THEISM

BEING

BY

ROBERT FLINT, D.D., LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
AUTHOR OF 'THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
IN EUROPE,' ETC.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXXVII

PREFATORY NOTE.

The Lectures in this volume have been delivered in Glasgow, St Andrews, and Edinburgh, in connection with the Lectureship founded by the late Mr James Baird of Auchmedden and Cambusdoon. They will be followed by a volume on Antitheistic Theories, containing the Baird Lectures for 1877.

The author has to thank the Baird Trustees for having twice appointed him Lecturer, and for much indulgence extended to him during his tenure of office. His special thanks are due to James A. Campbell, Esq., LL.D., of Stracathro, for kindly revising the sheets of this volume, and for suggesting many corrections and improvements.

Johnstone Lodge, Craigmillar Park,
Edinburgh, 22d August 1877.

CONTENTS.

APPENDIX.

THEISM.

LECTURE I.

ISSUES INVOLVED IN THE QUESTION TO BE DISCUSSED—WHENCE AND HOW WE GET THE IDEA OF GOD.

I.

Is belief in God a reasonable belief, or is it not? Have we sufficient evidence for thinking that there is a self-existent, eternal Being, infinite in power and wisdom, and perfect in holiness and goodness, the Maker of heaven and earth, or have we not? Is theism true, or is some antagonistic, some anti-theistic theory true? This is the question which we have to discuss and to answer, and it seems desirable to state briefly at the outset what issues are involved in answering it. Obviously, the statement of these issues must not be so framed as to create prejudice for or against any particular answer. Its only legitimate purpose is to help us to realise aright our true relation to the question. We can never in any investigation see too early or too clearly the true and full significance, the general and special bearings, of the question we intend to study; but the more important and serious the question is, the more incumbent on us is it not to prejudge what must be the answer.

It is obvious, then, in the first place, that the inquiry before us is one as to whether or not religion has any reasonable ground, any basis, in truth; and if so, what that ground or basis is. Religion, in order to be reasonable, must rest on knowledge of its object. This is not to say that it is exclusively knowledge, or that knowledge is its one essential element. It is not to say that feeling and will are not as important constituents in the religious life as intellectual apprehension. Mere knowledge, however clear, profound, and comprehensive it may be, can never be religion. There can be no religion where feeling and affection are not added to knowledge. There can be no religion in any mind devoid of reverence or love, hope or fear, gratitude or desire—in any mind whose thinking is untouched, uncoloured, uninspired by some pious emotion. And religion includes more even than an apprehension of God supplemented by feeling—than the love or fear of God based on knowledge. It is unrealised and incomplete so long as there is no self-surrender of the soul to the object of its knowledge and affection—so long as the will is unmoved, the character and conduct unmodified. The importance of feeling and will in religion is thus in no respect questioned or denied when it is maintained that religion cannot be a reasonable process, a healthy condition of mind, if constituted by either feeling or volition separate from knowledge. Some have represented it as consisting essentially in the feeling of dependence, others in that of love, and others in fear; but these are all feelings which must be elicited by knowledge, and which must be proportional to knowledge in every undisordered mind. We can neither love nor fear what we know nothing about. We cannot love what we do not think worthy of love, nor fear unless we think there is reason for fear. We cannot feel our dependence upon what we do not know to exist. We cannot feel trustful and confiding dependence on what we do not suppose to have a character which merits trust and confidence. Then, however true it may be that short of the action of the will in the form of the self-surrender of the soul to the object of its worship the religious process is essentially imperfect, this self-surrender cannot be independent of reason and yet reasonable. In order to be a legitimate act it must spring out of good affections,—and these affections must be enlightened; they must rest on the knowledge of an object worthy of them, and worthy of the self-sacrifice to which they prompt. Unless there be such an object, and unless it can be known, all the feeling and willing involved in religion must be delusive—must be of a kind which reason and duty command us to resist and suppress.

But religion is certainly a very large phenomenon. It is practically coextensive, indeed, with human life and history. It is doubtful if any people, any age, has been without some religion. And religion has not only in some form existed almost wherever man has existed, but its existence has to a great extent influenced his whole existence. The religion of a people colours its entire civilisation; its action may be traced on industry, art, literature, science, and philosophy, in all their stages. And the question whether there is a God or not, whether God can be known or not, is, otherwise put, whether or not religious history, and history so far as influenced by religion, have had any root in reason, any ground in fact. If there be no God, or if it be impossible to know whether there be a God or not, history, to the whole extent of its being religious and influenced by religion, must have been unreasonable. Perhaps religion might still be conceived of, although it is difficult to see how it could be so conceived of on consistent grounds, as having done some good: and one religion might be regarded as better than another, in the sense of doing more good or less evil than another; but no religion could be conceived of as true, nor could one religion be conceived of as truer than another. If there be no God to know, or if God cannot be known, religion is merely a delusion or mental disease—its history is merely the history of a delusion or disease, and any science of it possible is merely a part of mental pathology.

Further, whether Christianity be a reasonable creed or not obviously depends on whether or not certain beliefs regarding God are reasonable. If there be no God, if there be more Gods than one, if God be not the Creator and Upholder of the world and the Father of our spirits, if God be not infinite in being and perfection, in power, wisdom, and holiness, Christianity cannot possibly be a thing to be believed. It professes to be a revelation from God, and consequently assumes that there is a God. It demands our fullest confidence, on the ground of being His word; and consequently assumes that He is "not a man that He should lie," but One whose word may be trusted to the uttermost. It professes to be a law of life, and therefore assumes the holiness of its author; to be a plan of salvation, and therefore presupposes His love; to be certain of final triumph, and so presupposes His power. It presents itself to us as the completion of a progressive process of positive revelation, and therefore presupposes a heavenly Father, Judge, and King. The books in which we have the record of this process—the books of the Old and New Testaments—therefore assume, and could not but assume, that God is, and that He is all-powerful, perfectly wise, and perfectly holy. They do not prove it, but refer us to the world and our own hearts for the means and materials of proof. They may draw away from nature, and from before the eyes of men, a veil which covers and conceals the proof; they may be a record of facts which powerfully confirm and largely supplement what proof there is in the universe without and the mind within: but they must necessarily imply, and do everywhere imply, that a real proof exists there. If what they in this respect imply be untrue, all that they profess to tell us of God, and as from God, must be rejected by us, if we are to judge and act as reasonable beings.[1]

For all men, then, who have religious beliefs, and especially for all men who have Christian beliefs, these questions, What evidence is there for God's existence? and, What is known of His nature? are of primary importance. The answers given to them must determine whether religion and Christianity ought to be received or rejected. There can be no use in discussing other religious questions so long as these fundamental questions have not been thoughtfully studied and distinctly answered. It is only through their investigation that we can establish a right to entertain any religious belief, to cherish any religious feeling, to perform any religious act. And the result to which the investigation leads us must largely decide what sort of a religious theory we shall hold, and what sort of a religious life we shall lead. Almost all religious differences of really serious import may be traced back to differences in men's thoughts about God. The idea of God is the generative and regulative idea in every great religious system and every great religious movement. It is a true feeling which has led to the inclusion of all religious doctrines whatever in a science which bears the name of theology (discourse about God, λογοσ περι του θεου), for what is believed about God determines what will be believed about everything else which is included either under natural or revealed religion.

In the second place, the moral issues depending on the inquiry before us are momentous. An erroneous result must, from the very nature of the case, be of the most serious character. If there be no God, the creeds and rites and precepts which have been imposed on humanity in His name must all be regarded as a cruel and intolerable burden. The indignation which atheists have so often expressed at the contemplation of religious history is quite intelligible—quite natural; for to them it can only appear as a long course of perversion of the conscience and affections of mankind. If religion be in its essence, and in all its forms and phases, false, the evils which have been associated with it have been as much its legitimate effects as any good which can be ascribed to it; and there can be no warrant for speaking of benefits as its proper effects, or uses and mischiefs as merely occasioned by it, or as its abuses. If in itself false, it must be credited with the evil as well as with the good which has followed it; and all the unprofitable sufferings and useless privations—all the undefined terrors and degrading rites—all the corruptions of moral sentiment, factitious antipathies, intolerance, and persecution—all the spiritual despotism of the few, and the spiritual abjectness of the many—all the aversion to improvement and opposition to science, &c., which are usually referred to false religion and to superstition,—must be attributed to religion in itself, if there be no distinction between true and false in religion—between religion and superstition. In that case, belief in God must be regarded as really the root of all these evils. It is only if we can separate between religious truth and religious error—only if we can distinguish religion itself from the perversions of religion—that we can possibly maintain that the evils which have flowed from religious error, from the perversions of religion, are not to be traced to the religious principle itself.[2]

On the other hand, if there be a God, he who denies His existence, and, in consequence, discards all religious motives, represses all religious sentiments, and despises all religious practices, assuredly goes morally far astray. If there be a God—all-mighty, all-wise, and all-holy—the want of belief in Him must be in all circumstances a great moral misfortune, and, wherever it arises from a want of desire to know Him, a serious moral fault, necessarily involving, as it does, indifference to one who deserves the highest love and deepest reverence, ingratitude to a benefactor whose bounties have been unspeakable, and the neglect of those habits of trust and prayer by which men realise the presence of infinite sympathy and implore the help of infinite strength. If there be a God, the virtue which takes no account of Him, even if it were otherwise faultless, must be most defective. The performance of personal and social duty can in that case no more compensate for the want of piety than justice can excuse intemperance or benevolence licentiousness.

Besides, if God exist—if piety, therefore, ought also to exist—it can scarcely be supposed that personal and social morality will not suffer when the claims of religion are unheeded. It has seemed to some that morality rests on religion, and cannot exist apart from it. And almost all who believe that there are religious truths which men, as reasonable beings, are bound to accept, will be found maintaining that, although morality may be independent of religion for its mere existence, a morality unsupported by religion would be insufficient to satisfy the wants of the personal and social life. Without religion, they maintain, man would not be able to resist the temptations and support the trials of his lot, and would be cut off from the source of his loftiest thoughts, his richest and purest enjoyments, and his most heroic deeds. Without it nations, they further maintain, would be unprogressive, selfish, diseased, corrupt, unworthy of life, incapable of long life. They argue that they find in human nature and in human history the most powerful reasons for thinking thus; and so much depends upon whether they are right or wrong, that they are obviously entitled to expect that these reasons, and also the grounds of religious belief, will be impartially and carefully examined and weighed.

It will be denied, indeed, by no one, that religious belief influences moral practice. Both reason and history make doubt on this point impossible. The convictions of a man's heart as to the supreme object of his reverence, and as to the ways in which he ought to show his reverence thereof, necessarily affect for good or ill his entire mind and conduct. The whole moral life takes a different colour according to the religious light which falls upon it. As the valley of the Rhone presents a different aspect when seen from a summit of the Jura and from a peak of the Alps, so the course of human existence appears very different when looked at from different spiritual points of view. Atheism, polytheism, pantheism, theism, cannot regard life and death in the same way, and cannot solve in the same way the problems which they present to the intellect and the heart. These different theories naturally—yea, necessarily—yield different moral results. Now, doubt may be entertained as to whether or not we can legitimately employ the maxim, "By their fruits ye shall know them," in attempting to ascertain the truth or falsity of a theory. The endeavour to support religion by appealing to its utility has been denounced as "moral bribery and subornation of the understanding."[3] But no man, I think, however scrupulous or exacting, can doubt that when one theory bears different moral and social fruits than another, that fact is a valid and weighty reason for inquiring very carefully which of them is true and which false. He who believes, for example, that there is a God, and he who believes that there is no being in the universe higher than himself—he who believes that material force is the source of all things, and he who believes that nature originated in an intelligent, holy, and loving Will,—must look upon the world, upon history, and upon themselves so very differently—must think, feel, and act so very differently—that for every man it must be of supreme importance to know which of these beliefs he is bound in reason to accept and which to reject.

Then, in the third place, the primary question in religion is immediately and inseparably connected with the ultimate question of science. Does the world explain itself, or does it lead the mind above and beyond itself? Science cannot but suggest this question; religion is an answer to it. When the phenomena of the world have been classified, the connections between them traced, their laws ascertained, science may, probably enough, have accomplished all that it undertakes—all that it can perform; but is it certain that the mind can ascend no further? Must it rest in the recognition of order, for example, and reject the thought of an intelligence in which that order has its source? Or, is this not to represent every science as leading us into a darkness far greater than any from which it has delivered us? Granting that no religious theory of the world can be accepted which contradicts the results established by the sciences, are we not free to ask, and even bound to ask—Do these results not, both separately and collectively, imply a religious theory of the world, and the particular religious theory, it may be, which is called theism? Are these results not the expressions of a unity and order in the world which can only be explained on the supposition that material nature, organic existences, the mind and heart of man, society and its history, have originated in a power, wisdom, and goodness not their own, which still upholds them, and works in and through them? The question is one which may be answered in various ways, and to which the answer may be that it cannot be answered; but be the answer that or another—be the answer what it may—obviously the question itself is a great one,—a greater than any science has ever answered—one which all science raises, and in the answering of which all science is deeply interested.

No scientific man can be credited with much insight who does not perceive that religious theory has an intimate and influential bearing on science. There are religious theories with which science cannot consistently coexist at all. Where fetichism or polytheism prevails, you cannot have science with its pursuit of general laws. A dualistic religion must, with all the strength it possesses, oppose science in the accomplishment of its task—the proof of unity and universal order. Even when the conception of One Creative Being is reached, there are ways of thinking of His character and agency which science must challenge, since they imperil its life and retard its progress. The medieval belief in miracles and the modern belief in law cannot be held by the same mind, and still less by the same society.

We have no reason, however, to complain at present that our scientific men are, as a class, wanting in the insight referred to, or that the truth just indicated is imperfectly realised by them. Perhaps such complaint was never less applicable. It is not long since it was the fashion among men of science to avoid all reference to religion—to treat religious theory and scientific theory as entirely separate and unconnected. They either cared not or dared not to indicate how their scientific findings were rationally related to current religious beliefs. But within the last few years there has been a remarkable change in this respect. The attitude of indifference formerly assumed by so many of the representatives of science towards religion has been very generally exchanged for one of aggression or defence. The number of them who seem to think themselves bound to publish to the world confessions of their faith, declarations of the religious conclusions to which their scientific researches have led them, is great, perhaps, beyond example in any age. They are manifesting unmistakably the most serious interest in the inquiry into the foundation of religion, and into the relationship of religion to science. The change is certainly one for the better. It is not wholly good only because scientific men in their excursions into the domain of religion are too frequently chargeable with a one-sidedness of view and statement which their scientific education might have been hoped to make impossible—only because they too seldom give to religious truths the patient and impartial consideration to which these are entitled. But most deserving of welcome is every evidence on their part of the conviction that when science goes deep enough it cannot but raise the questions to which religion professes to be an answer; so that the mind, instead of getting free from religious reflection by advancing in scientific inquiry, finds such reflection only the more incumbent on it the farther it advances—a conviction which falls short of, indeed, but is closely allied to, the belief so aptly expressed by Lord Bacon, "that while a slight taste of philosophy may dispose the mind to indifference to religion, deeper draughts must bring it back to it; that while on the threshold of philosophy, where second causes appear to absorb the attention, some oblivion of the highest cause may ensue, when the mind penetrates deeper, and sees the dependence of causes and the works of Providence, it will easily perceive, according to the mythology of the poets, that the upper link of nature's chain is fastened to Jupiter's throne." Men of science are simply exercising a right to which they are fully entitled when they judge of religion by what they find to be ascertained in science; and no class of men is more likely than they are to open up the way to points of view whence religious truth will be seen with a clearness and comprehensiveness greater than any to which professional theologians could hope of themselves to attain. He can be no wise theologian who does not perceive that to a large extent he is dependent on the researches of men of science for his data, and who, firm in the faith that God will never be disgraced by His works, is not ready to accept all that is truly discovered about these works, in order to understand thereby God's character.

The greatest issues, then, are involved in the investigation on which we enter. Can we think what these are, or reflect on their greatness, without drawing this inference, that we ought, in conducting it, to have no other end before us than that of seeking, accepting, and communicating the truth? This is here so important that everything beside it must be insignificant and unworthy. Any polemical triumphs which could be gained either by logical or rhetorical artifices would be unspeakably paltry. Nothing can be appropriate in so serious a discussion but to state as accurately as we can the reasons for our own belief in theism, and to examine as carefully and impartially as we can the objections of those who reject that belief, and their reasons for holding an opposite belief. It can only do us harm to overrate the worth of our own convictions and arguments, or to underrate the worth of those of others. We must not dare to carry into the discussion the spirit of men who feel that they have a case to advocate at all hazards. We must not try to conceal a weakness in our argumentation by saying hard things of those who endeavour to point it out. There is no doubt that character has an influence on creed—that the state of a man's feelings determines to a considerable extent the nature of his beliefs—that badness of heart is often the cause of perversity of judgment; but we have no right to begin any argument by assuming that this truth has its bright side—its side of promise—turned towards us, and its dark and threatening side turned towards those who differ from us. If we can begin by assuming our opponents to be wicked, why should we not assume them at once to be wrong, and so spare ourselves the trouble of arguing with them? It will be better to begin by assuming only what no one will question—namely, that it is a duty to do to others as we would have others do to us. When a man errs, it is a kindness to show him his error—and the greater the error, the greater the kindness; but error is so much its own punishment to every ingenuous nature, that to convince a person of it is all that one fallible person ought to do to another. The scoff and the sneer are out of place in all serious discussion; especially are they out of place when our minds are occupied with thoughts of Him who, if He exist, is the Father and Judge of us all, who alone possesses the full truth, and who has made us that we might love one another.[4]

II.

Theism is the doctrine that the universe owes its existence, and continuance in existence, to the reason and will of a self-existent Being, who is infinitely powerful, wise, and good. It is the doctrine that nature has a Creator and Preserver, the nations a Governor, men a heavenly Father and Judge. It is a doctrine which has a long history behind it, and it is desirable that we should understand how we are related to that history.

Theism is very far from coextensive with religion. Religion is spread over the whole earth; theism only over a comparatively small portion of it. There are but three theistic religions—the Mosaic, the Christian, and the Mohammedan. They are connected historically in the closest manner—the idea of God having been transmitted to the two latter, and not independently originated by them. All other religions are polytheistic or pantheistic, or both together. Among those who have been educated in any of these heathen religions, only a few minds of rare penetration and power have been able to rise by their own exertions to a consistent theistic belief. The God of all those among us who believe in God, even of those who reject Christianity, who reject all revelation, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. From these ancient Jewish fathers the knowledge of Him has historically descended through an unbroken succession of generations to us. We have inherited it from them. If it had not thus come down to us, if we had not been born into a society pervaded by it, there is no reason to suppose that we should have found it out for ourselves, and still less that we should merely have required to open our eyes in order to see it. Rousseau only showed how imperfectly he realised the dependence of man on man, and the extent to which tradition enters into all our thinking, when he pretended that a human being born on a desert island, and who had grown up without any acquaintance with other beings, would naturally, and without assistance, rise to the apprehension of this great thought. The Koran well expresses a view which has been widely held when it says, "Every child is born into the religion of nature; its parents make it a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian." The view is, however, not a true one. A child is born, not into the religion of nature, but into blank ignorance; and, left entirely to itself, it would probably never find out as much religious truth as the most ignorant of parents can teach it. It is doubtless better to be born into the most barbarous pagan society than it would be to be born on a desert island and abandoned to find out a religion for one's self.

The individual man left to himself is very weak. He is strong only when he can avail himself of the strength of many others, of the stores of power accumulated by generations of his predecessors, or of the combined forces of a multitude of his contemporaries. The greatest men have achieved what they have done only because they have had the faculty and skill to utilise resources vastly greater than their own. Nothing reaches far forward into the future which does not stretch far back into the past. Before a tragedy like 'Hamlet,' for example, could be written, it was requisite that humanity should have passed through ages of moral discipline, and should be in possession of vast and subtle conceptions such as could only be the growth of centuries, of the appropriate language at the appropriate epoch of its development, and of a noble style of literary workmanship. "We allow ourselves," says Mr Froude, "to think of Shakespeare, or of Raphael, or of Phidias as having accomplished their work by the power of their individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of perfection which prevails widely around it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No such single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear." What the historian has thus said as to art is equally true of all other forms of thinking and doing. It is certainly true of religious thought, which has never risen without much help to the sublime conception of one God. It is, in fact, an indisputable historical truth that we owe our theism in great part to our Christianity,—that natural religion has had no real existence prior to or apart from what has claimed to be revealed religion—and that the independence which it now assumes is that of one who has grown ashamed of his origin.

It does not in the least follow that we are to regard theism as merely or even mainly a tradition—as a doctrine received simply on authority, and transmitted from age to age, from generation to generation, without investigation, without reflection. It does not follow that it is not a truth the evidence of which has been seen in some measure by every generation which has accepted it, and into the depth and comprehensiveness and reasonableness of which humanity has obtained a constantly-growing insight. There have, it is true, been a considerable number of theologians who have traced all religious beliefs to revelation, and who have assigned to reason merely the function of passively accepting, retaining, and transmitting them. They have conceived of the first man as receiving the knowledge of God by sensible converse with Him, and of the knowledge thus received as transmitted, with the confirmation of successive manifestations, to the early ancestors of all nations. The various notions of God and a future state to be found in heathen countries are, according to them, broken and scattered rays of these revelations; and all the religious rites of prayer, purification, and sacrifice which prevail among savage peoples, are faint and feeble relics of a primitive worship due to divine institution. This view was natural enough in the early ages of the Christian Church and in medieval times, when the New World was undiscovered and a very small part of either Asia or Africa was known. It was consonant also to the general estimate of tradition as a means of transmitting truth, entertained by the Roman Catholic Church; but it is not consistent with the Protestant rejection of tradition, and it is wholly untenable in the light of modern science, the geography, ethnology, comparative mythology, &c., of the present day. A man who should thus account for the phenomena of the religious history of heathen humanity must be now as far behind the scientific knowledge of his age regarding the subject on which he theorises, as a man who should still ascribe, despite all geological proofs to the contrary, the occurrence of fossils in the Silurian beds to the action of the Noachian deluge.[5]

Theism has come to us mainly through Christianity. But Christianity itself rests on theism; it presupposes theism. It could only manifest, establish, and diffuse itself in so far as theism was apprehended. The belief that there is one God, infinite in power, wisdom, and goodness, has certainly not been wrought out by each one of us for himself, but has been passed on from man to man, from parent to child: tradition, education, common consent, the social medium, have exerted great influence in determining its acceptance and prevalence; but we have no right to conceive of them as excluding the exercise of reason and reflection. We know historically that reason and reflection have not been excluded from the development of theistic belief, but have been constantly present and active therein; that by the use of his reason man has in some countries gradually risen to a belief in one God; and that where this belief existed, he has, by the use of his reason, been continuously altering, and, it may be hoped, extending and improving his views of God's nature and operations. We know that in Greece, for example, the history of religion was not a merely passive and traditional process. We know as a historical fact that reason there undermined the polytheism which flourished when Homer sang; that it discovered the chief theistic proofs still employed, and attained in many minds nearly the same belief in God which now prevails. The experience of the ancient classical world is insufficient to prove that a purely rational philosophy can establish theism as the creed of a nation; but it is amply sufficient to prove that it can destroy polytheism, and find out all the principal arguments for theism. We know, further, that in no age of the history of the Christian Church has reason entirely neglected to occupy itself in seeking the grounds on which the belief of God can be rested. We know that reason is certainly not declining that labour in the present day. The theistic belief, although common to the whole Christian world, is one which every individual mind may study for itself, which no one is asked to accept without proof, and which multitudes have doubtless accepted only after careful consideration. It comes to us so far traditionally, but not nearly so much so as belief in the law of gravitation. For every one who has examined the evidences for belief in the law of gravitation, thousands on thousands have examined the evidences for the existence of God.

Tradition, then, does not necessarily exclude private judgment, and private judgment does not necessarily imply the rejection of tradition—that is, of transmitted belief. The one does not even necessarily confine or restrict the activity of the other. They are so far from being essentially antagonistic, that they may co-operate, may support and help each other; nay, they must do, if religious development is to be natural, easy, peaceful, and regular. This is but saying in another form that religious development, when true and normal, must combine and harmonise conservatism and progress. All development must do that, or it will be of an imperfect and injurious kind. In nature the rule of development is neither revolution nor reaction, but evolution—a process which is at once conservative and progressive, which brings the new out of the old by the continuous growth and elaboration of the germs of life into organic completeness. All that is essential in the old is retained and perfected, while the form is altered to accord with new circumstances and to respond to new wants. It should not be otherwise in the moral and social worlds. The only true progress there, also, is that continuous and consistent development which can only be secured through true conservatism—through retaining, applying, and utilising whatever truth and goodness the past has brought down to the present; and the only true conservatism is that which secures against stagnation and death by continuous progress. Therefore it is that, alike in matters of civil polity, of scientific research, and of religious life, wisdom lies in combining the conservative with the progressive spirit, the principle of authority with the principle of liberty, due respect to the collective reason in history with due respect to the rights of the individual reason. The man who has not humility enough to feel that he is but one among the living millions of men, and that his whole generation is but a single link in the great chain of the human race—who is arrogant enough to fancy that wisdom on any great human interest has begun with himself, and that he may consequently begin history for himself,—the man who is not conservative to the extent of possessing this humility, and shrinking from this arrogance, is no truly free man, but the slave of his own vanity, and the inheritance which his fathers have left him will be little increased by him. The man, on the other hand, who always accepts what is as what ought to be; who identifies the actual with the reasonable; who would have to-morrow exactly like to-day; who would hold fast what Providence is most clearly showing ought to pass away, or to pass into something better,—the man, in a word, who would lay an arrest on the germs of life and truth, and prevent them from sprouting and ripening—is the very opposite of genuinely conservative—is the most dangerous of destructives. There is nothing so conservative against decay and dissolution as natural growth, orderly progress.

