of order, beneficence, majesty, tenderness,
and beauty in the universe, a spirit is felt
appealing to ours, and a promise seems to be
conveyed. But if omnipotence and benevo-
lence are to meet, it must apparently be at a
point at present beyond our ken. These are
the perplexities which obtrude themselves on
a scientific age.
What is man? Whence comes he ? Whither
goes he? In the hands of what power is
he? What are the character and designs of
that power? These are questions which, now
directly presented to us, are of such over-
whelming magnitude that we almost wonder
at the zeal and heat which other questions,
such as party politics, continue to excite.
The interest felt in them, however, is daily
deepening, and an attentive audience is assured
to any one who comes forward with a solution,
however crude, of the mystery of existence.
Attentive audiences have gathered round Mr.
Kidd, Mr. Drummond, and Mr. Balfour, each
of whom has a theory to propound. Mr.
Kidd's work has had special vogue, and the
compliments which its author pays to Pro-
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 9
fessor Weismann have been reciprocated by
that luminary of science.
Mr. Drummond undertakes to reconcile, and
more than reconcile, our natural theology and
our moral instincts to the law of evolution.
His title. The Ascent of Man, is not new ;
probably it has been used by more than one
writer before ; nor is he the first to point
out that the humble origin of the human
species, instead of dejecting, ought to encour-
age us, since the being who has risen from
an ape to Socrates and Newton may hope to
rise still higher in the future, if not by
further physical development, which physi-
ology seems to bar by pronouncing the brain
unsusceptible of further organic improvement,
yet by intellectual and moral effort. Mr.
Drummond treats his subject with great brill-
iancy of style and adorns it with very in-
teresting illustrations. Not less firmly than
Voltaire's optimist persuaded himself that
this was the best of all possible worlds, he
has persuaded himself that evolution was the
only right method of creation. He ulti-
mately identifies it with love. The cruelties
10 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
incidental to it he palliates with a compla-
cency which sometimes provokes a smile. All
of them seem to him comparatively of little
account, inasmuch as the struggle for exist-
ence was to lead up to the struggle for the
existence of others, in other words, to the
production of maternity and paternity, with
the altruism, as he terms it, or, as we have
hitherto termed it, the affection, attendant
on those relations. To reconcile us to the
sufferings of the vanquished in the struggle
he dilates on 'Hhe keenness of its energies,
the splendour of its stimulus, its bracing effect
on character, its wholesome lessons through-
out the whole range of character." "With-
out the vigorous weeding of the imperfect,"
he says, "the progress of the world would
not have been possible." Pleasant reading
this for " the imperfect " !
" If fit and unfit indiscriminately had been allowed to
live and reproduce their kind, every improvement which
any individual might acquire would be degraded to the
common level in the course of a few generations. Prog-
ress can only start by one or two individuals shooting
ahead of their species; and their life-gain can only be
conserved by their being shut off from their species —
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 11
or by their species being shut off from them. Unless
shut off from their species their acquisition will either
be neutralized in the course of time by the swamping
effect of inter-breeding with the common herd, or so
diluted as to involve no real advance. The only chance
for evolution, then, is either to carry off these improved
editions into 'physiological isolation,' or to remove the
unimproved editions by wholesale death. The first of
these two alternatives is only occasionally possible ; the
second always. Hence the death of the unevolved, or
of the unadapted in reference to some new and higher
relation with environment, is essential to the perpetua-
tion of a useful variation."
This reasoning, with much more to the
same effect, is plainly a limitation of omnip-
otence. It supposes that the ruling power
of the universe could attain the end only at
the expense of wholesale carnage and suffer-
ing, facts which cannot be glozed over, and
which, as the weakness was not the fault
of the weak, but of their Maker, are in
apparently irreconcilable conflict with our
human notions of benevolence and justice.
This, however, is not all. We might, com-
paratively speaking, be reconciled to Mr. Drum-
mond's plan of creation if all the carnage and
suffering could be shown to be necessary or
12 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
even conducive to the great end of giving birth
to humanity and love. But Mr. Drummond
himself has to admit that natural selection by
no means invariably works in the direction of
progress ; that in the case of parasites its result
has been almost utter degradation. The phe-
nomena of parasites and entozoa, with the need-
less torments which they inflict, appear irrecon-
cilable with any optimistic theory of the direc-
tion of suffering and destruction to a paramount
and compensating end. Not only so, but all the
extinct races except those which are in the line
leading up to man and may be numbered among
his progenitors, must apparently, upon Mr.
Drummond's hypothesis, have suffered and
perished in vain. That "a price, a price in
pain, and assuredly sometimes a very terrible
price," has been paid for the evolution of the
world, after all is said, Mr. Drummond admits
to be certain. But he holds it indisputable
that even at the highest estimate the thing
bought with that price was none too dear, inas-
much as it was nothing less than the present
progress of the world. So he thinks we " may
safely leave Nature to look after her own ethic."
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 13
Probably we might if all the pain was part of
the price. But we are distinctly told that it
was not ; so that there is much of it in which,
with our present lights or any that Mr. Drum-
mond is able to afford us, men can hardly help
thinking that they see the ruthless operation of
blind chance. Nature, being a mere abstraction,
has no ethic to look after ; nor has Evolution,
which is not a power, but a method, though it
is personified, we might almost say deified, by
its exponent. But if there is not some higher
authority which looks after ethic, what becomes
of the ethic of man? The most inhuman of
vivisectors, if he could show that his practice
really led, or was at all likely to lead, to know-
ledge, would have a better plea than, in the
case of suffering and destruction which have
led to nothing, the philosophy of evolution can
by itself put in for the Author of our being.
Mr. Drummond's treatise, like those of other
evolutionists, at least of the optimistic school,
assumes the paramount value of the type, and
the rightfulness of sacrificing individuals with-
out limit to its perfection and preservation.
But this assumption surely requires to be made
14 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
good, both to our intellects and to our hearts.
The ultimate perfection and preservation of
the type cannot, so far as we see, indemnify
the individuals who have perished miserably in
the preliminary stages. Far from having an
individual interest in the evolution of the type,
the sufferers of the ages before Darwin had not
even the clear idea of a type for their consola-
tion. Besides, what is the probable destiny of the
type itself ? Science appears to tell us pretty
confidently that the days of our planet, how-
ever many they may be, are numbered, and that
it is doomed at last to fall back into primeval
chaos, with all the types which it may contain.
Evolutionists, in their enthusiasm for the
species, are apt to bestow little thought on the
sentient members of which it consists. "Man "
is a mere generalization. This they forget,
and speak as if all men personally shared the
crown of the final heirs of human civilization.
The following passage is an instance : —
"Science is charged, be it once more recalled, with
numbering Man among the beasts, and levelling his body
with the dust. But he who reads for himself the history
of creation as it is written by the hand of Evolution will
GU:ESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 15
be overwhelmed by the glory and honour heaped upon this
creature. To be a Man, and to have no conceivable suc-
cessor; to be the fruit and crown of the long-past eter-
nity, and the highest possible fruit and crown ; to be the
last victor among the decimated phalanxes of earlier ex-
istences, and to be nevermore defeated ; to be the best
that Nature in her strength and opulence can produce ;
to be the first of the new order of beings who, by their
dominion over the lower world and their equipment for
a higher, reveal that they are made in the Image of God
— to be this is to be elevated to a rank in Nature more
exalted than any philosophy or any poetry or any theol-
ogy has ever given to man. Man was always told that
his place was high ;' the reason for it he never knew till
now^ ; he never knew that his title deeds were the very
laws of Nature, that he alone was the Alpha and Omega
of Creation, the beginning and the end of Matter, the
final goal of Life."
To be the last victor among the decimated
phalanxes of earlier existences, and to be
nevermore defeated, is, to say the least, a dif-
ferent sort of satisfaction from the glorious
triumph of love in which the process of Evolu-
tion, according to Mr. Drummond, ends, and
in virtue of which he proclaims that Evolu-
tion is nothing but the Involution of love, the
revelation of Infinite Spirit, the Eternal Life
returning to itself. It even reminds us a little
16 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
of the unamiable belief that in the next world
the sight of the wicked in torment will be a
part of the enjoyment of the righteous. Per-
haps there is also a touch of lingering geocen-
tricism in this rapturous exaltation of Man.
Evolution can give us no assurance that there
are not in other planets creatures no less
superior to man than he is to the lower tribes
upon this earth.
The crown of evolution in Mr. Drummond's
system is the evolution of a mother, accom-
panied by that of a father, which, however,
appears to be inferior in degree. The chapters
on this subject are more than philosophy ; they
are poetry, soaring almost into rhapsody.
"The goal," Mr. Drummond says, "of the
whole plant and animal kingdoms seems to
have been the creation of a family which the
very naturalist has to call mammals." The
following passage is the climax : —
"But by far the most vital point remains. For we
have next to observe how this bears directly on the theme
we set out to explore — the Evolution of Love. The pas-
sage from mere Otherism, in the physiological sense, to
Altruism, in the moral sense, occurs in connection with
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 17
the due performance of her natural task by lier to whom
the Struggle for the Life of Others is assigned. That
task, translated into one great word, is Maternity —
which is nothing but the Struggle for the Life of Others
transfigured to the moral sphere. Focussed in a single
human being, this function, as we rise in history, slowly
begins to be accompanied by those heaven-born psychical
states which transform the femaleness of the older order
into the Motherhood of the new. When one follows
Maternity out of the depths of lower Nature, and beholds
it ripening in quality as it reaches the human sphere, its
character, and the character of the processes by which it
is evolved, appear in their full divinity. For of what is
maternity the mother ? Of children ? No ; for these are
the mere vehicle of its spiritual manifestation. Of affec-
tion between female and male? No; for that, contrary
to accepted beliefs, has little to do in the first instance
with sex-relations. Of what then? Of Love itself, of
Love as Love, of Love as Life, of Love as Humanity, of
Love as the pure and undefiled fountain of all that is
eternal in the world. In the long stillness which follows
the crisis of Maternity, witnessed only by the new and
helpless life which is at once the last expression of the
older function and the unconscious vehicle of the new,
Humanity is born."
The father seems to be here shut out from
the apotheosis ; though why, except from a sort
of philosophic gallantry, it is difficult to dis-
cern. The man who toils from morning till
18 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
night to support wife and child surely has not
less to do with it than the woman who feeds
the child from her breast.
Somewhat paradoxical as it may seem, Mr.
Drummond maintains that love did not come
from lovers. It was not they that bestowed
this gift upon the world. It was the first
child, "till whose appearance man's affection
was non-existent, woman's was frozen ; and
man did not love the woman, and woman did
not love the man." Apparently, then, in a
childless couple there can be no love. Here,
according to Mr. Drummond, is the birth of
Altruism, for which all creation has travailed
from the beginning of time. This appears to
him a satisfactory solution of the problem of
existence. Yet the races which have been sac-
rificed to the production of altruism, if they
were critical and could find a voice, might ask
if there was anything totally unselfish in the
indulgence of the sexual passion, which after
all plays its part in the matter, and of which
the birth of a child is the unavoidable, not
perhaps always the welcome, consequence. To
the mother the child is necessary for a time
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 19
in order to relieve her of a physical secretion,
while it repays her care by its endearments,
the enjoyment of which is altruistic only on
the irrational hypothesis that affection and
domesticity are not parts of self. To both
parents, in the primitive state at all events,
children are necessary as the support and pro-
tection of old age. Beautiful and touching
parental affection is ; pure altruism it is not.
Very admirable, as a part of man's estate, it
is ; but we can hardly accept its appearance
as a sufficient justification of all that has been
suffered in the process of evolution or as a
solution of the mystery of existence. It is
curious that Mr. Drummond should place the
happiest scene of female development and all
that depends on it in the country where
divorces are most common and the increase of
their number is most rapid. He may have
noted, too, that in that same country and
among the most highly civilized races families
are proportionately small and fewer women
become mothers.
Then, put the mammalia as high as we will
in the scale of being, they are mortal. Evo-
20 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
lution tells us complacently that death is
necessary to the progress of the species. It
may be so ; but what is that to the individ-
ual ? The more intense and exalted affection,
whether conjugal or parental, is, the more
heartrending is the thought of the parting
which any day and any one of a thousand
accidents may bring, while it is sure to come
after a few years. Pleasure and happiness
are different things. Pleasure may be en-
joyed for the moment without any thought
of the future. The condemned criminal may
enjoy it, and, it seems, does not uncommonly
enjoy it in eating his last meal. But happi-
ness appears to be hardly possible without a
sense of security, much less with annihilation
always in sight. The oracle to which we
are listening has told us nothing about a life
beyond the present. It is needless to say
how much the character of that question has
been altered since the corporeal origin and
relations of our mental faculties, and of what
theology calls the soul, have been apparently
disclosed by science. The thought of con-
scious existence without end is one which
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 21
makes the mind, as it were, ache, and under
which imagination reels ; yet the thought of
annihilation is not welcome, nor have we up
to this time distinctly faced it. If ever it
should be distinctly faced by us, its influence
on life and action can hardly fail to be felt.
Is the evolutionary optimist himself content
to believe that nothing will survive the wreck,
inevitable, if science is to be trusted, of this
world ?
To say that a particular solution of a diffi-
culty is incomplete is not to say that the
difficulty is insoluble or even to pronounce
the particular solution worthless. Mr. Drum-
mond's solution may be incomplete, and yet
it may have value. The only moral excel-
lence of which we have any experience or
can form a distinct idea, is that produced by
moral effort. If we try to form an idea of
moral excellence unproduced by effort, the
only result is seraphic insipidity. This may
seem to afford a glimpse of possible recon-
ciliation between evolution and our moral
instincts. If upward struggle towards perfec-
tion, rather than perfection created by fiat,
22 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
is the law of the universe, we may see in it,
at all events, something analogous to the law
of our moral nature.
Mr. Kidd's theory is that man owes his
progress to his having acted against his
reason in obedience to a supernatural and
extra-rational sanction of action which is
identified with religion. The interest of the
individual and that of society, Mr. Kidd
holds to be radically opposed to each other.
Reason bids the individual prefer his own
interest. The supernatural and extra-rational
sanction bids him prefer the interest of so-
ciety, which is assumed to be paramount, and
thus civilization advances. The practical con-
clusion is that the churches are the greatest
instruments of human progress.
What does Mr. Kidd mean by reason ? He
appears to regard it as a special organ or
faculty, capable of being contradicted by
another faculty, as one sense sometimes for a
moment contradicts another sense, or as our
senses are corrected by our intelligence in
the case of the apparent motion of the sun.
But our reason comprises all the mental ante-
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 23
cedents of action. It is the man's intellectual
self. To be misled by it when weak or per-
verted is possible; to act consciously against
it is not. Simeon Stylites obeys it as well as
Sardanapalus or Jay Gould. He believes, how-
ever absurdly, that the Deity accepts the sacri-
fice of self-torture, and that it will be well for
the self -torturer in the sum of things. His
self-torture is therefore in accordance with
his individual reason, though it is far enough
from being in accordance with reason in the
abstract. A supernatural sanction, supposing
its reality to be proved, becomes a part of the
data on which reason acts, or rather it becomes,
for the occasion, the sole datum; and to obey
it, instead of being unreasonable, is the most
reasonable thing in the world. Misled by his
reason, we repeat, to any extent a man may be,
both in matters speculative and practical; but
he can no more think or act outside of his
reason, that is, the entirety of his impressions
and inducements, than he can jump out of his
skin. What Mr. Kidd seems at bottom to
mean is that we may and do, with the best
results, prefer social to individual, and moral to
24 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
material, objects. But this is a totally different
thing from acting against reason, and while it
requires a certain elevation of character, it
requires no extra-rational motive.
Mr. Kidd speaks of "reason" and the ca-
pacity for acting with his fellows in society as
" two new forces which made their advent with
man." He cannot mean, what his words might
be taken to imply, that the rudiments of reason
are not discernible in brutes, or that sociability
does not prevail in the herd, the swarm, and
the hive. To the herd, the swarm, and the
hive sacrifices of the individual animal or insect
are made like those of the individual man to
his community. Is there supernatural or extra-
rational sanction in the case of the deer, the
ant, or the bee ?
Altruism, acting against reason with a super-
natural and extra-rational sanction, is, accord-
ing to Mr. Kidd, the motive power of progress.
But this altruism of which we hear so much,
what is it ? Man is not only a self-regardant,
but a sympathetic, domestic, and social being.
He is so by nature, just as he is a biped or a
mammal. How he became so the physiologist
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 25
and psychologist must be left to explain. But
a sympathetic, domestic, and social being he is,
and in gratifying his sympathetic, domestic, or
social propensities, he is no more altruistic, if
altruism means disregard of self, than he is
when he gratifies his desire of food or motion.
Self is not disregarded, because self is sympa-
thetic, domestic, and social. The man of feel-
ing identifies himself with his kind; the father
with his children ; the patriot with his state ;
and they all look in various forms for a return
of their affection or devotion. The man in
each of the cases goes out of his narrower self,
but he does not go out of self. Show us the
altruist who gives up his dinner to benefit the
inhabitants of the planet Mars, and we will
admit the existence of altruism in the sense in
which the term seems to be used by Mr. Kidd
and some other philosophers of to-day.
Reason, as defined by Mr. Kidd, appears to
be a faculty which tells us what is desirable,
but does not tell us what is possible. "The
lower classes of our population," he says, " have
no sanction from reason for maintaining exist-
ing conditions." "They should in self-interest
26 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
put an immediate end to existing social condi-
tions." Why, so they would if they had the
power, supposing their condition and the causes
of it to be what Mr. Kidd represents. It is
not altruism that prevents them, but necessity;
the same necessity which constrains people of
all classes to submit to evils of various kinds,
submission to which, if unnecessary, would be
idiotic. That poverty and calamity have been
endured more patiently in the hope of a com-
pensation hereafter is true, but makes no differ-
ence as to the reasonableness of the endurance.
From a comparison of the two sentences just
quoted, it would appear that Mr. Kidd identi-
fies reason with self-interest, and, therefore, with
something antagonistic to society. Whereas, in
a sociable being, conformity to the laws of society
is reason. '' The interests of the social organism
and of the individual," says Mr. Kidd, "are and
must remain antagonistic." Why so in the case
of a man any more than in that of a bee ?
What is the " supernatural and extra-rational
sanction " in virtue of which man acts against
the dictates of his reason, and by so acting
makes progress ? Religion. What is religion ?
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 27
"A religion is a form of belief providing an ultra-
rational sanction for that large class of conduct in
the individual where his interests and the interests of
the social organism are antagonistic, and by which the
former are rendered subordinate to the latter in the
general interests of the evolution which the race is
undergoing."
Here is a definition of religion without men-
tion of God. The supernatural sanction is re-
ligion, and religion is a supernatural sanction.
This surely does not give us much new light.
But we are further told that " there can never
be such a thing as a rational religion." Super-
stition, such as the worship of Moloch, that of
Apis, that of the Gods of Mexico, or mediaeval
religion in its debased form, is not rational,
nor will our calling it supernatural or extra-
rational make it an influence above nature and
reason, or prove it to have been the motive
power of progress, which, on the contrary, it
has retarded and sometimes, as in the case of
Egypt, killed outright. But religions which
in their day have been instruments of progress,
and among which may perhaps be numbered,
at a grade lower than Christianity, Moham-
medanism and Buddhism, have owed their
^
28 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
character to their rational adaptation to human
nature and their consecration of rational effort.
They are counterparts, not of the polytheistic
state religion of Greece, but of the Socratic
philosophy, which had a divinity of its own,
the impersonation of its morality, and paid
homage to the state polytheism only by sacri-
ficing a cock to ^sculapius. Christianity, as
it came from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth,
was, like the philosophy of Socrates, unliturgi-
cal and unsacerdotal ; its liturgy was one sim-
ple prayer. " Supernatural " is a convenient
word, but it by implication begs the question,
and when applied to superstitions is most fal-
lacious. '' Infranatural," or something imply-
ing degradation and grossness, not elevation
above the world of sense, would be the right
expression. Christian ethics, as distinguished
from dogma, are not supernatural ; they are
drawn from, and adapted to, human nature.
It is disappointing to find that a theorist
who makes everything depend on the in-
fluence of religion should not have attempted
to ascertain precisely what religion is and what
is its origin, or to distinguish from each other
GUESSES AT THE KIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 29
the widely diverse phenomena which bear the
name. His sanction itself calls for a sanction
and calls in vain.
When a hypothesis will not bear inspection
in itself, time is wasted in applying it, or test-
ing its applications, to history. But Mr. Kidd
says of the first fourteen centuries after Christ:
" So far, fourteen centuries of the history of our civiliza-
tion had been devoted to the growth and development of
a stupendous system of other-worldliness. The conflict
against reason had been successful to a degree never be-
fore equalled in the history of the world. The super-
rational sanction of conduct had attained a strength and
universality unknown in the Roman and Greek civiliza-
tions. The State was a divine institution. The ruler
held his place by divine right, and every political office
and all subsidiary power issued from him in virtue of the
same authority. Every consideration of the present was
over-shadowed in men's minds by conceptions of a future
life, and the whole social and political system and the in-
dividual lives of men had become profoundly tinged with
the prevailing ideas."
Of all the actions by which mediaeval
civilization was moulded and advanced, what
percentage does Mr. Kidd suppose to have
been performed under religious influence or
from a spiritual motive ? How many feudal
30 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
kings and lords — how many, even, of the
ecclesiastical statesmen of the Middle Ages —
does he suppose to have been carrying on a
conflict with reason for objects other than
worldly and under the inspiration of divine
right ? How much resemblance to the
character of the Author of Christianity
would he have found among the rulers and
the active spirits of the community or even
of the Church ? How much among the occu-
pants of the Papal throne itself ?
Other critics have pointed out that Mr.
Kidd, to say the least, overstates his case in
saying that Christianity was directly opposed
by all the intellectual forces of the time. So
close was the affinity of Roman Stoicism to
it that one eminent French writer has under-
taken to demonstrate the influence of Chris-
tianity on the writings of the Roman Stoics.
It had intellectual champions as soon as it
had intellectual assailants, and their arguments
were addressed to reason. The pessimistic
melancholy of a falling empire and the revolt
from a decrepit polytheism were also intel-
lectual or partly intellectual forces on its side.
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 31
In the recent concessions of political power
by the upper classes to the masses, Mr. Kidd
finds an example of altruism prevailing over
reason. That something has in the course
of this revolution occasionally prevailed over
reason might be very plausibly maintained.
Whether it was anything supernatural or ex-
tra-rational seems very doubtful. In Great
Britain, for instance, the extension of the
franchise in 1832 was the result of a conflict
between classes and parties carried on in a
spirit as far as possible from altruistic and
pushed to the very verge of civil war. After-
wards, the Whig leader, finding himself politi-
cally becalmed, brought in a new Reform Bill
to raise the wind, and was outbid by Derby
and Disraeli, whose avowed object was to
"dish the Whigs." Of altruistic self-sacrifice
it would be difficult in the whole process to
find much trace.
If this branch of the inquiry were to be
pursued, it might be worth while for Mr. Kidd
to consider the case of Japan, the progress of
which of late has been so marvellously rapid.
It appears that in Japan, while the lower
32 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
classes have a superstition at once very gross
and very feeble, the upper classes, by whom
the movement has been initiated and carried
forward, have no genuine religion, but at most
official forms, such as could not sustain action
against self-interest.
The cause of human progress has been the
desire of man to improve his condition, ever
mounting as, with the success of his efforts,
fresh possibilities of improvement were brought
within his view. It is in this respect he spe-
cially differs from the brutes. Mechanical evo-
lution and selection by mere struggle for exist-
ence apply to man in his rudimentary state or
in his character as an animal. Of humanity,
desire of improvement is the motive power.
There is no need, therefore, of importing the
language, fast becoming a jargon, of evolution
into our general treatment of history. Bees,
ants, and beavers are marvels of nature in
their way. But they show no desire for im-
provement, and make no effort to improve.
Man alone aspires. The aspiration is weak in
the lower races of men, strong in the higher.
Of its existence and of the different degrees
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 33
in which it exists, science may be able to give
an account. But it certainly is not the off-
spring of unreason, nor can it be aided in any
way by superstition or by any rejection of truth.
A work on the foundations of religious be-
lief by the leader of a party in the British
House of Commons, who is by some marked
out as a future Prime Minister, shows, like
the theological and cosmogonical essays of
Mr. Gladstone, the increasing interest felt
about these problems, not only by divines and
philosophers, but by men of the world. In
Mr. Balfour's case the union of speculation
with politics is the more striking, inasmuch
as his work is one of abstruse philosophy. It
is by metaphysical arguments that he under-
takes to overthrow systems opposed to reli-
gion, and to rebuild the dilapidated edifice on
new and surer foundations. He is thus tread-
ing in the steps of Coleridge, the great reli-
gious philosopher of the English Church. It
is to a limited circle of readers that he appeals.
Ordinary minds find metaphysics " out of
their welkin," to use the words of the Clown
34 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
in Twelfth Night. They venerate from afar a
study which has engaged and still engages the
attention of powerful intellects. But they are
themselves lost in the region in which "tran-
scendental solipsism " has its home. They
are unable to see at what definitive conclu-
sions, still more, at what practical conclusions,
such as might influence conduct, philosophy
has arrived. Metaphysic seems to them to be
in a perpetual state of flux. "The theories
of the great metaphysicians of the past," Mr.
Balfour says, " are no concern of ours." They
would surely concern us, however, if, like suc-
cessive schools of science, they had made some
real discoveries and left something substantial
behind them. But as Mr. Balfour plaintively
tells us, the system of Plato, notwithstanding
the beauty of its literary vesture, has no effect-
ual vitality ; our debts to Aristotle, though
immense, "do not include a tenable theory
of the universe " ; in the Stoic metaphysics
"nobody takes any interest." The Neo-Pla-
tonists were mystics, and in mysticism Mr.
