The unrealized logic of religion, a study in credibilities

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THE UNREALIZED LOGIC
OF RELIGION

The 35th Fernley Lecture

THE

UNREALIZED LOGIC
OF RELIGION

A STUDY IN CREDIBILITIES

BY

W. H. FITCHETT, B.A., LL.D.

AUTHOR OP
1 DEEDS THAT WOK THB EMPIRE,' ' HOW ENGLAND SAVED EUROPE," BTC.

ELEVENTH THOUSAND

ILonfcon
CHARLES H. KELLY

CASTLE BT., CITY ROAD, AND 26 PATERNOSTER ROW, R.C.
1906

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no;

STOR

PRINTED BV

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
n
RELIGION AND ITS LOGIC ,

BOOK I
IN HISTORY

I. THE LOGIC OF THE CHANGED CALENDAR . . .15

II. THE LOGIC OP THE KEYSTONE AND THE ARCH . . 27
III. THE LOGIC OF THE MISSIONABY .... 41

BOOK II
IN SCIENCE

I. THE IRRELEVANT LOGIC OF SIZE .... 55
II. THE LOGIC OF OUR RELATION TO NATURE . . 68

III. THE LOGIC OF VERIFICATION 87

IV. THE LOGIC OF THE SUNSET 101

BOOK III

IN PHILOSOPHY
L THE LOGIC OF PROPORTION . . . . 119

II. THE LOGIC OF OURSELVES 130

III. THE LOGIC OF THE INFINITESIMAL 149

vi Contents

BOOK IV
IN LITERATURE

CHAPTBB rAOH

I. THE LOGIC OF AN HYPOTHESIS . . . . .161
II. THE LOGIC OF HUMAN SPEECH . 18U

BOOK V

IN SPIRITUAL LIFE

I. THE LOGIC OF ANSWERED PBAYERS . . . .195
II. THE LOGIC OF DESIGN IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD . 205

BOOK VI

IN COMMON LIFE

I. THE LOGIC OF UNPROVED NEGATIVES . . .219

II. THE LOGIC OF HALF-KNOWLEDGE .... 232

III. THE LOGIC or THE UNLEARNED .... 247

EPILOGUE 2G9

THE UNREALIZED LOGIC
OF RELIGION

INTRODUCTION
Religion and its Logic

' Syllogistic reasoning la utterly inadequate to the subtlety of
nature.' — BACON, Novum Oryanum.

'The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but
through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the
testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persona
influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.
Many a man will live and die upon a dogma ; no man will be a
martyr for a conclusion.' — NEWMAN.

THERE exists a somewhat distressful form of
religious literature known as the Evidences
of Christianity, in which we have the argu
ment for the Christian faith set out at length, and on
a scheme of what may be called scheduled logic. We
are offered evidences external and internal ; proofs
direct, indirect, and collateral ; arguments a priori, a
posteriori, and intuitional. The whole is a demonstra
tion of the Christian faith which derives its cogency
from the facts of history, the frame of the physical
universe, the characteristics of the Bible itself. No

B

2 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

one desires to speak disrespectfully of this demonstra
tion* It is a stately structure of proof, with deep
foundations and sky-piercing summits.

But to master the scientific and formal ' evidences '
of Christianity is the business of experts. For the
man in the street, the man whose business is not
theology, or literature, or scholarship, life is too brief,
duty too urgent, the hours too swift and crowded, to
make any adequate study of these evidences possible.
"Who, moreover, can afford to wait for a faith till it is
built up, course after course, on a foundation of scientific
argument ? Nay, if we have mastered this great and
technical demonstration, for practical purposes we must
forget it. Who goes back to the categories of formed
logic in search of a tonic for a sick faith? Religion,
in a sense, is never a deduction; it is, to quote
Newman, ' a message, or a history, or a vision.'

Sir Oliver Lodge, with a logic too daring for most
of us, contends that we err by linking our religious
beliefs too closely, or at least too exclusively, to specific
historical facts — facts that occurred in a definite locality,
at a definite moment of time, and are sustained by a
more or less convincing array of direct evidence. We
have such facts; they are unchallengeable; but it is
possible to give them a mistaken place and value in the
scheme of religious proof. ' It is the absence of any
thing like a material foundation/ says Sir Oliver
Lodge,1 ' which makes the earth so secure. If it were
1 Lecture at Midland Institute, Birmingham, October 24, 1904.

Religion and its Logic 3

based upon a pedestal, or otherwise solidly supported,
we should be anxious as to the stability or durability
of the support, and we should have a royal commission
sitting on it/ As it is, the earth floats securely in the
liquidness of space.

The stability, balance, and order of the planet, its
amazing wedlock of swiftest movement and of exquisite
and unjarring equipoise, all depend, in a word, not on one
specific force or fact, but on the innumerable harmonies
of a thousand forces. And Sir Oliver Lodge invites us to
accept this as a parable of Christianity. ' To conceive
of Christianity/ he says, ' as built on any physical or
historic fact is dangerous.' It is ' dangerous,' not be
cause the facts do not exist, or cannot be proved ; but
because to limit the area of proof to them is to give up
whole realms of other, and sometimes of nobler, evidence.
Whereas to base it upon the primary facts of conscious
ness, or on direct spiritual experience, as Paul did,
1 this,' says the great scientist, ' is safe.'

But beyond even the primary facts of consciousness,
or the direct spiritual experience of this saintly spirit
or that, is the argument derived from the harmony of
all facts and of all experiences. And for Christianity,
what better 'proof can be asked than its profound,
unbroken, multiform harmony with the laws on which
the universe is built, with the facts of history, and with
the unbroken spiritual experience of the race ; a harmony
which is expressed in a thousand forms, and can be
verified in a thousand ways ?

4 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Newman, in his Grammar of Assent, had, long
before Sir Oliver Lodge, taken much the same ground.
' Formal logical sequence/ he says, ' is not the method
by which we are to become certain of what is concrete.
. . . The real and necessary method ... is the accu
mulation of probabilities, independent of each other,
arising out of the nature and circumstances of the
particular case which is under review — probabilities
too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to
be converted into syllogisms, too numerous and various
for such conversion, even were they convertible.' ' De
fenders of Christianity/ he goes on to say, ' are
tempted to select as reasons for belief, not the highest,
the truest, the most sacred, the most intimately per
suasive, but such as best admit of being exhibited in
argument, and these are commonly not the real
reasons in the case of religious men.'

It is certain there are proofs of the truth and divinity
of religion which lie closer to us than those formal
arguments of which we have spoken, and are of quite
another type. They do not need to be drawn out into
syllogisms; perhaps they cannot be so drawn out.
They are incidental, infinitely various, apparently un
related to each other ; seen vividly at times, and yet at
other times lost to sight. They are not, perhaps,
usually recognized as ' proofs/ yet their evidential
value is of great and perpetually expanding scale.
Literature and life grow richer in them every day.
They break upon us as surprises from unexpected

Religion and its Logic 5

quarters, they multiply as the mind grows in the habit
of meditation.

It is not easy to describe them, or to assess them.
Sometimes they consist of correspondences — analogies
unexpectedly discovered, high as the roof of the heavens
and deep as the soul of man — betwixt the physical and
the spiritual ; harmonies suddenly made audible betwixt
faith and science, betwixt things in the material, and
things in the spiritual, order. Sometimes they take the
form of spiritual intuitions strangely verified ; of great
spiritual truths found hidden in physical facts, and
suddenly breaking out from them.

Every one accustomed to think much on religious
things knows how — now at this point, now at that —
they grow unexpectedly luminous. An astronomer —
to borrow an illustration from the physical realm — sees
in the night sky a stain of white vapour. He turns
the disc of the great telescope upon it, and lo! the
vapour slowly resolves itself into tiny points of fire.
As he still watches, these tiny points of fire expand
into a constellation of stars. What was a patch of
mere structureless vapour presently becomes to the
wondering eye a cluster of planets, moving in majestic
order through the depths of space.

And in the same way there are facts in science, or
history, or in everyday life which to-day are regarded
as absolutely secular. But a gleam of spiritual meaning
becomes dimly recognizable in them, and they are seen
to be illustrations, broken and imperfect, of divine

6 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

truth. Then as the mind dwells on them the light
grows. Its area widens. What were only illustrations
become analogies. They brighten into revelations.

Sometimes what we have called the unrealized logic
of religion is found in a vision of the contrast betwixt
the majestic structure of Christian faith, standing un-
destroyed while centuries pass, and the broken and
forgotten shapes of unbelief which have opposed it.
The centuries are strewn with the wrecks of forgotten
unbeliefs, of theories intended to refute Christianity and
to take its place. No one has written yet, or has
written adequately, the history of unbelief; but when
that is done it will be one of the most powerful argu
ments for faith the human mind knows. Sometimes,
again, a glimpse of what may be called the whole trend
of the accumulating knowledge of the race constitutes
a new and hitherto unrecognized argument for religion.
Who can fail to see, for example, that steadily, and with
fast-growing momentum, the scientific interpretation of
the universe turns in the direction of Christianity ?

The purely materialistic reading of the universe is —
by all serious thinkers at least — discredited. Matter
in its last analysis is found to be only a mode of Force ;
and Force, when analysed, is the expression of Will ;
and Will is the quality of a Person. And so science
itself, drawing aside one obscuring veil after another,
is showing us — dimly seen behind all veils — the figure
of a personal and ever-working Creator. We do not
always see this ; but when it is seen, how the vision

Religion and its Logic 7

reinforces faith ! We have only to contrast such typical
scientists as Lord Kelvin and Sir Oliver Lodge with,
say, Tyndall or Haeckel, to realize what may be called
the drift of science.

Sometimes, again, this evidence of the final truth
of religion takes darker shapes ; it speaks with sterner
accents. It may take the shape of pain ; pain that
awakens suddenly, and we know not how, or whence,
in the innermost chamber of the spirit ; strange fears
that witness to the existence of moral forces; a dis
quiet which has the conscience as its instrument, and
the deepest susceptibilities of the human soul for its
field. 'If there be a God/ says Dalgairns, 'our
imagination would present Him to us as inflicting -nain
on the violator of His law ; and, lo ! the imagination
turns out to be an experienced fact ; the Unknowable
suddenly stabs me to the heart.'

A sense of the resistless logic of religion is sometimes
awakened as we realize how the accumulated witness
of all godly souls, in every land and throughout every
age, arrays itself on this side. John saw in vision the
great victorious host of heaven, and heard the loud
voice saying, 'Now is come salvation and strength,
and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His
Christ ' ; and that mighty and triumphant host, he is
told, ' overcame by the blood of the Lamb and by the
word of their testimony.' And that 'testimony' is
surely an instrument of victorious power for Christi
anity ; the witness of those -in all ages, under all skies,

The Unrealized Logic of Religion

who have lived by it, loved it, verified it, found in it
the secret of strength and of victory. And the sound
of that great and accumulating testimony deepens con
tinually. It grows in volume and majesty. Every
day adds to it; every saintly life and every happy
deathbed increases its authority. Who realizes that
has a new and exultant sense of the truth of religion.

The strange half-seen unities, again, which run
through religion, when for a moment realized, give a
new and overwhelming sense of its divinity. Every
one knows the subtle and persistent correspondences
which link the physical universe into unity, and prove
that unity. Let an atom of hydrogen be taken from
the belt of Orion, or from the central sun of the Pleiades,
and from a kitchen fire. They have never touched.
They have no physical relations with each other. All
the vast distances of utmost space part them. And
yet, when tested, they yield exactly the same results !
Put these two tiny jets of hydrogen flame, lit from such
far-off fires, to the test of the spectrum analysis ; they
register themselves in the same belts of colour, in
exactly the same order. They will do it always, no
matter what hand applies the test.

All the duties, truths, and doctrines of Christianity
have the same mysterious unity of structure. When put
to an adequate test — a test that has for them the office
the spectrum analysis has for light — they yield the same
characteristics. And this is the scientific proof that
they have one source ; they reflect one creative Mind.

Religion and its Logic 9

These incidental evidences of religion abound in
secular life, and take the shape of a logic that repeats,
in its own dialect, and in accents of authority, all the
great demands of religion. Sometimes this incidental
proof is found in the axiomatic logic of the instinctive
reason asserting itself; a suddenly realized sense of
what the spiritual consciousness declares, and of the
finality of its witness. Sometimes it is the gift of a
vision, all too rarely caught, and too easily lost, of the
true perspective of history; a realized vision of cen
turies, and ages, and nations, and civilizations, moving
under the impulse of a divine purpose and towards a
divine end.

History, to sum up, is rich in these examples of
what may be called the undeciphered, or the half-
deciphered, logic of Christian faith. They abound in
science ; they meet us in everyday life. They lurk in
our very senses ; they whisper to us in the most secret
chambers of the soul. Sometimes they shed the white
light of certainty on truths hitherto only half seen.
Sometimes they make the duty at our feet suddenly
luminous, and clothe it with peremptory authority for
the conscience. Sometimes they open an unexpected
window of vision into some vast chamber of the spiritual
world ; they yield a glimpse of some spiritual law run
ning through all time, and all realms, and touching all
souls.

To an electrician the characteristic and proof of a
'live' wire consists in the fact that when tested, no

io The Unrealized Logic of Religion

matter how often, at points no matter how widely
separate from each other, mysterious currents of energy
within the wire instantly answer, and answer in the
same terms. And it may be said that history, the
physical universe, the facts of our daily life, the very
make of our spiritual nature, if tested adequately, give
in one form or another instant and definite response ;
and these responses are an infinitely varied chain of
proofs of the reality of religion.

To the poet's ear, as Wordsworth long ago taught
us, the world is full of messages —

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep

I hear the echoes through the mountains throng.
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep

— all bringing strange meanings. To the child's eye,
again, strange visions come —

Thou blest philosopher who yet dost keep
Thy heritage; thou eye amongst the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind.

But to the devout spirit, to which is linked the
simplicity of the child's heart, come visions, too, such
as neither poet nor child can know. The whole world
at some moment grows luminous. God's very presence
— not merely the print of His foot or the signature of
His Hand — is on every side. The universe is a vast
whispering-gallery, and the inner ear catches messages

Religion and its Logic n

of which the outward senses know nothing. Nature
itself thus seen is written over with divine hieroglyphics.
No one has collected these incidental and suddenly
realized proofs into a system; perhaps they cannot be
systematized. Their spontaneity, their number, their
unexpectedness, the widely separated points at which
they appear, their very unrelatedness, constitute their
value. But they are all of the class we have tried
describe-correspondences suddenly discovered betwixt
the physical and the spiritual order, showing the same
Mind behind both; analogies proving that through all
realms that Mind is working towards the same ends ;
justifications of the terms of religion breaking in on us
from the laws of secular life; vast outlines of a moral
order, and of a moral purpose, shining through the
entanglements and bewilderments of human history.

Is there any logic known to the human reason like
the logic found in the answer of the chambers of a
lock to the wards of the key that opens it ? If key
and lock fit, the debate ends. And to a degree which
is very imperfectly realized, at a thousand points, and
in a thousand ways, beyond expectation-sometimes
even against expectation-this logic is arraying itself
on the side of Christian faith.

The chapters which follow are designedly spread
over a wide area of topics ; they deal with what seem
unrelated subjects, and that, the writer ventures to
think, constitutes their value. Their aim is to show
that when widely separated points in literature, history,

12 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

science, philosophy, and common life are tried by their
relation to religion, they instantly fall into logical
terms with it.

Incidentally, it may be added, the chapters are a
study of what may be called opposing credibilities.
Faith has its difficulties; but the incredibilities of
unbelief, when tested at any point, are so vast, that
their mere scale constitutes a new argument for
Christian belief. There are harmonies everywhere and
discords nowhere.

BOOK I
IN HISTORY

CHAPTER I
The Logic of the Changed Calendar

' Christ . . . who, being the holiest amongst the mighty,
the mightiest amongst the holy, lifted with His pierced hand
empires off their hinges, turned the stream of centuries out of its
channel, and still governs the ages.' — JEAN PAUL RICHTEB.

NO one stops to ask for an explanation of one
of the strangest facts, not only in historical
literature, but in the living world ; the fact
that all civilized time is dated from the birth of Jesus
Christ. This is the twentieth century ; and from what
event are those twenty centuries counted ? From the
birth of a Jew, who, on the sceptical theory, if he
ever existed, was a peasant in an obscure province in
a far-off age ; who wrote no book, made no discovery,
invented no philosophy, built no temple ; a peasant
who died when, as men count years, he had scarcely
reached his prime, and died the death of a criminal.
And even before his death the little band of disciples
he had succeeded in gathering, all forsook him and fled.
This is a story written in all the characters of defeat.
Yet civilized time is dated from the birth of this Jew !
The centuries carry His signature, and the years of the

1 6 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

modern world are labelled by universal consent the
' years of our Lord.'

And no one knows how it came to be done, or
when, or by whom. Not one educated man out of a
thousand can tell, off-hand, why all civilized calendars
are reckoned from that far-off birth in a little Jewish
village. Every morning all the newspapers of the
civilized world — though some of them fill their columns
with attacks on Jesus Christ — readjust their date to
His cradle. Each new year, as it arrives, is baptized
with His name. Calendars and Acts of Parliament,
business, and politics, and literature — the very dates
on our cheques and letters — all are thus unconsciously
adjusted to the chronology of Christ's life.

To write a human signature on Time itself, to put
a human name on the brow of the hurrying centuries
— this is a marvellous achievement ! Caesar has not
done it, nor Shakespeare, nor Newton. Genius is vain
to accomplish such a task ; the sword is vain ; wealth
is vain. But this Jew has done . it ! Plato was a
teacher, and Socrates was a martyr, with elements of
artistic interest and of human power which might be
thought to surpass anything associated with Jesus
Christ. Plato taught on a larger stage, belonged to a
more imperial race, and spoke a richer language than
the carpenter's son of Nazareth. Socrates drank the
cup of hemlock to an accompaniment of philosophic
discourse such as never was heard in Galilean villages.
He talked the language of Homer and Aeschylus, not

The Logic of the Changed Calendar 17

the rude Aramaic of Jewish peasants. The philosophy
of Plato, the dialogues of Socrates, are studied yet in
all the universities of the world. But the world does
not reckon its time from Plato or Socrates ; from
Alexander, or Caesar, or Marcus Aurelius ; from Greek
Olympiads or Eoman Consulates. It dates its time
from One who, as unbelief explains Him, was merely
a Jewish peasant, and who died the death of a
criminal !

Christian men as they dwell on this strange thing
know that it is no accident. It is a sign writ large
on Time itself, of the empire of Him who is the Lord
of Time. But if we accept the theory of those who
reject Christ, the very almanac of the modern world
is an incredible absurdity. How does it come to pass,
we repeat, that not by accident, not by some conspiracy
of fanatics, not by the force of any imperial edict, but
by a convergence of silent, unrecognized, almost un
conscious forces, all civilized time is baptized into the
name of Jesus Christ ?

To have some common measure of time is, of
course, a necessity of organized society; and in a
thousand ways the attempt has been made to establish
such a universal time-measure. But all these attempts
— save one — have failed. The trouble is to find an
adequate starting-point for the calendar. It must be
an event, or a person, or an institution universally
known; some one, or something, which has left an
enduring mark on the imagination of mankind. And

c

1 8 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

the scale of the event from which mankind consents,
or is compelled, to count its years, may be measured
by the geographical area over which that date is
accepted as a starting-point of time, and the number
of centuries through which it keeps that great office.
A world-shaking victory, the foundation of some many-
centuried city, the birth of a dynasty or of a creed,
the beginning of a revolution — such an event, it might
reasonably be expected, would give time a new starting-
point. And it has a curious effect to look back and
see how many starting-points have been set up, were
visible for a moment, and are now forgotten.

History is strewn thick with these forgotten way-
marks of time — Greek Olympiads, Koman Consulates,
Babylonian Eponyms. For centuries the mystic letters
' A.u.c.' were a witness that the world's time was dated
from the foundation of the great city on the Tiber. One
calendar dates from Alexander the Great, another from
Julius Caesar. Pharsalia and Actium were battles that
changed the course of history, and each in turn was
taken as a starting-point for the world's almanac.

But no conqueror's sword has ever cut deeply
enough on Time to leave an enduring mark. The
Julian era, the Alexandrian era, the era of the Seleu-
cidae — all have had their little day and vanished.
The martyrdoms of Diocletian could not burn deeply
enough into the calendar to leave a lasting mark there.
The Aera Martyrum is forgotten. The Indictions of
all names — imperial and pontificial — have fled like

The Logic of the Changed Calendar 19

shadows. There is for civilized men but one enduring,
universally recognized starting-point of civilized time.
It is that which dates from the cradle of Bethlehem !

How is this strange fact to be explained ? Did
a conspiracy of Christ's followers capture all the
calendars of the race and baptize them by fraud into
the name of their Master ? No one ventures to suggest
that explanation. The change was neither achieved by
fraud nor imposed by authority. It does not represent
the will of a conqueror, or the arts of priests, or the
enactment of a despot. Most people would say, on
general grounds, that we owe the christianization of
the calendar to the Emperor Constantine. It was he
who saw the cross in vision, surrounded by the
shining characters 'In hoc vinces'; and he stamped
that cross on the institutions and literature of his time.
He, first of all the world's rulers, gave to Christianity
official recognition.

But as a matter of historic fact he did not writa
the name of Jesus Christ on the calendar. The famous
Indictions — or tax-periods — were his work, and in some
provinces of the empire they outlasted the empire itself.
Traces of them, for example, are found in France for
nearly a thousand years after Constantine. But the
Indictions had no religious aspect whatever ; they
simply marked the tax-periods in cycles of fifteen
years. The most significant and impressire feature in
the strange change wrought in the calendar is, indeed,
the silence and the slowness with which it was effected.

20 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

The process was as independent of human will as tho
coming of spring, or as the rise of a sea tide — and as
resistless.

The name of Jesus Christ did not emerge in the
calendar till five centuries after His death, a space of
time long enough for Him to have been forgotten had
He been an impostor. It took another five hundred
years to become universally accepted as a starting-
point for historic time. And the process is linked to
no single human name. Who knows, or cares, any
thing about Dionysius Exiguus, an obscure Roman
abbot, who from A.D. 525 had begun, in his Easter
tables, to count ' ab incarnatione domini ' ? As a
matter of fact, only twelve years after the Easter
tables of Dionysius Exiguus the Emperor Justinian
— A.D. 537 — issued a decree directing that all public
documents should be dated by the year of the emperor,
the name of the consul, and the Indiction, or tax-
period, then current. But only four years later the
last consul was elected; the office and the name alike
became shadows !

Emperors and consuls have counted for nothing
against the name of Jesus Christ. By A.D. 525 that
name had stolen into the imagination of the world.
It had stamped itself on literature. Greek games,
IJoman Consulates, mighty emperors, world-famed
conquerors vanished like hurrying phantoms. Why
should time be dated ' ab urbe condita ' when Eome
itself had lost bcth empire and fame ? So A.D. took

The Logic of the Changed Calendar 21

the place of A.U.C. Only one Name survived; only
one figure was visible across wide spaces of perished
time. That name and figure represented the energies
which were moulding human society to a new pattern ;
and, as a visible and concrete reflex of that fact, the
world's time began to be reckoned from the birth of
Jesus Christ. All that had gone before, all that had
happened beside, no longer counted. By a deep, un
conscious, inarticulate, yet irresistible instinct the
world recognized, and recorded on its almanacs, the
true starting-point of its life.

Many attempts have been made since to give
another point of departure for recorded time. La
Place, the astronomer, proposed to give stability and
dignity to human chronology by linking it to the
stars. Some four thousand years before Christ the
major axis of the earth's orbit coincided with the line
of the equinoxes ; in A.D. 1250 they were at right angles
to each other. Human time, La Place argued, ought
not to be adjusted to the trivial events and vanishing
names of earthly history, but to the march of the
heavenly bodies. Here in the depths of space, and in
the grouping of the planets, it was possible to find a
magnificent and unchanging mark to which all human
calendars might be adjusted. Why not make the
moment from which the whole earth should count its
time that at which the line of the equinoxes is at
right angles to the axis of the earth's orbit? But
science has not yet redated the almanac, and never will.

22 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Islam has made a faint and broken mark on the
calendar. Mohammedan nations count their time from
the Hegira, A.D. 622. The Moslem almanac was drawn
up by the Caliph Omar in A.D. 640, only eighteen years
after the Flight ; and he imposed his calendar on all
the followers of Mohammed by the logic of the sword.
Time for them was redated by force ; and still the
Hegira is confined as a time-measure to a dying creed
and to a cluster of half-civilized races.

The most notable attempt in modern days to find
a new starting-point for civilized time was that under
taken by France in 1793. The Eevolution was to be
counted as the Year One ; and that ambitious calendar
had many things in its favour. It undoubtedly coin
cided with a political new birth ; and since the
Eevolution had great passions and forces behind it,
and great ideals before it, the new date marked the
beginning of an enduring movement. The world of
European politics has never been the same since the
Eevolution, and never will be. The calendar enacted
by the French Assembly had thus some historic
justification, and it was adorned with all the artistic
graces the lively French imagination could invent.
Its months had poetical names; its festivals bore
such high-sounding labels as Virtue, Genius, Labour,
Opinions, Eewards. The revolutionary calendar, in
brief, had for the Eevolution itself the office of a flag
— and it shared the fate of a flag. It fell with the
cause it represented. It lasted just thirteen years;

The Logic of the Changed Calendar 23

and its only legacy to history is the tangle of names
and dates with which it confuses the records of those
thirteen years.

All the forces known to history, in a word, and
all the ideas that have authority for the human
imagination, have been employed to mark the starting-
point from which the human race may count its
years; and all have failed. Only one Event towers
high enough above the horizon of history to serve as a
landmark and a time-measure for all civilized races.

Faith, of course, sees in that deep mark on human
almanacs a mysterious and, as far as human purpose is
concerned, an undesigned, but all-significant, token of
ownership. It corresponds to the stamp on the coin.
It answers the challenge, ' Whose image and super
scription is this ? * It is both a sign and a prophecy ;
a sign that the centuries belong to Christ, a prophecy
of the fast-coming hour when all that Time includes
and represents shall bear His signature.

But what faith sees in the christianized calendar
is, for our purpose, irrelevant. What adequate and
intelligible explanation can, on scientific grounds, be
given of this strange signature of a dead Jew's hand
on all the almanacs of the living world ? What force
wrote it there ? Is it a mere historic accident ? Is
it the result of a reasonless caprice ? It is certainly
not the result of any conspiracy on the part of
Christian fanatics.

The line left by a wave on the sloping beach is

24 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

slight ; a child's foot can efface it. But it shows where
the tide has run. It is a measure of the mysterious
energies, born of the movements of the planets and of
the unsounded depths of ocean, which cause the tides.
And so the date on the almanac is a tide-mark,
and it is the mark of a tide which has known no
reflux. If a jury of historians had to explain on
purely historical grounds the letters A.D., which now
serve universally as a point whence civilized time is
reckoned, they must report that some force, mysterious
in origin and quality, and independent of human will,
but with range and energy sufficient to affect all
civilized nations, and persistent enough in character
to run through all the centuries, has somehow put
the impress of Christ's hand on history. What other
explanation is possible ?

Suppose some strange chemical force suddenly
awoke in all the seas of the planet, crept through all
their depths, and changed the tint of every wave. No
one could name the moment when the change took
place ; no one could guess the cause. But the change
was visible to man's very senses. Every wave that
broke reflected the new tint. Would plain men accept
as a sufficient explanation the theory that a child had
by accident dropped its box of colours into the sea ?
Would a conspiracy of chemists explain it? What
affected the colour of all the seas must be a force as
wide as the sea, and as deep.

On the theory that Christ never lived, or that lie

The Logic of the Changed Calendar 25

was an impostor, in regard to whom only the visible
human elements have to be computed, the change in
the nomenclature of time is the very paradox of his
tory. Here is a peasant in the darkest age of the
world; he lived in a subject province; he never
wrote a sentence which has been preserved; he died
when he had scarcely reached manhood, and he died
cast out by his own race, and abandoned by his scanty
handful of followers. And yet twenty centuries after
he hung on the cross his birth is accepted, by believers
and unbelievers alike, as the point whence all the
centuries must be counted. In Jean Paul Eichter's
magnificent sentences, 'the crucified Jew, being the
holiest amongst the mighty, the mightiest amongst
the holy, has lifted with His pierced hands empires off
their hinges, turned the stream of centuries out of its
channel, and still governs the ages.' And all our
almanacs repeat in unconscious prose, and in un
rhythmical numerals, that flight of stately rhetoric.

As Faith with adoring eyes looks on Jesus Christ,
the cause is scientifically adequate to the effect. It is
fitting that He who came to transfigure human his
tory should put the transforming touch of His hand
on the very records of Time. The Christian centuries
ought to carry the signature of Christ's name. But
the unbelief which rejects Christ can have no answer
to this puzzle. How does it happen, it may be asked,
that an obscure Jew has done what Alexander and
Caesar failed to do ; what it would seem an idle

26 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

absurdity to expect Shakespeare, or Newton, or Napoleon
to do?

The incarnate Son of God, the Word made flesh
who has come into the world's history to shape it
to a new pattern-it is fitting that to Him all the
years should pay the unconscious homage of bearin*
His name. The christianized calendar represents the
seal of Christ's kingship on Time itself. But to be
lieve that a remote impostor, in a forgotten province
of a perished empire, stamped himself so deeply on
Time as to compel all the centuries to bear his name
is to believe that a child, with its box of colours, could
change the tint of all the oceans I

CHAPTER H
The Logic of the Keystone and the Arch

'Christian theology means philosophy become Christian.'—
ILLIXGWOBTH.

« Pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly under
stood, were but a preparation for the goepeL The Greek poets and
sages were in a certain sense prophets ; for " thonghts beyond their
thoughts to those high bards were given." ' — NEWMAS.

TWO stately pillars rise from separate bases.
They are parallel yet distinct. They climb
upward through space, course on course ; but,
at a certain point they curve; they converge, and
approach each other. Yet they do not meet. They
wait for something different from each, which will
unite both. They are waiting for the keystone ! Each
is unfinished, imperfect, fragmentary. But the keystone
completes them. It turns the fragments into a unit;
it weds the separate pillars into an arch.

And there are two movements in history — Jewish
prophecy and Greek philosophy— which seem parted
by a very wide gulf from each other, but which fulfil
the parable of the keystone and the arch. It is not usual
to think of them as being twin forces in one great

28 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

history, factors in a common plan. There is, it is true,
a curious agreement, in point of time, betwixt them.
But by geography, language, environment, they are
utterly divorced. They seem to move in different
realms. One belongs to secular history, the other to
sacred. One is moral, the other is intellectual. One
works by the conscience, the other through the reason.
One represents an aspiration after holiness ; the other
is the translation into historic terms of the second
great hunger of human nature, the hunger of the
intellect for knowledge.

Yet the two movements, though each was uncon
scious, through whole centuries, of the very existence
of the other, are parallel. Their rise, their climax,
their point of arrest coincide. Each of itself was
incomplete, but at a given moment these two separate
movements strangely approach. They combine. Each
finds its completion in one sublime, historic event, the
Incarnation. And the manner of their union, the way
in which a single historic fact, the entrance into human
flesh of the Son of God, fulfils both movements, is one
of the strongest proofs the human intellect can ask that
behind both was one divine and shaping Will.

Jewish prophecy is, of course, everywhere recognized
as a movement in preparation for the Incarnation, and
the long chain of verified predictions is one of the
legitimate and familiar arguments drawn from history
for the divinity of Jesus Christ. It is, perhaps, true
that at one stage in the fight for the Christian faith

The Logic of the Keystone and the Arch 29

the argument from Messianic prophecies was not too
wisely used. Christian apologists were too anxious to
discover predictive hints and types on every page of
Scripture; to catalogue specific prophecies whose ful
filment could be dated and identified. The wiser
tendency now is to lay less emphasis on individual
predictions, but to increase the prophetic significance
of the whole history of the Jewish people. That his
tory is a web shot through and through, over its entire
extent, with Messianic predictions. The history and
the literature of the Jewish nation alike are unintel-
licrible if the whisper of a coming Messiah is not heard
throughout every sentence.

The whole story of the Jewish people is the tale
of a nation selected and morally trained to be the
religious teachers of the race. If the Greek ideal was
knowledge, and the Koman ideal social order, the
Jewish ideal was religion. And the very structure of
Jewish history and institutions is a great interwoven
scheme of events and institutions, designed to create a
vocabulary for religion ; to burn in upon the human con
science the great ideas of religion : the sense of what sin
means, and of what its penalty must be ; the vision of
holiness, as it exists in God and as it is imperative
on man; a message of forgiveness, reached through a
scheme of mysterious suffering, suffering vicarious in
character — the suffering of the innocent for the guilty.

And, visibly, Jewish history before the Incarnation
is a movement towards a sublime goal not yet reached

30 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Its literature shines with the fore-gleams of a revelation
still to come. It is incomplete. It bears witness to
righteousness, and to some approaching and perfect
triumph of righteousness ; but the goal is still far off.

Jewish history and religion are thus a movement
towards a spiritual victory necessary for the happiness
of the race and for the completion of God's plans, but
impossible to man as he is, and only to be achieved
by the appearance of a great and mysterious Deliverer.
Looked at historically, it is, to quote Illingworth, 'a
great, divine idea moving onward with infinite patience
to its realization.' And the prophetic character of
Judaism, it may be repeated, does not depend on
specific predictions, but on the drift of the whole
movement It is all prophetic, through every syllable.
It points continually forward to something better and
greater than itself.

But a parallel, though widely different movement
is visible throughout the same period in the secular
realm; and the Christian Church of to-day, which is
slowly learning how 'God fulfils Himself 'in many
ways,' how wide are His plans, and how surely His
Spirit runs through all human history, can recognize
that the great movement of the Greek mind in the
realms of philosophy had a deep, if unconscious, kinship
with the training of the Jewish people.

Christianity, of course, is not a philosophy; it is a
religion. It is not an intellectual theory, but a life ;
not a discovery, but a revelation. But since philosophy

The Logic of the Keystone and the Arch 3 1

deals with knowledge as a whole, and seeks to find the
underlying unity behind all facts, there must be a
philosophic aspect to religion, as well as a religious
aspect to philosophy. And there is in human history
no more splendid chapter of intellectual effort than
that of Greek philosophy, from Thales to Aristotle.
All the great questions that perplex the human mind,
and which are as old as the race itself, were debated
in the Greek schools by the keenest intellects the race
has known. The current questions of to-day — as to
the relation of matter and spirit, the problem of free
will, the puzzle of human personality, the nature of
God, the unity of natural law, the ultimate reality
lying behind all phenomena — are to be found in the
literature of the Greek philosophical schools.

These problems are co-existent with the human
mind ; and the modern terms into which we translate
them ought not to hide the essential identity betwixt
the questions debated in Greek schools centuries before
Christ and those over which so much ink is spilt in
modern newspapers. Nothing that materialism asserts,
and nothing that agnosticism denies to-day, but was
asserted, or denied, in Greek philosophy more than
two thousand years ago.

Now, Greek philosophy reaches its high- water mark
in Plato ; and philosophy with him was not intellectual
merely, but intensely religious. Plato reasoned twenty
centuries before Kant was born ; he represents another
stage in the great evolution of philosophical knowledge.

32 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

He lacked Kant's piercing vision into what may be
called the roots of human personality and the essential
conditions of human knowledge. But the great Greek
thinker was dimly conscious of those inevitable limita
tions lying upon the human intellect, which Kant has
taught us to recognize. The human mind can only
think in the terms of its own categories. In the very
act of translating sensations into perceptions, we give
Truth a new aspect, and so, in a sense, miss it. The
highest human duty, Plato taught, was to break free
from the illusion of the senses and to reach the ultimate
realities of things. And the ultimate reality of the
universe is God.

Many of Plato's thoughts about God are marked by
a singular loftiness. There is even a curious forecast of
the mystery of the Trinity in his analysis of God under
three forms : TO ov, the Cause of all things ; o Aoyo?, the
Reason and Ruler of all tilings ; and the third, the ^vx»)
KOffftov, the Soul of all things. 'Nothing can be more
certain/ says Pope, ' than that the trinity of personal
hypostases glimmered in the writings of Plato.' ' His
definition of God,' Pope adds, ' has never been surpassed
in sublimity.' Light, Plato declared, is His shadow.
God Himself is the Light of lights. Knowledge,
Plato taught, does not lie in the senses, or in what the
senses report. The world of ideas is the world of
realities. What the senses deal with are but illusions.
The highest Idea is the idea of goodness ; and God
is the ultimate reality of goodness.

The Logic of the Keystone and the Arch 33

Plato, in a word, taught as definitely as St. Paul
that ' the things which are seen are temporal, and the
things which are unseen are eternal.' Truth and false
hood, he held, are radical and ultimate contradictories.
'If,' says Maurice, 'in the minutest thing Plato
believes that there is a reality, an archetypal form
or idea, yet he believes, also, just as firmly, that every
idea has its root in one higher than itself; and that
there is a Supreme Idea, the foundation and consum
mation of all these — the Idea of the absolute and perfect
Being in whose mind they all dwell, and in whose
eternity alone they can be thought of as eternal.' l

It is unnecessary to dwell on the defects of Plato's
philosophy, and on the practical blots in his EepuUic.
It is enough to note that his whole scheme of thought
about the universe was profoundly theistic, spiritual,
ethical ; it justifies the great saying of Clement of
Alexandria, that ' philosophy was to the Greeks what
the law was to the Jews, a schoolmaster to bring them
to Christ.' Who can doubt that the Spirit of God was
at work in the Greek intellect as truly as in the Jewish
conscience, and in both was moving towards one sublime
goal?