The truth just stated is, as I have said, of universal application. But it is nowhere more applicable than in the inquiry on which we are engaged. The great idea of God—the sublimest and most important of all ideas—has come to us in a wondrous manner through the minds and hearts of countless generations which it has exercised and sustained, which it has guided in darkness, strengthened in danger, and consoled in affliction. It has come to us by a long, unbroken tradition; and had it not come to us, we should of a certainty not have found it out for ourselves. We should have had to supply its place, to fill "the aching void" within us caused by its absence, with some far lower idea, perhaps with some wild fiction, some foul idol. Probably we cannot estimate too humbly the amount or worth of the religious knowledge which we should have acquired, supposing we acquired any, if we had been left wholly to our own unaided exertions—if we had been cut off from the general reason of our race, and from the Divine Reason, which has never ceased to speak in and to our race.

While, however, the idea of God has been brought to us, and is not independently wrought out by us, no man is asked to accept it blindly or slavishly; no man is asked to forego in the slightest degree, even before this the most venerable and general of the beliefs of humanity, the rights of his own individual reason. He is free to examine the grounds of it, and to choose according to the result of his examination. His acceptance of the idea, his acquiescence in the belief, is of worth only if it be the free acceptance of, the loving acquiescence in, what his reason, heart, and conscience testify to be true and good. Therefore, neither in this idea or belief itself, nor in the way in which it has come to us, is there any restriction or repression of our mental liberty. And the mere rejection of it is no sign, as some seem to fancy, of intellectual freedom, of an independent judgment. It is no evidence of a man's being freer from incredulity than the most superstitious of his neighbours. "To disbelieve is to believe," says Whately. "If one man believes there is a God, and another that there is no God, whichever holds the less reasonable of these two opinions is chargeable with credulity. For the only way to avoid credulity and incredulity—the two necessarily going together—is to listen to, and yield to the best evidence, and to believe and disbelieve on good grounds." These are wise words of Dr Whately. Whenever reason has been awakened to serious reflection on the subject, the vast majority of men have felt themselves unable to believe that this mighty universe, so wondrous in its adjustments and adaptations, was the product of chance, or dead matter, or blind force—that the physical, mental, and moral order which they everywhere beheld implied no Supreme Intelligence and Will; and the few who can believe it, have assuredly no right, simply on the ground of such ability, to assume that they are less credulous, freer thinkers, than others. The disbelief of the atheist must ever seem to all men but himself to require more faith, more credulity, than the beliefs of all the legends of the Talmud.[6]

LECTURE II.

GENERAL IDEA OF RELIGION—COMPARISON OF POLYTHEISM AND PANTHEISM WITH THEISM—THE THREE GREAT THEISTIC RELIGIONS COMPARED—NO RELIGIOUS PROGRESS BEYOND THEISM.

I.

There are three great theistic religions. All of them can scarcely be supposed to be perfect. It is most unlikely that they should all be equal in rank and value. But to determine the position and worth of a religion, whether theistic or non-theistic, it is indispensable that we have some notion of what religion is in itself.

It is very difficult to give a correct definition or accurate description of religion. And the reason is that religion is so wide and diversified a thing. It has spread over the whole earth, and it has assumed an almost countless variety of forms. Some sense of an invisible power or powers ruling his destiny is manifested by man alike in the lowest stages of barbarism and in the highest stages of civilisation, but the rude savage and the cultured thinker conceive very differently of the powers which they adore. The aspects of religion are, in fact, numerous as the phases of human life and the steps of human progress. It extends its sway over all lands, ages, and peoples, and yet it is the same in no two countries, no two generations, no two men even. There is, accordingly, of necessity a great difficulty in finding an expression which will comprehend and suit the vast variety of forms assumed by the religious life. Instead of trying to find an expression of the kind, many, I might almost say most, theologians are content silently to substitute for religion the phases of it with which they are most familiar, and instead of a definition of religion, to give us, say, a definition of theism, or even of Christianity. It is the rule and not the exception to find the same theologians who define religion as the communion of man with God, or the self-surrender of the soul to God, arguing that religion is common to all races and peoples. Of course, this is self-contradictory. Their definitions identify religion with monotheism, and their arguments assume it to include pantheism, polytheism, fetichism, &c. Belief in the one God and the worship of Him are very far from being universal even at the present day. If there be no other religion—if nothing short of that be religion—there are still vast continents and populous nations where religion is unknown.

A definition of religion must completely circumscribe religion; it must not be applicable merely to one religion, or at the most to several out of the vast host of religions which are spread over the earth; it must draw a boundary line which includes all religions, the lowest as well as the highest, and which excludes all things else.[7] A definition thus extensive cannot be, in logical language, very comprehensive; to include all religions, it must not tell us much about what any religion is; in significance it can be neither rich nor definite. Perhaps if we say that religion is man's belief in a being or beings, mightier than himself and inaccessible to his senses, but not indifferent to his sentiments and actions, with the feelings and practices which flow from such belief, we have a definition of the kind required. I fear at least that any definition less abstract and vague will be found to apply only to particular forms or special developments of religion. Religion is man's communion, then, with what he believes to be a god or gods; his sense of relationship to, and dependence on, a higher and mysterious agency, with all the thoughts, emotions, and actions which proceed therefrom. The communion may be dark and gross, and find expression in impure and bloody rites, or it may be in spirit and in truth, and expressed in ways which educate and elevate both mind and heart. The belief may rest on wild delusions, on authority blindly accepted, or on rational grounds. The god may be some personified power of nature, some monstrous phantom of the brain, some imaginary demon of lust or cruelty; or it may be He in whom all truth, wisdom, goodness, and holiness have their source. But whatever be the form or character which religion presents, it always and everywhere involves belief in a god or object of worship, and feelings and actions corresponding to that belief. It is always and everywhere a consciousness of relationship to a worshipped being.

Is there any truth which can be affirmed to belong universally to this consciousness? If there be, it will hold good universally of religion, and the recognition of it will advance us a step in the knowledge of the nature of religion. One such truth at least, it appears to me, there is—viz., that the religious consciousness, or the frame and condition of spiritual life distinctive and essential in religion, is not peculiar to some one province of human nature, but extends into all its provinces. This truth has been often contradicted in appearance, seldom in reality. The seat of religion, as I indicated in last lecture, has been placed by some in the intellect, by others in the affections, and by others still in the will. It has been represented as knowing, or feeling, or doing. When we examine, however, the multitude of, at first glance, apparently very conflicting views which have originated in thus fixing upon some single mental faculty as the religious faculty, the organ and seat of religion, we soon find that they are not so discordant and antagonistic as they seem to be.

Those who represent religion as essentially knowledge or belief, do not really mean to affirm that anything entitled to be called religion is ever mere knowledge or mere belief; on the contrary, they proceed on the supposition that feeling and volition will correspond to the knowledge or belief. They define religion as knowledge or belief, and not as affection or volition, because, regarding religious knowledge or belief as the ground of religious feeling and willing, they think they may treat the two latter, not as constituents, but as consequences of religion. Then, although a few of those who have defined religion as feeling have written as if they supposed that the feeling rested upon no sort of apprehension or conviction, they have been very few, and they have never been able to explain what they meant. In presence of the Power which is manifested in the universe, or of the moral order of the world, they have felt an awe or joy, it may be, irresistibly raising them above themselves, above the hampering details of earth, and "giving fulness and tone to their existence;" and being unaccustomed to analyse states of consciousness, although familiar with the mechanics and chemistry of matter, they have overlooked the obvious fact, that but for an intellectual perception of the presence of an all-pervading Power, and all-embracing order, the awe and joy could never have been excited. Mere feeling cannot tell us anything about what is out of ourselves, and cannot take us out of ourselves. Mere feeling is, in fact, mere absurdity. It is but what we should expect, therefore, that all those capable of reflecting in any measure on mental processes who have placed the essence of religion in feeling, have always admitted that the religious feeling could not be wholly separated either from the power of cognition on the one hand, or the exertion of will on the other. Men like Schleiermacher and Opzoomer argue strenuously that religion is feeling and not knowledge or practice; but it is expressly on the ground that, as there can be what is called religious knowledge and practice without piety, the knowledge is a mere antecedent, and the practice a mere consequent. Those, again, who make religion consist essentially in an act of will, in the self-surrender of the soul to the object of its worship, do so, they tell us, because pious feeling, even though based on knowledge, is only religiousness, not religion—the capacity of being religious, not actually being so; and religion only exists as a reality, a completed thing, when the will of man submits itself to the Divine Will. But this is to acknowledge, you observe, that both thought and feeling are present and presupposed wherever religion exists.

Now, if the facts be as I have just stated, obviously the controversy as to whether religion is essentially knowing, feeling, or willing, is mainly verbal. It turns on an undefined use of the term essential. Thought, feeling, and will—knowledge, affection, and self-surrender—are admitted to be indissolubly united, inseparably present, in religion, even by those who will not admit them to be all its equally essential constituents. But in these circumstances, they should carefully explain what they mean by essential and non-essential, and tell us how we are to distinguish among inseparable states those which are essential from those which are non-essential. This they never do; this they cannot do. All facts which always go together, and are always equally found in any state or process, are its equally essential components. When we always find certain elements together, and can neither discover nor imagine them apart, we have no right to represent some of them as essential to the compound into which they enter, and others as non-essential. They are all essential.

The conclusion to which we are thus brought is, that religion belongs exclusively to no one part or province, no one disposition or faculty of the soul, but embraces the whole mind, the whole man. Its seat is the centre of human nature, and its circumference is the utmost limit of all the energies and capacities of that nature. At the lowest it has something alike of intellect, affection, and practical obedience in it. At its best it should include all the highest exercises of reason, all the purest and deepest emotions and affections, and the noblest kind of conduct. It responds to its own true nature only in the measure that it fills the whole intellect with light, satisfies the reverence and love of the most capacious heart, and provides an ideal and law for practical life in all its breadth. There is, then, a general notion of religion which includes all religions, and that notion both suggests to us that the various religions of the world are of very different values, and points us to a standard by which we may determine their respective rank, and estimate their worth. The definition of religion, in other words, though not to be confounded with the type or ideal of religion, is connected with it, and indicates what it is. The type is the normal and full development of what is expressed in the definition. It is the type, of course, and not the definition, which is the standard—the medium and measure of comparison. And the type or ideal of religion is the complete surrender of the heart, and strength, and soul, and mind of man to Deity. Only a religion which admits of a full communion of the reason, affection, and will of the worshipper with the object of his worship—only a religion which presents an object of worship capable of eliciting the entire devotion of the worshipper's nature, and at the same time of ennobling, enlarging, refining, and satisfying that nature—fully realises the idea of religion, or, in other words, can claim to be a perfect religion.[8]

II.

Applying the very general idea of religion which has now been reached, it soon becomes apparent that no religion can possibly claim to conform to it which does not present to man as the true and supreme object of his adoration, love, and obedience, the One Infinite Personal God—almighty, all-wise, and all-holy; or, in other words, that it is only in a theistic religion that whatever in religion is fitted to satisfy the reason and affections of man, and to strengthen and guide his will, can find its proper development.

Look at polytheism—the worship of more gods than one. Clearly religion can only be very imperfectly realised in any polytheistic form; and still more clearly are most of the forms which polytheism has actually assumed unspeakably degrading. Think for a moment of a human being worshipping a stock or a stone, a plant or a tree, a fish or serpent, an ox or tiger—of the negro of Guinea beating his gods when he does not get what he wishes, or the New Zealander trying to frighten them by threatening to kill and eat them—of the car of Juggernaut, the fires of Moloch, the sacrifices to the Mexican war-god, the abominations ascribed to Jupiter, the licentious orgies so widely practised by the heathen in honour of their deities. Reflect on such a scene as is brought before us in the forty-fourth chapter of Isaiah. The language of the prophet is so graphic that one almost seems to see the man whom he depicts choosing his tree in the forest and hewing it down—to see the smith working at it with his tongs among the coals, and hear the ring of his hammer—to see the carpenter with adze and line and compass shape it into an ugly monstrous shape, bearing faint resemblance to the human—to see the workman with one part of the tree kindling a fire, and baking bread, and roasting roast, and eating it, and then going up to the ugly, wooden, human shape that he has fashioned out of another part of the same tree, prostrating himself before it, feeling awed in its presence, and praying, "Deliver me; for thou art my god." The prophet obviously painted from the life, and his picture is still true to the life where polytheism prevails. But what could be more calculated to inspire both horror and pity? How awful is it that man should be able so to delude and degrade himself! As a rule, the gods of polytheists are such that, even under the delusion that they are gods, little improving communion with them is possible. As a rule, the religion of polytheists consists of vague, dark, wild imaginations, instead of true and reasoned convictions—of coarse, selfish desires, fear and suspicion, instead of love, and trust, and joy—and of arbitrary or even immoral rites and practices, instead of spiritual worship, and the conformity of the will to a righteous law.

Then, at the very best, polytheism must be far from good,—at its highest, it must be low. Were it much better than it has ever been—had it all the merits of Greek polytheism, without any of its faults, save those which are inherent in the very nature of polytheism—it would still be but a poor religion, for its essential and irremediable defects are such as to render it altogether incapable of truly satisfying the nature of man. It is a belief in more gods than one. This of itself is what reason cannot rest in—what reason is constantly finding out more clearly to be false. The more the universe is examined and understood, the more apparent does it become that it is a single, self-consistent whole—a vast unity in which nothing is isolated or independent. The very notion, therefore, of separate and independent deities, and still more, of course, of discordant or hostile deities, ruling over different departments of nature, is opposed to the strivings and findings of reason. The heart will no less vainly seek satisfaction in the belief of many gods. Its spiritual affections need a single Divine object. To distribute them among many objects is to dissipate and destroy them. The reverence, love, and trust which religion demands are a whole-hearted, absolute, unlimited reverence, love, and trust, such as can only be felt towards one God, with no other beside Him. The will of man in like manner requires to be under not a number of independent wills, but a single, all-comprehensive, perfectly consistent, and perfectly righteous will. It cannot serve many masters; it can only reasonably and rightly serve one. It can only yield itself up unreservedly to be guided by One Supreme Will. If there be no such will in the universe, but only a multitude of independent and co-ordinate wills, that full surrender of the will of the worshipper to the object of his worship, in which religion should find its consummation, is impossible.

Further, polytheism is not only the belief in more gods than one, but in gods all of which are finite. There can be no true recognition of the infinity of God where there is no true recognition of His unity. But the mind of man, although finite itself, cannot be satisfied with any object of worship which it perceives to be finite. It craves an infinite object; it desires to offer a boundless devotion; it seeks an absolute blessedness. The aim of the religious life is the communion of the finite with the infinite; and every religion, however otherwise excellent, which suppresses the infinite, and presents to the finite only the finite, is a failure.

Religion can no more attain to its proper development in pantheism than in polytheism. For pantheism denies that the One Infinite Being is a person—is a free, holy, and loving intelligence. It denies even that we ourselves are truly persons. It represents our consciousness of freedom and sense of responsibility as illusions. God, according to pantheism, alone is. All individual existences are merely His manifestations,—all our deeds, whether good or bad, are His actions; and yet, while all is God and God is all, there is no God who can hear us or understand us—no God to love us or care for us—no God able or willing to help us. Such a view of the universe may have its attractions for the poet and the philosopher in certain moods of mind, but it assuredly affords little foundation for religion, if religion be the communion of the worshipper and the worshipped. What communion of reason can a man have with a being which does not understand him, or of affection with a being which has no love, or of will with a being which has no choice or freedom, and is the necessary cause both of good and evil? Pantheism represents absorption in Deity, the losing of self in God, as the highest good of humanity; but this is a mere caricature of that idea of communion with God in which religion must find its realisation, as pantheism leaves neither a self to surrender, nor a personal God to whom to surrender it. The absorption of the finite in the infinite which pantheism preaches is as different from that surrender of the self to God, which is the condition of God dwelling in us and we in God, as night is from day, as death is from life.

We find ample historical confirmation of what has just been said in the very instructive fact, that widespread as pantheism is, it has never in itself been the religion of any people. It has never been more than the philosophy of certain speculative individuals. India is no exception, for even there, in order to gain and retain the people, pantheism has had to combine with polytheism. It is the personal gods of Hindu polytheism and not the impersonal principle of Hindu pantheism that the Hindu people worship. The Sankhya and Vedanta systems are no more religions than the systems of Spinoza, Schelling, or Hegel. They are merely philosophies. Buddhism has laid hold of the hearts of men to a wonderful extent; not, however, in virtue of the pantheism, scarcely dis-tinguishable from atheism, which underlies it, but because of the attractiveness of the character and teaching of the Buddha Sakyamuni himself, of the man-god who came to save men. The human heart cries out for a living personal God to worship, and pantheism fails miserably as a religion because it wholly disregards, yea, despises that cry.

We are compelled to pass onwards, then, to theism. And here, applying the same view of religion as before, it soon becomes obvious that of the three great theistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism—the last is far inferior to the other two, and the first is a transition to and preparation for the second. Although the latest of the three to arise, Mohammedanism is manifestly the least developed, the least matured. Instead of evolving and extending the theistic idea which it borrowed, it has marred and mutilated it. Instead of representing God as possessed of all spiritual fulness and perfection, it exhibits Him as devoid of the divinest spiritual attributes. Although the Suras of the Koran are all, with one exception, prefaced by the formula, "In the name of Allah, the God of mercy, the merciful," there is extremely little in them of the spirit of mercy, while they superabound in a fierce intolerance. Allah is set before us with clearness, with force, with intense sincerity, as endowed with the natural attributes which we ascribe to God, but only so as to exhibit very imperfectly and erroneously His moral attributes. He is set before us as God alone, beside whom there is none other; as the first and the last, the seen and the hidden; as eternal and unchanging; as omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; as the Creator, the Preserver, and the Judge of all;—but He is not set before us as truly righteous or even as truly reasonable, and still less as Love. He is set before us as an infinite and absolute arbitrary Will, the acts of which are right simply because they cannot be wrong, and which ordains its creatures and instruments to honour or dishonour, heaven or hell, without love or hate, without interest or sympathy, and on no grounds of fitness or justice.

His infinite exaltation above His creatures is recognised, but not His relationship to and interest in His creatures. His almighty power is vividly apprehended, but His infinite love is overlooked, or only seen dimly and in stray and fitful glimpses. His character is thus most imperfectly unveiled, and even seriously defaced; and, in consequence, a whole-hearted communion with Him is impossible. As an unlimited arbitrary Will He leaves man with no true will to surrender to Him. Inaccessible, without sympathy, jealous, and egoistic, His appropriate worship is servile obedience, blind submission—not the enlightened reverence and loving affection of the true piety in which mind and heart fully accord; unquestioning belief, passionless resignation, outward observances, mere external works—not the free use of reason, not the loving dependence of a child on its father, not an internal life of holiness springing from a divine indwelling source. God and man thus remain in this system, theistic although it be, infinitely separate from each other. Man is not made to feel that his whole spiritual being should live and rejoice in God; on the contrary, he is made to feel that he has scarcely any other relation to God than an inert instrument has to the hand which uses it. Submission to the will of God, whatever it may be, without recognition of its being the will of a Father who seeks in all things the good of His children, is the Mussulman's highest conception either of religion or duty, and consequently he ignores the central principle of religious communion and the strongest motive to moral action.

The theism of the Old Testament is incomparably superior to that of the Koran. It possesses every truth contained in Mohammedanism, while it gives due prominence to those aspects of the Divine character which Mohammedanism obscures and distorts. The unity and eternity of God, His omniscience, omnipresence, and inscrutable perfections, the wonders of His creative power, His glory in the heavens and on the earth, are described by Moses and the author of the Book of Job, by the psalmists and the prophets, in language so magnificent that all the intervening centuries have been unable to surpass it. And yet far greater stress is justly laid by them on the moral glory of God, which is reflected in so dim and broken and disproportionate a way through the visions of Mohammed. It is impossible to take a comprehensive view of the Old Testament dispensation without perceiving that its main aim, alike in its ceremonial observances, moral precepts, and prophetic teaching, was to open and deepen the sense of sin, to give reality and intensity to the recognition of moral law, to make known especially that aspect of God's character which we call His righteousness, His holiness. At the same time God is set forth as merciful, long-suffering, and gracious; as healing our diseases, redeeming our life, and crowning us with loving-kindnesses; as creating in us clean hearts, and desiring not sacrifice but a broken spirit.

Before the close of the Old Testament dispensation, a view of God's character had been attained as complete as could be reached through mere spiritual vision and expressed through mere words. The character of God was so disclosed that His people longed with their whole hearts for the blessedness of true spiritual communion with Him, and worthily apprehended what that communion ought to be. But with the widening of their views and the deepening of their longings as to this the supreme good, they realised the more how far they were from the attainment of it. From the beginning Judaism looked beyond itself and confessed its own preparatory and transitional character. And this consciousness grew with its growth. In the days of the later prophets men knew far better what spiritual communion with God ought to be than in the days of the patriarchs, but they did not actually enjoy even the same measure of childlike communion with Him. The law had done its work; it had made men feel more than ever the need of being in communion with God, but it had made them realise also the distance between God and them, and especially the awful width of the gulf between them caused by sin.

That gulf no mere spiritual vision of man could see across, and no mere declarations of love and mercy even from God Himself could bridge over. The reason of man could only be enlightened—the heart of man could only be satisfied—as to how God would deal with sin and sinners, by an actual self-manifestation of God in humiliation, suffering, and sacrifice, which would leave men in no doubt that high and holy as God was, He was also in the deepest and truest sense their Father, and that they were His ransomed and redeemed children. It was only when this was accomplished that religion and theism were alike perfected. Then the character of God was unveiled, the heart of God disclosed, and in such a manner that the most childlike confidence in Him could be combined with the profoundest sense of His greatness and righteousness. Perfect communion with Him in trustful love no longer supposed, as it did in earlier times, an imperfect knowledge, on the part of the worshipper, either of God's character or of his own. It required no overlooking of the evil of sin, for it rested on the certainty that sin had been overcome. Only the life hid with God in Christ can completely realise the idea of religion, for only in Christ can the heart of sinful man be sincerely and unreservedly yielded to a holy God. "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me," are words of the Lord Jesus which can only be denied by those who do not understand what they mean—what the truth and the life are, what fatherhood signifies, and what is involved in coming to a Father.

Christian theism alone gives us a perfect representation of God. It precedes and surpasses reason, especially in the disclosure of the depths of fatherly love which are in the heart of the infinite Jehovah; but it nowhere contradicts reason—nay, it incorporates all the findings of reason. It presents as one great and brilliant light all the scattered sparks of truth which scintillated amidst the darkness of heathendom; it combines into a living unity all the separate elements of positive truth which are to be found in systems like pantheism, deism, rationalism; it excludes all that is false in views lower than or contrary to its own. Whenever it maintains a truth regarding God, reason finds that it is defending a principle of Christian theism; whenever it refutes an error regarding Him, it finds itself assailing some one of the many enemies of Christian theism.

III.

Theism, I argued in last lecture, can never be reasonably rejected in the name of religious liberty. I may now, I think, maintain that it can never be reasonably thrown off in the name of religious progress. It can never be an onward step in the spiritual life to pass away from the belief which is distinctive and characteristic of theism. The highest possible form of religion must be a theistic religion—a religion in which the one personal and perfect God is the object of worship. Fetichism, nature-worship, humanitarian polytheism, and pantheism, are all very much lower forms of religion, and therefore to abandon theism for any of them is not to advance but to retrograde, is not to rise but to fall. We can turn towards any of them only by turning our back on the spiritual goal towards which humanity has been slowly but continuously moving through so many ages. There is no hope or possibility of advance on the side of any of the old forms of heathendom.

Shall we try, then, to get out of and beyond theism on that other side to which some moderns beckon us? Shall we suppose that as men have given up the lower for the higher forms of polytheism, and then abandoned polytheism for theism, so they may now surrender theism itself for systems like the positivism of Comte or the new faith of Strauss? No. And for two reasons. First, so far as there is any religion in these systems there is no advance on theism in them but the reverse. Comte strives to represent humanity, and Strauss to represent the universe, as a god, by imaginatively investing them with attributes which do not inherently and properly belong to them; but with all their efforts they can only make of them fetich gods; and Europeans, it is to be hoped, will never fall down and worship fetiches, however big these fetiches may be, and whoever may be willing to serve them as prophets or priests. Humanity must be blind to its follies and sins, insensible to its weakness and miseries, and given over to the madness of a boundless vanity, before it can raise an altar and burn incense to its own self. "Man," says an eloquent author, "is great is sublime, with immortal hope in his heart and the divine aureole around his brow; but that he may preserve his greatness let us leave him in his proper place. Let us leave to him the struggles which make his glory, that condemnation of his own miseries which does him honour, the tears shed over his faults which are the most unexceptionable testimony to his dignity. Let us leave him tears, repentance, conflict, and hope; but let us not deify him; for no sooner shall he have said, 'I am God,' than, deprived that instant of all his blessings, he shall find himself naked and spoiled."[9] Man, I may add, if his eyes be open and capable of vision, can still less worship the universe than he can worship himself. Mind can never bow down to matter except under the influence of delusion. Man is greater than anything he can see or touch; and those who believe only in what they can see and touch, who have what Strauss calls a feeling for the universe, but no true feeling for what is spiritual and divine, must either worship humanity or something even less worthy of their adoration. There is thus no advance on this side either, even if the systems which we are invited to adopt could be properly regarded as religious. But, secondly, we may safely say that so far as they are theories based on science, there is no religion in them; and that, consequently, to give up a religion for them would be to give up not one form of religion for another, a lower for a higher, but would be to give up religion for what is not religion, or, in other words, would be to cast off religion altogether. And to cease to be religious can surely never be to advance in religion. Positivism and materialism are not stages beyond theism, for they are not on the same road. They are not phases in the development of religion; they are forms of the denial of religion. The grossest fetichism has more of religion in it than either of them can consistently claim on scientific grounds. There is nothing in science, properly so called, which justifies the exaltation either of matter or man to the rank of gods even of the lowest fetich order.