Balfour recognizes an undying element of hu-
man thought, but "nobody is concerned about
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 35
their hierarchy of beings connecting through
infinite gradations the Absolute at one end
of the scale with matter at the other." The
metaphysics of Descartes "are not more liv-
ing than his physics " ; neither " his two sub-
stances, nor the single substance of Spinoza,
nor the innumerable substances of Leibnitz
satisfy the searcher after truth." Had these
several systems been investigations of matters
in which real discovery was possible, each of
them surely would have discovered something,
and a certain interest in each of them would
remain. But they have flitted like a series
of dreams, or a succession of kaleidoscopic
variations. Mr. Balfour doubts "whether any
metaphysical philosopher before Kant can be
said to have made contributions to this sub-
ject [a theory of nature] which at the present
day need to be taken into serious account,"
and he presently proceeds to indicate that
"Kant's doctrines, even as modified by his
successors, do not provide a sound basis for an
epistemology of nature." Mr. Balfour seems
even to think that philosophy is in some de-
gree a matter of national temperament. He
36 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
says that the philosophy of Kant and other
German philosophers will never be thoroughly
received so as to form standards of reference
in any English-speaking community " until
the ideas of these speculative giants are thor-
oughly re-thought by Englishmen and repro-
duced in a shape which ordinary Englishmen
will consent to assimilate." " Under ordinary
conditions," he says, "philosophy cannot, like
science, become international." This seems
as much as saying that philosophy is still not
a department of science, or a real investiga-
tion resulting in truths evident to all the
world alike, but a mode of looking at things
which may vary with national peculiarities
of mind and character.
Locke, as Mr. Balfour reminds us, toward
the end of his great work assures his readers
that he " suspects that natural philosophy is
not capable of being made science," and
serenely draws from his admissions the moral
that " as we are so little fitted to frame theo-
ries about this present world we had better
devote our energies to preparing for the next."
Perhaps we might amend tlie suggestion by
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 37
saying that most of us had better devote our
energies to the search for attainable truth and
to the improvement of our character and es-
tate in this world as a preparation for the
world to come. A man so metaphysical in
his cast as Emerson is obliged to say that
we know nothing of nature or of ourselves,
and that man has not " taken one step towards
the solution of the problem of his destiny."
Before the relation of mind and body had
been proved, and while the mind was sup-
posed to have a divine origin of its own and
to be a sojourner in the body as a temporary
home or prison-house, it was perhaps easier to
believe, as did the mediaeval philosophers, that
in the mind there was a source of knowledge
about the universe apart from the perceptions
of sense, and that the world might be studied,
not by observation, but by introspection, and
even through the analysis of language as the
embodiment of ideas. Transcendental Solip-
sism and a world constructed out of catego-
ries, would, under those conditions, have their
day. Something of the mediaeval disposition
seems to lurk in the effort to demonstrate
3S GUESSES AT THE MIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
that the material world has no existence apart
from our perceptions. Be this true or not, it
can make little difference in our theological or
spiritual position. The fact must be the same
in the case of a dog as in the case of a man.
Most of us, therefore, will be content to
look on while Mr. Balfour's metaphysical
blade, flashing to the right and left, disposes
of " Naturalism " on the one hand and of
Transcendentalism on the other. We have
only to put in a gentle caveat against any
idea of driving the world back through gen-
eral scepticism to faith. Scepticism, not only
general, but universal, is more likely to be
the ultimate result, and any faith which is
not spontaneous, whether it be begotten of
ecclesiastical pressure or intellectual despair,
is, and in the end will show itself to be,
merely veiled unbelief. The catastrophe of
Dean Mansel, who, while he was trying in
the interest of orthodoxy, to cut the ground
from under the feet of the Rationalist, him-
self inadvertently demonstrated the impossi-
bility of believing in God, was an awful
warning to the polemical tactician.
GUESSES AT THE MIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 39
Mr. Balfour gets on more practical ground
and comes more within the range of general
interest when he proceeds to set up authority
apart from reason as a foundation of theologi-
cal belief. Above reason authority must ap-
parently be if it is apart from it, for wherever
authority has established itself reason must
give way, while it has no means of constrain-
ing the submission of authority. No one could
be less inclined to presumptuous rationalism
than Butler, who, in his work, which though
in partial ruin is still great, with noble frank-
ness accepts reason as our only guide to truth.
In combating the objections against the evi-
dences of Christianity, Butler says that " he
expresses himself with caution lest he should
be mistaken to vilify reason, which is indeed
the only faculty we have to judge concerning
anything, even revelation." What is defer-
ence to authority but the deference to su-
perior knowledge or wisdom which reason
pays, and which, if its grounds, intellectual
or moral, fail or become doubtful, reason will
withdraw? This is just as true with regard
to the authority of tradition as with regard
40 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
to that of a living informant or adviser ; just
as true with regard to the authority of a
Church as with regard to that of an individ-
ual teacher or guide. Authority, Mr. Bal-
four says, as the term is used by him, " is in
all cases contrasted with reason and stands
for that group of non-rational causes, moral,
social, and educational, which produces its
results by psychic processes other than rea-
son." A writer may affix to a term any sense
he pleases for his personal convenience ; but
the reasoning of the psychic process of defer-
ence to authority, though undeveloped, and,
perhaps, till it is challenged, unconscious,
whether its cause be moral, social, or edu-
cational, is capable of being presented in a
rational form, and cannot, therefore, be rightly
called non-rational. There is, of course, a sort
of authority, so styled, which impresses itself
by means other than rational, such as religious
persecution, priestly thaumaturgy, spiritual ter-
rorism, or social tyranny. But in this Mr.
Balfour would not recognize a source of truth
or foundation of theological belief. A phi-
losopher who proposes to rebuild theology,
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 41
wholly or in part, on the basis of authority,
seems bound to provide us with some analy-
sis of authority itself, and some test by which
genuine authority may be distinguished from
ancient and venerable imposture. Papal in-
fallibility, which Mr. Balfour cites as an
instance, does undoubtedly postulate the sub-
mission of reason to authority; but it proved
the necessity of that submission by the exter-
mination of the Albigenses and the holocausts
of the Inquisition. It is still ready, as its
Encyclical and Syllabus intimate, to sustain
the demonstration by the help of the secular
arm.
So in the case of habit. Our common actions
have no doubt become by use automatic, as our
common beliefs are accepted without investiga-
tion. But if they are challenged, reasons for
them can be given. A man eats without think-
ing, but if he is called upon, he can give a good
reason for taking food. A soldier obeys the
word of command mechanically, but if he were
called upon, he could give a good reason for his
obedience.
Mr. Balfour scarcely lets us see distinctly
42 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
what is his view of belief in miracles, which
must play an important part in any reconstruc-
tion or review of the basis of theology; an all-
important part, indeed, if Paley was right in
saying, as he did in reply to Hume, that there
was no way other than miracle by which God
could be revealed. He seems inclined to repre-
sent the objections to them as philosophical
rather than historical, and such as a sounder
philosophy may dissipate, intimating that ra-
tionalists have approached the inquiry with a
predetermination "to force the testimony of
existing records into conformity with theories
on the truth or falsity of which it is for phi-
losophy not history to pronounce." This might
be said with some justice of Strauss's first Life
of Jesus^ and perhaps of some other German
philosophies of the Gospel history. But the
current objections to miracles, with which a
theologian has to deal, are clearly of a historical
kind. A miracle is an argument addressed
through the sense to the understanding, which
pronounces that the thing done is supernatural
and proof of the intervention of a higher power.
It seems inconceivable, if the salvation of the
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 43
world were to depend on belief in miracles,
that Providence should have failed to provide
records for the assurance of those who were
not eye-witnesses equal in certainty to the evi-
dence afforded eye-witnesses by sense. Are
the records of the miracles which we possess
unquestionably authentic and contemporane-
ous ? Were the reporters beyond all suspicion,
not only of deceit, but of innocent self-delusion ?
Were they, looking to the circumstances of
their time and their education, likely to be duly
critical in their examination of the case ? Is
there anything in the internal character of the
miracles themselves, the demoniac miracles for
example, to move suspicion, it being impossible
to think that Providence would allow indispen-
sable evidences of vital truth to be stamped
with the marks of falsehood ? What is the
weight of the adverse evidence derived from
the silence of external history and the apparent
absence of the impression which might have
been expected to be made by prodigies such as
miraculous darkness and the rising of the dead
out of their graves ? These questions, daily
pressed upon us by scepticism, are strictly
44 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
historical, and will have to be treated by
restorers of theological belief on strictly histori-
cal grounds.
Mr. Balfour recognizes mysticism as an " un-
dying element in human thought." That it is
not yet dead is evident. Minds not a few have
taken refuge in various forms of it. But un-
dying it surely is not. The mystic, however
exalted, merely imposes on himself. He creates
by a subtle sophistication of his own mind the
cloudy object of his faith and worship. He has
himself written his Book of Mormon, and hid-
den it where he finds it. In that direction
there can be no hope of laying the foundation
of a new theological belief.
There can be no hope, apparently, of laying
new foundations for a rational theology in any
direction excepting that of the study of the
universe and of humanity as manifestations of
the supreme power in that spirit of thorough-
going intellectual honesty of which Huxley,
who has just been taken from us, is truly said
to have been an illustrious example. That we
are made and intended to pursue knowledge is
as certain as that we are made and intended to
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 46
strive for the improvement of our estate, and
"we cannot tell how far or to what revelations
the pursuit may lead us. If Revelation is
lost, Manifestation remains, and great mani-
festations appear to be operuag on our view.
Agnosticism is right, if it is a counsel of
honesty, but ought not to be heard i£ it is a
counsel of despair.
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD
TESTAMENT
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD
TESTAMENT
At the English Church Congress held in
1895 at Norwich, Professor Bonney, Canon of
Manchester, made a bold and honourable at-
tempt to cast a millstone oif the neck of Chris-
tianity by frankly renouncing belief in the
historical character of the earlier books of the
Bible.
" I cannot deny," he said, " that the increase
of scientific knowledge has deprived parts of
the earlier books of the Bible of the historical
value which was generally attributed to them
by our forefathers. The story of the creation
in Genesis, unless we play fast and loose either
with words or with science, cannot be brought
into harmony with what we have learned from
geology. Its ethnological statements are im-
perfect, if not sometimes inaccurate. The
stories of the flood and of the Tower of Babel
E 49
50 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
are incredible in their present form. Some his-
torical element may underlie many of the tradi-
tions in the first eleven chapters of that book,
but this we cannot hope to recover."
With the historical character of the chapters
relating to the creation, Canon Bonney must
resign his belief in the Fall of Adam ; with his
belief in the Fall of Adam he must surrender
the doctrine of the Atonement, as connected
with that event, and thus relieve conscience of
the strain put upon it in struggling to recon-
cile vicarious punishment with our sense of
justice. He will also have to lay aside his
belief in the Serpent of the Temptation, and in
the primeval personality of Evil.
In Lux Mundi^ a collection of essays edited
by the Reverend Principal of Pusey House,
and understood to emanate from the High
Church quarter, we find plain indications that
the unhistoric character, so frankly recognized
by the learned Canon in the opening chapters
of Genesis, is recognized in other parts of Old
Testament history by High Churchmen, who,
having studied recent criticism, feel like the
Canon, that there is a millstone to be cast off.
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 51
One of these essayists admits that the "battle
of historical record cannot be fought on the
field of the Old Testament as it can on that of
the New " ; that " very little of the early
record can be securely traced to a period near
the events"; and that "the Church cannot
insist upon the historical character of the earli-
est records of the ancient church in detail as
she can on the historical character of the Gos-
pels or the Acts of the Apostles." The same
writer seems ready to entertain the view that
the "books of Chronicles represent a later
and less historical version of Israel's history
than that given in Samuel and Kings," and that
they "represent the version of that history which
had become current in the priestly schools."
" Conscious perversion " he will not acknow-
ledge, but in the theory of " unconscious idealiz-
ing" of history he is willing, apparently, to
acquiesce. Inspiration, he thinks, is consistent
with this sort of "idealizing," though it
excludes conscious deception or pious fraud.
Conscious deception or pious fraud no large-
minded and instructed critic of primeval records
would be inclined to charge. But "ideal" is
52 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
apparently only another name for " mythical,"
and it is difficult to see how myths can in any
sense be inspired, or why, if the records are in
any sense inspired, the Church should not be
able to insist on their historical character. " In
detail " is a saving expression ; but the details
make up the history, and if the truth of the
details cannot be guaranteed, what is our guar-
antee for the truth of the whole ? Human testi-
mony, no doubt, may sometimes fail in minor
particulars, while in the main account of the
matter it is true. But is it conceivable that
the Holy Spirit, in dictating the record of God's
dealings with mankind for our instruction in
the way of life, should simulate the defects of
human evidence ?
A veil which in all the orthodox Churches
hung before the eyes of free inquiry when
they were turned on the origin and estate of
man is removed by the Canon's renuncia-
tions. The present writer, as a student at
college, attended the lectures of Dr. Buck-
land, a pioneer in geology ; and he remem-
bers the desperate shifts to which the lecturer
was driven in his efforts to reconcile the facts
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 53
of his science with the Mosaic cosmogony,
the literal truth of which he did not venture
to impugn. By a " day " Dr. Buckland said,
Moses meant a geological period, though the
text says that each day was made up of a
morning and an evening, while the Deca-
logue fixes the sense by enjoining the observ-
ance of the seventh day as that on which
the Creator rested after the six days' labour
of creation. How the professor dealt with
fossil records of geological races and the
appearance of death in the world before the
fall of man, the writer does not now remem-
ber. It is not very long since a preacher
before an educated audience could meet the
objection to the Mosaic deluge arising from
the position of stones in the mountains of
Auvergne, which such a cataclysm must have
swept away, by the simple expedient of af-
firming that when the deluge was over, the
stones had been restored to their places by
miracle. Nay, were not Mr. Gladstone's great
intellectual powers the other day exerted to
prove that the Creator, in dictating to Moses
the account of the creation, had come won-
54 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
derfuUy near the scientific truth and almost
anticipated the nebular hypothesis?
That the Bible does not teach science apol-
ogists are now ready to proclaim. But the
fact is that it does teach science, — cosmo-
gonical science at least, — and that its teach-
ings have been disproved.
From the conceptions of science, geocen-
tricism, derived from the Mosaic cosmogony,
may have been banished, but over those of
theology its cloud still heavily hangs. The
consecrated impression has survived the dis-
tinct belief, and faith shrinks from the theo-
logical revolution which the abandonment of
the impression would involve.
Faith takes refuge in the substitution of fig-
urative and symbolical for literal truth. This
is Origen over again with his system of alle-
gorical interpretation as a universal solvent of
moral difficulties in Scripture. The refuge is
surely little better than a subterfuge. The
writer of a primeval narrative, unconscious of
astronomy, geology, or physiology, believed in
the literal truth of his legend. He had no
idea of allegory or symbol. When he said
^m
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 55
six days of creation, he meant days and not
aeons. Paradise, the Trees of Life and Know-
ledge, the intercourse of God in human form
with men, the Fall, the longevity of the patri-
archs, the Noachic deluge, the miraculous ori-
gin of the rainbow, were to him literal facts.
If it was from the Holy Spirit that these
narratives emanated, how can the Holy Spirit
have failed to let mankind know that in real-
ity they were allegories ? How could it allow
them to be received as literal truths, to mis-
lead the world for ages, to bar the advance of
science, and, when science at last prevailed, to
discredit revelation by the exposure ? Besides,
to maintain the symbolical truths of Genesis,
is almost as hard as to maintain its literal
truth. What symbolical truth is there in the
order of creation now disproved by science, or
in the description of the cosmic system and
the relations of the sun and moon to our
planet? What symbolic truth is there in the
Fall of Man, and how does it designate the
rise of man from the brute, which science
shows him originally to have been, to the level
of civilized humanity ?
56 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
The history of every nation begins with
myth. A primeval tribe keeps no record, and
a nation in its maturity has no more recollec-
tion of what happened in its infancy than a
man of what happened to him in his cradle.
It is needless to say that the first book of
Livy is a tissue of fable, though the Romans
were great keepers of records and very matter-
of-fact as a people. When the age of reflec-
tion arrives and the nation begins to speculate
on its origin, it gives itself a mythical founder,
a Theseus, a Romulus, or an Abraham, and
ascribes to him its ancestral institutions or cus-
toms. In his history also are found the keys
to immemorial names and the origin of myste-
rious or venerated objects, the Ruminal Fig-
tree or the tomb of Abraham. It is a rule
of criticism that we cannot by any critical
alembic extract materials for history out of
fable. If the details of a story are fabulous,
so is the whole. If the details of Abraham's
story — the appearances of the Deity to him,
so strangely anthropomorphic, the miraculous
birth of his son when his wife was ninety years
old, his adventures with Sarah in Egypt and
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 57
afterwards in Gerar, evidently two versions of
the same legend, the sacrifice of his son ar-
rested by the angel, with the episode of Lot,
the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, and
the turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt ^
— are plainly unhistorical, the whole story must
be relegated to the domain of tribal fancy.
We cannot make a real personage out of un-
realities or fix a place for him in unrecorded
time.
That the alleged record is of a date posterior
by many centuries to the events, and there-
fore no record at all, plainly appears from the
mention of Kings of Israel in Genesis (xxxvi.
31). No reason has been shown for suppos-
ing that the passage is an interpolation, while
the suggestion that it is prophetic is extrava-
gant. It stamps the date of the book, like
1 In the case of the metamorphosis of Lot's wife, we have
the origin of the legend still clearly before us in the pillars
or needles of salt, at Usdum, near the southwest corner of
the Dead Sea, which sometimes bear a resemblance to the
human form. The natural peculiarities of the Dead Sea
region are pretty evidently the source of this whole circle
of legend. — See Andrew D. White's most interesting work.
The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom^ Vol.
II., chap, xviii.
58 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
the mention of the death of Moses in Deu-
teronomy, to get rid of which efforts equally
desperate are made. The words of Genesis
xii. 6, "the Canaanite was then in the land,"
show that the book was written when the
Canaanite had long disappeared, and the words
of Deuteronomy xxxiv. 10, " there arose not a
prophet in Israel since like unto Moses," imply
that the book was written after the rise of a
line of other prophets. Moreover the writer
always speaks of Moses in the third person.
These things were noticed by critics long ago,
but the eyes of faith, in England and America
at least, have been shut. The canon of Sir
George Cornewall Lewis, limiting the trust-
worthiness of oral tradition to a single cen-
tury, may be too rigid ; but we certainly
cannot trust oral tradition for such a period
as that between the call of Abraham and the
Kings, especially when, the alleged events
being miraculous, an extraordinary amount of
evidence is necessary to justify belief.
The figure of the patriarch Abraham, a typi-
cal sheikh, as well as the father of Israel, is
exceptionally vivid, and his history is excep-
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 59
tionally dramatic. It is needless to say that
the narrative contains episodes of striking
beauty, such as the meeting of the steward
with Rebekah, the scene of Hagar and her
child nearly perishing in the wilderness, and
the sacrifice of Isaac. But to regard Abra-
ham as a real founder, not only of a nation,
but of the Church, and as the chosen medium
of communication between God and man,
sound criticism will no longer allow us; and
sound criticism, like genuine science, is the
voice of the Spirit of Truth. A writer in
Lux Mundi^ already quoted, avows his belief
that "the modern development of historical
criticism is reaching results as sure, where
it is fairly used, as scientific inquiry." He
significantly reminds churchmen of the warn-
ing conveyed by the name of Galileo. Why
should we any longer cling to that which,
whatever it may have been to the men of a
primeval tribe, is to us a low and narrow con-
ception of the Deity? Why should we force
ourselves to believe that a Being who fills
eternity and infinity became the guest of a
Hebrew sheikh ; entered into a covenant with
60 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
the sheikh's tribe, to the exclusion of the rest
of the human race ; and as the seal of the
covenant ordained the perpetuation of a bar-
barous tribal rite ? There have been bibli-
olaters so extreme as to wish even converted
Jews to continue the practice to which the
promise was mysteriously annexed. Tribalism
may attach inordinate value to genealogies
as well as to ancestral rites, but can we im-
agine the Author of the universe limiting his
providential regard and his communication of
vital truth to his creatures by tribal lines ?
Every tribe is the chosen people of its own
god ; enjoys a monopoly of his favour ; is up-
held by him against the interest of other na-
tions, and especially protected by him in war.
It is he who gives it victory, and if stones
fall or are hurled on the enemy retreating
through a rocky pass, it is he who casts them
down (Joshua x. 11). Christianity is the
denial of Jewish tribalism, proclaiming that
all nations have been made of one blood to
dwell together on the earth, and are sharers
alike in the care of Providence. Of the bad
effects of a conception of God drawn from the
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 61
imagination of Jewish tribalism, the least is
the waste of money and effort in desperate
attempts to convert the Jews.
Of the history of the other patriarchs the
texture is apparently the same as that of
the history of Abraham. They are mythical
fathers of a race, a character which extends
to Ishmael and Esau. In fact the chapters
relating to them are full of what, in an ordi-
nary case, would be called ethnological myth.
Of contemporary or anything like contem-
porary record, even supposing the Pentateuch
to have been written by Moses, there can be
no pretence. It is thus in the absence of
anything like evidence that we have been
called upon to accept such incidents as the
bodily wrestling of Jehovah with Jacob, and
the appearance to Jacob in a dream of an
angel who is the organ of a supernatural com-
munication about the speckles of the rams or
he-goats. Most picturesque and memorable,
no doubt, are the characters of Esau, the typi-
cal father of the hunter tribe, and of Jacob,
in whose unscrupulous and successful cunning
we have a picture such as the anti-Semite
62 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
would now draw of liis enemy, the financial
Jew. These chapters are full of legends con-
nected with fanciful interpretations of names,
such as Jehovah-Jireh (Genesis xxii. 14) ;
fanciful accounts of immemorial monuments,
such as Jacob's pillar ; or of tribal customs,
such as that of refraining from a particular
sinew because it had been touched and made
to shrink by Jehovah in wrestling with Jacob.
Extraordinary simplicity is surely displayed
by the commentators who appeal to the
custom as evidence of the historic event.
Much labour has been spent in efforts to
identify the Pharaoh of the Exodus and to fix
the date of that event and its connection
with Egyptian history. Still more labour has
been spent in tracing the route of the Israel-
ites through the wilderness and explaining
away the tremendous difficulties of the narra-
tive. What if the whole is mythical ? There
is a famine in Palestine. The patriarch sends
his ten sons, each with an ass and a sack,
across the desert to buy food in Egypt. Pro-
visions must have been furnished them for
their journey, and of what they bought they
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 63
must have consumed not a little on their
journey home. This seems improbable, nor
was it very likely that the ten should strike
the exact place where their brother Joseph
was in power. Of the poetic character of
the story of Joseph, with its miraculous
dreams and their interpretations, there surely
can be no doubt. Yet upon the story of
Joseph and his brethren the whole history of
the captivity in Egypt and the Exodus ap-
parently hangs. We might almost renounce
the task of analyzing the rest of the nar-
rative — the attempt of the Egyptian rulers
to extirpate the Hebrews by the strange com-
mand to the midwives when they might have
taken a shorter and surer course ; the contest
in thaumaturgy between the magicians of
Jehovah and those of Egypt; the plagues
sent upon the helpless people of Egypt to
make their ruler do that which Omnipotence
might at once have done by its fiat ; the ex-
traordinary multiplication of the Hebrews,
whose adult males, in spite of the destruction
of their male children, amount to six hundred
thousand, a number which implies a total
64 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
population of more than two millions ; their
sudden appearance as an armed host though
they had just been represented as the unresist-
ing bondsmen of the Egyptians ; their wander-
ings for forty years within the narrow limits
of the Sinaitic peninsula, where, though the
region is desert, they find food and water
not only for themselves but for their innu-
merable flocks and herds ; their construction
of a sumptuous tabernacle where materials
or artificers for it could not have been
found ; the plague of fiery serpents which
was sent among them and the brazen serpent
by looking on which they were healed ; the
miraculous destruction of the impious oppo-
nents of an exclusive priesthood ; the giants
of Canaan ; the victories gained over native
tribes by the direct interposition of Heaven ;
the strange episode of Balaam and his collo-
quy with his ass ; the stopping of the sun
and moon that Israel might have time for
the pursuit and slaughter of his enemies.
This last incident alone seems enough to
stamp the legendary character of the whole.
In vain we attempt to reduce the miracle.
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT Q^
which would imply a disturbance of the
entire solar system, to a mere prolongation of
the daylight. The Old Testament is al-
together geocentric, and not merely in the
phenomenal sense. The sun and moon are
made "for lights in the firmament of the
heaven to give light on the earth," and with
them is coupled the creation of the stars.
The writer of the book of Joshua cites the
book of Jasher as evidence of the miracle.
Was the book of Jasher inspired? Could an
inspired writer need or rest on the evidence
of one who was uninspired?
Whether any sojourn of the Hebrews in
Egypt or any real connection with that coun-
try is denoted by the visit of Abraham to
Egypt and afterwards by the story of the
Exodus, it is for Egyptologists to determine.
Nothing certainly Egyptian seems to be
traceable in Hebrew beliefs or institutions.
Of the appearance of Hebrew forms on Egyp-
tian monuments, Egyptian conquest would
appear to give a sufficient explanation. The
history of the Exodus is connected with the
account of the institution of the Passover,
66 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
and analogy may lead us to surmise that
national imagination has been busy in explain-
ing the origin of an immemorial rite.
As to the date and sources of the Penta-
teuch and the other historical books there is
a flux of learned hypothesis. But the ques-
tions of what documentary materials a book
was composed, and whether it was composed
in the reign of Josiah or at the time of the
captivity, do not concern us here. It is
enough that the book has no pretension to
authenticity or to a date within many cen-
turies of the events. Let it be observed that
the Church still tenders the Pentateuch to the
people as the books of Moses, though a
learned churchman will now hardly be found
to maintain that Moses was the writer.
We are, then, in no way bound to believe
that God so identified himself with a fa-
voured tribe as to license it to invade a num-
ber of other tribes which had done it no
wrong, to slaughter them and take possession
of their land. We are in no way bound to
believe that he, by the mouth of Moses, re-
buked his chosen people for saving alive the
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 67
women and children of the Midianites and
bade them kill every male among the little
ones and every woman that had known man
(Numbers xxxi. 17) ; or that he commanded
them to slay, not only man, woman, and
child, but the dumb animals, everything that
breathed, in a captured city. To the objec-
tions raised by humanity against the slaughter
of the Canaanites, Christian apologists have
made various and, as one of their number
admits, not very consistent replies. While
Bishop Butler holds that divine command in
itself constituted morality, Mozley, the But-
ler of our day, holds that the divine command
could not constitute morality had not the
general morality of the people been on that
level. Some say that in conquering Canaan
the Israelites did but recover their own, a
plea which, even if it had not been ousted
by prescription, would be totally inconsistent
with the account of the sojourning of Abra-
ham and of his purchase of a plot of land.