But he who studies the history of these two move
ments will see that, at a stage almost coincident in
point of time, both suffer arrest. With the Messianic
prophecies of Jewish history, it was the pause in a,
great drama waiting for its final act. For nearly four
1 Moral and, Metaphysical Philosophy, Part I, p. 49,

D

34 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

centuries before Christ, the voice of the prophet was
hushed. The nation was waiting — though perhaps
hardly conscious of its own attitude and expectation
— for an event which should fulfil the accumulated
prophecies of centuries ; a fulfilment without which
its history was a failure, its types false, its aspira
tions defeated. Christianity without Judaism is a root
less flower ; but Judaism without Christianity is a
root that never breaks into blossom. Unless the dim
and splendid prophecies of Jewish history found historic
embodiment, there must come the greatest defeat of
human hope the literature of the race records.

But Greek philosophy, too, during the centuries
immediately before Christ, suffered strange and con
scious defeat. Plato himself was conscious of the
limitations of the human intellect. It was capable of
aspiring after truth, but incapable of reaching it. How
could the human mind penetrate through all the illu
sions of the senses and reach the ultimate reality of
things? In the Republic is the well-known and
most pathetic Myth of the Cave. Men are pictured by
Plato as prisoners in some vast and shadow-haunted
cave. They are chained with their backs to a fire;
they see cast on the rocky wall before them the shadows
flung by their own forms and gestures, and they mis
take this shadow-dance for reality. Some of these
prisoners have turned their faces to the light; they
oil up the steep slope to the mouth of the cave ; they
stand with dazed eyes in the sunlight, trying to endure

The Logic of the Keystone and the Arch 35

the vision of the sun itself. These escaped prisoners,
struggling into the light, and trying to bear its radiance,
are the highest souls of the race, its philosophers. But
the mass of the race still dwelt, and must dwell, in
darkness and shadows.

There finds utterance in the later writings of Plato
himself, a pathetic consciousness of failure. The soul
is wearied of its own aspirations. It cannot climb to
God ; God must, as Plato dimly sees, stoop to man ; and
he puts on the lips of Socrates the words, ' We will wait
for one, either God or a God-inspired man, to teach us
our religious duties and to take away the darkness from
our eyes.' Greek philosophy, as Plato left it, is not
merely a tangle of questions unanswered, of puzzles
unsolved. It is a confession that the questions are
unanswerable, the puzzles beyond solution.

But if there is that pathetic note of intellectual
defeat in Plato's later philosophy, the defeat and the
despair of human intellect itself find complete expres
sion in the schools that succeeded Plato. In these schools
we have philosophy fallen consciously bankrupt. It
becomes mere Pyrrhonism, the teaching that there is
nothing noble or base, just or unjust; that nothing
truly exists and nothing matters. And the city which
gave Socrates the hemlock, gave Pyrrho, for such teach
ing as this, the honours of citizenship, and for his sake
exempted all philosophers from the payment of taxes !
'A despair of philosophy in its old sense/ says
Maurice, ' was implied in all the later Greek schools.'

36 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

That despair finds expression alike in the teachings of
Epicurus, in the doctrines of the Stoics, in the atom-
dance of Democritus. The perception of any real law
and standard for man had perished. The very power of
conceiving the central principle of Plato's philosophy
was lost to his countrymen. The later schools are, to
use Maurice's words, ' the lees of Greek philosophy.'
And Greek ethics, like Greek philosophy, became a mere
decaying ferment, whose foulness Paul has described in
terrible characters.

Then, suddenly, there came, to Jewish prophecy
and Greek philosophy alike, a meeting-point — an Event
that interpreted and united them both. The keystone
was fitted into the arch !

One great and significant term had survived from
Plato's philosophy ; it was the word ' logos,' with the
double sense of 'reason' and of 'speech.' In Plato's
terminology the Logos was the reason, the shaping
reality of all things. The Jewish mind in the century
immediately before Christ had become conscious of its
kinship with Greek thought, and hence the appearance
of Philo, a contemporary of Christ, in Alexandria. In
his writing he borrows the Logos of Plato and links it
to the creative and personified Wisdom of later Jewish
literature. But it is St. John who takes the word
Greek philosophy had shaped, baptizes it with a
Christian meaning, and puts it in the opening sentence
of his Gospel.

The earlier evangelists could not have done this.

The Logic of the Keystone and the Arch 37

They were concerned merely with facts. The question
of the relations of facts, of the philosophy underlying
the facts, comes later. But John, writing in what may
be called a philosophic environment, and writing, we
must believe, towards the close of the first Christian
century, has a vision of the inter-relations of history.
He sees that Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God,
is the Logos, the shaping Eeason of the universe, of
whom Plato had caught a broken vision. And so he
takes the term, which represents the climax of Greek
thought reaching out after God, and links it with the
fulfilment of Jewish prophecy. ' In the beginning/ he
says, * was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. . . . And the Word was made
flesh and dwelt among us/ And, as a matter of fact,
as we look at the Incarnation in the perspective of
history, it is certain that it links together and fulfils
these two great movements in the development of the
race.

That the Incarnation satisfies all the Messianic
predictions of the Old Testament no one doubts ; but it
also meets and satisfies all that Greek philosophy
dreamed of, and longed for, and failed to reach. Plato,
if he could have read the opening verses of John's
Gospel, would have recognized his own conception ; but
he would have found his conception lifted up into
sublime clearness, and linked to an historical event
which exactly met all the needs of the human soul, as
Plato imperfectly saw them ; an event which, in place

38 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

of intellectual defeat and despair, gives to the soul the
triumph of intellectual attainment.

The Word, John teaches, is personal, eternal ; it
is made flesh. Here is God descending from those
heights to which the human intellect cannot climb,
and giving Himself in human terms to the human
soul. Here is the central Eeality of the universe
offered to our very senses. The great doctrine that
God is love is only intelligible in the light of the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity ; for how could God
be love if eternally alone ; if eternally there were not
this trinity of persons in the Godhead ? Plato, as we
have seen, had curious fore-gleams of the multiple
personality in the Godhead ; but he never linked it
to the great Christian doctrine, its correlative, that
God is love. And though he hoped for some teacher,
'a God-inspired man, or God,' who would solve for
the human intellect all the problems that perplexed
and baffled it, he never dreamed of such an event as
the Incarnation.

It came, indeed, in a shape neither Jew nor Greek
expected. It disappointed both. To the Jew the In
carnation was a stumbling-block, to the Greek it was
foolishness. Yet, as we now see, it completed the two
great movements represented both by Jew and Greek.
It fulfilled the Jewish ideal of a divine and perfect)
holiness, and the Greek ideal of a divine Wisdom, the
ultimate reality of the universe. It offers both ex
pressed in human terms. In the Incarnation we have

The Logic of the Keystone and the Arch 39
Messianic prophecies verified and Greek philosophy
fulfilled.

In the meanwhile how did it happen that John—
who was a Jew, not a Greek; a fisherman, not a
philosopher— seized this great philosophical term which
Plato had invented, and put it in the opening sentence
of his Gospel ? How did he identify the Logos of Plato
with the Messiah of Jewish hope and prophecy ? And,
more wonderful still, how does it happen that this Jewish
Messiah does, as a matter of fact, correspond so pro
foundly to the Logos of whom Plato debated and dreamed?
For just as it is historically certain that the Word
who was made flesh satisfies Jewish prophecy, so it is
intellectually certain that in the great Figure described
in John's Gospel— the Word whom John declared his
eyes had seen, his hands had touched— Plato would
have found an answer to all the puzzles of his own
philosophy. The Incarnation, if it be accepted as a
fact, does answer all the questions over which Greek
philosophers debated for centuries; until, in sheer
intellectual despair, they turned to mere Pyrrhonism.

The Incarnation is a revelation of the Ultimate
Reality of the universe. It reveals God; it reveals
Him as a Person ; as love, and light, and holiness. It
is a revelation of the spiritual nature of man ; of his
place in the universe ; of his significance in the sight
of God. It is a supreme interpretation of duty ; and
it brings into the circle of human experience the
moral forces which make duty possible.

40 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Incidentally, the Incarnation is an assertion of the
spiritual basis of the universe, and of the moral goal
towards which it moves. It is a declaration of the fact
that the whole material universe is for man, a servant,
a tool, a training-ground. It is an assertion not only
of the fact that God is love, but that man is His child,
and is meant to stand to Him in a relationship of love.
A philosophical analysis of the meaning of the
Incarnation, quite apart from the question of its
historic truth, will show, in brief, that it answers all the
puzzles of the human intellect And, we repeat, how
does it come to pass that in a single event, the Incar
nation, these two great and apparently unrelated historic
movements — Jewish prophecy on one side, Greek
philosophy on the other— meet and find their fulfil
ment ? And how did John come to discern this, and
put Plato's Word in the first line of his Christian
Gospel, a silent witness of the great harmony thus
revealed ?

All this, of course, is only to ask why the keystone
fits, and completes, the arch. And who that looks at
the perfect lines of the completed arch, the wedlock of
unshakable strength and of reasoned symmetry it
represents, can doubt that behind it is the thought
of a divine Mind, working in different lands, by
different forces, and, through men of different blood
and speech, towards one sublime goal ?

CHAPTER III
The Logic of the Missionary

1 Should a voyager chance to be on the point of shipwreck on
some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of
the missionary may have reached thus far. . . . The lesson of the
missionary is the enchanter's wand.' — DARWLH.

THE Church is beginning to see the reflex value
of Christian missions, though the vision is yet
very imperfect. Missions call into exercise,
they intensify by exercise, the central motives, the
most characteristic energies and emotions of religion.
They repeat in human terms that divine passion of
pity, of seeking love, of love which takes the supreme
form of sacrifice, which is behind the Incarnation and
explains it They measure our fidelity to all the great
doctrinal conceptions of the Christian scheme: the
value of man, the awfulness of sin, the range and
tenderness of the redeeming purpose of God. And
it may be added that if they disappeared, Christianity
would lose one of its divinest credentials. For in
missions, as a branch of Christian evidences, there is an
unrealized force. They not only diffuse Christianity,
they prove it. They are the revelation of a force

42 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

which can only be scientifically explained on the
supposition that Christianity is true.

In a cluster of familiar Scripture words — words
which, as Wellington put it with a soldier's insight,
constitute ' the marching orders ' of Christianity — is to
be found the charter of missions : ' Go ye into all the
world and preach the gospel to every creature.' Now,
a bit of literature, like a flower, cannot be separated from
its environment, its climate, its soil, its root. And, tried
by literary tests, these words are a paradox. They are
in utter quarrel with their environment. They were
spoken only six weeks after what, to the group of
Jewish peasants and fishermen who listened, must
have seemed the shattering and final defeat of the
Cross.

We etherealize the Cross to-day. We set it in
the perspective of nearly twenty centuries of victorious
history. We see it, as Constantine saw it in his dream,
high in the sky, with a nimbus of glory about it, while
mighty voices out of unseen worlds are crying to us
' in hoc signo vinces.' But to the immediate spectators
the Cross was a fact, as brutal and as tainted with
shame, as to the modern imagination is the hangman's
rope. It was the instrument and sign of the death of
a criminal.

Yet within six weeks of — let us say — the hangman's
rope, here is a message tingling with triumphant energy
in every syllable, commanding the news of the death
that rope has accomplished to be carried as a gospel to

The Logic of the Missionary 43

the whole world ! There is victory in the words,
authority, the gladness of supernatural hopes. They
overleap all national barriers. And, as a matter of
historic fact, they proved the signal for that great
march of Christianity, before which empires, and king
doms, and creeds have gone down, which — though it
has sometimes loitered — has never ceased since, and
never will cease.

Looked at as a mere problem in literature, how is
this strange message, out of which Christian missions
have sprung, emerging under such strange conditions,
to be explained ? Was it the expression, in literary
terms, of a delusion which had somehow captured the
narrow brains of a group of affrighted and defeated
Jews ? But the words are in open quarrel with the
whole temper of Judaism. The Jew, bound up in the
narrow pride of his race, scorned the Gentile world ;
and history had deepened that scorn to hate. For
centuries Palestine had been a doormat on which
one great invader after another had wiped his feet.
The Jew who had seen a Greek conqueror sacrifice
a sow in the Holy of Holies, and a Eoman con
queror march his legions through the gates of Jeru
salem ; who had seen the Holy Land broken up and
oppressed by one Idumean after another — how he
hated them all, Assyrian and Greek, Eoman and
Idumean !

He nursed his hate like a piety. He avenged
himself by it for a hundred defeats, for the captivities

44 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

and oppressions of whole centuries. Its black eclipse
covered the whole human race outside the men of his
own blood.

Could a message like this, with its world-embracing
good will, find its cradle within the narrow brows of a
Jew ? That is unthinkable. ' These Jews' to quote
Eousseau, 'could never have struck this tone.' Eighteen
centuries of Christian history had yet to pass before the
Christian conscience itself learned to spell the first
syllables of that great message. Whatever the words
represent, they do not reflect the genius of Judaism ;
they are in conflict with it. If some one discovered
one of Shakespeare's sonnets hidden in some harsh
Scandinavian saga; or if stanzas wearing the austere
grace and charged with the lofty conceptions of 'In
Memoriam,' were found embedded in some musky
and sensual love-song of the East, it would not be a
literary paradox more bewildering than the sound of
words like these on Jewish lips. And yet, on the
sceptical theory, they are the utterance, real or
imaginary, of a Galilean peasant !

But the message is in quarrel, not only with the
temper of Jerusalem, but with the visible facts of the
moment. No one can read the words and believe that
behind them is a defeated Christ; a Christ lying in
Joseph's grave, with the stone yet at the door, and
Pilate's seal unbroken. There are those who believe
that the resurrection is a myth, and they expend
pensive compliments on the body of Christ still

The Logic of the Missionary 45

wrapped in Mary's spices. They say with Matthew
Arnold —

Now He is dead! Far hence lie lies

la the lorn Syrian town,
And on His grave with pitying eyes

The Syrian stars look down.

But no one who really believed that could have
imagined, or could have uttered, the great charter
which stands behind Christian missions. A dead Christ
is a defeated Christ. And the note of these words is
not one of defeat, but of victory, and of the exultant
energy born of victory.

Huxley says that when no star yet swung in its
orbit, all the worlds lay potentially in the cosmic vapour
which eddied through space, and a being of sufficient
intelligence might have discovered in that vapour
everything there is in the world to-day, from the last
winner of the Derby to the last leading article in the
journals. Tennyson strikes a saner note in his lines
beginning —

Flower in the crannied wall —

If I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

And from a flower a being of sufficient intelligence
could, no doubt, deduce all that goes to produce the
flower — earth and rain and sun. It needs an ante
cedent universe to make the flower possible. We
could not explain it without taking into account all

46 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

the worlds. And in the cluster of words behind
Christian missions the whole gospel comes into bloom.
It needs the whole gospel to explain them.

There must be victory, and not defeat, behind them.
Would it have occurred to a group of men whose leader
had just died the death of a criminal, who were stagger
ing under the shock of a disaster so great, and trembling
for their own safety, to talk in accents like these ?
That is unthinkable. At the back of the words, to
make them credible or possible, there must have been
the miracle of the open grave, the risen Christ, the
transfigured Cross ; the miracle of a divine redemption
accomplished, fulfilled, and crowned.

But if there is one set of wonders behind these
words to make them possible, another set of wonders
has followed them. Slowly, and by a process runnin^
through centuries, they have mastered the conscience
of the Christian Church; they have coloured its
ideals. And to-day, by universally admitted ethical
obligation, Christianity is a missionary religion. It
is a creed which, twenty centuries after its founder's
death, produces missions and missionaries as naturally
as a living tree, in whose woody fibres the mysterious
forces of spring are stirring, produces blossoms.

And the missionaries it produces are of an absolutely
unique type. Mohammedanism is a missionary religion,
too, but the evangelists of Islam use the logic of the
sword-blade. Their message is, 'Accept the Koran
or diel' But the Christian missionary is a human

The Logic of the Missionary 47

phenomenon without parallel in history. A certain
measure of half-pitying contempt commonly gathers
about him. He has the scantiest equipment. He carries
no arms ; he is clad with no civil authority ; he has
very little money ; he is usually alone. He has only a
message and a motive. The message is the story of
Christ, and the motive is the love of Christ.

And, somehow, he succeeds everywhere ! He works
a miracle which all the resources of science, and litera
ture, and civilization without him could not do. A
pagan race, it is true, can learn the mechanical arts
and borrow the dreadful weapons of civilization.
Japan has dc-ne this, and has shifted the very centre
of political gravity for the whole world as a result.
But to create a new moral character in a people foul
with the vices of heathenism, this is a miracle beyond
the wit of man to accomplish. But the missionary does
it ! He lands on some lonely and savage isle, and, under
black skins, in dull brains, in human souls made fierce
with whole centuries of savage ancestry and habits, he
yet creates a new character. By some strange magic
he reproduces, on such strange soil, the best morality
civilized lands know. In races that yesterday were
heathen and savage he somehow develops many of
the qualities of saints, and, not seldom, something of
the temper of martyrs.

What may be called the secondary results of the
missionary's work are, in their kind, marvellous. He
civilizes, though civilization is not his immediate aim.

48 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

For a barbarous race with a rude and scanty vocabu
lary, he creates a written language. He gives them a
literature, and the faculty for enjoying it. He raises
womanhood ; he creates homes ; he draws a whole race
to high levels of life. He does this under all skies and
on all shores.

Now, on any reading of the story, this is a social
miracle. We have many forces of a non-religious sort
amongst us j but which of these could, or would, do
the missionary's work ? The Press is one of the great
forces of civilization. It takes charge of us all; it
instructs and rebukes us all; it talks in accents of
infallibility which popes once used, but have forgotten.
When these peculiarities have been smiled at, and
forgiven, it remains that the power of the Press is
both great and noble. But can any one imagine a
committee of editors, or of newspaper proprietors,
landing, with their presses, on some savage island and
undertaking to change cruelty into love, lust into
purity, and naked savagery into civilized order ? For
that purpose they have neither language nor message.
A gospel of leading articles will not serve to turn
cannibals into saints. For such a cause the Press has
no vocation, and would certainly evolve no martyrs.

Science, again, is a great civilizing force; but can
any one imagine, say, a cluster of biologists, or of
chemists, armed with sufficiently ingenious formulae,
visiting some wild shore, and undertaking to morally
transform its savage inhabitants; to create ethics for

The Logic of the Missionary 49

them ; to persuade them to be chaste, not to kill, not
to steal? Commerce, too, is one of the great forces
of the modern world; but in the main it touches
savage races only to destroy them. Its gospel of gin-
cases is deadly. It adds to the vices of savages the
yet fouler vices of civilized life.

Only Christianity, as a matter of fact, creates the
missionary. It evolves him ; gives him a message ;
inspires him with adequate motives ; clothes him with
strange forces. And so it visibly works that greatest
of social miracles — the moral transformation of whole
communities.

The whole historic record of Christian missions
proves this. The modern world is their creation ; it
could not have existed but for them. Suppose the
'marching orders' of Christianity — lie or fact — had
not been spoken, and the new creed had remained in
its Jewish shell. It is certain that in that case the
history of the world would have been changed. There
might, indeed, have been no history ! How near death
the world of that day was — how corrupt in every drop
of its tainted blood, how surely on the point of lapsing
into universal chaos — can hardly be realized. The
vileness, as of uttermost decay, of that age is written
in those terrible sentences in the Epistle to the Eomans.
Or, if a Christian apostle must be dismissed as a witness
with a bias, the same testimony is written, in characters
black and ineffaceable, in the story of the later Eoman
Empire.

s

5° The Unrealized Logic of Religion

But this particular group of men, under the impulse
of this real or imaginary command, betook themselves
to every land. Persecution was behind them, martyr
dom before them ; but they carried a message which,
whether fraud or fact, stirred the dying world like
the call of an archangel's trumpet. And in the work
of this little company of men the world, somehow,
found a new starting-point, a fountain of new and
exhaustless energies.

We can judge of the transforming energy of the
missionary gospel by the experience of our own
English-speaking race. It was not Eome — the Eome
of the consuls and the emperors — that civilized Great
Britain. What of order, or religion, or law Eome
planted on British soil was submerged and destroyed
under the wave of sea-robbers from the stormy north,
and the inroads of wild Pictish clans from the Welsh
hills, or from beyond the Tweed. What was it tamed
those fierce piratic races ; fused them into a nation,
and determined the type of their civilization ? J. H.
Green, the historian, says that when, late in the sixth
century, Augustine with his band of monks landed
on the isle of Thanet — the very spot where, a century
before, Hengist and his long-bearded, sea-beaten hordes
had landed — it was simply the return, in another form,
of Eoman civilization. 'The march of the monks as
they chanted their solemn litany was, in one sense,
a return of the Eoman legions who had retired at the
trumpet-call of Alaric.'

The Logic of the Missionary 51

But that is certainly not true. Augustine and his
monks, no doubt, started on their pilgrimage to Britain
from the steps of a church in Eome. They brought
with them the tongue, and many of the usages, of
Eome. But had they brought only these they would
have left no mark on England. They brought — though
it is true in an imperfect form — the Christian faith;
and that faith awoke in our race the pulse of a strong,
deep, and rich life which endures to this day. England
may well be the most missionary of races, for it owes
most to missions. It is nearly fourteen centuries
since Augustine put his feet on English soil, but the
new energy of life which the teaching of Christianity
brought remains.

What is the scientific explanation of the facts here
described and of the forces behind them? Every
effect must have an adequate cause. To take the
case of our own nation alone : is it credible that the
deep religious life of Great Britain, with its manifold
energies, has nothing behind it but an illusion ? That
is as if one announced that the Gulf Stream has
nothing behind it but an exhausted, or even an imita
tion, water-tap ! It is to offer as an explanation of
the greatest force in the modern world a fraud that
somehow, in spite of history, of plain facts, of fierce
national prejudices, got itself, two thousand years ago,
born in the narrow brains of a little cluster of Jews.

This lie had energy enough to send them round the
world without money or arms, at the cost of infinite

52 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

toil and of unnumbered perils, to tell the tale of their
delusion to stray travellers on the wayside, to little
gatherings on river-banks or in city slums. The
sword could not slay this delusion, if delusion it was,
nor fires consume, nor the strength of armies stop it.
What is stranger still, quarrels and betrayals, in
fidelities and disloyalties in a thousand forms amongst
the missionaries themselves, could not arrest it. It
has captured the world. Never was so prosperous a
lie, and never one so beneficent! It discharges all
the offices, and has all the indestructible vitality of a
truth.

Surely the whole history is more wildly incredible
on the theory that the assumptions behind Christian
missions are false, than if we accept them as truel
Do tares produce wheat, or thistles grapes? When
that happens, we may believe that from the black
seed of a lie there blossoms all the splendid forces
and fruits of Christian missions.

BOOK II
IN SCIENCE

CHAPTER I
The Irrelevant Logic of Size

« There is surely a piece of divinity in us ; something that was
before the elements, and pays no homage to the sun.'— SIR THOMAS
BKOWHE.

' Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature ; but he is a
thinking reed. It is not necessary that the whole universe should
arm itself to crush him— a vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill
him. But though the universe should crush him, man would still
be more nolle than that which kills him, because he knows that he
dies, and the advantage which the universe has over him.'— PASCAL.

PERHAPS nothing has done more to create in
the general imagination the sense of God's
remoteness from us, to generate a vague and
paralysing scepticism, and to give to the whole theory
of the universe for which the Bible stands a look
of incredibility, than the contrast betwixt the little
ness of man and the overwhelming vastness of the
physical universe, which we owe to the discoveries of
modern science. The mood of feeling itself is ancient.
The writer of Psalm viii., whoever he was, put it into
words three thousand years ago : ' When I consider
Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and
the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man . . . ? '

56 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

That bitter question has been asked in troubled accents
in every age.

But the familiar psalm, with its note of doubt, was
born before the age of the telescope, and is inadequate.
All of the physical heavens that the writer of the
psalm knew was that tiny curve measured in it by the
unassisted eye; and within the radius of the natural
eye, as actual count shows, lie only some six thousand
stars. The great telescopes of modern observatories
multiply the range of human vision more than two
hundred times ; and in the dim, vast, ever-widening
realms of space thus opened there burn a hundred
million suns !

The application of photography to astronomical
science, again, has opened new depths of space and
new armies of stars, if not literally to human vision,
yet to assured human knowledge. A sensitized plate
is applied to the eye-piece of a telescope, in some great
observatory, and the huge tube is turned to what seems
an empty spot in the heavens. After long exposure,
the plate is found to be pricked with thousands of tiny
pin-points of white — each one the image of a star !
Sometimes across the plate is drawn a faint line of
white, a line which registers the track of a planet
through unguessed depths of space. The human eye,
even with the aid of the great telescope, fails to register
the worlds thus discovered ; but the worlds are there,
in mighty armies.

Lord Kelvin, too, has given us a hint, drawn from

The Irrelevant Logic of Size 57

another source, of the depth and the riches of the star-
filled heavens. He has, so to speak, put the tape of
his mathematics round their whole circumference. He
has computed the total mass of the heavenly bodies ;
and with the bewildering yet reasoned arithmetic
science employs, he reckons that there must be a
thousand million suns and planets in space !

In this measureless ocean of star-thronged space
our little earth is but a pin-point. If God, says one
despairing astronomer, dispatched one of His angels to
discover this tiny planet amongst the glittering hosts
of His stars, it would be like sending a child out upon
some vast prairie to find a speck of sand at the root of
some blade of grass. And what is man, with his brief
and fleeting life, his politics and literature, his debates
and discoveries, his insect round of work, and care,
and enjoyments, when set against the background of a
thousand million suns ? How can it matter what he
does, or what he is ? He is but one of the ephemeridae.
He shrinks, when set against the dreadful altitudes of
space, into less than insect scale.

Stately purpose, valour in battle, splendid annals of army and

fleet,
Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, shouts

of triumph, sighs of defeat,

Eaving politics, never at rest while this poor earth's pale his
tory runs :

What is it all but the murmur of gnats in the gleam of a
million million suns ?

No one who knows current literature, or the average

58 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

thinking of the average man, can doubt that this
modern and growing consciousness of mere dispropor
tion in scale betwixt man and the unnumbered stars
which burn above him darkens the faith of multitudes.
It makes God immeasurably remote, too far off for
either prayer or love. How can the cry of need, or the
sigh of penitence, or the whispered prayer of a child at
its mother's knee, find its way through all these rushing
worlds to the God who sits beyond them ? These
dreadful vastnesses seem to give a new incredibility
to the Christian account of man's standing in the uni
verse, and of his value in the sight of God; to the
story of the love which, from the Maker of all these
stars, stoops to him; to the dream of a Providence
which, amid the rushing planets, still remembers him,
touches him, plans for him.

The logic of relative size, it must be frankly ad
mitted, is overwhelmingly against man, and against
the Christian account of man's standing in the universe.
But is that logic valid ? Can we hold unshaken, and,
in spite of all the discoveries of science, can we still,
vindicate the Christian teaching about man and the
scale of his nature ?

Yes ; even while we stand looking with amazed and
awe-stricken eyes into these multiplying provinces of
God's mighty universe, as they open before us, faith
need not be shaken. The Christian reading of man
and his relation to God is still credible. A little
courageous thinking will show us that this logic of

The Irrelevant Logic of Size 59

mere size — the logic of the foot-rule and of the grocer's
scales — has no relevancy in the realm in which man
stands. It does not run in the great spiritual king
doms to which he belongs.

We act on this belief every day in the circle of our
own lives. We refuse to be bullied by mere scale. In
the realm of love, for example — and that realm is the
highest, the sweetest, and noblest we know — mere
physical bulk has no relevance. It might almost be
described as an impertinence. Will any mother con
sent to have the value of her child measured in
inches, or assessed in pounds avoirdupois ? She may
be told that the house is a thousand times bigger than
the baby, and this is true. But in love's realm the
argument of the foot-rule does not count. In the
scales of a mother's values all the Himalayas and Alps
of the planet are less than her infant !

And let no one dismiss this estimate with a smile
as a mere flight of feminine and unreasoning sentiment.
There is an imperishable logic, the logic of the highest
thing we know— of reason as well as of love— which
justifies that estimate. And if love is the same in
quality through all its degrees — and we are sure of
nothing if we doubt this — if the love of a mother's
heart is the best interpretation we possess of love in
God ; then, since we are God's children, and the stars
represent only the brute unconsciousness of dead matter,
how can we doubt our own relative value in God's
judgement ? How can we fear that the mere bulk of

60 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

the stars hides us from God's sight ? That is to invert
all rational thinking.

The discovery of the planet Neptune is a familiar
story which belongs to the romance of astronomy. It
was noted that at one point in its track through space,
the planet Uranus swung outward from the perfect
curve of its orbit. What drew the great planet from
its course ? Two astronomers, independently of each
other, solved the problem. Some unknown mass
across millions of leagues deflected the rushing orb in
its course. They calculated the distance, the direction,
the weight of the disturbing body, and climbing up,
so to speak, on the slenderest thread of mathematical
calculation, through measureless altitudes of untracked
space, they found the new planet !

Now, tried by the test of physical size, what dis
proportion can be vaster than that betwixt the planet
Neptune and the brain of the astronomer, who, by sheer
force of reasoned logic, reached and discovered it ? It
is the contrast betwixt a planet still shining in the
heavens and a speck of grey matter in a human skull
long since turned to dust. The foot-rule, the scales,
all the tests of physical measurement, all the authori
ties of physical values, are on the side of the planet,
and against the astronomer.

But the planet was, and is, and will always be, a
mass of brute, dead, unintelligent matter. It is un
conscious of its own vastness. It knows nothing of the
mighty curve of its path, It never felt the touch of

The Irrelevant Logic of Size 61

its Maker's hand. It can give to that Maker no tribute
of knowledge or of worship. The astronomer's brain,
on the other hand, was the instrument of conscious
intelligence, of a capacity for sustained reasoning in
finitely nobler than the mass of all the stars piled
together. Nay, it was the vehicle of nobler things
than even thought or knowledge. The faculty of wor
ship was in it; it was the home of those spiritual
qualities which link man to the spiritual order. It is
intensity that counts, range of spiritual faculty, not
mere physical magnitude. And in the scale of such
contrasting values bulk is irrelevant.

Measured against the chronology of eternity, a
planet is but a temporary aggregation of atoms; set
against the spiritual nature of man it is a meaningless
cipher ! For man belongs in the last analysis to the
moral order. This is his essential characteristic and
distinction. He can not only think ; he can love and
will. His character is the field — or, it may be — of the
greatest moral qualities, of love imperishable, of good
ness, of righteousness. In the realm of the natural
affections, as we have seen, and in the kingdom of the
intellect, material bulk has neither value nor relevancy.
How much more must this be true in the yet loftier
world of moral character !

A certain school of scientists, it is true, wrould
translate all forces and qualities back into material
terms. The soul, it teaches, is the mere effervescence
of matter. The fungus that grows unnoticed in the

62 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

field, and the genius which wrote Hamlet, are alike
expressions of matter. The love with which a mother
stoops over her infant, and the ferment of a stagnant
pond in the sunlight; the worship that burns in the
spirit of the saint, and the sap which stirs in the
woody fibres of a tree, are all disguises of the same
force, and may be assessed by like values. But this
is a theory which the healthy human reason, without
waiting for scientific argument, instantly rejects. We
instinctively act on the assumption that it is false.
In the scale of forces and values on which the universe
is built, unconscious matter stands lowest; and as
against the spiritual order it has no relevancy.

Man, then, may keep his self-respect even when
he stands looking out from his tiny planet on the
rush of all the unnumbered worlds. There is con
sciously in his nature something loftier than is found
in Saturn, with its belt of fire, or Jupiter with its
band of shining moons. In the scale of God's
judgements physical mass, we are sure, can have no
value as a counter. He is a Spirit; spiritual values
with Him must be supreme. And we, too, consciously
belong to the spiritual order.

But it is worth while noting how the very doubts
as to whether God is not utterly remote from us, which
science— on the argument of the scale of the physical
universe — awakens, are answered by science itself, from
the opposite pole of the same realm. For the latest
scientific reading of the constitution of matter shows

The Irrelevant Logic of Size 63

God present in the infinitely little, in such astonishing
manifestations of energy, and contrivance, and care, as
almost outshine such manifestations in the physically
vast.

It is asked, and doubted, whether God can come
down to our poor level. Can He think of such an
insect as man ? Are we not too small to be so much
as visible in the mighty landscape of God's universe ?
Now science itself answers that challenge. It shows
us God stooping not merely to the man, but to the
atom. It sees Him hanging in the tiny curve of a
molecule a whole system of stars, as wonderful in
their very want of scale as Arcturus and Orion are in
their vastness of scale.

It is not simply that the microscope is the cor
relative of the telescope, so that while one reveals the
wonders of the physically vast, the other unveils the
marvels of the physically minute. What we yesterday
thought to be the ultimate forms of matter have been
broken open, and we see shining within the infinitesimal
horizons of the molecule a whole system of stars ;
inconceivably minute points of electric energy moving
in orbits like the stars, and with an ordered speed that
equals theirs. And this is God's work ! He sets us
betwixt two firmaments — a firmament of planets in
the dreadful height of the heavens above us, a
firmament, sown as thick with starry electrons, in the
atoms under our feet. By measureless degrees below
the farthest reach of the telescope, in. terms of a

64 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

minuteness which only the symbols of mathematics
can express, God is revealed working with an order,
a greatness, an energy of power, a splendour of
contrivance, before which the human imagination
droops.

If a dewdrop were expanded to the size of a planet,
the molecules of hydrogen of which it consists would
resemble, says Sir Oliver Lodge, oranges or footballs.
How many ' oranges ' would it take to constitute a
bulk equal to that of our planet? And as many
inconceivably minute molecules of hydrogen are packed
into the mass of a dewdrop. And yet within each
such molecule science now discovers a stellar system
which is not only the reflex, in infinitesimal terms,
of the solar system, or of the Pleiades, but, by reason
of its very minuteness, is more wonderful than they.
It is a reproduction, in terms of the inconceivably
minute, of the splendour of the physically vast.
' Science thus, in the terms of its own logic, proves
that with God material vastness has no significance.
All that we find in the majesty of the planets — their
order, their speed, the perfect curve of their orbits — we
find repeated in the molecule. Does God, as doubt
whispers, sit far off from us in the dreadful height of
His heavens, amongst a thousand million stars, with
Orion and the Pleiades at His feet, too concerned with
them to listen to us? Science itself shows that God
does not come down merely to where we stand. He
goes down by distance immeasurable, below our feet.

The Irrelevant Logic of Size 65

He is present not merely in the dust grain and the
atom, but in the electron.

God in the infinitesimal, hiding His wonders there,
working His miracles of power there, as much as in
the infinite ! This is the message of science. Tho
order of the material universe is a mighty chain
which runs upward to heights of which David never
dreamed ; but it runs downward to depths of which,
yesterday, science itself had no thought. It is a
chain of ordered magnificence with the planet at one
end, the electron at the other, and God at every link.

Christ, it will be remembered, sanctions — nay, Ho
enjoins — this appeal to the near, the minute, and the
commonplace, as an answer to the doubt of whether
we have any value in God's sight. Is Providence
concerned about our little lives ? Christ points us to
the falling sparrow, to the blades of trodden grass;
God's thoughts come down to these. Nay, if unbelief
bids us consider the heavens to learn our insignificance
— how little God must care for us, Christ bids us
consider the most trivial things of earth — the lilies,
the grass, and the sparrow — to learn how God cares
for things immeasurably lower in Nature's scale than
we are. He appeals, moreover, to what, we are
tempted to think, is the least important quality in
vegetable life, its grace of form and beauty of tint,
and bids us find in these the most intimate signature
of God's thought.

There is a leaven of Puritanism, and of the Puritan

s

66 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

mistrust of beauty, in much of our Protestantism.
We are accustomed to say that * God does not care
for the mere look of a thing ' — a very deplorable
heresy indeed 1 It is this very thing — the ' look ' of
the lily, how God clothes the grass of the field — Christ
bids us ' consider.'

The great Maker and Lord of all the stars thinks
it worth while to paint a splendour beyond the ward
robes of kings on the perishing leaf of a flower that
blossoms only for a day. And this is only a sample
of God's methods. He pours into the tiny cup of a
violet a purple that mocks the splendour of kings.
He mingles for the rose its rich and exquisite tints.
Nay, that dainty perfume, which beats itself out in
such exquisite pulses of scent on the air from every
flower, and which has no other ' use ' than the giving
of pleasure, is God's contrivance. Here is a revelation
not only of God's methods, but of God's values, written
on the trodden grass, on the worthless dust beneath our
feet. And Christ bids us ' consider ' these things to
learn how God cares for things of immeasurably less
value than we are.

And science, as we have seen, reinforces with its
discoveries exactly that lesson. Yesterday it seemed
to give energy to unbelief by the argument against
man's value drawn from the vastness of the material
universe. To-day it is on our side, against the
tyrannous scale of matter. It repeats with trium
phant accents all the arguments for faith in our own

The Irrelevant Logic of Size 67

significance by showing that God finds a place in
His plans and field for the exercise of His utmost
omnipotence, in terms of physical minuteness beyond
the range of the microscope itself.