It is only, then, by keeping within the limits of theism that further religious progress is possible. If we would advance in religion, it must be, not by getting rid of our belief in God, but by getting deeper and wider views of His character and operations, and by conforming our hearts and lives more sincerely and faithfully to our knowledge. There is still ample room for religious progress of this kind. I do not say, I do not believe indeed, that we shall find out any absolutely new truth about God. Were a man to tell me that he had discovered a Divine attribute which had never previously been thought of, I should listen to him with the same incredulous pity as if he were to tell me that he had discovered a human virtue which had escaped the notice of all other men. In a real and important sense, the revelation of God made in Scripture, and more particularly and especially the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, is most justly to be regarded as complete, and incapable of addition. But there may be no limits to the growth of our apprehension and realisation of the idea of God there set before us perfectly as regards general features. To perceive the mere general outline and general aspect of a truth is one thing, and to know it thoroughly, to realise it exhaustively—which is the only way thoroughly to know it—is another and very different thing; and centuries, yea, millenniums without number, may elapse between the former and the latter of these two stages, between the beginning and the end of this process. Thousands of years ago there were men who said as plainly as could be done or desired that God was omnipotent; but surely every one who believes in God will acknowledge, that the discoveries of modern astronomy give more overwhelming impressions of Divine power than either heathen sage or Hebrew psalmist can be imagined as possessing. It is ages since men ascribed perfect wisdom to God; but all the discoveries of science which help us to understand how the earth is related to other worlds—how it has been brought into its present condition—how it has been stocked, adorned, and enriched with its varied tribes of plants and animals—and how these have been developed, distributed, and provided for,—must be accepted by every intelligent theist as enlarging and correcting human views as to God's ways of working, and consequently as to His wisdom. The righteousness of God has been the trust and support of men in all generations; but history is a continuous unveiling of the mysteries of this attribute: through the discipline of Providence individuals and nations are ever being more thoroughly instructed in the knowledge of it. I have, indeed, heard men say—I have heard even teachers of theology say—that the knowledge of God is unlike all other knowledge, in being unchanging and unprogressive. To me it seems that of all knowledge the knowledge of God is, or at least ought to be, the most progressive. And that for this simple reason, that every increase of other knowledge,—be it the knowledge of outward nature, or of the human soul, or of history—be it the knowledge of truth, or beauty, or goodness,—ought also to increase our knowledge of Him. If it do not, it has not been used aright; and the reason why it has not been so used must be that we have looked upon God as if He were only one among many things, instead of looking upon Him as the One Being of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things; and that we have, in consequence, kept our knowledge of Him wholly apart from our other knowledge, instead of centring all our knowledge in it, because we feel it to be "the light of all our seeing," as well as "a lamp to our feet." In other words, our knowledge of God is in this case not a living, all-diffusive knowledge. Only a dead knowledge of Him is an unprogressive knowledge. That, I admit, is unprogressive. It may fade away and be effaced, but it does not grow, does not absorb and assimilate, and thereby transmute and glorify all our other knowledge.

Growth in the knowledge of God is a kind of progress which can have absolutely no end, for the truth to be realised is infinite truth; truth unlimited by time or space; truth involved in all actual existence, and containing the fulness of inexhaustible possibilities. It is, I shall conclude by adding, a kind of progress which underlies and determines all other progress. Whenever our views of truth, of righteousness, of love, of happiness rise above experience; whenever we have ideals of existence and conduct which transcend the actual world and actual life; whenever we have longings for a perfection and blessedness which finite things and finite persons cannot confer upon us,—our minds and hearts are really, although it may be unconsciously, feeling after God, if haply they may find Him. It is only in and through God that there is anything to correspond to these ideals and longings. If man be himself the highest and best of beings, how comes it that all the noblest of his race should be haunted and possessed as they are by aspirations after what is higher and better than themselves—by visions of a truth, beauty, and holiness which they have not yet attained—by desires for a blessedness which neither earth nor humanity can bestow? Must not, in that case, his ideals be mere dreams—his longings mere delusions? Pessimists like Schopenhauer and Hartmann and their followers, openly avow that they believe them to be so; that the history of the world is but the series of illusions through which these ideals and longings have impelled humanity; that our ideals never have been and never will be realised; that our longings never have been and never will be satisfied, for, "behold, all is vanity." I believe them to be quite logical in thinking so, seeing that they have ceased to believe in God, who is the ideal which alone gives meaning to all true ideals, who can alone satisfy the deeper spiritual longings of the heart, and likeness to whom is the goal of all mental, moral, and religious progress. Of course, if the pessimists can persuade mankind that the sources of progress are not the truths and affections by which Infinite Goodness is drawing men to itself, but mere fictions of their own brains and flatteries of their own hearts, progress must soon cease. When a delusion is seen through, the power of it is gone. But the pessimists will not, we may trust, succeed. They will mislead for a time, as they are now misleading, certain unstable minds; but the main result of their activity must be just the opposite of what they anticipate. It must be that men will prize more the doctrines the most opposite to the dreary view of life and history which they propagate. Pessimism must send the philosophical few back with deepened reverence and quickened insight to Plato, in order to master more thoroughly, and take to heart more seriously, his great message to the world, that the actual and the ideal meet and harmonise in God, who is at once the First and the Final Cause, the Absolute Idea, the Highest Good; and it must increase the gratitude of the many, whether learned or unlearned, for the Gospel which has taught them that to glorify God is an end in which there is no illusion, and to enjoy Him a good which never disappoints. God, as the presupposition of all elevating ideals, and the object of all ennobling desires, is the primary source and the ultimate explanation of all progress.[10]

LECTURE III.

THE NATURE, CONDITIONS, AND LIMITS OF THEISTIC PROOF.

I.

If we believe that there is one God—the Creator, Preserver, and Ruler of all finite beings—we ought to have reasons or grounds for this belief. We can have no right to believe it simply because we wish or will to believe it. The grounds or reasons which we have for our belief must be to us proofs of God's existence. Those who affirm that God exists, and yet deny that His existence can be proved, must either maintain a position obviously erroneous, or use the term proof in some extraordinary sense, fitted only to perplex and mislead. True and weighty, therefore, seem to me these words of one of the most distinguished of living German philosophers: "The proofs for the existence of God, after having long played a great part in philosophy and theology, have in recent times, especially since Kant's famous critique, fallen into disrepute. Since then, the opinion has been widely spread, both among believers and unbelievers, that the existence of God does not admit of being proved. Even theologians readily assent to this opinion, deride the vain attempts, and imagine that in so doing they are serving the faith which they preach. But the proofs for the existence of God coincide with the grounds for the belief in God; they are simply the real grounds of the belief established and expounded in a scientific manner. If there be no such proofs, there are also no such grounds; and a belief which has no ground, if possible at all, can be no proper belief, but an arbitrary, self-made, subjective opinion. Yes, religious belief must sink to the level of the mere illusion or fixed idea of a mind which is insane, if contradicted by all reality, all facts scientifically established, and the theory of the universe which such facts support and justify."[11]

The proofs of God's existence must be, in fact, simply His own manifestations; the ways in which He makes Himself known; the phenomena on which His power and character are imprinted. They can neither be, properly speaking, our reasonings, nor our analyses of the principles involved in our reasonings. Our reasonings are worth nothing except in so far as they are expositions of God's modes of manifestation; and even when our reasonings are correct, our analyses of them, supposing we attempt to analyse them, may be erroneous. The facts,—the works and ways of God—which are the real evidences of His existence and the true indications of His character,—may raise countless minds to God which can give no general description of the process by which they are thus elevated, and are still less capable of resolving it into its principles. It is late in the history both of the individual mind and of the collective mind before they can so reflect on their own acts, so distinguish them one from another, and so discern the characteristics of each, as to be able even to give a clear and correct account of them; and it is much later before they can detect their conditions and laws. The minds of multitudes may therefore readily be supposed to rise legitimately from perception of the visible universe to apprehension of the invisible personal Creator, although either wholly unconscious or only dimly and inaccurately aware of the nature of the transition, and although, if called on to indicate the conclusion at which they had arrived, they would employ far weaker reasons in words than those by which they were actually convinced in thought. The principles of the theistic inference may be very badly determined, and yet the theistic inference itself may be perfectly valid.

If the real proofs of God's existence are all those facts which cannot be reasonably conceived of as other than the manifestations of God—His glory in the heavens, His handiwork on the earth, His operations in the soul, His ways among the nations—and if the task of the theist is to trace out these facts, and to show that they cannot reasonably be denied to be marks or impressions of Divine agency, then must a theist, when seeking or expounding the reasons for his belief, feel that his mind is conversant not with mere thoughts of his own, but with the manifested thoughts or acts of God Himself. He must carry into his inquiry the consciousness that he is not simply engaged in an intellectual process, but is trying to apprehend and actually apprehending the Divine Being. To him, therefore, the inquiry as to the ultimate source and reason of things must be an essentially solemn and awe-inspired one. To the atheist it must, of course, be much less so; but even he ought to feel it to be not only a most important inquiry, but one which carries him into the presence of a vast, eternal, and mysterious power—a power in darkness shrouded, yet on which hang all life and death, all joy and woe.

According to the view just stated, the evidences or proofs of God's existence are countless. They are to be found in all the forces, laws, and arrangements of nature—in every material object, every organism, every intellect and heart. At the same time, they concur and coalesce into a single all-comprehensive argument, which is just the sum of the indications of God given by the physical universe, the minds of men, and human history. Nothing short of that is the full proof. There may be points in space and instants in time where creative and sustaining power appear to our narrow and superficial intellects to have been strangely limited, but surely we ought not so to concentrate our attention on any such points or instants as to be unable to take in a general impression of the immeasurable power displayed throughout the realms of space and the ages of time. It may be possible to show that many things which have been regarded as evidences of intelligence or wisdom are not really so, and yet the universe may teem with the manifestations of these attributes. Faith in the righteousness and moral government of God must be able to look over and to look beyond many things calculated to produce doubt and disbelief. No man can judge fairly as to whether or not there is a God, who makes the question turn on what is the significance of a few particular facts, who is incapable of gathering up into one general finding the results of innumerable indications. A true religious view of the world must be a wide, a comprehensive view of it, such as demands an eye for the whole and not merely for a part—the faculties which harmonise and unify, and not merely those which divide and analyse. A part, a point, the eye of an insect, the seed of a fruit, may indeed be looked at religiously, but it must be in the light of the universe as a whole, in the light of eternity and infinity.

"Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
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."

In another respect the theistic proof is exceedingly complex and comprehensive. It takes up into itself, as it were, the entire wealth of human nature. The mind can only rise to the apprehension of God by a process which involves all that is most essential in its own constitution. Thus the will is presupposed. Theistic inference clearly involves the principle of causality. God can only be thought of in the properly theistic sense as the cause of which the universe is the effect. But to think of God as a cause—to apprehend the universe as an effect,—we must have some immediate and direct experience of causation. And such experience we have only in the consciousness of volition. When the soul wills, it knows itself as an agent, as a cause. This is the first knowledge of causation which the mind requires, and the most perfect knowledge thereof which it ever requires. It is a knowledge which sheds light over all the regions of experience subsequently brought under the principle of causality, which accompanies the reason in its upward search until it rests in the cognition of an ultimate cause, and which enables us to think of that cause as the primary, all-originating will. If we did not know ourselves as causes, we could not know God as a cause; and we know ourselves as causes only in so far as we know ourselves as wills.

But the principle of causality alone or by itself is quite insufficient to lead the mind up to the apprehension of Deity; and an immediate and direct consciousness of far more within us than will is required to make that apprehension possible. The evidences of intelligence must be combined with the evidences of power before we can be warranted to infer more from the facts of the universe than the existence of an ultimate force; and no mere force, however great or wonderful, is worthy to be called God. God is not only the ultimate Cause, but the Supreme Intelligence; and as it is only in virtue of the direct consciousness of our volitions that we can think of God as a cause, so is it only in virtue of the direct consciousness of our intellectual operations that we can think of Him as an intelligence. It is not from the mere occurrence of a change, or the mere existence of a derivative phenomenon, that we infer the change or phenomenon to be due to an intelligent cause, but from the mode of the occurrence or the character of the phenomenon being such that any cause but an intelligent cause must be deemed an insufficient cause. The inference supposes, however, that we already have some knowledge of what an intelligent cause is—that we have enough of knowledge of the nature of intelligence to convince us that it alone can fully account for order, law, and adjustment. Whence do we get this knowledge? We have not far to seek it; it is inherent in self-consciousness. We know ourselves as intelligences, as beings that foresee and contrive, that can discover and apply principles, that can originate order and adjustment. It is only through this knowledge of the nature of intelligence that we can infer our fellow-men to be intelligent beings; and not less is it an indispensable condition of our inferring God to be an intelligence.

Then, causality and design, and the will and intelligence within us through which they are interpreted, cannot, even when combined, enable us to think of the Creative Reason as righteous; although obviously, until so thought of, that reason is by no means to be identified with God. The greatest conceivable power and intelligence, if united with hatred of righteousness and love of wickedness, can yield us only the idea of a devil; and if separated from all moral principle and character, good or bad, only that of a being far lower than man, which might have reason for worshipping man, but which man cannot worship without degrading himself. The existence, however, of a moral principle within us, of a conscience which witnesses against sin and on behalf of holiness, is of itself evidence that God must be a moral being, one who hates sin and loves holiness; and the light of this, "the candle of the Lord," in the soul, enables us to discover many other reasons for the same conclusion in the constitution of society and the course of history. But if we had no moral perceptions on the contemplation of our own voluntary acts, we certainly would not, and could not, invest the Divine Being with moral perfections because of His acts.

There is still another step to be taken in order to obtain an apprehension of God; and it is one where the outward universe fails us, where we are thrown entirely, or nearly so, on our internal resources. The universe, interpreted by the human mind in the manner which has been indicated, may warrant belief in a Being whose power is immense, whose wisdom is inexpressibly wonderful, and whose righteousness is to be held in profoundest admiration and reverence, notwithstanding all the clouds and darkness which may in part conceal it from our view; but not in a Being whose existence is absolute, whose power is infinite, whose wisdom and goodness are perfect. We cannot infer that the author of a universe which is finite, imperfect, and relative, and all the phenomena of which are finite, imperfect, and relative, must be, in the true and strict sense of the terms, infinite, perfect, and absolute. We cannot deduce the infinite from the finite, the perfect from the imperfect, the absolute from the relative. And yet it is only in the recognition of an absolute Being of infinite power, who works with perfect wisdom towards the accomplishment of perfectly holy ends, that we reach a true knowledge of God, or, which is much the same thing, a knowledge of the true God. Is there, then, any warrant in our own nature for thinking of God as infinite, absolute, and perfect, since there seems to be little or none in outward nature? Yes, there are within us necessary conditions of thought and feeling and ineradicable aspirations which force on us ideas of absolute existence, infinity, and perfection, and will neither permit us to deny these perfections to God nor to ascribe them to any other being.

Thus the mental process in virtue of which we have the idea of God comprehends and concentrates all that is most essential in human nature. It is through bearing the image of God that we are alone able to apprehend God. Take any essential feature of that image out of a human soul, and to apprehend God is made thereby impossible to it. All that is divine in us meets, unites, co-operates, to lay hold of what is divine without us. Hence the fuller and clearer the divine image is in any man, the fuller and clearer will be his perception of the divine original. Hence what is more or less true everywhere, is especially and emphatically true in religion, that "the eye sees only what it brings with it the power of seeing." Where the will, for example, is without energy—where rest is longed for as the highest good, and labour deemed the greatest evil—where extinction is preferred to exertion,—the mind of a nation may be highly cultured, and subtle and profound in speculation, and yet may manifest a marked inability to think of God as a cause or will, with a consequently inveterate tendency to pantheism. The Hindu mind, and the systems of religion and philosophy to which it has given birth, may serve as illustration and proof. Where the animal nature of man is strong, and his moral and spiritual nature still undeveloped, as is the case among all rude and undisciplined races, he worships not the pure and perfect supreme Spirit, whose goodness, truth, and righteousness are as infinite as His power and knowledge, but gods endowed in his imagination chiefly with physical and animal qualities. "Recognition of Nature," says Mr Carlyle, "one finds to be the chief element of Paganism; recognition of Man and his Moral Duty—though this, too, is not wanting—comes to be the chief element only in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, is a great distinction and epoch in Human Beliefs; a great landmark in the religious development of Mankind. Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her Powers, wonders and worships over those; not till a later epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of Thou shalt, and thou shalt not." The explanation of the historical truth thus stated by Mr Carlyle is just that man is vividly alive to the wants and claims of his body and merely natural life during long ages in which he is almost dead to the wants and claims of his spirit or true self and the moral life. So the ordinary mind is prone, even at present, in the most civilised countries of the world, to think of God after the likeness of man, or, in other words, as a vastly magnified man. Why? Because the ordinary mind is always very feebly and dimly conscious of those principles of reason which demand in God the existence of attributes neither to be found in the physical universe nor in itself. Some exercise in speculation, some training in philosophy, is needed to make us reflect on them; and until we reflect on them we cannot be expected to do them justice in the formation of our religious convictions. Those who have never thought on what infinite and unconditioned mean, and who have never in their lives grappled with a metaphysical problem, will infer quite as readily as if they had spent their days in philosophical speculation that all the power and order in the universe, and all the wisdom and goodness in humanity, are the reflections of a far higher power, wisdom, and goodness in their source—the Divine Mind; but they must realise much less correctly in what respects God cannot be imaged in His works: they may do equal or even fuller justice to what is true in anthropomorphism, but they cannot perceive as distinctly where anthropomorphism is false. It is only through the activity of the speculative reason that religion is prevented from becoming a degrading anthropomorphism, that the mind is compelled to think of God not merely as a Father, King, and Judge, but as the Absolute and Infinite Being. This is, perhaps, the chief service which philosophy renders to religion; and it ought not to be undervalued, notwithstanding that philosophy has often, in checking one error, fallen into another as great, or even greater, denying that there is any likeness between God and man.

While the mental process which has been described—the theistic inference—is capable of analysis, it is in itself synthetic. The principles on which it depends are so connected that the mind can embrace them all in a single act, and must include and apply them all in the apprehension of God. Will, intelligence, conscience, reason, and the ideas which they supply; cause, design, goodness, infinity, with the arguments which rest on these ideas,—all coalesce into this one grand issue. The inferences are as inseparable as the principles from which they spring. A very large number of the objections to theism arise wholly from inattention to this truth. Men argue as if each principle involved in the knowledge of God were to be kept strictly by itself, as if each argument brought forward as leading to a theistic conclusion were to be jealously isolated; and then, if the last result of the principle, the conclusion of the argument, be not an adequate knowledge of God, they pronounce the principle altogether inapplicable, and the argument altogether fallacious. It is strange that this procedure should not be universally seen to be sophistical in the extreme—a kind of reasoning which, if generally adopted, would at once arrest all science and all business; but obviously anti-theists think differently, for they habitually have recourse to it. If you argue, for example, that the universe is an event or effect which must have an adequate cause, they will question your right to refer to the order which is in the universe as a proof that it is an event or effect, because order implies another principle, and is the ground of another argument. They overlook that you are not making an abstract use of the principle of causality, and that you are not arguing from the mere terms universe and event, but from the universe itself; and that in order to know whether it be an event or not—an effect or not—you must study it as it is, and take everything into account which bears on the question. They reason as if they supposed that a cause and an intelligence must be two different things, and that a cause cannot be an intelligence, nor an intelligence a cause. Similarly, the arguments from the power, order, and goodness displayed in nature have often been objected to altogether, have often been pronounced worthless, because they do not in themselves prove God to be infinitely powerful, wise, and good. They are brought forward to show that the Author of the universe must have the power, wisdom, and goodness required to create and govern it; and forthwith many oppose them by declaring that they do not show Him to be infinite. Now, no man who did not imagine nature to be infinite ever adduced them to prove God infinite. Their not proving that, is therefore no reason for denying them to prove what they profess to prove. No argument can stand if we may reject it because it does not prove more than it undertakes to prove.

It is clear that the evidences of design, instead of being wholly distinct from the evidences of power, and independent of the principle of causality, are evidences of a kind of power and manifestations of a kind of causality—intelligent power and causality. In like manner the evidences of goodness are also evidences of design, for goodness is a form of design—morally, beneficent design. Although causality does not involve design, nor design goodness, design involves causality, and goodness both causality and design. The proofs of intelligence are also proofs of power; the proofs of goodness are proofs both of intelligence and power. The principles of reason which compel us to think of the Supreme Moral Intelligence as a self-existent, eternal, infinite, and unchangeable Being, supplement the proofs from other sources, and give self-consistency and completeness to the doctrine of theism. The various theistic arguments are, in a word, but stages in a single rational process, but parts of one comprehensive argument. They are naturally, and, as it were, organically related—they support and strengthen one another. It is therefore an arbitrary and illegitimate procedure to separate them any farther than may be necessary for the purpose of clear and orderly exposition. It is sophistry to attempt to destroy them separately by assailing each as if it had no connection with the other, and as if each isolated fragmentary argument were bound to yield as large a conclusion as all the arguments combined. A man quite unable to break a bundle of rods firmly bound together may be strong enough to break each rod separately. But before proceeding to deal with the bundle in that way, he may be required to establish his right to untie it, and to decline putting forth his strength upon it as it is presented to him.[12]

II.

The theistic inference, although a complex process, is not a difficult one. It looks, indeed, long and formidable when analysed in books of evidences, and elaborated with perverse ingenuity into series of syllogisms. But numerous processes, very simple and easy in themselves, are toilsome and troublesome to analyse, or describe, or comprehend. Vision and digestion are, in general, not difficult bodily functions, but they have been the subjects of a great many very large treatises; and doubtless physiologists have not even yet found out all that is to be known about them. As a rule, the theistic process is as simple and easy an operation for the mind as vision or digestion for the body. The multitude of books which have been written in explanation and illustration of it, and the subtle and abstruse character of the researches and speculations contained in many of these books, are not the slightest indications of its being other than simple and natural in itself. The inferences which it involves are, in fact, like those which Weber, Helmholtz, and Zöllner have shown to be implied in the perceptions of sense, involuntary and unconscious. If not perfectly instantaneous, they are so rapid and spontaneous as to have seemed to many intuitive. And in a loose sense, perhaps, they may be considered so. Not, however, strictly and properly, since the idea of Deity is no simple idea, but the most complex of ideas, comprehending all that is great and good in nature and man, along with perfections which belong to neither nature nor man; and since the presence of Deity is not seen without the intervention of any media—face to face, eye to eye—but only as "through a glass darkly." The contemplation of nature, and mind, and history is an indispensable stage towards the knowledge of Him. Physical and mental facts and laws are the materials or data of reason in its quest of religious truth. There is a rational transition from the natural to the supernatural, wherever the latter is reached.

Our knowledge of God is obtained as simply and naturally as our knowledge of our fellow-men. It is obtained, in fact, mainly in the same way. In both cases we refer certain manifestations of will, intelligence, and goodness—qualities which are known to us by consciousness—to these qualities as their causes. We have no direct or immediate knowledge—no intuitive or a priori knowledge—of the intelligence of our fellow-creatures, any more than we have of the intelligence of our Creator; but we have a direct personal consciousness of intelligence in ourselves which enables us confidently to infer that the works both of God and of men can only have originated in intelligences. We grow up into knowledge of the mind of God as we grow in acquaintance with the minds of men through familiarity with their acts. The Father in heaven is known just as a father on earth is known. The latter is as unseen as the former. No human being has really ever seen another. No sense has will, or wisdom, or goodness for its object. Man must infer the existence of his fellow-men, for he can have no immediate perception of it; he must become acquainted with their characters through the use of his intelligence, because character cannot be heard with the ear, or looked upon with the eye, or touched with the finger. Yet a child is not long in learning to know that a spirit is near it. As soon as it knows itself, it easily detects a spirit like its own, yet other than itself, when the signs of a spirit's activity are presented to it. The process of inference by which it ascends from the works of man to the spirit which originates them is not more legitimate, more simple, or more natural, than that by which it rises from nature to nature's God.