Others maintain that, having been driven by
force from Egypt, they had a right to help
themselves to a home where they could find
68 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
it, and to put all the existing inhabitants to
the sword. The bequest of Noah is also
pleaded. But at last the apologist has to
fall back upon the simple command of the
Almighty, which is justified on the ground
that the Canaanites were idolaters, they never
having heard of the true God.
Such examples as the slaughter of the
Canaanites, the killing of Sisera, the assassi-
nation of Eglon, the hewing of Agag in
pieces by Samuel before the Lord, Elijah's
massacre of the prophets of Baal, the hang-
ing of Haman with his ten sons commem-
orated in the hideous feast of Purim, have,
it is needless to say, had a deplorable effect
in forming the harsher and darker parts of
the character which calls itself Christian.
They are responsible in no small degree for
murderous persecutions, and for the extirpa-
tion or oppression of heathen races. The dark
side of the Puritan character in particular is
traceable to their influence. Macaulay men-
tions a fanatical Scotch Calvinist whose writ-
ings, he says, hardly bear a trace of acquaint-
ance with the New Testament. Scotch Cal-
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 69
vinism itself has in fact ethically in it not a
little of the Old Testament.
Jael, when she decoyed her husband's ally
into her tent and slew him while he was rest-
ing trustfully beneath it, broke in the most
signal manner the sacred rule of Arab hospi-
tality, as well as the ordinary moral law.
The comment of orthodoxy upon this is : " If
we can overlook the treachery and violence
which belong to the age and country, and
bear in mind Jael's ardent sympathies with
the oppressed people of God, her faith in the
right of Israel to possess the land in which
they were now slaves, her zeal for the glory
of Jehovah as against the gods of Canaan, and
the heroic courage and firmness with which she
executed her deadly purpose, we shall be ready
to yield to her the praise which is her due."^
The extenuating motives supplied by the com-
mentator are not to be found in the text. To
reconcile us to the assassination of Eglon, a
distinction is drawn between God's providential
order and his moral law, the providential order
ordaining what the moral law would forbid.
J The Speakers Commentary , ad loc.
70 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
Perhaps nothing in the Old Testament is
more instinct with fanatical tribalism or more
revolting than the praise of Rahab, the harlot
of Jericho, who secretes the spies of the rob-
ber tribe which is coming to destroy her
country, and who, though a traitress, has a
place of honour as a heroine in one of the
genealogies of Jesus.
The writer heard the other day a very
beautiful Christian sermon on the purity of
heart in virtue of which good men see God.
But the lesson of the day, read before that
sermon, was the history of Jehu. Jehu, a
usurper, begins by murdering Joram, the son
of his master Ahab, king of Israel, and
Ahaziah, the king of Judah, neither of whom
had done him any wrong. He then has Jeze-
bel, Ahab's widow, killed by her own servants.
Next he suborns the guardians and tutors of
Ahab's seventy sons in Samaria to murder
the children committed to their care and
send the seventy heads to him in baskets to
be piled at the gate of the city. Then he
butchers the brethren of Ahaziah, king of
Judah, with whom he falls in on the road.
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 71
two and forty in number, for no specified or
apparent crime. On his arrival at Samaria
there is more butchery. Finally he entraps
all the worshippers of Baal, by an invitation
to a solemn assembly, and massacres them
to a man. At the end of this series of
atrocities the Lord is made to say to him,
" Because thou hast done well in executing
that which is right in mine eyes and hast
done unto the house of Ahab all that was in
my heart, thy children unto the fourth gen-
eration shall sit on the throne of Israel."
Jehu had undoubtedly done what was in the
heart of the Jehovist party and right in its
eyes. But between the sensuality of the
Baalite and the sanguinary zealotry of the
Jehovist it might not have been very easy
to choose.
David is loyal, chivalrous, ardent in friend-
ship, and combines with adventurous valour
the tenderness which has led to our accept-
ing him as the writer of some of the Psalms.
So far, he is an object of our admiration,
due allowance for time and circumstance
being made. But he is guilty of murder and
72 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
adultery, both in the first degree ; he puts to
death with hideous tortures the people of a
captured city ; on his death-bed he bequeaths
to his son a murderous legacy of vengeance ;
he exemplilies by his treatment of his ten
concubines, whom he shuts up for life, the
most cruel evils of polygamy (2 Samuel
XX. 3). The man after God's own heart he
might be deemed by a primitive priesthood
to whose divinity he was always true ; but it
is hardly possible that he should be so deemed
by a moral civilization. Still less possible is
it that we should imagine the issues of spirit-
ual life to be so shut up that from this man's
loins salvation would be bound to spring.
The books of the Old Testament, and nota-
bly the historical books, are for the most
part by unknown authors and of unknown
dates. That the early part of Genesis is
made up of two narratives, the Elohistic, in
which the name of God is Elohim, and the
Jehovistic, in which the name is Jehovah, all
experts are now agreed, and even the un-
learned reader may verify the fact. A com-
bination of two narratives is still traceable in
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 73
the history of Abraham and his son. That
in the account of the creation and the flood,
Assyrian legend is the basis on which the
Hebrew built a more monotheistic and sub-
limer story, is the opinion of writers who still
deem themselves orthodox and avIio apparently
do not shrink from the hypothesis that the
Deity in compiling an account of his own
works was fain, as the basis of his narrative,
to avail himself of an Assyrian legend. Docu-
mentary analysis and the philosophy of his-
tory combined have made it highly probable
that writings, ascribed by our Bible to Moses,
not only were not his, but were of a date as late
as the Captivity. It is likely that the schools
of the prophets played a great part, as did the
monasteries of the Middle Ages, in composing
the chronicles of the nation. The pensive-
ness of the Captivity seems to pervade the
Psalms. These, as has been already said,
are matters at present of hypothesis, and
though most interesting to the learned, little
affect the practical question whether the writ-
ings ascribed to Moses should continue to be
read in churches as authentic and inspired.
74 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
That they are not authentic is certain. It is
not less certain that by whomsoever, at what-
ever time, and by whatever process they
may have been produced, we are without an
assignable reason for supposing them to be
inspired.
Nor do the Old Testament writers themselves
put forward any claim to inspiration. Where
they cite elder authorities, such as the book
of Jasher, they in effect declare themselves
indebted to human records, and therefore un-
inspired. Preachers, especially preachers of
reform, speak in the name of Heaven. Ori-
ental and primitive preachers speak as the
inspired organs of Heaven. The prophets,
whose name, with its modern connotation, is
scarcely more appropriate than it would be if
applied to Savonarola or John Wesley, are in
this respect like others of their class. One of
them when bidden to prophesy calls for a
minstrel, under the influence of whose strains
the hand of the Lord comes upon him (2 Kings
iii. 15 ; see also 1 Samuel x. 5). All seers,
as their name imports, have visions. Primitive
lawgivers speak by divine command. In no
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 75
other way, apparently, is inspiration claimed
by the authors of the Old Testament.
Jesus came to substitute a religion of con-
science for that of law, a religion of humanity
for that of a race, worship in spirit and in
truth for worship in the temple. His preach-
ing was a reaction against the Judaism then
impersonated in the Pharisee, afterwards de-
veloped in the Talmud, and now fully repre-
sented in the Talmudic Jew. But he was not
a revolutionist. Like Socrates, he accepted
established institutions, including the national
ritual, and in that sense fulfilled all righteous-
ness. Nor was he, on any hypothesis as to
his nature, a critic or concerned with any
critical objections to the sacred books. Ad-
dressing an audience which believed in them,
he cited them and appealed to their authority
in the usual way. He cites the book of Jonah,
and in terms which seem to show that he
regards it as a real history ; so that a literalist,
like the late Dr. Liddon, took fire at being told
that the book was an apologue, considering this
an impeachment of the veracity of Jesus. Yet
few, even of the most orthodox, would now pro-
76 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
fess to believe that Jonah sojourned in the belly
of a fish. St. Paul in like manner treats the
narrative of the fall of Adam in Genesis as
historical and connects a doctrine with it,
though the mythical character of the narrative
is admitted, as we have seen, even by a digni-
tary of the Church.
The Evangelists, simple-minded, find in the
sacred books of their nation prognostications
of the character and mission of Jesus. Some-
times, as critical examination shows, a little
has been enough to satisfy their uncritical
minds (see Matthew ii. 18 ; xxi. 5). But
surely it is something like a platitude to as-
cribe to them such an idea of Old Testament
prophecy as is worked out for us by Keith
and other modern divines. No real and specific
prediction of the advent of Jesus, or of any
event in his life, can be produced from the
books of the Old Testament. At most we
find passages or phrases which are capable of
a spiritual application, and in that metaphorical
sense prophetic. Even of the famous passage
in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, if it is read
without strong prepossessions, no more than
this can be said.
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 77
Beyond contest and almost beyond com-
pare is the beauty, spiritual as well as lyri-
cal, of some of the Psalms. But there are
others which it is shocking to hear a Chris-
tian congregation reciting, still more shock-
ing, perhaps, to hear it chanting in a church.
To wish that your enemy's wife may be a
widow, and that his children may be father-
less and have none to pity them, is oriental.
To wish that his prayer may be turned to
sin and that Satan may stand at his right
hand, to wish in short for his spiritual ruin,
is surely oriental and something more. The
writer in Lmx Mund% already cited, would
persuade himself and us that these utter-
ances are not those of personal spite, but
"the claim which righteous Israel makes
upon God that he should vindicate himself
and let her eyes see how righteousness turns
again to judgment." This is the way in
which we have been led by our traditional
belief in the inspiration of the Old Testament
to play fast and loose with our understand-
ings and with our moral sense. It might
almost as well be pretended, when the Greek
78 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
poet Theognis longs to drink the blood of
his political enemies, that he is not actuated
by hatred, but has some great moral object
in his mind.
What is the Old Testament? It is the
entire body of Hebrew literature, theology,
philosophy, history, fiction, and poetry, in-
cluding the poetry of love as well as that of
religion. We have bound it all up together
as a single book, and bound up that book
with the New Testament, as though the
religion of the two were the same and the
slaughter of the Canaanites or the massacre
of the day of Purim were a step towards
Christian brotherhood and the Sermon on
the Mount. We have forcibly turned He-
brew literature into a sort of cryptogram
of Christianity. The love-song called the
Song of Solomon has been turned into a
cryptographic description of the union of
Christ with his Church. A certain divine,
when his advice was asked about the method
of reading the Scriptures, used to say that
his method was to begin at the beginning
and read to the end ; so that he would spend
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 79
three hours at least on the Old Testament
for one that he spent on the New, and would
read the list of the Dukes of Edom as often
as he read the Sermon on the Mount. The
first step towards a rational appreciation of
the Old Testament is to break up the vol-
ume, separate the acts of Joshua or Jehu
from the teachings of Jesus, and the differ-
ent books of the Old Testament from each
other. This has been done long since, men-
tally at least, by the critic ; but it has not
been done by the churches. Nor have the
churches ceased to ascribe the Pentateuch
to Moses, the book of Daniel to Daniel, and
both parts of Isaiah to the same prophet.
We are told in the book of Joshua (xxiv. 2)
that the ancestors of Abraham served other
gods. How, or by what influences, whether
those of individual reformers like the prophets
or of general circumstance, the nation was
raised from its primeval worship to tribal
monotheism of an eminently pure and exalted
type, seems to be a historical mystery. Higher
than to tribal monotheism it did not rise ; at
least, it advanced no further than to the belief
80 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
that its God was superior in power as well as
in character to all other gods, and thus Lord
of the whole earth. Its God was still the
God of Israel, and the Jews were still his
chosen people. Nor did it wholly get rid of
localism. Jerusalem was still the abode of
God when Jesus, according to the fourth
Gospel, announced to the woman of Samaria
the abolition of local religion. Judaism,
therefore, never reached the religious ele-
vation of some chosen spirits among the
heathen world, such as Seneca, Marcus
Aurelius, and Epictetus ; although the Jew-
ish belief was more intense than that of the
philosophers and extended not only to a
select circle but to a portion at least of the
people.
Nor could the Jew, hampered as he was
by lingering tribalism, form a conception of
the universality and majesty of divine gov-
ernment in the form of moral law such as
we find in Plato or in Cicero. There is
nothing in the Hebrew writings like a pas-
sage in Cicero's Republic^ preserved by Lac-
tantius : " There is a true law, right reason,
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 81
in unison with nature, all-embracing, consist-
ent, and eternal, which, by its commands,
calls to duty, by its prohibitions deters from
crime, which, however, never addresses to
the good its commands or its prohibitions
in vain, nor by command or prohibition
moves the wicked. This law cannot be
amended, nor can any clause of it be re-
pealed, nor can it be abrogated as a whole.
By no vote either of the Senate or of the
people can we be released from it. It re-
quires none to explain or to interpret it.
Nor will there be one law at Rome and
another at Athens ; one now and another
hereafter. For all nations and for all time
there will be one law, immutable and eter-
nal; there will be a common master and
ruler of all, — God, the f ramer, exponent, and
enactor of this law, whom he who fails to
obey will be recreant to himself, and, re-
nouncing human nature, will, by that very
fact, incur the severest punishment, even
though he should escape other penalties real
or supposed. "1 Equally broad is the lan-
^Divin. Instit, VI., 8.
82 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
guage of the De Legihus: ''Since, then, noth-
ing is superior to reason, whether in God or
man, it is by partnership in reason, above
all, that man is connected with God. Part-
nership in reason is partnership in right
reason ; and as law is right reason, law
again is a bond between God and man.
Community of law is community of right.
Those to whom these things are common
are citizens of the same commonwealth. If
men obey the same power and rule, much
more do they obey this celestial code, the
divine mind and the supreme power of God.
So that we must regard this universe as
one and a single commonwealth of gods and
men. And whereas in states, on a prin-
ciple of which we will speak in the proper
place, the position of the citizen is marked
by his family ties, in the universal nature of
things we have something more august and
glorious, the bond of kinship between gods
and men."^
Of a belief in the immortality of the soul no
evidence can be found in the Old Testament,
1 De Leg., I., 7.
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 83
though readers of the Bible who continue to
use the unrevised version may remain under
the impression that the doctrine is found in
Job. Sheol is merely, like the Hades of the
Odyssey, a shadowy abode of the dead. Had
the doctrine of a resurrection been proclaimed
in the Mosaic books, it could hardly have been
denied by the Sadducees ; its acceptance by
the Pharisees was a speculation of their school.
In Ezekiel xviii. life is held out as the re-
ward of those who do well ; death is the pen-
alty of those who do evil. But the "life," for
all that appears, is temporal, though the Chris-
tian, by reading into it immortality, may apply
the chapter to his own use. Enoch and Elijah
are represented as translated to heaven, not as
living after death, nor is it said that the appari-
tion of Samuel called up by the witch of Endor
was the spirit of Samuel himself ; it appears
rather to have been like the apparitions sum-
moned by the witches in Macbeth. The re-
wards and punishments of the Old Testament
are temporal and material ; its rewards are
wealth and offspring, its punishments are beg-
gary and childlessness. The only immortality
84 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
of which it speaks is the perpetuation of a
man's family in his tribe. The vindication
and requital of Job's virtue are added wealth
and multiplied offspring. Nor do we find in
the Old Testament that moral immortality, if
the expression may be used, which is found in
Greek and Roman philosophers, who, without
speaking definitely of a life after death, identify
the virtuous man with the undying power of
virtue and intimate that it will be well with
him in the sum of things.
Not assuredly that the Hebrew literature
lacks qualities, irrespective of its dogmatic posi-
tion, such as may well account for the hold
which it has retained, in spite of its primeval
cosmogony, theology, or morality, on the alle-
giance of civilized minds. The sublimity of its
cosmogony impressed, as we know, Longinus.
Voltaire himself could hardly have failed to
acknowledge the magnificence of some parts of
the prophetic writings, though in other parts
he might find marks for his satire. All must
be touched by the beauty of the story of Joseph
and of the book of Ruth. Admirable, we repeat,
are both the religious and the lyrical excel-
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 85
lence of some of the Psalms. The histories are
marred by tribalism, primeval inhumanity, and
fanaticism ; but they derive dignity as well as
unity from the continuous purpose which runs
through them, and which in the main is moral ;
since Jehovah was a God of righteousness and
purity, in contrast with the gods of other tribes.
His worship, though ritual, sacrificial, and un-
like the worship "in spirit and in truth," the
advent of Avhich was proclaimed to the woman
of Samaria, was yet spiritual compared with
that of deities whose votaries gashed them-
selves with knives or celebrated lascivious
orgies beneath the sacred tree.
Hebrew law is primitive, and the idea of
reviving it, conceived by some of the Puritans,
was absurd. But it is an improvement in
primitive law. It makes human life sacred,
treating murder as a crime to be punished with
death, not as a mere injury to be compounded
by a fine. It recognizes the avenger of blood,
the rude minister of justice before the insti-
tution of police ; but it confines his office to
the case of wilful murder, and forbids heredi-
tary blood-feuds. It recognizes asylum, a nee-
86 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
essary check on wild primeval passion, but
confines it to accidental homicide, ordaining
that if a man slay his neighbour with guile,
he shall be taken, even from the altar, and
put to death. It recognizes the father's power
of life and death over his child, patria potestas
as the Roman called it, but unlike the hideous
Roman law, it requires public procedure and
a definite charge, while it secures mercy by
requiring the concurrence of the mother. It
recognizes polygamy, but strives to temper the
jealousies and injustice of the harem. It is
comparatively hospitable and liberal in its
treatment of the stranger. Its Sabbath was
most beneficent, especially to the slave, and
strict formality was essential to observance
among primitive people. Ordeal is confined
to the particular case of a wife suspected of
infidelity, and divination is forbidden save
by the Urim and Thummim. The law miti-
gates the customs of war, requiring that a city
shall be summoned before it is besieged, and
forbidding the cutting down of the fruit trees
in a hostile country, which was regularly prac-
tised by the Greeks ; while the female captive,
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 87
instead of being dragged at once to the bed of
the captor, is allowed a month of mourning.
Nor is war exalted or encouraged, as it was
among the Assyrians and the Persians. Ser-
vice is to be voluntary ; captains are to be
chosen only when the army takes the field, so
that there would be no military class; horses
and chariots are not to be multiplied. Jeho-
vah, though a God of battles, is not char-
acteristically so. Not victory in war, but
peace, is the normal blessing. Kings it was
expected the Israelites would have, like the
nations around them. But unlike the kings
of the nations around them, their king was
to be the choice of the nation ; he was to be
under the law, which he was to study that
his heart might not be lifted up among his
brethren ; and his luxury, his harem, his accu-
mulation of treasure, and his military estab-
lishment were to be kept within bounds.
Finally, while there was to be a priestly order,
that order was not to be a caste. The Levites
were to be ordained by the laying on of the
hands of the whole assembly of Israel. Nor,
while the ritual was consigned to the priest.
88 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
hood, was religious teaching confined to them ;
its organs were the prophet and the psalmist.
Worship was sacrificial, and all sacrifice is
irrational, but there was no human sacrifice,
and the scape-goat was a goat, not, as among
the polished Athenians, a man. The Ameri-
can slave-owner could appeal to the Old Testa-
ment as a warrant for his institution. Slavery
there was everywhere in primitive times, but
the Hebrew slave-law is more merciful than
that either of Greece or Rome, notwithstand-
ing the ordinance, shocking to our sense, which
held the master blameless for killing his slave
if death was not immediate, on the ground that
the slave "was his money." ^ The belief in
witchcraft as a crime to be punished by death
is also accepted as true, and, though not promi-
nent, gave birth in misguided Christendom to
an almost incredible series of atrocities. How
1 An essay written by the author on the question '* Does
the Bible Sanction American Slavery?" has probably been
long since forgotten. In its line of argument against slavery
as an anachronistic and immoral revival of a primitive and
once moral institution it was consistent with the present
paper. But the essay was written in the penumbra of ortho-
doxy and would now require very great modification.
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 89
far these ordinances or any of them actually
took effect we cannot say. Probably they
were to a great extent speculative and ideal.
The ordinance against cutting down the fruit
trees in an enemy's country certainly was not
observed, for the fruit trees of the Moabites
are cut down, Elisha giving the word (2 Kings
iii. 19). The agricultural polity of family
freeholds, reverting to the family in the year
of jubilee, may safely be said to have never
come into practical existence, but to have
been the ideal Republic of some very Hebrew
Plato. Nor was the court or the harem of
Solomon limited by any jealous regulations.
From the social point of view, perhaps
the most notable passages of the Old Testa-
ment are those rebuking the selfishness of
wealth and the oppression of the poor in the
prophetic writings and the Psalms, which have
supplied weapons for the champions of social
justice. There is scarcely anything like these
in Greek or Roman literature. Juvenal com-
plains of the contempt and insult to which
poverty exposes a man, but he does not de-
nounce social oppression. In this respect the
90 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
Mahometan and the Buddhist are perhaps
superior to the Greek or Roman. But we
shall hardly find anywhere a moral force equal
in intensity to that of the Hebrew prophets,
narrowly local and national though their
preaching is.
In forming an estimate of Hebrew litera-
ture we may have still to be upon our guard
against a lingering belief in the inspired char-
acter of the books which is apt to betray itself
in a somewhat unbounded admiration. Much
in the prophets surely is rhapsody to which in-
tense self-excitement might give birth. Of the
history we have only the prophet's version, and
if the other side had spoken, complaints of
gloomy and oppressive fanaticism might have
been heard. It was hardly well that modern
religion and life should take their colour from
a sombre struggle between Jehovah and Baal.
There is in Hebrew literature comparatively
little of tenderness or geniality, of humour
nothing, unless it be the grotesque adventures
of Samson among the Philistines. To the
growth of science blind belief in the Old
Testament, which represents each event of
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 91
nature as the direct act of Jehovah, exclud-
ing secondary causes, has been morally op-
posed. Neither of science nor of art had the
Jew any share ; and both defects make them-
selves felt.
Religion in the primitive state of man is
identified with nationality. For a member of
the tribe or of the nation, which inherited the
religion of the tribe, to worship any but the
tribal or national god or gods is treason pun-
ishable by death. "He that sacrificeth unto
any god save unto the Lord only he shall be
utterly destroyed." To the importation of
this feature of an obsolete tribalism into Chris-
tianity, Christendom in part at least owes the
fatal identification of the Church with the
State, the extermination of the Albigenses, the
religious wars, the Inquisition, the burning of
Servetus. At the end of the seventeenth
century a boy was put to death by the Cal-
vinistic fanatics of Scotland for having blas-
phemed the Lord by disparaging the dogma of
the Trinity. Nor have we yet got rid of the
shade cast over human life by superstitious
use of a literature dark with struggles of
92 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
religion or race, stern with denunciation, de-
void of humour or playfulness, and seldom
in touch with common humanity.
We have been taught by philosophic apolo-
gists to believe in Jewish history and legisla-
tion as the education of a chosen people
directed by the Almighty and leading them
gradually from a low to a high morality,
from fetishism or primitive superstition to
monotheism, and from tribalism to humanity.
This, as it recognizes a low beginning and a
gradual improvement, is at all events a rational
view compared with the common bibliolatry.
But Jewish progress after all is only a segment,
however momentous a segment, of the progress
of civilization. There is nothing in it which
denotes the exclusive action of deity. This,
since a broader view has been taken of history,
is almost universally acknowledged. Then the
education thus designated as divine, — in what
did it end ? In the Jews of Ezra, with their in-
tensified tribalism and self-estrangement from
humanity, not only renouncing intermarriage
with other races, but ruthlessly putting away
the wives, mothers, and children with whom
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 93
they had been living ; in Pharisaism ; in cere-
monialism, the most irrational and oppressive ;
in Jewish angelology and demonology, the
craziest of superstitions ; in the Talmud with
its extravagant legalism and its unspeakable
nonsense ; in the murder of the great Teacher
of humanity and the rejection of his Gospel ;
in the perpetuation of tribalism of the most
hateful kind by a vast cosmopolitan race of
usurers wandering over the world without a
country, treating, in their pride of race, their
fellowmen as gentiles and unclean, preying on
all the nations, and inevitably hated by them
all.
If Jerusalem may be credited with Christian-
ity as her final development, papal Rome may
be credited with the religion of the Refor-
mation. There is a continuity, there is an en-
during element in both cases. The Sanhedrim
understood Judaism, and when it yelled " Cru-
cify him" it knew what the relation was be-
tween its own religion and the teaching of
Christ.
That which is not a supernatural revelation
may still, so far as it is good, be a manifestation
94 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
of the divine. As a manifestation of the
divine the Hebrew books, teaching righteous-
ness and purity, may keep their place in our
love and admiration for ever ; while of their
tribalism, their intolerance, their religious
cruelty, we for ever take our leave. The time
has surely come when as a supernatural reve-
lation they should be frankly though reverently
laid aside, and no more allowed to cloud the
vision of free inquiry or to cast the shadow
of primeval religion and law over our modern
life.
It surely is useless and paltering with the
truth to set up, like the writer in Lux Mundi^
and other rationalistic apologists, the figment
of a semi-inspiration. An inspiration which
errs, which contradicts itself, which dictates
manifest incredibilities, such as the stopping
of the sun, Balaam's speaking ass, Elisha's
avenging bears, or the transformation of Nebu-
chadnezzar, is no inspiration at all. It requires
the supplementary action of human criticism
to winnow the divine from the human, the
truth from the falsehood ; and the result of the
process varies with the personal tendencies of
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 95
the critics. The use of the phrase " inspiration "
when the belief has really been abandoned is
worse than weak ; it is Jesuitical, and will end
as all Jesuitry must end. Those who try to
break the fall of orthodoxy will only make the
fall heavier at last. When we are told that
there are in the Old Testament Scriptures both
a human and a divine element, we must ask
by what test the divine is to be distinguished
from the human and proved to be divine.