If the question of physical scale, in a word, is to
count, we must measure ourselves against, not the
planet, but the molecule. For God is more worder-
fully present to even the gaze of science in e'l a,
molecule, than He was to the eyes of adoring mye ,1-
tudes in the Shekinah of the Jewish templ^ impo.

CHAPTER II
\LThe Logic of our Relation to Nature.

~tion of the human free-will is a miracle to physical
and chem-' .. -r^nd mathematical science.' — LOUD KELVIN.

'We are c.,jcious of being ahle to originate action, to initiate
events, even in t\ measure to modify the processes of nature, in
virtue of our free-vill or power of self-determination. And what
we demand, therefore, in a First Cause, ii analogous to what wo
find within ourselves and nowhere else.' — ILUNGWORTH.

ONE of the most familiar, far-spread, and con
fident forms of unbelief is the theory that
the miraculous is essentially and hopelessly
the incredible. It is not that, historically, the evidence
for this miracle or that is insufficient; but the order
of nature — stately, majestic, unvarying; moving in
rhythmical sequences of unbroken law towards change
less goals — is looked on as fatal to the whole conception
of miracles. The natural blots out the supernatural.

Hume's famous argument against miracles — or,
rather, that section of it which is best remembered — is
that they are improvable. He challenged boldly the
possibility of a miracle, and yet more subtly and
confidently its communicability. The evidence of any

The Logic of our Relation to Nature 69

particular group of witnesses to a specific miracle, he
argued, must be less than the silent and general con
sensus of all history, and of general human experience
on the other side. So the value of affirmative testimony
on one side of the equation must, in every instance, be
less than the value of the negative testimony on the
other side.

But the new mood of scepticism lays greater em
phasis on the other branch of Hume's argument.
Miracles are not merely unprovable, they are impossible.
The natural order, as science interprets it to us, fills
the whole circumference of the horizon. The super
natural is a dream, not to say a discord.

Now, the general weight of logic on the side of the
miraculous — or, rather, to use a better term, of the
supernatural — is stronger than is generally realized.
There is what may be called the direct Christian reply.
Miracles are made credible by their context, and can
not be separated from their context. They form part
of a great history which attests them, and which is
unintelligible without them. Their context is the
whole redemptive scheme of Christianity. They are,
on the Christian theory, incidents in the life of a
supernatural Teacher and Saviour. It is not merely
that they were needed as credentials. Granted that
there broke in on human history — a history disordered
by sin — the figure of a divine Person, Himself com
pletely out of the natural order, it was inevitable that
this sudden emergence of the supernatural would

70 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

register itself at a hundred points in events out of the
natural order.

The old crude, not to say false, definition of a
miracle described it as 'a suspension, or violation, of
the ordinary laws of nature.' Most of the objections
against miracles hold only against this false conception
of them. In the sense of a ' violation of the natural
order,' sin is the true miracle. It is essentially a
breach of the divine order of the universe, and Christ's
acts of supernatural healing are the restoration of law
to its kingdom; the arrest of that disorder in man's
physical nature which sin produces. His miracles are
not a breach of the divine order, but its reassertion.
They are prophetic hints, in physical terms, of the great
ends of His redemption.

It is usual to say that the act of forgiveness which
Christ claimed to perform, and upon which still hangs
all human hope, was a miracle in the spiritual order.
Luther was accustomed to call conversion 'the greatest
of all miracles ' ; and the logic which rejects Christ's
power to work miracles in the physical order is equally
fatal to His claim to work miracles in the spiritual
order. For law is a unit. It is as absolute — if absolute
at all — in the spiritual as in the physical realm. But
forgiveness, too, looked at properly, is not a breach of
spiritual order, but the restoration of an order already
broken.

There is, again, what may be called the direct
scientific defence of miracles. It is certain that on

The Logic of our Relation to Nature 71

the severest scientific reading of the universe \ve can
not blot out the miraculous. There is always what
De Quincey calls the a priori miracle, the beginning
of life. Life must have been originated at some given
moment, and by some specific act; for the theory of
an eternal unoriginated race — a chain with no first
link — is a theory more confounding to the human
mind than any miracle can be. That life exists we
know. That there was a time on this planet when it
did not exist we are certain ; for within a period which
science can measure the earth was, as all science de
clares, a red-hot molten globe, on which no life could
exist. There must have been a moment when the first
pulse of life stirred. Whence did that pulse come ?

Not, it is scientifically certain, from dead matter.
It must have sprung from the entrance into the circle
of phenomena of an absolutely new force. The super
natural, that is, must have broken in on the natural.
Every pulse in our own veins thus runs back into the
miraculous. Life began in a 'miracle'*; it is itself
the great miracle. "Wallace, indeed,1 claims that there
are at least three stages in the development of the
organic world where some new cause of power, from
outside that world, must necessarily have come into
action.

Darwin, it is true, whittles down the super
natural, which must lie at the roots of life, to the
smallest possible size. He stipulates for 'life, with
1 Darwinism, p. 274,

72 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

its several powers, having been originally breathed by
the Creator into a few forms, or into one.' But the
notion that the smaller the miracle is the more credible
it becomes is absurd. Christ multiplied five loaves
and two small fishes into a meal for five thousand
people. Would the miracle have become more credible
if at its basis lay twice as many loaves and fishes ? If
out of 'a few microscopic forms, or even one,' could
be evolved all the crowded life, the sea of living energy,
which fills the living world to-day, how much of
miracle must have been packed into those two or three
primary cells! The miracle becomes not less, but
greater, as we reduce in scale the original starting-
point.

To-day, it may be added, almost as certainly as in
that far-off sublime moment on the cooling earth, when
the first pulse of life stirred, a miracle lies at the root
of life. Or if we cannot postulate a miracle, still the
origin of life constantly runs back into a mystery so
profound that it suggests the miraculous ; and science
itself is so dumb in its presence that at least, it may be
claimed, it has no authority to deny the miraculous.
Here is a tiny speck on the very border line of the
invisible. It is too minute for analysis ; it baffles all
tests. But what strange powers are hidden in that
almost invisible mote! It levies tribute from land
and water and sky. It takes fibre from the earth,
colour from the sun, energy from the gases of the
atmosphere, and builds up its strange architecture of

The Logic of our Relation to Nature 73

organs and faculties. And before the whole process
Science stands with wondering eyes and silent lips.
It has no explanation for what it sees. What miracle
could be so completely beyond the possibility of ex
planation as the force which lies at the root of every
form of life !

But if the general vague doubt as to the miraculous
be analysed, it will be found to consist of certain pre
suppositions which are denionstrably false. There is,
first, the assumption that God has emigrated from His
universe. He touched it once to set it going; He
placed on the cooling globe at least those 'two or
three ' living germs into which was packed all life, and
all history, and all literature. But since then He no
longer interferes with the universe He has set going.
The second pre-supposition is that natural law is some
thing sacrosanct ; it is a changeless, imperative, and
ascertained order ; an order which is an end to itself,
and which it is a mere folly to think can ever be
changed to serve any end outside itself. The third
pre-supposition is that man, and all that man repre
sents, count for little in the system of things. It is
absurd to think that his welfare can weigh for an
instant in the scales of cosmic values. The physical
universe, with its supposed order, its network of in
exorable and unconscious laws, is the supreme fact in
the universe. The supernatural is irrelevant, incredible,
something lying outside the very domain of science.

That God is distant, that man is little and irrelevant,

74 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

that nature — meaning by ' nature ' the great circle of
physical phenomena— is great, these are the three un
spoken assumptions in the great argument against
miracles. And it may be said with the utmost con
fidence that these three pre - suppositions are in
conflict with both science and common sense. They
result from looking at the whole universe in a false
perspective.

That the so-called 'laws' of nature are nothing
more than observed sequences of events has become
almost a platitude ; and yet round the phrase ' natural
laws ' still hangs a false authority which is an offence
to science. ' A law of nature in the scientific sense,'
says Huxley, 'is the product of a mental operation
upon the facts of nature which come under our obser
vation, and has no more existence outside the mind
than colour has/ ' Law,' says Newman,1 ' is not a
cause, but a fact. When we come to the question of
cause, then we have no experience of any cause, but
will.' The notion of natural laws as categories
of imperative force may certainly be dismissed as
unscientific.

The notion, too, that God has emigrated from the
physical universe, that the touch of His hand is to be
discovered, not in the living world of to-day, but only
at some far-off point in the measureless past, may be
put aside with a smile. That is not the Christian
theory. 'My Father worketh hitherto/ said Christ,
1 Grammar of Assent, p. 69,

The Logic of our Relation to Nature 75

' and I work/ ' A concluded creation/ says Fairbairn,
' could only signify an exhausted universe and a dead
deity/ Christian doctrine asserts the presence of the
ever-working God in the living universe about us.
Science, on its physical side at least, is not entitled to
have any theory on the subject; yet all the great
scientists are on the side of theology in this matter.
They believe in the divine immanence. 'Look/ says
Sir Oliver Lodge, ' for the action of the Deity, if at all,
then always ; not in the past alone, not only in the
future, but equally in the present. If His action is not
visible now, it never will be, and never has been visible/ 1
Even that school of science which almost persuades
itself that God does not exist, or which attenuates
Him into a vague impersonal mystery, yet believes that
if He exists He fills the universe.

Herbert Spencer, who banishes God from human
knowledge as being for ever inscrutable, has to bring
back God in the shape of an Energy, in order to keep
the universe going. Through all the mysteries, the
half-knowledge of life, ' there remains/ he says, ' the
one absolute certainty that we are ever in the presence
of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all
things proceed/ It is not a remote or purely historic
Energy, but one in whose presence we, and all things,
stand every moment. An ' Energy ' which has set
the universe going, and then departed from it, is to
science itself unthinkable.

1 Hibbert Journal, vol. i., No. 2, Jan. 1903, p. 214,

7 6 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

But the best defence of miracles — or, rather, of the
supernatural, which is the true underlying issue — is
found in the latest scientific reading of the whole
relation betwixt the material and the spiritual. A
shallow and unscientific interpretation of the universe,
even if it admits that the supernatural and spiritual, as
well as the physical, exist, puts wide intervals of time
and measureless gulfs of space between them. They
belong to separate realms. They are in discord. If
they touch the natural is broken.

Now, it is not enough to say that the natural and
the supernatural, the physical and the spiritual, are con
current ; that we cannot conceive of one without the
other. On the severest scientific reading of the facts of
the universe, it is fused with spirit. It is intelligible
only by the help of spirit. And through all its pheno
mena, from the highest to the lowest, the physical is
the servant of the spiritual. In Locke's psychology
the human mind was simply a mirror which reflected
the image of the external universe, brought to it by the
senses; and Hume's scepticism was built on Locke's
psychology, for he taught that the mind itself was
nothing but a chain of such images without reality
in them.

But the profounder psychology of Kant taught that
the mind is a laboratory, transforming what it receives
from the external universe into some new thing. The
mind receives through the eyes invisible vibrations of
ether, and translates them into colour; nerve- waves,

The Logic of our Relation to Nature 77

and transmutes them into form. We have been
imagining, he says, space outside us, and have tried
to find it in things ; but it is not in them, it is in us,
involved in our method of contemplating substances.
Time and space are categories of our own mind.

All this sounds obscure and mystical, but we can
verify it for ourselves. Where is colour ? Not in the
sunset, in the snow peaks, in the purple sea, the soft
green of the landscape, the blowing poppies. It is in
us ! Vibrations of mysterious ether — that ether which
the latest guess of science whispers must be the ultimate
stuff out of which the whole visible universe is made —
strike with varying degrees of intensity upon the sen
sitive lens of the eyeball ; and somewhere betwixt the
eye and the grey matter of the brain — somewhere on
that strange and unmapped border which lies betwixt
the spirit and matter — a strange thing takes place.
The vibrations report themselves to our consciousness
in the purple of the violet, the flush of the rose, the
glory of the sunset, the majesty of the far-off hills.
; No one can so much as guess how it is done. ' The
passage from the physics of the brain to the correspond
ing facts of consciousness,' says Professor Tyndall, 'is
unthinkable.' But the passage takes place. And all
the harmonies and discords of sound, all the majesty of
form and splendour of colour in the external universe,
is thus literally the creation of our own mind. Science,
when it analyses the material world, discovers in it
nothing but atoms and vibrations, energies and

7 8 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

sequences ; it knows nothing of flame in the sunset, of
sound in the vibrating air. Colour, it declares, is the
creation of the eye, or of the mind behind the eye ;
sound of the ear, or of the mind behind the ear. Spirit,
that is, translates matter into its own terms before it
can be so much as known.

Beethoven, as every one knows, in his later years
was deaf. No whisper of sound reached his conscious
ness. But in the forum of his mind he wove the
exquisite web of melodies unheard by himself, and, as
far as his own consciousness was concerned, with no
relation to sound. Music, his case proves, is a phe
nomenon of mind, not of matter.

All this is but the A B C of psychology. ' Colour,'
says Fairbairn,1 ' does not inhere in things ; Nature, by
herself, is without it. It is there because man is there
and possesses that sense by which it is not simply
perceived, but, in a sense, constituted.' Nature gives
us, in brief, the raw material of colour, of sound, of
physical form. We bring it into perfect existence in
the laboratory of the brain. Nature in her own right
is, if not a void, yet at most a mere aggregate of
mechanical properties. ' Her pomp of beauty, her
voice, and all her harmonies she owes to mind. We
receive from her what we have given to her, and with
out them she would not be what she is.'

The very order ' of nature, on which so many eager
disputants insist as an argument against the spiritual,
1 Philosophy of Religion, p. 33,

The Logic of our Relation to Nature 79

is itself a purely spiritual product. 'Atoms,' says
Illingworth,1 'combine in mathematical proportions.
Stars move in their courses by mechanical rule, organic
life in plant and animal is minutely and elaborately
teleological.' But these links are not mechanical ; they
are spiritual.

The ' order of nature ' thus is a combination of two
elements, matter and spirit, set in a certain relation; and
that relation, from the dust of the physical universe to
its very crown, is one service on the part of matter to
spirit. Matter is what moves in space, spirit is that
which thinks, and wills, and loves ; and, as may be tested
at any point, matter never uses spirit, but spirit always
uses matter. Illingworth has wrought this out in
matchless demonstration in his Divine Immanence.
' If matter/ he says, ' lay at our feet as a thing to be
left or employed at will, we might regard its use as
accidental. Bat its fusion with spirit is, in fact, far
too intimate, its correlation too exact, to admit of any
such idea.' 2 Spirit and matter are linked together, but
matter exists for spirit, not spirit for matter.

What we find about us, then, is not a majestic order
of physical structure, bound together by iron laws,
to which spiritual ends are irrelevant, and weighed
against which man, with his brief life and petty troubles,
is but as an insect weighed against a planet. If this
were so, it might be contended that it is foolish to
suppose that the order of nature could be arrested, or
1 Divine Immanence, p. 69. 2 Ibid., p. 8,

8o The Unrealized Logic of Religion

diverted, in the interests of man. We live, on the
contrary, in a universe in which, at every point and
throughout every moment, spirit rules matter ; claims
as of right to govern and never to serve matter ; and
in which matter is adjusted to spiritual ends.

If, then, the assumption underlying a miracle is that
at some given point, in some specific event, the laws of
matter were made the servants of some spiritual end,
this is not in conflict with what may be called the
scientific reading of the usage of the universe. It is in
profoundest harmony with it. For throughout all the
categories of that universe matter is fused with spirit,
and is the servant of spirit. The whole material
universe, in brief, is set in exactly that relation to
spiritual ends and forces for which miracles stand.

All this, however, may seem to the man in the
street somewhat academic, if not unintelligible. He
does not understand psychological laws, and if told that
the glow of sunset in the western sky does not really
burn there, that its fires are lit in the cells of his own
brain, is apt to be bewildered and incredulous. He is
still more puzzled, if not sceptical, when told that time
and space exist not outside him, but within him. Even
a philosopher must admit that time does in some sense
exist ; for if we acted in practical things on the theory
that it is an illusion, then, as Sir Oliver Lodge reminds
us, we should never catch a train !

Is it possible to translate the psychological argument
for the empire of the spiritual over the material into

The Logic of our Relation to Nature 81

easier and nearer terms ? Is there any reply to the
argument against miracles that lies close at hand ;
that can be easily understood ; that appeals to com
mon sense and is justified by plain facts ? If so, this
will supply for the man in the street the answer to
the attack on miracles which he wants.

And there is such an answer. It lies in our own con
sciousness; in the plainest facts of the everyday world;
in that relation to the external universe in which we
are conscious we stand, and of which our very senses
are the judge. If we consider, we shall find that we
have ourselves a certain relation to natural order,
which is shared by no other form of life known to
us. We are part of the material system of things;
yet, somehow, we stand above it ; we can study it ;
we can set it in perspective, as though we looked at
it from another realm ; we can read its secrets, put
our hand upon its forces, master it, make it take for
us the uses of a tool. We can put its laws into new
combinations, and compel them to be the servants of
our thoughts. We can use its energies to produce
results which, to the whole system of things without
us, would be impossible.

And the reason is that we are free, personal,
reasoning spirits, moving amongst the forces and laws
of material nature as the master of a great factory
moves amongst its flying wheels and travelling belts.
They are our servants. The sequences of nature are
to us mere tools. We cannot alter them, but we can

G

82 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

make them pliant to our will. A thousand illus
trations leap up at once to show that we ourselves
have power, without violating natural order, to produce
results outside that order and impossible to it.

It is a law of nature, for example, that iron shall
sink in water. It took a miracle to make an axe-
head float. But the modern shipbuilder will take
ten thousand tons of iron, mould them to a certain
shape, put within them one of the simplest physical
forces, and so we have the spectacle of a great iron
clad that not merely floats, but travels across the
surface of the yielding sea with the ordered speed
and momentum of a railway train. All the forces of
nature put together would never build the ironclad.
When man's shaping brain and faculty of controlling
will are added to the process, the 'supernatural'
instantly emerges.

The air-currents floating through the pipes of an
organ are a purely natural force ; but not all the air
currents that ever blew, not all the ' laws of harmony '
ever tabulated, would produce the 'Hallelujah Chorus.'
But mind, working through the cells of the musician's
brain, bids these air-currents flow in certain measured
pulses ; and lo ! the majestic harmonies of Beethoven
and the stormy choruses of Wagner are created !

It is possible to say that a great bridge represents
the triumph of physical energy; but 'shall we seek
that energy,' asks Sir Oliver Lodge, ' in the tin cans in
which the navvies bring their breakfast, or in the mind

The Logic of our Relation to Nature 83

of the engineer ? ' It is a familiar story how a famous
engineer used the energy of the sea-tides to lift the
huge tubes of the Menai Bridge to their place on the
summit of the mighty stone piers. Great iron caissons
were floated into position at the base of the piers.
Each returning tide lifted them a certain height; the
' lift ' was captured and secured, and, foot by foot, to
the pulses of the sea, the vast masses of iron rose
to their place.

Now, behind the sea-tides was a sequence of forces
running to the farthest planets, and to the remotest
ages of time. The physical energy of the whole
material universe, in a sense, was in them. Yet
they would never have built the Menai Bridge. To
this great and ordered procession of natural forces
must be added one tiny but tremendous plus — the brain
of the engineer ! Then the bridge becomes possible.
It rises as the result of the energy of natural forces,
but the result is impossible to that energy alone.

A parable of the relation of the human mind to
nature might be extracted, as Sir Oliver Lodge tells
us, from the time-table on which a train runs. The
train itself, travelling on fixed iron lines, and driven by
unconscious mechanical forces, is a mere congeries of
physical and unintelligent energies. The time-table
is the mind of the director expressed in certain symbols,
running ahead of the train, determining with varying
adjustments at what speed the train shall travel, when
and where and for how long it shall stop. It is a picture

84 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

of mind acting in advance on mechanical sequences,
and using them to reach an object which is outside them.
' Take a train/ Sir Oliver Lodge says, 'running through
a savage country, moving, say, on the Cape to Cairo
railway, without stopping. Natives on the route would
come to regard it in time as a sort of force in nature,
which moved through their country inexorably, and
could not be stopped. They would come presently
to suppose that it obeys fixed laws — as, indeed, it
does — and that it is unchangeable. If they were told
that it was arranged in the directors' board-room, and
they were sceptical and intelligent, they would say,
" That is all nonsense. The thing goes because there
is fire and steam." They would say, " What do you
mean by a miracle ? It goes by perfect law and regu
larity, and miracles do not happen." Yet they might
be told that, if they wanted the train stopped, a peti
tion conveyed to the board-room might get the train
stopped. They would certainly be sceptical about
that. Still,' says the great scientist, dryly, * perhaps it
might be managed by methods of which they were not
aware.'

One explanation of miracles may certainly be
found in that parable of the train and the time
table. God's time-table of natural sequences may
include the emergence of the miracle. Time, for Him,
is non-existent : sequences do not exist ; all events
for Him are present. But a larger and better reply
is found in the assertion that in our own relation to

The Logic of our Relation to Nature 85

natural law there is a hint of God's relation to His
universe. He cannot have a more remote relation to
His own works than He has given to us. It is in
credible that He has devised for us, and bestowed
on us, a freedom of action, a power to use all natural
forces as the immediate servants of our personal intelli
gence, which He does not Himself possess.

He who has made us the masters of the physical laws
of the universe cannot Himself be their servant. God
must possess in the scale of His own infinite nature,
and throughout the fields of His vast universe, that
present, personal, absolute mastery over the forces and
sequences of His works which we, in the scale of our
brief lives and of our limited powers, possess. It is
not that once He built the machine and set it going,
and then left it. He is for ever present. There is no
point in space and no moment in time at which, and
in which, He is not at work. His will, in the last
analysis, is the great driving energy of the universe.
And if that be so, the whole question of miracles is
settled. They are reasonable, natural, and inevitable.

God does not, it is true, act on caprice. He does
not ' violate His own laws ' ; nor is any such ' violation '
needed to produce results above those laws. It is the
obedience of His laws, not their violation, which
makes the miracle possible. The natural and the
supernatural are concurrent. The physical is covered
over its whole area by the spiritual, as the elastic atmo
sphere covers, over its whole area, the surface of the

86 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

sea. And God does not sit inert and careless, or, per
chance, asleep, in His own universe. This, says Sir
Oliver Lodge, is ' a law-saturated cosmos.' And what
we call law is but the action of the creative Mind on
the forces He has called into existence.

And, granted the personal Mind of the Creator in
His own creation, miracles are possible. ' Once admit
of God,' says J. S. Mill, ' and the production of an effect
by His direct volition must be reckoned with as a
serious possibility.' 1 The only logical alternative to a
belief in their possibility is, as Huxley frankly ad
mitted, blank, unqualified atheism. .And that is a
theory more profoundly abhorrent to the sane intellect
than belief in all the miracles the Gospels record.
1 Essays on Religion, p. 230.

CHAPTER III
The Logic of Verification

' The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not
by faith, but by verification.' — HUXLEY, Lay Swmons.

* If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine. . . . '

IN one of his letters St. John takes up the exultant
phrase ' we know/ and claims it for religion.
Again, and yet again, in accents of triumphant
certainty, he repeats it. ' We know/ he says, ' that
we are of God/ 'We know that the Son of God is
come, and hath given us an understanding/ 'We
know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true,
even in His Son Jesus Christ.' For him, as his
spiritual experience deepened and life drew to its close,
religion became an august realm of verified certainties.
Over all the vital doctrines of the Christian faith he
writes that great and challenging affirmation, ' we know/
And yet multitudes of sceptics will say to the
Christian, ' That is exactly what you do not do ! You
dream ; you imagine ; you hope ; you believe. The
dream is fair ; the imagination is noble ; the belief has
a certain air of plausibility ; the hope might well be
envied. But you never get beyond the misty horizons

88

The Unrealized Logic of Religion

of faith, and faith is less than knowledge ; less sure,
less safe. It comes short by unmeasured distance of
certainty.' The whole interval, indeed, betwixt religion
and science, many people think, lies at that point. The
man of science knows ; the man of religion merely
believes. Eeligion, its critics say, is a kingdom of
credulities. It is at best a realm of unverified specula
tions. But science is a world of certainties 1

And the secret of the triumphant certainty, audible,
for the general ear, in every accent of science, lies in
that word 'verification,' which Huxley uses. The
scientist can translate his theories into concrete shape
at will. He can test them by an appeal to fact. He
can produce and reproduce a given and specified result
under given and exact conditions.

Does any one doubt that all the primary colours lie
hidden in each ray of white light ? A boy with the
help of a broken bit of glass may repeat Newton's
experiment, and splinter the shining pencil of soft
white light into the rainbow. That water, at a certain
temperature, becomes vapour, and at another tempera
ture turns into a solid, is a doctrine of science which
can be verified at will. A chemist discovers that a
given solution will crystallize into a certain form, and
reports the circumstance. Nobody need take the dis
covery on trust. Any chemist in his laboratory can
prepare the solution, and watch how in the precipitating
fluid the angles of the coming crystal shape themselves,
until the perfect crystal emerges.

The Logic of Verification 89

The whole strange mystic process reports itself
to the senses, and will report itself as often as
anybody chooses to repeat the experiment. A given
metal, tried by the spectrum analysis, registers itself in
certain colour-lines, arranged in a certain order ; and as
often as the experiment is repeated, by no matter what
hands, on the light yielded by that metal, taken from
any source, the same spectrum emerges. Behind all
the propositions of science, in a word, is the great law
of the uniformity of nature. All separate facts run
back into that uniformity, and express it. And so
science stands, it is claimed, on a solid foundation of
verified and constantly verifiable results.

How far this claim for science is true is discussed
elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the mysterious realm of
religion are such verifications possible ? Can its truths
be translated into concrete form at will ? Can they be
put to the test of actual experiment, and survive the
test? Dare the Christian believer take up Huxley's
words, as well as Paul's, and say that he believes in
justification, not merely by faith, but by verification ?
Do we reach in the spiritual realm, in a word, the
height of that great certainty which enables the soul
to say, not merely ' I believe,' but — a more triumphant
assertion yet — ' I know ' 1

It is true beyond all possibility of serious denial
that the seal of a genuine verification can be put, and
is daily put, on the doctrines of Christianity. Under
certain conditions they are countersigned, both by the

9O The Unrealized Logic of Religion

personal consciousness of the believer, and by the visible
facts of the world.

Verification for a chemist consists in putting
together the elements of a given formula so that they
produce, and always produce, a result which can be
predicted. Let the process be translated into spiritual
terms. Let us imagine that into the soul of a thief
the great forces of religion are, somehow, introduced.
Something will instantly and inevitably follow. He
will steal no more ! The thievish fingers will forget
their evil art. Let us suppose that a fallen woman
from the street comes under the forces of religion, and
is converted. In the defiled soul of that woman a
strange white flame of chastity will instantly begin to
glow. Vice will become hateful, purity imperative.
The harlot of yesterday will become to-day, if not a
saint, yet a soul under the law of saintly forces.

Let the missionary go with his New Testament to
some cluster of savage tribes set on a reef-girdled
island in the Pacific. ' The lesson of the missionary/
says Darwin, ' is the enchanter's wand.' It is always
the enchanter's wand ! It will not only create civilized
habits, call a written language into existence, make
commerce possible. It will slay lust and cruelty; it
will make the savage gentle, the cannibal humane.
The proof of this is written in history and on every
page of the actual world.

These experiments, of course, cannot be tried at will,
for merely dialectical purposes, or at the bidding of a

The Logic of Verification 91

scientific curiosity. You cannot catch your thief and
inject Christian principles into him, with a hypodermic
syringe, as you inject drugs. You cannot inoculate
your harlot at will, and with a lancet. Christianity
can only be applied under its own conditions and laws,
and these conditions are personal to the subject. They
are conditions, not of scientific curiosity in the operator,
but of moral surrender and trust in the personal soul
to which Christianity makes its appeal. Huxley's
famous proposal to apply a prayer-test to a given ward
in a great hospital showed, on his part, a complete
ignorance of the real nature of prayer, and of the
spiritual laws which govern it.

It can be no complaint against religion that it
must be tested under its own conditions. That is
true of every verification of science. Each phenomenon
has its own laws, and must be dealt with in harmony
with those laws. But when the conditions of religion
are satisfied, that certain results follow, follow inevitably
and instantly, is beyond challenge. History may be put
into the witness-box to prove it; the visible facts of
the world attest it

But let us go a step farther. It may be claimed
that, with uncounted multitudes of men and women
to-day, religion stands, as a personal experience, in the
category of verified truths. They do not simply be
lieve, they know. They know by the surest evidence
on which truth can be built — the certitudes of con
sciousness.

92 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Millions of living men and women, for example,
have undergone the process called conversion. They
can recall the moment when, the place where, they
yielded themselves to Christ. They hold still in vivid
memory the phenomena and emotions which followed :
the sudden rush of joy; the thrill of spirit touching
spirit; the changed perspective of life; the sense of
new relationships awakened; the empire of new
motives suddenly established. And the essential
identity of this great experience in myriads of lives,
under the widest possible diversities of temperament,
of education, and of environment, is a scientific phe
nomenon of the most impressive sort.

The experience is as old as authentic history, and
yet as new as the last sunrise, or as the dews lying on
to-day's flowers. It is not confined to poets and
mystics, to monks and dreamers; the witnesses run
through all ranks of life, all diversities of character,
and all generations of time. They range from John and
Paul, from Augustine and a Kempis, to Pascal and
Luther, to Gordon and Havelock. How do exactly
the same phenomena emerge under conditions so un
like; in scholar and peasant, in little children and
in learned men, in Augustine in the fifth century,
and in John Smith in the twentieth century ?

To many, it is true, religion does not report itself
in any sudden rush of deep emotion, at some clearly
dated moment, of the character described. But they
know as a present fact, a fact verified from moment to

The Logic of Verification 93

moment in their consciousness, that religion is true ;
that, being accepted, it produces certain results in
character and life. For them religion is not a theology,
a history, a ritual, a hymnology. It is not even a
scheme of ethics. It is a life, with all the forces, the
self-conscious energies, and the quick susceptibilities
of life. It is a living relationship to a personal God ;
and the relationship is as vivid and definite as any tie
that links one human being to another.

And all this knowledge, it is to be noted, stands on
a foundation of evidence at least as sure as our know
ledge of the external world itself. Our knowledge of
the existence of the world of colour and form is only
an act of faith in the veracity of the reports brought
by the senses. It is but the translation into perception
— wrought we cannot tell how — of certain nerve-vibra
tions. And does the great spiritual nature within us,
which stands related to the spiritual order, possess
nothing linking it to that order which corresponds to
the senses by which we are linked to the material
world? Shall we trust the touch of our fingers, the
sight of our eyes, the hearing of our ears, and not trust
the deepest consciousness of our higher nature — the
answer of conscience, the flame of spiritual gladness,
the glow of spiritual love ?

To deny that spiritual experience is as real as
physical experience is to slander the noblest faculties
of our nature. It is to say that one half of our nature
tells the truth, and the other half utters lies. The

94 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

proposition that facts in the spiritual region are less
real than facts in the physical realm contradicts all
philosophy.

And these subjective experiences, it is to be noted,
are attested by external results. The inner experience
has its reflex in the outer life. It registers itself in
gentle tempers, in noble motives, in lives visibly lived
under the empire of great forces.

It may be objected that this verification is private,
subjective; good, no doubt, for the soul to which it
comes, but without authority for any one else ; whereas
the verifications of science are universal. They are
stamped with no personal signature, and wear and
carry no marks of private ownership.

But all knowledge runs back into privacy. We
' know ' in the scientific sense only what we have trans
lated into the categories of our own mind. And the
knowledge of God, sweet, and subtle, and sacred
beyond all others, must have round it the shelter of
a special privacy. Eeligion being in its final analysis
a personal relation betwixt the personal soul and the
personal God and Saviour, its verification must in the
nature of things be personal.

To make this position clearer, let it be remembered,
for a moment, what 'knowledge/ in the scientific mean
ing of the word, is. In the philosophical sense it is,
and must be, an absolutely personal and untransferable
thing. It rests on experience, it is limited to ex
perience. We can, in the scientific sense, know nothing

The Logic of Verification 95

of which we have not had direct and individual ex
perience, and which we have not translated into terms
of consciousness. And experience for any one is a
tiny and limited area, covering only a limited range
of facts. But who in practical life limits knowledge
to the tests and demands of philosophy ? ' We all/
says Illingworth, 'deal habitually with two kinds of
knowledge, that which we verify for ourselves, and of
whose truth we are personally certain, and that which
we have never verified, and of which, therefore, at the
very utmost, we can never be more than morally
certain.' l But who pretends to rediscover, personally,
all science ; to verify all geography ; to reject from the
category of historical knowledge everything that did
not begin with his own personal existence, and is not
capable of being verified within that existence ?

We practically, and in every realm, accept the col
lective experience of the race — or even the experience of
a tiny cluster of individuals — as a sufficient equivalent
for our own personal experience, and unhesitatingly
describe what we thus learn as 'knowledge/ We
claim to ' know ' there is a place called Tibet, even if
our feet have never trodden its frosty plateau. We
know it as certainly, if not as scientifically, as the men
who have waded in its icy streams and felt the blowing
of its bitter winds. Even a scientist does not pretend
to knowledge at first hand outside his own section of
study. He accepts nine-tenths of what he calls his
1 Reason and Revelation, p. 77,

96 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

science on hearsay. If he is a geologist, he takes his
astronomy on trust. If he is an astronomer, he accepts
his chemistry on authority.

And knowledge which rests on the collective ex
perience of the race, or of one section of the race, if it
does not satisfy the philosophical definition of know
ledge, and gives us only 'moral certainty,' is yet
sufficient for all the purposes of life. A king will
reward a soldier, a jury will hang a criminal, a banker
will cash a cheque, on very much less than first hand
and direct knowledge. And in this large and popular,
though untechnical, sense, religion stands in the category
of verified certainties. It is attested by the general
experience of mankind.

The other and rarer form of knowledge — knowledge
whose witness lies in the secret and innermost chamber
of the personal consciousness — the knowledge which
is final and absolute for its subject, is possessed as to
religion by myriads, and it is absurd to say that their
experience is not valid for any one but themselves.
It constitutes a weight of evidence which, for the rest
of mankind, amounts to moral certainty. Let any one
reflect on the cumulative force of evidence called into
existence by all these separate and isolated verifica
tions. It is a mass of evidence as weighty as anytime
known to science.

For consider the witnesses, their number, their
character ; how they fill the centuries, how they crowd
every realm, how they constitute one great unbroken

The Logic of Verification 97

and many-centuried tradition. Here is a vast unceasing
procession of men and women, born under every sky,
belonging to every race and age, of all degrees of civiliza
tion, all varieties of social rank. It is a procession
of witnesses continually renewed. In character — taken
as a whole, and allowing for cases of imperfect develop
ment — they form the very salt of the race. Purity,
truth, honour, integrity, humanity, all reach their highest
level in them. The chain of witnesses stretches from
the martyrs of the first Christian century to the last
forgiven sinner of to-day. The Christian tradition is
a thing which countless currents from countless sources,
from countless ages, have imperceptibly gone to form ;
4 brooks ' — to quote Illingworth — ' flowing into streams,
streams swelling into rivers, rivers meeting in oceans,
till the earth has become full of the knowledge of the
Lord as the waters cover the sea.'

In her Glimpses of Tennyson, just published,
Miss Agnes Grace Weld tells how the great poet, as
he walked side by side with her on the high, wind
swept hills about his house, said : —

God is with us now on this down as we two are walking
together, just as truly as Christ was with the two disciples on the
way to Erumaus; we cannot see Him, but He, the Father, and
the Saviour, and the Spirit, are nearer perhaps now than then, to
those that are not afraid to believe the words of the Apostles
about the actual and the real presence of God and His Christ with
ah1 who yearn for it.

I should be sorely afraid to live my life without God's
presence, but to feel He is by my side just now as much as you
are, that is the very joy of my heart.

H

98 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

This is an experience repeated in myriads of human
souls. Will any one say that this vast company of
earth's very noblest and best, stretching through all
the centuries and found under all skies, represents
one huge conspiracy of falsehood? Are all these
witnesses dishonest or deceived ? If any physical
phenomena were attested by such a body of witnesses,
living or dead— a chain of witnesses perpetually
renewed — doubt in regard to them would be insanity. ;

God Himself makes this appeal to human con
sciousness. 'Ye are My witnesses/ He says. And
the personal experience of the uncounted multitudes
of Christ's followers in every age is, in each unit of
the great host, a direct verification of the reality
of religion. And these constantly reverberated and
reduplicated verifications entitle us to claim that
religion, as surely as science, stands in the category
of things verified.

It may be asked why this experience is not
universal ; and the answer is clear. The experience
is not cheap, easy, independent of moral character;
won without effort, and kept without care. God can
only reveal Himself under the laws of personality,
and these are fixed. They require attention, sympathy,
moral harmony. A person who is holy cannot reveal
himself to the unholy, for his character to them is a
thing unintelligible, or even hateful.

All knowledge has behind it personal conditions.
All knowledge, indeed— even knowledge of secular

The Logic of Verification 99

things — runs back to a moral root. It represents, in
the last analysis, attention ; and attention means desire,
desire crystallized into will and sustained with effort.
And personal knowledge depends absolutely on con
ditions of harmony betwixt the person knowing and
the person known. ' Blessed,' says the Divine Word,
' are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.' ' He
that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.'
Nothing in philosophy is more profound than those
words.