In saying this, I refer merely to the process of inference in itself. That is identical in the two cases. In other respects there are obvious differences, of which one important consequence is, that while the scepticism which denies the existence of God is not unfrequently to be met with, a scepticism which denies the existence of human beings is unknown. The facts which prove that there are men, are grouped together within limits of space and of time which allow of their being so easily surveyed, and they are in themselves so simple and familiar, that all sane minds draw from them their natural inference. The facts which prove that there is a God need, in order to be rightly interpreted, more attention and reflection, more comprehensiveness, impartiality, and elevation of mind. Countless as they are, they can be overlooked, and often have been overlooked. Clear and conspicuous as they are, worldliness and prejudice and sin may blind the soul to their significance. True, the existence and possibility of atheism have often been denied, but the testimony of history to the reality of atheism cannot be set aside. Although many have been called atheists unjustly and calumniously, and although a few who have professed themselves to be atheists may have really possessed a religious belief which they overlooked or were averse to acknowledge, we cannot reasonably refuse to take at their own word the majority of those who have inculcated a naked and undisguised atheism, and claimed and gloried in the name of atheist. Incredible as it may seem that any intelligent being, conscious of human wants and weaknesses, should be able to look upon the wonders of the heavens and of the earth, of the soul within him and of society around him, and yet say that there is no God, men have done so, and we have no alternative but to accept the fact as we find it. It is a fact which involves nothing inconsistent with the truth that the process by which the mind attains to a belief in God is of the same natural and direct, yet inferential, character as the process by which it attains to belief in the existence of finite minds closely akin to itself.

Our entire spiritual being is constituted for the apprehension of God in and through His works. All the essential principles of mental action, when applied to the meditative consideration of finite things, lead up from them to Infinite Creative Wisdom. The whole of nature external to us is a revelation of God; the whole nature within us has been made for the reception and interpretation of that revelation. What more would we have? Strange as it may seem, there are many theists at the present day who represent it as insufficient, or as even worthless, and who join with atheists in denying that God's existence can be proved, and in affirming that all the arguments for His existence are inconclusive and sophistical. I confess I deem this a most erroneous and dangerous procedure. Such theists seem to me not only the best allies of atheists, but even more effective labourers in the cause of unbelief than atheists themselves. They shake men's confidence to a far greater extent in the reasonable grounds of faith in God's existence, and substitute for these grounds others as weak and arbitrary as any atheist could possibly wish. They pronounce illegitimate and invalid the arguments from effect to cause, from order and arrangement to intelligence, from history to providence, from conscience to a moral governor,—an assertion which, if true, infallibly implies that the heavens do not declare the glory of God, and that the earth does not show forth His handiworks—that the course of human events discloses no trace of His wisdom, goodness, or justice—and that the moral nature of man is wholly dissociated from a Divine law and a Divine lawgiver. Then, in place of a universe revealing God, and a soul made in His image, and a humanity overruled and guided by Him, they present to us as something stronger and surer—an intuition or a feeling or an exercise of mere faith. For it is a noticeable and certainly not a promising circumstance, that there is no general agreement as to what that state of mind is on which the weight of the entire edifice of theism is proposed to be rested even among those who profess to possess it. An intuition, a feeling, and a belief are very different things; and not much dependence is to be put on the psychology which is unable to distinguish between them.

Man, say some, knows God by immediate intuition; he needs no argument for His existence, because he perceives Him directly—face to face—without any medium. It is easy to assert this, but obviously the assertion is the merest dogmatism. Not one man in a thousand who understands what he is affirming will dare to claim to have an immediate vision of God, and nothing can be more likely than that the man who makes such a claim is self-deluded. It is not difficult to see how he may be deluded. There is so much that is intuitive involved in the apprehension of God that the apprehension itself may readily be imagined to be intuitive. The intuitive nature of the conditions which it implies may arrest the attention, and the fact that they are simply conditions may be overlooked. The possibility, however, of analysing the apprehension into simpler elements—of showing that it is a complex act, and presupposes conditions that can be indicated—is a conclusive proof that it is no intuition, that our idea of God is no more or otherwise intuitive than our idea of a fellow-man. Besides, what seem intuitions are often really inferences, and not unfrequently erroneous inferences; what seem the immediate dictates of pure reason, or the direct and unclouded perceptions of a special spiritual faculty, may be the conceits of fancy or the products of habit and association, or the reflections of strong feeling. A man must prove to himself, and he must prove to others, that what he takes to be an intuition is an intuition. Is that proof in this case likely to be easier or more conclusive than the proof of the Divine existence? The so-called immediate perception of God must be shown to be a perception and to be immediate; it must be vindicated and verified: and how this is to be done, especially if there be no other reasons for believing in God than itself, it is difficult to conceive. The history of religion, which is what ought to yield the clearest confirmation of the alleged intuition, appears to be from beginning to end a conspicuous contradiction of it. If all men have the spiritual power of directly beholding their Creator—have an immediate vision of God—how happens it that whole nations believe in the most absurd and monstrous gods? that millions of men are ignorant whether there be one god or thousands? that even a people like the Greeks could suppose the highest of their deities to have been born, to have a body, and to have committed the vilest actions? A true power of intuition is little susceptible of growth, and its testimonies vary within narrow limits; any development of which it admits is only slightly due to external conditions, and mainly the necessary consequence of internal activity, of inherent expansibility. It is thus, for example, with the senses of sight and hearing, in so far as they are intuitive. But it is manifestly very different with the religious nature. Its growth is mainly dependent, not on the organic evolution of a particular faculty, but on the general state of the soul, on the one hand; and on the influence of external circumstances—education, example, law, &c.—on the other hand. It is this difference in the character of their development which explains why the deliverances of the senses are so uniform and nearly infallible, while the most cursory survey of the religious world shows us the greatest want of uniformity and truthfulness in religious judgments. The various phases of polytheism and pantheism are inexplicable, if an intuition of God be universally inherent in human nature. Theism is perfectly explicable without intuition, as the evidences for it are numerous, obvious, and strong.

The opinion that man has an intuition or immediate perception of God is untenable; the opinion that he has an immediate feeling of God is absurd. A man feels only in so far as he perceives and knows. Feeling is in consciousness essentially dependent on, and necessarily subsequent to, knowing. Mere feeling—feeling without knowing—is an utterly inconceivable and impossible experience. Admit, however, not only that there may be a mere feeling, but that there is a mere feeling of God. What worth can it have? By supposition—by definition—no knowledge of God underlies and explains it. But in that case, how can any man pretend to get a knowledge of God out of it? What right can any one have to represent it as a source of knowledge of God? I am not aware that these questions have ever been answered except by the merest verbal jugglery. The very men who tell us that we cannot know God, but that we feel Him, tell us also that the feeling of Him is an immediate consciousness of Him, and that immediate consciousness is its own self-evidence, is absolute certainty, or, in other words, the highest and surest knowledge. We do not know God, but we feel Him; however, to feel Him is to know Him,—such is their answer more or less distinctly expressed, or, I should rather say, more or less skilfully concealed. It is at once a Yes and a No, the affirmation of what is denied and the denial of what is affirmed. And it is this because it cannot be anything else—because mere feeling is an impossible experience—and because feeling, so far as it is uncaused and unenlightened by knowledge, testifies only to the folly or insanity of the being which feels. If theism have no other basis than feeling, it is a house which foolish men have built upon the sand. The first storm will cast it down, and no wise man will regret its fall. Whatever is founded on mere emotion—on emotion which is not itself explained and justified by reason—stands but by sufferance; has no right to stand; ought to be cast down and swept from the earth. But the storms which have already in the course of the ages spent their force against theism with no other effect than to make its strength more conspicuous, and to carry away what would have weakened or deformed it, are sufficient to show us that it has been built on eternal truth by the finite human reasons which have been enlightened by Infinite and Divine Reason.

The strangest of all theories as to the foundation of our belief in God is, that it has no foundation at all—that it is a belief which rests upon itself, an act of faith which is its own warrant. We are told that we can neither know that God is nor what God is, but that we can nevertheless believe in God, and ought to believe in Him, and can and ought to act as if we knew His existence and character. But surely belief without a reason must be arbitrary belief, and either to believe or act as if we knew what we do not know, can never be conduct to be justified, much less commended. Faith which is not rational is faith which ought to be rejected. We cannot believe what we do not know or think that we know. We have no right to believe more than we know. I know, for example, that the grass grows, and consequently I believe, and am justified in believing, that it grows. I do not know how the grass grows, and I do not believe how it grows; I can justify my believing about its growth nothing beyond what I know to be true. This law of belief is as binding for the highest as for the lowliest objects. If I have no reason for believing that there is a God, I have no right to believe that there is a God. If I do not know that God is infinite, I am bound not to believe that He is infinite. Belief is inseparable from knowledge, and ought to be precisely coextensive with knowledge. Those who deny this fundamental truth will always be found employing the words knowledge and belief in a capricious and misleading way.[13]

III.

When man apprehends God as powerful, wise, and good—as possessed of will, reason, and righteousness—obviously he thinks of Him as bearing some likeness to himself, as having in an infinite or perfect measure qualities which human creatures have in a finite and imperfect measure. This can be no stumbling-block to any one who believes that God made man in His image, after His likeness. If man be in some respects like God, God must, of course, be in some respects like man. Power and freedom, knowledge and wisdom, love, goodness, and justice, are, according to this view, finitely in man, because they are infinitely in God. But it is a view which excites in certain minds deep aversion. There are men who protest, in the name of religion, in the name of God, against this anthropomorphic theism, as they call it. According to them, to attribute to God any human qualities, even the highest and best, is to limit and degrade Him—is contrary to reason and contrary to piety—is idolatrous and profane. The Psalmist represents the Lord as reproaching the wicked for supposing that He was like them in their wickedness—"altogether such an one as themselves;" but the modern philosophers to whom I am referring are horrified at the thought that the most righteous man, even in his righteousness, has any likeness to God. According to them, to think of God as wise is to dishonour Him, and to declare Him holy is to calumniate Him. To think of Him as foolish, and to pronounce Him wicked, are, in their eyes, only a little more irreverent and no more irrational.

"We must not fall down and worship," writes one of these philosophers, "as the source of our life and virtue, the image which our own minds have set up. Why is such idolatry any better than that of the old wood and stone? If we worship the creations of our minds, why not also those of our hands? The one is, indeed, a more refined self-adoration than the other; but the radical error remains the same in both. The old idolaters were wrong, not because they worshipped themselves, but because they worshipped their creation as if it were their creator; and how can any anthropomorphic theory 'escape the same condemnation'?"[14] The writer does not see that God can only be thought of as wise and righteous and free because the mind of man is His creation, so that His being thus thought of can be no proof that He is its creation. The fact that we can think of God as wise and righteous and free is no evidence that He is an image which our own minds have set up. The man who draws such an inference from such a premiss can be no dispassionate reasoner. And certainly the fact that we can think of God as possessed of intellectual and moral perfections is no reason for our not falling down and worshipping Him, and no evidence that our doing so is idolatry. To fall down and worship any being whom we do not know to possess these characteristics is what would clearly be idolatry. And this idolatry is what the philosophers to whom I refer are manifestly chargeable with encouraging. When they have rejected the living, personal, righteous, loving God, in whom humanity has so long trusted, they can only suggest as a substitute for Him a mysterious Power which is wholly unknown, and even unknowable. Great is their simplicity if they fancy that they can persuade men to receive any such god as that, or if they fancy that men would be any better for a faith so vague and empty. To believe in we know not what, is directly contrary to reason; to worship it would be "an idolatry no better than that of the old wood and stone." What we know is often not the creation of our minds: the unknowable is in itself nothing at all to us, and, as a thought, is always the mere creation of our minds; it is different for each creature, each mind; it is the mere result and reflection of our finiteness. There can be no unknown or unknowable to an infinite mind. To worship what is unknowable would be, therefore, simply to worship our own ignorance—one of the creations of our minds least worthy, perhaps, of being worshipped. There is, at least, no kind of worship less entitled "to escape condemnation," even as anthropomorphic idolatry, than the worship of the Unknowable,—the god proposed to us by some as the alone true God, belief in whom—perhaps I should rather say, belief in which—is to be the final and perfect reconciliation of science and religion.

All true theism implies a certain likeness between God and man. It holds that God is not merely an all-pervading and all-sustaining Power, but an omniscient Mind and perfectly holy Will. It refuses to think of Him merely according to the analogies of the physical world, as if human reason and human love were less worthy expressions of His perfections than mechanical or brute force. It refers to Him not only "all the majesty of nature, but all the humanity of man." This truth—that there is a likeness between God and man—must, however, be combined with two other truths, otherwise it will lead to the gravest errors.

The first is, that while God and man are both like each other, in that both possess certain excellences, they are utterly unlike, in that God possesses these excellences in all their perfection and in an infinite measure, while man possesses them in a very small degree and violated with many flaws and faults. The highest glory which a man can hope for is, that he should be made wholly into the image of God; but never can God be rightly thought of as mainly, and still less as merely, in the image of man. It was the great error of classic heathendom that it thus conceived of the Divine. "Men," says Heraclitus, "are mortal gods, and the gods immortal men." And the gods of Greece, as represented by her poets and adored by her people, were simply magnified and immortal men—a race closely akin to their worshippers in weaknesses and vices no less than in powers and virtues. They were supposed to be born as men are, to have voice and figure, parts and passions, and even at times to cheat and rail and lie. They reflected all the tendencies of the Greek mind, both good and evil.

Worshippers of the one God can scarcely fall into the same extravagance of error in this respect as the Greeks and Romans did, as all polytheists do; but they can, and often do, fall into the error, and think of God as subject to limits and defects, which are only in themselves. For instance, what is called deism, as distinguished from theism, rests wholly on the conception that the presence and power of God are limited, and that He acts in the manner to which man as a finite creature is restricted. The deist thinks of God as outside of and away from the universe; he thinks of the universe as a mechanism which God has contrived, and which He has endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which it is able to sustain itself in existence, and to perform its work so as to save God, as it were, all further trouble and labour concerning it. It is a great gain for us to have a machine doing what we desire without our needing to pay any attention to it or even to be present where it is, because we cannot give our attention to more than one object at one and the same instant of time, and cannot be present at the same time in more places than one; but those who liken God to man in this respect, divest Him of His omnipresence and omnipotence, and represent Him as characterised in some measure by their own impotency. There is a truth which Pantheism often claims as peculiarly and distinctively its own,—the truth that in God we and all things live, and move, and have our being—that of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things,—but which theism must sincerely and fully appropriate as one of its simplest and most certain elements, otherwise the charge against it of being a false and presumptuous likening of God to man will be warranted. We must not think of Him as "an absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of His universe, and 'seeing it go'"—as a God at hand but not afar off, or afar off but not at hand—as here, not there, or there, not here; but we must think of Him as everywhere present, everywhere active—as at once the source of all order, the spring of all life, and the ground of all affection and thought.

We need to be still more on our guard against limiting His wisdom or righteousness or love, as it is what we are still more prone to do. These attributes of God are often thought of in the meanest and most unworthy ways; and doubtless it has to a large extent been horror at the consequent degradation of the idea of God which has made some men refuse to assign to Him any of the properties of humanity, saying, with Xenophanes, that if the animals could think, they would imagine the Deity to be in their likeness—and with Spinoza, that if a circle could think, it would suppose His essence to be circularity. But this is to flee from one extreme to another extreme, from one error to a still more terrible error, through utterly failing to distinguish between perfection and imperfection, between what ought and what ought not to be ascribed to God. Circularity, animal forms and dispositions, human limitations—these are imperfections, and we must not refer them to God; but intelligence, righteousness, love—these are so little in their own nature imperfections that an intelligent being, however feeble, would be more excellent than an omnipotent and omnipresent being destitute of intelligence; and righteousness and love are as much superior to mere intelligence as it is to mere power and magnitude. To ascribe these to God, if we only ascribe them to Him in infinite perfection, is no presumption, no error; not to ascribe them to Him is the greatest presumption, the most lamentable error.

The second truth necessary to be borne in mind, whenever we affirm the likeness of God to man, is, that in whatever measure and to whatever extent God may be known, our knowledge of Him is, and always must be, very inadequate. In these latter days of science we are proud of our knowledge of the universe; and yet, although we do know a little of far-away stars and systems, what is this, after all, but, as Carlyle says, the knowledge which a minnow in its native creek has of the outlying ocean? And our knowledge of God must fall unspeakably farther short of being coextensive with its object. To illustrate the disproportion there, no comparison can be appropriate. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? Deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea." Our idea of God may contain nothing which is not true of God, and may omit nothing which it is essential for our spiritual welfare that we should know regarding Him; but it is impossible that it should be a complete and exhaustive idea of Him. We have scarcely a complete and exhaustive idea of anything, and least of all can we have such an idea of the infinite and inexhaustible source of all being. God alone can have a complete and exhaustive idea of Himself. There must be infinitely more in God than we have any idea of. There must be many qualities, powers, excellences, in Divine nature, which are wholly unknown to men, or even wholly unknowable by them, owing to their want of any faculties for their apprehension. And even as to what we do know of God, our knowledge is but partial and inadequate. We know that God knows, that He feels, that He acts; but as to how He knows, feels, and acts, as to what is distinctive and characteristic of His knowing, feeling, and acting, we have little or no notion. We can apprehend certain attributes of God, but we can comprehend, or fully grasp, or definitely image, not one of them. If we could find out God unto perfection in any respect, then, either we must be infinite or God must be finite in that respect. The finite mind can never stretch itself out in any direction until it is coextensive with the Infinite Mind. Man is made in the image of God, but he is not the measure of God.

LECTURE IV.

NATURE IS BUT THE NAME FOR AN EFFECT WHOSE CAUSE IS GOD.

I.

We have now to consider the principle of causality so far as it is implied in the theistic inference, and the theistic inference so far as it is conditioned by the principle of causality. It is not necessary to discuss the nature of the principle of causality in itself or for its own sake; it is even expedient, I believe, not to attempt to penetrate farther into its metaphysics and psychology than the work on hand imperatively requires. We must of course go as far as those have gone who have maintained on metaphysical or psychological grounds that the principle of causality warrants no theistic inference; we must show that their metaphysics and psychology are irrelevant when true, and false when relevant; but we may be content to stop when we have reached this result. The truth of theism has been very generally represented, both by those who admit and by those who deny the validity of the theistic inference, as much more dependent than it really is on the truth or falsity of some one or other of the many views which have been entertained as to the nature of causation, and the origin of the causal judgment. We are constantly being warned by theists that unless we accept this or that particular notion of causation, and account for it in this or that particular manner, we cannot reasonably believe in the existence of God; we are constantly being assured by anti-theists that belief in God is irrational, because it assumes some erroneous view of causation, or some erroneous explanation of the process by which causation is apprehended. But it will be found that representations of this kind seldom prove more than one-sidedness and immaturity of thought in those who make them. An accurate and comprehensive view of the nature of causation, and of our apprehension of it, will, it is true, have here as elsewhere great advantages over an erroneous and narrow one, but hardly any of the theories which have been held on these points can be consistently argued by those who hold them to invalidate theistic belief. Even utterly inadequate statements and explanations of the principle of causality—as, for example, those of Hume and J. S. Mill—are not more incompatible with the theistic inference than they are with any other inference which is a real extension of knowledge. Unless they are understood and applied more rigidly than by those who propound them, they allow us to draw the theistic inference; if understood and applied so as to forbid our drawing it, they logically disallow all scientific inference except such as is purely formal and deductive. In a word, if compatible with science they are compatible with theism, and if incompatible with theism they are incompatible with science.

When we assume the principle of causality in the argument for the existence of God, what precisely is it that we assume? Only this: that whatever has begun to be, must have had an antecedent, or ground, or cause which accounts for it. We do not assume that every existence must have had a cause. We have no right, indeed, to assume that any existence has had a cause until we have found reason to regard it as not an eternal existence, but one which has had an origin. Whatever we believe, however, to have had an origin, we at once believe also to have had a cause. The theistic argument assumes that this belief is true. It assumes that every existence, once new, every event or occurrence or change, must have a cause. This is certainly no very large assumption: on the contrary, if any assumption can claim to be self-evident, it surely may. Thought implies the truth of it every moment. Sensation only gives rise to thought in virtue of it. Unless it were true there could be no such thing as thought. To deny that the principle of causality, understood as has been indicated, is true, would be to deny that reason is reason; it would be equivalent to affirming that to seek for a reason is always and essentially an unreasonable process. And, in fact, so understood, the principle never has been denied. Hume even did not venture to deny it, although he ought in consistency to have denied it, and obviously desired to be able to deny it. He did not, however, deny that every object which begins to exist must have a cause,—he did not venture to do more than deny that this is either intuitively or demonstratively certain, and that any bond or tie can be perceived between what is called a cause and what is called an effect. The inquiry which he instituted was not whether we pronounce it necessary that everything whose existence has a beginning should also have a cause or not, but for what reason we pronounce it necessary. He assumed that we pronounce it necessary, and his elaborate investigation into the nature of causation was undertaken expressly and entirely to discover why we do so. The conclusion to which he came—viz., that the causal judgment is an "offspring of experience engendered upon custom"—was not only a very inadequate and erroneous one in itself, but inconsistent with the reality of what it professed to explain: still the admission which has been mentioned was what was professed to be explained.

Now, if it be true at all that every event, whether it be a new existence or a change in an old existence, presupposes an explanatory antecedent or cause, there can of course be no accepting in all its breadth one of the propositions which Hume urges most strenuously—viz., that the mere study of an event can tell us nothing about its cause. We may grant that it can tell us very little,—that Hume performed an immense service in showing how extremely little we can know of the particular causes of particular events apart from the study of both in connection, apart from observation, experiment, and induction,—but we cannot grant that the event itself teaches us absolutely nothing. If every event must have a cause, every event must have a sufficient cause. For these two statements, although verbally different, are really identical. The second seems to mean, but does not actually mean, more than the first. The whole cause of the elevation of a weight of ten pounds a foot high cannot be also the whole cause of the elevation of twenty pounds to the same height, for the simple reason that in the latter case the elevation of ten pounds—of half the weight—would be an event which had no cause at all. And this is universally true. If every event have not a sufficient cause, some events have no cause at all. This, then, I say, we necessarily know that the efficient cause of every event is a sufficient cause, however vague may be our knowledge of efficiency and sufficiency.

If every event—using this term as convenient to denote either a new existence or a change in some existence—must have a cause, to prove that the universe must have had a cause we require to prove it to have been an event—to have had a commencement. Can this be done? That is the question in the theistic argument from causality. Compared therewith, all other questions which have been introduced into or associated with the argument are of very subordinate importance. Now there is only one way of reasonably answering the question, and that is by examining the universe, in order to determine whether or not it bears the marks of being an event—whether or not it has the character of an effect. We have no right to assume it to be an event, or to have had a beginning. The entire argument for the Divine existence, which is at present under consideration, can be no stronger than the strength of the proof which we can adduce in favour of its having had a beginning, and the only valid proof of that which reason can hope to find must be derived from the examination of the universe itself.

What, then, is the result of such an examination? An absolute certainty that all the things which are seen are temporal,—that every object in the universe which presents itself to the senses has had a beginning,—that the most powerful, penetrating, and delicate instruments devised to assist our senses reach no cause which is not obviously also an effect. The progress of science has not more convincingly and completely disproved the once prevalent notion that the universe was created about six thousand years ago, than it has convincingly and completely established that everything of which our senses inform us has had a commencement in time, and is of a compound, derivative, and dependent nature. It is not long since men had no means of proving that the rocks, for example, were not as old as the earth itself—no direct means of proving even that they were not eternal; but science is now able to tell us with confidence under what conditions, in what order, and in what epochs of geological time they were formed. We have probably a more satisfactory knowledge of the formation of the coal-measures than of the establishment of the feudal system. We know that the Alps, although they look as if they might have stood for ever, are not even old, as geologists count age. The morning and night, the origin and disappearance of the countless species of living things which have peopled the earth from the enormously remote times when the rocks of the Laurentian period were deposited down to the births and deaths of contemporaneous animals, have been again brought into the light of day by the power of science. The limits of research are not even there reached, and with bold flight science passes beyond the confines of discovered life—beyond the epochs of formation even of the oldest rocks—to a time when there was no distinction of earth and sea and atmosphere, as all were mingled together in nebulous matter, in some sort of fluid or mist or steam; yea, onwards to a time when our earth had no separate existence, and suns, moons, and stars were not yet divided and arranged into systems. If we seek, then, after what is eternal, science tells us that it is not the earth nor anything which it contains, not the sea nor the living things within it, not the moving air, not the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars. These things when interrogated all tell us to look above and beyond them, for although they may have begun to be in times far remote, yet it was within times to which the thoughts of finite beings can reach back.