Nobody would ever have thought of "partial
inspiration " except as an expedient to cover
retreat. We do but tamper with our own
understandings and consciences by such at-
tempts at once to hold on and let go, to retain
the shadow of the belief when the substance has
passed away. Far better it is, whatever the
effort may cost, honestly to admit that the
sacred books of the Hebrews, granting their
superiority to the sacred books of other nations,
are, like the sacred books of other nations, the
works of man and not of God. Compared with
the semi-inspirationist, the believers in verbal
inspiration, of whom some still remain, des-
perate as are the difficulties with which they
06 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
have to contend, stand upon firm ground.
Verbal inspiration is at all events a consecrated
tradition as well as a consistent view. Semi-
inspiration is a subterfuge and nothing more.
That the semi-inspiration theory is entirely
new and has sprung up to meet the inroads of
destructive criticism, those who have embraced
it do not deny. Yet Providence would surely
have shown a curious indifference to its own
ends if it had so constructed revelation that a
false view of it, entailing the most disastrous
consequences, should have inevitably prevailed
and been disseminated through all the churches
till now.
These are troublous times. The trouble is
everywhere : in politics, in the social system,
in religion. But the storm-centre seems to
be in the region of religion. The fundamental
beliefs on which our social system has partly
rested are giving way. To replace them
before the edifice falls, and at the same time
to give us such knowledge as may be attainable
of man's estate and destiny, thought must be
entirely free.
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
The appearance of a portly and learned
volume by the Rev. Dr. Salmond on The
Christian Doctrine of Immortality shows the
anxious interest which has been awakened in
these questions. His treatment of the subject
also recognizes the necessity which is felt of
perfectly free though reverent inquiry, as our
sole way of salvation amidst the perplexities,
theological, social, and moral, in which we
are now involved. For himself, he unreserv-
edly accepts the Christian revelation. Chris-
tianity, he is so happy as to believe, ''has
translated the hope of immortality from a
guess, a dream, a longing, a probability, into
a certainty, and has done this by interpreting
us to ourselves and confirming the voice of
prophecy within us." But he subjects the
sacred records of Christianity to critical exam-
99
100 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
ination. He does not talk effete orthodoxy
to an age of reason. Nor does he rest upon
the evidence of Revelation alone. He en-
deavours to combine with it that of Manifesta-
tion as presented by reason and history.
The change made by Darwin's great dis-
covery — as, with all rights of modification
reserved, it may surely be called,^ — in our
notions regarding the origin of our species
could not fail to stimulate curiosity as to its
destiny. We held, it is true, before Darwin
that man had been formed out of the dust ;
in that respect our ideas have undergone no
change. It is true also that whatever our
origin may have been, and through whatever
process we may have gone, we are what we
are, none the less for Darwin's discovery ;
while the fact that we have risen from the
1 I once ventured to ask an eminent Darwinian whether
he thought that within any limit of time assignable for the
duration of bird life upon this planet, the Darwinian pro-
cess of natural selection could have produced a bird which
should build a nest in anticipation of laying an egg. He
said that account must be taken of the faculty of imitation.
To which the reply was, that to produce that faculty another
Darwinian process, extending through countless seons,
would be required.
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 101
dust or from the condition of the worm, in-
stead of leading us to despair, ought rather
to inspire us with hope. Still, before Darwin
we rested in the belief that man had been
called into existence by a separate creation, in
virtue of which he was a being apart from all
other animals; and this belief has by Darwin
been dispelled. A being apart from the other
animals man remains in virtue of his reason,
of which other animals have, at most, only the
rudiments, and yet more perhaps in virtue of
his aspirations and his capacity for improve-
ment, of which even the most intelligent of
the other animals, so far as we can see, have
no share. He alone pursues moral good; he
alone is religious ; he alone is speculative,
looking before and after ; he alone feels the
influence of beauty and expresses his sense of
it in poetry and art ; what is lust in brutes in
him alone is love ; he alone thinks or dreams
that there is in him anything that ought not
to die. Yet Darwin's discovery has effaced
the impassable line which we took to have
been drawn by a separate creation between
man and the beg^sts which perish.
102 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
Science, moreover, Darwinian and general,
has put an end to the traditional belief in
the soul as a being separate from the body,
breathed into the body by a distinct act of
the Creator, pent up in it as in a prison-house,
beating spiritually against the bars of the flesh
and looking to be set free by death. Soul
and body, we now know, form an indivisible
whole, the nature of man being one, enfolded
at first in the same embryo, advancing in all
its parts and aspects through the same stages
to maturity, and succumbing at last to the
same decay. Not that this makes our nature
more material in the gross sense of that term.
Spirituality is an attribute of moral elevation
and aspiration, not of the composition of the
organism. Tyndall called himself a "materi-
alist," yet no man was ever less so in the
gross sense. If we wish to see clearly in these
matters it might be almost better to suspend
for a time our use of the word "soul," with
its traditional connotation of antagonism to
the body, and to speak only of the higher life
or of spiritual aim and effort.
We have, moreover, in approaching these
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 103
questions to clear our minds entirely of geo-
centricism, theological and philosophical as
well as physical, of our notions of this earth
as the centre of the universe and the grand
scene of providential action, and at the same
time of the ideas of our religious infancy
about the Mosaic beginning and the Apoca-
lyptic end of things. We have wholly to
banish the creations of Milton's fancy, so
strongly impressed upon our imaginations, as
well as the Ptolemaic cosmography, and think
no more of a heaven above and an earth be-
low, with angels ascending and descending
between them, or of a court of heaven look-
ing down upon the earth. We must float out
in thought into a universe without a centre,
without limit, without beginning or end, of
which all that we see on a starlight night is
but a point, in which we ourselves are but
living and conscious atoms. To fathom the
mystery of the universe, — that is, the mystery
of existence, — we cannot hope. Of eternity
and infinity we can form no notion ; we can
think of them only as time and space extended
without limit, a conception which involves a
104 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
metaphysical absurdity, since of space and
time we must always think as divisible into
parts, while of infinity or eternity there can
be no division. The thought of eternal ex-
istence, even of a life of eternal happiness,
if we dwell upon it, turns the brain giddy ;
it is a sort of mental torture to attempt to
realize the idea.
The doctrine of a future life with rewards
for the good and punishment for the wicked,
as we all know, pervades the New Testament.
That this present world is evil, and Christians
must look forward to a better, is the senti-
ment of the Founder of Christianity and of
all the Christian churches. It could not fail
to be fostered by the state of the world,
especially of a province like Galilee, under the
Roman Empire. The Christian martyrdoms
are a signal testimony to the same belief.
Yet the doctrine can hardly be said to be
so distinctly stated in the New Testament
as its overwhelming importance might have
led us to expect. It is in fact rather as-
sumed than stated. The passages concern-
ing it are rather homiletic than dogmatic ;
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE 105
they are enforcements of the infinite blessed-
ness of piety and goodness, of the infinite
curse attending wickedness, rather than enun-
ciations of an article for a creed. Nor is
anything explicitly said as to the manner in
which the mortal is to put on immortality,
or as to the state and occupations of the
blessed in the next world. White robes,
harps, palm branches, a city of gold and
jewels, are not spiritual; they must be taken
as material imagery ; taken literally, they
provoke the derision of the sceptic.
Difficulties crowd upon us and severely tax
the exegetical resources of Dr. Salmond. A
sudden and absolute change of nature is con-
trary to all our experience, which would lead
us to believe that gradual progress is the
law. The disproportion of eternal rewards
and punishments to the merits or sins of
man's short life is profoundly repugnant to
our moral sense. When we take in the
cases of children, of savages, of the hapless
offspring of the slums, of the heathen who
have never heard the Word, the difficulty is
immensely increased.
106 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
In all the churches there is now a revolt
against the belief in eternal fire, which, never-
theless, if the Gospel is to be taken literally,
it would seem difficult to avoid. Such a
belief in fact can hardly be thought ever to
have gained a practical hold on the mind ;
if it had, it would almost have dissolved hu-
manity with terror. Imagination could not
have played with the idea as it does in the
poem of Dante, where God, with his everlast-
ing torture-house, is a thousand times more
cruel than Eccelino or the tyrants of Milan.
Nor is there in reality any such line of de-
marcation between the good and the wicked
as that drawn in the homiletic language of
the Gospel between the wheat and the tares,
between the sheep and the goats, between
the people of the wide and those of the nar-
row gate. Between the extreme points of
goodness and wickedness there are gradations
of character in number infinite and fluctuat-
ing from hour to hour. The Roman Catholic
Church tries to meet this difficulty by the
invention of Purgatory, which, it is needless
to say, is- a creation of her own. In this case
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 107
also the difficulty is enhanced when we take
in children and those on whom circumstances
have borne so hardly as almost to preclude
volition.
Is the doctrine of resurrection to be extended
to every being that has borne human form, —
the Caliban just emerging from the ape, the
cave-dweller, the Carib, the idiot, as well as
the infant in whom reason and morality had
barely dawned ? Where can the line be drawn ?
Nor are the passages in the Gospel concern-
ing the future state, if pressed literally, alto-
gether consistent with each other, at least
with regard to the mode of the transition.
The idea generally presented is that of a final
judgment in which the good are to be sepa-
rated from the wicked, the good entering into
eternal joy, the wicked into eternal fire, and
of a period of sleep or unconsciousness which
is to last till the Judgment Day. But this
is not consistent with the parable of Dives
and Lazarus, with the preaching of Christ to
the souls in prison, or with the words of
Christ on the cross to the penitent thief.
These variations become more important when
108 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
we consider the unspeakably vital character
of the doctrine.
Resurrection of the body is an article of
the Creed. It presents insuperable difficul-
ties ; not only are the particles of the body
dispersed, but they must often be incorpo-
rated into other bodies. Besides, is a babe
to rise again a babe, and is an old man to
rise with the body of old age ? Devices for
meeting such difficulties may be found ; but
they are devices and not solutions. St.
Paul's answer to doubters involves the false
analogy of the seed, which germinates when
he fancies that it dies.
It is on the Christian revelation that our
hope has hitherto rested. Butler, when he
applies reason to the question of a future life,
has revelation all the time in reserve. He
professes not to offer independent proof of
the doctrine, but merely to disarm Reason of
the objections which she might urge against
Revelation. Of independent proof, with def-
erence be it said, he offers, not so much as,
with our present scientific lights at all events,
will amount even to a serious intimation.
i*^-
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 109
Assuming, after the fashion of his day, that
the soul is a being apart from the body, he
suggests that it may be a simple monad, inde-
cerptible and therefore indestructible, or at
least not presumably liable to dissolution when
the body is dissolved. But we know that
his presumption is unfounded, and that what
he calls the soul is but the higher and finer
activity of our general frame. He says that
the faculties and emotions sometimes remain
unaffected by mortal disease even at the point
of death. But they do not remain unaffected
by a disease of the brain. His strongest point
perhaps is the unbroken continuance of con-
scious identity notwithstanding the change
of our bodily frame by the flux of its compo-
nent particles, and in spite of sleep and fits
of insensibility. But the flux of particles or
the suspension of consciousness by sleep or a
fainting fit is a different thing from total
dissolution, such as takes place when the body
moulders in the grave. Besides, the phe-
nomenon is common to us with brutes, and
the objection that this or any other of But-
ler's arguments would apply as well to brutes
110 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
as to man is not to be evaded by calling
it invidious. The great thinker would per-
haps have seen this more clearly had he lived
in the Darwinian age and been disenchanted
of his belief in the special breathing of a soul
into man. He is so far from our present
point of view as to think that dreams are prod-
ucts of the mind acting apart from the bodily
sense. Do not dogs also dream?
There are those who, like Mr. Francis
Newman when he wrote The Soul, discard all
arguments on this subject addressed to the
intellect apart from the intuitions of the spirit-
ual man. Intuition is incommunicable, and
it is to the intellect alone that arguments can
be addressed. Besides, if intuition or faith
were traced to its source, it might be found
to have sprung from an intellectual convic-
tion implanted in early years. The existence
of such a faculty as religious intuition inde-
pendent of any action of the intellect would
surely be difficult to demonstrate.
The great thinkers of antiquity, while they
lacked our modern science, had the advantage,
when they had once thrown off their state
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? Ill
polytheism, of studying the problem of exis-
tence with minds free from ecclesiastical or
theological prepossession. Of the two greatest
of them Plato believed intensely in a future
life, for which this present life is but a train-
ing, and in a future state of rewards and
punishments. His arguments, put into the
mouth of Socrates, who is about to die, come
to us in the most persuasive guise. But they
are entangled with the fanciful tenets of pre-
existence, of knowledge as a reminiscence from
a previous state, and of the real existence of ab-
stract ideas. They are based on the erroneous
conception of the soul as an entity distinct from
the body and imprisoned in it, so that, in the
case at least of one who has kept his soul
pure and healthy by philosophy and asceticism,
death would be emancipation. The soul,
Plato thinks, cannot be affected by diseases
of the body, but only by its own diseases,
ignorance and vice. An evidence of more
weight practically than any of the metaphysi-
cal arguments adduced by the disciple of
Socrates is the death of Socrates itself, which,
like the Christian martyrdoms, implies a strong
112 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
and rooted faith in the future reward of
loyalty to truth and virtue. The same faith
is expressed by Plato in the Republic. To
him amid the license of Athenian democracy
in its hour of decay, as to the Christian amid
the demoralization of the Roman Empire, the
world seemed evil ; and he found support for
righteousness in the conviction that though
the righteous man may suffer obloquy, perse-
cution, and even a painful and shameful death
in this life, it would be well for him in the
final result. If there is a soul of the uni-
verse and if it holds communion in any way
with the soul of man, such a belief would
seem likely to be no mere hallucination.
In Aristotle's Ethics there is no trace of the
doctrine, either in its specific form or in the
form of faith in the ultimate triumph of vir-
tue which it assumes in Plato. The fact is
that virtue, in our sense of the word and as
denoting obedience to a moral law, is hardly
a term of Aristotle's system. His virtue is
not so much obedience to a moral law as the
functional activity of fully developed and
perfectly balanced humanity, such as is pre-
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE 9 113
sented with a rather statuesque dignity in
his moral character of the high-minded man
(^fi€yaX6yjrvxo<;^, All that he wants is a life
sufficiently long for full development (/Sto?
Te\€to9). Of compensation or retribution he
seems to have no idea.
In the great Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus
Aurelius, there is no expression of belief in a
personal life beyond the present. What they
seem to expect is absorption in the universe,
which, if personality is merged, would be the
extinction of our personal selves. On the
other hand, they show the profoundest faith in
the divinity of the moral law, in the nothing-
ness of present pleasures or pains, and in the
infinite reward of virtue. Their asceticism
— that of Marcus Aurelius on a throne —
was a practical demonstration of their faith.
In Seneca may be found a vague intimation
of belief that death is a transition to a
higher life ; but Seneca is a rhetorician rather
than a philosopher.
A belief in the immortality of the soul has
been a part of most of the religions, yet not
of all. It is absent from the sacred books
114 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
of the Hebrews, strenuous as have been the
efforts to import it into them, and bold as is
the statement of the Anglican Articles that
both in the Old and the New Testament
everlasting life is offered to mankind through
Christ. An exception such as that of the
Hebrews, an eminently religious nation, is
enough to bar any argument from universal
consent, even if universal consent, where it
can be explained by natural desire, were
sufficient to prove a belief innate. The other
world has often formed the lucrative domain
of priests, who have pretended by mystic rites
to provide the dying with a passport to ce-
lestial bliss. Egypt seems to have been pre-
eminent in the definiteness of her creed and
the minuteness of her mortuary ritual, while
she was also strangely preeminent in the effort
to protract the existence of the bodily tene-
ment, showing thereby apparently an absence
of belief in the separate existence of the soul.
The Persian faith in a future life appears also
to have been strong, though mixed with de-
grading absurdities which make it philosophi-
cally worthless. Buddhism is a philosophy
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 115
rather than a religion, while upon any hypothe-
sis as to the meaning of Nirvana, the hope of
the Buddhist is not personal immortality but
escape from personal existence. Be Nirvana
what it may, it is a fancy, generated in part
by local influences, and offers nothing in the
way of verification.
"The evidences of a future life, sir, are
sufficient," was Boswell's remark to Johnson.
"I could wish for more, sir," was Johnson's
reply. It was no doubt his sense of the in-
sufficiency of the evidences, considering the
vital character of the doctrine, that disposed
Johnson to belief in ghosts, and made him
anxious to investigate all stories of the kind,
even when they were so absurd as that of the
ghost of Cock Lane. It cannot be necessary to
discuss such fictions. The only case, so far
as we are aware, in which there is anything
like first-hand evidence is that of the warning
apparition to Lord Lyttelton, which may be
explained as the masked suicide of a voluptuary
sated with life. Nor can Spiritualistic appari-
tions call for notice here. They have been
enough exposed. Nothing is proved by them
116 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
but the fond credulity of bereavement pining
for communion with the lost. Spiritualism, it
should not be forgotten, had its farcical origin
in table-turning. Apart from the miraculous
resurrection of Christ, and Christ's miraculous
raisings from the dead, no one has been seen or
heard from after death. That evidence which
alone could be absolutely conclusive has never
been afforded. This is the stubborn fact with
which Butler and those who adopt his line of
argument have to contend.
Positivism hopes that it has indemnified, or
more than indemnified, us for the loss of per-
sonal immortality by tendering an imper-
sonal immortality in the consequences of our
lives and actions prolonged through the gen-
erations which come after us to the end of
time. But this immortality is not only imper-
sonal, it is unconscious, and, therefore, so far
as our sensations are concerned, not distin-
guishable from annihilation. It is not even
specially human; we share it with every
motor, animate or inanimate ; with the horse
which draws a wagon, with the water which
turns a mill, with the food which passes into
■;^
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 117
the muscles of the consumer, with the falling
stone.
Besides, all theories which pretend to con-
sole man for his mortality by making him a
partaker in the immortality of his race, seem,
as was said before, to encounter the objection
that the race itself is not immortal. How long
the planet which is the abode of man will last
or remain fit for man's habitation, the oracles
of science may not be agreed, but they appear
to be agreed in holding that the end must
come. If they are right, philosophy does but
mock us when she bids us find our real spirit-
ual life in efforts to perfect humanity, and our
paradise in anticipation of the state of bliss
into which humanity, when perfected, will be
brought. At a certain, however remote, date
planetary wreck will be the end. Nor has the
promise of perfection by evolution, such as
another school of thinkers holds out, any ad-
vantage in this respect over the promise of
perfection by effort. Evolution, like effort,
comes at last to naught. That death is the
renewing of the species, and apparently indis-
pensable to progress, might be a satisfactory
118 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
reflection if the species were everything and
the individual were nothing. But the indi-
vidual is something in his own eyes. Against
any scientific theory that human organisms are
simply vehicles for the transmission of life
the consciousness of each organism protests
and rebels. It is conceivable that by the
progress of humanity, before the end of our
world, some glorious consummation may be
reached. But it is hardly conceivable that
in that consummation we or the cave-dwellers
can have a share.
Still less can any substitute for our hope of
a personal immortality be found in demonstra-
tions of the indefeasible vitality of protoplasm.
The hope which we resign is personal. Proto-
plastic vitality is not. Life more or less active
may, as these comforters tell us, pervade all
things; and in that sense we may continue to
live after our dissolution and absorption into
the general frame of nature. But what is the
value of a life of which Ave shall not be indi-
vidually conscious ? There may be life in the
fermentation of a dunghill. But who can
imagine himself blest in the prospect of shar-
ing it ?
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 119
Of death and of the perpetual renewal of the
race the necessity is obvious so far as the
present estate of man is concerned. Upon
the succession of generations man's conjugal
and parental character, among other things,
depends. The existence of an undying man
would be that of one of Swift's *' Struldbrugs "
infinitely prolonged.
There are those who think to console them-
selves for the shortness of life and its final ex-
tinction at death, by saying that its very short-
ness makes it all the more precious while it
lasts, and that a pensive, or, to use their phrase,
an idyllic tenderness, is imparted to it by the
prospect of its extinction. Such an argument
seems open to an easy reduction to absurdity,
since it implies that the more brief and pre-
carious the possession the more valuable is the
thing possessed. A great deal of poetry, no
doubt, has its source in our mortality. But
such poetry is not an expression of enjoyment
or gladness ; it is a melodious sigh in which
sadness finds relief.
It may be admitted that our non-existence
in the future is not less conceivable than
120 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
our non-existence in the past, which we
take as certain, notwithstanding the Socratic
fancy of reminiscence. But we now exist,
and the question whether we continue to
exist or return to nothing is one of proba-
bility and evidence, not of possible con-
ception. That the universe might do without
us we may modestly admit ; whether it intends
to do without us is what we are feebly
endeavouring to divine.
John Stuart Mill, in a passage of his essay
on Immortality, highly lauded by Fitzjames
Stephen, admits the possibility of conceiving
that thought may continue to exist without a
material brain, the relation of the two being no
metaphysical necessity, but simply a constant
coexistence within the limits of observation.
Even if we suppose thought to embrace life,
feeling, and affection, the mere admission that
its disembodied existence is conceivable would
be but cold comfort. Mill himself seems to
fall back on the enjoyment of the present life
exalted by the religion of humanity and end-
ing in what he calls "eternal rest." "If,"
he says in his essay on The Utility of Religion^
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 121
" the Religion of Humanity were as sedulously-
cultivated as the supernatural religions are,
... all who had received the customary
amount of moral cultivation would up to the
hour of death live ideally in the life of those
who are to follow them." What is the Re-
ligion of Humanity? How can there be a
religion without a God ? How can we wor-
ship a generalization which cannot hear prayer
or hymn, which is not even complete, since the
history of man is unfinished, and of which, to
enhance the anomaly, the worshipper himself
is a part ? Is the religion of Humanity any-
thing more than a fervid philanthropy which
must probably be confined to a few choice
spirits and, so far as it involves self-sacri-
fice, is not likely to be increased by the con-
viction that the philanthropist, in giving up
present good, gives up all ? What again is
ideal life but unreal life ? What is unreal
life but death? To Mill it appears probable
that after a length of time different in dif-
ferent persons they would have had enough
of existence and would gladly lie down to
take their eternal rest. Death is not rest :
122 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
it is destruction. When we lay ourselves
down to rest it is with the prospect of wak-
ing again refreshed and invigorated to new
life. A Greek poet spoke to the heart when
he tearfully contrasted the lot of man with
that of the flowers of the field, which renew
their growth at the return of spring, while
man with all his bravery and wisdom, once
laid in his dark and narrow bed, sleeps a sleep
which knows no waking.
Yet it is not the extinction of bravery and
wisdom that most moves our pity for ourselves.
This the next generation may repair. The
torch of science is handed on, and the discovery
half made by one man of science is completed,
when he is gone, by a successor. It is the
perpetual slaughter of affection that touches us
most, and that, we should think, would most
touch the Power in whose hands we are, if in
its nature there is any affinity to mortal love.
Affection at all events, without the survival of
the personalities, must die for ever.
The mere existence of a desire in man to
prolong his being, even if it were universal,
can afford little assurance that the desire will
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 123
be fulfilled. Of desires that will never be
fulfilled man's whole estate is lamentably full.
If to each of us his own little being is inex-
pressibly dear, so is its own little being to the
insect, which nevertheless is crushed without
remorse and without hope of a future existence.
It is sad that man should perish, and
perish just when he has reached his prime.
This seems like cruel wastefulness in nature.
But is not nature full of waste ? Butler rather
philosophically finds an analogy to the waste
of souls in the waste of seeds. He might have
found one in the destruction of geological
races, in the redundancy of animal life, which
involves elimination by wholesale slaughter, in
the multitude of children brought into the
world only to die. The deaths of children, of
which a large number appear inevitable, seem
to present an insurmountable stumbling-block
to any optimism which holds that nature can
never be guilty of waste, even in regard to the
highest of her works. Waste there evidently
is in nature both animate and inanimate, and
to an enormous extent if our intelligence tells
us true. The earth is full of waste places as
124 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
well as of blind agencies of destruction, such
as earthquakes, volcanic fires, and floods, while
her satellite appears to be nothing but waste.
Can we rest on the presumption that for all
suffering, at least for all unmerited suffering,
here, supreme justice must have provided com-
pensation hereafter? Is there not an infinity
of suffering among animals ? Are not many of
them by the very constitution of nature doomed
as the prey of other animals to suffer agonies
of fear and at last a painful death ? Are not
others fated to be tortured by parasites ? Yet
where will be their compensation ? Where will
be the compensation of the hapless dog which
writhes beneath the knife of the vivisector, and
which not only is innocent but is an involun-
tary benefactor of humanity ?
That a survey of nature drives us to one of
two conclusions, either to the conclusion that
Benevolence is not omnipotent or to the con-
clusion that Omnipotence is not, in our accepta-
tion of the term, purely benevolent, has been
proved with a superfluity of logic. What may
be behind the veil we cannot tell. But in that
which is manifested to us there seems to be
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 125
nothing that can warrant us in looking for
immortality as the certain gift of unlimited
benevolence invested with unlimited power.
What lies beyond that which is manifested
to us is the region not of demonstration but
of hope. _
Yet man shrinks from annihilation. It he
were certified of it, in spite of all that science
or criticism has done to prepare him for disen-
chantment, and notwithstanding the soothing
talk of philosophers about "eternal rest," his
being would receive a great shock. A fear-
ful light would be thrown on the misery and
degradation of which the world is full, has
always been full, and is likely long to remain
full. A fearful light would be thrown on all
the horrors of history. The sufferers of the
past at all events derived no comfort amidst
famine, plague, massacre, and torture, from
these theories of an "ideal life," of a "Reli-
gion of Humanity," and of a "posthumous
and subjective existence in the progress of
the species." A selfish tyrant like Louis XIV.
would on this supposition, at least while his
fortune lasted, have been of all men the
126 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
happiest, while the victims of his selfish ambi-
tion or rapine, slaughtered in his profligate
wars, perishing of hunger through his extrava-
gance, or worked to death as slaves in his
galleys, would have been of all men the most
miserable.