Verification, we repeat, must always be personal.
It must lie deep in the secrets of the spiritual nature ;
and such a verification of religion lies within every
man's reach. 'If any man will do His will,' says
Christ, 'he shall know.' And the presumptions in
favour of Christianity are so mighty, so sacred, are
of so tender and moving a character, that this mood
of ' willingness ' — of eager and solemn consent to do
God's will as soon as that will is known, and step by
step as it is known — is a moral obligation on every
man. It is sufficient to put us on trial.

There is no force of evidence on the side of unbelief
that entitles any man to hold himself discharged from
the duty of reverent and eager search after Christ. The
mere possibility that He exists, that His gospel is
true, that He has suffered for us, that He has redeemed
us by His blood, and touches us with tender and nail-
torn hands — all this lifts the whole question of religion
out of the realm of what may be called debating-society

ioo The Unrealized Logic of Religion

logic, and translates it into moral terms. It clothes
the bare possibility that religion is true, or may be
true, with authority for the conscience, with subduing
sweetness for the heart. It becomes, even at this
stage, that 'categorical imperative' of which Kant
had a vision so clear.

And truth, no matter how beclouded by doubt,
becomes at the touch of the loyal and assenting will
translucent. The effort to obey scatters the shadows.
It brings an instant verification. Obedience is the
true and final solvent of doubt.

CHAPTER IV
The Logic of the Sunset

Spirits are not finely touched,
But to fine issues.

SHAKESPEARE.

Nature is visible thought.

HEINE.

IN" his Life, Darwin tells us how, after wandering in
the shadowy and leafy depths of a Brazilian
forest, he wrote in his diary, ' It is not possible
to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of
wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate
the mind.' He recalls that passage late in life, and
says with a certain accent of regret, ' Now the grandest
scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings
to arise in my mind.'

That decay of the higher susceptibilities in his case
illustrates, of course, the law that the unused faculty
dies. But Darwin himself can be quoted in proof of
the fact that nature in one of her many forms of beauty
— the beauty of a vast tropical forest — has power to
strike in the human soul the chords of a feeling which
is deeper than admiration, loftier than wonder ; a mood

102 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

of ' devotion ' ; the sense of a Presence behind nature,
and speaking through nature, to which the soul turns
with an impulse of worship.

But that experience is repeated in human life
constantly; it is reflected on every page of litera
ture. The experience, it is true, does not come at
will ; it is not possible in every mood. The capacity
for it may be slain. But whoever has watched closely
the emotions aroused in his own mind by any of the
higher manifestations of natural beauty must have
found that in them, and through them, ran a certain
deep note of religious feeling.

Almost every form of natural beauty will at some
time or other produce this effect. The silent multitude
of the stars at night ; the glow of the sunrise and of
the sunset ; the vastness of a mountain crowned with
the pure whiteness of snow; the fret of sea waves
seen against the curving edge of the horizon ; beauty
of blossoming fruit-tree filled with the scents of spring
and the hum of bees ; beauty of sound, from the lark's
keen trill high in the sky, to the undertone of the sea
at night time ; beauty of colour, from the deep blue of
the arched sky to the purple that lies in the cup of a
violet; beauty of form, from the trembling grace of
the blue-bell to the stern majesty of a peak in the
Himalayas ; — all have power, in some of our moods at
least, to touch the human spirit to fine issues.

Literature has for the intellect the functions of the
spectrum analysis. It reveals imperishable elements

The Logic of the Sunset 103

that lie hidden in the general human mind. And
literature everywhere, in prose and poetry alike, makes
visible this strange power concealed in the higher
forms of natural beauty ; the power to speak to the
In^an spirit and to awaken in it emotions through
which runs a sense of religion. Illingworth fills whole
pages in his Divine Immanence with extracts from
poets of every land and every tongue to show that
in this way matter becomes to us the channel of
religious forces. Wordsworth speaks for the whole
choir of poets when in the well-known lines on
Tiutern Abbey he tells how, looking on a sunset, he
has felt —

A presence that disturbs me with a joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man.

Cowper, in his more restrained fashion, repeats the
thought in such lines as —

Nature employed in her allotted space
Is handmaid to the purposes of Grace.

Pope again, infinitely less spiritual than Cowper,
yet has the same conception —

Nature affords at least a glimmering light,

The lines, tho' touched but faintly, are drawn right.

Examples may be gathered from every page of
literature and from every class of mind. Burns,

104 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

trudging behind his plough in a Scottish field, sees a
daisy in the track of the keen ploughshare, and from
that ' wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,' somehow an
influence thrills his conscience, and he sees in it a
dim suggestion of some penalty, driven of inexorable
law, waiting himself. William Cullen Bryant sees
darkly painted on the crimson sky with wide-stretched
wings, the figure of a water-fowl. He asks —

Whither, midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

Thy solitary way?

Then, as he muses, faith in God's providence for him
self awakens —

There is a power, whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast —
The desert, the illimitable air —

Lone wandering, but not lost

He who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,

Will lead my steps aright.

But these, it may be said, are poets, with the un-
chartered imagination natural to poets. But the same
effect, as we have seen in Darwin's case, is produced,
by the same cause, in the mind of a scientist. Who
does not remember how Linnaeus knelt and adored
amid the blossoming gorse outside London ? Who
does not remember Kepler's cry as he spelt out the

The Logic of the Sunset 105

wonders of the stars, '0 God, I am thinking Thy
thoughts after Thee ! ' ?

How deep a chord of religious emotion may be
struck by the humblest form of vegetable life is illus
trated in the familiar story of Mungo Park. Plun
dered, beaten, stripped by a band of savages, five
hundred miles from the nearest human help, he
tells how he flung himself down under the blazing
African sun to die. As he lay despairing, a tiny bead
of moss caught his eye. It was no bigger than the tip
of his finger ; and yet as he looked at the exquisite
shaping of its roots, leaves, and capsule, he asked him
self whether the Mind which planned and sheltered,
and brought to such a perfection of beauty that tiny
bead of moss could forget him. The tiny speck of
vegetable life had for him the office of a prophet, it
spoke to him with a prophet's lips. 'I started up,'
he said, 'and, disregarding both hunger and fatigue,
travelled forward.' That impulse of faith was not in
the moss, but it streamed through it into that fainting
human spirit.

Wordsworth was a poet ; but multitudes who have
no poetic gift have shared the experience he describes,
when he declares that in him 'the meanest flower
that blows ' could awaken thoughts ' too deep for
tears.'

Now here is an effect which must have some cause
corresponding to it in nature. Are these emotions
accidents or illusions ? That is incredible. They form

io6 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

part of universal human experience ; they are common to
men of every temperament and every land. The atoms
and ether waves that science discovers behind colour are
real; the sensations which race from them along the
nerves are real; the perceptions which mysteriously
emerge from these nerve-waves in the consciousness,
they, too, are real. And the effect on the spirit, which
is the last link in this chain of effects, is surely as real
as all the rest. Illingworth, indeed, says that the
emotional effect is even more ' real,' in the only intel
ligible sense of the word, than the mechanical causes
which produce it, since it more profoundly touches our
personality.

But, it may be argued, these spiritual emotions
aroused by natural beauty are nothing better than
tricks of the imagination, and need not be taken
seriously. Poets feel them, and artists. The reason
knows nothing of them. But this, again, is unscien
tific. These emotions are the legitimate answer of
our personality to the touch of some external cause.
We cannot logically say that one part of our per
sonality is to be taken seriously, and the other to
be ignored; that the answer one part gives to an
external appeal is veracious, but the response of the
other is an illusion. The emotions are as much
a part of our personality as the reason ; and, in its
order, the answer of the imagination is as valid as
that of reason.

Nor can these impressions produced in our spiritual

The Logic of the Sunset 107

nature by physical beauty be dismissed as being in
themselves material. The effect lies in the spirit. The
mind in us uses matter ; the brain cannot think with
out the help of the blood that nourishes it, and the
blood is made up of oxygen and nitrogen, of phosphorus
and carbon. But the mind itself does not consist of
chemical elements ; nor have these chemical elements
the sensibilities of mind.

These spiritual impressions produced on us by
forms of physical beauty must be taken seriously ; and
they are part of a great fact, true in every field of the
universe, the fact of the relation betwixt matter and
spirit. According to one reading of the universe, it
is, to quote a well-known scientist, ' a chain of law
whose beginning and ending are unknown, and on
which mind and matter are strung like beads ' ; but
not even the authority of a great name can make
that statement credible. The very sense attached to
the term ' law ' in it is unscientific. Natural law, in
the accurate meaning of the word, is nothing more
than a certain observed sequence of phenomena.
And spirit and matter are not twin, unconscious
beads strung upon some iron thread of law. Spirit
is a free force, and matter everywhere is its servant
and minister.

It is not merely that matter is interfused with
mind; nor that matter, as science analyses it, and
tracks it down to its starting-point, melts evermore
into terms of mind ; becoming, that is, nothing but a

io8 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

disguise of force. To the man in the street; the state
ment that colour is not in the sunset or the flower, but
in his own brain ; that time and space are categories
of his own mind, will seem unintelligible or even
absurd. They may be metaphysically true ; but he will
think they are hardly less absurd on that account.
And yet matter, as our wiser science now teaches, is
but the raw material that mind uses to produce all
those phenomena in the consciousness we describe as
form, colour, &c. Matter is everywhere the tool and
servant of mind. It exists for the sake of mind. Its
laws or relations, as we have seen, can only be described
in terms of mind.

And the effect of physical beauty on the deeper
emotions of our personality is the most significant part
of the service matter renders to mind. It shows that
to us, under certain conditions, and in certain moods,
matter has a religious office. It becomes the vehicle
of religious forces. For let the effect of a landscape, or
a sunset, or the sound of the lark's voice falling out of
the sky, or the deep monotone of the sea heard through
the darkness — the voice of ' mighty waters rolling ever
more' — be analysed. Amongst the effects are some
clearly and definitely religious. Perhaps what has
been called ' the sacrament of the sunset ' — the colours
that flame, and then grow pale and die in the western
sky as the sun sinks — can best be analysed, since the
spectacle is so constantly recurrent and on a scale so
large.

The Logic of the Sunset 109

What is the exact emotional effect produced by a
sunset ? The most easily recognized is, no doubt, the
pathetic reminder it gives of our own mortality; the
sense of transitory things. The little perishing life
under the great arch of the sky, how brief it seems !
How swiftly comes the end of it all ! The ending day
tells us, in nature's mighty yet fading hieroglyphics, of
other endings. Sunt laclirymae rerum. This is how
Wordsworth interprets the sunset —

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from the eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

But if the mood kindled by the sunset-skies be
analysed, deeper elements will be found in it, some
pensive, some peaceful, some strangely ennobling.
There are in it sometimes forces that rebuke. Vile
things in us are taught shame ; petty and fermenting
quarrels are hushed. Life seems set against a new and
loftier background. Sometimes, as we look, a sense of
kinship with other orders, and even a sense of perma
nency in ourselves beneath nature's changes, dimly
stirs. Something of the peace of the great skies falls
upon us.

And, deepest of all, there is a sense of the power
and greatness of the Infinite Creator and Lord of
all worlds, whose thoughts, in terms of beauty, we
see.

All this goes to prove that there is in matter

no The Unrealized Logic of Religion

a religious office. The ether waves, the atoms
which constitute matter, become the vehicle of forces
which are non-material 'The sea/ says the 'Auto
crat of the Breakfast-table,' 'belongs to eternity, and
of that it sings.' 'The starry heaven/ says Burke,
'never fails to excite an idea of grandeur, and this
cannot be owing to anything in the stars themselves.'
Every one remembers Keats's famous line, 'A thing of
beauty is a joy for ever/ but we forget how he goes on
to say that physical beauty itself is

An endless fountain of immortal drink
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

Now there is certainly no religious element in the
mere structure of nature; in ether waves and atoms,
in hydrogen and carbon and phosphorus. And yet
it is also certain — a fact attested, as we have seen, by
all literature and all human experience — that there is
a religious service wrought into the very structure of
the physical universe. And it follows from this that
there is Something behind the veil of the material
universe seeking religious ends, and appealing to us
through matter for religious ends.

That mind should use matter to carry to other
minds messages of which matter itself knows nothing

o

is a fact proved by universal experience. What do
the leaden types on which Hamlet is printed know
of the meaning of the great drama? But Shake
speare's genius uses those bits of metal still to thrill

The Logic of the Sunset in

our minds with all the splendours of his creative
imagination. What do the air waves of which the

O

' Hallelujah Chorus ' is composed know of the exulta
tion, the fervours of worship and adoration they convey
to us? It is the soul of Handel behind these air waves
that speaks to our souls through them. A cluster of
wind-blown flags at the mast-head of the Victory on
the great day of Trafalgar kindled the seamen of a
whole fleet with a new daring. They still are a force
stirring in the blood of the English-speaking race
everywhere. But what did the flags know of the
message they carried ?

There must be mind at both ends of such a message.
The mind of Nelson is still in the syllables of the
historic signal, the mind of Handel in the great chorus.
And there is Mind speaking to our minds through all
these natural phenomena of which we have spoken —
the glow of the sunset, the song of the bird, the mighty
concave of the sky, the dim shapes of far-off mountains,
the figure of the water-fowl outlined against the purple
sky. To deny this is to say that in the signal at
Trafalgar there was nothing but the woven cotton and
the crude colours of the flags ; that in the ' Hallelujah
Chorus' there is nothing but certain vibrations of
air.

* If a poet,' says Sir Oliver Lodge, ' witnessing the
cloud-glories of a sunset, for instance, or the profusion
of beauty with which snow-mountains seem to fling
themselves to the heavens, in districts unpeopled and

ii2 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

in epochs long before human consciousness awoke
upon the earth; if such a seer feels the revelation
weigh upon his spirit with an almost sickening pressure,
and is constrained to ascribe this wealth and pro
digality of beauty to the joy of the Eternal Being
in His own existence — to an anticipation, as it were,
of the developments which lie before the universe in
which He is at work, and which He is slowly guiding
towards an unimaginable perfection, — it behoves the
man of science to put his hand upon his mouth, lest,
in his efforts to be true in the absence of knowledge,
he find himself uttering, in his ignorance, words of
lamentable folly or blasphemy.' l

We must, then, on scientific grounds, and as a
scientific fact, accept the religious office hidden in
matter. God sets on the frontiers of the morning and
the night the great signal of sunrise and of sunset.
Over the dust of city streets and the clamour of city
crowds burn the great fires of the dying sun. It is
God's signal to us set in His heavens. He makes the
rolling of the earth sunward a message. 'The sky,'
says Euskin, 'is the part of nature in which God has
done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the
sole and evident purpose of touching him, than any
other of His works.' And at how many points, by
how many signals and voices, God in these accents
speaks to us ! Oliver Wendell Holmes picks up a shell
on the seashore, and in his poem of ' The Chambered
1 Eibbert Journal,

The Logic of the Sunset 113

Nautilus/ he tells how the tiny shell became a parable
and a message to him —

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,

Child of the wandering sea,

Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn !

While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voico that sings —

' Build thee more stately mansions, 0 my soul I

As the swift seasons roll 1

Leave thy low-vaulted past !
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!'

Shelley hears the lark singing at heaven's gate —

Singing hymns unbidden
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

'Of all God's gifts to the sight of man,' says
Euskin, ' colour is the holiest, most divine, and most
solemn ' ; and he repeats that lesson a hundred times
over in his pages. And these exquisite cadences of
colour, that touch the spirit so finely, and to an issue
so fine, do they represent merely forces in matter, or a
Spirit behind matter, and which speaks through it to
our spirits ? ' There is religion,' says Euskin, ' in every
thing around us, a calm and holy religion in the unbreath-
ing things of nature. ... It is a meek and blessed
influence, stealing in, as it were, unawares upon the

I

H4 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

heart ; it is fresh from the hands of its author, glowing
from the immediate presence of the great Spirit which
pervades and quickens it ; it is written on the arched sky,
it looks out from every star, it is on the sailing cloud
and in the invisible wind ; it is among the hills and
valleys of the earth, where the shrubless mountain-
top pierces the thin atmosphere of eternal winter, or
where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong
wind, with its dark -graves of green foliage; it is
spread out, like a legible language, upon the broad
face of the unsleeping ocean. It is the poetry of
nature ! It is this which uplifts the spirit within
us, until it is strong enough to overlook the shadows
of our place of probation; which breaks, link after
link, the chain that binds us to materiality, and which
opens to our imagination a world of spiritual beauty
and holiness.'

God, in a word, surrounds us with beauty, from
the star-filled heavens above our heads to the flower-
sprinkled grass under our feet ; from the eastern skies
where in glory the day is born, to the western horizon
where in splendid but fading tints it dies. And this
ministry of beauty has spiritual ends. And these ends
are part of the original purpose of material beauty;
for that cannot be in the conclusion which was not
already in the premisses. And this higher office of
natural beauty is missed by us only when by mere
disuse we have killed the sensibilities to which it
appeals.

The Logic of the Sunset 115

Now if there are religious forces streaming upon us
through material things, there must be some great Mind
behind the veil of matter, seeking religious ends in us,
and using the very molecules and vibrations of the
material universe to serve those ends. The witness of
God and religion, in brief, is wrought into the very
structure of the physical universe, and the witness of
our own involuntary response to physical beauty
attests it*

BOOK III
IN PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER 1
The Logic of Proportion

1 The utmost for the highest.'— The motto of Watts, the painter.

IF the essential elements of beauty are analysed it
will be found that a certain law of proportion, a
definite harmony of scale, runs through them and
links them together. Failure at this point is the defeat
of beauty. Nor is it merely art that demands propor
tion ; in every realm known to the human mind it is a
postulate of the healthy intellect. The preface must
bear some true ratio to the book, the prelude to the
song, the pedestal to the statue. If a sculptor were to
construct a pedestal a hundred feet high, and perch on
it a statue of a dozen inches, his work would cover him
with ridicule. That perfection of any sort — of form,
or of character — lies in a certain balance and symmetry
of proportion is a law which runs through all realms.

And the law applies to life and character. The
intellectual is higher than the physical ; the moral
than the intellectual ; and any nature that touches
these three realms, to be perfect, must be highest in the
realm that is loftiest. He must be higher in intellectual

iso The Unrealized Logic of Religion

than in material terms, and higher in moral than even
in intellectual qualities. A human body with the
limbs of Hercrles, the grace of Antinous, but with the
brain of a flea and with a non-existent conscience,
would be a jest. A perfect body linked to a perfect
intellect, but without any touch of moral qualities,
would be a devil.

A British private, to a critic who complained that
Wellington was a very little man, replied, trium
phantly, that 'he was biggest at the top'; and any
nature in the degree in which it is perfect must obey
this law of proportion. The motto of Watts, the
great English artist, 'The utmost for the highest,'
was simply the law of artistic proportion expressed
in terms of conduct. So certain is this rule that it
might be described as an imperative demand of the
healthy reason. Give an astronomer the curve of a
planet's track through space, and he will construct
the full orbit. Give a mathematician the first term of
a geometrical progression, and he will draw out the
whole series. So in a perfect nature, if we know
what is in lower terms, we can affirm, with absolute
confidence, what it must be in higher things.

Now, all this applies to God ; it is the law of
His character and works. What He is in His lowest
works tells, with a certainty as absolute as anything
known to mathematical science, what He must be in
higher things. The ellipse must fulfil the prophecy of
the curve. The first term of the progression, unless

The Logic of Proportion 121

mathematical science itself is false, is the index of later
and higher terms.

Now, God's lower works lie near us, in the realm of
our senses. The material universe is the expression of
what He is in material terms ; and we are learning,
with the help of science, to spell out the great alphabet
of its wonders. When God thinks in terms of matter,
He thinks in planets. The Milky Way itself is but
one of His thoughts. Sir Oliver Lodge, in rebuking
the purely materialistic reading of the universe, makes
a daring use of the analogy suggested by the changes
in the grey matter of our own brain which attend each
process of thought. Perhaps, he suggests, the whole
mighty rush of the countless hosts of stars is but the
expression, in material terms, of thought in the divine
Mind!

Certainly if we want to know in what mighty
circles God's thoughts run, with space as their field,
and matter as their instrument, we must take the
wheeling stars for our guide. And day by day, with
deeper and more adoring accents, we are learning to
cry, ' Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord God
Almighty.' How David sang of God's glory, as re
vealed in the stars on which his eyes looked, we know ;
but in what new rapture of adoration would he have
struck the keynote of his psalm had he been told that
all the stars human eyes can see are but a handful
compared with the unseen armies of the sky that lie
beyond all seeing! And there are wonders in their

122 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

flaming depths, in the presence of which thought and

imagination seem to droop rebuked, or even° afraid
can cast a plummet into the stream of the Milky

Way, that great river of stars, and sound its depths,

and map out its currents ?

Yet all these stars consist of brute, unconscious
matter. They know nothing of their own splendour,
their paths through space, of their rushing speed
They are God's lowest works. Their mere scale, it is
true, oppresses us. They dwarf us into the insi^ifi.
cance of insects. They seem to push God beyond our
reach. And yet it is certain they represent only the
outer fringe of God's greatness. They scarcely even
begin to reveal what God Himself is. They are a rude
unconscious measure of His physical omnipotence, and
that, in the scale of God's attributes, is His least and
lowest glory.

Not the mass of the material universe not its
energies, not the rush of the planets, the almost measure
less sweep of their orbits, is what is most wonderful
higher than this is the intelligence that rules them'
and maintains the equipoise of all the wheelina planets'
The world of stars is built on mathematical terms'
on principles of ordered and numerical ratio. It is not
merely the revelation of God's power, made to us in
terms of force and matter, nor the ordered and stu
pendous architecture of the heavens, which overwhelms
It is the creative mind behind that architecture with
its height and depth, its minuteness and its vastness. It

The Logic of Proportion 123

is too high for us. It outruns even our wonder. It
bewilders us. We catch only broken visions of it ; and
then beneath the revelation thought sinks, overwhelmed.

And modern science, as we have seem, is opening
ever new kingdoms of creative intelligence to our
wonder. A few years ago the ultimate form of matter
was supposed to be found in sixty or seventy primary
elements, irreducible and inconvertible. They repre
sented the stuff of which the physical universe was
made. But science has untwisted the last fibres of
matter; it has broken open these ultimate capsules.
And lo, it is found that each lightest atom rehearses the
order, and reproduces the glory of the whole star-
crowded heavens ! Within the tiny curve cf each of
these supposed ultimate molecules is a cluster of points
of electrical energy, which correspond to the planets
and asteroids in a solar system. Hidden in a drop of
dew are a thousand star-systems more wonderful than
anything the heavens know, because they revolve in
dimensions which — not by their vastness, but by their
minuteness— evade not only our senses, but almost our
comprehension.

And so God, in the infinitesimal, seems more wonder
ful than even in the infinite. We have neither imagi
nation nor wonder adequate for the mystery of power
and wisdom thus revealed to us. ' The starry heavens,'
says Mr. Balfour, in his address to the British Associa
tion, ' have from time immemorial moved the worship
or the wonder of mankind. But if the dust beneath

124 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

our feet be indeed compounded of innumerable systems,
whose elements are ever in the most rapid motion, yet
retain through uncounted ages their equilibrium un
shaken, we can hardly deny that the marvels we
directly see are not more worthy of admiration than
those which recent discoveries have enabled us dimly
to surmise.'

But let all we have learned of God at this point
be analysed. It is absolutely destitute of any moral
elements. It is high— high beyond our dreams; but
we are sure it is not the highest. We have revealed
to us the wonders of matter and of material force, the
wonders of the Contriving Mind, all on a scale which
outruns our very imagination. When God thinks in
terms of matter, the solar system is one of His thoughts.
When He thinks in terms of physical power, all
the omnipresent energies of gravitation express that
thought. When He thinks in terms of contriving
skill the balance and harmony of the material universe
give us a measure of the range of intellect expressed.

But if the story stopped short at this point, how
much would be lacking ! The highest word would be
unspoken, the loftiest realm unreached. We should
have the pedestal without the statue, the preface with
out the volume, the prelude without the song. Power
in its highest terms, intellect in its noblest exercise,
divorced of moral qualities, might be the equipment
and revelation of a devil. Does God stop short at
that point? That would be to say, not that He

The Logic of Proportion 125

does not exist, but that He is a Being deformed, or
malformed.

No; the wonders, the energies, the speed beyond
comprehension of God's physical omnipotence; the
splendours of His creative and contriving wisdom thus
dimly revealed to us, are nothing more than the first
terms in a geometrical series. They are only the
curve which foretells the ellipse. The law of propor
tion, the test of all beauty, the condition of all per
fection, must apply to God. He must be highest in
the highest. What He does in the realm of unintelli
gent matter can only be the rude index of what He
does in the kingdom of moral qualities.

The Hebrew psalmist saw this, and dared to say,
1 As the heavens are high above the earth, so great is
His mercy toward them that fear Him.' The measure
of the physical heavens, that is, is the index, in terms
of matter, of the sweep of God's love ; and yet it can
never be more than an imperfect index. God must
be not merely as great on the spiritual side as He is
on the physical ; He must be greater ! His mercy
must have a curve even beyond that of the measureless
heavens. It must have heights beyond our dreams
and depths below our sounding. It must hide wonders
which outrun our utmost thoughts.

The law that God must be greatest in the highest
is axiomatic, and it robs, at a breath, the scale of the
material universe of its terrifying power. It is idle to
deny that faith does, in some moods, find the height

i26 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

of the heavens dreadful. The number and the rush of
the stars, the far-running curves of space, they terrify
the imagination. But the law of proportion which
must apply to God turns these wide heavens, with all
their mysterious chambers, into an argument, not against
hope, but for it. The physical heavens which find
room in their depths for the orbits of a thousand million
stars are but a parable, in physical terms, of the greater
firmament of God's mercy. Nay, the physical is but
the first term of the series, and the series must multiply
as it ascends. God, to come back to our starting-point,
must be ' biggest at the top.'

When He thinks in terms of matter, as we have
said, He thinks in planets. When He thinks in terms
of love, does He think in inches ? When, in the depths
of space, He draws the orbit of a planet, how mighty is
the curve ! And when in the mysterious realm of His
love He draws the orbit of a soul, does His hand
move in narrower curves ?

That is to say that God inverts, in His own per
sonal character, all those laws of beauty which He
has Himself made imperative on our reason. It is
to say that He has the physical strength of a giant
linked to the moral scale of a dwarf.

The material universe is only the outer court of
the great temple of God; the spiritual realm is the
Holy of Holies. And who shall dare to think that
the outer court is more splendid than the very presence-
chamber of the Creator ? By a mathematical necessity,

The Logic of Proportion 127

a progressive series must run on, clothing itself with
new powers as it runs. And by a moral necessity God
must work in the spiritual realm on even nobler terms
than those shown by His works in the kingdom of matter.

Now, the applications of this principle are innumer
able, and they reinforce faith at a thousand points. Let
it be realized, for example, what a miracle of beauty
God hides, say, in the cup of a violet. Nature, it has
been finely said, is ' not an artisan but an artist ' ; but
' nature ' is a word which tricks the sense. God is the
divine artist. He takes for His canvas a little curve
of vegetable fibre ; He bids the brown earth, the falling
rain, the hastening light become His servants, and He
makes for its brief life a spring blossom — the cup of
a violet, the curve of a lily, the close-packed leaves of
a rose — beautiful. How God works for perfection in
even a dying flower! He takes from the untwisted
light all the glories of colour to adorn it.

And all this is a parable of higher things. What
must be God's ideals for the imperishable soul ? To
wards what ideals of beauty and of purity in it does
He work ; what mysterious reflections of His own
perfect grace does He not seek for it ?

It is incredible that He should make the unconscious
earth, and the wind-driven rain, and the far-off fountains
of the sun co-operate to make a perishing flower beau
tiful for a moment, and then be careless about the
beauty of a soul. God's ideals in the material realm
are of perfect grace. They must grow richer as they

128 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

rise through other realms. And looked at in this
light, the purple cup of a violet is an argument for the
richest spiritual hopes.

Or an illustration can be taken from another realm.
A microscopic speck of radium, it is computed, is
capable of sending out a stream of fiery particles for
thirty thousand years. A needle dipped into a solution
of radium nitrate, when viewed through a microscope,
and set opposite a phosphorescent screen, will turn the
screen into a target for successive jets of tiny stars, and
the surface of the screen will be broken into minute
crystals by the stream of particles which rush on it
from the needle. A radium electroscope has been de
signed which is calculated to go on automatically ring
ing a bell for thirty thousand years.

Now, if God has hidden in the tiny curve of an
almost invisible speck of radium a physical energy so
tremendous, an energy whose pulses will beat through
tens of thousands of years, what possibilities of sus
tained energy has He not hidden in the spirit of His
child ! Is He mightier in the atom than in the human
spirit ?

To one who has seen that pulse of fiery particles
streaming from an invisible speck, and realizes that it
will maintain its energy through whole ages, a belief in
the immortality of the human soul gains a quite new
credibility.

But these analogies are merely incidental. The
underlying affirmation is that by the mere logic of

The Logic of Proportion 129

proportion, the logic that demands that the circle shall
fulfil the promise of the curve, all the wonders of re
demption — the Incarnation with its mystery, the Cross
with its atoning suffering, the broken grave with its
deliverance of a dying race from death, all the miracles
and splendours of our salvation, in a word — are not
only credible ; they are inevitable. The pledge of them
is found in the overwhelming revelations of the physical
universe. And each new kingdom of wonders opened
to us by science gives them a new credibility. For on
any simple rule of proportion, if God be so glorious in
the meaner realm, what must be the splendour of His
thoughts, and what the greatness of His works in the
higher realm ! For if we know nothing else about His
glories, we are sure, at least, of this : they must grow
brighter as they run higher I

CHAPTER II
The Logic of Ourselves

1 If the idea of Order underlies all scientific thought, standing,
as it were, at the entrance of scientific reasoning, there is another
idea which stands at the end of all scientific thought. This is
the idea of Unity in its most impressive form as Individuality.'—
PROFESSOR MFRZ, History of European Thought.

1 Should we possess these things and God not possess them ? '
— SIR OLIVER LODGE.

IF any one asks what is the central doctrine of
religion, the doctrine that for many minds grows
pale, and beyond all others needs to be reinforced
in authority and made vivid to the understanding and
the imagination, the answer must be, It is the doctrine
of the personality of God. For when the sense of
that great central fact becomes faint religion itself
perishes. And it is exactly at this point lies the
greatest peril of current religion.

We are not tempted to whisper with the fool ' There
is no God.' Naked atheism belongs to the wards of a
lunatic asylum. Some persons, it is true, contrive to
keep on friendly terms with atheism by clothing it
with all sorts of verbal and philosophical disguises;

The Logic of Ourselves 13 l

but atheism, unqualified and unadorned, is for the sane
intellect unthinkable. ' The atheistic idea,' says Lord
Kelvin, 'is so nonsensical that I do not see how I
can put it into words.' The healthy reason refuses to
believe in a three-legged stool without a carpenter
behind it to explain it. No sane man would offer to
his neighbour the theory that the house in which he
lived had no planning brain behind it and no skilful
toiling hands that built it. And this great universe,
whose architecture outruns all comprehension, with
stars shining in such countless multitudes in its mighty
firmament, and yet other stars, as science now teaches
us, hidden in its very dust ; this great physical universe,
built on mathematical laws, saturated with intelligence
to its very atoms — that this has behind it no infinite
and contriving Mind is unthinkable.

All science proceeds on the theory that the visible
universe is intelligible. It is built on laws which
may be ascertained, on mathematical principles which
can be read. And from what source can intelligibility
proceed except from Intelligence ?

But many, though they believe there is, and must
be, a God, have abandoned the notion of His personality.
He is infinite ; and infinity seems, like measureless
space, to be formless. We conceive of the Infinite as
a mere abstract fringe of emptiness outside the Finite.
So God is resolved, in Matthew Arnold's words, into
a mere ' stream of tendency ' ; an impersonal ' power
not ourselves ' that, no doubt, makes for righteousness ;

132 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

but is as incapable of personal relationships as, say,
the Gulf Stream, or Niagara. And the denial of
personality to God ia fatal to religion. It thrusts
God out of the moral realm, it makes personal
relationship with Him impossible.

Love can only be thought of in personal terms ;
morality can only be predicated of a person. All
the highest and sweetest relationships of life are
personal. The fundamental distinction betwixt matter
and spirit lies at this point; and to deny personality
to God is to translate Him, no matter what decorous
and high-sounding phrases are used, into terms of
matter.

A machine cannot reason, or love, or will. Who
can love gravitation ; or pray to electricity ; or sing
hymns, say, to the law of the conservation of energy ?
All the great offices and forces of religion perish at a
breath if there be no personal God. The heavens are
empty, the soul sits orphaned in the waste kingdoms
of space. Thomson's City of Dreadful Night, the
one poem in English speech which may be described
as atheism set to music, is true if there be no personal
God—

The world rolls round for ever like a mill,
It grinds out death and life, and good and ill,
It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will.

While air of space and Time's full river flow,
The mill must blindly whirl unresting so.
It may be wearing out, but who can know?

The Logic of Ourselves 133

Man might know one thing were his sight less dim,
That it whirls, not to suit his petty whim,
That it is quite indifferent to him.

Nay, doth it use him harshly, as he saith?
It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
Then grinds him back into eternal death.

Now the general argument for God's personality
is of great force, but cannot be dealt with here. It
rests in the last analysis on the certainty that the
world is the product of mind, and mind is the quality
of a person. The one great presupposition of science,
as we have said, is that the material universe is
intelligible. This implies that it is the work of
intelligence ; intelligence that chooses its ends, and
takes fit means to reach those ends. And intelligence
is the attribute of a person.

Scientific authority for this belief is overwhelming.
' Science,' says Lord Kelvin, ' positively affirms creating
and directive power, which it compels us to accept as
an article of belief.'1 'Design,' says G. G. Stokes,
'is altogether unmeaning without a designing mind.'
'A law,' says Newman, 'is not a cause, but a fact.
But when we come to the question of cause, then we
have no experience of any cause but will.' a ' The
presence of mind,' says Sir John Herschel, 'is what
solves the whole problem of the material universe.'
And the signature of mind is written on every atom

» Nineteenth Century, June, 1903, p. 827.
, • Grammar of Assent, p. 69,

134 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

of that universe, on every pulse of life, on every
movement of force.

It were as easy to believe that, say, Milton's
Paradise Lost had been set up, in all its stately march
of balanced syllables, by an anthropoid ape, or that
the letters composing it had been blown together by
a whirlwind, as to believe that the visible universe
about us — built on mathematical laws, knitted together
by a million correspondences, and crowded thick with
marks of purpose — is the creation of some mindless
Force.

We find an argument for God's personality hidden
deep in one of the indestructible capacities of our own
nature — the moral sense. Conscience has many uses.
One of these is its silent, inextinguishable witness for
God ; and not only for God, but for God as a Person.
What gives its mysterious sharpness to the rebuke of
conscience ? It is the fact that its rebuke testifies not
only to some violation of impersonal law, some breach
of mechanical order. It is found in the sense — not,
perhaps, always translated into terms of consciousness,
but lying hidden deep and inarticulate in the soul —
that an infinite, loving Person has been wronged. It is
the personal element which makes the sense of sin so
deep, so sharp, so closely linked to remorse. * We are
not,' says Newman, ' affectionate towards a stone, nor
do we feel shame before a horse or a dog. We have no
remorse or compunction on breaking mere human law.
Yet, so it is, conscience excites all these painful

The Logic of Ourselves 135

emotions, confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation.
The wicked flees, when no one pursueth. Then why
does he flee ? Whence his terror ? Who is it that he
sees in solitude, in darkness, in the hidden chambers of
his heart ? If the cause of these emotions does not
belong to this visible world, the Object to which his
perception is directed must be supernatural and
divine.' l

Conscience, as Illingworth a argues, commands our
will with an authority which we can only attribute to
the touch of a conscious will. It educates our character
with a precision of adjusted influence which shows it
streams from a personal mind. ' The philosophers who
have probed it, the saints and heroes who have obeyed
and loved it, the sinners who have defied it have
agreed in this. And the inevitable inference must be
that it is the voice of a personal God.'

An almost amusing proof that God is personal
may be found in the complete failure of all attempts
to formulate, in intelligible terms, the conception of
a God emptied of personality and attenuated into a
mere impersonal force.

Human language somehow refuses to give this idea
expression. The very terms used to express the notion
of God, the Creator of the universe, divorced from in
telligence and will, are fit for nothing but a museum of
curiosities. Illingworth has given a memorable and

1 Grammar of Assent, p. 107.

* Personality Divine and Human, p. Ill,

136 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

brilliant summary of these alternatives to the con
ception of a personal God, and of the methods by
which the notion of Personality is evaded or whittled
down into invisibility. Thus we have Hegel's Idea,
the Blind Will of Schopenhauer, the Sublimated
Unconscious of Hartmann, the Moral Order of Fichte,
and the 'Eternal Not Ourselves ' of Matthew Arnold.
But all these are nothing better than disguises of
personality, or functions of personality, torn from
their source, and made to clear thought incredible,
not to say absurd, as a result The phrases assume
personality in God even when seeming to deny it.

Darwin supplies a striking example of this in
the famous passage in the Origin of Species, p. 146, in
which he describes the structure of the eye, with its
layers of tissues and complex web of nerves. In the
twenty-seven lines of this passage there are, as Pro
fessor Henslow points out, no less than seventeen
suppositions, a circumstance which takes it out of the
category of severe science. But the thing to be noted
is the part that ' Natural Selection ' takes in the process
by which the eye is called into existence. ' We must
suppose,' says Darwin, 'that there is a Power repre
sented by Natural Selection intently watching' eacn
alteration in the transparent layers, and ' carefully pre
serving the most fit ' until a better one is produced, and
then destroying the old ones. In this way, for millions
of years, and during each year in millions of individuals
of many kinds, Natural Selection will 'pick out wiih

The Logic of Ourselves 137

unerring skill' each improvement. But a Power, no
matter how labelled, which 'watches,' 'chooses,' 'de
stroys,' and builds up by intelligent methods continued
for millions of years, is certainly not a mindless and
unconscious Force. It has that higher quality of
personality, a reasoning will.