There is no denying, then, that the universe is to a great extent an effect, an event, something which has begun to be, a process of becoming. Science is, day by day, year by year, finding out more and more that it is an effect. The growth of science is in great part merely the extension of the proof that the universe is an effect. But the scientific proof of the non-eternity of matter is as yet far from a complete one. It leaves it possible for the mind to refer the phases through which the universe has passed, and the forms which it has assumed, to an underlying eternal source in nature itself, and, therefore, not to God. And this is by far the most plausible and forcible way of combating the argument we are employing. It meets it with a direct counter-argument, which every person must acknowledge to be relevant, and which, if sufficiently made out, is obviously decisive. That counter-argument we are bound, therefore, to dispose of. It has been thus stated by Mr J. S. Mill: "There is in nature a permanent element, and also a changeable: the changes are always the effects of previous changes; the permanent existences, so far as we know, are not effects at all. It is true we are accustomed to say not only of events, but of objects, that they are produced by causes, as water by the union of hydrogen and oxygen. But by this we only mean that when they begin to exist, their beginning is the effect of a cause. But their beginning to exist is not an object, it is an event. If it be objected that the cause of a thing's beginning to exist may be said with propriety to be the cause of the thing itself, I shall not quarrel with the expression. But that which in an object begins to exist, is that in it which belongs to the changeable element in nature; the outward form and the properties depending on mechanical or chemical combinations of its component parts. There is in every object another and a permanent element—viz., the specific elementary substance or substances of which it consists and their inherent properties. These are not known to us as beginning to exist: within the range of human knowledge they had no beginning, and consequently no cause; though they themselves are causes or non-causes of everything that takes place. Experience, therefore, affords no evidences, not even analogies, to justify our extending to the apparently immutable, a generalisation grounded only on our observation of the changeable."[15]

On this I would remark, first, that mere experience does not take us to anything which we are entitled to call even apparently immutable. It only takes us, even when extended to the utmost by scientific instruments and processes, to elements which we call simple because we have hitherto failed to analyse them into simpler elements. It is a perfectly legitimate scientific hypothesis that all the substances recognised by chemists as elementary and intransmutable, are in reality the modifications or syntheses of a single material element, which have been produced under conditions that render them incapable of being affected by any tests or agencies which the analyst in his laboratory can bring to bear upon them. Indeed, unless this hypothesis be true, the theory of development, so generally accepted at present, can hardly be supposed to be of any very wide application, seeing that at its very outset it has to affirm the existence of no fewer than sixty-four true untransformable species. But suppose the so-called elementary substances of chemistry to be simple, no one can reasonably suppose them as known to us to be ultimate. In oxygen there may be no atoms which are not atoms of oxygen, but we know by experience only oxygen, not atoms of oxygen. No man has ever been able to put himself in sensible contact with what alone can be immutable in oxygen, if there be anything immutable in it, its ultimate atoms. No man has seen, heard, touched, or tasted an ultimate atom of any kind of matter. We know nothing of atoms—nothing of what is permanent in nature—from direct experience. We must pass beyond such experience—beyond all testimony of the senses—when we believe in anything permanent in nature, not less than when we believe in something beyond and above nature. The atomic theory in chemistry demands a faith which transcends experience, not less than the theistic theory in religion.

Then, secondly, although we grant that there is a permanent element in the physical universe, something in matter itself which is self-existent and eternal, we still need, in order to account for the universe which we know, an Eternal Intelligence. The universe, regarded even only so far as it is admitted by all materialists no less than by theists and pantheists to be an effect, cannot be explained, as materialists think, merely physically. The atoms of matter are, it is said, eternal and immutable. Grant them to be so. There are, however, countless millions of them, and manifestly the universe is one, is a single, magnificent, and complicated system, is characterised by a marvellous unity in variety. We must be informed how the universe came to be a universe,—how it came to have the unity which underlies its diversity,—if it resulted from a countless multitude of ultimate causes. Did the atoms take counsel together and devise a common plan and work it out? That hypothesis is unspeakably absurd, yet it is rational in comparison with the notion that these atoms combined by mere chance, and by chance produced such a universe as that in which we live. Grant all the atoms of matter to be eternal, grant all the properties and forces which with the smallest degree of plausibility can be claimed for them to be eternal and immutable, and it is still beyond all expression improbable that these atoms with these forces, if unarranged, uncombined, ununified, unutilised by a presiding mind, would give rise to anything entitled to be called a universe. It is millions to one that they would never produce the simplest of the regular arrangements which we comprehend under the designation of course of nature, or the lowest of vegetable or animal organisms; millions of millions to one that they would never produce a solar system, the earth, the animal kingdom, or human history. No number of material atoms, although eternal and endowed with mechanical force, can explain the unity and order of the universe, and therefore the supposition of their existence does not free us from the necessity of believing in a single intelligent cause—a Supreme Mind—to move and mould, combine and adjust, the ultimate atoms of matter into a single orderly system. There at once rises the question, Is it really necessary to believe both matter and mind to be eternal? No, must be our answer. The law of parsimony of causes directly forbids the belief, unless we can show that one cause is insufficient to explain the universe. And that we cannot do. We can show that matter is insufficient,—that it cannot account of itself even for the physical universe,—but not that mind is insufficient, not that mind cannot account for anything that is in matter. On what grounds can it be shown that a mind possessed of sufficient power to originate the universe, the ultimate elements of matter being given, could not also have created these elements? that the Supreme Intelligence, which gave to each sun, and planet, and satellite its size, and shape, and position, and motion, could not have summoned into being their constituent particles? On none whatever. We may not understand how they could be created, but we have no reason for thinking that they could not be created; and it is surely far easier and far more reasonable to believe that they were created, than that a countless number of inconceivably small indivisible particles of matter, lying far beyond the range of any of our senses, but extending through immeasurable fields of space, should all, inconceivably minute although they be, be self-existent and eternal. The man who asks us to accept the latter supposition, asks us, it seems to me, to believe what is not only as mysterious as the self-existence of Deity, but millions of millions of times more mysterious. I should require strong reasons for assigning infinitely great attributes to excessively little things, and to an inconceivable number of them; but I can in this instance find no reasons at all.

Then, in the third place, any plausible conceptions we can form of the ultimate nature of matter lead to the belief that even that is an event or effect, a something derivative and caused. It must be admitted that the most plausible of these conceptions are vague and conjectural. We have a practical and relative knowledge of matter which is both exact and trustworthy,—a knowledge of its properties from which we can mathematically deduce a multitude of remote consequences of an extremely precise character—but we are hardly entitled to characterise as knowledge at all any of the views which have been propounded as to what it is in itself. It is only the unreflecting who fancy that matter in itself is something very clear and obvious, which they may apprehend by merely opening their eyes and stretching out their hands. Those who have never reasoned on the subject are apt to imagine that the nature of matter is of all things the easiest to understand, and they unhesitatingly invest it with their own sensations and perceptions. That is the so-called commonsense view of matter; but the slightest inquiry proves it to be delusive and nonsensical. Colour, for example, is just what is seen, and sound just what is heard; they are not qualities inherent in objects independent of the eye and ear: the matter which is supposed to cause by its motions on our senses these and other perceptions of the material world, we cannot see, hear, or apprehend by any sense. Change our senses and the universe will be thereby changed, everything in it becoming something other than it was before, green perhaps red, the bitter sweet, the loudest noise a gentle whisper, the hardest substance soft. As soon, then, as we thoughtfully ask ourselves, What is matter? we begin to discover that it is in itself something utterly mysterious. The collection of phenomena which we call its properties are quite unlike the phenomena of mind in this most important respect, that whatever they may be they are not what they appear to be. A state of mind is what we feel it to be; a state of matter is certainly not what we seem to ourselves to perceive it to be. No one, of course, knew all this better than Mr Mill. He, as a philosopher, had asked himself what matter is; he had formed a theory in answer to the question. And what is his theory? Just this,—that we cannot find a permanent element in matter; that we have no right to suppose that there is a permanent real existence or actual substance in matter; that all that we are warranted to affirm about the ultimate nature of matter is that it is a permanent possibility,—the permanent possibility of sensations. That was the conclusion which he arrived at when he theorised on matter without any theological aim. But he appears to have forgotten it when he came to criticise the argument for a first cause. He could not otherwise have written as if it were quite certain that there was in matter "a permanent element," not an underlying possibility but an inherent real substance. Had he remembered what his own theory as to the nature of matter was, he would have avoided as utterly untrue and misleading every expression which could suggest the notion of there being a permanent element in matter, and would have admitted that very probably the permanent possibilities of sensation, the causes of all material phenomena, lay in the Divine will, since he had been unable to find anything else permanent in which they could be supposed to subsist. That is a view which many profound thinkers have adopted. They have been led to hold that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that the whole material world is ultimately resolvable into forces; and that all its forces are but manifestations or outgoings of will-force. If so, the whole material world is not only dependent on, but is, the will of God, and has no being of any kind apart from the will of God. If so, God's will is not only the cause and controlling power of nature, but its substance, its self. And this view, that what alone substantially underlies all the phenomena we designate material is an acting mind, an energising will, has not only been reached by mental philosophers and idealistic speculators, but by those physicists who, like Boscovitch and Faraday, have found themselves forced to conclude that what is constitutive of matter is not indivisible particles, even infinitesimally small, but mere centres of force, since force necessarily implies some sort of substance, and, therefore, spirit where not matter.

But suppose the substratum of the universe to consist of a countless number of inconceivably small indivisible particles of matter, and do we not even on this hypothesis reach by a single step the truth on which theism rests, and on which only theism can be based? "None of the processes of nature," says one of the most eminent of our physical philosophers, "since the time when nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural. On the other hand, the exact quality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent. Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which science must stop. Not that science is debarred from studying the external mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces, any more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together. But, in tracing back the history of matter, science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and on the other that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural."[16] I believe that no reply to these words of Professor Clark Maxwell is possible from any one who holds the ordinary view of scientific men as to the ultimate constitution of matter. They must suppose every atom, every molecule, to be of such a nature, to be so related to others, and to the universe generally, that things may be such as we see them to be; but this their fitness to be built up into the structure of the universe is a proof that they have been made fit, and since natural forces could not have acted on them while not yet existent, a supernatural power must have created them, and created them with a view to their manifold uses. Every atom, every molecule, must even in what is ultimate in it bear the impress of a Supernatural Power and Wisdom; must, from the very nature of the case, reflect the glory of God and proclaim its dependence upon Him.

In like manner the latest speculation regarding the nature of matter—the vortex-atom theory of Sir William Thomson—seems, so far from having any tendency to exclude creative action, necessarily to imply it. He supposes that the atoms may be small vortex-rings in the ether, the rotating portions of a perfect fluid which fills all space. But a perfect fluid can neither explain its own existence nor the commencement of rotation in any part of it. Rotation once commenced in a perfect or frictionless and incompressible fluid would continue for ever, but it never could naturally commence. There is nothing in a perfect fluid to account either for the origin or cessation of rotation, and consequently nothing, on the vortex-atom hypothesis, to account either for the production or destruction of an atom of matter. The origin and cessation of rotation in fluids are due to their imperfection, their internal friction, their viscosity. The origin or cessation of rotation in a perfect fluid must be the effect of supernatural action; in other words, every vortex-atom must owe the rotation which gives it its individuality to a Divine impulse.

A theist has certainly no need, then, to be afraid of researches into the ultimate nature of matter. Our knowledge thereof is exceedingly small and imperfect, but all that we do know of it, all that we can even rationally conceive of it, leads to the inference that it is not self-existent, but the work of God. The farther research is pushed, the more clearly, we may be assured, will this become apparent, for the more wonderfully adapted will the ultimate constituents of matter be found for assuming countless forms and composing countless objects—the air, the land, the sea, and starry heavens, with all that in or on them is. Research has already shown us reason to believe "that even chemical atoms are very complicated structures; that an atom of pure iron is probably a vastly more complicated system than that of the planets and their satellites; that each constituent of a chemical atom must go through an orbit in the millionth part of the twinkling of an eye, in which it successively or simultaneously is under the influence of many other constituents, or possibly comes into collision with them; that each of these particles is, as Sir John Herschel has beautifully said, for ever solving differential equations which, if written out in full, might perhaps belt the earth."[17] Now, what does this mean, if not that every ultimate atom of matter is full to the very heart of it with evidences of the power and wisdom of God, and that every particle of dust or drop of water is crowded with traces of the action of the Divine Reason, not less marvellous, it may be, than those which astronomy exhibits in the structure of the heavens and the evolutions of the heavenly bodies? Those who hoped that molecular science would help them to get rid of God have obviously made a profound mistake. It has already shown far more clearly than ever was or could have been anticipated, that every atom of matter points back beyond itself to the all-originating will of God, and refuses to receive the idolatrous homage of those who would put it in the place of God.

To these considerations it has to be added that some of our ablest physicists believe that in the present age a strictly scientific proof has been found of the position that the universe had a beginning in time. "According to Sir W. Thomson's deductions from Fourier's Theory of Heat, we can trace down the dissipation of heat by conduction and radiation to an infinitely distant time when all things will be uniformly cold. But we cannot similarly trace the heat-history of the universe to an infinite distance in the past. For a certain negative value of the time the formulæ give impossible values, indicating that there was some initial distribution of heat which could not have resulted, according to known laws of nature, from any previous distribution. There are other cases in which a consideration of the dissipation of energy leads to the conception of a limit to the antiquity of the present order of things."[18] If this theory be true, physical science, instead of giving any countenance to the notion of matter having existed from eternity, distinctly teaches that creation took place, that the present system of nature and its laws originated at an approximately assignable date in the past. The theory is supported by the most eminent physical philosophers of this country, and if there be any oversight or error in the principles or calculations on which it is founded, it would appear not to have been as yet detected. It is a theory on which, however, only specialists are entitled to pronounce judgment; and therefore, although those who assume that matter was not created are bound to refute it, I do not wish myself to lay any stress upon it—the more especially as I believe that apart from it there is amply sufficient evidence for holding that "Nature is but the name for an effect whose cause is God."[19]

II.

It seems to me, then, that the universe when examined must be concluded to be throughout—from centre to circumference—alike in what is most permanent and what is most changeable in it,—an event or effect, and that its only adequate cause is a Supreme Intelligence. It is only such a cause which is sufficient to explain the universe as we know it, and that universe is what has to be explained. The assertion of Kant that the principle of causality cannot take us beyond the limits of the sensible world is only true if causality be confined to strictly material events which display no signs of law and order, and the progress of science is one long uninterrupted proof that no such events are to be discovered; that it is hopeless to look for them; that matter and its changes are ordained, arranged, adjusted phenomena. The assertion of Kant is clearly false, if we are not to exclude from the event anything which demands explanation; if we are to reason from the universe itself and not from its name; if we are to infer a particular cause from a knowledge of the nature of a given particular event. This, the so-called concrete use of the principle of causality, is the only use of it which is legitimate, the only use of it which is not extremely childish.

The opposite—the absurd—notion that the principle of causality is abstractly applied, has led some to argue that it leads legitimately to nothing else than an infinite regress—an eternal succession of causes and effects. But whatever it may lead to, it certainly does not lead to that conclusion, and has never led any human being, either legitimately or illegitimately, to that conclusion. Those even who have maintained that the principle of causality cannot lead to a first cause, to an eternal self-existent cause, but only to an eternal succession of causes and effects, have all, without a single exception, allowed themselves to be led by it to a first cause and not to an eternal succession of causes. They have all believed what they say they ought to have disbelieved; they have all disbelieved what they say they ought to have believed. They have all accepted as true that there is a first and self-existent cause, although some have supposed it to be matter, some mind, some within the world, some without the world. They have differed as to what it is, but not as to that it is. None of them have adopted the conclusion to which they have said the argument founded on causation logically leads. No man has ever adopted that conclusion. The human mind universally and instantaneously rejects it as inconceivable, unthinkable, self-contradictory, absurd. We may believe either in a self-existent God or in a self-existent world, and must believe in one or the other; we cannot believe in an infinite regress of causes. The alternatives of a self-existent cause and an infinite regress of causes are not, as some would represent, equally credible alternatives. The one is an indubitable truth, the other is a manifest absurdity. The one all men believe, the other no man believes.

This takes away, it seems to me, all force from the objection that the argument founded on the principle of causality when it infers God as the self-existent cause of the universe infers more than is strictly warranted, a self-existent cause being something which does not in itself fall under the principle of causality. That every event must have a cause will be valid, it is said, for an endless series of causes and effects; but if you stop, if you affirm the existence of what is uncaused, of what is at once, as it were, cause and effect, you may affirm what is true, but you affirm also what is independent of the principle of causation. You claim more than your argument entitles you to; you are not developing a logical conclusion, but concealing under a term which seems to express the same idea what is really the vaulting of the mind to a higher idea which cannot be expressed under the form efficient cause at all.

Now, of course, a self-existent cause does not in itself come completely under the law of causality. That law cannot inform us what self-existence is. A self-existent cause, however, may be known as well as any other cause by its effects. The mind may rise to it from its effects. The principle of causality may lead up to it, although it does not include within itself the proof of the self-existence of the cause. It may at the last stage be attached to some other principle which compels the affirmation of the self-existence of the cause reached; in other words, the affirmation that the first cause is a self-existent cause, may be a distinct mental act not necessitated by the principle of causality itself. It may either be held that this mental necessity is the reason why we cannot entertain the thought of an infinite regress of causes, or that the incapacity of the mind to regard the thought of an infinite regress of causes as other than self-contradictory, is the explanation of its felt necessitation to affirm a self-existent cause; in which latter case the principle of causality really necessitates a belief in the ungenerated and self-existent. Both of these views are plausible, and which of them is true is an interesting subject of metaphysical investigation, but it is one of no practical consequence in the inquiry on which we are engaged. The principle of causality can lead us up from all things which have on them the marks of having begun to be, and if we at length come to something which bears no such marks, be it matter or be it mind, no man can doubt, or does doubt, that something to be self-existent. This difficulty about a self-existent cause not being able to be arrived at by the principle of causality, will be worth attending to by the theist when it is attended to by any one else,—when any atheist or any anti-theist of any kind is prepared to deny that the last cause in the order of knowledge, and the first in the order of existence, must be a self-existent cause—but not until then; and it is mere sophistry to represent it as of practical importance. Whenever we come to an existence which we cannot regard as an effect or thing generated in time, we, either in consequence of the very nature of the causal judgment, or of some self-evident condition or conditions of knowledge necessarily attached thereto, attribute to it self-existence and eternity. We may dispute as to whether this is done in the one or the other of these two ways, but that is a merely theoretical question; that every one does, and must, as a reasonable being, do it, is what no man disputes, or can dispute,—and this alone is of practical consequence.

Another admission must be made by every man who reflects carefully on the nature of causation. To say that the idea of cause can never demand belief in an uncaused cause, sounds as self-evident; to say that the idea of cause can find no satisfaction save in the belief of an uncaused cause, sounds as a paradox; but let a man meditate for a little with real thoughtfulness on the meaning of these two statements, and he cannot fail to perceive that the former is an undeniable falsehood, and the latter an undeniable truth. An uncaused cause, a first cause, alone answers truly to the idea of a cause. A secondary cause, in so far as secondary, in so far as caused, is not a cause. I witness some event—some change. I am compelled as a rational being to seek its cause. I reach it only to find that this cause was due to a prior cause. What has happened? The cause from which I have had to go back has ceased to be a cause; the cause to which I have had to go back has become the cause of two effects, but it will remain so only if I am not reasonably bound to seek a cause for it. If I am, its causality must pass over to its explanatory antecedent. We may go back a hundred, a thousand, a million times, but if the last cause reached be not truly a first cause, an uncaused cause, the idea of cause in our mind will be as unsatisfied at the end of our search as at the beginning, and the whole process of investigation will be aimless and meaningless. A true cause is one to which the reason not only moves but in which it rests, and except in a first cause the mind cannot rest. A first cause, however, is certainly not one which has been itself caused.

We are warranted, then, in looking upon the universe as an event or effect, and we may be certain that it is not the last link of an infinite chain of causes and effects, or of any series of causes and effects, long or short, suspended upon nothing. No chain or series can be, properly speaking, infinite, or without a first link or term. The universe has a First Cause. And its First Cause, I must proceed to remark, reason and observation alike lead us to believe must be one—a single cause. When one First Cause is sufficient to explain all the facts, it is contrary to reason to suppose another or several. We must prove that no one First Cause could account for the universe before we can be entitled to ascribe it to more causes than one. The First Cause, we shall further see afterwards, must have attributes which no two or more beings can be supposed to possess, which one being alone can possess. Then the character of the effect itself refers us back to a single cause. A belief in more gods than one not only finds no support in the universe, but, as the very word universe indicates, is contradicted by it. For, numerous and diverse as are the objects in nature, they are so constituted and connected—so dependent on and related to one another—as to compose a whole which exhibits a marvellous unity in variety. Everything counteracts or balances or assists something else, and thus all things proclaim their common dependence on One Original. Co-ordinate things must all be derivative and secondary, and all things in nature are co-ordinate parts of a stupendous system. Each one of us knows, for example, that a few years ago he was not, and that in a few years hence the place which knows him now will know him no more; and each one of us has been often taught by the failure of his plans, and the disappointment of his hopes, and the vanity of his efforts, that there are stronger forces and more important interests in the world than his own, and that he is in the grasp of a Power which he cannot resist—which besets him behind and before, and hems him in on all sides. When we extend our view, we perceive that this is as true of others as of ourselves, and that it is true even, in a measure, of all finite things. No man lives or dies to himself; no object moves and acts absolutely from and for itself alone. This reveals a single all-originating, all-pervading, all-sustaining principle. These manifold mutually dependent existences imply one independent existence. The limitations assigned to all individual persons and things point to a Being which limits them all. Particular causes and secondary movements lead back to "a cause of causes," "a first mover, itself immovable, yet making all things else to move."

The first cause must be far more truly and properly a cause than any secondary cause. In fact, as we have already seen, a secondary cause is not strictly a cause; so far as secondary, it merely transmits to its consequent what it has received from its antecedent. There may be a succession of a thousand such causes in a process, yet the first cause is also the last, and there is, in fact, all through, but one cause; the others merely convey and communicate its force. A machine, however numerous its parts and movements, does not create the least amount of force; on the contrary, the most perfect machine wastes and absorbs some of the force which is imparted to it. The universe, so far as subject to mechanical laws, is merely a machine which transmits a given quantity of force, but which no more creates it than it creates itself. The author of that force is the one true cause of all physical phenomena. Life is probably, and mind is certainly, not entirely explicable on mechanical principles; but neither life nor mind can be maintained to do more than to determine the direction or application of the power implanted in them, or rendered accessible to them, through the working of the first cause. All things must, consequently, "live, move, and have their being" therein. It is at their end as well as at their origin; it encompasses them, all round; it penetrates them, all through. The least things are not merely linked on to it through intermediate agencies which go back an enormous distance, but are immediately present to it, and filled to the limit of their faculties with its power. It is in every ray of sunlight, every breath of wind, and blade of grass; it is the source and life of all human minds and hearts. The pantheist errs not so much in what he affirms of it, as in what he denies to it.

This cause—the cause of causes—must, it is further obvious, be in possession of a power far beyond the comprehension of our reasons or imaginations. All other power is derived from its power. All the power which is distributed and distinguished in secondary causes must be combined and united in the first cause. Now, think what an enormous power there is displayed even in this world. In every half-ounce of coal there is stored up power enough, if properly used, to draw two tons a mile. How vast, then, the power which God has deposited in the coal-beds of the world alone! The inhabitants of this little island, by availing themselves of the natural forces which Providence has placed at their disposal, annually accomplish more work than could by any possibility be effected by the inhabitants of the whole earth, if they exerted merely the power which is in their own bodies, the power of human bones and muscles. And yet there can be little doubt that, even in this country, we make no use at all of many natural agents, and only a wasteful use of any of them. "Weigh the earth on which we dwell," says an astronomer; "count the millions of its inhabitants that have come and gone for the last six thousand years; unite their strength into one arm; and test its power in an effort to move the earth. It could not stir it a single foot in a thousand years; and yet, under the omnipotent hand of God, not a minute passes that it does not fly far more than a thousand miles." The earth, however, is but a mere atom in the universe. Through the vast abysses of space there are scattered countless systems, at enormous distances, yet all related; glorious galaxies of suns, planets, satellites, comets, all sweeping onwards in their appointed courses. How mighty the arm which impels and guides the whole! God can do all that, for He continually does it. How much more He could do than He does, we cannot know. The power of no true cause, of no free cause, is to be measured by what it does. It must be adequate to produce its actual effects, but it may be able to produce countless merely possible effects. It has power over its powers, and is not necessitated to do all that it is capable of doing. It is difficult, perhaps, to show that the universe is not infinite. It is obviously unreasonable and presumptuous to deny that the power of its Author may be infinite. And yet we find men who do so. For example, the late Mr John Stuart Mill, for no better reasons than that nature sometimes drowns men, and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed in such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness of a human intellect. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit the greatness of its Creator.

A first cause, we have already seen, must be a free cause. It cannot have been itself caused. It is absurd to look for it among effects. But we never get out of the sphere of effects until we enter that of free agency; until we emerge from the natural into the spiritual; until we leave matter and reach mind. The first cause must, indeed, be in—all through—the universe; but it must also be out of the universe, anterior to, and above the universe. The idea of cause is a delusion—the search for causes an inexplicable folly—if there be no first cause, and if that first cause be not a free cause, a Will, a Spirit, a Person. Those who object to the causation argument, that it does not take us beyond the world—does not lead us up to a personal cause of the world—have failed to apprehend what causation signifies. Secondary causes may not be true causes, and yet reason be trustworthy, for there is that behind them on which it can fall back; but if there be no first cause, or if the first cause be not free, reason is throughout a lie. Reason, if honest and consistent, cannot in its pursuit of causes stop short of a rational will. That alone answers to and satisfies its idea of a cause.

The most rapid glance at the universe powerfully confirms the conclusion that its first cause can only be a Mind, a Reason. The universe is a universe; that is to say, it is a whole, a unity, a system. The first cause of it, therefore, in creating and sustaining it, must comprehend, act on, and guide it as a systematic whole; must have created all things with reference to each other; and must continually direct them towards a preconceived goal. The complex and harmonious constitution of the universe is the expression of a Divine Idea, of a Creative Reason. This thought brings me to my next argument and next lecture.[20]

LECTURE V.

THE ARGUMENT FROM ORDER.

I.

The prevalence of order in nature has already been referred to as contributing to prove that the universe is an event, a generated existence, a something which once began to be. It will now be brought forward as in itself a manifestation of, and consequently a ground for believing in, a Supreme Mind. Where order meets us, the natural and immediate inference is that there is the work of intelligence. And order meets us everywhere in the universe. It covers and pervades the universe. It is obvious to the ordinary naked eye, and spreads far beyond the range of disciplined vision when assisted by all the instruments and appliances which science and art have been able to invent. It is conspicuous alike in the architecture of the heavens and the structure of a feather or a leaf. It goes back through all the epochs of human history, and all the ages of geological and astronomical time. It is the common work of all the sciences to discover and explain the order in the universe. There is no true science which is not constantly making new and fuller discoveries of the order in nature,—the order within us and without us; not one which is not ever increasingly establishing that in order all things move and have their being. What is maintained by the theist is, that this order, the proof of which is the grand achievement of science, universally implies mind; that all relations of order—all laws and uniformities—are evidences of an intelligent cause.