Is there any voice in our nature which dis-
tinctly tells us that death is not the end ? If
there is, there seems to be no reason why we
should not listen to it, even though its message
may be incapable of verification such as in
regard to a material hypothesis is required by
physical science. That the intelligence of our
five senses, of which science is the systematized
record, is exhaustive, we have, as was before
said, no apparent ground for assuming; the
probability seems to be the other way ; it
seems likely that our senses, mere nerves even
if completely evolved, are imperfect monitors,
and that we may be living in a universe of
which we really know as little as the mole,
which no doubt seems to itself to perceive
everything that is perceptible, knows of the
world of sight. Now, there does seem to be
a voice in every man which, if he will listen to
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 127
it, tells him that his account is not closed at
death. The good man, however unfortunate
he may have been, and even though he may
not have found integrity profitable, feels at the
end of life a satisfaction in his past and an
assurance that in the sum of things he will find
that he has chosen aright. The most obdu-
rately wicked man, however his wickedness may
have prospered, will probably wish when he
comes to die that he had lived the life of the
righteous. It may be possible to explain the
sanctions or warnings of conscience generally
as the influence of human opinion reflected in
the individual mind, transmitted perhaps by
inheritance and accumulated in transmission.
But such an explanation will hardly cover the
case of death-bed self -approbation or remorse.
There seems to be no reason why we should
not trust the normal indications of our moral
nature as well as the normal indications of our
bodily sense ; and against the belief that the
greatest benefactors and the greatest enemies
of mankind rot at last undistinguished in the
same grave our moral nature vehemently
rebels.
128 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
This at all events is certain : if death, is
to end all alike for the righteous and for the
unrighteous, for those who have been blessings
and for those who have been curses to their
kind, the Power which rules the universe can-
not be just in any sense of the word which
we can understand.
Is there anything which appears to transcend
the conditions of man's present existence, to
be likely to survive and be carried over to a
larger sphere of being ? This seems to be the
practical question if the subject is to be re-
garded from the strictly rational point of view.
Character is no doubt formed by action on a
basis of natural tendency, under the moulding
environment of circumstance ; nor can it be
affirmed that there is anything in moral action
not dictated by the present requirements of
our state as domestic and social beings, having
relations with others, as well as being under
the necessity of caring for ourselves. Yet,
while formed and manifested by acting in
conformity with the rules of our present life,
character seems when formed to have a value
and a beauty of its own, apart from its use-
IS THE HE ANOTHER LIFE? 129
fulness in current action ; so that we can
contemplate it, mark its improvement or dete-
rioration in ourselves, and make its improve-
ment the object of distinct and conscious
effort. What we call spiritual life seems in
fact to be the cultivation of character carried
on under religious influence by a sort of inner
self. It is conceivable that good and beauti-
ful character may be prized by the Soul of
the Universe, if the universe has a soul, as
capable of union with itself, and that it may
thus transcend the limits of our being here.
If this is but a hint, on a question at once so
dark and of such overwhelming importance,
we may gladly welcome the faintest gleam
of light.
At the same time, sa far as we can discern,
character can be formed only by effort, which
implies something against which to strive;
so that without evil, or what appears to us
evil, character could not be formed. The ex-
istence of evil in fact, so far as we can see, is
the necessary condition of active life. For
aught we know, effort, or something which we
can only describe as effort, not fiat or mere
130 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
evolution, may be the real law of the universe.
It is true that the immortality to which
any suggestion of this kind points would be
of the conditional kind, since good character
only could have a life-giving affinity to the
power of good.
To all the questionings about the origin of
evil, which the writer of Genesis answered
by the story of the Forbidden Fruit, our
answer must be that what we call evil is a
part of the constitution of the universe.
Supposing all proofs of personal immor-
tality failed us, we should have to fall back
upon the Stoic idea of reabsorption in the
universe and union with its workings and
destinies, whatever they may be. If con-
sciousness and affection are lost, pain, suf-
fering, and unfulfilled desire at all events
will be no more.
All arguments of this kind of course have
relation to the natural aspect of things apart
from revelation. He who, with Dr. Sal-
mond, believes that he has a divine revela-
tion in the Gospel, and a pledge of immor-
tality in union with Christ, can stand in no
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 131
need of further assurance otherwise than in
the way of corroboration. He discusses the
natural evidences, like Butler, with revelation
in reserve.
There are those who think they display
their good sense in bidding us give up these
speculations, which, they tell us, are beyond
the range of our understandings, and culti-
vate our pleasure and happiness in the present
world. One element of our pleasure and
happiness is the gratification of curiosity on
the highest subjects. Our curiosity has been
or is being gratified as to the origin of our
species, and surely the destiny of our species
is a question not less interesting even to sci-
ence, while it is inevitably set on foot by the
other. However, pleasure and happiness are
different things. Pleasure may be felt by the
condemned convict in eating his last meal.
But happiness seems to imply the sense of
security and permanence. It can hardly be
predicated of a being whose life is never safe
and at most endures but for an hour.
The estate of man upon this earth of
ours may in course of time be vastly improved.
132 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE?
So much seems to be promised by the recent
achievements of science, whose advance is in
geometrical progression, each discovery giv-
ing birth to several more. Increase of health
and extension of life by sanitary, dietetic, and
gymnastic improvement ; increase of wealth
by invention, and of leisure by the substitu-
tion of machinery for labour ; more equal dis-
tribution of wealth, with its comforts and
refinements; diffusion of knowledge; political
improvement; elevation of the domestic affec-
tions and social sentiments ; unification of
mankind, and elimination of war through
ascendency of reason over passion, — all these
things may be carried to an indefinite extent,
and may produce what in comparison with the
present estate of man would be a terrestrial
paradise. Selection and the merciless struggle
for existence may be in some measure super-
seded by selection of a more scientific and
merciful kind. Death may be deprived at
all events of its pangs. On the other hand,
the horizon does not appear to be clear
of cloud. The pressure of population is
a danger which the anti-Malthusian can no
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 133
longer set at naught, and to check which it
is certain that Providence will not interpose.
The tendency of the factory with its increas-
ing division of labour has not hitherto been
to make industrial life less monotonous or
more cheerful. Frost, heat, storm, drought,
and earthquake, human progress can hardly
abate. Art and poetry do not seem likely to
advance with the ascendency of severe science.
There is some truth in the saying of the poet
that a glory has passed away from the earth.
However, let our fancy suppose the most
chimerical of Utopias realized in a com-
monwealth of man. Mortal life prolonged to
any conceivable extent is but a span. Still
over every festal board in the community of
terrestrial bliss will be cast the shadow of
approaching death; and the sweeter life be-
comes, the more bitter death will be. The
more bitter it will be at least to the ordinary
man, and the number of philosophers like
John Stuart Mill is small.
THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN
CHRISTIANITY
THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN
CHRISTIANITY
The effect produced by the teaching of
Jesus and his disciples is, beyond question,
the most momentous fact in history. If cir-
cumstances, such as the fusion of races under
the Roman Empire and the distress attend-
ant on the decline of the Empire concurred,
Christianity was the motive power. The con-
version of Saul marks the greatness of the
moral change. It is the proclamation of a
new ideal of human brotherhood and purity
of life. Here, if at any point in history, we
may believe that the Spirit of the World, if
the world has a spirit, was at work. If evil
to a terrible extent as well as good has appar-
ently flowed from the Gospel; if Christianity
has given birth to priestcraft, intolerance,
persecution, and religious war, as well as to
137
138 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
some perversions of morality, it is because
the miraculous elements, and the circle of
ecclesiastical dogma which under the theo-
sophic influences of the succeeding age formed
itself around them, have been allowed to
overlay and obscure the character and teach-
ing of Jesus of Nazareth.
The author of Supernatural Religion^ after
demolishing, as he conceives, the authority of
the ecclesiastical canon, himself says of the
ethical system of Christianity: —
"It must be admitted that Christian ethics
were not in their details either new or origi-
nal. The precepts which distinguish the
system may be found separately in early
religions, in ancient philosophies, and in the
utterances of the great poets and seers of
Israel. The teaching of Jesus, however, car-
ried morality to the sublimest point attained
or even attainable by humanity. The influence
of his spiritual religion has been rendered
doubly great by the unparalleled purity and
elevation of his own character. Surpassing
in his sublime simplicity and earnestness the
moral grandeur of ^^^akya-mouni, and putting
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 139
to the blush the sometimes sullied, though
generally admirable, teaching of Socrates and
Plato, and the whole round of Greek philoso-
phers, he presented the rare spectacle of a
life, so far as we can estimate it, uniformly
noble and consistent with his own lofty prin-
ciples, so that the ' imitation of Christ ' has
■become almost the final word in the preach-
ing of his religion, and must continue to be
one of the most powerful elements of its
permanence. His system might not be new,
but it was in a high sense the perfect devel-
opment of natural morality, and it was final
in this respect amongst others, that, super-
seding codes of law and elaborate rules of
life, it confined itself to two fundamental
principles: love to God and love to man.
Whilst all previous systems had merely sought
to purify the stream, it demanded the purifi-
cation of the fountain. It placed the evil
thought on a par with the evil action. Such
morality, based upon the intelligent and ear-
nest acceptance of divine law, and perfect
recognition of the brotherhood of man, is the
highest conceivable by humanity, and although
140 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
its power and influence must augment with
the increase of enlightenment, it is itself be-
yond development, consisting as it does of
principles unlimited in their range and in-
exhaustible in their application. Its perfect
realization is that true spiritual Nirvana which
(^hakya-mouni has clearly conceived, and ob-
scured with Oriental mysticism: extinction
of rebellious personal opposition to divine
order, and the attainment of perfect harmony
with the will of God."i
Of the four religions which have been styled
universal, Christianity alone is universal in
fact. Christianity alone preaches its Gospel
to the whole world. A Buddhist element has
recently found its way into a certain school
of European philosophy, but not through Bud-
dhist preaching or under a Buddhist form.
Mahometanism and Buddhism are something
more than local or tribal, yet less than uni-
versal. Mahometanism is military, as its
Koran avows. In conquest it lives, with con-
quest it decays; it also practically belongs
to the despotic, polygamic, and slave-owning
1 Vol. II., pp. 487-8.
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 141
East. It has never been the religion of a
Western race, or of a free and industrial com-
munity. By arms it has been propagated, or
by local influence and contagion, not by mis-
sions. Buddhism, if it is really a religion
and not rather a quietist philosophy engen-
dered of languor and suffering, is partly
a religion of climate and of race; of its
boasted myriads the majority, the Chinese,
retain little more than a tincture of Buddha,
while all are enclosed within a ring-fence in
a particular quarter of the globe. Its Euro-
pean offspring is a philosophy of despair.
Judaism, after its rejection of Christianity,
itself fell back into a tribalism, which is of
all tribalisms morally the most anti-social,
since it is not primitive and natural but self-
enforced and artificially maintained in the face
of humanity; while the proselytism which was
rife when the philosophic Judaism of Philo was
verging on universality has since that epoch
ceased. It is to be noted also that Christianity
is almost alone in its display of recuperative
power. No parallel to the revivals of Wycliff,
Luther, Calvin, and Wesley is presented by any
142 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IX CHRISTIANITY
other religion. The Wahabi movement will
hardly be thought as a spiritual revival to
deserve that rank.
Moral civilization and sustained progress
have been thus far limited to Christendom.
So have distinct and effective ideas of human
brotherhood, which implies a common frater-
nity, and of the service of humanity. In Bud-
dhism, if they have been distinct, they cannot
be said to have been equally effective. They
seem to be closely connected with the Christian
idea of the Church, with its struggle for the
emancipation of the world from the powers
of evil and with its hope of final victory.
Much, therefore, of Avhat we have cherished
would still stand even if our evidence for the
miracles should fall.
We need hardly expend thought on the
discussion as to the possibility of believing
in miracles. The very term supposes the
existence of a power above nature, able to
reveal itself by a suspension of nature's ordi-
nary course and willing so to reveal itself for
the salvation of mankind. There is nothing
apparently repugnant to reason in such a sup-
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 143
position. The existence of the power is even
implied in the phrase " laws of nature " con-
stantly used by science; for wherever there
is a law there must be a law-giver, and the
law-giver must be presumed capable of sus-
pending the operation of law. This Hume
himself would hardly have denied. In fact,
the metaphysical argument against mira-
cles comes, as has been said before, pretty
much to this, that a miracle cannot take
place, because if it did it would be a miracle.
We could not help believing our own senses
if we actually saw a man raised from the
dead. There is no reason why we should not
believe the testimony of other people, pro-
vided that they were eye-witnesses, that they
were competent in character and in intelli-
gence, and that their testimony had been
submitted to impartial and thorough investi-
gation. Suppose a hundred men of known
character, judgment, and scientific attain-
ments were to unite in declaring that they
had seen a blind man restored to sight or a
man raised from the dead in circumstances
precluding the possibility of fraud or illusion,
144 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
should we, as Hume says, at once reject their
testimony ? On what ground ? On the ground
of universal experience? Experience, being
only previous uniformity, is broken by a well-
attested exception. We assume an adequate
object, such as the revelation to man of vital
truth undiscoverable by his own intellect
would be. It is simply a question of evi-
dence. All will allow that we require either
the evidence of our own senses or an extraor-
dinary amount of unexceptionable testimony
to warrant us in accepting a miracle.
That the Supreme Being, supposing that
he intended to reveal himself by miracle for
the salvation of mankind, and required belief
in the miracle as the condition of our salva-
tion, would provide us with conclusive evi-
dence, may surely be assumed. A miracle is
an appeal to our reason through our senses,
and to make it valid either the evidence of
our own senses, or evidence equivalent to
that of our own senses, is required. To call
upon us to believe without sufficient evidence
would be to put an end to belief itself in
any rational sense of the term. Theologians
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 145
always take advantage of proof so far as it
is forthcoming. Faith, to which they have
appealed in defect of proof, is a belief, not
in things unproved, but in things unseen.
Miracles may be accepted on the evidence of
a church assumed to be itself divine; they
may even be accepted on the supposed evi-
dence of a spiritual sense illuminated by
divine influence; but if we are to accept
them on the evidence of reason, there must
be satisfactory eye-witnesses. What ocular
testimony do we possess?
In the fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle
to the Corinthians St. Paul says that the
risen Christ had appeared to him. He says
simply appeared (w^^?;). He gives no par-
ticulars nor anything which can enable us to
judge whether the apparition was certainly
real, or whether it may have been the product
of ecstatic imagination, like the apparition
seen by Colonel Gardiner or those which made
Coleridge say that he did not believe in
ghosts because he had seen too many of them.
Three detailed accounts of the vision are
given in the Acts, but not one of them can
146 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
be traced to St. Paul, though two of them
are put into his mouth; and they are at vari-
ance with each other, one (Acts ix. 7) say-
ing that St. Paul's fellow-travellers heard
the voice but saw no man; another (Acts
xxii. 9) saying that they saw the light but
did not hear the voice; while the utterances
of the voice itself differ widely in the three
passages (compare Acts ix. 4-7, with Acts
xxii. 7, 8, and more especially with Acts
xxvi. 14-19), though it would seem that the
words ought to have made an indelible im-
pression; not to mention that "it is hard for
thee to kick against the goad" is a strange
phrase to be used by a voice from heaven.
In the same passage of the first Epistle to
the Corinthians St. Paul states "that Christ
died for our sins according to the Scriptures ;
that he was buried; that he had been raised
on the third day according to the Scriptures ;
that he had appeared unto Cephas, then to the
twelve; that he had afterwards appeared to
about five hundred brethren at once, of whom
the greater part remained till that time, but
some were fallen asleep; then to James; then
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 147
to all the apostles." It is natural to assume
that St. Paul learned this from Peter and
James, the two apostles whom he saw on his
first visit to Jerusalem after his conversion.
But he does not cite their authority, much
less does he say that he had taken any meas-
ures to sift their evidence. Nor is it likely
that he would have taken such measures,
being, as he was, an ardent proselyte of
three years' standing, and having staked his
spiritual life on the resurrection of Christ.
Here again he uses the expression " appeared "
(w(^^7;), and leaves us once more to speculate
on the effect of enthusiasm in giving birth to
visions and on the contagion of excited im-
agination. He says nothing about the inter-
course of the risen Christ with his Apostles
during the days preceding the Ascension. Nor
does it seem easy to harmonize his story with
that of the Gospels.
Some attestations of miracles given in the
Acts are in the first person, implying that
an eye-witness is speaking. The eye-wit-
ness, however, is anonymous, and we have
no means of testing his trustworthiness. The
148 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
escape of St. Paul at Melita from the sting
of the viper which had come out of the
burning sticks and fastened on his hand,
and his prophetic reliance upon God in the
shipwreck, while they are vividly attested,
can hardly be called miraculous.
In 1 Corinthians xii. 4-11, St. Paul refers
in a general way to the existence of miracu-
lous gifts among members of the Church :
"Now there are diversities of gifts, but
the same Spirit. And there are diversities
of ministrations, and the same Lord. And
there are diversities of workings, but the
same God, who worketh all things in all.
But to each one is given the manifestation
of the Spirit to profit withal. For to one is
given through the Spirit the word of wis-
dom; and to another the word of knowledge,
according to the same Spirit: to another
faith, in the same Spirit; and to another
gifts of healings, in the one Spirit; and to
another workings of miracles; and to another
prophecy; and to another discernings of
spirits: to another divers kinds of tongues;
and to another the interpretation of tongues:
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 149
but all tliese worketh the one and the same
Spirit, dividing to each one severally even as
he will." Gifts of divers kinds of tongues
and of the interpretation of tongues, it will
be observed, are put on a level with the rest,
though St. Paul himself (1 Corinthians xiv.)
treats those gifts as equivocal, and we know
from modern experience that they may be the
offspring of self-delusion; while the account
of the gift of tongues in Acts ii. 8, as that
of speaking divers known languages, is at
variance with the words of St. Paul, who
describes it as that of speaking in a tongue
unknown to all. St. Paul does not testify to
the occurrence of any specific miracle other
than his own vision, nor does he profess to
have performed a specific miracle himself.
His general appeal is not to miracles but to
the divine character and merits of Christ.
In the first Epistle of St. Peter there are
allusions (i. 3 and iii. 18) to the resurrec-
tion of Christ. But they are connected with
an allusion to his preaching "unto the spirits
in prison, which aforetime were disobedient,
when the longsuffering of God waited in
150 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
the days of Noah while the ark was a pre-
paring"; a tradition which implies belief in
the Noachic legend, while its character seems
to militate against the authenticity of the
Epistle as the work of a companion of
Christ, since actual contact with reality
usually sets bounds to imagination. In the
second Epistle of St. Peter there is an allu-
sion to the Transfiguration. But the authen-
ticity of the second Epistle of St. Peter is
strongly impugned and feebly defended.
The testimony comprised in the above pas-
sages is, apparently, the sum-total of the
ocular evidence producible for the miracu-
lous part of Christianity. Besides this there
is nothing but tradition of unknown origin
recorded by unknown writers at a date
uncertain and, for aught that we can tell,
many years after the events. The four
Gospels are anonymous. Two of them, the
second and third, are not even ascribed to
eye-witnesses, while the preface to the third
distinctly implies that it is not the work of
an eye-witness, but of one of a number of
compilers. The first Gospel, if Matthew were
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 151
really its author, would be the work of an
eye-witness. But it seems to be certainly
attested that if Matthew wrote a Gospel at
all it was in Hebrew, whereas the first Gos-
pel is in Greek and is pronounced to be not
even a translation from the Hebrew. In the
fourth Gospel there is an attestation; but it
is anonymous and suspicious, serving rather
to shake than to confirm our belief in apos-
tolic authorship; for why should not the
writer himself have given his name instead
of leaving the authenticity to be attested by
an unknown hand? Of the proof tendered for
the authenticity of this Gospel as the work
of St. John, it may safely be said that it is
not such as would be accepted in the case of
any ordinary work. Of the most recent
experts there is a decided and apparently
growing majority on the other side. The
Apocalypse as well as the Gospel was
ascribed by the Church to St. John, and as
the difference of character and style is such
that the two cannot have been by the same
hand, whatever makes for the authenticity
p| the Appcalypse makes against the authen-
''♦*
152 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
ticity of the Gospel. Nothing can seem more
unlikely than that a Gospel tinctured with
Alexandrian theosophy should be the work of
a simple fisherman of Galilee. Nor is there
any similarity between the character of John
depicted in the first three Gospels and that
with which the fourth Gospel is suffused. The
writer's attitude of aversion towards the Jews
and his references to their laws and customs as
those of another nation are scarcely compatible
with the supposition that he was himself a Jew.
Not one of the four Gospels can be shown
with any certainty to have existed in its
present form till a period had elapsed after
the events fully sufficient, in a totally un-
critical age, for the growth of any amount of
miraculous legend, as the biographies of
numerous saints in the Middle Ages prove.
This much at the very least seems to have
been established by the author of Super-
natural Religion^ whose main argument, as
Matthew Arnold says, is not to be shaken
by pursuing him into minor issues and dis-
crediting him there. It is alleged that the
Gospels must have been written before the
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 153
destruction of Jerusalem, because they do not
refer to that catastrophe but seem to speak
of the "altar" as if it were still existing.
The answer appears to be that if the tradi-
tions worked up by the Evangelists were
anterior to the fall of Jerusalem, there is no
reason why that event should be imported
into them. Legends do not ordinarily men-
tion intervening events. Besides, there does
appear in Matthew xxiv. and Mark xiii. to
be an allusion to the flight of the Christians
in the day of conflict.
In the narratives of the first three Evan-
gelists, there is found a large common ele-
ment. It appears that if the whole text of
the Synoptics is broken up into one hun-
dred and seventy-four sections, fifty-eight of
these are common to all three; twenty-six
besides to Matthew and Mark; seventeen to
Mark and Luke; thirty-two to Matthew and
Luke; leaving only forty-one unshared ele-
ments, of which thirty-one are found in
Luke, seven in Matthew, and three in Mark.^
1 Martineau, Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 184. See
also the following pages.
154 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
This similarity in the selection of a limited
portion of the Life, combined with the actual
identity of language in so many passages, has
been justly thought to preclude the hypothesis
of independent authorship and to suggest com-
pilation on a common basis. There must on
that supposition have been an interval of time
between the events and the compilation during
which the common basis was formed.
It is surely incredible that divine Provi-
dence, intending to consign facts on the
knowledge of which the salvation of man
depended to particular writings, should not
have placed the authorship and date of those
writings beyond a doubt.
Not one of the four Evangelists claims
inspiration. The author of the third Gospel
seems distinctly to renounce it, putting his
narrative on a level with a number of others,
over which he asserts his superiority, if at
all, only in carefulness of investigation. The
Church, however, has treated all four Gospels
as equally inspired. Papias on the other hand,
in the middle of the second century, seems to
recognize no Gospel as inspired, holding that
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 155
nothing derived from books was so profitable
as the living voice of tradition.
There would be a natural and almost over-
whelming temptation to ascribe an anony-
mous and popular history of Christ to one of
the apostles; and this would be done in an
uncritical age without any thought of fraud.
It is true that we accept without question
the works of Tacitus and other ancient his-
torians, though anonymous, as those of their
reputed authors. But in these cases there
was no temptation to false ascription, nor
does it greatly signify who wrote the his-
tory, the facts neither requiring an extraor-
dinary amount of evidence, nor being vital to
the salvation of mankind.
Of some of the miraculous parts of the
Gospel, such, for instance, as the Temptation
in the Wilderness, and the Agony in the
Garden, with the descent of the angel, there
could be no eye-witnesses. Of the Annuncia-
tion and the Immaculate Conception the only
possible witness tells us nothing. It is hard
indeed to see how we could have eye-wit-
nesses to anything which happened before
156 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
the calling of the apostles. Who can have
reported to the Evangelist the canticles of
Mary, Zacharias, and Simeon? Here surely
we are dealing with legend and poetry, not
with historic fact.
Between the narratives of the different
Gospels there are discrepancies which baffle
the harmonists. Between the narratives of
the Resurrection and the events which follow
there are discrepancies which drive the har-
monists to despair. There are contradictions
as to the names of the apostles, the behav-
iour of the two thieves at the Crucifixion,
the attendance at the cross. There is a con-
tradiction with regard to the miracle at
Gadara, one Gospel giving a single demo-
niac, the other a pair. Three Gospels treat
Galilee, the fourth Judea, as the chief centre
of the ministry. One Gospel gives, another
omits, such incidents as the Annunciation,
the Adoration of the Magi, the Temptation,
the Transfiguration, the raising of Lazarus,
and the conversation with the woman of
Samaria; while the suggestion that the nar-
ratives were intended to supplement each
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 157
other is gratuitous in itself, and is repelled
by the existence of a large common element
in the first three. But the most notable
discrepancy of all perhaps is that respecting
the day of the Crucifixion, and the character
of the Last Supper. The first three Gospels
make Christ eat the Passover with his dis-
ciples and suffer on the day following; the
fourth puts the Crucifixion on the day of
the Preparation for the Passover, suggesting
that Christ was the Paschal Lamb sacrificed
for the sins of the world. In the first three
Gospels the Last Supper plainly is the Pass-
over; in the fourth it as plainly is not. To
force the two accounts into agreement des-
perate expedients, such as the supposition
of a religious meal, not identical with the
Passover but identical with the Last Supper,
have been tried. But God would scarcely
have left inspired narratives of an event on
which human salvation was to depend to be
reconciled by extreme expedients invented
eighteen centuries afterwards by learned and
ingenious minds. Unless the two accounts
can be reconciled, it is obvious that the
158 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IX CHRISTIANITY
author of one of them can have been no eye-
witness nor even well-informed.
It is idle to contend that such discrepan-
cies are of a minor kind and the ordinary-
variations of human testimony, even on the
strange supposition that the Holy Spirit
would either lapse into the infirmities of
human testimony or simulate them in dic-
tating the Gospel narrative. They are such
as would certainly invalidate human testi-
mony to any extraordinary event.
Between the general representation of
Christ's character and teaching in the first
three Gospels and that in the fourth, there
is marked divergence. The teaching in the
first three is generally ethical, in the fourth
it is theological. The character of Christ in
the first is that of a divine teacher; in the
fourth it is that of the second Person in the
Trinity and the Logos. The fourth Gos-
pel has, indeed, in modern times been pre-
ferred to the other three on account of its
specially theological character and its spir-
itual elevation. When we find a similar
divergence between the Xenophontic and the
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 159
Platonic Socrates, we conclude that the Pla-
tonic Socrates is largely the creation of Plato.