Abbott, in his Through Nature to Christ, has keenly
analysed Matthew Arnold's phrase, ' a power not our
selves which makes for righteousness.' ' What/ he
asks, ' is meant by the word " makes " ? For the word
necessarily calls up three, and only three, kinds of
"making"; either "making" voluntarily, as a man
makes ; or " making " instinctively, as a beast makes ;
or "making" neither voluntarily nor instinctively,
but unconsciously, just as an eddy, or current may
be said to " make." Of these three kinds of " making,"
which is meant ? If the first, you are anthropomor
phic ; if the second, you are zoomorphic ; if the third,
you are azoomorphic. Such a use of the words,'
he adds, 'rather conceals than reveals thought, and
conveys, as perhaps, indeed, it is intended to convey,
no certain revelation whatever of the nature of
God.'

Perhaps the least successful effort to express in
reasoned language the conception of God without
personality is that of Herbert Spencer, and there is no
more brilliant example of destructive criticism than
that applied to Herbert Spencer's views by William
Arthur in his Ediyion Without God. Mr. Frederic

138 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Harrison unkindly describes Herbert Spencer's Un
knowable as the ' All Nothingness.' He pictures its
inventor, Mr. Herbert Spencer, however, as saying to
the theologians, ' I cannot allow you to speak of a
First Cause, or a Creator, or an All-being, or an
Absolute Existence, because you mean something
intelligible and conceivable by these terms ; and I tell
you that they stand for ideas that are unthinkable and
inconceivable. But 7 have a perfect right to use these
terms, because I mean nothing by them, at least nothing
that can either be thought or conceived of, and I know
that I am not talking of anything intelligent or con
ceivable. That is the faith of an agnostic, which,
except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.'

A brother sceptic, Sir James Stephen, is still more
severe. ' Mr. Herbert Spencer,' he says, ' works his
words about this way and that ; he counts that part for
ghosts and dreams, and the residue thereof he maketli
a God, and saith, " Ha, ha, I am wise, I have seen the
truth." ' The string of names by which Herbert
Spencer tries to express the conception of an ultimate
cause and of a creative power who is not personal;
' these/ says Sir James Stephen, ' are nothing but a
scries of metaphysics built upon one another and ending
where they began.'

William Arthur, too,1 distils excellent satire on
Spencer's Unascertained Something, 'of whose exist
ence we are more certain than any other existence,'
1 Religion Without God, p. 486,

The Logic of Ourselves

his Power without attributes, his Substratum of
material existence on which only Nothingness rests;
his Unconscious Agency of which conscious humanity
is a product; his Unconscious Substance of which
conscious humanity is formed ... his disguises, when
there is only a single thing to disguise itself and be
imposed upon ; his Creative Power that does not think,
act, or will. ' Putting all these positives into line with
all the negatives, we arrive,' says William Arthur, ' at
only one perfectly clear idea— namely, that at every
moment, no matter how much accumulates to obscure
it, the existence of an eternal and omnipotent Creator
keeps cropping up through all.'

In one striking passage, indeed, Herbert Spencer's
better sense revolts from the strange conception of a
God who discharges all the offices of reason without
possessing reason. 'Christians/ he says, 'make the
erroneous assumption that the choice is between per
sonality and something lower than personality; whereas
the choice is rather between personality and something

higher.' l

Mr. Bradlaugh in his turn, is on the most familiar
terms with God. He has walked round about Him,
explored Him, measured Him with the foot-rule, and
is able to report that God 'cannot be intelligent,'
'cannot think,' 'cannot have the faculty of judgement/
&c. Haeckel's negatives are on an amazing scale.
His monistic philosophy definitely rules out the three
i First Principles, p. 31,

140 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

great central truths of God, Freedom, and Immortality.
What room is left even for the riddles of the universe,
or who survives to speculate on these riddles, after
God, Freedom, and Immortality are dismissed, and only
a world of machines is left, the plain man fails to
understand.

For it is to be noted that all those forms of philo
sophy which deny personality to God attenuate into
nothingness the personality of man. Looking up
into the heavens they find them empty; and look
ing round on man and nature they discover nothing
but, to use William Arthur's phrase, 'a mere Vanity
Fair of disguises.' And this twin denial of person
ality both to God and man may well drive us to
suspect the logic on which both dreadful denials
stand.

For when all the qualities of Personality — intelli
gence, will, and freedom — are denied to man, what is
left? On the monistic theory men are mere bubbles
on the surface of reality, and they are bubbles ex
hausted of moral contents. The harlot in the street
is one bubble ; the mother bending tenderly over her
child is another. They are equally necessitated, equally
incapable of praise or blame. A man's beliefs are as
much necessitated as the colour of his hair, and as
remote from all moral qualities. Emotions, beliefs,
political theories, philosophical arguments, the foulest
lusts, the purest affections, all may be resolved into
chemical terms.

The Logic of Ourselves 141

'All of our philosophy,' says Huxley, 'all our
poetry, all our science, and all our art — Plato, Shake
speare, Newton, and Eaphael — are potential in the fires
of the sun.' The protoplasm of a mushroom, he de
clared in his lecture on ' The Physical Basis of Life,' is
essentially identical with that of the man who eats it.
Two particles of fungoid will develop — one into a
mushroom, and the other, via the brain of Shakespeare,
into Hamlet; and as far as physical contents are
concerned, both are identical.

An adequate knowledge of chemistry, on this theory,
would enable a philosopher to inject — say, with a
hypodermic syringe — free-trade views, or a belief in
protection; a triumphant confidence in the monistic
theory, or the most energetic scorn of that theory, into
any given number of persons. The arrangement of the
particles of grey matter in Professor Haeckel's brain
which compels him to believe in what he calls monism
is as inevitable as, say, the combination of grey matter
in Sir James Stephen's brain which compelled him to
pronounce that theory not merely a form of error, but
' the most complete nonsense.' Everything is mechanical,
necessitated, non-moral. It is as logical to exhort a
man to change his creed as to become, say, six feet
high. It is as unreasonable on this theory to blame
him for being a rogue as it would be to blame him for
having red hair.

This is a theory, of course, which destroys all
morality. To act on it, or even to hold it consistently,

142 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

and to talk about it intelligibly many minutes in
succession is impossible. It is entertaining to notice how
Ilaeckel credits the primary atoms with the very power
he denies to man. ' The atom,' he says, ' is not without
a rudimentary form of sensation and of will.' The
scientist who denies soul to man thus discovers soul in
the molecule.

Who will not turn away with a touch of scorn from
teaching so flippant, so charged with peril to morality,
and so utterly in conflict with our own consciousness ?
To call it ' scientific ' is to dishonour a great word.

But turning aside from the verbal feats of distressed
philosophers, and the civil strife which wages among
them, it is sufficient for our present purpose to point
out that the nearest, the most intelligible, the highest
proof of personality in God lies in ourselves, in the
central fact, rooted deep in our own consciousness, that
we are persons.

Personality is for us a fact of consciousness. It
is, to quote Illingworth, ' the inevitable and necessary
starting-point of all human thought, for we cannot
by any conceivable means get behind it, or beyond
it.'1 If we are not sure of this, we are sure of
nothing. 'If I may not assume/ says Newman,
' that I exist and in a particular way, that is with a
particular mental constitution, I have nothing to
speculate about, and had better leave speculation alone.
Such as I am it is my all, and must be taken for
1 Personality Human and Divine, p. 41,

The Logic of Ourselves 143

granted, otherwise thought is but an idle amusement
not worth the trouble.'

A whole science of psychology is built on this one
luminous certainty, the certainty of our own self-
consciousness; and psychology is as much a science,
and deals as certainly with definite laws and ascertained
phenomena, as astronomy, or chemistry, or geology.

But what, when the very roots of our nature are
examined, do we find constitutes in us personality?
Included in it are, no doubt, deep, mysterious realms
which can only be guessed at; forces which evade
definition. Deep below the consciousness are vast
primitive tracts of being, unilluminated and uncharted.
That sub-conscious region resembles a dim and un
mapped continent. But when we have allowed for
these mystic and strange realms which lie outside the
clear disc of consciousness, certain elements of our
personality are clear. The Christian reading of our
nature is noble and adequate; it is the only reading
which fits the facts, as science slowly, and by the
debates of centuries, interprets the facts. We are
spiritual beings ; and the spiritual order is one which
transcends matter, masters it, uses it, includes it ; just
as the chemical includes and transfigures the mechanical,
or the vital the chemical order.

The fundamental characteristic of personality is, to
use the language of psychology, self-consciousness ; the
quality of a subject becoming an object to itself.
Herbert Spencer, it is true, denies this fundamental

144 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

mark of our personality. 'If it is the true self which
thinks/ he demands, ' what other self can it be that is
thought of?' William Arthur burlesques this by
saying that, if it is the true self which shaves, it must be
another self which shaves it. Mansel argues that if
in personality subject and object are identified, this
means the annihilation of both, and on the strength of
this logic he dismisses self to the dim realms of the
unknown and the unknowable.

And yet it is a fact of consciousness, of which every
inau can be the judge, that he can make himself the
object of his own thought. Self-consciousness lies in
that fact. And in the light of that self-consciousness
we see in ourselves the great faculties of reason, of will,
and of love. If these are the most mysterious things we
know, yet they are the things we know most certainly.
They stand in the light of direct self-consciousness.

Perhaps of all these qualities that of a free, self-
determining will is most vehemently denied. Yet we
are directly conscious of freedom; of the power to
think and to love ; of the power to choose our ends.
The materialistic school, it is true, denies in stentorian
accents the very possibility of a free will in man.
Haeckel, in his Riddle of the Universe (p. 5), says, ' The
freedom of the will is a pure dogma, based on delusion,
and has no real existence. Every act of the will is as
absolutely determined by the organization of the in
dividual, and as dependent on the momentary condition
of his environment, as every other activity.' But

The Logic of Ourselves 145

Haeckel could not be consistent. After denying free
will to man, he declares, as we have seen, that even the
atom is not without a rudimentary form of sensation
and will. Why that should be denied to man v/hich is
ascribed to the atom is hard to see. Dr. Johnson settles
the question with his sturdy common sense. ' Sir/ he
said to Boswell, ' we know our will is free, and there's
an end on't. As to the doctrine of necessity, no man
believes it.'

There is certainly no easy predisposition in man to
believe in his own free will. Linked to the freedom of
the will is the twin fact of responsibility, ' and,' says
Illingworth, ' there is no fact in the world that in their
misery men would not more gladly have denied ' ; for
if it could be denied, human responsibility would cease,
and that dark element in human experience, remorse,
the sense of failure, would not exist.

But the sense of freedom is inwrought into the very
fibres of our consciousness. It lies at the root of our
nature. Even those who regard it as a delusion are
obliged to admit that it is a delusion from which there
is no escape; a delusion which we must treat as a
reality. All human law proceeds on the theory that
man is free, and, being free, is responsible. All history
verifies it. The rational order of society is only pos
sible on the theory that men are not automata, but
responsible beings ; and that a rational order of society
could spring from an irrational disease of the mind is
unthinkable.

L

146 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Human personality, in brief, includes great and
splendid capacities which we ourselves only half com
prehend. One of the classic and memorable passages
in Augustine's Confessions is that in which he wanders
through ' the stately halls of memory/ and dwells on
its splendours and mysteries. And memory is only
one of the secondary endowments of our personality.
And behind all other factors is the entity to which they
belong, and from which they are inseparable. These
strange and half-comprehended qualities of personality
are linked into conscious unity, and fenced into a
separateness of which, to quote Liebnitz, the impenetra
bility of matter is but a faint analogue.

Personality, with all its mystery and greatness, is
thus the ultimate fact of consciousness. Man is con
scious that he is a free spirit. The sequences of the
material world are compelled and unconscious; but
man is self-determined, an end in himself, a free spirit
moving in a world of unconscious forces and compelled
sequences.

This, then, is the fact about ourselves. What light
does it shed on the nature of God ?

It is the supreme proof that God Himself is
personal For is it credible that He has given us
something nobler and loftier than He Himself pos
sesses? It makes the dignity of our nature that we
are not links in a chain, accidental eddies in some
stream of unconscious existence. This quality of
separate and indestructible personality makes all great

The Logic of Ourselves 147

things possible to us. We can love, we can choose,
we can worship. If personality is denied to man he is
smitten with an instant degradation. He is thrust out
of the moral order. All the sweetest relations of human
life are made illusions. The love of a mother to her
child is as mechanical as the blowing of the wind. All
moral possibilities are extinguished. Our consciousness
tricks us. If a man is only a machine the very highest
activities of human life are turned to lies. Why should
we preach to machines; pass laws which they are
expected to obey ; love them, weep over them, admonish
them?

But we know we are not machines. An engineer,
with his endowment of free and conscious personality,
can stand beside the great engines which drive a battle
ship and feel he is nobler than they. He has invented
them; he is able to control them. They answer to
every pulse of his will with all their giant strength.

Shall we, then, say that God who has given us this
high and noble endowment, and so set us in the moral
order, does not Himself possess what He has given to
us ? To say that involves a paradox which confounds
all reason. If this be so, then is God less than His
own creature. He is lower in the scale of existence.
He is Himself thrust out of the moral order. This ia
to say that the infinitesimal contains what cannot be
found in the Infinite. 'There are many errors,' says
Sir Oliver Lodge, 'but there is one truth, in anthro
pomorphism. Whatever worthy attribute belongs to

148 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

man, be it personality or any other, its existence in the
universe is thereby admitted ; we can deny it no more.'

It is Christianity which has deciphered man's
nature and drawn into clear light the elements of his
personality. The historic development of the science
is clear, and can be traced from Augustine to Luther;
from Luther to Kant ; from Kant to Lotze and Mar-
tineau, to McCosh and Mansel, and many another.
Christianity sets man in the august light of the Incar
nation, and so the whole reading of man's nature has
been revolutionized. Even the metaphysical disputes of
the early Christian centuries as to the Trinity, and the
relations of the Persons in the Godhead to each other,
disputes which we now contemplate with intellectual
impatience, and even with an undeserved touch of
intellectual scorn, helped to shape the whole conception
of human personality, and to create the science of
psychology.

And when we have read our own nature we have
learned to interpret the nature of God. The proof and
the interpretation of personality in God are found in
that sense of a free personality which is the deepest
consciousness of our own being.

CHAPTER III
The Logic of the Infinitesimal

1 The earth is a point, not only in respect of the heavens above
us, but of that heavenly and celestial part within us. ...
There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before
the elements, and pays no homage to the sun.' — SIR THOMAS
BBOWHX.

GDD is the infinite, man is the infinitesimal.
God is the ocean, man the drop. And what
ratio is thinkable betwixt extremes parted
by an interval so measureless ? The ocean includes
all that the drop contains, and infinitely more. Where
the infinitesimal ends the Infinite begins. How can
the infinitesimal measure or interpret the Infinite ?

Yet in some dim, profound sense, the drop does
interpret the ocean ; the infinitesimal suggests and
explains God, the Infinite. This must be true, if only
in this sense : that whatever of rich and noble faculty
there is in us God must possess, and possess on a
scale outrunning not only the broken hint of our own
faculties, but the utmost measures of our imagination.
It is unthinkable that God is less rich in faculty than
His own handiwork; that He has given us at any

150 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

point more than He Himself possesses. How can the
drop include in its tiny curve something the ocean
itself does not hold ?

Our very senses are in this way a divine revelation
to us ; a witness of what there must be in God. They
suggest powers and faculties which, in the mysterious
scale of His infinitude, God Himself must possess.
Was it a deaf God who invented the ear, or a blind
God who gave us the faculty of sight ? Is it think
able that a Being, Himself mindless and unintelligent,
gave us — what He does not Himself possess — the
imperial faculty of reason ? ' He that planted the ear,
shall lie not hear ; He that formed the eye, shall He
not see; He that teacheth man knowledge, shall not
He know ? '

To say that man is the measure of God is an
affront to reason ; for it is to say that the atom is as
great as the planet. But it is a yet vaster incredibility
to say that in any one faculty God can be less than
His own creature, for this is to say that the atom has
something the planet lacks. The Infinite must for
ever, and in all the heights and depths of capacity, be
more than the infinitesimal. So we get a principle as
certain as anything the human mind can know, but
capable of a hundred applications, and carrying with it
far-reaching issues : the principle that what is highest
in us best interprets what God is, if only because He
must possess more than we can find in our own nature.

If, for example, this principle of the ratio betwixt

The Logic of the Infinitesimal 151

the infinitesimal and the Infinite be applied to Christian
history, it instantly makes more than credible — it makes
certain, and even inevitable — what seems to many
persons the central incredibility of that history: the
story of the Incarnation, the descent into human flesh
of the eternal Son of God. Love, we know instinc
tively, is the highest in the whole range of moral
qualities. If the loftiest nature in the universe, in
the highest mood love knows, the mood of limitless
self-sacrifice, breaks into history and takes visible form,
it must be exactly in such a shape as that we, on the
Christian faith, hold the Incarnation to be. And the
proof of this lies, not remote from us, hidden in
perplexed terms of logic ; it lies near to us, in the
very make and capabilities of our own nature.

Human love in its ordinary manifestations is selfish
and brief. But there is one form of that love — a form
which, since we were all once children, has touched us
— which makes the love of the Incarnation perfectly
credible. Not all mothers, it is true, are motherly;
but in the heart of every true mother, at the sight of
her infant's face, the touch of her infant's fingers, the
cry of her infant's pain, there breaks into flame the
glow of a love which is deathless, and which is capable
of moods and acts of self-sacrifice which carry with
them strange implications.

Here is love speaking with human lips, and wearing
a human guise, which is not destroyed by want of
desert in the object loved j which finds, indeed, in the

i52 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

very want of desert only a new argument for tenderness
and sacrifice ; love which often takes its most com
passionate forms towards the one who least deserves it.
It is for the wanderer, for the outcast, for the son who
has broken loose from household ties, and is in the far
country, and perhaps by the swine's trough, that the
true mother weeps oftenest at God's feet. Here is a
love which time cannot change, nor failing strength
make faint. The mother's senses grow dim ; her busy
hands lose their strength, her tireless feet their swift
lightness. But behind the failing senses, the dimmed
eyes, the whitening hair, still burns, quenchless and
immortal, the flame of her love for her child ! A true
mother knows that heaven itself would be for her
unthinkable, if her child were left outside the gates.

There is a familiar story of such a mother — it might
be told of many mothers — who lay dying. Her eyes
had lost their power of seeing, her ears their faculty
for hearing. The voice of the minister while he prayed
at her bedside, the sound of her name from her
husband's lips, sent no vibration to the brain, drowsed
with the stupor of fast coming death. But while those
who stood round her bed waited, in the hush of grief,
for the last fluttering breath from the dying lips,
suddenly from the next room there arose the voice
of a weeping child. And the mother heard ! It was
as though her soul turned back on the dim ways of
death at the call of her child's voice.

Let us suppose such a mother in heaven ! Her feet

The Logic of the Infinitesimal 153

tread the streets of gold ; the chant of the angels fills
her ears ; her eyes see the face of God ; she is clad in
the fine linen, clean and white, the garment of the
saints. And, suddenly, she hears, in that darkness
which lies outside the gates of heaven, the sound of
her child's voice, lamenting ; the voice of her firstborn
son, of the daughter on whose cheek she grudged the
wind to blow too roughly. What at such a moment,
and at the sound of such a call, would be love's
impulse — love even in the imperfect form in which
it dwells in the human heart ? It would be to leave
street of gold and chant of saint, and to go with out
stretched hands and hastening feet into that outer
darkness, in search of her lost and lamenting child.

Who is it has planted deep in an imperfect human
soul a love capable of an impulse so tender ? This is
God's gift. And has He nothing in His own nature
which corresponds to it, and explains it ; nothing
which on the scale of infinity moves the Infinite
Himself ?

The Incarnation, the descent of the eternal Son
of God into suffering human life is, in fact, but
the expression, in historic terms, and on a scale in
harmony with God's nature, of a love in kind like that
which a good mother knows. And such love, taking
such a shape, is, on the witness of our own nature,
most credible. Nay, we have but to assume — what
not to admit is blasphemy — that God possesses, and
possesses in the measure of His being, what He has

154 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

given us, and the Incarnation is something more than
credible. It is inevitable !

If it had not taken place we might have accused
God of having set at the gate of life for most of us,
shrined in a human heart, and making tender a hnman
voice, a love deeper and stronger, loftier in scale, and
more tender in quality, than that which keeps watch
at the gates of eternity. It is to say that He has
given, to some of our race at least, capacities for the
self-sacrifice in which love expresses itself which out
range anything found in His own nature.

But this principle of the necessary ratio betwixt the
infinitesimal and the Infinite can be applied to Chris
tian ethics, as well as to Christian history. Changed
into the terms of ethics it suggests this strange ques
tion : Does God expect a goodness in us that does not
exist in Himself? Does He keep His own laws?
Does He act in the circles of eternity, and on the
scale of His infinite attributes, upon those moral
principles which, in the tiny curve of our own brief
lives, He has made imperative on us ?

To doubt that is to say that God expects us to be
morally better than He is Himself. God's laws of
moral conduct are not caprices. They are revelations.
They are the reflex of His own character, a declaration
to us of the principles on which He Himself acts.
This is what makes these laws, what in poetic language
they are sometimes called, ' the music of the universe.'
TLoy make audible the deep, eternal harmonies which

The Logic of the Infinitesimal 155

run through all the chambers of the universe, and all
the ages of eternity. But if we realize that God must,
on the scale of His nature and attributes, and through
out His whole universe, act on the moral principles
He has enjoined on us, instantly all the great messages
of the gospel, and all the great human hopes built on
that gospel, take a new and imperative credibility.

The great law of pity, for example, is by God's
enactment, and by Christ's teaching, made binding on
the human conscience. It is mandatory ; it is eternal.
To translate it into conduct is for us the supreme
obligation.

It is God's law for human society. The strong is
linked to the weak, the rich to the poor, the instructed
to the ignorant, by a tie woven of imperishable obliga
tion. The strong must help the weak ; the rich holds
his wealth under obligations of service to the poor ; the
instructed must make his knowledge the servant of the
ignorant. This great law, as yet only half understood,
is some day to solve all the social problems of the world;
it is to bring in the new heaven and the new earth for
which the race waits and suffers. All human gifts —
strength, knowledge, money — turned into selfish posses
sions and kept back from the help of those who lack
these things, become the guilt of the possessor. This
is the law, as God teaches us, from man to man.

Does God, then, Himself act on some law less noble
and lofty ? Does He demand in these terms a higher
morality from us than that He practises Himself?

156 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Such a question has in it a note of blasphemy. George
Macdonald uses as a motto for one of his tales a rugged
verse inscribed on an old gravestone in a Scottish
churchyard —

Here, lie I, Martin Elginbrodde ;
Hae mercy o' my soul, Lord God;
Aa I wad do, were I Lord God,
And ye were Martin Elginbrodde.

And in those rough rhymes lies enshrined a true if
daring conception, a conception which is the very key
to Christian theology.

In that great parable of pity, the story of the Good
Samaritan, Christ strikes the deep, eternal keynote of
human duty. lie draws the figure of the pitying
Samaritan, stooping over the stripped and wounded
wretch lying in the dust. He says to us all : ' Go and
do thou likewise.' Want cries to us; its broken
accents are the eternal and peremptory voice of law.
We ourselves, Christ warns us, smitten with a need so
sore, are to play the part of the good Samaritan to
those about us who suffer yet worse needs. Is it think
able, then, that God reserves for Himself, sitting far
above the heavens amongst ten thousand worlds, the
part of the Levite, or of the priest !

Is it too daring a thing to say that this link of
sacred duty which binds us in offices of help to each
other must run up to the crown of the universe ; that
it must be imperative on God Himself? We cannot
but say it. Nay ! not to say it is to impeach God.

The Logic of the Infinitesimal 157

What makes this very law of duty sacred, tender, of
imperishable and universal authority ? It is the fact
that it is the reflection of something eternal; something
in God's own nature. And if this be so, what a new
certainty and scale of credibility the whole gospel of
divine pity and help, on which all human hope is
built, instantly gains !

Forgiveness from man to man, again, is one of the
most absolute forms of duty. Who refuses to forgive
his brother, Christ teaches us, makes impossible God's
forgiveness to himself; and here is revealed a law
which runs through all time and all worlds. But in
the tiny curve of this human obligation to forgive, how
much is included ? Peter raised this very problem in
his question to Christ : ' How oft shall my brother sin
against me and I forgive him ? Till seven times ? '
' I say unto you,' was Christ's answer, ' not till seven
times, but till seventy times seven.' This, of course,
does not mean that the human obligation of forgiveness
extends to four hundred and ninety times, and ceases
on the four hundred and ninety-first offence. It simply
means that human love keeps no count ; it knows in
the great act of forgiveness no arithmetic.

Is it credible that God's love can be narrower than
He requires human love to be ? If this is the law
which God imposes from man to man, on what law
does He Himself act? Will He who expects us to
forgive till seventy times seven stop short of that
great height, and forgive, say, only till seven times ?

158 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

That is to say that He expects from us a loftier
morality than He practises Himself; that, in a word,
the infinitesimal must, in moral terms, outrange the
Infinite. And what inversion of reason can be more
shocking 1

BOOK IV
IN LITERATURE

CHAPTER I
The Logic of an Hypothesis

' I will not believe that it is given to man to have thoughts
higher and nobler than the real truth of things.'— Sia OLIVER
LODGE.

EHIKD every negative stands, uttered or silent,
some positive. Who denies that two plus two
equals four must be held to affirm that it
equals five, or three, or some other number. Now
unbelief, like every other creed, is best judged by its
affirmatives. We are too much concerned with what
it denies. We do not draw out in clear terms the
affirmatives which stand behind these denials. Some
day a book will be written on what may be called the
affirmatives of unbelief, and it will be a very amazing
bit of literature. For when the denials of unbelief are
translated into positive terms it will be seen they
require for their acceptance and digestion a much more
amazing exercise of faith than the largest propositions
of belief itself.

To enable this to be even faintly seen it is worth
while to accept for a moment the hypothesis that

M

1 62 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Christianity can at last be regarded as disproved. Un
belief, let us suppose, has won a final victory all along
the line, and Christianity, by general consent, is dis
missed absolutely from the faith of men. On this
hypothesis where do we all stand ?

Now, if Christ be banished out of history as a
detected impostor, His mark on history remains, and
has to be accounted for. Christ and the creed which
bears His name are, on any theory as to their origin,
the greatest facts in history. 'The simple record
of three short years of Christ's active life/ says
Lecky the historian, 'has done more to regenerate
and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of
philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.'1
This ' impostor ' somehow has far more profoundly
affected the human race than all the other great figures
of history put together ; and to account for the actual
world about us without Him is the most perplexing
task to which the human intellect was ever called upon
to address itself.

The confession of John Stuart Mill is noteworthy.
' It is of no use to say that Christ, as exhibited in the
Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not how
much of what is admirable has been superadded by
the tradition of His followers. Who among His
disciples, or among their proselytes, was capable of
inventing the sayings described as those of Jesus, or of
imagining the life and character revealed in the
1 History of Morality, vol. ii. p. 83,

The Logic of an Hypothesis 163

Gospels ? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee, still
less the early Christian writers.' 1

The theory that the whole Bible is a mere collection
of legends, that it represents the inventions of rogues or
the dreams of fools, is held with easy assurance by
some simple people. But on any theory as to the truth
or falsehood of the Bible, its historic force, its results in
civilization, remain unaffected. It is still the most
wonderful and influential form of literature the human
race knows.

If we accept the hypothesis that there is no reliable
history behind it, that there are Psalms but no Psalmist,
laws but no law-giver, prophecies but no prophet,
evangelists but no evangel, the wonder of the Bible is
not lessened. It is almost infinitely increased. Fact
or fraud, history or dream, the book exists. It has
done a certain work in the world. It may be tried as
the Iliad is tried, or the historical writings of
Thucydides or of Tacitus — by purely literary tests.
And when we have agreed that David, or Christ, or
Paul never existed, that the events recorded in the
Bible did not actually happen, yet some explanation
must be given of the book.

How does it come to pass that the most splendid
literature the race knows has blossomed, not on the
Btem of Greek intellect, or of Koman genius, not in the
brains of scholars, or philosophers, or poets, but
beneath the narrow brows of a cluster of Jewish
» Essays on Nature, p, 253,

1 64 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

peasants and fishermen ? For that the literature of the
Bible, considered simply as literature, does utterly
outrange all other products of the human brain cannot
be doubted. The Iliad and the Psalms may be taken,
roughly, as contemporaneous forms of literature; but
it is impossible to compare for a moment the God of
•whom the Hebrew Psalms sing with the lying, quarrel
ling, lustful deities of the Iliad. Pope has condensed
the moral character of these deities into two terrible
lines —

Gods changeful, partial, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, and lust.

Who can imagine the 23rd Psalm set singing
amid the clash of weapons which makes up tho
Iliad ?

If we compare Isaiah with Plato, or, say, Juvenal
with St. John, the contrast in merely literary values
is nothing less than startling. They belong to different
worlds. The pure, profound, and infinitely tender
teachings of what, on the theory of unbelief, is a
deluded Jewish peasant, such as John, compared with
the literature of Imperial Eome — the Eome or the
Greece of his time — are like the song of a lark carol
ling in the sunlit depths of the sky, compared with
the foul imagination and obscene wit of a Caliban
fallen drunk.

But the mere contrast in spirit and genius betwixt
the Bible, as a form of literature, and all other human
writings, is, perhaps, the least wonderful fact in the

The Logic of an Hypothesis 165

case. Mark Twain summed up the disputes as to the
authorship of the Iliad by saying the critics had proved
it was not written by Homer, but ' by another person
of the same name!' That, of course, is a jest. The
theory of the multiform authorship of the Iliad was
practically slain by the reflection that it is easier to
believe in one Homer than in a dozen. But what shall
we say of the theory which explains the Iliad without
any Homer at all ?

There are keen disputes as to whether Shakespeare
wrote the plays which bear his name. But some one
with Shakespeare's genius, whatever name he bore,
certainly lived. The works which actually exist prove
this. Suppose it were discovered beyond doubt that
Shakespeare never existed; his plays are forgeries;
the grave at Stratford-on-Avon is empty. Still Hamlet
and Macbeth, the Midsummer Night's Dream and The
Tempest exist. It takes a Shakespeare to invent a
Shakespeare. A man who, not having Shakespeare's
brain, yet borrowed his name and wrote his plays,
would be a more astonishing phenomenon than Shake
speare himself. And it takes a Christ to invent a
Christ. To ask us to believe that some nameless and
forgotten impostor invented the character and story of
Jesus Christ, preached the Sermon on the Mount for
Him, imagined all His parables, fcrged His ethics,
conceived in His name the parable of the Prodigal
Son and of the Good Samaritan, and yet was him
self throughout the whole process a conscious and

1 66 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

conscienceless impostor — this is the wildest flight of
mere unreason.

And the fraud of this nameless cheat, we must
believe, has created the Christian religion. It has
built cathedrals, inspired martyrs, made saints, sent out
missionaries, reshaped civilization, created a myriad
godly lives and uncounted happy deaths. What a
stupendous genius such an impostor must have
been !

In what period did he live ? What was his name,
his birth, his training, his motives, his reward ? He
was surely a much more astonishing being than Christ
Himself ! The New Testament, with no Christ and no
Paul behind it, is a much more perplexing book than
even on the Christian theory it claims to be, and is
infinitely less credible.

It is a mere form of lunacy to declare that behind
the fifteenth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, the four
teenth of St. John, and the Sermon on the Mount there
is the soul of a rogue, the brain of some sly and lyin<*
Greek, the temper of some narrow and pharisaical Jew.
If falsehood can assume the office, wear the aspect, and
talk with the accents of self-evident truth in this
fashion, all the foundations of knowledge are unsettled.

Some truths are self-evident, some facts prove
themselves ; and no truth is surer, and no fact more
absolute than the truth and the fact that behind the
literature of Christianity, however we quarrel about its
dates or the exact names of its writers, there is a

The Logic of an Hypothesis 167

spiritual genius unparalleled elsewhere in human
literature.

Now, it satisfies science, when called upon to ex
plain a rose, with its vivid tints and rich perfume, to
be told that there is a living root to the flower. But
the theory which requires us to believe that the rose
never had a root, or that it blossomed on the stem,
say, of a thistle, can only be regarded as a jest. The
rose itself, in the only logic science knows, proves the
rose-seed. All botany is nonsense if that be not true.

We may dismiss, then, the crude scepticism which
declares the Bible to be a forgery, which asks us to
believe that the book which in every syllable enforces
truth, is itself a lie ; that the scheme of ethics which
scourges roguery with whips of utmost penalty, is itself
an invention of rogues. That form of infidelity, at least,
is dead, killed of mere intellectual contempt. The sane
human reason rejects it in advance. But there is a
more plausible form of unbelief which rejects the Bible,
as an illusion— an innocent illusion — with a sort of
tender and admiring regret. The great book is no
doubt beautiful, but, alas ! it is only a tangle of human
dreams, and it is as unsubstantial as a dream. It is
made up of the visions of nameless and long-dead poets,
the dreams of mystics and enthusiasts.

Christ is one of these dreams. The redeeming love
which sought us, suffered for us, died for us, is another
of these dreams. There is no such love anywhere in
the universe. God as a Father, watching from the

1 68 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

crown of His heavens with unforgetting tenderness over
His children, is but another dream, beautiful, no doubt,
but, alas! air-drawn and unsubstantial. There is no
fatherhood amongst the stars, or beyond them. Heaven
is a dream which delights children. It soothes the
imagination of the dying, and serves as a useful opiate
for grief. But no golden and eternal reality corre
sponds to it. The notion that we have spiritual natures,
and belong to a spiritual order, which death cannot
touch, and which has heritage with God Himself, is
yet another dream.

The compassionate fancy might wish these dreams
were true, but it is idle to build life on illusions. In
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, the hag-ridden, haunted
slayer of the albatross comes home at last. He sees
the hills, the lights of his native town, and he trembles
lest it should be only an idle vision that cheats his
senses. Is it all a dream ? then how bitter the wakin^

o

will be !

Is this the hill, is this the kirk,
Is this my ain countree?

Oh, let me be awake, my God,
Or let me sleep alway.

And any one who has drunk in the splendid
imaginations of the Bible, who believes in God's love,
in Christ's redemption, in immortality, in final victory
over sin, in a character lifted by God's grace to a divine
purity, in the eternal city of the saints, with its streets
of gold and gates of pearl— if told that these are nothing

The Logic of an Hypothesis 169

but idle dreams, might well ask never to be awakened
from them !

But who wants to live in a fool's paradise ? Let
us know the truth at any cost. If religion is woven
of illusions, if it is a kingdom of unrealities, what
honest mind will not renounce it ?

But when this hypothesis which turns the Bible
into a book of dreams has been accepted, there remains
the question : Where did these dreams come from ? We
have somehow, it seems, contrived to build in our
imagination a better God than really exists ! We have
dreamed of Him doing nobler things than He actually
has done, or could do. He is a God who cannot reach
the scale of our imagination, who is not so big, so rich
in faculty, so lofty in purpose and action as our dreams
picture Him. How did He come into existence ?

We have been able to dream of a love divine and
eternal, which stoops from the crown of the heavens to
save God's wandering children, and saves them by
suffering for them. And the very dream" of such a
love, in its reflex effects on us is, by the test of actual
facts, the noblest force that has ever touched human
character. But God, alas ! is smaller than our dreams.
We have endowed Him, it turns out, with a loftiness
and a tenderness of love of which He is, as a matter
of fact, incapable. This is surely the most amazing
paradox yet invented! No miracle recorded in the
Bible requires so much faith for its acceptance.

Is it a dishonour to God that, being great, He

1 70 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

stoops to us ? Does it make Him less ? Having made
us so that we long for Him with the strongest passion
human nature knows, is it a reproach to Him that
He gives Himself to us ? Would it be more to His
glory if He mocked us ? It is this very wedlock of
the wisdom that planned the heavens, the measureless
power that guides the stars, with the tenderness that
stoops to the whispered prayer of a child, that counts
the tears of the widow, that hears the sigh of the
prodigal, which makes the inconceivable greatness of
God. It completes the mighty curve of His attributes.
And is it credible that we can conceive this amazing
greatness, and God not be capable of it ?

' Like as a father pitieth his children.' So runs the
ancient Psalm. And such pity ought to exist. It
makes God Himself more divine. Pity sitting crowned
beyond the stars, pity linked to infinite power and
making that power its servant— if this be true, the
universe shines with a new glory, and God Himself
is more god-like. If we could be God, and choose
what kind of God we would be, it would be this I Have
we, then, imagined a nobler God than actually exists,
and has our fancy framed a grander universe than He
has been able to build ?