The order which science finds in nature may be described as either general or special, although in strictness the difference between them is only a difference of degree, the former being the more and the latter the less general, or the former being the less and the latter the more special. In what may be called general order, that which strikes us chiefly is regularity; in what may be called special order, that which chiefly strikes us is adaptation or adjustment. In inorganic nature general order is the more conspicuous; in organic nature special order. Astronomy discloses to us relations of number and proportion so far-reaching that it almost seems as if nature were "a living arithmetic in its development, a realised geometry in its repose." Biology, on the other hand, impresses us by showing the delicacy and subtlety of the adjustment of part to part, of part to whole, and of whole to surroundings, in the organic world. There is, perhaps, sufficient difference between these two kinds of order to warrant their being viewed separately, and as each furnishing the basis of an argument for the existence of God. The argument from regularity has sometimes been kept apart from the argument from adjustment. The former infers the universe to be an effect of mind because it is characterised by proportion or harmony, which is held to be only explicable by the operation of mind. The latter draws the same inference because the universe contains countless complex wholes, of which the parts are so collocated and combined as to co-operate with one another in the attainment of certain results; and this, it is contended, implies an intelligent purpose in the primary cause of these things.

While we may readily admit the distinction to be so far valid, it is certainly not absolute. Regularity and adjustment are rather different aspects of order than different kinds of order, and, so far from excluding each other, they will be found implying each other. It is obvious that even the most specialised adjustments of organic structure and activity presuppose the most general and simple uniformities of purely physical nature. Such cases of adjustment comprehend in fact many cases of regularity. It is less obvious, but not less true, that wherever regularity can be traced adjustment will also be found, if the search be carried far enough. The regularity disclosed by astronomy depends on adjustment as regards magnitude, weight, distance, &c., in the celestial bodies, just as the adjustments brought to light by biology depend on the general regularity of the course of nature. There is no law of nature so simple as not to presuppose in every instance of its action at least two things related to one another in the manner which is meant when we speak of adjustment. It being thus impossible to separate regularity from adjustment as regards the phenomena of the universe, it seems unnecessary to attempt by abstraction to separate them in the theological argumentation, while giving a rapid general glance at the phenomena which display them.

The physical universe has, perhaps, no more general characteristic than this,—its laws are mathematical relations. The law of gravitation, which rules all masses of matter, great or small, heavy or light, at all distances, is a definite numerical law. The curves which the heavenly bodies describe under the influence of that law are the ellipse, circle, parabola, and hyperbola—or, in other words, they all belong to the class of curves called conic sections, the properties of which mathematicians had begun to investigate nearly twenty centuries before Newton established that whatever was true of them might be directly transferred to the heavens, since the planets revolve in ellipses, the satellites of Jupiter in circles, and the comets in elliptical, parabolic, and hyperbolic orbits. The law of chemical combination, through which the whole world of matter has been built up out of a few elements, always admits of precise numerical expression. So does the law of the correlation of heat and gravitation. Each colour in the rainbow is due to a certain number of vibrations in a given time; so is each note in the scale of harmony. Each crystal is a geometrical construction. The pistils of flowers, and the feathers in the wings and tails of birds, are all numbered. If nature had not thus been ruled by numerical laws, the mathematical sciences might have existed, but they would have had no other use than to exercise the intellect, whereas they have been the great instruments of physical investigation. They are the creations of a mental power which, while occupied in their origination and elaboration, requires to borrow little, if anything, from matter; and yet, it is only with their help that the constitution of the material universe has been displayed, and its laws have been discovered, with that high measure of success of which physicists are so proud. But they could not have been applied to the universe at all unless its order had been of the exact numerical and geometrical kind which has been indicated; unless masses had attracted each other, and elements combined with each other, in invariable proportions; unless "the waters had been measured as if in the hollow of a hand, the heaven meted out as with a span, the dust of the earth comprehended in a measure, and the mountains weighed in scales and the hills in a balance." Now it is possible to deny that things have been thus weighed, measured, and numbered by a Creative Intelligence, but not that they have been weighed, measured, and numbered. If we are to give any credit to science, there can be no doubt about the weights and measures and numbers. This question, then, is alone left,—Could anything else than intelligence thus weigh, measure, and number? Could mere matter know the abstrusest properties of space and time and number, so as to obey them in the wondrous way it does? Could what has taken so much mathematical knowledge and research to apprehend, have originated with what was wholly ignorant of all quantitative relations? Or must not the order of the universe be due to a mind whose thoughts as to these relations are high above even those of the profoundest mathematicians, as are the heavens above the earth? If the universe were created by an intelligence conversant with quantitative truth, it is easy to understand why it should be ruled by definitely quantitative laws; but that there should be such laws in a universe which did not originate in intelligence, is not only inexplicable but inconceivably improbable. There is not merely in that case no discoverable reason why there should be any numerically definite law in nature, but the probability of there being no law or numerical regularity of any kind is exceedingly great, and of there being no law-governed universe incalculably great. Apart from the supposition of a Supreme Intelligence, the chances in favour of disorder against order, of chaos against cosmos, of the numerically indefinite and inconstant against the definite and constant, must be pronounced all but infinite. The belief in a Divine Reason is alone capable of rendering rational the fact that mathematical truths are realised in the material world.[21]

The celestial bodies were among the earliest objects of science, and before there was any science they stimulated religious thought and awakened religious feeling. The sun and moon have given rise to so extraordinary a number of myths that some authors have referred to them the whole of heathen mythology. There can be little doubt that the growth of astronomical knowledge contributed greatly to bring about the transition from polytheism to monotheism, and that so soon as the heavens were clearly understood to be subject to law, and the countless bodies which circle in them not to be independent agents but parts or members of a single mechanical or organic system, the triumph of the latter was for ever secured. No science, indeed, has hitherto had so much influence on man's religious beliefs as astronomy, although there may now appear to be indications that chemistry and biology will rival it in this respect in the future. And it has been thus influential chiefly because through its whole history it has been a continuous, conspicuous, and ever-advancing, ever-expanding demonstration of a reign of law on the most magnificent scale,—a demonstration begun when with unassisted vision men first attempted roughly to distribute the stars into groups or constellations, and far from yet ended when the same laws of gravitation, light, heat, and chemical combination which rule on earth have been proved to rule on orbs so distant that their rays do not reach us in a thousand years. The system of which our earth is a member is vast, varied, and orderly, the planets and satellites of which it is composed being so adjusted as regards magnitude and mass, distance, rate, and plane of direction, &c., that the whole is stable and secure, while part ministers to part as organ to organ in an animal body. Our own planet, for example, is so related to the sun and moon that seed-time and harvest never fail, and the ebb and flow of the tides never deceive us. And the solar system is but one of hundreds of millions of systems, some of which are incalculably larger than it, yet the countless millions of suns and stars thus "profusely scattered o'er the void immense" are so arranged and distributed in relation to one another and in accordance with the requirements of the profoundest mathematics as to secure the safety of one and all, and to produce everywhere harmony and beauty. Each orb is affecting the orbit of every other—each is doing what, if unchecked, would destroy itself and the entire system—but so wondrously is the whole constructed that these seemingly dangerous disturbances are the very means of preventing destruction and securing the universal welfare, being due to reciprocally compensating forces which in given times exactly balance one another. Is it, I ask, to be held as evidence of the power of the human mind that it should have been able after many centuries of combined and continuous exertion to compute with approximate accuracy the paths and perturbations of the planets which circle round our sun and the returns of a few comets, but as no evidence even of the existence of mind in the First Cause of things that the paths and perturbations of millions on millions of suns and planets and comets should have been determined with perfect precision for all the ages past and future of their existence, so that, multitudinous as they are, each proceeds safely on its destined way, and all united form a glorious harmony of structure and motion?[22]

A much more recent science than astronomy, the science of chemistry, undertakes to instruct us as to the composition of the universe, and it is marvellous how much it can tell us even of the composition of the stars. What, then, is its most general and certain result? Just this, that order of the strictest kind, the most definite proportions, are wrought into the very structure of every world, and of every compound object in the world, air and water, earth and mineral, plant and animal. The vast variety of visible substances are reducible to rather more than sixty constituent elements, each of which has not only its own peculiar properties but its own definite and unvarying combining proportions with other elements, so that amidst the prodigious number of combinations all is strictly ordered, numerically exact. There is no chemical union possible except when the elements bear to each other a numerically constant ratio. Different compounds are always the products of the combination of the elements in different yet strictly definite proportions, there being no intermediate combinations, no transitional compounds. If each element did not admit of union with many others, the world would be dead and poor, its contents few and unvaried; if their unions were not always regulated by law, disorder would everywhere prevail. How comes it that they are so made in relation to one another that their manifold unions are ever regulated by law, and generate an endless variety of admirable products? Who made them thus? Did they make themselves? or, did any blind force make them? Reason answers that they must have been made by an intelligence which wanted them for its purposes. When the proportions of the elementary constituents are altered, the same elements produce the most diverse substances with the most dissimilar and even opposite properties, charcoal and diamond, a deadly poison or the breath of life, theine or strychnine. These powers all work together for good; but if they worked even a very little differently—if the circumstances in which they work, not to speak of the laws by which they work, were altered—they would spread destruction and death through the universe. The atmosphere is rather a mixture than a combination of chemical elements, but it is a mixture in which the constituents are proportioned to each other in the only way which fits it to sustain the lives of plants and animals, and to accomplish its many other important services; and wonderful in the extreme is the provision made for the constant restoration of the due proportions amidst perpetual oscillations. One of the chiefs of modern chemistry, Baron Liebig, points to what takes place when rain falls on the soil of a field adapted for vegetable growth as to something which "effectually strikes all human wisdom dumb." "During the filtration of rain-water," he says, "through the soil, the earth does not surrender one particle of all the nutritive matter which it contains available for vegetable growth (such as potash, silicic acid, ammonia, &c.); the most unintermittent rain is unable to abstract from it (except by the mechanical action of floods) any of the chief requisites for its fertility. The particles of mould not only firmly retain all matter nutritive to vegetable growth, but also immediately absorb such as are contained in the rain-water (ammonia, potash, &c.). But only such substances are completely absorbed from the water as are indispensable requisites for vegetable growth; others remain either entirely or for the most part in a state of solution." The laws and uses of light and heat, electricity and magnetism, and the adjustments which they presuppose, all point not less clearly to the ordinances of a supremely profound and accurate mind. In a word, out of a few elements endowed with definite powers, this world with its air and its seas, its hills and valleys, its vegetable forms and animal frames, and other worlds innumerable, have been built up by long-sustained and endlessly-varied processes of chemical synthesis mostly conducted under conditions so delicately adjusted to the requirements of each case, that the ablest chemists, with all their instruments and artifices, cannot even reproduce them on any scale however small. Can these elements be reasonably thought of as having been unfashioned and unprepared, or these processes as having been uninstituted and unpresided over by intelligence?[23]

The sciences of geology and palæontology disclose to us the history of our earth and of its vegetable and animal organisms. They prove that for countless ages, that from the inconceivably remote period of the deposition of the Laurentian rocks, light and heat, air and moisture, land and sea, and all general physical forces have been so arranged and co-ordinated as to produce and maintain a state of things which secured during all these countless ages life and health and pleasure for the countless millions of individuals contained in the multitude of species of creatures which have contemporaneously or successively peopled the earth. The sea, with its winds and waves, its streams and currents, its salts, its flora and fauna, teems with adaptations no less than the land. Probably no one has studied it with more care or to more purpose than Lieutenant Maury, and his well-known work on its physical geography proceeds throughout on the principle that "he who would understand its phenomena must cease to regard it as a waste of waters, and view it as the expression of One Thought, a unity with harmonies which One Intelligence, and One Intelligence alone, could utter;" while many of its pages might appropriately be read as a commentary on these lines of Wordsworth,—

"Huge ocean shows, within his yellow strand,
A habitation marvellously planned,
For life to occupy in love and rest."

The sciences referred to certify further, that as regards the various forms of life there has been from the time when it can be first traced to the present day "advance and progress in the main," and that the history of the earth corresponds throughout with the history of life on the earth, while each age prepares for the coming of another better than itself. But advance and progress presuppose intelligence, because they cannot be rationally conceived of apart from an ideal goal foreseen and selected. Volumes might be written to show how subtly and accurately external nature is adjusted to the requirements of vegetable and animal life, and how vegetable and animal life are inter-related; nay, even on how well the earth is fitted for the development and happiness of man. Think of the innumerable points of contact and connection, for example, between physical geography and political economy, which all indicate so many harmonies between the earth and man's economical condition, capacities, and history.[24]

The vegetable and animal kingdoms viewed generally, are also striking instances of unity of plan, of progressive order, of elaborately adjusted system. There are general principles of structure and general laws of development common to all organisms, constituting a plan of organisation capable of almost infinite variation, which underlies all the genera and orders of living creatures, vegetable and animal. It comprehends a number of subordinate plans which involve very abstract conceptions, and which even the ablest naturalists still very imperfectly comprehend. These higher plans would probably never have been thought of but for the detection of the numerous phenomena which seemed on a superficial view irreconcilable with the idea of purpose in creation. Just as it was those so-called "disturbances" in the planetary orbits, which appeared at first to point to some disorder and error in the construction of the sidereal system, that prompted Lagrange to the investigations which resulted in establishing that the order of the heavens was of a sublimer and more remarkable character than had been imagined, essentially including these apparent disturbances, so it has been the seeming exceptions to plan which are witnessed in rudimentary and aborted organs (such as the wing-bones in wingless birds, the finger-bones in horses, the legs below the skin in serpents, the teeth which never cut the gums in whales, &c.), that have indicated to modern biologists a unity of organisation far more comprehensive and wonderful than had previously been suspected. The larger and more ideal order thus brought to light as ruling in the organic world is one which could only have originated in a mind of unspeakable power and perfection. And it not only thus testifies directly of itself in favour of a Divine Intelligence, but the recognition of it, while correcting in some respects earlier conceptions as to the place of utility in nature, far from proving that utility has been disregarded or sacrificed, shows that each organ has been formed, not only with reference to its actual use in a given individual or species, but to the capacity of being applied to use in countless other individuals and species.[25]

When we enter into the examination of organisation in itself, adjustment becomes still more obvious in the processes of growth, reproduction, fructification, &c., in plants and animals, and in the provisions for locomotion, for securing food and shelter, for sight, hearing, &c., in the latter. The great physician, Sir Charles Bell, devoted a whole treatise to point out those which are to be found in the hand alone. The arrangement of bones, muscles, joints, and other parts in the limb of a tiger or the wing of an eagle are not less admirable. The eye and ear are singularly exquisite structures, the former being far the most perfect of optical, and the latter far the most perfect of acoustic instruments. Instances of this sort are, indeed, so remarkable, and so irresistibly convincing to most minds, that some theists have consented to rest on them exclusively the inference of a designing intelligence. They would grant that the evidences of purpose are only to be traced in organisation. The limitation is inconsistent and untenable, but not inexplicable. The adjustment of parts to one another, and their co-ordination as means to an end, are not more certainly existent in fitting the eye to see and the ear to hear than in securing the stability of the solar system, but they are more obviously visible because compressed into a compass easily grasped and surveyed; because organ and function are the most specialised kinds of means and ends; because organisms are the most curiously and conspicuously elaborate examples of order. And as the telescope can show us no end of the simple and majestic order of the heavens, so the microscope can show us no end of the exquisite and impressive order which discloses even—

"In Nature's most minute design,
The signature and stamp of power divine;
Contrivance intricate, expressed with ease,
Where unassisted sight no beauty sees.
The shapely limb and lubricated joint
Within the small dimensions of a point;
Muscle and nerve miraculously spun,
His mighty work, who speaks and it is done.
The Invisible, in things scarce seen revealed,
To whom an atom is an ample field."—(Cowper.)[26]

The traces of a Supreme Reason crowd still more upon the vision when we come to the human mind,—

"The varied scene of quick-compounded thought,
And where the mixing passions endless shift."
—(Thomson.)

The mere existence of originated minds necessarily implies the existence of an unoriginated mind. "What can be more absurd," asks Montesquieu, "than to imagine that a blind fatalistic force has produced intelligent beings?" The complicated and refined adjustments of the body to the mind, and of the mind to the body, are so numerous and interesting that their study has now become the task of a special class of scientific men. A very little disorder in the organisation of the brain—such as even microscopic post-mortem examination may fail to detect—suffices to cause hallucinations of the senses, to shake intellect from its throne, to paralyse the will, and to corrupt the sentiments and affections. How precise and skilful must the adjustment be between the sound brain and sane mind! Who sufficiently realises the mystery of wisdom which lies in the familiar fact that the mind, by merely willing to use the members of the body, sets in motion instantaneously and unconsciously, without effort and without failure, cords and pulleys and levers, joints and muscles, of which it only vaguely, if at all, surmises the existence? The laws of our various appetencies, affections, and emotions, and their relations to their special ends or objects, the nature of the several intellectual faculties and their subservience to mental culture, and still more the general constitution of the mind as a system consisting of a multitude of powers under the government of reason and conscience, present to us vast fields filled with the evidences of Divine Wisdom.[27]

There are others no less extensive and inexhaustible in the principles which underlie and maintain human society, and those which preside over the progressive development of humanity. Political economy is the department of social science which has been cultivated with most success. What, then, is its most comprehensive and best established theorem? This—that although the great majority of men are moved mainly by self-interest, and few seek with much zeal or persistency the general good, the result of their being left in perfect freedom to pursue their own advantage, so long as they do not outwardly violate the rules of justice, is far better for the whole society than if they conformed their conduct to any plan which human wisdom, aiming directly at the general good, could devise; nature having provided in the principles of the human constitution and the circumstances of human life for the selfish plans and passions of individuals so neutralising one another, so counteracting and counterpoising one another, as to secure the social stability and welfare—as to leave general ideas and interests to rule with comparatively little resistance. It is surely a natural inference from this that a Supreme Reason grasps all human reasons, and uses them in order to realise a purpose grander and better than any which they themselves contemplate. History viewed as a whole teaches the same truth on a wider scale. An examination of it discloses a plan pervading human affairs from the origin of man until the present day—a progress which has proceeded without break or stoppage, in accordance with laws which are as yet very imperfectly apprehended. Of the countless generations which have come and gone like the leaves of the forest, for unknown thousands of years, few have had the slightest glimpse of the order which connected them with their fellows, and embraced their every action; fewer still have sought to conform to it; the immense majority have set before them only mean and narrow schemes for personal good; all passions have raged and all vices prevailed in their turn; there have been confusion and tumult and war; and yet the order, progress, plan I speak of have been slowly and silently but surely built up. In this evolution of order out of the chaos of millions on millions of conflicting human wills seeking merely their own pleasure, there is, perhaps, even a more impressive proof of the operation of Divine Wisdom than in the origination and preservation of order among the multitudinous stars of heaven. The philosophical historian who has most conclusively shown by the scrutiny of the chief events in the annals of humanity the existence of such a progressive plan, is amply justified in arguing that it cannot have originated with man, or matter, or chance, but must be the work of God. "We have passed in review," he says, "all the theories imagined by philosophers and historians to explain the mysterious fact that there is in the life of man unfolded in history a succession, a plan, a development, which cannot be referred to man himself. Some, despairing from the outset to find a solution, make of their ignorance a blind power which they call hazard. Evidently that is no solution. Hazard is a word, and nothing more. Other writers—the majority of writers—say that this mysterious power is nature, under the form of climate, or races, or the whole of the physical influences which act on the moral world. But what is nature? Whence has it this power, this foresight, this intelligence, which are so conspicuous in the course of our destinies? If nature is matter, and nothing but matter, that too is no answer. Who will believe that matter acts with wisdom—with intelligence? Where there is intelligent action there must be an intelligent being; therefore nature leads us to God. Finally, there are those who substitute for nature general laws. But do not laws suppose a legislator? and who can this legislator be, if not God?"[28]

There is, then, everywhere, both in the physical and moral worlds, order and adaptation, proportion and co-ordination, and there is very widely present progress—order which advances in a certain direction to a certain end, which is until realised only an ideal. This is the state of things which science discloses. The question is, Is this state of things intelligible on any other supposition than that of a designing mind? The theist holds that it is not; that it directly and imperatively demands an intelligent cause; that to assign it either to no cause, or to any other than an intelligent cause, is, in the strictest and strongest sense of the term, absurd. If we deny that there is such order as I have indicated, we set aside the entire teaching of all the sciences—we pronounce science to be from beginning to end a delusion and a lie. Men in the present day dare not do this. If we deny that such order implies the agency of a Supreme Intelligence, we contradict no express declaration of any of the sciences; we may accept all that they have to tell us about order, and they can tell us about nothing else. But notwithstanding this, it is far more reasonable, far less absurd, to deny that there is order in the universe, than to admit it and deny that its ultimate cause is an intelligence. Further, although we cannot be more certain of the cause than of the effect from which it is inferred, and consequently cannot be more certain that an intelligence has produced the order which is in the universe than that there is order therein, the theistic inference from the whole of that order may well be greatly stronger than the scientific proof of order in any particular instance. Men of science have probably never as good reasons for believing in the laws of order brought to light by their own special science, as the theist has for believing in a Supreme Intelligence because of the order which is the common and concurrent result of all the sciences, and which is obvious to every eye.

II.

The argument from order and adaptation is often spoken of as "the argument from design." The phrase is an unfortunate one. The argument is not from but to design. To assume design and then to affirm that "every design must have a designer," is manifestly not serious reasoning, but a play upon words. To assume design at all is to assume precisely what one is most bound to prove; and to assume design in the universe is to assume what cannot be proved, yea, what the theist requires to show against the pantheist cannot be proved. In any other than a very loose and metaphorical sense design has no existence except in mind. There is no design in the sky, or the sea, or the land; there are only law, order, and arrangement therein, and these things are not designs although they imply designs. What we can describe as the designs of the lower animals are given to them with their constitutions, and are only a part of the instrumentality which fits them for their place in the world. Men have designs properly so called; but the argument for the existence of God from the evidences of a Supreme Wisdom in the progressive evolution of human history, instead of resting on these designs, is based on the fact that what has actually been realised has far transcended them. Science as a mere exposition of the facts of the universe can never show us Divine design, for the good reason that there is no such design in these facts, although, had it not existed elsewhere, they could never have been what they are. While this is true, it must in justice be added that most if not all of the advocates of theism who have presented the argument under consideration in the faulty form,—"Design implies a designer; the universe abounds in design; therefore the universe, so far as it abounds in design, implies a designer,"—have erred more in expression than in thought. In reality they have not meant by design what is properly so called, and consequently have not begun their argument by assuming what was denied and in need of proof. In reality they have meant by design those characteristics of things which they hold to be the indications or evidences or correlatives of intelligence, and which they might have designated by such terms as order, adjustment, adaptation, fitness, progress, &c. All attempts to refute their reasoning, therefore, by a strict and literal interpretation of the phrase "Design implies a designer," must be pronounced unfair. Censure of the phrase is warranted. Rejection of the argument on account of the phrase is superficial and unjust.

It has been held that the argument from order and adaptation is essentially different from the design argument. The reason given for this has been that the design argument is based on the analogy or supposed analogy between the works of nature and the products of human art. In this argument, we are told, we infer from the likeness which certain natural objects bear to artificial objects that there must be a likeness in their causes. We know, it is said, that only intelligent beings frame such structures as houses, ships, and watches, and seeing that there is in the mechanism of the heavens, the circulation of the blood, and the construction of the eye, arrangements and adjustments of a similar kind, we conclude that they also must have been framed by an intelligent being, who must be as much greater than man as the works of nature are greater than the works of art, for causes are proportional to their effects. Now this may be the design argument as some have presented it who had no particular wish to criticise it severely, and it certainly is the way in which Hume and Kant wished it to be presented; but it has no claim whatever to be considered the only proper form of the argument, and is, in fact, a very bad form of it. It is true that there is an analogy between the works of nature and the works of art, and that on the strength of this analogy the two classes of works, and also their causes, may be compared, but not true that the design argument when correctly stated either rests on such analogy or implies such comparison. The analogy and comparison may be drawn into, and, as it were, incorporated with the design argument, but that is rather as a means of illustration than as a condition of inference. When we infer from an examination of their construction that the eye and the ear have been designed by an intelligent being, we are no more dependent on our knowledge that a watch or a telescope has been designed by an intelligent being than we are dependent on our knowledge of the eye and ear being the products of intelligence when we infer that the watch and the telescope are the products of intelligence. There is an inference in both cases, and an inference of precisely the same nature in both cases. It is as direct and independent when the transition is to God from His works as when to our fellow-men from their works. We are greatly mistaken if we suppose that we have an immediate knowledge of the intelligence of the beings who make watches, houses, and ships; we only know that the beings who make these things are intelligent because such things could not be made without intelligence: in a word, we only know our fellow-creatures to be intelligent beings because they utter and arrange sounds so as to convey a meaning, execute movements which tend to an end, and construct machines. We have no more a direct perception or a personal experience of the intelligence of our fellow-men than we have of the intelligence of God. The mind which has given origin to the order and adjustments of the universe is not more absolutely inaccessible to sense and self-consciousness than the mind which gives origin to the order and adjustments of a watch. It is therefore impossible that our knowledge of the former should be dependent on our knowledge of the latter. In both cases the knowledge is inferential,—in both cases it is dependent on the immediate consciousness of intelligence in ourselves,—but the inference is in the former case neither longer nor less legitimate than in the latter. We deny, then, that there is any truth in the statement that the design argument rests on the analogy between the works of nature and the products of art It rests directly on the character of the works of nature as displaying order and adjustment. It is essentially identical with the argument which we have expounded.