Testimony is plainly invalidated by the ascen-
dency of imagination.
Sufficient attention seems hardly to have
been paid to the adverse weight of negative
evidence. A teacher who has been drawing
all eyes upon him by his words and by a course
of stupendous miracles, culminating in the
raising from the dead of a man who had been
four days in the grave, enters Jerusalem amidst
the acclamations of a vast concourse of people.
He is brought before the Sanhedrim and after-
wards tried in the most public manner before
the Roman governor. The governor's wife is
warned about him in a dream. He is crucified,
and when he expires miraculous darkness covers
the earth for three hours, the earth quakes, the
veil of the temple is rent in twain from the
top to the bottom, the tombs are opened, and
bodies of the saints that slept come forth
out of the grave, enter into the holy city,
and appear to many. The Roman centurion
and the watch are impressed, and say that
this truly was the Son of God. But other-
160 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
wise no impression is made, no notice of
these tremendous events seems to be taken,
no trace of them is left in general history, ^
no one apparently is converted, not even
Saul. The Jews, of whose acts this was an
overwhelming condemnation, are so little
impressed that they think only of bribing the
watch to confess that the body of Jesus had
been stolen from the tomb.
We cannot pick and choose. The evidence
upon which the miraculous darkness and the
apparitions of the dead rest is the same as
that upon which all the other miracles rest,
and must be accepted or rejected in all the
cases alike.
The Acts, like the Gospels, is anonymous,
and if its author is identical with the author
of the third Gospel, this shows that he
was not an eye-witness of the Resurrection.
An examination of its internal difficulties
1 Gibbon, who has not failed to make the point, though
he has hardly pushed the argument home, observes that the
preternatural darkness happened in the time of Pliny, the
naturalist, and of Seneca, who wrote a collection of natural
facts in seven books, and is not mentioned by either of them.
Pliny, however, would be a boy at that date.
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 161
would be beside our present purpose, which is
to ascertain the amount and value of the ocular
testimony to the miracles. It seems to be ad-
mitted that there is no positive and unequiv-
ocal evidence of the existence of this book
till towards the end of the second century.
Is it conceivable that Providence would
allow vital truth, or anything essential to
our belief in vital truth, to be stamped with
the mark of falsehood? The demoniac mira-
cles are clearly stamped with the mark of
Jewish superstition. To the imagination of
the Jews at this period, spirits good and evil
were everywhere present. They were with
you in the lecture-room; they were with
you in every function of life. From the
fourth Gospel demoniac miracles are absent,
not because that Gospel is supplementary, a
supposition for which, as was before said,
there is no sort of colour, but because the
first three Gospels were written for Jewish
readers to whom demoniac miracles were con-
genial, while the fourth Gospel was written
for an intellectual circle to which they were
not congenial, and perhaps at a later day.
162 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
According to Mark, Jesus casts a legion
of devils out of a man into a herd of two
thousand swine, which forthwith rush down
into the sea and are drowned. The comment
of an orthodox writer of great eminence upon
this astounding and repellent miracle is
this: "That the demoniac was healed —
that in the terrible final paroxysm which
usually accompanied the deliverance from
this strange and awful malady, a herd of
swine was in some way affected with such
wild terror as to rush headlong in large
numbers over a steep hillside into the waters
of the lake — and that, in the minds of all
who were present, including that of the suf-
ferer himself, this precipitate rushing of the
swine was connected with the man's release
from his demoniac thraldom — thus much is
clear. "1 Such attempts to minimize the
miracles or reduce them within the compass
of possible belief are common in writings
of liberal theologians, especially of Germans.
In the miracle of the conversion of water
into wine at Cana, Olshausen would have us
1 The Life of Christ, by Frederic W. Farrar, I., 337.
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 163
suppose that we have only an accelerated
operation of nature; Neander, that the water
was magnetized; Lange, that the guests were
in a state of supernatural exaltation. With
regard to the acceleration hypothesis, a criti-
cal physicist has remarked that nature alone,
whatever time you give her, will never make
thirty imperial gallons of wine without at
least ten pounds of carbon.
What is hard to believe in the miracle of
Bethesda, the liberal theologian escapes by
remarking that there is no indication in the
narrative that any one who used the water
was at once or miraculously healed; that the
repeated use of an intermittent and gaseous
spring, a character which more than one of
the springs about Jerusalem continue to bear
to the present day, was, doubtless, likely to
produce most beneficial results. He further
suggests that it was as much the man's will
that was paralyzed as his limbs. Of the troub-
ling of the water by the angel, apologists are
glad to be rid by dismissing it as a popular
legend, interpolated into the text of St. John.
But so long as anytjiing miraculous is left the
164 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
difficulty of proof remains; while if nothing
miraculous is left there is an end of this dis-
cussion. Nor, it must be repeated, can we
pick and choose among the miracles, as some
are evidently inclined to do. The evidence
for the miracle of the demoniac and the swine
is just the same as that for any other miracle.
All rest upon the same testimony and must
stand or fall together.
Jewish belief both in angels and devils is
entwined with the history of the first three
Gospels; the archangel Gabriel, with a He-
brew name, announces the birth of Christ;
angels proclaim it to the shepherds; angels
appear again at the tomb of Christ; Satan
comes in person to tempt Christ in the wil-
derness. There are angels in the fourth
Gospel, but there is no personal Satan.
From the preface to the third Gospel it
appears that many had drawn up narratives
concerning the life of Christ. Upon what
principle the four were selected by the
Church as inspired and authoritative we can-
not tell. Irenaeus said that as there were
four quarters of the world and four chief
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 165
winds, the Gospels, which were to be coex-
tensive with the world and to be the breath
of life to its inhabitants, must be four. Be-
sides, the Gospel was given by him who sits
above the fourfold cherubim, four was the
number of the Beasts, and four were God's
covenants through Adam, Noah, Moses, and
Christ. It is probable that these four narra-
tives survived by their intrinsic merits. But
for their authenticity little security can be
found in the critical faculty or discernment
of the patristic age.
Miraculous Christianity involves anti-sci-
entific ideas of the world. It assumes that
the earth is the centre of the universe with
the heaven, which is the abode of the Deity,
stretched above it, and Hades sunk beneath
it. The angels and the mystic dove descend
from the skies, and the risen Christ ascends
to them. When Satan shows Christ all the
kingdoms of the earth from a high mountain,
the writer seems to take the globe for a
plane. The theological geocentricism, which
makes our planet the centre of all interest,
the especial care of the Divinity, and the sole
166 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
field of divine action, appears in the Johan-
nine doctrine of the Trinity. It might be
possible to imagine Deity stooping from a
limited heaven to redeem the inhabitants of
earth. It would have been hardly possible
to imagine a Being who fills eternity and
infinity becoming, for the redemption of one
speck in the universe, an embryo in the
womb of a Jewish maiden. For this stupen-
dous doctrine our principal evidence is the
anonymous work of a mystic writer.
The Incarnation, it will be observed, is
the centre of this whole circle of miracles.
Without it they can be hardly said to have
a purpose or a meaning. But since our rejec-
tion of the authenticity and authority of the
book of Genesis, the purpose and meaning of
the Incarnation itself have been withdrawn.
If there was no Fall of Man, there can be no
need of the Redemption. If there was no
need of the Redemption, there can have been
no motive for the Incarnation. The whole
ecclesiastical scheme of salvation with all its
miraculous appurtenances apparently falls to
the ground* This is a vital point.
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 167
In the story of the Star of the Nativity
primitive astronomy and astrology are involved.
It is useless to attempt scientific explana-
tions, such as a remarkable conjunction of
the planets, or the temporary appearance
and sudden extinction of a star. The Magi,
as astrologers, recognize the star of Christ;
it moves before them as a guide, regardless
of the general march of planets or the sidereal
system, and stops over the cradle in which
the child of destiny lies.
There is one class of the miraculous evi-
dences respecting which we have undoubtedly
the means of forming our own judgment.
We can tell whether there was really a
miraculous fulfilment of Hebrew prophecies
in the history of Jesus. To the alleged
prophecy that Christ should be called a
Nazarene, there is nothing whatsoever corre-
sponding in the Old Testament. Apologists,
after trying such expedients as the identifica-
tion of Nazarene with Nazarite, which even
if it were feasible would help them but
little, Christ having fulfilled none of the
conditions of a Nazarite, are fain to give up
168 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
the problem in despair. But once more it
must be said that we cannot pick and
choose. Our assurance of the miraculous
fulfilment of an Old Testament prophecy in
this and the other cases is the same, while it
is impossible to think that the Holy Spirit
would either purposely misquote or lapse into
involuntary misquotation. In Matthew xxi.
5-7, the supposed fulfilment of the prophecy
is founded upon a literary error into which
a writer acquainted with Hebrew literature
could hardly have fallen. The "ass" and the
"colt, the foal of an ass," are in the Hebrew
not two things but two expressions for the
same thing, and we have before us not only
a misconstruction, but, as it is hardly possible
that Jesus could have ridden at once upon
the ass and upon the foal, a probable adapta-
tion of the history to the fulfilment of the
supposed prophecy. The same may be said
with regard to the alleged fulfilment of the
Scripture in John xix. 24, where the words
of the Psalm, "They parted my garment
among them, and upon my vesture did they
cast lots," are taken as denoting two actions,
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 169
when they are a double expression, after the
manner of Hebrew poetry, for one. "I called
my son out of Egypt," as it stands in Hosea
xi. 1, can by no ingenuity be referred to any-
thing but the Exodus, not to mention the
strong suspicion which here again is raised
of a story framed to correspond with the sup-
posed prophecy. "Behold a virgin shall con-
ceive and bear a son," in Isaiah vii. 14, is
evidently a sign given by the prophet in
relation to a crisis of contemporary history,
and has plainly not the remotest connection
with the immaculate conception of Jesus.
Messianic predictions, such as "The sceptre
shall not depart from Judah nor the ruler's
staff from between his feet until Shiloh come,
and unto him shall the obedience of the
peoples be," not only were not fulfilled but
were contradicted by the history of Jesus,
who was not a temporal ruler or deliverer,
and was therefore not recognized as the Mes-
siah by the Jews. None in short of the
so-called prophecies will be found to be
more than applications, and many of them as
applications are far fetched. This is true
170 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
even of the most remarkable of the number,
the description of the oppressed and sorrow-
ing servant of Jehovah, in Isaiah liii. 3,
the author of which cannot be said to have
distinctly foretold anything in the history
of Jesus, even if we take Jesus to have
been so preeminently a man of sorrows, a
point on which a word will be presently
said. In no single case can Jesus, or
any event of his life, be said to have been
present to the mental eye of the prophet. In
fact, divines of the more rationalistic school
are retiring from the ground of miraculous
prophecy to that of ethical application, a
movement parallel to that which they are
performing in the case of the miracles by
substituting natural causes, as far as they
can, for divine interruption of the course of
nature. But applications, even if they are
apposite, are not prophecies. A similar set
might probably be framed for almost any
marked character of history in a nation pos-
sessed of an ancient literature. On this ques-
tion, as on that of miracles, orthodoxy retreats,
covering its movement with language which.
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 111
while it renounces inspiration, clings with-
out any definite reason to the belief in some-
thing which is not human but divine.
The martyrdoms of the apostles, it has been
said, are testimony of the miracles, since
without the assurance of the miracles the
pains of martyrdom would not have been
faced. This history contradicts. To say noth-
ing of the persecutions endured under Nero
and Diocletian, when belief in miracles still
lived, we have instances in abundance at
the time of the Reformation of martyrdom
undergone for the doctrine of the reformers,
though no miracles were even alleged to have
taken place. Nor are such cases confined to
the Christian pale. The sect of the Babis in
Persia has in recent times undergone the most
cruel persecution, not only without the sup-
port of miracles but for a faith which Chris-
tians pronounce false. Servetus died for
Socinianism, and Giordano Bruno for scep-
ticism. St. Paul endured a life of martyr-
dom, but evidently it was for love of Christ
and for the faith. That Christ had risen was
an essential part of his faith, and it is in this
172 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
aspect, rather than as a confirmatory miracle,
that it presents itself to the mind of Paul.
No man of comprehensive mind, unless it
be Renan in his dealing with the raising of
Lazarus, has taken the miracles for creations
of fraud. They are the offspring of a child-
like fancy in a totally uncritical age. They
are a halo which naturally grew round the
head of the adored Teacher and Founder, as
it grew round the head of every mediaeval
saint. That world teemed with miracle, both
divine and diabolical. Jesus himself is rep-
resented as recognizing miracles of both
kinds. He challenges his opponents to say,
if he by Beelzebub casts out devils, by whom
do their sons cast them out. Instead of a
disposition to criticise, there was a domi-
nant predisposition to accept. If in the
country of Descartes highly educated men
could believe in the miracles wrought at the
tomb of the saintly Deacon Paris, how much
more easily could Galilean peasants, or sim-
ple-minded disciples of whatever race, believe
in the miracles ascribed, perhaps long after
his death, to Jesus? Dr. Arnold asked
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 173
whether it was possible that there should be
myths in the age of Tacitus. The age of
Tacitus it was, but not the country; though
even in the country of Tacitus miraculous
signs attended the births or deaths of Caesars,
and Tacitus himself records miracles reported
to have been performed by Vespasian, in
which, however, nobody believes. The Jews
were further prepared for the acceptance of
fresh miracles by their traditional acceptance
of those of the Old Testament. So devoid
were they of any conception of natural law,
or of anything except a direct action of Deity,
that with them a miracle would hardly be
miraculous.
If we must resipi'n the miracles, ^ the Mes- (T / 7
sianic prophecies with their supposed fulfil-
ment in Christ, and the Trinitarian creed,
what remains to us of the Gospel? There
remain to us the Character, the sayings, and
the parables, which made and have sustained
moral, though not ritualistic, dogmatic, or
persecuting, Christendom. There remain
the supremacy of conscience over law and
the recognition of motive as that which
174 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
determines the quality of action. The
character is only impaired as the model
and guiding star of humanity by supposing
that it was preterhuman. We cannot even
conceive the union of two natures, divine
and human, though we may mechanically
repeat the form of words. The sayings of
Christ would be not less true or applicable
if they had been cast ashore by the tide of
time without anything to designate their
source. The parable of the prodigal son,
that of the labourers in the vineyard, or
that of the Good Samaritan, would touch our
hearts whoever might be deemed their author.
There remains, moreover, the ethical beauty
of the Gospels themselves, unapproachable
after its kind. Their miracles are miracles
of mercy, not of destruction, like many of the
miracles of the Old Testament. When James
and John propose to perform an Old Testa-
ment miracle by commanding fire to come
down from heaven and destroy an inhospita-
ble village, they are rebuked and told they
know not of what manner of spirit they are.
In this sense it may be said that the mira-
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 175
^cles_^onfirm the Gospel and the Gospel con-^
jirms t lxe mi xacle^ The Inquisition, to justify
its existence, could find among Christ's words
none more apposite than "Compel them to
come in," said by the giver of the feast in
the parable. The halo of miracle is worthy
of the figure. If there is a Supreme Being,
and if he is anywhere manifest in human
history, it is here.
A biography of Christ there cannot be.
There are no genuine materials for it, as
Strauss truly says. Four compilations of
legend cannot be pieced together so as to
make the history of a life. No ingenuity
can produce a chronological sequence of
scene such as a biographer requires. The
"Lives," so called, are merely the four Gos-
pels cut into shreds, which are forced into
some sort of order, while, to impart to
the narrative an air of reality, it is pro-
fusely decked out with references to local
scenery, allusions to national customs, and
Hebrew names. Each biographer gives us
a Christ according to his own prepossessions;
Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, or
176 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
Rationalist. The Roman Catholic priest pre-
sents him as a living crucifix ; the New York
minister as a divine preacher. Renan's Life
of Jesus^ though it is exquisite as a work of
literary art, as a biography is worth no more
than the rest. It has no critical basis, and
the facts are arbitrarily selected and arranged
in virtue of a learned insight which Renan
supposes himself to possess. Nothing is
more arbitrary than the selection of the rais-
ing of Lazarus as an example of pious fraud.
Nor does Renan's work escape the idiosyn-
cras}'' of the writer. We find in it a touch
of sentimentality, or even of something ver-
ging on the sensuous, which bespeaks a
Parisian hand.
Did Jesus give himself out or allow his
followers to designate him as the Messiah?
It is impossible to tell. All that we can say
is that his disciples, and not only those
whose traditions are embodied in the first
Gospel, desired to identify him with the hope
of Israel and applied or wrested passages of
the Old Testament to that intent. With
that object evidently were produced, by two
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 111
different hands, the two genealogies, which
hopelessly diverge from each other, while one
of them, by arbitrary erasion, forces the pedi-
gree into three mystic sections of fourteen
each; a clear proof that it was not taken
from any public record, even if we could
suppose it possible that amid all the convul-
sions of Judea the record of a peasant's
pedigree had been preserved. One of the
genealogies, moreover, includes the mythical
line of patriarchs between Adam and Abra-
ham. The Messiahship of Jesus is a ques-
tion with which we need practically concern
ourselves no more. The Messiah was a
dream of the tribal pride of the Jew, to
which, as to other creations of tribal or
national pride or fancy, we may bid a long
farewell. That it should be necessary for
the redeemer of the Jewish race to trace his
pedigree to a hero so dear to the national
heart, though morally so questionable, as
David, was natural enough; but who can
believe that this was necessary for the Re-
deemer of mankind? It is rather lamentable
to think how much study and thought have
178 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
been wasted in the attempt to establish the
fulfilment of a Hebrew vision, devoid of
importance or interest for the rest of the
human race.
What was the relation of Christ to Juda-
ism ? His culture manifestly was Jewish ; he
accepted the sacred books of the nation,
treating the book of Daniel as authentic and
the story of Jonah as history ; he taught in
the synagogues; he fulfilled all righteousness
by his observance of the ceremonial law. He
was a reformer and a regenerator, not a revo-
lutionist. It can hardly be doubted that he
was of pure Jewish race, though the popula-
tion of Galilee was very mixed and was, on
that account, despised by the blue blood of
Jerusalem, while the fabrication of genealo-
gies seems rather to indicate some misgivings
on this point. Here, again, we are perplexed
by the discrepancies among the authorities,
if authorities they can be called. In some
places Christ is made to represent himself as
being sent only to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel ; as coming not to destroy the
law, but to fulfil it and to establish every
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 179
jot and tittle of it for ever; as regarding all
outside the pale of Judaism in the light of
dogs, worthy only to eat of the crumbs
under the Judaic table; as forbidding his
apostles to enter any city of the Gentiles or
Samaritans. Elsewhere he selects a Samaritan
in contrast to the self-righteous Jew as a
type of charity, praises the faith of a hea-
then soldier as greater than any found in
Israel, and chooses the Samaritan woman as
the recipient of his highest and most memor-
able utterance concerning the nature of reli-
gion, while the parables of the prodigal
son and the labourers in the vineyard seem
also symbolically to suggest the conversion
and admission of the Gentiles. The writer
of the first Gospel evidently draws one way;
the writer of the fourth, who betrays a posi-
tive antipathy to the Jews, the other. What
is certain is that practically Jesus put con-
science above the law, even above the law of
the Decalogue; and in place of the tribal
and half-local religion of the Jew introduced
the religion of humanity. For this Judaism
rejected him, crucified him, and itself, sink-
180 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
ing deeper than ever into its tribalism and
legalism, remained the enemy of his reli-
gion and of his brotherhood of man. In the
Pauline Epistles we see Christianity detach-
ing itself by a painful effort from Judaism;
and we willingly believe that Paul is right
in holding that the genuine tradition of
Jesus is on the side of emancipation.
Did Jesus regard himself or allow himself
to be regarded as God? Unitarians quote
strong texts to the contrary. The Trinita-
rians get their texts chiefly from the fourth
Gospel, which is manifestly imbued with the
peculiar views of its writer and his circle.
In fact, it may be said to be one note of
the comparatively late composition of that
Gospel, that time must have elapsed sufficient
for the Teacher of Galilee to become, first
divine, and then the Second Person of the
Trinity and the Alexandrian Logos. It
seems unlikely that even in those days of
theosophic reverie the author of the sayings
and the parables should ever have been led
by spiritual exaltation or by the adoring love
of his disciples to form and promulgate such
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 181
a conception of himself. At any rate, we have
done with the Alexandrian Logos, as well as
with the paradoxes of the Athanasian Creed.
We have done, too, for ever with the mixt-
ure of Rabbinism and Alexandrian theoso-
phy, with which St. Paul has been accused
of overlaying the Christian faith. We may
bid farewell to his doctrine of the Atone-
ment. That doctrine is bound up with the
belief in the fall of Adam, and the fall of
Adam is now abandoned as a fact even by
orthodox theologians, though they would fain
substitute for it some lapse of the human
race from a more perfect state, without any
proof either of the more perfect state or of
the lapse. As was said before, if there was
no Fall, there was no need of an Atonement;
if no need of an Atonement, there was no
need of an Incarnation ; and that whole cycle
of dogma apparently falls to the ground.
In calling himself the Son of Man Jesus
might seem to identify himself with a mystic
figure in Daniel; but the Son of Man is not
the Son of God, nor is it the Son of a Jew;
it is a title of humanity.
182 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
From such ethical limitations and peculi-
arities as cling to the characters and teach-
ing of philosophers of Athens and Roman
Stoics, the character and teaching of Jesus
are essentially free. There is no brand of
nationality or race to interfere with our
acceptance of him as pattern and model of
humanity. His limitations are those of a
peasant of Galilee seeing nothing of modern
and complex civilization. For Jesus politics
had no existence; at least, the only political
relation known to him was that of provincial
subjection to the military empire of Rome,
so that all political questions were perfectly
solved for him when he had said, "Render
unto Csesar the things which are Caesar's,
and unto God the things which are God's."
He saw little of commerce; if he ever
looked on Tyre and Sidon it was from afar;
trade, as it showed itself in the money-
changers and salesmen of the temple, was
revolting to him; from the magnificent
buildings of the capital his simplicity seems
to have recoiled. Art Judea had not, but
to art he would probably have been in-
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 183
different. To his eye the lily of the field
was more beautiful than Solomon in all his
glory, and would have been more beautiful
than the work of Phidias. Wealth ap-
peared to him only in the guise of Dives
with Lazarus lying at his gate, not in its
more beneficent form; and therefore to him
wealth seemed in itself unblest and poverty
in itself blest. His benign influence has
been mainly over the individual heart and
in the simple relations of life. Over poli-
tics, commerce, the great world, and civiliza-
tion generally his influence, notwithstanding
national professions and state churches, has
been far less. The pursuit of wealth has
been eager among the professed disciples of
him who preached the Sermon upon the
Mount, and in the temples of the Prince
of Peace have been hung up the trophies of
war. The morality of civil, commercial, and
social life has, perhaps, rather suffered by
the formal profession of an unattainable
standard, and the world has been more evil
than it might have been if the ideal of good
men had not been withdrawal from an evil
184 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
world. Among the teachings of Jesus re-
corded in the Gospels, learning, literature,
and science have no place. To the mind of
Jesus, had they presented themselves, they
would probably have seemed entirely alien.
The simplicity of the child and the spiritual
insight of poverty were in his eyes superior
to the wisdom of the wise. In this respect
his thoroughgoing disciples have generally
reflected the image of their Master. What
would St. Francis of Assisi have made of
European civilization? Other limitations of
Jesus were his estrangement from domestic
life with its relations, and the curtailment of
his experience by an early death.
To one of low estate in a province
oppressed by foreign rule, full of misery
and leprosy, it might well seem that this
world was evil and the only chance of hap-
piness for man was by escaping from it to a
better. There can be no doubt that the pes-
simist has a right to say that the Gospel is
with him so far as the present world is con-
cerned.
Allowance must be made also for Oriental
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 185
hyperbole. Over-carefulness poisons life;
but if we literally cared not for the things
of to-morrow, we and our families should
starve. The sparrows do not look to Provi-
dence to feed them; they search for food the
livelong day themselves. Forgiveness is the
general principle which even self-interest
prescribes; but if we were to offer the
other cheek to the smiter, the other cheek
would too often be smitten; and if we were
to forgive all wrong-doers until seventy
times seven, wrong would fill the world.
To the brotherhood of men there is a
rational limit. In our relations to each
other, if there is something that is fraternal,
there is something that is not. Competition
and antagonism are normal facts. The prac-
tical truth lies somewhere between the view
of Hobbes and that of the Gospel, though
with a recognition of the Gospel view as the
ideal. Justice, with her scales and her
sword, will keep her place as well as love
or the enthusiasm of humanity. If the
aggressor tries to take away your coat, you
will have, instead of giving him your cloak
186 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
also, to withstand his aggression in the court
of law or by force. It would be bad for him
as well as for you if you did not.
Of the intolerance, persecutions, and reli-
gious wars which have resulted from dog-
matism, on the other hand, the true Jesus is
blameless. If anything like narrowness or
intolerance is thrust upon him by a dogmatic
narrator, his own character and the general
scope of his teaching repel it. His genuine
teaching clearly was ethical and spiritual, not
dogmatic. Nor to him can be fairly ascribed
asceticism, eremitism, the false idea of saint-
ship as seclusion and self-torture, or the
hideous array of hospital pathos embodying
that idea which fills the galleries of mediaeval
art. His ministry commences at a marriage
feast and his enemies reproach him with not
being ascetic. In his character and history
there is no doubt a large element of sorrow,
without which he would not have touched
humanity. Yet we think too much of Jeru-
salem and of the closing scene with its ago-
nies, its horrors, and the circle of dark, even
of dreadful, dogma which has been formed
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 187
around it. We think too little of the preach-
ing of the Word of life, and of the land in
which tlie Word of life was preached. Let
us sometimes draw a veil over the Cross,
banish from our imaginations Jerusalem and
its temple reeking with bloody sacrifice, its
fanatical Judaism, its hypocritical Pharisa-
ism, its throng of bigots yelling for a judi-
cial murder. Let us learn to see the great
Teacher of humanity in the happy days of
his mission, while he gathers round him the
circle of loving disciples and of simple hearts
thirsting for the waters of life, in the vil-
lage synagogue, on the summer hillside or
lake shore, amidst the vines and oleanders
and lilies of Galilee.