And the New Testament reading gives scale and
definiteness to the pity of the Old Testament. ' God
so loved the world,' runs the great message, 'that He
gave His only begotten Son. . . .' Here, in brief, is
a revelation that opens a new moral kingdom to us, a

The Logic of an Hypothesis 17 1

kingdom of unimaginable tenderness and grace. And
we are asked to believe that it is the mere creation of
our broken fancy ; that outside that kingdom the actual
God sits, a Being too small to fill its horizons, too petty
to sit upon its throne, unworthy so much as to cross its
threshold. And can human dreams outrange God's
facts in this fashion? This is not credible. The
message of redemption is a light breaking in on us
from great realms above us. It is a revelation which
proves itself. ' The Incarnation/ says Illingworth, ' is
its own evidence. It is here; and how did it come
here, and why has it remained here except by being

true ? '

The Bible represents God as saying, ' My thoughts
are not as your thoughts, nor My ways as your ways.
For as the heavens are high above the earth, so are My
thoughts above your thoughts and My ways than your
ways.' And this ought to be true! The realities of
God ought to be nobler than the dreams of man. It
would be the perplexity and the despair of reason if
this were not so. But, on the theory of unbelief, it is
man who is able to say to God, 'My thoughts are
higher than your thoughts'! We have pitched our
conceptions too high. Our poor dreams are fairer than
God's realities !

Yet, according to unbelief itself, this incredible
inversion of ratio betwixt God and ourselves— an
inversion which makes man's thoughts too high for
the scale of God's acts or God's character— obtains in

1 72 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

only one realm. It is visibly false throughout all the
mighty chambers of the physical universe. If we con
sider the scale, the transcendent forces, the measureless
greatness of the visible universe, God's thoughts in
that region outrun ours as the planet exceeds the atom.
Our utmost science is only beginning to spell out the
first letters in the great alphabet of God's material
works. We are catching a broken vision of the
illimitable horizon of the physical universe. The
vastn6ss of that universe, its mysterious heights and
depths, the forces that beat in it, from the fires of the
far-off sun to the mysterious energies throbbing in an
atom of radium, all are great beyond our dreams.

But, on the theory of unbelief, when we enter the
still loftier realm of the moral universe a strange thing
happens. God shrinks in stature ; man expands ! In
all the great forces of that realm, in love, in goodness,
in pity, God's facts are smaller and poorer than man's
dreams ! In the physical realm our highest science
cannot comprehend God's lowest works. What do we
really know of space, of matter, of force, or of life ?
But in the spiritual order unbelief asks us to believe
that a hundred nameless and forgotten impostors have
been able to imagine more than God has ever been
able to perform. They have dreamed of a loveliness
to which God Himself has never attained !

Where did we get this power of imagining some
thing greater than there is in our Creator ? Was there
ever such a paradox offered to the sane intellect ? ID

The Logic of an Hypothesis 173

is askin^ us to believe that the ocean itself has a
narrower curve than one of the drops buried in its
depths.

Even the most obstinate of sceptics, it may be
claimed with confidence, might well wish religion to
be true. For the illusion is lofty. If it were true, God
would be greater than He is, man happier, goodness
easier, the outlook for the race infinitely nobler. And
it may be asked in an astonished whisper, How does
it come to pass that a lie is nobler, loftier, and more
beneficent than the truth ?

Christianity, it is to be observed, is the one moral
theory which could be translated into universal practice
without destroying the world. If Plato's republic sud
denly became the pattern of universal society, slavery
would re-emerge ; the brothel would take its place
everywhere as a decorous piece of social machinery. If
the Koran miraculously and suddenly shaped the world
to its pattern, a religion of cruelty would take the place
of a religion of love. One-half of the human race, the
feminine half, would sink in the scale of being to the
level of the dogs. Woman, on its teaching, is denied
a soul here and a heaven hereafter.

But suppose that by some strange chance, and in
the course of a single night, the Bible stole into the
imagination of the whole world! It took possession
of every human life; it reshaped to its own pattern
the ideals, the wills, the tempers, the politics, the
literature, the appetites of mankind; and to-morrow

174 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

morning the whole planet awoke with Christianity
supreme everywhere.

Whether the Bible be a reality or a falsehood, it is
clear that certain things would immediately follow.
There would not be a liar's tongue, a rogue's brain,
a thief s palm left in the world ! Henri Quatre's dream
of a French millennium was ' a fowl in every peasant's
pot'; but the sudden and universal supremacy of
the Christian religion in the world would put peace
at every man's fireside and love in every human
heart. There would be no scolding wives, no faith
less husbands, no wrecked homes, no broken-hearted
mothers, no fallen women. Hunger and strife and
hate would vanish. If every man acted on the Golden
Eule, the immemorial quarrel betwixt the ' haves ' and
the 'have-nots' would end at a breath. All social
hates would die. The want of the world would dis
appear. Greed and selfishness would perish. The
strife betwixt nations would come to an end. Milton's
dream of a time when

No war or battle's sound
Was heard the world around

would come true, and 'the idle spear and shield*
would be ' high up-hung ' for ever.

No one can doubt that if Christianity became the
master force in every human life this is what would
follow. But let us take the other hypothesis. Let us
suppose that the conviction of the absolute untruth of
the Bible suddenly became universal. It was a detected

The Logic of an Hypothesis 175

and universally abandoned fraud. Its conception of
God was known to be a drearn, its ethics ceased to be
binding ; its conception of the eternal world, of an im
mortal life hanging on these few broken, hurrying
moments of time, of measureless penalties for wrong
doing, and infinite rewards for righteousness — all was
as idle as a child's fairy tale. Heaven was known to
be a dream. God, it was finally discovered, had nothing
to do with us.

Now, it is certain that such a triumph of scepticism
would call into instant existence a world in which no
sceptic would desire to live. Worship would perish,
and all that goes with worship. Prayer would be
universally abandoned; it would die on the lips of
little children ; it would be heard no more in the hush
of great sorrows, in the worship of great congregations.
The Churches, with all their beneficent offices for the
young, for the sick, for the outcast, with their great
service to society, their witness for righteousness, their
restraining power against vice, would crumble into
ruins. The last hymn would have been sung, the last
missionary recalled, the last sermon preached, the last
leaf of the Bible dismissed to a museum or to a dust-heap.

Under such conditions no one can doubt that
human society would suffer an instant and limitless
injury. Life would lose its horizon. For grief there
would be no consolation, for morality no binding
authority, for undeserved wrong no eternal compensa
tions. All the disruptive forces of society would gain

176 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

a new and strange energy. Would morality itself
survive, with no throne of judgement waiting for us
beyond the grave, no infinite equity inexorably binding
punishment to wrong-doing, and measureless rewards to
right-doing ?

The ethical trend of the new materialistic theory
of man, as a matter of fact, is already visible. In
Ilaeckel's latest work, Tlie Wonders of Life, for
example, he praises suicide. It is a form of social
' redemption.' A man, he declares, has ' an unques
tionable right to put an end to his sufferings by death.'1
Nay, we have a moral right to kill, not only ourselves,
but other people. We shoot or poison a faithful dog
who has grown too old for comfortable life, and why
should we not, on the same principles, shoot or poison
our friends when they grow bald-headed and lose their
teeth ? ' We have a right, if not a duty,' says Haeckel,
' under such conditions to put an end to the sufferings
of our fellow men.' To dismiss the too obstinate invalid
by a dose of morphia or cyanide of potassium, Haeckel
assures us, * would very often be a blessing both to the
invalids and their families.' He calculates 2 that in
Europe alone there are two million lunatics, many of
them incurable, to say nothing of lepers, people with
cancer, &c. ; and these are kept in life at a huge
public and private cost. How much of this pain and
expense could be spared, Haeckel reflects, if people
could only make up their minds to administer to
1 Wonders of Life, p. 116, « Ibid., p. 123,

The Logic of an Hypothesis 177

every incurable a sufficient dose of morphia. He
admires the ancient Spartan habit of strangling new
born children if they were weakly, and urges its general
adoption.1

A moral world reflecting these ideas would be a
somewhat alarming place of residence. But Haeckel
is quite logical. If men are mere ferments of chemical
forces, with no more of free will, and of the responsi
bility born of free will, than, say, the effervescence of
an acid and soda compound, what room is left for pity
or morality ? What obligations of help or forbearance
does one bottle of chemicals on a shelf in a laboratory
owe to the bottle beside it ? And, does any one think
that the morality which sanctions the strangling of
sickly infants would not produce fruits in other realms
of human life as alarming ?

Now, let the whole creed thus offered to us be con
sidered. At every point it is an affront to reason. It
asks us to believe that life is a transitory by-product of
the blind play of unconscious forces ; so that which
knows is born of that which is unknowing ; the moral
blossoms on the stem of the non-moral; pity emerges
from the clash of forces that are pitiless. This wonder
ful universe is a mechanical process with no discover
able purpose, an eternal gyration of mechanical energies
with no trace of moral order in it. But a moral order
does exist, with its roots in our conscience, and its
verifications in our consciousness, and therefore it is
1 Wonders of Life, p, 124,

8

178 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

part of the system of things. Yet we are asked to
believe it represents no principle in that system.

This creed is a direct menace to morals. According
to its teaching, all moral qualities — courage, goodness,
pity, self-sacrifice — are nothing better than labels on
the jars of a chemist's shop. A mother is a mere com
bination of carbon, phosphorus, lime, and water, with
a few salts thrown in. The whole interval betwixt
greed and love, betwixt the lust that prompts to sin
and the conscience that rebukes sin, can be measured in
the terms of chemistry. A few grains, more or less,
say, of mercury, make the whole difference betwixt
the saint and the harlot. Why, then, should we admire
the saint or blame the harlot ?

Some rare souls, it is true, even after all this had
been proved, might say, like Huxley or Clifford, 'If
there be no God, let us live as if one existed. If
goodness is not mandatory, if it may even be disastrous,
yet for its own sake we will follow it.' But for the
common mass of mankind, in the rush and competition
of life, with all the clamour of appetite, the evil fires
of passion and greed, in them and about them, what
chance would there be of virtue surviving when sepa
rated absolutely from the authority of a divine Law-giver,
and from the great motives which belong to the tender
ness of Christ's redemption, the holiness of God's
character, the awfulness of eternity ?

The world, as a matter of fact, did once try the
experiment of living without belief in God or a future

The Logic of an Hypothesis 179

life. And what the result of that dreadful experiment
was let the morality, the literature, the social corruption
of the later Eoman Empire tell !

Let not the logic of all this be misread. If a lie
is advantageous and beautiful, in no matter what degree ;
if the truth is, no matter how, disastrous in its conse
quences — yet in God's name let us reject the lie and
hold fast the truth ! But how does it come to pass that
a lie is infinitely more beneficent than truth itself?
Is it credible that truth would kill morality, and
a lie reinforce it ? Yet, if we accept the hypothesis
of unbelief, this is what happens. Christianity is a
delusion, but it creates in human society and character
the grandest realities. It is a delusion, but while it
lasts it is the safety of the world. If it were universally
found out, it would destroy the world.

This is a paradox too monstrous for the sane reason.
It is like inviting us to believe that the sun is the
secret cause of darkness, and the only way of sufficiently
illuminating the world is to extinguish it !

' I will not believe,' says Sir Oliver Lodge, ' that it
is given to man to think out a clear and consistent
system higher and nobler than the real truth. Our
highest thoughts are likely to be nearest to reality,'

CHAPTER II
The Logic of Human Speech

' Language alone illumes tho vast, monotonously coloured chart
of the universe.' — RICHTER.

' Language ! By this wo build pyramids, fight battles, ordain
and administer laws, shape and teach religion, are knit man to man,
cultivate each other and ourselves.' — Jcmy STERLING.

' Language, as well as the faculty of speech, ia the immediate
gift of God.' — NOAH WEBSTEK.

' "\A7'7'-E are a11 agnostics now/ according to tho

\A/ newspapers, and the doctrine that any

knowledge of God the Infinite, by man

the finite, is philosophically impossible, is certainly

welcomed by many as a sort of gospel. They label

themselves 'agnostics' with an air of gladness. The

word serves, at least, as an excuse for dismissing God

from the realm of their affairs, and for treating Him as

non-existent in His own universe.

It is not that this particular book of the Bible, or
that particular message from God, is regarded as histori
cally disproved. Multitudes have as a working creed
the theory that any relations of knowledge betwixt
God and man are unthinkable. It is a metaphysical
incredibility that the Infinite can be translated into

The Logic of Human Speech 181

terms of knowledge for the finite. And in this vague
assertion, which wears a delightful look of philosophical
finality, thousands discover a discharge from all obliga
tions to give God a place in their scheme of life. They
take as their motto Watson's words, though not in
Watson's spirit :

Above the cloud, beneath the sod,
The Unknown God, the Unknown God.

The history of agnosticism is instructive. Huxley
invented the word ; Herbert Spencer supplied it with
logic. But agnosticism does not begin with either
Huxley or Spencer.

The recognition of the fact that some things lie for
us beyond the possibility of complete knowledge is as
old as the history of thought. The limits of the human
mind are undeniable; every system of psychology
recognizes them, though they may differ as to the area
of things unknowable, or the conditions which forbid
them to be known. 'The last step of reason,' says
Pascal, ' is to know there is an infinitude of things that
surpass it.' And some clever wits have been eager
to use this inevitable limitation of human knowledge
to rule God out of human life.

Hume, for example, was an agnostic before the title
was invented ; and if Locke's psychology was not the
root of his scepticism, it was certainly the weapon lie
used for its defence. Locke taught that the mind is
a mirror; it simply reflects the impressions brought
to it by the senses; and ideas are only remembered

1 82 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

impressions. Hume turned Locke's theory to uses of
which its author never dreamed. We ourselves, he
contended, are nothing more than a stream of such
remembered impressions ; our consciousness is only a
succession of images which we mistake for ourselves.
We can never get beyond or behind this shadow-dance
of impressions to reality, to Space and Time and God.
So the supreme realities must be for ever beyond the
reach of knowledge.

Kant had a profounder psychology than Locke, but
it is inconsistent with itself, and that inconsistency
gives point to Haeckel's sneering question, 'Which
Kant do you mean ? '

Kant held all knowledge to be limited to phe
nomena, the office of the understanding being to collate
the perceptions of the senses, and that of the reason to
regulate the methods of the understanding. ' All our
knowledge/ says Kant, ' begins with sense, proceeds to
understanding, and ends with reason.' And the reason
knows only three ultimate conceptions — the Soul, the
Universe, and God. Yet these three sublime and ulti
mate ideas are for the human soul illusions, though
they are illusions from which we cannot escape. They
are illusions, not because they do not represent objec
tive facts, but because we are incapable of comprehend
ing them. The soul is, even to itself, an illusion. The
universe is an illusion. God is an illusion. The
philosopher who believed in ' the categorical imperative '
of the moral law, yet, by his theory of the nature of

The Logic of Human Speech 183

knowledge, was compelled to treat the soul, the universe,
and God as lying beyond knowledge.

Hamilton held that the mind can only know the
limited and the conditioned. 'The Infinite and the
Absolute/ he said, ' are only the names of counter
imbecilities of the human mind.' l They are ' imbecili
ties ' of the mind, because they represent the effort to
comprehend what transcends the sweep of its faculties.
•We must believe,' he said, 'in the infinity of God;
but, being finite, we can never grasp the Infinite.'
Hansel, in the same way, taught that ' the Infinite is
merely a name for the absence of those conditions
under which thought is possible ' ; but he held that
' it is a duty enjoined by reason itself to believe in that
which reason cannot grasp/

It is true that behind that tangle of metaphysical
subtleties Kant and Hamilton and Hansel alike find
room for God ; only He stands in the category of faith,
not of knowledge. He is the Unknowable, and the
Absolute.

This, of course, is a harmless form of agnosticism
for the unlearned man. The refinements of meta
physics, the subtleties of much-meditating philosophers,
are for him nothing more than a web of unmeaning
phrases. Hill, however, accepted one half of the
Kantian philosophy— that which declared God to be
for ever outside the realm of human knowledge— but
rejected the other half, which taught that belief in God
1 Discussions on Philosophy, p. 21.

1 84 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

was the highest reason. His philosophy has, somehow,
stained through to the average mind, and it hides God
finally from human thought or human concern behind
the label of the Unknowable. ' We are obliged to
suppose/ Herbert Spencer concedes, that there is a First
Cause. It is a postulate of the sane reason. We are
driven, he goes on to say, by ' an inexorable logic/ to
the conclusion that He— or It— 'must be infinite and
independent.' Spencer affirms, indeed, that ' the omni
presence of Something which passes comprehension ' is
' that belief which the most unsparing criticism of all
religions leaves unquestionable or makes even clearer.' l
Spencer thus does not banish religion from the system
of things. Eeligion, he says, 'expresses some eternal
fact/ Eeligious ideas of one kind or other are almost,
if not quite, 'universal'; but, according to Herbert
Spencer, ' the ultimate religious truth of the highest
possible certainty, is that the Power which the universe
manifests to us is utterly inscrutable/ a

' Ignorance/ according to the monkish adage, 'is the
mother of devotion'; and Herbert Spencer's theory,
that the religion which 'nothing can banish from the
system of things ' is founded upon the glorious truth—
a truth of ' the highest possible certainty '—that we can
never by any possibility know anything about God,
is but that same much-abused aphorism disguised in
philosophical language.

i Preface to First Principles, p. 45.
1 Ibid., p. 46,

The Logic of Human Speech 185

If any terms of knowledge betwixt man and God
are impossible, it is difficult to see how religion ex
presses any 'eternal fact' What we do not know,
what must for ever remain to us unknown, will by
plain sense, and by men who are in a hurry, be dis
missed as a factor from human affairs ; and this is
what agnosticism as a working creed really means. It
explains, it is to be feared, the content — not to say
the gladness — with which multitudes label themselves
agnostics.

It is, of course, an obvious criticism that agnosti
cism is a creed which refutes itself. No one can quite
succeed in holding it consistently and logically.
Herbert Spencer himself said we are obliged, by the
very constitution of our minds, to suppose that a First
Cause exists ; that He — or It — is infinite, independent,
and omnipresent. These, surely, are large affirma
tions ; they represent a very wide, area of knowledge.
How can that be ' unknowable,' of which so much is
known ? How much, too, must be known about the
Unknowable before we reach the certainty that no
revelation to us is, or ever can be, possible ?

The finite, it is true, cannot comprehend the Infinite.
But agnosticism really undertakes to explore the capa
cities and limits of the Infinite ; and on the authority
of that exploration to declare that there is something
the Infinite never can do. It can never reveal itself
to the intelligence it has created. Agnosticism thus,
on the authority of its intimate knowledge of God,

1 86 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

announces in stentorian tones that nothing whatever
about God can ever be known !

The self-contradictions of agnosticism, however, are
its most harmless feature; the deadly poison hidden
in it lies elsewhere. It lies in the fact that while
announcing that any knowledge of God is impossible,
it undertakes to give enough information about God
to make Him hateful. For agnosticism carries with
it some implications which make it as a religious
theory more hateful by measureless degrees than
atheism itself.

Atheism says the throne of the universe is empty;
we are orphans. Agnosticism says Something sits on
the throne, Something infinite and omnipresent. This
infinite Something is our creator, but It sits with
veiled face, shrouded in darkness. He hides Himself
— or Itself — from His— or Its — own offspring. What
a riddle — the jest of a cruel God — would be the eye
without the element of light which corresponds to it !
And on the theory of agnosticism the human soul itself
is exactly such a jest. There is planted in it an in
extinguishable longing for God — a longing which
He who gave it to the soul meant to be for ever
unsatisfied.

Imagine a human father who sits before his blind
child, looking on the pitiful face, the sightless eyeballs
He could give vision to the sealed eyes, but he will
not ! Nay, imagine a father who deliberately took the
power of vision from the eyes, the faculty of speech

The Logic of Human Speech 187

from the lips, the sense of hearing from the ears of his
child, and thus shut up his child's soul, meant for light
and speech and knowledge, in darkness and silence!
There never was such a human father ! If he existed
he would be a devil.

And agnosticism says, in effect, that God is such
a monster. He planted in us these indestructible
yearnings after Himself, and then for ever He dooms
them to be mocked. There are things He hates, and for
doing which He will punish us, but He will not tell us
what these things are. There are things He loves, and
which will bring to us infinite rewards ; but He denies
to us all knowledge of their character. ' Eeligion,' says
Herbert Spencer, ' expresses some eternal fact/ but on
the agnostic theory, behind all the worship of all races
through all the ages, behind the hymns and prayers of
all the saints, and the smoke of all sacrifices, there is
nothing but a lie.

Now, whatever else is credible, this theory is
incredible. The mere inconsistency of agnosticism
destroys it. While declaring that any knowledge of
God is impossible, it yet assumes to know enough
about God's resources to affirm what He cannot do,
and enough about God's character to know that He is
hateful.

But to show that agnosticism as a philosophical
theory is absurd and incredible does not help us
much. Is there any proof lying close at hand, and
clear to even the unphilosophical intelligence, which

1 88 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

makes communication betwixt God and ourselves
credible ?

As an answer to that question, let the significance
of that unique faculty of language, which is the special
characteristic of man — the faculty which perhaps more
than any other separates him from the beast—be con
sidered. In one sense, his own personality is for each
man a sealed kingdom. Each soul sits within its own
limits, solitary, alone, a thing apart. The separateness,
the inviolable loneliness of human personality, is one
of its most striking and significant characteristics.
The impenetrability of matter is its faint analogue.
Souls are more separate than are planets. Each human
consciousness is a sealed world, dwelling apart from
any other consciousness.

But it is not inaccessible. The boundaries that
part one human spirit from another can be crossed.
The separate spirit of man can touch, can become in
telligible to, other spirits. We take the faculty of
speech as a thing of course ; but Professor Max Miiller
calls it ' our Eubicon, on the hither side of which men
alone are found.' It is the boundary between the
domain of the human race and that of the brutes.

There have been idle speculations as to the evolution
of speech betwixt the lower animals, born of the mere
expressiveness of sounds; but the common sense of
mankind rejects the theory that speech — the expression
of thought — could develop itself, even in millions of
years, out of inarticulate sounds which merely express

The Logic of Human Speech 189

feelings of animal pain and appetite. 'All serious
thinkers/ says Professor Max Miiller, l 'agree with
Bunsen that the specific difference between the human
animal and all other animals consists in language.'
/ Man is man/ says Humboldt, ' only through speech ;
but, in order to invent it, he must already be man.'

And what is the significance of speech ? It is the
act of the human spirit unveiling itself to a fellow
spirit. Man can take a cluster of air- waves, beating in
more or less intense vibrations on the stretched mem
brane of the ear, and make it a vehicle of all the
heights of thought, the depths and tenderness of
emotion, the linked processes of reason. And the
wonder does not merely lie in spoken language. "With
the help of a few visible symbols the human mind can
record itself so that it will be intelligible to other
minds thousands of years afterwards. A few dim
characters are found on an ancient stone upon which
desert sands have blown for forty centuries, and through
them the thought of some long-dead conqueror or law
giver becomes audible afresh to us.

And it is nothing less than marvellous in what
multiplying degree, and by what various devices, the
power of human spirits to touch, and reveal themselves
to, other human spirits, is exercised. A few electric
vibrations sent through thousands of miles of dead
wire, hung in the sea depths, will transmit thought,

1 Presidential address before the Anthropological section of the
British Association, 1889,

190 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

purpose, intelligence to a whole nation. A few danc
ing gleams of light flung on to the blackness of the
night-sky will convey a message to a besieged city
across hostile armies.

Now, the logic of human speech is clear. Why
should that which is so abundantly and variously
possible to man be impossible to God ? If spirit can
talk to spirit — the spirit of man to the soul of man —
in spite of separating walls of flesh, across wide gulfs
of space and thousands of years of time, how can it be
impossible for the Supreme Spirit of the universe, the
Father of all spirits, to speak to His own offspring?
That man is capable of receiving, that he longs to
receive, such messages is certain. And can we think
that God is incapable of sending such messages, or is
unwilling to send them ? ' Shall we possess these
things/ says Sir Oliver Lodge, ' and God not possess
them ? ' If man be not dumb to his fellow men, why
should we think God must be dumb to us all ? If we
can speak to each other, is it credible that the God
who endowed us with that faculty has nothing in
Himself which corresponds to it ?

To know the infinite God, if by such knowledge is
meant to comprehend all that lies in the mysterious
infinitude of His nature, must be, for a finite spirit, for
ever impossible. In that large and absolute sense we
do not know each other. The mother does not know
the infant she holds to her breast. Our largest science,
in that sense of the word, knows nothing — not the

The Logic of Human Speech 191

flower in the crannied wall, nor the blowing wind that
shakes its leaves, nor the light which gives it colour.

But there is knowledge which is short of perfect
comprehension. No human spirit comprehends all that
lies within the consciousness of any other human spirit.
Yet knowledge does exist from man to man ; speech
exists. Mind touches mind and interprets itself to
mind. And agnosticism, since in the last analysis it
means the denial to God of the power which He has
Himself given to His creature man, is a theory which
the sane reason instinctively and absolutely rejects.
No sophistry can make it credible. The mystery of
speech in us makes credible the mystery of speech from
God to us.

BOOK V
IN SPIRITUAL LIFE

CHAPTER I
The Logic of Answered Prayers

Speak to Him, then, for He hears, and spirit with spirit can

meet,

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.

TENNYSON.

NO one thinks of prayer, or of answers to
prayer, as a branch of Christian evidences.
And yet, deep hidden in that sweetest of
all human experiences, the communion betwixt the
personal soul and God, there is an unrecognized logic
which constitutes one of the strongest attestations of
the Christian faith reason can desire.

The force of the argument from design, as we have
shown elsewhere, lies in the thrill of personal recogni
tion betwixt mind and mind. It is the discovery of
intelligent purpose controlling force in the physical
order ;°and intelligent purpose is the attribute of mind.
So the argument from design, when analysed, resolves
itself into the answer of the Mind of the infinite
Creator to the finite mind of the creature through the
medium of material things. Kepler's cry-already

0 2

196 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

quoted— expresses it— '0 God, I am thinking Thy
thoughts after Thee ! '

But can we recognize and decipher the rnind of
God only when set before us in such dim hieroglyphics
as the physical universe knows ? If we were a dumb
race we could only speak to each other by signs and
gestures. If we were a race both blind and dumb we
could only communicate through actual touch of fingers.
And is the spiritual world such a realm of broken
faculties and clouded senses ? We belong to the
spiritual order; and it cannot be we are on such
terms with God, who is a Spirit, and is the Father
of our spirits, that He can only reveal His mind to
us through the rude cipher of material things. There
must be some direct and personal discovery of Himself
to us which the Infinite Mind is capable of making
and we are capable of receiving. And the proof of
that lies— too faintly recognized, alas ! — in the separate,
countless, accumulated, and perpetual answers to prayer,
which form the most sacred part of the experience of
all devout souls.

Prayer fills so large a space in human experience,
it is so vitally and essentially the very atmosphere of
religion, that, unless we assume that our experience in
this, the highest realm, is a mere dance of illusions,
there must be some great reality in prayer ; some deep
philosophy behind it; some wide and perpetual use
which justifies its existence. 'Prayer,' says Carlyle,
' is, and remains always, the native and deepest impulse

The Logic of Answered Prayers 197

of the soul of man.' It is incredible that such an
impulse, the purest and most characteristic our nature
knows, can be nothing better than a trick ; a thing as
idle and empty of meaning as the rustle of leaves in
a wind-shaken tree. Has the God who made us — and
He is Himself, we must believe, a God of truth — set
in the very centre of our lives a longing, an impulse —
nay, a passion — which is only a lie? And, by some
bewildering paradox, has He made that lie the root of
all noblest things ?

' No prayer,' says Carlyle, ' no religion, or at least
only a dumb and lamed one.' And it is certain that
prayer has in religion the office of oxygen in the
atmosphere. It is the first condition of life. No
human soul would venture to undertake a religious
life, to expect the ardours, the emotions, the inspira
tions of religion, on the condition that prayer must be
dismissed from it.

On the Christian theory prayer has behind it a
profound philosophy, and the facts correspond to the
philosophy. Its reason lies in the roots of our nature.
We are persons, and God is a person ; and however
wide the interval of mere scale, the analogies of human
personality best interpret to us what God is. And
nothing is more certain than that self-communication
is the essential impulse of personality. This is the
human fact; and on the Christian belief that God
has made us in His likeness, the desire of self-com
munication must be in Him. Personality in us is the

198 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

faint shadow of personality in God ; and the Christian
theory is that in us the need, in God the desire, of
self-communication are fundamental.

This, it may be said, is only a guess, but the facts
correspond to the guess. Prayer runs through all
history, exists in all religions, is as natural as
breathing. 'Blessings,' cried Sancho Fanza, 'on the
man who invented sleep ! ' And prayer is as little
a human invention as is sleep. On its human side
prayer is the cry for communion with God ; on its
divine side it is the response to that cry. It repre
sents a relationship which finds its reason in the
very make of our own nature, and in the essential
attributes of God.

But it is commonly said that prayer is a purely
subjective exercise, and it is questioned whether the
human mind in the act of prayer actually touches the
divine Mind. Are there, in a word, any such things
as answers to prayer; the response of the divine love
to human need ; the touch in the darkness, the whisper
in the silence, the answer of the heavenly Father to
the cry of His children ?

Every one remembers the story of how Marconi
set up on the American coast the first installation for
wireless telegraphy ; while on a point on the coast of
England stood the corresponding installation. Betwixt
the two rolled the desolate waters of the Atlantic, a
grey space swept with many winds. Could an electrical
vibration carry a message from one mind to another

The Logic of Answered Prayers 199

across that vast interval ? And Marconi has told us
how he watched and listened to the faint and vagrant
rapping of the instrument. A single letter, flung from
the station on the English coast across thousands of
leagues of sea, was to be caught and registered on the
American coast.

There came a moment when Marconi heard, or
thought he heard, the triple tick which was the agreed
signal! Mind and mind across so many thousand
miles of space had touched. But no second signal
came, or has ever come since. The interval was too
wide, the instruments too crude, or the electrical
waves too vagrant ; and, naturally enough, the world
has since grown sceptical as to that alleged first signal.
But suppose the signal had been repeated con
tinuously; that it could be repeated to-day at will.
Suppose that a thousand Marconis had set up in
stallations along every shore washed by the sea, and
the messages passed from land to land intelligibly
and incessantly. In spite of sea-space and blowing
winds, souls talked to souls ; questions were asked
and answered, messages were daily sent and received.
The fact of such a conquest of the separating power
of space, such a manifestation of the power of human
minds to speak to each other without any material
link of contact, would be scientifically established.
No one would doubt it, though they could not under
stand it, any more than we doubt, though we cannot
understand, the telephone.

200 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

And if this illustration be transferred to the
spiritual world, and translated into spiritual terms,
it almost exactly describes the phenomena of prayer.
In true, believing prayer, as millions of godly men
and women know by the witness of their consciousness,
the soul of man and the very being of God touch.
There is appeal and response, petition and answer, the
cry of need and the swift coming of help ; the upward
impulse of adoration from the human side, the clearest
gift of blessing from the divine side.

The facts can only be rejected on grounds which
would pronounce all human testimony unreliable, and
bring to wreck some of the most confident generaliza
tions of science. The sea-cable which in 1865 was
being laid betwixt America and England snapped at
one stage of the process, and the broken end sank in
the depths of the Atlantic. The broken cable lay
there for nearly a year, but the shore end at Valentia
was still connected with the recording instrument.
While the cable was being laid, intelligible messages
betwixt ship and shore ran incessantly. When the
cable was broken these, of course, ceased; but their
place was taken by a stream of meaningless and idle
vibrations, born of the vagrant earth-currents that
poured themselves into the broken wire and kept the
far-off needle rapping. No intelligence governed them,
or could be read in them ; they were simply the play
of mindless force.

Meanwhile, ships were patiently groping in the

The Logic of Answered Prayers 201

dark sea depths for the cable. Suddenly along the
lost and broken wire there came to Valentia a mes
sage ! The restless needle spelt out a word — two
words. Here was thought coming along the wire.
Some one was speaking. It was only a mutilated
sentence that was spelt out, the words ' Got it ' — a
verb without a subject. But this was sufficient. It
proved that there was mind at the other end of the
wire. Only two syllables whispered out of the mind
less sea depths, from unseen lips or fingers, across
hundreds of miles ; yet nobody doubted the cable was
found and was being used. When intelligence speaks
to intelligence through dark depths of sunless waters,
the recognition is instant ! A syllable is enough.

Men tell us there is only a broken wire betwixt
us and God. What we think are answers to prayer,
we are assured, are nothing but vagrant echoes out of
empty space; the wandering currents of our own
thoughts somehow coming back to us, reverberated
out of eternity. But to a sceptic who doubted whether
there was a mind at the other end of the broken
sea-cable the two syllables, suddenly and mysteriously
reporting themselves, would have been a sufficient
answer. For quick, beyond all realization, is mind
to recognize mind. And exactly this is what, by the
testimony of myriads of human souls in all ages and
under all skies, takes place in prayer. There are real
answers, clear, sure, repeated ; the response of a personal
Mind to our mind.

202 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Answers to prayer! Who shall classify them,
remember them, or measure them? They are made
up of deliverances, comforts, pardons, illuminations ;
strange endowments of strength to the weak, of courage
to the fearful, and of guidance to the perplexed. The
lives of all good mothers are rich in them. Little
children know them. Strong men live by them. They
have put an atmosphere of triumph round innumerable
death-beds. They have dried how many tears, and
comforted how many sorrows! They form part of
the daily experience of multitudes. The days come
and go to their music.

What explanation is possible for phenomena like
these ? In that silence which lies about the feet of
God, when we wait in the hush and awe of prayer,
shall men tell us that no voice has spoken to us ; no
hand has touched us, no love has blessed us ? Are all
these rich and deep experiences nothing better than
a trick of the senses, a lie of the spiritual faculties ?
If that is so, the finest qualities of human nature — its
sweetest tempers, its noblest flowers, the fruit of pure
lives and of happy deaths — are but a form of mental
disorder. For these things are born of prayer ; and if
answers to prayer are mere illusions which cheat us, they
are nothing but a variety of mental disease. But what
' disease ' is that which creates the strength, the clean-
blooded gladness, the exultant energies which health
itself can only envy ? What delusion is this on whose
stem blossom such flowers as reality itself does not bear ?

The Logic of Answered Prayers 203

Let it be remembered who are the witnesses in this
matter. They are a great multitude of every people
and nation and tongue ; of every century and of every
clime. ' This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him
and delivered him out of all his troubles.' And in
every age, under every sky, uncounted voices repeat
that testimony— saints and martyrs, soldiers and states
men, great scholars and simple-hearted women. Nay,
in the whole succession of the devout, the saintly, the
pure, throughout all the Christian centuries, there is
not one but would affirm that prayer finds its answer.
Here, then, is a great, unvarying, and multiform tradi
tion. It represents the most overwhelming verification
the human intellect can know.

Of course, it may be replied that in each instance
the supposed answer to prayer is a purely subjective
experience ; valid, perhaps, for the person to whom it
comes, but for no one else. But each witness testifies
to definite phenomena in the realm of human con
sciousness ; and each separate witness must be multi
plied by all the generations that have gone by, and all
the saints that live to-day.

Science, to go back to our illustration, would accept
absolutely half a dozen letters coming mysteriously out
of the unsunned sea depths as a proof that Some one
was speaking at the other end of the wire. For the
blind earth-currents do not clothe themselves in intel
ligible speech, any more than the vagrant winds could
compose Paradise Lost, or the vibrations of the light

204 The Unrealized Logic of Religion
paint the Madonna of Kaphael. If the spiritual
experience of all the saints is to be rejected as an
illusion, what of certain knowledge in any realm is left
to the human intellect ?

Prayer is like the sea-cable. Some one certainly
is speaking, is speaking every moment to uncounted
human souls, from the other end. The material uni
verse, with which our senses deal, is only a veil-
behind it is the great kingdom of the spiritual universe'
to which we belong, and into which in a few swift
moments more we must pass. That is the kingdom
God's open presence. Prayer is the electric wire
mining into that kingdom. We speak to God through
it; we hear His voice in answer. That He exists
that He stands in personal and living relations with
as, is surely proved afresh, and throughout every
moment of time, by the answered prayers of aU the
uncounted multitudes of praying hearts, since the
drama of human history began.

CHAPTER II
The Logic of Design in the Spiritual World

' The essence of mind is design and purpose. There are some
who deny that there is any design or purpose in the universe at
all ; but how can that be maintained when humanity itself
possesses these attributes ?' — SIB OLIVER LODGE.

NO one denies the logical force of design in the
material world. Paley's argument from the
watch to the watchmaker is still final for
the healthy intellect. It is a form of reason which a
child can understand. The house proves the builder.
Intelligence in us recognizes that intelligence has
planned floor and roof, walls and windows; and this
logic does not stop short with the house roof. It runs
to the roof of the heavens. It is as wide as the very
sweep of the universe. No one can pretend to believe
that behind St. Paul's Cathedral there was not the
brain of a great architect, determining every line and
curve and detail of the great structure. And by the
same sure proof we know that behind the mighty
architecture of the star-crowded heavens there must
be some contriving Mind, If we cannot trust the

206 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

logic which links design everywhere to a designing
intelligence, reason itself has no authority.

What is the exact logic of design ? It is the dis
covery of conscious and intelligent purpose, that chooses
its end and works towards it by fit and intelligent
contrivance. And mind in the observer recognizes
mind in the worker. If there is, for example, in the
physical universe a discovery of purpose, of purpose
using force as its servant and instrument, this is, and
must be, the revelation of an Intelligence in or behind
Nature to intelligence in us. So we have the thrill of
conscious mind answering the touch of mind.