It is not less objectionable to speak of the argument from order and adaptation as being an argument from final causes than to speak of it as being an argument from design, unless the different significations of final cause be distinguished, and those which are irrelevant and illegitimate be excluded. For the expression "final cause" has various significations which are indeed intimately related, yet which cannot be employed indifferently without leading to utter confusion. These significations may be distributed into two classes. Each class contains three significations, and every signification of the first class has a signification of the second class to correspond to it. In fact, the significations of the first class are simply so many aspects of order or adaptation, and those of the second class so many aspects of design or intention; the former are order and adaptation viewed with reference to the intrinsic, the extrinsic, and the ultimate ends of things, and the latter are design and intention viewed with reference to the same three ends. Final cause sometimes means the intrinsic end of what is orderly and adjusted, the realisation of the nature of anything which is considered as a whole, a complex of order and adjustment. The combined stability and movement of the solar system is in this sense the final cause of the arrangements by which that result is secured. Sight is in this sense the final cause of the eye, because in sight the true nature of the eye manifests itself. Then, final cause sometimes means not the intrinsic but the extrinsic end of what is orderly and adjusted; not merely the realisation of the nature of anything, but its relationship to other things, its adaptations to their requirements, its uses; not merely the end of an arrangement regarded as a self-contained or completed whole, but the end or ends which it serves as a system surrounded by, connected with, and included in other systems. It is impossible to admit final cause in the sense of intrinsic end and to deny it in that of extrinsic end; for the universe is not a mere aggregate of systems placed alongside of one another, but otherwise unconnected—it is itself a system composed of an infinity of systems within systems. Nothing in nature stands alone; nothing lives to itself nor dies to itself. What is a whole with reference to something smaller than itself, is a part with reference to something larger than itself. The eye is a whole with reference to its own cords, lenses, fluids, and membranes, but it is a part with reference to the body; sight is therefore not more certainly its end than the uses of sight How can a man admit final cause to be involved in the relationship between his stomach and bodily life, but deny it to be involved in the relationship between his stomach and the vegetable and animal substances with which he satisfies its cravings? Clearly the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic ends is a narrow one, and exists not so much in the nature of things as in our way of looking at things. We have but to elevate and extend our own view, and what was before an extrinsic end is thereby changed into an intrinsic end. Admit, in fact, final cause anywhere, and you must admit it everywhere; admit anything to have an end, and you must admit all things to have an end; for the world is a grand and wondrous unity in which all objects depend on and serve one another, and all forces contribute to the attainment of a single comprehensive issue. Once accept the principle of finality, and there is no consistent stopping short of the conviction of Aristotle, that on it hang the whole heavens and earth.

It is only when the word final cause is used in one or other of these two senses that we can with any propriety speak of reasoning from final causes to the existence of God. And these are just the senses in which the expression is now least used. Final cause is generally employed at present to signify design. It means, not the arrangement of causes and effects into systematic unities, the parts of which have definite relations to one another and a common issue, or the adaptation of these unities to support and serve one another, but purpose or intention in the Divine Mind with respect to such arrangement or adaptation. This sense of the word is so obviously general enough to refer both to intrinsic and extrinsic ends that it would be unnecessary to direct attention to the fact, were it not that we are much more apt to fall into error regarding extrinsic than intrinsic ends, and consequently, regarding the intention or purpose which refers to them. A thing has just one intrinsic end—namely, the single conspicuous and all-comprehensive function or issue in virtue of which we can regard it as being a whole or unity, and as possessed of a certain relative independence or completeness. There is thus comparatively little possibility of error in determining what the intrinsic end is in a given instance, and comparatively little danger of presumption in affirming it to have been the end contemplated by the Divine Mind. There is no doubt, for example, that the eye is an instrument constructed in a way calculated to attain the intrinsic end—sight; and there can be no presumption in affirming that God must have had that end in view in the construction of the eye. If there be a God, and if He have had anything to do with the making of the eye, He must have designed that His creatures should see with their eyes. It is different with extrinsic ends. A thing has never merely one extrinsic end; it has always a multitude of extrinsic ends, for it is always related to a multitude of other things. If we would speak of the extrinsic end of a thing we must mean thereby the whole of its adaptations to other things, the entire circle of its external relationships, the sum of its uses. But men have always shown themselves prone in judging of the extrinsic ends of things to single out some particular adaptation or use, or at least a few adaptations or uses, and to ignore or exclude all others. And especially have they shown themselves prone to judge of things merely from their relationship and utility to themselves, as if their happiness was the chief if not sole end of all things. This is, of course, an utterly erroneous method of judging, and necessarily leads to ridiculous thoughts about things, and to irreverent thoughts about God's designs in the creation of things. "It can," as Hegel tells us, "truly profit neither religion nor science, if, after considering the vine with reference to the well-known uses which it confers upon man, we proceed to consider the cork-tree with reference to the corks which are cut from its bark to serve as stoppers for wine-bottles."

When we affirm, then, that final causes in the sense of intrinsic ends are in things, we affirm merely that things are systematic unities, the parts of which are definitely related to one another and co-ordinated to a common issue; and when we affirm that final causes in the sense of extrinsic ends are in things, we affirm merely that things are not isolated and independent systems, but systems definitely related to other systems, and so adjusted as to be parts or components of higher systems, and means to issues more comprehensive than their own. We cannot affirm that final causes in the sense of designs are in things; they can only exist in a mind. What do we mean when we hold that final causes in this sense truly are in the Divine Mind, and with reference equally to intrinsic and extrinsic ends? Merely that such order and adjustment as may actually be seen in things and between things—seen with the naked eye it may be, or only to be seen through the telescope or microscope—or which, if they cannot be seen, yet can by scientific induction be proved to be in and between things,—that that order and adjustment which actually exist, were intended or designed by God to exist. Of course every theist who sees evidences of God's existence in the harmonies of nature, must necessarily rise to final causes in this sense from final causes in the other senses which have been indicated; he must pass from material arrangements to the Divine Intelligence which he believes to be manifested by them. And there can be no shadow of presumption in any theist searching for final causes—Divine designs—in this sense and to this extent. What Descartes and others have said against doing so, on the ground that it is arrogant for a man to suppose he can investigate the ends contemplated by the Deity—can penetrate into the counsels of Divine Wisdom—has manifestly no force or relevancy, so long as all that is maintained is that the order which actually exists was meant to exist. The doubt or denial of that is irreverent. To admit the existence of God, and yet to refuse to acknowledge that He purposed and planned the adaptations and harmonies in nature, is surely as presumptuous as it is inconsistent. To assume that God is ignorant of the constitution and character of the universe, and has had no share in the contrivance and management of it, is to degrade Him to the level of the dream-and-dread-begotten gods of Democritus and Epicurus. Better not to think of God at all, than to think of Him in such a way.

The final cause of a thing, however, may mean, and with reference both to adjustment and design, neither its intrinsic nor extrinsic, but its ultimate end. It may mean, not merely that a thing is and was intended to be the mechanism or organism which science analyses and explains, and to stand in the relationships and fulfil the uses which science traces, but also that it will have, and was intended to have, a destination in the far future. We may ask, What is the goal towards which creation moves? What will be the fate of the earth? In what directions are vegetable and animal life developing? What is the chief end of man? Whither is history tending? What is the ideal of truth which science has before it, and which it hopes to realise? of beauty, which art has before it? of goodness, which virtue has before it? And although to most if not all of these questions probably no very definite and certain answer can be given, to deny that they can in any measure be answered, to pronounce all speculation regarding ultimate ends as wholly vain, would justly be deemed the expression of a rash and thoughtless dogmatism. Science claims not only to explain the past but to foretell the future. The power of prevision possessed by a science is the best criterion of its rank among the sciences when rank is determined by certitude. And most significant is the boldness with which some of the sciences have of late begun to forecast the future. Thus, with reference to the end of the world, the spirit of prophecy, which until very recently was almost confined to the most noted religious visionaries, is now poured largely out upon our most distinguished physicists. This we regard as a most significant and hopeful circumstance, and trust that ere long the prophets of science will be far less discordant and conflicting in their predictions even of the remotest issues than they must be admitted to be at present.

While speculation as to final causes in the sense of ultimate ends is, within certain limits, as legitimate as it is natural, its results are undoubtedly far too meagre and uncertain to allow of our reasoning from them to the existence or wisdom of God. We must prove that there is a Divine Intelligence from what we actually perceive in things, and not from what we can conjecture as to the final destinies of things. In fact, until we have ascertained that there is a Divine Intelligence, and in some measure what are the principles on which that Intelligence proceeds, our chance of reaching truth through speculation as to the ultimate ends of things is, in all probability, exceedingly small. It is on no hazardous speculations of this kind that we would rest an argument for the Divine existence, although questions have been raised as to the Divine character and government which will, at a later stage of the discussion, involve us to some extent in the consideration of ultimate ends.

When final cause is employed to signify design in any reference, be it to intrinsic, extrinsic, or ultimate ends, I have nothing to object to Bacon and Descartes's condemnation of it as illegitimate and unprofitable in science. I know of no science, physical or moral, in which, while thus understood, it can be of the slightest use as a principle of scientific discovery. It is as much out of place in the world of organic as of inorganic nature. It is quite incorrect to say that although it does not lead to the discovery of new truths in strictly physical science, it does so in physiology for example, or in psychology, or in ethics. It is only when it means merely the inherent order and adjustment of things—not when it means designs and purposes regarding them—that the search after it can possibly lead to scientific truth, and, when so understood, it leads to truth in all sciences alike. It was the suggestive principle in Adams and Leverrier's discovery of the planet Neptune from certain unexplained perturbations of the planet Uranus, quite as much as in Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood from the observation of certain unexplained valves at the outlet of the veins and the rise of the arteries. It is involved in the very nature of the inductive process, and is only confirmed and enlarged by the progress of inductive research. It stands in no opposition to the principle of efficient causes, and is in no degree disproved by the discovery of such causes. Assertions to the effect that it has gradually been driven by the advance of knowledge from the simpler sciences into those which are complex and difficult,—that it is being expelled even out of biology and sociology—and that it always draws its confirmation, not from phenomena which have been explained, but from phenomena which await explanation,—are often made, but they rest almost exclusively on the wishes of those who make them. They have no real historical basis.[29]

LECTURE VI.

OBJECTIONS TO THE ARGUMENT FROM ORDER EXAMINED.

I.

The universe is a system which comprehends countless subordinate systems. It is full of combinations of parts which constitute wholes, and of means which conspire to ends. The natural and obvious explanation of the order and adjustments which it thus presents is that they are due to a mind or intelligence. And this is the only rational explanation of them. Mind can alone account for order and adjustment, for the co-ordination of parts into a whole, or the adaptation of means to an end. If we refer them to anything else, the reference is essentially contrary to reason, essentially irrational. It may seem at the first superficial glance as if there were a variety of hypotheses as to the origin of the order we everywhere see around us, all equally or nearly equally credible; but adequate reflection cannot fail to convince us that they must be reduced to a single alternative—to two antagonistic theories. Our only choice is between reason and unreason, between a sufficient and an insufficient cause, between, we may even say, a cause and no cause. This will be brought out by an examination of the various hypotheses which have been suggested by those who are unwilling to admit that the order of the world originated in mind. They try their best to suggest some other alternative than that which I have said is inevitable; but every suggestion they make only raises the alternative which they would avoid—mind or chance, reason or unreason, a sufficient explanation or an absurd one. Before proceeding to establish this, however, it may be necessary to remark on some direct objections which have been taken to the design argument,—objections which might be valid, although no explanation of order could be given or were even attempted.

The inference which the theist requires to draw from the existence of order in the universe is merely the existence of an intelligence who produced that order. It follows that it is an unfair objection to his argument to urge, as has often been urged, that it does not directly and of itself prove God to be the creator of the universe, but only the former of it—not the author of matter, but only of the collocations of matter. This objection, which men even like Hume and Kant and J. S. Mill, have thought worth employing, is simply that the argument does not prove more than it professes to prove. It does not pretend to make all other reasoning for the Divine existence superfluous. It is no condition of its validity that it should stand alone; that it should contribute nothing to other arguments and receive nothing from them. The objection is thus entirely irrelevant. It may be a wise caution to those who would trust exclusively to it, and neglect or depreciate other arguments. It is no objection to its legitimacy.

It is remarkable, too, that those who have urged this objection have never felt that before employing it they were bound to satisfy themselves and to prove to others that order is a mere surface or superficial thing—outside of matter, superimposed on it. If order be something inherently and intrinsically in matter—be of its very essence—belong to what is ultimate in it; if matter and its form be inseparable,—then the author of its order must have been also the author of itself; and all that this objection shows us is, that those who have employed it have had mistaken notions about the nature of matter. Now, as I have already had to indicate, modern science seems rapidly perfecting the proof of this. The order in the heavens, and in the most complicated animal organisms, appears to be not more wonderful than the order in the ultimate atoms of which they are composed. The balance of evidence is in favour of the view that order extends as far and penetrates as deep as matter itself does. The human intellect is daily learning that it is foolish to fancy that there is anywhere in matter a sphere in which the Divine Wisdom does not manifest itself in and through order.

There is still another remark to be made on the objection under consideration. The immediate inference from the order of the universe is to an intelligent former of the universe, not to a creator. But this does not preclude the raising of the question, Is it reasonable to believe the former of the world merely its former? Must not its former be also its creator? On the contrary, the inference that the order of the world must be the result of intelligent agency ought to suggest this question to every serious and reflective mind, and it should even contribute something to its answer. The order of the universe must have originated with intelligence. What is implied in this admission? Clearly that the order of the universe cannot have originated with matter,—that matter is unintelligent, and cannot account either for intelligence or the effects of intelligence. But if so, the intelligence which formed the universe must be an eternal intelligence. The supposition that matter is eternal must in this case be supplemented by the admission that mind is eternal. In other words, the affirmation that the former of the world is merely its former—the denial that its former is also its creator—means dualism, the belief in two distinct eternal existences,—an eternal mind and eternal matter. Whoever is not prepared to accept this hypothesis must abandon the affirmation and denial from which it necessarily follows. And who can, after due deliberation, accept it? The law of parsimony of causes absolutely forbids our assuming, for the explanation of anything, more causes than are necessary to account for it. It forbids, therefore, our belief in an eternal matter and an eternal mind, unless we can show reason for holding that one of them alone is not a sufficient cause of the universe. Now those who grant the inference from order to intelligence, themselves admit that matter is not a sufficient First Cause of the universe as it actually exists. Do they find any person admitting that mind would be an insufficient First Cause? Do they themselves see any way of showing its insufficiency? Do they not even perceive that it would be foolish and hopeless to try to show that an eternal mind could not create a material universe, and that all they could show would be, the here quite irrelevant truth, that the human mind is ignorant of the manner in which this could be done? If the answers to these questions are what I believe they must be, it must also be acknowledged that the former of the universe can only be rationally thought of as also its creator.

I turn to the consideration of another equally futile objection to the argument from order. That argument, it is said, does not prove the Divine Intelligence to be infinite. The universe, as a system of order, is finite, and we have no right to conclude that its cause is in respect of intelligence, or in any other respect, infinite. We must attribute to the cause the wisdom necessary to produce the effect, but no more. The obvious reply is, that this is precisely what we do. The argument is not employed to prove the infinity of the Divine Intelligence, but to prove that the order and adaptations which everywhere abound in the universe must have had an intelligence capable of conceiving and producing them. It is an obvious and legitimate argument to that extent, and it is pushed no farther. The inference that the world had an intelligent author is as simple, direct, and valid, as that any statue, painting, or book had an intelligent author. When Mr Spencer, Mr Lewes, and Professor Tyndall argue that the cause of the universe cannot be known to be intelligent, because the reason of man, being finite, cannot comprehend the infinite, they overlook that the reason of man has no need to comprehend the infinite in order to apprehend such manifestations of the infinite as come before it. Just as a person reading the works of the able men who urge this weak objection feels certain that these books must have had their origin in minds endowed with certain intellectual powers, and cannot have been produced by chance, or blind forces, or bodies destitute of minds, and this although much in their minds is and always must be inscrutable to him; so, when he studies the books of nature and of history, he feels equally certain, and in the same way certain, that they are the compositions of a most amazing intellect; and his certainty as to this need not be lessened, clouded, or in any degree affected, by the great and indubitable, but here irrelevant, truth—that the mind of God is in itself, in its essence, inscrutable; and in its greatness, its infinity, incomprehensible.

The argument from order must further be admitted sufficient to show, if valid at all, that the wisdom of the First Cause is of the most wondrous character. The more nature and mind and history are studied by any one who sees in them evidence of design at all, the more wondrous must the wisdom displayed in them be felt to be. Whoever realises that that wisdom is at once guiding the countless hosts of heavenly bodies in all their evolutions through the boundless realms of space, and fashioning and providing for the countless hosts of microscopic creatures dwelling on the leaf of a flower or in a drop of water, everywhere accomplishing a multitude of ends by few and simple means, or effecting single and definite purposes by the most elaborate and complex contrivances, must feel that rash beyond all expression is the short-sighted mortal who can venture to affirm that it is not infinite. If "the Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth, and by understanding hath established the heavens," His wisdom and His understanding are at least so great that we cannot measure them, and have no right to pronounce them limited. The adjustments and harmonies of the universe, as we know it, indicate a depth and richness of wisdom in its Author which far pass our comprehension; and the universe which we know is probably less in comparison with the universe which God has made, than the leaf on which a host of animalcules live and die is in comparison with the vastest of primeval forests, or an ant-hill with the solar system. The universe which we see and know is a noble commentary on such words of Scripture as these: "I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions. The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When He prepared the heavens, I was there: when He set a compass on the face of the depth: when He established the clouds above: when He strengthened the fountains of the deep: when He gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass His commandment: when He appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him; and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him." But beyond the universe which we see and know, extend illimitable fields of space and stretches of time which we do not see and do not know, but which may be even more crowded with the works of Divine Intelligence than any which are within our range of bodily or mental vision. The ingenious authors of the book entitled 'The Unseen Universe' suppose the entire visible universe to be but a local product and temporary phase of a far older and greater universe, which itself again may be only an island in the ocean of a universe still more stupendous and refined. Whatever error may be mingled with this thought in the work mentioned, there is, I doubt not, at least this much of truth also, that the entire course of nature which science reveals is but a ripple, a current, in the ocean of God's universal action. The man whose mind is duly open to the possibility of this will not venture to pronounce the intelligence of God to be finite. The man who fails to recognise its possibility is very blind, very thoughtless.

It is scarcely credible that the evidences of God's wisdom should have been argued to be proofs of His weakness. And yet this has happened. "It is not too much to say," wrote Mr J. S. Mill, "that every indication of design in the Kosmos is so much evidence against the omnipotence of the Designer. For what is meant by design? Contrivance: the adaptation of means to an end. But the necessity for contrivance—the need of employing means—is a consequence of the limitation of power. Who would have recourse to means if to attain his end his mere word was sufficient? The very idea of means implies that the means have an efficacy which the direct action of the being who employs them has not. Otherwise they are not means, but an encumbrance. A man does not use machinery to move his arms. If he did, it could only be when paralysis had deprived him of the power of moving them by volition. But if the employment of contrivance is in itself a sign of limited power, how much more so is the careful and skilful choice of contrivances? Can any wisdom be shown in the selection of means when the means have no efficacy but what is given them by the will of him who employs them, and when his will could have bestowed the same efficacy on any other means? Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, and there is no room for them in a being for whom no difficulties exist. The evidences, therefore, of natural theology distinctly imply that the author of the Kosmos worked under limitations."[30]

This, it seems to me, is very strange and worthless reasoning. According to it, the ability of God to form and execute a purpose is evidence not of power but of weakness. I wonder if Mr Mill imagined that the inability of God to form and carry out a purpose would have been evidence not of His weakness but of His power. Or did he suppose, perhaps, that both ability and inability were signs of weakness, and that, consequently, for once opposites were identical? Or did he not think on the subject at all, and so reasoned very much at random? I confess I cannot see how ability to contrive things is weakness, or inability to contrive them power. I hold to Bacon's maxim that "knowledge is power," and refuse to admit that wisdom is weakness. But God, if omnipotent, it is said, did not need to contrive: His mere word must have been sufficient. Yes, is the obvious answer; His mere word, His mere will, was sufficient to produce all His contrivances, and has produced them all. There is no shadow of reason for suspecting that anything was difficult to Him or for Him. No such suspicion is entertained by those who employ the design argument; and those who would rationally object to that argument must find something else to insist on than the power of God's mere will. The will of God is everywhere as efficacious as He in His omnipotence and omniscience chooses that it should be. At the same time, if He desire certain ends, His will cannot remain mere will and dispense with the contrivance of appropriate means. If He wish to bestow happiness on human beings, He must create human beings, and contrive their bodies and minds. To speak of His will as able to "bestow the same efficacy on any means" is no less contrary to reason than it would be to speak of it as able to make the part greater than the whole. It is only in the world imagined by Mr Mill—one in which two and two might be five—that a sunbeam could serve the same purpose as a granite pillar or a steam-engine; and such a world, most people will assuredly hold, even omnipotence could not create. Infinite power and wisdom must necessarily work "under limitations" when they originate and control finite things; but the limitations are not in the infinite power and wisdom themselves—they are in their operations and effects. According to Mr Mill's argument, infinite power could not create a finite world at all: only a finite power could do so. That surely means that a finite power must be mightier than an infinite power; and that, again, is surely a plain self-contradiction, a manifest absurdity.

There is another objection which, although in itself unworthy of answer, has been urged so often and presented in so many forms, some of which are rhetorically impressive, that it cannot be wholly passed over. The design argument has been censured as "assuming that the genesis of the heavens and the earth was effected somewhat after the manner in which a workman shapes a piece of furniture"—as "converting the Power whose garment is seen in the visible universe into an Artificer, fashioned after the human model, and acting as man is seen to act"—as "transforming the First Cause into a magnified mechanist who constructs a work of art, and then sits apart from it and observes how it goes," &c. Now the heavens and the earth are to such a wonderful extent exemplifications both of mechanical laws and æsthetic principles, that no man of sense, I think, will deny that they may most justly be compared to machines or works of art, or even pronounced to be machines and works of art. They are that, although they are more than that. An animal is a machine, although an organism too. Every organism is a machine, although every machine is not an organism. Art and nature are not antagonistic and exclusive. Man and all man's arts are included in nature, and nature is the highest art. While, however, it is legitimate and even necessary to illustrate the design argument by references to human inventions, the numerous and immense differences between the works of man's art and the processes of nature must not be overlooked; and there is no excuse for saying that they have been overlooked. It is precisely because the universe is so above anything man has made or can make, and because vegetable and animal organisms are so different from watches and statues, that the argument in question leads us to a divine and not to a merely human intelligence. It implies that both the works of God and the works of man are products of intelligence; but it does not require that they should have anything else in common. It recognises that the most elaborate and exquisite contrivances of man fall immeasurably below "nature's most minute designs." So far from requiring, it forbids our carrying any of the limitations or peculiarities of human contrivance over to that which is divine. Besides, the belief in design is held in conjunction with the belief in creation out of nothing. The same persons who recognise that there is a divine wisdom displayed in the constitution and course of nature believe the universe to have been called into being by the mere volition of the Almighty. But among all theories of the genesis of the heavens and the earth, that is the only one which does not represent the First Cause as working like a man. Man never creates—he cannot create. To produce anything he must have something to work on—he must have materials to mould and modify.[31]

II.

Those who refuse to refer the order and adaptations in the universe to a designing intelligence are bound to account for them in some other way. Has this been done? Has any person succeeded in tracing them back to any other principle which can be reasonably regarded as their cause, or as adequate to their production? This is the question which we have now to consider.