MORALITY AND THEISM
MORALITY AND THEISM
Mr. Leslie Stephen, at the conclusion of
his Science of Ethics^ admits, with his usual
candour and courage, that one great difficulty
remains not only unsolved but insoluble.
"There is," he says, "no absolute coinci-
dence between virtue and happiness. I can-
not prove that it is always prudent to act
rightly or that it is always happiest to be
virtuous." In another passage he avows that
in accepting the altruist theory he accepts,
as inseparable from it, the conclusion that
" the path of duty does not coincide with the
path of happiness"; and he compares the
attempt to establish an absolute coincidence
to an attempt to square the circle or dis-
cover perpetual motion. In another passage
he puts the same thing in a concrete form.
"The virtuous men," he says, "may be the
191
192 MORALITY AND THEISM
very salt of the earth, and yet the discharge
of a function socially necessary may involve
their own misery." "A great moral and
religious teacher," he adds, "has often been
a martyr, and we are certainly not entitled
to assume either that he was a fool for his
pains or, on the other hand, that the highest
conceivable degree of virtue can make mar-
tyrdom agreeable." We may doubt, in his
opinion, whether it answers to be a moral
hero. "In a gross society, Avhere the tem-
perate man is an object of ridicule and nec-
essarily cut off from participation in the
ordinary pleasures of life, he may find his
moral squeamishness conducive to misery;
the just and honourable man is made miser-
able in a corrupt society where the social
combinations are simply bands of thieves,
and his high spirit only awakens hatred; and
the benevolent is tortured in proportion to
the strength of his sympathies in a society
where they meet with no return, and where
he has to witness cruelty triumphant and
mercy ridiculed as weakness." So that not
only are men exposed to misery by reason of
MORALITY AND THEISM 193
their superiority, but "every reformer who
breaks with the world, though for the world's
good, must naturally expect much pain and
must be often tempted to think that peace
and harmony are worth buying, even at the
price of condoning evil." "'Be good if you
would be happy ' seems to be the verdict
even of worldly prudence; but it adds, in an
emphatic aside, 'Be not too good.'" Of a
moral hero it is said, that "it may be true
both that a less honourable man would have
had a happier life, and that a temporary fall
below the highest strain of heroism would
have secured for him a greater chance of
happiness." Had he given way, "he might
have made the discovery — not a very rare
one — that remorse is among the passions
most easily lived down." Mr. Stephen fully
recognizes the existence of men "capable of
intense pleasure from purely sensual gratifi-
cation, and incapable of really enjoying any
of the pleasures which imply public spirit,
or private affection, or vivid imagination";
and he confesses that with regard to such
men the moralist has no leverage whatever.
194 MORALITY AND THEISM
The physician has leverage; so has the
policeman; but it is possible, as Mr. Stephen
would probably admit, to indulge not only
covetousness but lust at great cost to others
without injury to your own health, and with-
out falling into the clutches of the law.
The inference from Mr. Stephen's admission
seems to be that duty is a theistic term. The
same may be said of its synonyms, moral
obligation and moral law. We cannot tell
whether they are binding on reason unless
we know whether there is a God or some
superior power to impose the law, bestow the
reward, and enforce the penalty. We may
extend the statement to perfect happiness,
which, as a state distinct from pleasure, seems
to imply a guarantee superior to the accidents,
and a duration uncurtailed by the brevity, of
mortal life.
With every man his own interest must be
paramount, and every man's interest is the
fulfilment of his strongest desires. As a
general rule, our desires, seeing that we are
domestic and social as well as individual,
may lead us to promote the good of the
MORALITY AND THEISM 195
family and of society. But this is not in-
variably the case, and when it is not the
case, supposing that there is no God to fix
his canon against evil-doing, what is there
to withhold a man from gratifying his de-
sires at the expense of society, or to make
his gratification criminal ? Napoleon avowed
that he deliberately excluded from his mind
thoughts about any world but this, and that
had he not done so he could not have achieved
great things. Of the great things which he
did achieve, his agnosticism was unquestionably
a condition. But of the great things which the
Antonines and other Roman Stoics achieved,
the condition was not less unquestionably the
ascendancy of thoughts which Napoleon ex-
cluded. It was not in their case a definite
religious belief, but it was a belief in a power
of righteousness and in an assured reward of
virtue. Observe, too, that Napoleon found it
necessary, in the interest of political and social
order, to restore religion.
"Virtue is the doing good to mankind in
obedience to the will of God and for the
sake of everlasting happiness." So says
196 MORALITY AND THEISM
Paley, speaking with his usual directness.
He omits to note those social and domestic
desires and necessities of our nature which,
in themselves, move us to do good to man-
kind as well for the pleasure of doing good
as for the hope that good will be done to us
in turn. Yet it seems impossible to doubt
that morality, personal and social, but espe-
cially social, has hitherto largely rested, in
ordinary minds, on a foundation of religious
belief, including the belief in another life
and in future rewards and punishments.
That foundation is now manifestly giving
way. Literature teems with the proofs of
this. So does the conversation of the edu-
cated classes. So does even apologetic the-
ology, the attitude of which is generally one
of concession and retreat, while among large
bodies of quick-witted mechanics, even in
England, still more in France and other
countries, scepticism is undisguised and
blunt, in France going the length even of
a comic Life of Christ. It is natural to
fear that unless a substitute for religion
can, within a measurable time, be found, a
MORALITY AND THEISM 197
period of some moral confusion will ensue.
Philosophers, of course, will be kept right,
not only by their philosophy, but by the char-
acter which dedication to philosophy implies.
Nobody expects that they will fall to com-
mitting murder or adultery; although the
writer, as he believes, may himself say that
he Jias witnessed the case of a highly edu-
cated mind to which the leap from theism
to agnosticism proved morally fatal. It is not
likely that there will be any sudden catas-
trophe. Society will not fall to pieces. It
will be held together by the necessity of
labour, of order, of mutual help and forbear-
ance, by the domestic and social affections,
by opinion, by the law and the police, f^ It
has, in fact, been held together, after a cer-
tain fashion, in China by these forces with
little aid from religion. But it does not
follow that, pending the reparation of the
basis, society may not undergo a bad quarter
qf^^an^ hour, especially if, in the absence of
spiritual aims and of any hopes beyond this
world, a passionate thirst for pleasure, and
for the means of obtaining it, should prevail.
198 MORALITY AND THEISM
A moral interregnum of this kind there actu-
ally was between the decline of mediaeval
Catholicism and the installation of Protes-
tantism or reformed Catholicism in its place.
To that interregnum belong the Borgias, the
Visconti, Machiavel, and Catherine de Medi-
cis. The chief of Christendom glories in the
massacre of St. Bartholomew, and even the
court of England thinks so lightly of it as to
continue negotiating with Catherine de Medici
for a marriage between the queen of England
and one of Catherine's sons. The present
vogue of ethical heterodoxy under the guise
of works of fiction, among other things, is
surely a symptom of ethical disintegration.
Benjamin Franklin, describing the effects
of scepticism on himself and young men of
his time, says that with religion morality
gave way at once, even to common honesty
and common decency, and that it was only
after much reflection that he began to sus-
pect that wrong was not wrong because it
was forbidden, but that it was forbidden be-
cause it was wrong. It is true this was in
the eighteenth century, and the same effect
t^
MORALITY AND THEISM 199
would not be produced on a Franklin now.
But the masses are not Franklins. They are
not as capable of reflection now as Franklin
was in his time, and while they are coming
up to his level the world may have that bad
quarter of an hour.
Even in countries where there is no state
church, society is still largely organized in
the form of churches. Philanthropy works
to a great extent through the churches, and
so, in some measure, does education. The
social shock occasioned by the departure of
religion would, therefore, in itself be severe.
It is probably the apprehension of this and
of the social and political consequences of
atheism, not less than the influence of habit
on fashion, that leads some, who themselves
believe no longer, to support the church.
Even pronounced Positivists have been known
to give money for this purpose. There is no
saying, indeed, how much of the apparent
church-going and contribution to church offer-
tories may be merely politic, or how hollow
the crust of profession may be. But taking
the lowest reasonable estimate of religious
200 MORALITY AND THEISM
influence, what a void would the departure
of religion and the closing of the churches
leave in life!
Again, what is to become of the clergy?
Here is a great body of the very flower of our
morality, as well as of our culture, committed
to a calling the existence of which is bound
up, so far as we can see, certainly with
theism, if not with supernatural religion.
Supposing religion to fail, what would the
clergy do? Would they transform themselves
into teachers of ethics and social guides?
Would they starve? Would some of them
be drawn into revolution and thus add to the
seething elements of disturbance? A celibate
priest is well prepared for adventure, and he
may hope, however vainly, by throwing him-
self into a social revolution to found his
authority anew. Clergymen read and think.
Must not the mental state of some of them
already be uneasy? Is not Ritualism itself
in some cases the veil of doubt?
We talk of the moral law, and repeat the
famous saying of Kant that the two things
ihe contemplation of which filled his soul
MORALITY AND THEISM 201
with awe, were the moral law and the starry-
heavens. This implies that the moral law is
one, and that, with the order of the heavens,
it is upheld by a power above us. What
power is there above us if there is no God
or we have no proof of his existence ? What
is the moral law? There are certain rules
of conduct which we must observe in order
to maintain our health, bodily and mental, to
keep our affections pure and warm, and to
enable us to earn our bread. There are other
rules which we must observe in order to
secure our domestic happiness. There are
also rules which we must observe in order
to secure our welfare as members of society,
of the commonwealth, of the race. These
rules play into each other, the preservation
of our health, for example, being essential to
our right temper and effective action in all
the fields; but they are apparently no more
one or capable of being represented as a self-
existing authority transcending all individual
interests, than our care for our own comfort
in travelling is capable of being represented
as one with our necessary respect for the
202 MORALITY AND THEISM
comfort of our fellow-travellers. The rudi-
ments of morality have been shown to exist
in animals, which are as little conscious of
Kant's moral law as they are of the grandeur
which fills his soul with awe when he gazes
on the starry heavens.
Evolution clearly is not moral. There is
nothing moral in the struggle for existence
or in natural selection. This bold evolution-
ists, such as Haeckel, frankly admit. An
organism does not regulate its own stage of
evolution, nor does it select itself or endow
itself with the strength which will enable it
to triumph in the struggle for existence. It
is not answerable for its own propensities,
which may be those of a philanthropist or
those of an assassin; of a human being or of
a tiger. If it survives in the struggle for
existence its survival must be that of the
fittest, and therefore its sufficient justifica-
tion. The ultimate tendency of things may
be against it, as it is against the propensi-
ties of tigers, those of the human tiger per-
haps, as well as those of the tiger of the
jungle. But this does not make it the duty
MORALITY AND THEISM 203
of the offensive organism to cooperate in its
own elimination or to refrain from gratifying
its natural propensities while it exists.
So far as social morality depends on the
sanctity of human life or of humanity gener-
ally, it can hardly fail to be somewhat threat-
ened by evolution, which levels men in point
of origin, and, as some have begun to be-
lieve, in point of destiny with other animals.
A German physiologist of the extreme evo-
lutionary school said to Agassiz that the
kingdom of science would have really come
when you could go out and shoot a man for
the purpose of dissection. "Of course,"
replied Agassiz, "you will take a fine speci-
men, a Goethe or a Von Humboldt." We
have still, no doubt, the same tribal interest
in safeguarding our own species, and this
will lead us to hang the murderer when we
catch him. But the murderer who by his
cunning escapes the gallows, and perhaps
comes into the enjoyment of wealth out of
which the life which he has taken would
have kept him, — why should he feel any
more remorse than he would have felt if he
204 MORALITY AND THEISM
had taken the life of a dog? Let us sup-
pose, for instance, that the life of a child
stands between a needy man and a great
estate; that he puts an end to the child's
life in such a way as to escape detection,
enters into the estate, lives a life of ease
and affluence instead of struggling for bread,
spends his money well and enjoys the good-
will of the people among whom he lives;
why is he to feel remorse, or, if he has a
twinge of it, why is he not to repress it as
he would any other unpleasant emotion or
bodily pain?
We speak of the brotherhood of man as
our great security for mutual benevolence
and our high inducement to virtuous effort.
But is it an absolute certainty that men are
brothers? Has science pronounced decisively
in favour of the unity of the race? Some
men of science certainly have pronounced on
the other side. Again, does not brotherhood
imply a common paternity, and where is the
common paternity unless we have all a father
in God? If that idea is set aside, are we
not as much competitors as brothers?
MORALITY AND THEISM 205
If we make of pleasure our ethical criterion,
how are we to distinguish between one kind
of pleasure and another, between the pleasure
of eating the bread which is honestly earned
and the pleasure of eating the bread which
is stolen? Those who select as an instance
of ethical perfection the reciprocal pleasure
enjoyed by a mother and the child at her
breast, must exclude from their idea of per-
fection anything that we should commonly
call moral, since there is nothing in the
suckling of a human infant more moral than
in the suckling of a calf.
Perfect adaptation, again, would appear
to fail as an ethical criterion or sanction.
Adaptation may be, and often is, as perfect
in the case of means adopted to do ill deeds
as in the case of means adopted to do good
deeds. Punctuality, which is selected as an
instance of adaptation, and on that account
moral, is shown as much in keeping a crimi-
nal assignation as in keeping an appoint-
ment for the best of objects.
The satisfaction of cooperating with the
motive power of evolution is tendered as an
206 MORALITY AND THEISM
ethical inducement. It would hardly present
itself so to beings the elimination of whom
is a part of the process. Why should a
mortal sacrifice his enjoyments to the ten-
dencies, blind tendencies as far as we
know, of a soulless power or of a power
which to us manifests no soul? If the pro-
cess is, as an evolutionary philosopher repre-
sents it, one of alternating creation and
destruction, Prometheus might find satisfac-
tion rather in stopping the process at the
recommencement of its destructive part than
in devout cooperation.
The authors of systems of moral philosophy
have sought to discover some intellectual
principle from which all moral rules could
be logically deduced and the apprehension of
which would constrain all men to be moral.
But the question remains, why men who do
not like to be moral, as many men do not,
are to sacrifice their propensities to a logi-
cal deduction from an intellectual principle.
Suppose virtue to correspond, as Clarke says,
to the fitness of things, why is Borgia to
prefer the fitness of things to the enjoyment
MORALITY AND THEISM 207
of his orgies and to the criminal courses by
which the means of that enjoyment are to be
obtained? What is needed to influence the
actions of men is not an abstract principle
or a definition, but a motive. It is by
renewing and reinforcing the motive power,
not by defining morality, that the great moral
reforms and movements have been made.
Desire of health, of domestic happiness, of
the esteem and good-will of our fellows, of
the security for our lives and property which
we must purchase by reciprocal respect for
the lives and property of others, and by
obedience to the laws, are motive powers.
The necessity of obeying the will of God,
with eternal reward or punishment annexed,
on which Paley founds the inducement to
virtue, provided the truth of theism can be
proved, is a motive power of the most over-
whelming kind. Intellectual perception of the
fitness of things is not.
Systems of ethics founded on the moral taste
fail in the same way. They cannot show any
obligation to have the taste, or, in its absence, to
conform to the peculiarity of those who have it.
208 MORALITY AND THEISM
Butler's ethics are founded on the system
of man's inward frame and the supremacy
of conscience, which he takes to be manifest,
in that system. "Appetites, passions, affec-
tions, and the principle of reflection," he
says, "considered merely as the several parts
of our inward nature, do not at all give us
an idea of the system or constitution of this
nature; because the constitution is formed
by a somewhat not yet taken into considera-
tion, namely, by the relations which these
several parts have to each other, the chief
of which is the authority of reflection or
conscience." Conscience, he says, if it had
power as it has authority, would rule the
world. Whence, then, its lack of power?
Butler manifestly assumes that man's inward
frame is regulated by divine ordinance, and
that conscience is the voice of God. Unless
it be the voice of God, it is nothing more
than an index, formed by experience and
ratified by tradition, to the course of indi-
vidual action which is best for the commu-
nity and the race. If a man cares nothing for
the community or the race, with him con-
MORALITY AND THEISM 209
science can have no authority. Such a man
will have nothing within him to restrain
him from sacrificing the happiness and lives
of other men without measure to the pro-
motion of his own interest or the gratification
of his passions. His only restraints, and the
only restraints of thoroughly selfish men in
general, will be social influence and, in the
last resort, the penal law. Social influence
will be strong in proportion as society is
well compacted and as the man is by nature
sensitive to opinion and to the advantages
of kindly relations with his fellows. Beyond
this there remains, to control the wicked,
nothing but the penal law, and the penal
law may be evaded; cupidity and passion
will, at least, often hope to evade it; while
a man of Napoleon's genius and fortunes
may raise himself entirely above it, as well
as above the pressure of opinion, and run,
without fear of punishment, a career of
slaughter and robbery on the most gigantic
scale. If he ever feels a twinge of remorse,
arising from early lessons or the force of
habit, there seems to be no assignable reason
210 MORALITY AND THEISM
why he should not stifle it just as he would
assuage any bodily ache or pain.
In such action as is heroic, or involves great
sacrifice of self, especially, there appears to
be an element hardly separable from theism,
whatever allowance we may make for the
warmth of social feeling and what has been
called the enthusiasm of humanity. Any-
thing short of life perhaps we can imagine a
man would sacrifice from his love of his fel-
lows and in the hope of winning their love;
but the sacrifice of life seems to imply the ex-
istence of a hope beyond. One philosopher
has even found theism in the devotion of the
private soldier who is content, with almost
as little expectation of individual glory as
of profit, to give his life to the common
cause.
A great evolutionist deduced from evo-
lution the negation of free will and the
automatism of man. The discovery would
have been an end of anything that could
properly be called morality. The deduction,
however, supposing it logical, would be fatal
surely, not to free will, but to evolution.
MORALITY AND THEISM 211
That man has power over his own actions,
however limited or qualified that power may-
be, and by whatever name you may choose to
call it, with the responsibility attendant, is
surely a fact of human nature no less unde-
niable than the existence of any one of our
bodily senses. We may puzzle ourselves over
it without end, but no one ever practically
denies it either in his reflections on his own
actions or in forming his opinion on the
actions of his neighbours. The whole course
of life, of society, of law, and of government,
implies it. Its presence has hitherto repelled
the attempt to construct a science of history
analogous to the physical sciences. If any-
body has ever persuaded himself, nobody has
ever acted on the persuasion, that the relation
of the inducement to the action, in him or
in his neighbours, is as the impact of one
billiard ball on the other. The feeling of
free will, indeed, may be roughly described
as our sense, given us by consciousness, of
the difference between physical and moral
causation.
Mr. Cotter Morison, a man himself of
212 MORALITY AND THEISM
moral sensibility as well as the highest
cultivation, said that the sooner the idea of
moral responsibility was got rid of the better
it would be for society and moral education,
and that while virtue might, and possibly
would, bring happiness to the virtuous
man, to the immoral and the selfish virtue
would probably be the most distasteful or
even painful thing in their experience, while
vice would give them unmitigated pleasure.^
His method of moral reform is the elimina-
tion or suppression of the bad. But if the
bad happen to be the stronger or the more
cunning, what is to prevent their eliminating
or suppressing the good? What is to prevent
their doing this, not only with a clear con-
science, but with a glow of self-approbation?
The author of Modern Thinkers^ bravely
pushing agnostic principles to their extreme
conclusion, says : —
" It is generally believed to be moral to tell the truth,
and immoral to lie. And yet it would be difficult to
prove that nature prefers the true to the false. Every-
1 See The Service of Man, by James Cotter Morison, pp.
293-314.
MORALITY AND THEISM 213
where she makes the false impression first, and only-
after years, or thousands of years, do we become able
to detect her in her lies. . . . Natm-e endows almost
every animal with the faculty of deceit in order to aid
it in escaping from the brute force of its superiors. Why,
then, should not man be endowed with the faculty of
lying when it is to his interest to appear wise concern-
ing matters of which he is ignorant? Lying is often a
refuge to the weak, a stepping-stone to power, a ground
of reverence toward those who live by getting credit for
knowing what they do not know. No one doubts that it
is right for the maternal partridge to feign lameness, a
broken wing or leg, in order to conceal her young in
flight, by causing the pursuer to suppose he can more
easily catch her than her offspring. From whence, then,
in nature, do we derive the fact that a human being may
not properly tell an untruth with the same motive? Our
early histories, sciences, poetries, and theologies are all
false, yet they comprehend by far the major part of
human thought. Priesthoods have ruled the world by
deceiving our tender souls, and yet they command our
most enduring reverence. Where, then, do we discover
that any law of universal nature prefers truth to false-
hood, any more than oxygen to nitrogen, or alkalies to
salts? So habituated have we become to assume that
truth-telling is a virtue, that nothing is more difficult
then to tell how we came to assume it, nor is it easy of
proof that it is a virtue in an unrestricted sense. What
would be thought of the military strategist who made
no feints, of the advertisement that contained no lie, of
the business man whose polite suavity covered no false-
hood ?
.214 MORALITY AND THEISM
" Inasmuch as all moral rules are in the first instance
impressed by the strong, the dominant, the matured, and
the successful upon the weak, the crouching, the infantile,
and the servile, it would not be strange if a close analysis
and a minute historical research should concur in prov-
ing that all moral rules are doctrines established by the
strong for the government of the weak. It is invariably
the strong who require the weak to tell the truth, and
always to promote some interest of the strong. . . .
" ' Thou shalt not steal ' is a moral precept invented
by the strong, the matured, the successful, and by them
impressed upon the weak, the infantile, and the failures
in life's struggle, as all criminals are. For nowhere in
the world has the sign ever been blazoned on the shop
doors of a successful business man, ' Closed because the
proprietor prefers crime to industry.' Universal society
might be pictured, for the illustration of this feature of
the moral code, as consisting of two sets of swine, one of
which is in the clover, and the other is out. The swine
that are in the clover grunt, ' Thou shalt not steal ; put
up the bars.' The swine that are out of the clover grunt,
'Did you make the clover? let down the bars.' 'Thou
shalt not steal' is a maxim impressed by property holders
upon non-property holders. It is not only conceivable,
but it is absolute verity, that a sufficient deprivation of
property, and force, and delicacy of temptation, would
compel every one who utters it to steal, if he could get
an opportunity. In a philosophic sense, therefore, it is
not a universal, but a class, law; its prevalence and
obedience indicate that the property holders rule society,
which is itself an index of advance toward civilization.
No one would say that if a lion lay gorged with his ex-
MORALITY AND THEISM 215
cessive feast amidst the scattered carcass of a deer, and a
jaguar or a hyena stealthily bore away a haunch thereof,
the act of the hyena was less virtuous than that of the
lion. How does the case of two bushmen, between whom
the same incident occurs, differ from that of the two
quadrupeds? Each is doing that which tends in the
highest degree to his own preservation, and it may be
assumed that the party against whom the spoliation is
committed is not injured at all by it. Among many
savage tribes theft is taught as a virtue, and detection
is punished as a crime. . . . Having control of the
forces of society, the strong can always legislate, or
order, or wheedle, or preach, or assume other people's
money and land out of their possession into their own,
by methods which are not known as stealing, since in-
stead of violating the law they inspire and create the law.
But if the under dog in the social fight runs away with a
bone in violation of superior force, the top dog runs after
him bellowing, ' Thou shalt not steal,' and all the other
top dogs unite in bellowing, ' This is divine law and not
dog law' ; the verdict of the top dog, so far as law, re-
ligion, and other forms of brute force are concerned,
settles the question. But philosophy will see in this
contest of antagonistic forces, a mere play of opposing
elements, in which larceny is an incident of social weak-
ness and unfitness to survive, just as debility and leprosy
are; and would as soon assume a divine command,
'Thou shalt not break out in boils and sores,' to the
weakling or leper, as one of 'Thou shalt not steal' to
the failing straggler for subsistence. So far as the irre-
sistible promptings of nature may be said to constitute a
divine law, there are really two laws. The law to him
216 MORALITY AND THEISM
who will be injured by stealing is, 'Thou shalt not steal,'
meaning thereby, ' Thou shalt not suffer another to steal
from you.' The law to him w^ho cannot survive without
stealing is simply, ' Thou shalt, in stealing, avoid being
detected.'
" So the laws forbidding unchastity were framed by
those who, in the earlier periods of civilization, could
afford to own women, for the protection of their property
rights in them, against the poor who could not. . . .
We do not mean, by this course of reasoning, to imply
that the strong in society can, or ought to be, governed
by the weak: that is neither possible, nor, if possible,
would it be any improvement. We only assert that
moral precepts are largely the selfish maxims expressive
of the will of the ruling forces in society, those who have
health, wealth, knowledge, and power, and are designed
wholly for their own protection and the maintenance of
their power. They represent the view of the winning
side, in the struggle for subsistence, while the true in-
terior law of nature would represent a varying combat in
which two laws would appear, viz. : that known as the
moral or majority law, and that known as the immoral or
minority law, which commands a violation of the other." ^
Happily, the strong and the weak are not
two distinct sets of men. They are blended
together in society, by the common interests
and general opinion of which the strong in
the exercise of their strength are practically
1 Modern Thinkers, by Van Buren Denslow, pp. 240-246.
MORALITY AND THEISM 217
controlled. Men who are strong in one way-
are very often weak in others ; men who are
weak in one way are strong in others ; and
there are innumerable gradations of every kind
of strength.