Now, the presence of design in the material
universe is constant and undeniable. Science itself,
and scientists in every school, proclaim this. Newton
declared that the existence of an intelligent Creator
was a necessary inference from the study of celestial
mechanics, and that the study of God was therefore an
essential part of natural philosophy. 'Science,' says
Lord Kelvin, ' positively affirms a creating and direct
ing Power; she compels us to accept this as an article
of belief.' l Sir G. G. Stokes a finds the phenomena of
vision stained through and through with evidence of
design, and he says, ' Design is altogether unmeaning
without a designing mind.'

To think in terms of mathematics is the highest
sign of intelligence, and, lo ! the whole physical universe
is built on terms of mathematics, and represents
1 Nineteenth Century, June, 1903, * Burnct Lectures, p. 327.

Logic of Design in the Spiritual World 207

mathematical harmonies. A crystal is but a bit of con
crete geometry. The law of numbers runs through the
colours in the rainbow, the intervals of music, the pistils
of flowers. 'Mathematicians centuries before Christ,'
says Hill,1 'discussed the problem of what is called
extreme and mean ratio ; and they invented a process
for dividing the line in this ratio for use in the business
of inscribing a regular pentagon in a circle. But
modern science discovers that the mathematical idea of
extreme and mean ratio runs through the material
universe. It is expressed in the angles at which the
leaves of plants diverge from the stem ; it is found in
the revolutions of the planets about the sun. And,'
says Hill, ' how can we compare the reasonings of
Euclid upon extreme and mean ratio with the arrange
ment of leaves about the stem, and the revolutions of
planets round the sun, and not feel that these pheno
mena of creation express Euclid's idea as exactly as
diagrams or Arabic digits could do, and that this idea
was, in some form, present in the creation ? '

But the fact is that the very table of the elements
is the chart of a keyboard of vibrations which, like the
intervals in music, have a numerical basis. The dis
tribution of the stars themselves represent numerical
harmonies. Colour and music are built on numbers,
the law of gravitation works in ratios which can be
expressed in terms of numbers. What is all this but to
say that matter in every form is built on laws of mind ?
1 Natural Foundations of Theology, p. 369.

208 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Clerk-Maxwell, in his lecture on ' Molecules,' says :
' They continue this day as they were created, perfect
in number and measure and weight, and from the
ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may
learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measure
ment, truth in statement, and justice in action, which
we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours
because they are essential constituents of the image of
Him who in the beginning created, not only the heaven
and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and
earth consist.' *

'If we consider the whole universe,' says Darwin,
'the mind refuses to look at it as the outcome of
chance.' He says of the eye, that, as a living optical
instrument, 'it is as superior to one of glass as the
works of the Creator are to those of man.' a He after
wards regretted having used such a theological term as
' the Creator ' ; but he never varied his accent in speak
ing of the inimitable contrivances of the human eye ;
and these contrivances surely imply a Contriver.

Kant says : ' It is absurd for a man even to conceive
the idea that some day a Newton will arise who can
explain the origin of a single blade of grass by natural
laws uncontrolled by design.' Haeckel himself, while
he denies design in the inorganic world, confesses it
exists in organic life. ' We do undeniably perceive,'
he says, ' a purpose in the structure and in the life of
an organism. The plant and animal seem to be

1 Bradford, 1873, • Origin of Species, 5th edit., p. 226.

Logic of Design in the Spiritual World 209

controlled by a definite design in the combination of
their several parts, just as clearly as we sep in the
machines which man invents and constructs/ l

But the witness of individual scientists is un
necessary. The great presupposition on which science
itself stands is that the visible universe is intelligible,
or why should it be studied ? And what is intelligible
must be the work of intelligence. It can be known, or
why should we strive to know it ? Mind must be in a
thing before mind can know it. We can ifead type
when set up in the pages of a book and in the shape of
a poem or a story. But who could read type flung by
chance on the floor, or piled in clusters by an anthropoid
ape?

But somehow it is assumed, and conceded, on
almost every side, that design only exists in the
physical realm. It is to be discovered in the eye,
but not in the mind to which the eye brings its
reports. It is to be found in the skeleton of a bird's
wing, in the imitative and protective colours of an
insect, but not in the structure of the human soul.
That is dismissed as outside science. There is no
answer of mind to mind in what may be called the
native realm of the intelligence. The spiritual universe
is silent. Or if any one declares that for him it has
many voices, he is dismissed as 'unscientific,' or as
being tricked by the echoes of his own voice !

And yet if there be a creative Mind behind the
1 EiddU of the Universe, p. 93.

P

2io The Unrealized Logic of Religion

things created, it must surely be most clearly visible in
that part of creation which is highest and closest in
structure and faculty to the Creator. The mind in us
ought to discover traces of the creative Mind in its own
structure, and in the laws and forces of that spiritual
realm to which God Himself belongs, and in which, on
the theory of religion, He has given us a place. If the
watch reveals and proves the watchmaker, the soul
ought to reveal and prove God. And religion as a
phenomenon, if it be true and comes from God, ought
to show that perfect adaptation of means to ends which
is the signature of the Creator on all His works. Let
us see, briefly, if this is the case.

There are certainly all the marks of design in the
moral sense, that chord of our nature which responds
with deep, involuntary, far-heard vibrations to the
challenge of right and wrong. Kant, in a familiar
quotation, declares that two things move his deepest
wonder — the starry heavens and the moral sense in
man. And moral sense is the point of separation
betwixt man and the orders beneath him. Man's dis
tinction lies, not merely in the faculty of speech, nor
in any special range and height of intellectual power.
It lies exactly at this point, the vision of right and
wrong ; the capacity for moral character. That faculty
exists nowhere else in organized life as known to us.

A scientist so detached, and so little under the direct
influence of the Christian faith, as Professor W. K.
Clifford, yet says : ' The idea of an external conscious

Logic of Design in the Spiritual World 211

being is unavoidably suggested, as it seems to me, by
the categorical imperative of the moral sense; and,
moreover, in a way quite independent, by the aspect of
nature, which seems to answer our questionings with
an intelligence akin to our own.' l

The witness of our own highest faculty, in a word,
and of our own deepest consciousness, assures us of the
existence of a Mind which is concerned for moral ends,
and has made us for those ends. And this Mind
has strung our nature with sensibilities which vibrate
to the touch and challenge of moral forces. Just as
the eye reveals to us the world of form and colour,
or the ear makes possible for us the sense of sound,
and turns the vibrations of the physical atmosphere
into a channel of thought and sense, so the moral
sense in us links us to that world of moral qualities
and forces in which God Himself dwells.

And mind in us can read, written on the moral
sense within us, the purposes of the creative Mind. We
can discover the end for which He made us. There is
no logic more convincing than that of the correspon
dence betwixt an organ and the element in which it
works. The structure of the eye presupposes the
existence of light — and proves it. And the structure
of the conscience is as definite as that of the eye ; and
the evidence of its sensibilities is as convincing.

But let us take, as another illustration, the story of
Jesus Christ considered as a schome of philosophy ; a
4 Lectures and Essays, p. 388,

212 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

force addressed to a given end; a machinery which
undertakes to produce certain results. As a physio
logist studies a bird's wing in relation to the medium
in which it has to work and the end it has to accom
plish, or as an oculist judges the eye, as an optical
instrument, in relation to light, so let the story of
Christ be considered. The question of its truth or false
hood may be laid aside ; let it be looked at simply as
a cause intended to produce a specific effect. Has it a
true philosophy? Does it show intelligent purpose,
choosing a clear end, and working towards that end by
the fittest means ? This, surely, is a question of which
our reason is a competent judge.

And it is certain that if religion is a delusion, born
in the dreaming brain of some forgotten poet, or shaped
by the ravings of some unknown fanatic, it still, as a
matter of fact, has somehow caught the art, and learned
to use the accents of the divinest wisdom.

What is the end it seeks ? It is, reduced to its
elements, to bring the human will into rhythm, into
deep, eternal, rejoicing harmony, with the real or
supposed will of God. The end, then, is noble ; none
loftier can be so much as imagined. What are the
means used to reach this end ; what forces are called
into existence? There is, on any true reading of
human nature, only one force which the will obeys
inevitably, gladly, unweariedly. It is the master force
of love !

All other motives — ambition, greed, desire of power,

Logic of Design in the Spiritual World 213

hunger for knowledge or for fame — are partial and
temporary ; they lack the note of universality. Love,
provided it can only be kindled, is the master-force
of the human soul. And, as a question of fact, it
is the exact force to which religion addresses itself.
Somehow, the rogues or fools, the dreamers or
fanatics, who, on the theory of unbelief, invented
the Christian story, read the deep philosophy of the
human soul aright. They undertook to rule conduct
by love !

But how must love be created ? It cannot be
bribed, or bought, or compelled. Glory of heaven or
terror of hell is vain to awaken love. It has its own
unalterable conditions and laws.

Love, for one thing, can only be awakened by a
person. We cannot love in the deep, personal, supreme
sense a theology, a book, a code of laws, a system of
philosophy, or any abstraction, no matter how beautiful.
Love must be personal. And what is perfectly true,
and yet most strange, is that mere loveliness in a person
does not always and necessarily awaken love in the
beholder. It may affect us only as a statue does, or a
painting. If it is remote it is ineffective. It is love
that creates love. At love's touch and breath and
whisper, love awakens !

And yet not every form of love will create love.
Love itself may, indeed, as human experience some
times sadly proves, be only an irritant. But granted
the love of some one stronger, nobler, better, greater

214 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

than ourselves, some one on whom we are depen
dent, and suppose that love utters itself in love's
highest mood, the mood of self-sacrifice, it speaks to
us in accents of suffering, and of suffering endured
for us. Then we have, tried by the highest philo
sophy human nature knows, the force best fitted to
awaken love.

And exactly this is what Christianity brings to us.
It is love redeemed from weakness by being the love of
the infinite Lord and Maker of the universe. It has
conscience as its servant and advocate, since it is love
for the wrongdoer by the One who has been wronged.
And it is love which utters itself in suffering. Its
symbol is the cross and the sepulchre.

If a committee of philosophers — not to say arch
angels — were appointed to devise a plan which should
attain what is admitted to be the essential end of
religion, what more fitting means could be imagined ?
And on the theory that religion is not true, an in
credible thing follows. Here is a group of dreamers,
or fools, or impostors, who lived nobody knows where,
and died nobody knows when, who yet somehow read
the secrets of the human soul more profoundly than all
the philosophers have ever done ! And they invented a
scheme which, whether fact or fiction, does fit into the
human soul as the key fits into the lock !

If there be design — an intelligent purpose which
seeks a great end ; which works towards it by the
fittest means and with the mightiest known forces —

Logic of Design in the Spiritual World 215

recognizable by the human intelligence anywhere, it is
here. It actually does what all the logic of all the
philosophers, or the legal codes of all the statesmen
known to history could not do. It changes human
nature I It has not only built cathedrals, inspired
a great literature, changed the course of history,
and reshaped civilization. It creates saints ! It has
done this throughout whole centuries, and does it still
under every sky, and with men of every race and of
every stage of civilization. If the men and women who
have surrendered themselves to the forces of religion,
and are the witnesses of its power, were collected
together, they would be recognized as constituting the
very flower of the human race.

Shall we find design — the answer of mind to mind
— in the tissues of the eye, in the membranes of the
ear, in the skeleton of a bird's wing, in the nerve
system of a frog, in the spinnaret of a spider ? and shall
we not find it in the great and magnificent structure of
religion ? Not to admit the evidence of some great
contriving Mind there is the last disloyalty to reason.
It is to accept the curve and refuse to complete the
circle. It is to say that the law which is true in
one realm is false in another, and this is to unwrite all
science.

God's signature, in those characters we recognize
everywhere else, is assuredly written deep and inefface-
ably on the very fabric of religion. Its sign is found in
its profound correspondence with our own moral sense,

216 The Unrealised Logic of Religion

in its fitness to achieve the ends for which it exists.
To say that these supply no proof of the divine origin
of religion is to accept the major and minor premisses of
a syllogism, but to reject the conclusion. It is an
absurd example, in a word, of arrested logic.

BOOK VI
IN COMMON LIFE

CHAPTER I
The Logic of Unproved Negatives

' The natural world, then, and natural government of it, being
such an incomprehensible scheme, so incomprehensible that a
man must, really in the literal sense, know nothing at all who ia
not sensible of his ignorance in it — this immediately suggests and
strongly shows the credibility, that the moral world and govern
ment of it may be so too.' — BUTLER'S Analogy.

1 Ignorance and doubt afford scope for probation in all senses
as really as intuitive conviction or certainty.' — Ibid.

IN the secular realm— in the logic of everyday life,
of the shop, of the street and the exchange — we
all recognize the profound difference in practical
force betwixt positive and negative evidence. In the
scales of life they are not of equivalent weight. They
affect action in totally diverse ways. For Eobinson
Crusoe on his desert island, a positive fact of the tiniest
size — a single naked footprint in the sand — was enough
to fill him with alarm. It needed only that solitary
print, a patch of disturbed sand, to show that some one
had passed along what he thought was the empty shore.
But to prove the opposite, that the whole island hid no
hostile figure, quite another sort and scale of evidence
was necessary. To be sure that he was alone the

220 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

castaway must know every foot of the island, every
hiding-place, cave and valley, hill slope and creeping
stream, and depths of shadowy wood. A universal
negative, as every logician knows, can be built on
nothing less than universal knowledge.

Bishop Butler, through his great book — more
praised, alas ! than read to-day — argues that probability
is the law of life. Perfect knowledge is impossible to
us. "We must, in any realm, act on incomplete evidence.
Tried by the test of absolute metaphysical proof, we are
not certain that the world of form and colour and
sound — the world the hand touches, the feet press, the
eyes see— really exists. Wise men have doubted its
existence. They have written volumes to prove it has
no existence. But in daily life we learn to act on
evidence short of metaphysical certainty; and we
recognize that the force of incomplete proof varies by
measureless degree according to the side on which it
stands. Incomplete disproof is no release from the
obligation to act. It is consistent, indeed, with direct,
complete, and urgent necessity for action. Probabilities,
to go back to Butler's words, are of quite unequal value,
both in logic and morals. We admit this is true ; we
act on it where money is concerned, or health, or
safety.

There is a certain vague risk, a probability of low
order difficult to measure, that a man's house may take
fire and be burnt There are still greater probabilities
that no such calamity will happen, for not one house

The Logic of Unproved Negatives 221

in a. thousand actually takes fire. But the negative
probability in the scales of a wise man's brain does not
count. It does not cancel the obligation to act, and so
he insures his house. The miner does not know that
gold lies in the reef deep below the surface. There is
only a certain convergence of probabilities which points
in that direction. But on the strength of those pro
babilities he fights his way with steel and dynamite
down through two thousand feet of rock and clay.
He expends toil and time and wealth on evidence far
short of certainty ; evidence, indeed, only reaching a
moderate degree of probability, and discredited already,
in a hundred cases, by failure.

But in no realm of life do we wait for mathematical
certainty, and postpone action till it arrives. A shop
run, a ship sailed, a campaign fought, a science pursued
on that principle would be a jest. In life, we repeat,
duty and logic do not walk with equal steps. Duty
may be created by merely shadowy probabilities. It
leaps into existence long before a perfect syllogism is
reached.

Keligion, it is sometimes complained, is a kingdom
of half-truths ; of truths only half known, and often less
than half proved. We have not for its doctrines the
evidence we have for, say, mathematical propositions.
That is perfectly true. But the law of the practical
authority of incomplete proof runs into the great
realm of religion. There, as nowhere else, in regard
to its obligations and duties, only that impossible,

222 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

unattainable, unthinkable thing— a limitless negative-
is a discharge to the conscience. Short of that universal
and final disproof the conscience may be pledged,
and duty be peremptory. Incomplete proof is con
sistent with the highest measure of obligation; but
nothing less than universal disproof— a disproof that
leaves not one poor peeping doubt in existence— is a
release from duty.

And let it be noticed that through all the moods
of infidelity a final and universal disproof of religion
is never claimed. There are multitudes who ask°for
some more absolute, direct, and overwhelming evidence
of God's existence than anything yet offered to them ;
though there are thousands who know God exists
by a surer test than that by which they know the
sun shines or the earth stands. For the existence of
external things they have only the witness of their
physical senses; for facts of the spiritual order they
have the direct testimony of their spiritual conscious
ness. But what proof— far-stretching, measureless, and
final — is there in existence sufficient to sustain the
tremendous and universal negative, ' There is no God ' ?
What height and depth, what eternity and universality
of knowledge, must be assumed as a warrant for such
an assertion! Who is entitled to announce such a
negative ?

The mere sense of humour makes, or ought to make,
such a performance impossible. Here is a little creature
who was born yesterday and will die to-morrow. He

The Logic of Unproved Negatives 223

comes he knows not whence ; he is hastening he knows
not whither. He is hedged round with mysteries, im
prisoned in ignorance. He knows only one little patch
on the surface of only one little planet. He knows,
and that only dimly, a few of the mysterious laws
touching him and shaping his life. He cannot tell how
his own nails grow, or why his hands obey the impulse
of his thoughts, or whether, when to-morrow's sun rises,
he will be in existence. He cannot say of his own
knowledge whether there is not a man in the moon.
And shall he undertake to proclaim to the astonished
race that there is no infinite God in the immeasurable
universe !

John Foster's writings, it is to be feared, are for
gotten; but one overwhelming passage survives in
•which he proves that the tremendous negation on which
militant atheism stands is necessarily and confessedly
beyond proof.

The wonder turns on the great process, by which a man could
grow to the immense intelligence that can know there is no God.
What ages and what lights are requisite for this attainment ? This
intelligence involves the very attributes of Divinity, while a God is
denied. For unless this man is omnipresent, unless he is at this
moment in every place in the Universe, he cannot know but there
maybe in some place manifestations of a Deity by which even Aewould
be overpowered. If he does not absolutely know every agent in the
Universe, the one that he does not know may be God. If he is not
himself the chief agent in the Universe, and does not know what is
BO, that which is so may be God. If he is not in absolute possession
of all the propositions that constitute universal truth, the one which
he wants may be that there is a God. If he cannot with certainty
assign the cause of all that he perceives to exist, that cause may be

224 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

& God. If he does not know everything that has been done in the
immeasurable ages that are past, some things may have been done
by a God. Thus, unless he knows all things, that is, precludes
another Deity by being one himself, he cannot know that the Being
whose existence he rejects, does not exist.

To say that there is no God, in brief, is to assert
that all the chambers of the universe are empty, all
the kingdoms of space are silent; that in no world
amongst all the unnumbered hosts of the stars is to be
seen any print of God's foot, any touch of His hand.
How shall we reach the height of that great certainty ?
To be able to say ' there is no God, we must,' says
Chalmers, 'walk the whole expanse of infinity, and
ascertain, by observation, that trace of Him is to be
found nowhere; that through every known and un
trodden vastness in His illimitable universe there is no
sign of His presence.' Who shall undertake to speak
for all the unknown hosts of beings in other worlds, in
other ages, and assert that no one has ever heard the
whisper of God's voice, or found such signs of His
power as make doubt impossible ?

No one, in a word, can assure us that God does not
exist. And the mere unproved probability — the very
possibility— that He is, that He sits on the throne, that
we live under His laws, that we must give account to
Him of our actions, creates a degree of obligation which
is in itself a religion. It puts us on probation. It is
sufficient to morally test our characters, and, in testin^
our character, to fix our destiny. On any sane reading
of facts the possibility that God may exist is a fact

The Logic of Unproved Negatives 225

which has a right to colour our lives, even while the
argument for that existence is yet incomplete. While
doubt is possible, and certainty yet unattained, there is
still, to quote Chalmers, 'a path of irreligion and a
path of piety ' ; a moral temper which befits the proba
bility of God's existence, and a moral temper which is
an offence against it.

To disregard the will of God when we have found
He exists is wickedness; but to be careless of the
knowledge of God, to whom, if He does exist, we are
bound by measureless ties of gratitude, that, too, is
impiety. We need not open the Bible to learn our
obligations to God. The facts of the world about us —
a world adjusted to our happiness, that gives light to
the eyes, and soft air to the lungs, and beauty to every
sense ; a world adjusted with exquisite care, with com
plex and infinite correspondences to our existence —
are sufficient. To think of all these myriad adaptations,
these touches and signals of care, these gifts that come
in silence and go unacknowledged, and yet to care not
whether, anywhere in the space above us, or in the
unseen realms about us, there exists a Being who has
planned it all, and maintains it; this is wickedness.
No one doubts that to resist God after He is known is
impiety; but to be satisfied that He should remain
unknown is a baseness that aggravates impiety itself.

To the reason and to the conscience alike, in short,
there is no escape from the obligations of religion
except by the unattained and unattainable device of a

Q

226 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

universal negative. In this realm, duty, vast in scale
and peremptory in authority, finds standing-ground on
an unproved negativa

No one to-day, or no one who need be taken
seriously, will, as we have said, make himself re
sponsible for the confident and tremendous negative,
' There is no God.' But let us take a sister denial of
almost equal size, the assertion that historical Christi
anity — with its story of redeeming love, with the great
duties, and the measureless hopes born of that story —
is not true. It is a scheme disproved. Christ may at
last be dismissed from history and from human respect
as a myth, a dream, or an impostor. The literature of
Christianity is a forgery. Its ethics have no authority.
Its history is a mere procession of delusions. The
great hopes of which it whispers are idle dreams.

Now, many ingenious artists are busy at work
trying to exhaust Christianity of all solid contents, and
to whittle down its evidence to the vanishing-point.
But what range and energy of evidence is sufficient to
absolutely disprove Christianity ? The human intellect
certainly knows of no such evidence. No one even
pretends to know it or to produce it. The whole
civilized world about us is the creation of Christianity ;
its disappearance would leave the civilized order in
which we live without explanation. The most courage
ous performance of modern unbelief is the assertion
that Christianity is not proven; that it is definitely
and finally disproved no one seriously ventures to say.

The Logic of Unproved Negatives 227

And betwixt the two propositions : ' Christianity is
not, with mathematical certainty, proved to be true ' ;
and 'Christianity is finally, and with absolute logic,
proved to be untrue' — there is an interval almost
measureless !

If Christianity is indeed proved to be untrue, we
may dismiss it from our thoughts. But if that vast
negative is not yet reached, and reached with the cer
tainty of one of the propositions of Euclid — if, in brief,
there is only evidence enough to make Christianity
probably true, that bare probability creates a religion
— with the peremptory duties and the inevitable penal
ties of religion.

The logic that finally disproved Christianity must,
of course, in the very act of doing it, prove some
astonishing, not to say incredible, things. If, for ex
ample, Christianity is demonstrably untrue, then all
the saints are wrong, and all the rogues are right. The
truth is on the side, not of John, who laid his head on
the bosom of Jesus, but of Judas, who betrayed Him ;
of the soldiers, who mocked Him ; of Pilate, who
scourged and crucified Him. Paul, who preached Jesus
Christ and died for Him, was mistaken. Julian, the
apostate, who warred against ' the Galilean/ was right !
If Christianity is, indeed, proved to be a lie, then the
Bible — the flower of all our literature, the most won
derful book the eyes of man has ever read, the text
book of the only morals we know, the root and source
of all civilization — must be either the dreams of fools

228 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

or the forgery of rogues. How did fools come to dream
loftier wisdom than wise men can reach even in their
waking moments? By what art did rogues invent
the greatest force for righteousness history has ever
seen?

Tor Christianity is not a book, a creed, a history,
a theology, a system of ethics. It is a force reaching
through all history, and shaping the world, a force
without which the living world about us is left
without an explanation. The denial of its truth does
not merely leave the greatest event in history without
a cause ; it leaves it— which is a much greater affront
to science— with a cause which is in conflict with its
character !

The system which enjoins truth is itself a lie ; the
religion which demands righteousness was itself born
of a fraud. Behind the sweetest, purest, noblest things
human nature knows ; behind the hymns of worshipping
multitudes and the prayers of little children; behind
all saintly lives and all happy death-beds, there is
nothing but a vast and age-long imposture.

A flower without a root would be an offence to
science. But a flower which in every characteristic
and detail is in quarrel with its own root would
be an even more grievous scandal to both reason
and science. And if Christianity is untrue it is
exactly such a flower. It is in open quarrel with
its origin. It was born in falsehood, yet it enacts
truth. It had its cradle in some rogue's brain, but

The Logic of Unproved Negatives 229

in every syllable it is an energy that makes for
righteousness.

Where is the tremendous logic that proves a paradox
so confounding to the human intellect ? It does not
exist. No one, we repeat, affects to produce it. In
fidelity, so long at least as it pretends to talk in terms
of reason, does nothing more than deny the force
of this or that particular evidence for religion. It
nowhere makes itself responsible for its universal, abso
lute, and triumphant disproof. On the lowest reading
of the evidence for Christianity it is, at least, possibly
true.

For multitudes, indeed, of the sanest, noblest men
and women the world has ever known, or knows
to-day, the truth of Christianity is certain. It is
verified in every fibre of character, in every chamber
of experience, and throughout every waking moment.
But let the happy experience of these rejoicing
multitudes be laid aside. Let us be content with
saying that when the argument for Christianity has
been reduced to its lowest value, enough survives to
justify the assertion that Christianity is possibly true.
And that bare possibility challenges the conscience!
Nay, it binds the conscience !

If such a figure as Jesus Christ has come into
human life ; if such a relationship with God as that
to which Christianity calls us is possible; if it is
even faintly credible that its history is true ; that the
eternal Son of God has taken our flesh and so made

230 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Himself our kinsman; that He has carried our sins
and so become our Eedeemer; that such a destiny
beckons us, and such great heights of character are
possible to us — the mere possibility that these things
may be is a resistless moral appeal. It instantly
creates great duties.

"We have not seen with mortal eyes the holy city,
the new Jerusalem, descending from God out of heaven ;
but if it is even possible that such a kingdom of God
is being built up about us, and we may become its
citizens, ought the thought to leave us unstirred?
If these things are dreams, they are dreams we
ought to wish were true. But undeniably they are
more than dreams. For multitudes, it must be re
peated, they are certainties. Nothing the senses know,
not solid earth under our feet, nor radiant sunlight
over our heads, is more certain. But for even those
who label themselves sceptics these things are possi
bilities. And that is enough to bind the conscience.

To dismiss Christ from the realm of serious con
cern; to treat His story and His claims as not even
worth earnest curiosity before the great Disproval ia
finally reached ; this, surely, on any standard of ethics,
is an offence almost past forgiveness.

It is all a question of common sense; a question
of acting in the most sacred realm of life, in the region
where the highest obligations prevail, on the principles
on which we act in our daily business. We must run
no unnecessary risks. We must conduct our lives on

The Logic of Unproved Negatives 231

the principle that truths not yet fully proved are
sufficient to shape conduct ; are enough to make search
in the direction in which they point a peremptory
duty. And honest search will bring the soul under
the shining sky of that great promise, verified in
the spiritual consciousness of thousands : ' If any man
will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether
it be of God.'

Euskin, in a letter to his father, tells the story of
his religion: 'I resolved that I would believe in
Christ and take Him for my Master in whatever I
did ; that assuredly to disbelieve the Bible was quite
as difficult as to believe it ; that there were mysteries
either way ; and that the best mystery was that which
gave me Christ for a Master. And when I had done
this ... I felt a peace and spirit in me I had never
known before, at least to the same extent ; and every
thing has seemed to go right with me ever since, all
discouragement and difficulties vanishing, even in the
smallest things.'

CHAPTER U
Lofic off

:

- . -

F

-' - " •

-7

The LOCK of Half-knowfcdge 233

-- - :i:_ if ::' !_-:_:— :.".-. -• D» laws of conduct
H1jy t» stand in. alighi as unshadowed and intense
as the genoralizatiaQS of science. Sbbody doubts i^e

c a\.u

law of zrsvifcatioa, and 2 Iftmr an divine laws fir

- .-.:.- :.- :r: . J - '. : '.-- '- ' i - -""--' - ; -":

I"_ ^:._ _: -..*:•----. .-: . . f : ' ' i ~: ••- :--7 "--t -.— -'---
a ••""^•ii.iVaT ccnscifince. Wo. j s&onld not iie COIL-
acieace wifihin us, cbe fijculcy by which, she soul is so
be »mded across the mT^cerioTis seas :£ comiacc, be as

^ "

least as obvious and undeniable as she qrrivprfrTg needle
in the eomra^s-case ?

If there be an eternal world, on wk»e <2m Voviers
we sand, and into whc?se awfol realms we niosc in a
fe-r momencs jnm, why are iis gates mat; so dose ?
Whj do even those who come back from its myscery
bring with them sealed lips? 'Where wert then,
brother, those tihree days ? ' Tennyson puituiw Maty
: . , : ^ 1. j ._-: : .!:'_-•-:••--:?: •.-.:-.-: Way, in
bti^ aro we gjcani^ ia tibe kig^iflst walm of all^ less of
knowledge titan we possess in lower realms ?

The answer, of eoorse, is thakmnoMrf the worlds
ve toodk. and into wttdk onr actans otter, do we watt
Jl kBowfedgft, or u» foil knowledge poaaH» to us.
We move, to borrow Wordsworth's porase, ' in worlds
••% naltaadL' We see only im Icagjnencs. We work
with the unknown, or wiA lift fedf kBOwn» as our

Terr

234 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

forces of the intellect. We find certainty— the cer
tainty bora of full-orbed knowledge— nowhere, and
uncertainties everywhere. We must live and act in
all realms on nothing better than probabilities. Daily
life is full of examples of knowledge fading into
mystery ; of action based on the half seen or on the
half comprehended. If at each step we waited for a
knowledge exhausted of mystery— knowledge clear-cut
as a crystal, and as translucent— we should die of mere
inertia.

At the present instant ten thousand ships are toss
ing on the sea, their sole guide across its grey wastes
being that mystery we call the compass. All naviga
tion is built on the fact that a tiny, quivering rod of
steel, under certain conditions, will point north. We
do not in the least know why it does this. To the
test of the senses the needle in the compass-box is
exactly like any other bit of steel. But it is touched
by forces that come we know not whence, and work we
know not how. It has invisible relations with the
earth, the stars, and with strange currents of energy
thrilling through all space. That little shaken bit of
steel is the symbol of a mystery which baffles our
science. The forces which tremble in it are hidden
perhaps in the secret places of the earth, perhaps in the
far-oif heights of the stars — we cannot tell.

The needle, as a matter of fact, does not always
point north. The chart of the variations of the compass
is the signature, in some strange cipher we cannot

The Logic of Half-knowledge 235

read, of forces which move to the impulse of energies
beyond our guessing. Yet, in faith on the quivering
rod of steel, and the hidden forces which make it, in
spite of a thousand variations, point to one quarter of
the heavens, men risk every day uncounted wealth and
uncounted lives.

The world of science, too, though the fact is com
monly forgotten, is a realm where knowledge in the
absolute sense lies beyond our reach. It is a kingdom
of half-knowledge. What we know is a tiny circle of
light, itself broken by many shadows, and shut round
by a wide curve of encompassing darkness, born of
things we do not know. The ' laws ' of science are
merely convenient shorthand records of the observed
sequences of phenomena. The area of observation is
narrow, the forces hidden behind the sequence are
unguessed.

The largest and surest generalization of science is
that known as the uniformity of natural order. If
there is any proposition which can claim to be univer
sally true, a certainty beyond doubt, it is this. But
this truth of science, like every other, rests on ex
perience; and how can limited human experience
prove universal truth? 'The uniformity of nature,'
says Huxley, 'in a mathematical sense, cannot be
proved.' It is an assumption, a working hypothesis,
'the great working hypothesis of science,' but still
only a hypothesis, justified, no doubt, by a thousand
fruitful results, but essentially incapable of proof,

236 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

Yet the august fabric of science rests on that
hypothesis !

The law of gravitation is another of the ' certainties '
of physical science. It is a force that can be tested at
any point in space known to us, and at any moment of
time. But gravitation is only the name of a fact whose
cause lies beyond our knowledge. It explains all
the movements of the planets, but itself lies beyond
explanation. « The law of gravitation/ says Professor
Huxley, 'is a statement of the manner in which ex
perience shows that bodies which are free to move do,
in fact, move towards one another.' But it is only the
record of an observed phenomenon; the reason of
that phenomenon is an unpierced mystery. Herschel
has described gravitation as ' the exerted will of God/
and what better explanation can science offer ?

What is ether ? All the phenomena of light are
born of it. The latest guess of science is that it must
be the ultimate form of matter, the very stuff of which
the physical universe is constituted. And yet ether
lies beyond the grasp of our intelligence. It is, to use
Lord Salisbury's phrase, 'a half-discovered entity.' It
evades our tests; it mocks our senses. But science
has to accept that half-known fact as the explanation
of a thousand diverse phenomena.

Science, at the present moment, is preoccupied with
electricity, and in a hundred forms this force is being
yoked to the everyday service of mankind. But,
when the greatest living authority, Sir Oliver Lodge,

The Logic of Halkknowledge 237

undertakes to describe electricity, he can only speak in
negatives. It is not a form of energy, it cannot be
manufactured; it may, he vaguely guesses, be a formal
aspect of matter. Nay, matter itself is composed of
electricity, and of nothing else. But if it is asked
what is positive electricity, 'the answer,' says Sir
Oliver Lodge, ' is still " we do not know." For myself,
I do not even guess, beyond supposing it to be a
manifestation, or a differentiating portion, of the
continuous and all-pervading ether.' 1 But ether
itself, as we have seen, is a mystery, and this is only
explaining one mystery by a mystery still greater.

Our own natures are mysteries to us. The faculties
we have in familiar use run back into the unknown.
What, for example, is memory ? "We must trust that
faculty ; on its trustworthiness all history and all
science hang. Human business and society would
perish without it. Yet what is memory? In what
cipher does something, we know not what, record we
know not when or how, and report at what bidding
we cannot guess, the events and scenes and words of
the past ?

Do we really know the external world exists, the
world of colour and sound and form ? Surely we may
claim that what the fingers touch, what the eyes see,
what the ear reports, lies within the realm of absolute
knowledge. And yet, if we analyse our supposed
knowledge of the external world, we find it shades
1 Harper's Magazine,

238 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

off into mystery. It rests on nothing better than our
belief in the veracity of certain reports brought to us
by our senses, we know not how, and translated into
terms of consciousness by methods we cannot under
stand. The mysterious vibrations of the unknown
ether race along the nerves, they make some changes
in the grey matter of the brain. The nerves that
bring these vibrations know nothing of them, the
brain which receives them knows nothing. But to
the consciousness behind the brain conies the sense
of form or of colour. The colour varies according to
the greater or less intensity of the vibrations. But
what is the link betwixt the vibrations of the nerves,
and the consciousness of form and colour in the soul ?

To that question there is no answer. It all runs
back into darkness. Tyndall says the passage from
the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts
of consciousness is unthinkable. A definite thought
and a definite molecular action of the brain appear
together, but we do not know why. 'The chasm
betwixt physical processes and the facts of conscious
ness remains intellectually impassable.' Huxley says :
' I really know nothing whatever, and never hope to
know, anything of the steps by which the passage
of molecular movement to states of consciousness is
effected.'

No one, indeed, talks more humbly of the range
and certainty of science than does a true and wise
scientist. Newton, after all his shining discoveries,

The Logic of Half 'knowledge 239

draws that touching picture of himself as a little child
gathering shells on the border of some great sea,
unsounded and unknown; and the picture would be
accepted to-day by every wise mind in science.

' What does man know of the reality of things ? '
asks a distinguished living scientist in the Saturday
Revieio ; l and he answers the question himself : ' Man
is conscious of his own mind and of certain shadow
shapes projected thereon; but outside these limits he
cannot travel.' If there is anything which science
thinks it knows it is matter. This is its special field ;
it lies open to its tests, it can be analysed to its
innermost structure. And yet what does science know
of even the structure of matter ? ' For convenience/
says the authority already quoted, ' matter is regarded
as atomic in structure, yet it is inconceivable that the
atoms are indivisible, just as it is equally inconceivable
that they are continuous and divisible for ever. Both
theories are untenable. It is as illogical to hold one
as the other. We have simply reached one of the
limits of the mind where no decision is possible.'
The atomic constitution of matter, science has to con
fess, is only a working hypothesis, and every thinker
knows its inadequacy, and that it is a mere term for
something transcending our experience.

The atom, in a word, was supposed to be the
ultimate form of matter, the resting-place for the
mind, which marked the utmost limit to which
1 December 31, 1904.

240 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

analysis could be pushed. But the boundary has
given way. The molecule consists of atoms ; the
atom holds in its mysterious and unthinkably minute
curve a planetary system of electrons, and the electron
is a strain in the ether. What the ether is science
cannot even guess ; still less whence comes the ' strain.'
'Matter/ says Dr. Saleeby in the Academy, 'is no
more than a transient expression of a transient elec
trical relation.' Here is a catalogue of mysteries and
of un intelligibilities !

Can anything seem more absolutely certain than
the indications yielded by the spectroscope? They
prove the presence, say, in the photosphere of the
sun, of certain elements — iron, sodium, &c. And yet
nothing but invisible vibrations reach the spectroscope.
That the actual metals are there is only an inference
drawn from a certain cluster of coincidences.

Dubois-Eeymond finds no less than seven un
solved problems in the physical universe, enigmas
which are the puzzle and the despair of science.
These are (1) the nature of matter and force, (2) the
origin of motion, (3) the origin of life, (4) the designed
order of nature, (5) the origin of sensation and con
sciousness, (6) the origin of speech and thought, (7)
free will — a sufficiently spacious catalogue of things
not known !