This, however, is free thought expressed
with a vigour and frankness for which in-
quirers after truth will be thankful. It is
curious, as an indication of the tendencies of
the philosophy to which it relates, and as a re-
ply to the historical scepticism which refuses
to believe that the teaching of the Sophists
really was what it is represented to have
been by Socrates or Plato. It would also
seem to be a conclusive answer to those
who utterly deride the apprehension of a
moral interregnum, and feel confident that
society is going to sail, without interruption
or disturbance of its rule of conduct, out of
the zone of theistic into that of scientific
morality. It suggests that between one state
and the other there may be an interval in
which the question Avill be not so much be-
tween the moral and the immoral, as between
the "top and the under dog.'*
218 MORALITY AND THEISM
The Marquis of Stejne is an organism,
and, like all other organisms, so long as he
succeeds in maintaining himself against com-
peting organisms, is able to make good his
title to existence under the law of natural
selection. He has his pleasures; they are
not those of a St. Paul, or a Shakespeare, or
a Wilberforce, but they are his. They make
him happy, according to the only measure of
happiness which he can conceive; and if he
is cautious, as a sagacious voluptuary will
be, they need not diminish his vitality, they
may even increase it both in duration and
intensity, though they may play havoc with
the welfare of a number of victims and
dependants. He may successively seduce a
score of women without bad consequences to
himself. Why is he doing wrong? In the
name of what do you peremptorily summon
him to return to the path of virtue? In the
name of altruistic pleasure? He happens to
be one of those organisms which are not
capable of it. In the name of a state of
society which is to come into existence long
after he has mouldered to dust in the family
MORALITY AND THEISM 219
mausoleum of the Gaunts ? His reply will be
that as a sensible man he lives for the present,
not for a future in which he will have no
share. Suppose you could induce him to try
a course of virtue, or of altruism if the term
is more scientific, what in his case would be
the practical result? Would it not be a
painful conflict between passion and con-
science, or perhaps, in the terms of the
now current philosophy, betw^een presented
sensations on the one hand, and represented
or re-represented sensations on the other?
Is it not probable that he would end his
days before that conflict had been brought
to a close? Its fruits, however imperfect,
would, of course, be both happy and precious
in the estimation of theism; but in the esti-
mation of any ethical philosophy founded on
pleasure and pain, what could they be but
pleasure, unquestionable pleasure, lost, and
pain, pain of a distressing kind, incurred?
So with other organisms, which, as thorough-
going evolutionism would lead us to think,
are pursuing their congenial, though conven-
tionally reprobated, walks of life. The assas-
220 MORALITY AND THEISM
sin, the robber, and the sharper have their
status in nature, as well as any other members
iJ^ of the predatory tribes. It is laid down that
the life and interest of the social organism
must rank above the lives and interests of its
component particles, the individual men, and
form the measure of their desires and actions.
This, however, would seem to be an arbitrary
assumption, and one on which morality can-
not be firmly founded. Can the term ''organ-
ism " itself be applied to society otherwise
than in a metaphorical or imperfect sense? Of
the particles of which society consists, each,
unlike the particles of a true organism, has a
consciousness and a unit of its own. Further
enforcement at least is needed.
Apprehension of a temporary disturbance
of social order, however, or even of an
ethical interregnum, is not our highest motive
for desiring to know whether the universe
is guided by a Providence or borne blindly
on by a material evolution, and whether
there is or is not a supreme power on the
side of virtue. No question surely can be
more practical than these, unless we are con-
M
MORALITY AND THEISM 221
tent to be as the beasts that perish; a fate
to which probably few are deliberately re-
signed, however, amidst the business or the
enjoyments of life we may put aside the
thought of our mortality.
In what position then, since the discovery
of evolution or, as we should rather say, to
avoid building too much on a particular
theory, since the recent revelations of sci-
ence, is the theistic hypothesis left?
Clearly, there is an end of our faith, so far
as cosmogony is concerned, in the sacred
books of the Hebrews, from which our no-
tions of creation and the Creator have
hitherto been largely derived. Those books
must now be placed on the same shelf with
the sacred books of other races. They are
superior to their fellows no doubt, not only
in loftiness of imagination, but in compara-
tive approach to scientific truth, especially in
regard to the great fact of the unity of crea-
tion, which astronomy and spectrum-analy-
sis have confirmed. It is in virtue of this
superiority that they have so long retained
222 MORALITY AND THEISM
their hold upon our minds. But their narra-
tive of creation is hopelessly at variance
with scientific fact, while the authority of
some of them as the alleged works of Moses,
even if it could give them a title to accept-
ance as records of events anterior to the
existence of man, has been totally over-
thrown. The poetry of the Hebrew books
will never die. Of their cosmogony we
must, once for all, clear our minds. We are
in the position of the philosophers of Greece
when, having emancipated themselves from
the legendary cosmogony of the polytheistic
religion of the state, they faced with open
minds the problem of existence.
With belief in a first cause the theory of
evolution need not interfere. Evolution can-
not have evolved itself. It is a mode or
process, not a creative force. Some power
there must have been, if we can trust the
indications of our intelligence on such a
subject, to set evolution on foot and to
direct it in its course. Those who think to
account for all things by the hypothesis of
a vast alternation between homogeneity and
MORALITY AND THEISM 223
heterogeneity stand in need of a prime
motor; otherwise, whichever of the alternate
processes they take postulates the other as
its antecedent, and so backwards to infinity.
In plain language, they must have something
to set the see-saw going. If this objection
is said to be rather metaphysical, the answer
is that a hypothesis, before it can be applied
to facts, must be shown to be intelligible
and tenable in itself; a condition not ful-
filled by a hypothesis of original alternation.
It may be that evolution, as some say,
gives us a worthier idea of the majesty of
the Deity, who, instead of perpetual inter-
vention, has, once for all, commanded his
agents, and endowed them with, the power,
to work out the universal plan. At the
same time the Deity seems to be removed to
an immeasurable distance from us. It is
difficult to understand how we can retain
the practice of prayer, at least for anything
material. Belief in special providence evolu-
tion seems absolutely to preclude.
The old proof of the existence of a Deity,
which satisfied Paley and the authors of the
224 MORALITY AND THEISM
Bridgewater treatises, was the design assumed
to be visible in creation. But what is visi-
ble in creation is not design; it is only
adaptation, from which we are not warranted
in directly inferring design. Adapted to
each other things must have been; otherwise
the world could not have come into exist-
ence, or, when it had come into existence,
have held together. The arrangement of the
vertebrae is necessar}^ to the support of the
skull. The position of the pebble beneath is
necessary to the support of the pebble above,
though we do not take the ada23tation for
a proof of design. We have no other world
to compare with this, and, therefore, no
means of learning what could come by chance
or blind evolution and what could not.
Paley's man who finds the watch is able to
compare it with unwrought matter. He
knows that human artificers exist. He is a
man himself and can recognize the work of
his fellow.
The argument from design has been turned
on the upholders by the opponents of theism.
It has been said that contrivance is human
MORALITY AND THEISM 225
and inconsistent with our ideas of omnipo-
tence, which would produce perfection at
once by fiat. But here we are simply beyond
the range of our intelligence. We cannot
divine which way Deity would take to its
ends. There is nothing repugnant to reason
in the belief that what presents itself to our
minds as effort and a struggle towards per-
fection, rather than perfection by fiat, may
be the course chosen by the Master of the
universe and form its law. On the other
hand, it is evident that Paley's analogy
breaks down again in this respect, that God
is not like a mechanic, showing his skill by
his handling of matter, which, with its quali-
ties and its resistance, is given to him from
without. He is himself the Creator of the
matter with which he deals.
Science, it is true, frequently uses teleo-
logical language, language such as implies
design. But from this little can be inferred,
except that our established phraseology is
theistic and that science falls involuntarily
into the use of the familiar terms.
From mere inspection of the universe we
226 MORALITY AND THEISM
can only infer the existence of such a Deity
as the universe, including the nature of
man, discloses. This seems to be justly
urged by Hume; and a mere inspection of
the universe, at least of our part of it, can
hardly be said to disclose a moral Creator.
The Creator disclosed is one who sends not
only his sunshine and his rain, but his earth-
quakes, his plagues, and his famines, alike
upon the just and the unjust; who takes
away by death the good man from the house-
hold which loves him and depends on him for
bread, as well as the wicked man from his
den of crime; who, both among human beings
and among brutes, seems to scatter pain and
misery broadcast. What we see and experi-
ence may be, and probably is, but a faint
glimpse of the universal plan. But from
what we see and experience the combination
of omnipotence with beneficence, as we con-
ceive the one or the other, cannot be inferred.
For their ultimate union we must look behind
the veil. True, human effort is repaid, but
it is human.
In our own planet waste, wreck, and abor-
MORALITY AND THEISM 227
tion hold divided empire with economy, per-
fection, and fruitfuhiess. In our satellite,
the telescope tells us, they reign alone.
Nothing apparently warrants us in assuming
that the character of the Creator is reflected
by one side of creation, not by the other.
Pessimism may be said to be the reverie
of disappointment and satiety, with an infu-
sion of Byronic sentiment and of the melan-
choly of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. But it
has, at all events, been able to show that
the theological optimism against which it
revolts is only less irrational than itself.
It has, at all events, put an end to the
attempts of the complacent optimist to vindi-
cate the Creator and establish the theistic
hypothesis by representing pain, suffering,
and evil generally as mere negation. To
give that pious legerdemain its death-blow
a Lisbon earthquake, a famine, or a pes-
tilence is not needed. A toothache will
suffice.
Neither from sense nor from science can
we be said to have actual proof of the
existence of intelligence other than our
228 MORALITY AND THEISM
own, or even of any life other than that
which exists on our planet. Such is the
fact. But the mere statement of it seems to
carry the conviction that the range of our
senses, even with the aid of science and all
its instruments, must be narrow. It is in-
conceivable that we should be the sole con-
scious denizens of the universe. As has
been said before, there is no reason for the
presumption that the information of our
senses, or of science, which draws its know-
ledge from the senses, is exhaustive. We are
in a universe our knowledge of which is
probably mere purblindness. Gravitation is
only a fact observed but unexplained. Mind
itself, as it is in us, may not be ultimate.
It seems impossible to imagine our intelli-
gence, whatever the mode of its development,
is without an intelligent author.
Science shows that the universe, so far as
it falls within our vision, is pervaded and
ruled by a single power, Avhich, as its opera-
tions reveal themselves to our minds, we
cannot help divining to be a mind. Mono-
theism is at all events perfectly consistent
MORALITY AND THEISM 229
with the results of physical science; while
with polytheism science has done away.
Hence, science and religion, even the most
fervent religion, have been able to dwell
together in the intellects of Newton and
Faraday.
In metaphysical arguments there is little
comfort. Anselm thought that he had proved
the existence of a Deity by the argument
that our notion of the Deity was perfection
and that perfection implied existence. Des-
cartes reproduced the argument substantially
under a different form. Existence must enter
into our notion of a centaur or a griffin, and
is, in those cases, notional only, affording no
proof that the thing of which we think is
real. To all proofs of the existence of God
derived from supposed mental necessity, it
seems to be a sufficient answer that belief
in God has been, and is, absent from some
minds otherwise sound and normal. These
seem like relics of the scholastic fancy that
the mind is a casket containing in itself
knowledge about the universe which is ca-
pable of being educed by a logical process
230 MORALITY AND THEISM
apart from observation of the universe itself.
Nothing metaphysical has ever taken much
hold on general intelligence or exerted much
influence on practical faith. A fervent reli-
gion, metaphysically kindled, or even a lively
conception of the character of the Deity de-
rived from metaphysical speculation, it would
surely be hard to find.
Intuitionists would settle the question by
laying it down that there are always present
in intelligence, whether developed or nas-
cent, three ideas; consciousness of the world,
consciousness of self, and consciousness of
God. As has been already said, there are
men who, if they know the contents of their
own intelligence, are without a consciousness
of God. Can this intuition of a Deity be
proved to exist in the mind quite indepen-
dently of any notion derived from without
either through education or tradition? If it
can, we may accept it as decisive. If it can-
not, its testimony fails. We need not go on
to ask what sort of Deity it is that is thus
intuitively revealed, that of Jehovah, that of
Jupiter, that of Allah, that of the All-
MORALITY AND THEISM 231
Father presented by the teachings of Jesus,
an amalgam of them all, or a cold and filmy
abstraction.
On the other hand, there can be no doubt
as to the historical importance of the reli-
gious sense in man, or as to the failure of
some of the attempts of evolutionists to
wrest the history of religion into conformity
with their system. The source of religion
has been found in dreams about departed
chieftains. It would be curious to see the
connection traced between such dreams and
the religion of Jesus, or that of Bacon, Pas-
cal, Butler, and Newton. Did all primeval
men dream about departed chieftains ? How
did the religious tendency become universal?
How could a dream lead even to the most
primitive forms of worship, such as the
adora-tion of the sun? That religion began
in fetish-worship is a theory held by phi-
lology to be precarious. That its primitive
form was a worship of the powers of nature,
especially of those which most influence the
life of man, and of the sun above all, may
be taken to be true; but this accounts only
232 MORALITY AND THEISM
for the selection of objects, not for the exist-
ence of the sentiment itself. We can hardly
imagine that the grandeur and powers of
nature produce any sentiment of awe or ten-
dency to worship in animals. Neither in the
primitive direction of the religious sentiment
nor in its aberrations, brutish or cruel as
some of them were, is there anything to
repel the suggestion that it had its source
in reality and betokens a connection between
humanity and the Spirit of the Universe.
Paley may have been right in saying that
the Deity could reveal himself only in mira-
cle. If he does not reveal he may yet mani-
fest himself without miracle through human
nature and history, through the discoveries
of science and by other than supernatural
means. If there is a Deity, the reasonable
presumption surely is that he will manifest
himself to creatures capable of receiving the
manifestation. His counsel may be that
instead of his revealing himself to us, we
should feel after him and find him.
Rational theology has, perhaps, hardly taken
sufficient notice of our sense of beauty in its
MORALITY AND THEISM 233
different grades, from the sublimity of the
star-lit heaven to the loveliness of the hum-
ming-bird, or of the poetry and art which
are the expressions of that sense. It Avould
be difficult to account for beauty, or the
sense of beauty, by physical evolution, v^^hile
their presence and the charm v^hich they
throw over life seem to bespeak a certain
tenderness on the part of the Being in whose
power we are which softens the stern aspect
of evolution. The same may be said of the
poetic element in man, which as yet no one
has undertaken to trace to physical evolu-
tion; of the sentimental love, which is not
essential to procreation; and of the moral
beauty, which, though connected, is not iden-
tical with practical usefulness. Adaptation
is produced by evolution; but it is only in a
secondary sense that we call adaptation beau-
tiful. Darwin's loss of taste for poetry and
art is remarkable; he seems to have felt it as
a defect and as the atrophy of an essential
part of his nature, not as the necessary result
of devotion to scientific truth.
Man's notion of God has risen from nature-
234 MORALITY AND THEISM
worship, it may be from fetishism, to the
conception of the Heavenly Father who is
the idealization of our own moral nature.
Anthropomorphism still clings to our theism;
the very name of Father involves it; so do
those of Benefactor and Judge; nor can we
think of a personal God without importing
human personality into the idea. But a short-
coming in our power of conception does not
prove the object of our thoughts to be unreal.
We fail to conceive infinity, yet we are sure
that the universe is infinite. For the purpose
of natural theology and especially of inquiries
like the present, it might be well to say Power
or Soul of the Universe instead of God.
Of the attempts to construct for us a reli-
gion without a God, it may surely be said
that they serve only to show the tenacity of
the religious sentiment and the void which
is left in the heart by the departure of reli-
gion. Of the Comtist Religion of Humanity
we have spoken already. We have only to
ask once more how it is possible for us
to bow down in adoration to an abstraction
which is insensible to our worship. An
MORALITY AND THEISM 235
abstraction, in fact, Comte's Great Being
must be; it cannot even have so much sub-
stance as there would be in a generalization,
since, history being unfinished, the basis for
the generalization is incomplete. The Posi-
tivist ritual and calendar, which are a fanci-
ful reproduction of Catholicism, appear to
have taken little hold compared with the
philosophic part of the system; while even
the philosophic part has taken hold less as
a scientific solution than as a negation of
the theistic view. The alleged account of
history as a succession of theistic, metaphysi-
cal, and Positivist conceptions of the universe
cannot be verified by facts, which fail espe-
cially in respect to the metaphysical period.
The Founder of the Religion of Humanity
believed in the finality of his own system,
assuming that progress had reached its com-
pletion in it, and that he could cast society
into its final mould. The limits which he
undertook to set to human knowledge have,
in one direction, already been overpast. Sup-
posing his theory of the three periods, the
theistic, the metaphysical, and the positive,
236 MORALITY AND THEISM
were true, how could he tell that Positivism
was the last birth of time or that destiny
might not have a fourth period, possibly
even a reversion to theism in store?
Of Spiritualism little need be said. It
testifies to the craving of mankind for some-
thing beyond sense, and for something to fill
up the blank left by the failure of religious
faith, as well as to the desire of renewing
communion with the lost objects of affection.
It can hardly be admitted even to have a
good title to its name, since the dead are
made to "materialize," and to use material
instruments of communication.
Nor can it be necessary to dwell on the
different kinds of mysticism in which soli-
taries or small circles have taken refuge,
thinking that by seclusion they can shut out
the evil world, or soar above it by spiritual
ecstasy. We are not in Asia; and Lamaism,
though Schopenhauer would commend to us
something like it, with universal self-efface-
ment in prospect as the ultimate paradise, is
not likely to afford satisfaction here.
Others, Seeley, for instance, would give us,
MORALITY AND THEISM 237
as a substitute for definite belief in God, a
religion of enthusiastic admiration. "The
words 'religion' and 'worship,'" says Seeley,
"are commonly and conveniently appropriated
to the feelings with which we regard God;
but these feelings, love, awe, admiration,
which together make up worship, are felt in
various combinations for human beings and
even for inanimate objects." "It is not," he
says, "exclusively, but only par excellence,
that religion is directed towards God." Re-
ligion he elsewhere describes as "that higher
life of man which is sustained by admira-
tion," adding that "it has its essence in wor-
ship or some kind of enthusiastic contempla-
tion seeking for expression in outward acts."
If such is the origin of art, he is prepared
to call art religion. Enthusiastic nationality
with him is religion. He, and perhaps not
he alone, makes of the nation a god. This
surely is mere playing with words or worse;
it is an attempt to cheat us into the impres-
sion that we have a religious belief when we
have none. The objects of admiration, social,
scientific, or sesthetic, however salutary or
238 MORALITY AND THEISM
elevating may be their influence, are not a
Father in heaven. Ask the widow with her
fatherless children whether they are. Nor
does the culture necessary for these lofty and
refined emotions extend, or bid fair within
any calculable time to extend, to the masses
of the people. A clown who cannot read or
write and who earns his bread by the coarsest
work can take in the idea of God and of
divine rewards and punishments as thor-
oughly as Professor Seeley with all his cult-
ured capacity for admiration. But it would
be difficult to infuse into the clown a reli-
gion of national aggrandizement or of art.
" Cosmic emotion " presents itself only as a
substitute for religious emotion, since nothing
has been said about embodying it in worship.
It comes to us commended by poetic quota-
tions, and for common hearts stands in need
of the commendation. Transfer of affection
from an all-loving Father to an adamantine
universe is a process which needs all the aid
that the witchery of poetry can supply,
though the poetry itself, for aught that we
can see, must be ground out by the same
MORALITY AND THEISM 239
mill of evolution which grinds out virtue and
affection. The symbols of cosmic emotion
seem to be the feelings produced by the two
objects of Kant's peculiar reverence, the
starry heavens and the moral faculties of
man. But, after all, what are these but
aggregations of molecules in a certain stage
of evolution? To be able to feel cosmic
emotion, at all events, you must be sure that
you have a cosmos. The phrase law is
taken by science from theology, or from
jurisprudence. Science can tell us nothing
but phenomena accumulated by experience
and methodized, which would not make a
law, properly speaking, though they had been
observed through myriads of years. In "cos-
mos " also a theistic connotation seems to
lurk, since order there could hardly be without
an ordering power.
Too little notice has been taken by moral
philosophers of the different situations and
circumstances of men. They write as though
all men were capable of philosophy and free
to follow its sublime advice. All men are
capable of religion; all men can understand
240 MORALITY AND THEISM
the force of a divine command and the doc-
trine of future reward or punishment; but it
is vain to expect that a coal-heaver will
appreciate Shaftesbury's delineation of the
beauty of virtue like the persons of refine-
ment to whom it was addressed, or be made
to glow with cosmic emotion like Walt
Whitman; and until the structure of society
has been radically changed, coal-heavers, or
multitudes as little philosophic or poetic,
there will continue to be. We may begin
to think that we have reestablished religion,
when a practical impression, such as would
exhibit itself in worship or something equiva-
lent to it, has been made on common and
uncultivated minds.
If no divine command for the practice
of virtue can be shown, if no assurance of
the virtuous man's reward, such as Paley
assumes, can be given, moral philosophy
must, it would appear, be content simply
to take the observation of human nature as
its basis and to build its system on the
natural desires of man, offerinof them such
satisfaction as is consistent with the welfare
MORALITY AND THEISM 241
of the community and the race. We natu-
rally desire health, and to be healthy means
to be temperate and continent; we desire,
for ourselves and our families, the means of
living, and to obtain them we must be indus-
trious, frugal, and of good repute; we desire
domestic happiness, and to obtain it we must
practise the domestic virtues; we desire the
good-will of our fellow-men with the advan-
tages which it brings, and to obtain it we
must practise the virtues of good members of
society and good citizens. There is no such
thing as altruism in the literal sense of that
term. Self is present in all we do, though
the self is that of a being who desires love
and fellowship as well as food and raiment;
with which qualification the philosophy which
has resolved morality into self-interest,
though much decried, would be right enough.
No man ever really acts against what he
apprehends at the time to be his interest,
though his interest may lead him to sacrifice
his animal or individual to his domestic or
social desires.
The good which we do to others yields
242 MORALITY AND THEISM
US a deeper and more lasting satisfaction
than the good which we do to ourselves.
This is a pregnant fact and may seem to
indicate the purpose of the author of our
nature, if our nature has an author, and to
promise a social consummation before the
close. How far devotion to the interests of
the race and heroic or philanthropic action
will be affected by the departure of theistic
belief Avill be seen when the kingdom of
atheism or agnosticism has fully come. But
it is not by such a figment as posthumous
fame that the hearts of reasoning beings will
be lifted above selfish desires. Nor is it
likely that tribalism, however exalted or re-
fined by nationality and patriotism, will act
as it did on the Greek or Roman, in whom
still lived, though in a sublimated form, the
gregarious instinct of the herd.
Intellectual effort, while it implies moral
conditions, such as may dispose to labour and
raise above sensual indulgence, has motive
powers and attractions of its own apart
from any which theism supplies. Yet we
can hardly feel sure that there is not a
MORALITY AND THEISM 243
theistic element in the scientific conscience,
which sacrifices not only ease and pleasure but
sometimes reputation and everything else to
the pursuit of truth.
Whether this is, as Leibnitz thought, the
best, or, as Schopenhauer thought, the worst,
of all possible worlds, neither of them could
really tell. Neither of them had any means
of verifying his hypothesis by comparison or
in any other way. Practically it is a very
different world for different men. For the
Roman emperor this was not the worst of all
possible worlds; by the Roman slave it could
hardly be deemed the best. Man's temporal
estate is apparently capable of indefinite im-
provement within the limits of mortality,
though the improvement will not cancel the
sufferings of the generations that are past.
It takes, we are told, a period of time
longer than man's recorded history for a
ray of light to reach the earth from the
remotest telescopic star. Yet the starry field
swept by the telescope is inconceivably less
than that which we must assume to lie
beyond. In such a universe what is the life
244 MORALITY AND THEISM
of a man? Our little being is lost in
immensity. This thought and that of the
impenetrable mystery of existence are likely,
rather than cosmic emotion, worship of hu-
manity, or any of the other substitutes for
theism, to take possession of the human mind
if the belief in a God is withdrawn.
THE END
WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
THE UNITED STATES.
An Outline of Political History, 1492-1871.
With Map. Crown 8vo. $2.00.
" His survey of events is luminous, his estimate of character is singu-
larly keen and just, and his style is at once incisive, dignified, and scholarly.
. . . No one who takes up Mr. Goldwin Smith's volume will readily lay it
down before he has finished it; no one will lay it down without acknowledg-
ing the rare gifts of the writer." — The Times.
" It is a literary masterpiece, as readable as a novel, remarkable for its
compression without dryness, and its brilliancy without any rhetorical effort
or display. What American could, with so broad a grasp and so perfect a
style, have rehearsed our political history from Columbus to Grant in 300
duodecimo pages of open type, or would have manifested greater candor in
his judgment of men and events in a period of four centuries? It is enough
to say that no one before Mr. Smith has attempted the feat, and that he has
the field to himself." — The Nation.
ESSAYS ON QUESTIONS OF THE
DAY:
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL.
By GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L.
NEW, REVISED, AND ENLARGED EDITION.
izmo. Cloth. $2.25.
" These questions — for, as will be seen, there are many comprised under
one head — are all treated in Professor Smith's latest volume with the clear-
ness and force which belong to all his writings." — Critic.
" The book is admirably concise in method, often epigrammatic in the
sweeping generalizations. The method is modern, moreover, in that it takes
account of social forms and prejudices, of popular thought, in short, as well
as of the political plans of the few so-called leaders of men."
— Hamlin Garland, in The Arena.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY,
ee FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
CANADA AND THE CANADIAN
QUESTION.
With Map. Demy 8vo. Cloth. $2.00.
THREE ENGLISH STATESMEN.
A Course of Lectures on the Political History of England.
i2mo. $1.50.
Contents. — Pym; Cromwell; Pitt.
A TRIP TO ENGLAND.
New and Revised Edition.
iSmo. Cloth, gilt top. 75 cents.
"So delightful a cicerone as Mr. Goldwin Smith
proves himself in ' A Trip to England ' does not often
fall to the lot of the non-personally conducted. . . .
Meissonier-like in its diminutiveness, but also Meis-
sonier-Hke in its mastery." — CriUc.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY,
ee FIFTH AVENUE, NEW TOEK.
WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
SPEQMENS OF GREEK TRAGEDY.
2 vols. i6mo. Buckram, gilt top. $1.25 each.
Vol. I., ^scHYLUs and Sophocles; Vol. II., Euripides.
BAY LEAVES.
Translations from the Latin Poets.
i6nio. Buckram, gilt top. $1.25.
"It has been given to but few to approach, and to none in our
estimation to surpass, the delicate perception and the exquisite grace
with which Professor Goldwin Smith has served up this glorious clas-
sic feast with choicest English and in fauhless style." — The Week.
OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES
A VIEW FROM RADCLIFFE LIBRARY.
By GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L.
With many full-page illustrations.
i8mo. Cloth, gilt top. $1.50.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY,
60 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YOEK.
Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries
1 1012 01208 2055
aillii
i|iiiliiilli|i:ll:lt|iii:ip^^^