It is easy to multiply confessions of the ignorance
of science by great scientists. Is the physical life
that beats in our very blood exhausted of mystery?

The Logic of Halkknowledge 241

Does no shadow of the unknown lie about its roots ?
When Herbert Spencer wrote his Principles of
Psychology, he was confident that life could be
explained. ' The chasm,' he wrote, ' between the
organic and the inorganic is being filled up.' Haeckel,
he said, had detected a type of protogenes distinguish
able from a fragment of albumen only by its finely
granulated character. The difference betwixt the
living and the non-living, Spencer exulted to think,
was simply a question of more or less fine granulation.
Bat in the last years of his life 1 Herbert Spencer
wrote : ' In my revised Principles of Biology I have
contended that the theory of a vital principle fails,
and that a physico-chemical theory of life also fails ;
the corollary being that in its ultimate nature life is
incomprehensible.'

life is ' incomprehensible ' — the life of the blood,
the nerves, the brain ! This is the last word of science.
But we do not doubt life exists. And why should we
complain that the subtler life of the invisible spirit is
also incomprehensible ?

The human understanding, according to Kant, is
an island, and by its very nature is enclosed within
unchangeable boundaries. It is the country of truth,
but surrounded by a wild and stormy ocean, the special
abode of phantoms, where many a bank of mist and
much ice, soon to melt away, hold out the lying promise
of new regions ; and while it perpetually deceives the
1 Nature, October 20, 1898.

B

242 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

roaming seafarer with the faint hope of discoveries,
continually entangles him in adventures from which
he can never get loose, and which he can never brin^
to any result.1

If any one objects to receive Kant as an authority,
let him listen to Haeckel, in his latest work, The
Wonders of Life. Science, he admits (p. 56), like
religion, cannot do without faith; but 'scientific faith
fills the gaps in our knowledge of natural law with
temporary hypotheses' — a very poor compost; while
'religious faith contradicts natural law' — a statement
which assumes the whole matter in dispute. But,
according to Haeckel, science has as many gaps as a
picket fence, and it is the office of faith to fill
them up.

Hoffmann puts the same truth in more sober terms :
'Faith, considered as a mental act, is exercised in
the formation of every science. . . . Gravitation,
motion, force, atom, ether, and the like are veritable
products of faith, and in no sense matters of absolute
knowledge.'

Now, we can see some, at least, of the reasons
which explain these conditions of imperfect knowledge
under which, in every realm our life touches, we are
compelled to act. We are finite, and perfect knowledge
is possible only to the Infinite. We live under a law
of development, and half-knowledge is a condition of
progress. Moreover, we cannot know, in the fullest
1 Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, p. 62.

The Logic of Half 'knowledge 243

sense, anything without knowing everything. Tenny
son has a vision of this in his lines : ' Flower in the
crannied wall,' &c.

The flower of which Tennyson sings was wind
blown, a vegetable accident, a seed caught in the
crannied wall, and owing nothing to the gardener's
care or skill. t And yet nothing less than the whole
physical universe is involved in the explanation of
that seemingly accidental flower. It is the index and
symbol of a thousand mysteries ; the mystery of the
seed itself, with its strange energy of life that baffles
all science; the mystery of the wind that blows the
seed. To give that wind another direction, or greater
or less force, would mean new conditions of heat and
cold running back to the creation of the world. Then
comes the mystery of the rain, and of the forces which
produce the rain ; the mystery of colour, colour mixed
in the far-off fountains of the sun, borne on the
vibrations of ether across 93,000,000 miles of space,
and absorbed or refracted by mysterious susceptibilities
in the tissue of the flower, which are the puzzle of
science.

Eeflecting on this, with the brooding imagination
of a poet, Tennyson says —

Little flower — but if I could understand \

"What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

This is exact science as well as true poetry. No
one can completely and profoundly know what the

244 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

flower is without knowing what the whole physical
universe is, nay, what God Himself is. For all the
processes of that universe, and all the methods of
God, have co-operated to make the flower possible.

Knowledge, then, for man, on any subject, can
only be a tiny and limited disc with an engirdling
circle of darkness ; and the wider the area of light
the vaster the sweep of the encompassing shadow.
'We cannot give,' says Butler, 'the whole account
of any one thing whatever, of all its causes, ends, and
necessary adjuncts, without which it could not have
been. . . . The natural world, then, and natural
government of it, being such an incomprehensible
scheme, so incomprehensible that a man must really,
in the literal sense, know nothing at all who is
not sensible of his ignorance in it — this imme
diately suggests and strongly shows the credibility,
that the moral world and government of it may be
so too.'

In the daily business of life — to sum up — in our
relations to the world of sense, in the most familiar
tasks and processes of our existence, we must deal with
the unknown or with the half known. And we do not
quarrel with these conditions. We do not regard the
narrow horizon of our knowledge, with its encom
passing curve of mystery, as an argument for idleness.
Science builds its stately fabric on a foundation of
incomplete knowledge. It works in every realm with
an hypothesis as its tool. Men conduct their daily

The Logic of Half 'knowledge 245

business, and risk their property and their lives every
hour, on half-knowledge.

Now, religion is the highest realm in which we
move. It touches God; it links us to the spiritual
order ; it outruns time, and breathes the airs of eternity.
It is concerned with moral, not with physical, relations.
Its forces are more subtle than the viewless ether.
They thrill with stranger energies than electricity
knows. And shall we complain that in this loftiest
realm of all, open on every side to wider realms than
space knows, stretching to vaster distances than Time
can touch, and beating with the pulses of loftier
energies than those which hold the stars in their
courses, we do not possess a light on which rests no
shadow ? Shall we ask that here we shall have less
of mystery than in the little and familiar realm of
physical life and forces ?

We find half-knowledge inevitable everywhere else.
By what title do we demand the white light of an
absolute knowledge in this realm ? We cannot under
stand the process by which the world of form and
colour reports itself to our consciousness ; but we do
not doubt its existence on that account. Shall we
complain because we cannot understand the process
by which our spirits are reached and touched by the
Father of our spirits ? If in the realm in which our
bodies move we rejected everything outside the area
of absolute knowledge, we should bring life to an
abrupt stop. Shall it be a complaint — an argument

246 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

for unbelief or for inaction— that in the mysterious
kingdom of spiritual facts and forces we are not given
a light which certainly does not burn in the physical
heavens ?

A sea in which we could wade, and never get
beyond our depth, would be one in which no great
ship would float. And why should we complain that
the great spiritual ocean flowing about us has depths
beyond our sounding ?

We do not quarrel, we repeat, with the necessary
limitations of our knowledge in other realms They
leave us room enough for all the processes and interests
all the achievements and joys of life. Nay, these very
limitations are part of the necessary discipline of our
existence. We can climb to perfect truth only through
a procession of half-truths. And why should we n°ot
accept with cheerful submission that law of incomplete
knowledge under which we live in the spiritual realm ?
Let us exaggerate neither the 'certainties' of science
nor the uncertainties of religion. When we have
wisely assessed both, it remains clear that the two
realms are set in the same key. They are linked
together by profound correspondences which show that
they are the work of the same Mind.

CHAPTER III
The Logic of the Unlearned

We live by Faith; but Faith is not the slave
Of text and legend : Beason's voice and God's,
Nature's and Duty's, never are at odds.

WIHTTIEB.

Think not the Faith by which the just shall live
Is a dead creed, a map correct of Heaven,

Far less a feeling fond and fugitive,
A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given.

It is an Affirmation, and an Act

Which bids eternal truth be present fact.

HARTLEY COLERIDGE.

IN secular things we are accustomed to act on a
rough, swift, imperfect logic that is not scientific
or systematic or even very conscious of itself;
but which, in spite of that, is sufficient for daily
conduct. We act, to use a term of formal logic, not
on syllogisms, but on enthymemes, an enthyrneme
being a mutilated syllogism ; a syllogism with one of
its premisses omitted, or taken for granted. We ac
cept, that is, imperfect proofs, or proofs imperfectly
stated. We take a great deal for granted.

Suppose a man in England wishes to go to New

248 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

York, an undertaking that, for a certain number of
days, involves the committal of his life to forces he
does not in the least understand. How does he proceed
to make sure that the ship in which he is about to
embark offers all reasonable conditions of safety?
Being a sane man, he does not set out by rediscovering
for himself the whole theory of shipbuilding. He
accepts that as being already in existence. He does
not go all over the ship from stem to stern with a
little hammer, and tap every bolt and rivet in her to
satisfy himself that the vessel is sound. He does not
put the captain through an examination to judge of his
knowledge of ships. He does not make any in
dependent scrutiny of the charts. He does not take
the nautical tables under his arm and hasten to the
nearest observatory to have them tested ; still less does
he undertake to verify them himself by abstruse
mathematical calculations. If he did all this before he
set out for New York he would die without getting

.-, o o

there.

If he thinks about the matter at all, he says in
effect to himself : ' This ship belongs to a good line ; it
has crossed the Atlantic safely a score of times ; the
captain would not be in command of her except he
were competent ; many of my own friends have sailed
in her. This is enough for me.' And he embarks
with the most cheerful confidence. He takes, in fact, a
whole world of things for granted. As he steps on
board the ship and sails out into the mysterious and

The Logic of the Unlearned 249

trackless sea, the act represents a venture of faith
rather than a demonstration of knowledge. But he has
evidence enough for common sense.

This is the rough, hasty logic of practical life ; and
for the average man this represents — and must repre
sent — his logic in religion. Life is too short, death too
near, duty too urgent, the rush of affairs too swift, to
make it possible for him to wait till he has built up a
creed, fact by fact, article by article, and by a process
of tedious and elaborate reasoning. He borrows, as he
must necessarily borrow, the homespun logic of practi
cal life, and carries it to the realm of duty and faith.
Behind the things he takes for granted there is, of
course, a weight of unconscious and inarticulate logic
not easily realized, still less for the man whom it
influences, put into speech. But it is enough for him
to take the broad, general, unanalysed but undeniable
facts of the case.

He has never seen New York. How does he know
there is such a city ? He will tell you that everybody
acts on the assumption that it exists. Great ships sail
to and from it. Through every hour of the day and
night cablegrams bring news of it. The newspapers
cannot be explained except on the theory that it exists.
It is incredible that all the geographies could lie ; that
there is, in fact, with regard to New York a vast object
less conspiracy of lies stretching through generations,
and in which the entire human race takes part. That
such a confederation of lying should exist, so ancient,

250 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

so vast, so motiveless, so successful, is the most absurd
of incredibilities.

A resident in one of the outer provinces of the
empire has never seen the King; he perhaps has never
talked with anybody who has seen him. How does he
know that Edward VII is a real person ? If asked for
proof of his faith the man would smile. The laws run
in the King's name; the courts sit by his authority;
the coins with which we buy and sell bear his image.'
That he should not exist involves such stupendous and
concerted lying on the part of such a multitude of
people that the possibility may be dismissed as a
jest.

And all this represents the unconscious and justifi
able logic of the average man about Christianity.
Christianity is interwoven with the whole fabric of
human life. The moral laws which have authority
over every man's conscience run in Christ's name. You
cannot explain civilization, or the daily newspaper, or
the very almanac, and leave Christ out. There is' no
need, indeed, to appeal to such impersonal abstractions
as 'civilization' and ' literature ' for proof of religion.
The streets of every city are full of Christ's witnesses-
men and women who know Him, love Him, serve Him,
and would die for Him. All the best forces the man in'
the street knows, from the earliest sound of his mother's
voice to the face of his little child lying in its grave,
somehow stream from Christ, and lead back to Christ. '
This logic, we repeat, is not scientific, it is not

The Logic of the Unlearned 251

borrowed from books, it has not even a nodding ac
quaintance with metaphysics. It is rough, swift,
imperfect ; and yet it is enough for conscience ; enough
for conduct ; enough for everyday life.

But when analysed, the effective working logic
behind the unlearned man's religious faith will be
found to have certain definite and sufficiently reason
able elements. First, there is what may be called the
artist's logic of beauty. And beauty for the human
soul has a logic of its own. There is something in the
very make of our nature which, in the presence of any
thing visibly noble and gracious, yields instant and
silent tribute. It is one of the primary instincts of our
being, an impulse independent of logic, and stronger
than logic.

Now, here is the scheme of life, of belief, of duty,
that we call the Christian religion. The question of
its origin or of its evidences may be for the moment
put aside. Let it be judged as a landscape, or a
flower, or a great painting is judged, simply by the
element of beauty in it ; by the grace, the scale, the
dignity that awaken the admiration of the artist.
And it is certain that, by the test of the single quality
of beauty, its mysterious harmony, its shining aspect
of grace, the Christian scheme challenges the acceptance
of every faculty in us. If this great inter-knitted
scheme of belief and duty and hope is the product and
birth of a fraud, then somehow there exists a miracle
stranger than anything told in the Gospels — the miracle

252 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

of a lie which wears a fairer countenance, and is clothed
with a more perfect grace, than any truth the human
mind knows I

And this quality in the Christian scheme, as it
appeals to the unlearned man, may be judged at a
thousand points. Take, for example, the Christian
account of the origin of man. The man in the street,
who has no time to be scientific, and who translates what
of science he does know into a very unscientific verna
cular, does not completely understand the evolution
theory, and what of it he does understand, as far as it
applies to himself, he dislikes. That theory, as he reads
it, teaches that we began, a sufficient number of ages ago,
as a mere chemical 'ferment, or as a bubble in the
spawn and slime of the sea. Our ancestors were little
floating atoms in the salt spume of the dark primaeval
waters. Next they became ascidians, little bags of
unorganized jelly ; then they attained to the dignity of,
say, the oyster; and in process of ages, creeping out
from betwixt its shells, they reached the loftier height
of the tadpole. In due course they shed their tails, and
mounted to the dignity of frogs. Then followed a great
leap, or even a succession of leaps. Our ancestors
became monkeys, and, in some mysterious manner, got
their tails back again. Once more they got rid of
them, say by the process of sitting on them fora certain
number of centuries ; and so at last, and by some such
process, infinitely varied, manhood was reached.

This, of course, is little better than a translation

The Logic of the Unlearned 253

of the evolution theory into terms of humour; it is
absurdly unjust to what may be called the Theistic
version of that theory. 'It is possible to have a
reading of evolution that satisfies the imagination; a
reading which conceives of God as putting empires,
philosophies, civilizations, literatures, into some far-off
primary germ, and guiding their evolution from it.
Evolution plus God, and as a mode by which God has
worked, may, or may not, be scientifically proved;
but no one can contend that the theory is ignoble.'
But the description we have here given represents the
average man's conception of it. And if we take
Haeckel's reading of evolution — which brings man up
from the slime of the sea, or from a chemical ferment,
by a chain of purely animal ascent, with no touch
of a divine Hand, or of conscious purpose, at any
link — the man-in-the-street version of it is not so very
unjust. Man, according to Haeckel, is 'an affair of
chance ; the froth and fume at the wave-top of a sterile
ocean of matter.' l Is it strange that such an account
of his origin disquiets him ? It affronts his self-respect,
it shocks his common sense.

But the Bible takes him by the hand and leads
him back to the dawn of the worlds ; it lifts the great
veils of space and of time, and in the wondering hush
of heaven bids him hear God say, ' Let us make man
in Our image and in Our likeness.' The average man
doei not stop to nicely consider how much of this is
> Bibbert Journal, vol. iii., No. 2, Jan. 3GO&. x>. 293.

254 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

parable and how much historic fact ; but he contrasts
the two theories. The evolution theory in its anti-
theistic form is only an hypothesis, a scientific word
for a more or less reasoned guess. And if the Christian
account of man, as read in the simplicity of the open
ing chapters of the Bible, is only a parable, or even
a guess, which of the two has more of the accent of
' greatness ? If the Bible story is a delusion, it is a
splendid delusion! And without weighing evidence,
without determining, as indeed he cannot determine,
how much of the evolution theory is proved, and how
much guessed; or how much of the story in Genesis
is mysterious parable, and how much concrete history,
by the mere logic of its loftier accent, of the nobler
account it gives of his own origin, the unlearned man
accepts it.

Or, take the Christian account of God ; and is there
any other theory comparable with it, not merely for
scale and awfulness, but for tenderness and grace and
beauty? 'God is light'; 'God is love'; 'a God of
truth and without iniquity.' The radiant light — as
even Plato guessed — is but His shadow. When Charles
Kingsley lay on his death- bed, and there came to him
a gleam of that vision which death brings sometimes
to dying eyes, he said suddenly, after lying long silent,
' How beautiful is God ! ' And what may be called the
mere convincing beauty of God, as revealed in the
Bible is, as a force making for faith, almost better than
any logic.

The Logic of the Unlearned 255

The unlearned man reads in an old psalm, 'Like
as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them
that fear Him.' And under the music of the words
strange emotions stir in the heart. 'Why, this/ he
feels, ' ought to be true. It must be true ! ' Let the
conception of God as presented in the Christian scheme
be realized: the wedlock of measureless power with
infinite tenderness ; the unstained holiness which for
sin is a consuming fire, and yet the love beyond
imagination which for the sinner is a redeeming force ;
God revealed in Christ, speaking to us in Christ's voice,
touching us with Christ's hands. Unless the very
sense and instinct of beauty in us be destroyed,
this account of God, by mere loftiness and sweet
ness, stirs the human soul that meditates on it to
adoration.

Or, take the Christian doctrine of heaven, the
existence beyond death, with its eternal compensations ;
its glow of perfected life and faculty, its splendour of
environment, its great companionships. If it be a
dream, is there any other vision that ever awoke in
the chambers of a sleeping brain to compare with it ?
Suppose we say that gates of pearl and streets of gold,
strains of music and garments of saintly white, are
mere earthly symbols, as no doubt they are. Yet what
unguessed, unrealized glow shines through the symbols !
What spiritual splendour burns behind them! If it
be a dream, alas for the moment of waking 1

For the uncontroversial, not to say unlearned mind,

256 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

the artist's logic of beauty is a force on the side of
religion not easily realized.

Then there comes a more prosaic test — what may
be called the gardener's logic of fruit. The one evi
dence by which a tree is tested, and classified, is the
fruit it bears. Scale of trunk, beauty of leaf, fragrance
of blossom, all have their value; but they are mere
preludes to something more than themselves — some
thing for the sake of which they exist. A botanist, it
is true, will, for scientific purposes, classify a plant by
a hundred secondary and irrelevant details; but the
ultimate logic, the logic of the street and of the market,
the logic of practical use, knows only one test. It is
the test of fruit.

Now, as the unlearned man reasons, here is this
great tree we call Christianity. Nobody can deny the
tree ! Its roots wrap the round world in their grasp ;
its widespreading branches overshadow whole nations.
But there are many voices assuring us that it is only
a upas tree ; we are invited to cut it down, and assured
the world will be the sweeter for the process. Before
we cut it down, let us stop a moment, and ask, What
fruit in history and in life does this tree bear? and,
the plain man reflects, one need not be a botanist in
order to judge of the fruit of a tree.

Now, the fruit of Christianity in history, taken in
general terms, and allowing for a thousand accidental
failures, is undeniable. It is a fact to which all
history bears witness, that two thousand years ago

The Logic of the Unlearned 257

the civilized world was dying. The human race, say
at that moment when, beneath the daggers of the
assassins, Julius Caesar fell in the senate-house, was,
tried by any moral test, a dying world. Freedom
was dying; humanity was dying, or dead; civiliza
tion was corroded through and through with decay.
And from the line of the Caesars down to the later
Eoman Empire, this dreadful process of death and
decay spread.

But the curious thing is that the world, after all,
is not dead to-day ! It may be almost said to be in
its youth. There has come to it a second youth, a
rebirth of civilization, an emergence of nations whose
standard of law and humanity obeys some strange
upward impulse. What has wrought this marvel, so
that the world which, twenty centuries ago, was visibly
dying, is to-day full of living, purifying, and ascending
forces? There is only one possible answer. Nearly
two thousand years ago, in an obscure village, in an
obscure land, a Jewish peasant was born. For thirty
years He lived a poor man's life, working at the
carpenter's bench in a village workshop. For three
years He was a reformer and a teacher; and then He
died — and died the death of a criminal.

And it is the theory of Christianity that those
thirty years of silent life, those three years of patient
teaching, and that criminal's death, turned the world
clean round. It changed the very formula of the
curve on which the world is travelling. Since then

s

258 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

the path of the race has been upwards into ever-
increasing light. And, as we have already argued,
there is one odd, direct, and unmistakable proof of
this fact. It is written afresh every morning on every
newspaper in the land. It is the mere date in the
calendar! We acknowledge afresh with each sunrise
that the world must date its history from that morn
ing when Christ was born. The nations never con
sulted together and agreed to do this; but by some
mysterious instinct, by the silent compulsion of plain
fact, the human race to-day agrees to reckon its
history from that far-off morning when, lying low
amongst the beasts, a Jewish mother pressed the new
born Christ to her woman's bosom. This is the fruit
of Christianity in history. It saved the race from
perishing.

And what is the fruit of Christianity in the life
actually about us ? To an extent unrealized, or even
forgotten, all the things of which we are proudest
are the direct fruit of Christianity. If from the
pictures in the art gallery of any great city all of
noble thought and emotion that religion creates were
taken, how much of art would survive ? Or if from
the shelves of a great library could be withdrawn
all of poetry and song, of lofty thought, and
kindling speculation, and moving story religion has
called into existence, the library would be left rifled
and well-nigh valueless. What force has built the
hospitals that are the pride of great cities, and the

The Logic of the Unlearned 259

orphanages that shelter the outcasts ? These institu
tions are found nowhere except where the foot of
Christ has trodden, and the breath of Christ has
passed. If from the very gravestones under which
sleep the dead could be taken all the words of hope
borrowed from the pages of the Bible that shine there
amid the records of human grief, what a new and deeper
blackness would lie on the very grave !

Let the man, again, that Christianity makes, or
ought to make — and does make, if its ideal is reached
— be considered. There are many men, of course, who
are infidel in faith, and yet have a certain nobility of
life — men like John Stuart Mill, or Huxley, or Fitz-
james Stephen. But these men resemble cut flowers.
They carry the bloom of the earth in which they grew,
the perfume of the plant on which they blossomed.
But it is only for a moment. They are broken off
from the parent stem. They have no right to the
perfume or bloom which are native to it. The grace
of their lives really borrows its energy from the faith
they have forsaken. Unbelief ought to be judged by
its second generation.

But let the true moral product of Christianity be
compared with the type of character which infidelity,
when it has come to its kingdom, and evolved its own
ethics, has produced, and must produce. Let Eousseau,
stealing, under the shadow of night, through the streets
of Paris to drop his seventh infant into the receiving-
box of a foundling hospital, and then hastening back

260 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

to add a new page to his Contrat Social, be compared,
say, with Silas Told, ' the prisoners' friend,' labouring
in the foulness of London prisons; or John Howard,
flying across Europe to help the outcasts of every land.

But it is an ungracious task to contrast names, and
there is no need to ask for anxiously balanced proofs.
For the plain man the plain fact is sufficient, that
in history, in national institutions, in men's lives
Christianity has that best form of practical logic — the
logic of visible and richest fruit.

There is, in addition, what may be called the philo
sopher's logic of tendency. A philosopher can take
a principle, and if his logic is sufficiently true and
penetrating, can deduce from it its inevitable conse
quences. He can take an acorn — at least he thinks
he can — and deduce the oak. Now Christianity, it
may be frankly confessed, is not always translated
into perfect concrete form. Who judges Christianity
always by Christians, might well draw some melan
choly conclusions. Yet the whole tendency of the
Christian system is undeniable. It is plain, as a
matter of fact, that it makes for righteousness. It is
a force working for human happiness.

Take, for example, what is generally regarded as
the crudest and harshest of its ethical forms— the Ten
Commandments. It is unnecessary to ask whether they
really were spoken by God's voice on Mount Sinai, and
written by divine fingers on tablets of stone. Let this
question alone be asked: What is the drift of these

The Logic of the Unlearned 261

ten words? What would be their practical effect if
they were universally adopted ? The answer must be
that they visibly make for the world's order and happi
ness. Not one could be taken away without leaving
human life both poorer and less safe. 'Thou shalt
not steal ' ; that puts a guard round every man's house.
' Thou shalt not kill ' ; that is a divine fence built
round every man's life. ' Thou shalt not commit
adultery.' ; that guards the purity of wedded life
' Honour thy father and thy mother ' ; on the founda
tion of those words stands the sweetness of the home.

Some wit, in the sad days of the eighteenth century,
proposed to start a society for taking the 'not' out
of the Commandments and putting it into the Creed.
We have a number of practical philosophers always
amongst us, who conduct their lives on the principle
of leaving the ' not ' out of the Commandments ; and
what do we do with these artists in ethics ? We col
lect them, as far as we can ; we cut their hair short ;
dress them in useful moleskin, marked with a broad
arrow, so that we shall know them again; and we
build a stone wall round them to keep them together.
A world that rejected the Ten Commandments would
be one vast prison without the stone wall ! In every
gaol is kept a book of photographs, and each criminal
who passes through its cells leaves his likeness behind
him. And to turn over the pages of one of these
books of dreadful photographs is to find a new argu
ment for religion. This is the type of human face

262 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

which leaving the 'not' out of the Commandments
produces; faces scorched with lust, bitter with hato,
dark with murder, scribbled over with the signature of
every evil passion. We have only to imagine a world
filled with these faces, and no God above it, and this
would be hell !

Philosophers have always delighted in pictures of
an imaginary world, an ideal and perfect state ; from
the Atlantis of Plato to the Utopia of Sir Thomas
More. Now, it is easy to imagine a fairer world, one
immeasurably better than ever poet imagined or philo
sopher constructed. It is simply a world in which
everybody is a Christian ! Imagine walking down the
streets of one of the cities of such a world ! Let it be
still a city of earth, with its tumult of business, its
hurrying crowds, its eager faces, the changeful skies
above it, the commonplace soil beneath. Let every
thing be the same as before ; the one tremendous
change being that every man and woman is a Christian !
Every home is the kingdom of love and purity. The
Golden Rule knits all lives together. Trust has taken
the place of suspicion, charity of greed. Macaulay
sings of early Roman days —

Then none were for a party,

Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,

And the poor man loved the great.

As a matter of sober fact, there never were such days
in the stormy history of our race. But that golden

The Logic of the Unlearned 263

time would dawn to-morrow if Christianity became
instantly and perfectly authoritative in every human
life.

It cannot be denied, in brief, that Christian ethics
and Christian teaching, if suddenly made supreme
amongst us, would, at a breath, bring in a golden age.
And its tendency, and the goal towards which it is day
and night working, constitute part of the title-deeds
of Christianity.

Another form of what may be called the homespun
logic of the Christian faith is the business man's argu
ment of prudence. Prudence is the sane man's Bible.
His first principle is that he will run no needless risks.
He does not know that his house will be burned down ;
but it may be, and so he insures it. His second prin
ciple is that he will neglect no reasonable chances.
He does not know that if he buys a big line in wheat
it will rise, in six months, 20 per cent, in value ; but
if he sees a chance of making a profit on that scale,
he will not go to sleep before he grasps it. Eun no
needless risks, neglect no reasonable chances : these
are the principles on which a great business is built.

How those principles reinforce Christianity it is
needless to state. As we have argued elsewhere, no
one can prove, or ever has proved, the stupendous
negatives of infidelity. No one can guarantee that its
guess as to God, and our relation, or want of relation,
to Him ; as to eternity, and the degree in which our
acts in this life must influence us throughout that

264 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

eternity, is true. On the lowest reading of Christian
evidence it is probable God exists. Sin may involve
eternal death. It may cost us heaven. No one has
ever crossed the dark frontiers of death, explored the
world beyond, and come back to say, ' I have trodden
all the paths of eternity, and found there nothing
to make a bad man afraid.' There is, let us say, a
chance that the Bible may be true; and on mere
business principles— it is, of course, ignoble ground to
take— yet, on the lowest reading of prudence, we ought
not to run the tremendous risks involved in sin on the
slender chance that the Bible may not be true.

A couple of miners on an Australian goldfield will
stand on the slope of a hill and study the contour of
the landscape to find what they call ' the lie of the
reef.' When they have put together all the evidence
available, and there seems a certain probability, less or
greater, that by sinking a shaft at a certain point they
will strike the reef, they mark out the shaft, give to
the business of sinking it the patient toil of months.
They fight their way through stone and gravel and
clay for two thousand feet on the chance— the pro
bability measured by a balance of chances— of gold
being there. This is the miner's logic. It is the logic
of the man of business.

And we have only to apply that logic to religion to
find in it an ample title for the acceptance of all its
laws. It is not, we repeat, the loftiest ground to take;
but it is solid enough.

The Logic of the Unlearned 265

Then there is what may be called the practical
man's logic ; the final test of action. No man has a
right to doubt Christianity until he has tried it ; and
when he has honestly tried it he certainly will no
longer doubt it ! He who takes Christianity and trans
lates it into conduct: takes it to the shop and buys
and sells by its laws ; builds his home upon it, and
trains his children by it— he proves religion.

What is the musician's logic ? You gather round
a harp a jury of philosophers, says Henry Ward
Beecher, and ask them to decide whether, as an instru
ment, it is perfect. One judges it by its form, and
reports it has the true curved outlines of a harp.
Another tests it by the materials of which it is made.
Here are the vibrating metal strings ; the true materials
of a harp. But there comes a simple man who knows
nothing about the laws of sound, the properties of
metals, or the science of music. The only thing he
knows is how to play the harp. He draws his hand
across the strings, and the rich music slumbering in
them awakens ; it floats out on the trembling air, it
charms all ears. What need is there of any report of
philosophers ? The music proves the harp.

And the great system of Christianity is a divine
harp, an instrument that can fill human life with
music; and the only proof needed is to touch with
obedient fingers its strings. The answering music is

its own logic.

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EPILOGUE

THE foregoing chapters simply give examples
of the innumerable correspondences which
link the spiritual and the secular realms to
gether ; instances of profound agreement, yielded alike
by history and science and philosophy, at whatever
point, and by whatever method, they may be tested.
As the key fits the lock, so the great things of religion
answer to the deep things of the heart and the great
things of the physical universe. And the chapters here
written, it may be claimed, do not represent a cluster
of what may be called unrelated credibilities. The^e
manifold justifications of religion— signs of its energy
in history, analogies in science, correspondences in
nature and in the soul — these have a cumulative
force ; and they might be reinforced by facts gathered
from every field of knowledge open to the human
mind. The chapters, too, are a study in what may be
called contrasting credibilities. They show hpw, in
any form in which the question can be tried, the re
jection of religion carries with it difficulties infinitely
greater than its acceptance.

Christianity, it is true, does not solve all puzzles.

270 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

It does not pretend to find an answer to every question.
If it did, that very characteristic would prove it to be
of human origin. That it shades off into mystery at a
thousand points ; that it tests us by difficulties ; that
it requires us to walk by faith, and to deal with forces
half known, and less than half comprehended, shows
its agreement with the general scheme of human life.
These conditions of incomplete knowledge are part of
our discipline. A world in which everything was
known, that had not a mystery that challenged our
wonder, or a discovery to tax our intelligence, would
leave us with half the motives for effort slain.

But even those who remain unconvinced of the
truth of historic Christianity must admit that it
answers all the ends of a true religion. It sweetens
life ; it creates saints ; it inspires missionaries ; it brings
gifts of divine peace to dying hours. It is an energy
lifting the whole race up to new heights of goodness.
It is a barrier to all the forces which would destroy
society. All this is written in history; it is visible
in the living world about us.

And Christianity may well be set at this point in
contrast with any of the forms of unbelief. The re
jection of Christianity solves no problems. It adds a
new perplexity to them all. It deepens all the
shadows of life; it loosens all the deep anchorages of
morality. The ethical trend of materialistic belief is
clearly visible in Haeckel and his school He, at
least, has the courage of his logic. If man is only a

Epilogue 271

chemical ferment, an albuminous compound, a little
patch of plasm as destitute of either will or responsi
bility as, say, a seidlitz powder, what has he to do with
morality, or morality with him ? What moral obliga
tions link together a handful of seidlitz powders packed
into the same box ?

Haeckel holds that morality in man, like the tail of
a monkey or the shell of a tortoise, is purely a physio
logical effect. A moral habit resembles, he says,
nothing so much as ' the action of nitric acid on the
lower oxydes of nitrogen.' Nay, the categorical im
perative itself — that sublime sense of duty which
moved, as deeply as the vision of the starry heavens
themselves, the sense of wonder in Kant — is resolved
by Haeckel into a 'long series of phyletic modifica
tions of the phenomena of the cortex.' The moral
sense thus disappears, or is resolved into a spray of
meaningless words.

Now, this is a creed which, as it stains through to
the popular mind, must create a morality — or, rather,
an immorality — after its own pattern. The process is
already visible in the philosophers themselves. In his
New Conceptions of Science, for example, Mr. Carl
Snyder announces 'a new criminology,' a moral code
in which not a knavish brain, but a defective pair of
lungs, will be the true crime. ' We shall not punish,'
he says, ' but the deformed, the defective, the diseased
must be incessantly weeded out.' Haeckel, in his
latest book, The Wonders of Life, as we have already

272 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

shown, argues for the poisoning of the aged and of the
incurable sick. He records with admiration that
' many experienced physicians who practise their pro
fession without dogmatic prejudice have no scruple
about cutting short the sufferings of the incurable by a
dose of morphia or cyanide of potassium,' and he asks
us to think ' what a blessing this is both to the invalids
and their families.' In the same work he argues that
the tenderness with which a mother fights for the frail
life of her sickly baby is nothing less than an offence
against society. She ought to put a string round the
tender little throat, and draw it tight till the fluttering
breath ceased. This is her plain duty to the race.

How much of what the world to-day counts precious
— pity for human pain, the tenderness that ministers to
the weak, the charity that cares for the helpless, the
patience that watches over broken and failing life —
this new belief about man would destroy ! It would
reshape society on the ethical ideas of the brothel and
of the slaughter-house. Yet all this is the logical and
inevitable goal of materialistic unbelief. When full
grown it would destroy the world, and it would fit the
world for destruction by making it hateful.

Truth, of course, is sacred, no matter what its con
sequences ; and we might accept even a theory about
ourselves and the universe so dreadful, if the evidence
on which it stood were sufficient. But the creed of
materialistic unbelief has absolutely no authoritative
evidence. Its acceptance represents the triumph of

Epilogue 273

unreasoning credulity. Haeckel, for example, quotes
with scorn the opening sentence of the Apostles' Creed :
'I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of
heaven and earth/ and he offers us as a substitute for
God and as the true starting-point of life — and on
nothing better than his own private authority — 'a
chemical substance of a viscous character, having albu
minous matter and water as its chief constituents.'
' The chemical process which first set in,' he announces,
' . . . must have been catalyses, which led to the for
mation of albuminous combinations. The earliest
organisms to be thus formed can only have been " plas-
modomous monera," ' &c. (p. 355). With a spray of
words like these, and a procession of assumptions and
suppositions as long and various as the tail of a
comet, Haeckel thus constructs a rival credo to that of
Christianity.

But it is absolutely without proof! All known
proof, indeed, is in the other scale. The whole authority
of science, as represented by its wisest minds, is in
opposition to it.

' If a man of science,' says Sir Oliver Lodge, ' seeks
to dogmatize concerning the Emotions and the Will,
and asserts that he can reduce them to atomic forces
and motions, he is exhibiting the smallness of his con
ceptions, and gibbeting himself as a laughing-stock to
future generations.' l

Lord Kelvin pronounces the attempt to account for
1 Hibbert Journal.

T

274 The Unrealized Logic of Religion

life in this fashion as 'utterly absurd.' 'Scientific
thought,' he says, ' is compelled to accept the idea of
Creative Power. Forty years ago I asked Liebig,
walking somewhere in the country, if he believed that
the grass and flowers which we saw around us grew by
mere chemical forces. He answered, " No, no more
than I could believe that a book of botany describing
them could grow by mere chemical forces." '

But we do not need the authority of scientists or of
science in this matter. The very structure of the
human mind rejects this theory of a chain with only
one end to it, an infinite succession of effects with no
cause to explain them. It is possible to put together a
set of words describing phenomena so wonderful, but
the mind refuses to picture an unending series of
antecedents with no starting-point. It cannot strip
itself of that obstinate and primary instinct which
demands a cause which shall have no antecedent.
' The consciousness of cause/ says Herbert Spencer,
'can only be effaced by the destruction of conscious
ness ' ; and Haeckel's theory leaves all the phenomena
of the visible world in the category of things un
caused.

To accept his theory represents a more violent effort
of faith than is required for belief in the Old and New
Testaments put together. For that theory is only a
crude human guess, disguised in learned words, destitute
of a scrap of evidence, disavowed by all serious science,
and in quarrel with the very nature of the human mind.

Epilogue 275

Its sole evidence is found in the stentorian tones in
which it is proclaimed.

He who accepts Christianity, on the other hand,
opens his life to a creed which has behind it a vast and
manifold body of evidence ; a creed which finds its
verification alike in science, in history, and in the
human consciousness itself, and which is accepted by
the general reason of the race. Its own grace and
loftiness, the place in the universe it gives to man,
the moral ideals to which it is shaping him, the forces
with which it touches him — these are its title-deeds.

0 mighty love I Man is one world, and hath

Another to attend him.
Since then, my God, Thou hast

So brave a palace built, 0 dwell in it,
That it may dwell with Thee at last!

Till then, afford us so much wit,
That, as the world serves us, we may serve Thee,

And both Thy servants be.

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