Matter, some would have us believe, is the origin of the order of the universe. Grant it, and there is still the question—What is the origin of matter?—to be disposed of. We have seen that this is a question which we are bound to raise; we have seen that there are strong reasons for holding that matter had an origin, had a beginning in time, and none whatever for regarding it as self-existent and eternal. The very existence of order and system, of mechanical adjustments and organic adaptations in the universe, seems to prove that matter must have had a beginning. If certain collocations of matter evince design, and must have had a beginning, the adaptation of the parts to form the collocation evinces design, and implies a beginning. And if matter had a beginning, its cause can only have been mind. To say that it originated with chance or necessity is plainly absurd. Chance and necessity are meaningless terms unless mind or matter be presupposed. There can be no accidents where neither mind nor matter exists. There can be no chance where there is no law. Chance or accident is what occurs when two or more independent series of phenomena meet, without their meeting having been premeditated and provided for. When one series of causes leads a man to pass a house at a given moment of a given day, and another series of causes, coexistent with but wholly independent of the former series, determines that a heavy body shall fall from the roof of that house at that moment of that day and kill that man, the consequence—his death—is what may be properly called an accident, or matter of chance. One who believes, indeed, in the omniscience and universal foreordination and government of God, will hold that even in such a case the accident or chance is merely apparent; but he will not deny the right of the atheist to speak of chance or accident in this way, or to explain as matters of chance whatever he can. The word chance, or accident, can have no intelligible sense, however, unless there be such independent series of phenomena—unless there be mental and material existences, mental and material laws. Chance cannot be conceived of, even by the atheist, as the origin of existence. The same may be said of necessity. Matter or mind may act necessarily, but necessity cannot act without matter or mind. If it be requisite, therefore, to seek a cause for matter, mind alone can be assigned as its cause. If we are justified in seeking for the origin of matter at all, our choice of an answer lies between mind and absurdity, between a real and sufficient cause and an imaginary and inconceivable cause. Besides, how could matter of itself produce order, even if it were self-existent and eternal? It is far more unreasonable to believe that the atoms or constituents of matter produced of themselves, without the action of a Supreme Mind, this wonderful universe, than that the letters of the English alphabet produced the plays of Shakespeare, without the slightest assistance from the human mind known by that famous name. These atoms might, perhaps, now and then, here and there, at great distances and long intervals, produce, by a chance contact, some curious collocation or compound; but never could they produce order or organisation, on an extensive scale or of a durable character, unless ordered, arranged, and adjusted in ways of which intelligence alone can be the ultimate explanation. To believe that their fortuitous and undirected movements could originate the universe, and all the harmonies and utilities and beauties which abound in it, evinces a credulity far more extravagant than has ever been displayed by the most superstitious of religionists. Yet no consistent materialist can refuse to accept this colossal chance-hypothesis. All the explanations of the order of the universe which materialists, from Democritus and Epicurus to Diderot and Lange, have devised, rest on the assumption that the elements of matter, being eternal, must pass through infinite combinations, and that one of these must be our present world—a special collocation among the countless millions of collocations, past and future. Throw the letters of the Greek alphabet, it has been said, an infinite number of times, and you must produce the Iliad and all Greek books. The theory of probabilities, I need hardly say, requires us to believe nothing so absurd. Throw letters together without thought through all eternity, and you will never make them express thought. All the letters in the Iliad might have been tossed and jumbled together from morning to night by the hands of the whole human race, from the beginning of the world until now, and the first line of the Iliad would have been still to compose, had not the genius of Homer been inspired to sing the wrath of Achilles and the war around Troy. But what is the Iliad to the hymn of creation, and the drama of providence? Were these glorious works composed by the mere jumbling together of atoms, which were not even prepared beforehand to form things, as letters are to form words, and which had to shake themselves into order without the help of any hand? They may believe that who can. It seems to me that it ought to be much easier to believe all the Arabian Nights.

To ascribe the origination of order to law is a manifest evasion of the real problem. Law is order. Law is the very thing to be explained. The question is—Has law a reason, or is it without a reason? The unperverted human mind cannot believe it to be without a reason. "The existence of a law connecting and governing any class of phenomena implies a presiding intelligence which has preconceived and established the law. The regulation of events by precise rules of time and space, of number and measure, is evidence of thought and mind." So says Dr Whewell; and the statement is amply justified by the fact, that all laws and rules in the universe imply that existences are related to one another in a way of which intelligent adjustment alone is the adequate and ultimate explanation. The existence of a law uniformly involves the coexistence of several conditions, and that is a phenomenon which, whenever the conditions and law are physically ultimate, and consequently physically inexplicable, clearly presupposes mind. Laws, in a word, are not the causes but the expressions of order. They are themselves the results of delicately accurate adjustments, which indicate the operation of a divine wisdom. There are chemical laws, for example, simply because there are chemical elements endowed with affinities, attractions, or forces the most diverse, yet so balanced and harmonised as to secure the welfare of the world. Besides, laws do not act of themselves. No law produces of itself any result. It is the agents which act according to the law that produce results, and the nature of the result produced depends on the number and character of the agents, and how each is situated and circumstanced. If the agents oppose each other, or are inappropriately distributed, they bring about disorder and disaster in conformity to law. There is no calamity, no evil, no scene of confusion, in the known world, which is not the result of the action of agents which operate in strictest accordance to law. The law of gravitation might rule every particle of matter, and yet conflict and confusion and death would prevail throughout the entire solar system were harmony and stability and life not secured by very special arrangements. Matter might have all its present inherent and essential laws, and yet remain for ever a chaos. Apart from a designing and superintending intelligence, the chances in favour of chaos and against cosmos, even allowing matter to have uncreated properties and laws, were incalculable. The obvious inference is that which Professor Jevons expresses in these words—"As an unlimited number of atoms can be placed in unlimited space in an unlimited number of modes of distribution, there must, even granting matter to have had all its laws from eternity, have been at some moment in time, out of the unlimited choices and distributions possible, that one choice and distribution which yielded the fair and orderly universe that now exists." Only out of rational choice can order have come.

The most common mode, perhaps, of evading the problem which order presents to reason, is the indication of the process by which the order has been realised. From Democritus to the latest Darwinian there have been men who supposed that they had completely explained away the evidences for design in nature when they had described the physical antecedents of the arrangements appealed to as evidences. Aristotle showed the absurdity of the supposition more than 2200 years ago. But those who deny final causes have gone on arguing in the same irrational manner down to the present time. They cannot, in fact, do otherwise. They are committed to a false position, and they dare not abandon the sophism on which it rests. Nothing else can explain how any sane mind should infer that because a thing is conditioned it cannot have been designed. The man who argues that the eye was not constructed in order to see because it has been so constructed as to be capable of seeing, is clearly either unable to reason correctly, or allows his reasoning faculty to be terribly perverted by prejudice. That a result is secured by appropriate conditions can seem to no sound and unprejudiced intellect a reason for regarding it to have been undesigned. And yet what other reason is involved in all the attempts to explain away final causes by means of the nebular, Darwinian, and other development hypotheses?

M. Comte imagines that he has shown the inference of design, from the order and stability of the solar system, to be unwarranted, when he has pointed out the physical conditions through which that order and stability are secured, and the process by which they have been obtained. He refers to the comparative smallness of the planetary masses in relation to the central mass, the feeble eccentricity of their orbits, the moderate mutual inclination of their planes, and the superior mean density of their solid over their fluid constituents, as the circumstances which render it stable and habitable, and these characteristic circumstances, as he calls them, he tells us flow naturally and necessarily from the simple mutual gravity of the several parts of nebulous matter. When he has done this, he supposes himself to have proved that the heavens declare no other glory than that of Hipparchus, of Kepler, and of Newton.

Now, the assertion that the peculiarities which make the solar system stable and the earth habitable have flowed naturally and necessarily from the simple mutual gravity of the several parts of nebulous matter, is one which greatly requires proof, but which has never received it. In saying this, we do not challenge the proof of the nebular theory itself. That theory may or may not be true. We are quite willing to suppose it true; to grant that it has been scientifically established. What we maintain is, that even if we admit unreservedly that the earth, and the whole system to which it belongs, once existed in a nebulous state, from which they have been gradually evolved into their present condition conformably to physical laws, we are in no degree entitled to infer from the admission the conclusion which Comte and others have drawn. The man who fancies that the nebular theory implies that the law of gravitation, or any other physical law, has of itself determined the course of cosmical evolution, so that there is no need for believing in the existence and operation of a Divine Mind, proves merely that he is not exempt from reasoning very illogically. The solar system could only have been evolved out of its nebulous state into that which it now presents if the nebula possessed a certain size, mass, form, and constitution—if it was neither too rare nor too dense, neither too fluid nor too tenacious; if its atoms were all numbered, its elements all weighed, its constituents all disposed in due relation to each other—that is to say, only if the nebula was in reality as much a system of order, which intelligence alone could account for, as the worlds which have been developed from it. The origin of the nebula thus presents itself to the reason as a problem which demands solution no less than the origin of the planets. All the properties and laws of the nebula require to be accounted for. What origin are we to give them? It must be either reason or unreason. We may go back as far as we please, but at every step and stage of the regress we must find ourselves confronted with the same question—the same alternative.

The argument of Comte, it is further obvious, proceeds on the arbitrary and erroneous assumption that a process is proved to have been without significance or purpose when the manner in which it has been brought about is exhibited. It is plain that on this assumption even those works of man which have cost most thought might be shown to have cost none. A house is not built without considerable reflection and continuous reference to an end contemplated and desired, but the end is only gradually realised by a process which can be traced from its origin onwards, and through the concurrence or sequence of a multitude of conditions. Would a description of the circumstances on which the security and other merits of a house depend,—of the peculiarities in its foundation, walls, and roof, in its configuration and materials, which render it convenient and comfortable, or of the processes by which these peculiarities were attained,—prove the house to have been unbuilt by man, to have been developed without the intervention of an intelligent architect? It would, if Comte's argument were good; if it would not, Comte's argument must be bad. But can any one fail to see that such an argument in such a case would be ridiculous? The circumstances, peculiarities, and processes referred to are themselves manifest evidences of design and intelligence. They are a part of what has to be explained, and a part of it which can only be explained on the supposition of a contriving and superintending mind. They entitle us to reject all hypotheses which would explain the construction of the house without taking into account the intelligence of its architect. The circumstances, peculiarities, and process described by Comte, as rendering the earth an orderly system and the abode of life, are no less among the evidences for the belief that intelligence has presided over the formation of the earth. They require for their rational comprehension to be thought of as the means and conditions by which ends worthy of intelligence have been secured. They require to be accounted for; and they cannot be reasonably accounted for except on the supposition of having been designed. If we reject that view we must accept this, that the present system of things is a special instance of order which has occurred among innumerable instances of disorder, produced by the interaction of the elements or atoms of matter in infinite time. These elements or atoms we must imagine as affecting all possible combinations, and falling at length, after countless failures, into a regular and harmonious arrangement of things. Now, we can in a vague, thoughtless way imagine this, but we cannot justify our belief of it either by particular facts or general reasons. It is an act of imagination wholly divorced from intelligence. Thus to refer the origin and explanation of universal order to chance, is merely mental caprice.

If the evolution of the earth and the heavenly bodies from a nebula destroy neither the relevancy nor the force of the design argument, the development of complex organisms from simple ones, and the descent of all the plants and animals on earth from a very few living cells or forms, will not remove or lessen the necessity for supposing an intelligence to have designed all the organisms, simple and complex alike, and to have foreordained, arranged, and presided over the course of their development. Were it even proved that life and organisation had been evolved out of dead and inorganic matter, the necessity of believing in such an intelligence would still remain. Nothing of the kind has yet been proved. On the contrary, scientific experimentation has all tended to show that life proceeds only from life. But had it been otherwise—had this break and blank in the development theory been filled up—matter would only have been proved to be more wonderful than it had been supposed to be. The scientific confirmation of the hypothesis of what is called spontaneous generation would not relieve the mind from the necessity of referring the potency of life and all else that is wonderful in matter either to design or chance, reason or unreason—it would not free it from the dilemma which had previously presented itself.[32]

The development of higher from lower organisms, of course, still less frees us from the obligation to believe that a supreme intelligence presides over the development. Development is not itself a cause, but a process,—it is a something which must have a cause; and the only kinds of development which have yet been shown to be exemplified in the organic world demand intelligence as their ultimate cause. I do not know that I can better prove that there is no opposition between development and design than by referring to an illustration which Professor Huxley made use of with a directly contrary view. To show that the argument from final causes, or what is often called the theological argument, had, as commonly stated, received its death-blow from Mr Darwin, he wrote as follows: "The theological argument runs thus—an organ or organism (A) is precisely fitted to perform a function or purpose (B); therefore it was specially constructed to perform that purpose. In Paley's famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function or purpose of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end, on the ground that the only cause we know of competent to produce such an effect as a watch which shall keep time is a contriving intelligence, adapting the means directly to that end. Suppose, however, that any one had been able to show that the watch had not been made directly by any person, but that it was the result of the modification of another watch which kept time but poorly, and that this, again, had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called a watch at all, seeing that it had no figures on the dial, and the hands were rudimentary, and that, going back and back in time, we come at last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all these changes had resulted first from a tendency in the structure to vary indefinitely, and secondly from something in the surrounding world which helped all variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper and checked all those in other directions,—then it is obvious that the force of Paley's argument would be gone. For it would be demonstrated that an apparatus thoroughly well adapted to a particular purpose might be the result of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of the direct application of the means appropriate to that end by an intelligent agent."[33]

Our great comparative physiologist would probably not write so at present. He may still not accept the design argument; but he is now well aware that it has not got its death-blow, nor even any serious wound, from the theory of evolution. He has since, on more than one occasion, shown the perfect compatibility of development with design. He might, perhaps, in defence of his earlier and less considerate utterances, maintain that no organ has been made with the precise structure which it at present possesses in order to accomplish the precise function which it at present fulfils; but he admits that the most thoroughgoing evolutionist must at least assume "a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences," and "is thereby at the mercy of the theologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe." Granting thus much, he is logically bound to grant more. If the entire evolution of the universe may have been intended, the several stages of its evolution may have been intended; and they may have been intended for their own sakes as well as for the sake of the collective evolution or its final result. If eyes and ears were contrived for a purpose, the eyes and ears of each species of animals may have been made with the precise structure which they exhibit for the precise purposes which they fulfil, although they may have been developed out of a different kind of eyes and ears, and will, in the lapse of ages, be developed into still other kinds. The higher theology, the general designs, which Professor Huxley admits evolution cannot touch, is in no opposition to the lower theology, the special designs, which he strangely supposes it to have definitively discarded.

Nothing can be more certain than that Dr Paley would have held the design argument to have been in no degree weakened by the theory of evolution, and that he would have been very much astonished by Professor Huxley's remarks on that argument. In referring to the mechanism of a watch as an evidence of intelligence in its maker, Dr Paley pointed out that our idea of the greatness of that intelligence would be much increased if watches were so constructed as to give rise to other watches like themselves. He must necessarily have admitted that the watch imagined by Professor Huxley was still more remarkable, and implied a still greater intelligence in its contrivance. The revolving barrel must have had wonderful capabilities, which only intelligence could confer. All the circumstances in which it was to be placed must have been foreseen, and all the influences which were to act upon it must have been taken into account, which could only be done by intelligence. All that helped variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper must have been brought into requisition, and all that hindered it, or favoured variations in other directions, must have been detected and checked; but no unintelligent agents can be conceived of as accomplishing such work, or as more than the means of accomplishing it employed by a providential Reason. The greater the distance between the revolving barrel and the most elaborated watch—the greater the number of mechanisms between the first and the last of these two terms, or between the commencing cause and the final result—the greater the necessity for a mind the most comprehensive and accurate, to serve as an explanation of the entire series of mechanisms and the whole process of development.

Mr Darwin, and a large number of those who are called Darwinians, profess to prove that all the order of organic nature may have been unintentionally originated by the mechanical operation of natural forces. They think they can explain how, from a few simple living forms, or even from a single primordial cell, the entire vegetable and animal kingdoms, with all their harmonies and beauties, have arisen wholly independent of any ordaining and presiding mind, by means of the operation of the law of heredity that like produces like; of variability from the action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; of over-production, or a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for existence; of natural selection, or the survival and prevalence of the fittest, and the disappearance and extinction of what is unsuited to its circumstances and inferior to its competitors; and of sexual selection. But the remarkable originality, ingenuity, and skill which they display in endeavouring to establish, illustrate, and apply these laws, make all the more striking the absence of freshness and independence, of force or relevancy, in the reasonings by which they would attach to them an irreligious inference. The same men who have adduced so many new facts, and thrown so much new light on facts previously known, in support of the real or alleged laws indicated, have not adduced a single new reason, and scarcely even set in a more plausible light a single old reason, for the denial of design. They assure us, copiously and vehemently, that the laws which they claim to have proved are in themselves a disproof of design; but they somehow forget that it is incumbent on them to bestow the labour requisite to make this manifest. They reason as if it were almost or wholly self-evident, whereas a little more thought would show them that all their laws imply mind and purpose.

There is a law of heredity: like produces like. But why is there such a law? Why does like produce like? Why should not all nature have been sterile? Why should there have been any provision for the propagation of life in a universe ruled by a mere blind force? And why should producer and produced be like? Why should offspring not always be as unlike their parents as tadpoles are unlike frogs? The offspring of all the higher animals pass through various embryological stages in which they are extremely unlike their parents. Why should they ever become like to them? Physical science cannot answer these questions; but that is no reason why they should not both be asked and answered. I can conceive of no other intelligent answer being given to them than that there is a God of wisdom, who designed that the world should be for ages the abode of life; that the life therein should be rich and varied, yet that variation should have its limits; that there should be no disorder or confusion; and who, to secure this result, decreed that plants should yield seeds, and animals bring forth, after their kind. He who would disprove design must certainly not start with the great mystery of generation.

Then, the so-called law of variability is the expression of a purpose which must have Reason at its beginning, middle, and end. There is in no organism an absolutely indefinite tendency to vary. Every variation of every organism is in some measure determined by the constitution of the organism. "A whale," as Dr Huxley says, "does not tend to vary in the direction of producing feathers, nor a bird in the direction of producing whalebone." But a tendency to definite variation is an indication of purpose. If a man could make a revolving barrel with a tendency to develop into a watch, he would have to be credited with having designed both the barrel and watch, not less than if he had contrived and constructed the two separately. Further, variation has proceeded in a definite direction. Darwin admits that there is no law of necessary advancement. There is no more reason in the nature of the case for improvement than for deterioration. Apart from the internal constitution of an organism having been so planned, and its external circumstances so arranged, as to favour the one rather than the other, its variations could not have been more towards self-perfection than self-destruction. But variation, according to the Darwinians, has taken place in one direction and not in another; it has been forward, not backward; it has been a progression, not a retrogression. Why? Only because of a continuous adjustment of organisms to circumstances tending to bring this about. Had there been no such adjustment, there might have been only unsuitable variations, or the suitable variations might have been so few and slight that no higher organisms would have been evolved. Natural selection might have had no materials, or altogether insufficient materials, to work with. Or the circumstances might have been such, that the lowest organisms were the best endowed for the struggle of life. If the earth were covered with water, fish would survive, and higher creatures would perish. Natural selection cannot have made the conditions of its own action—the circumstances in the midst of which it must operate. Therefore, there is more in progressive variation than it can explain: there is what only an all-regulative intelligence can explain.

Again, there is a law of over-production, we are told, which gives rise to a struggle for existence. Well, is this law not a means to an end worthy of Divine Wisdom? In it we find the reason why the world is so wonderfully rich in the most varied forms of life. What is called over-production is a productivity which is in excess of the means of subsistence provided for the species itself; but no species exists merely for itself. The ratio of the production of life is probably none too high for the wants of all the creatures which have to be supplied with food and enjoyment. And the wants of all creatures are what have to be taken into account; not the wants of any single species—not the wants of man alone. If we adequately realised how vast is the number of guests which have constantly to be fed at the table of nature, we would, I have no doubt, acknowledge that there is little, if any, real waste of life in the world. Then, the struggle to which the rate of production gives rise is, on the showing of the Darwinians themselves, subservient to the noblest ends. Although involving privation, pain, and conflict, its final result is order and beauty. All the perfections of sentient creatures are represented as due to it. Through it the lion has gained its strength, the deer its speed, the dog its sagacity. The inference seems natural that these perfections were designed to be attained by it; that this state of struggle was ordained for the sake of the advantages which it is actually seen to produce. The suffering which the conflict involves may indicate that God has made even animals for some higher end than happiness—that He cares for animal perfection as well as for animal enjoyment; but it affords no reason for denying that the ends which the conflict actually serves, it was also intended to serve. Besides, the conflict is clearly not a struggle for bare existence; it is, even as regards the animals, a struggle for the largest amount of enjoyment which they can secure, and for the free and full exercise of all their faculties. It thus manifests, not only indirectly but also directly, what its ends are. They are ends which can only be reasonably conceived of as having been purposed by an intelligence, and which are eminently worthy of a Divine intelligence.

But what of the law, or so-called law, of natural selection? In itself, and so far as physical science can either prove or disprove it, it is simply an expression of the alleged fact, that in the struggle of life, any variation, however caused, which is profitable to the individuals of a species, will tend to their preservation, will have a chance of being transmitted to their offspring, and will be of use to them likewise, so that they will survive and multiply at the expense of competitors which are not so well endowed. But natural selection thus understood is obviously in no opposition to design; on the contrary, it is a way in which design may be realised. Some might even hold that design cannot be conceived of as realised in any other natural way; that if not thus realised, it could only be miraculously realised. But Mr Darwin, and many of those who call themselves his followers, tell us not only that there is natural selection, but that blind forces and mechanical laws alone bring it about; that intention and intelligence have nothing to do with it. What proof do they give us? Alas! the painful thing is that they give us none. They point out the blind forces and the mechanical laws by which the selection is effected and its results secured; they show how they are adapted to accomplish their work: and then they assert that these forces and laws explain the whole matter; that no underlying and all-embracing reason has prepared, arranged, and used them. They see the physical agencies and the physical process by which order and beauty have been attained—they do not see intelligence and design; and because they do not see them, they conclude that they have no existence. They describe the mechanism which their senses apprehend, and affirm it to have made itself, or at least to have been unmade, and to work of itself, because the mind which contrived it and directs it is inaccessible to sense. All their reasoning resolves itself into a denial of what is spiritual because it is unseen.

The only instances of natural selection which have been adduced to show that blind forces may bring about results as remarkable, and of the same kind, as those which are accomplished by intelligent agents, are manifestly irrelevant. They are of such a nature that every teleologist must hold them to imply what they are intended to disprove. When Professor Huxley points to the winds and waves of the Bay of Biscay as carefully selecting the particles of sea-sand on the coast of Brittany, and heaping them, according to their size and weight, in different belts along the shore; to a frosty night selecting the hardy plants in a plantation from among the tender ones; and to a hurricane transporting a sapling to a new seat in the soil,—he completely mistakes what the problem before him is. Fire and water can produce wonderful effects in a steam-engine; but the man who should infer, from there being no intelligence in the fire and water themselves, that intelligence must have had nothing to do with their effects when they were brought into contact in a steam-engine, would deserve no great credit for his reasoning. It is precisely Professor Huxley's reasoning. He looks at the fire and water separately, and completely ignores the engine. Because in a world which is a system of order and law a certain collocation and combination of physical conditions and forces will produce an orderly result, he infers that design and intelligence are not needed to produce such a result. I submit that that is illegitimate and irrelevant reasoning. It resolves itself into a denial of Divine and intelligent agency, because the senses apprehend merely physical elements and a physical process. It assumes a selected adaptation, which presupposes intelligence in order to get rid of intelligence. It begs the whole question.

The so-called law of sexual selection, if it be a law at all, is obviously teleological in its nature. Its end is the production of beauty in form and colour. Can blind physical forces, if not subservient to intelligence, be conceived of as working towards so essentially ideal a goal as beauty?

I think enough has now been said to show that the researches and speculations of the Darwinians have left unshaken the design argument. I might have gone farther if time had permitted, and proved that they had greatly enriched the argument. The works of Mr Darwin are invaluable to the theologian, owing to the multitude of "beautiful contrivances" and "marvellous adjustments" admirably described in them. The treatises on the fertilisation of orchids and on insectivorous plants require only to have their legitimate conclusions deduced and applied in order to be transformed into treatises of natural theology. If Paley's famous work be now somewhat out of date, it is not because Mr Darwin and his followers have refuted it, but because they have brought so much to light which confirms its argument.[34]

I have challenged the theology of Mr Darwin, and those who follow his guidance in theology. I have no wish to dispute his science. I pass no judgment on his theories so far as they are scientific theories. It may be safely left to the progress of scientific research to determine how far they are true and how far erroneous. We ought not to assail them needlessly, or to reject the truth which is in them, under the influence of a senseless dread that they can hurt religion. In so far as they are true, they must be merely expressions of the way in which Divine intelligence has operated in the universe. Instead of excluding, they must imply belief in an all-originating, all-foreseeing, all-foreordaining, all-regulative intelligence, to determine the rise and the course and the goal of life, as of all finite things. That intelligence far transcends the comprehension of our finite minds, yet we apprehend it as true intelligence. It is no blind force, but a Reason which knows itself, and knows us, and knows all things, and in the wisdom of which we may fully confide, even when clouds and darkness hide from us the definite reasons of its operations. We can see and know enough of its wisdom to justify faith where sight and knowledge are denied to us. Let us trust and follow it, and, without doubt, it will lead us by a path which we knew not, and make darkness light before us, and crooked things straight.

LECTURE VII.

MORAL ARGUMENT—TESTIMONY OF CONSCIENCE AND HISTORY.

I.

We have seen how the power manifest in the universe leads up to God as the First Cause, the all-originating Will. We have seen also how the order manifest in the universe leads up to Him as the Supreme Intelligence. But there is more in the universe than force and order; there is force which works for good, and a just and benevolent order; there are moral laws and moral actions, moral perceptions and moral feelings. Can anything be thence inferred as to whether God is, and what He is? I think we shall find that they clearly testify both as to His existence and character.

The moral law which reveals itself to conscience has seemed to certain authors so decisive a witness for God, that all other witnesses may be dispensed with. Kant, who exerted his great logical ability to prove that the speculative reason in searching after God inevitably loses itself in sophisms and self-contradictions, believed himself to have found in the practical reason or moral faculty an assurance for the Divine existence and government capable of defying the utmost efforts of scepticism. Sir William Hamilton has also affirmed that "the only valid arguments for the existence of God, and for the immortality of the human soul, rest on the ground of man's moral nature." Dr John Newman has insisted that conscience is the creative principle of religion, and has endeavoured to show how the whole doctrine of natural religion should be worked out from this central principle. A well-known living theologian of Germany, Dr Schenkel, has attempted to build up a complete theology on conscience as a basis, starting from the position that conscience is "the religious organ of the soul"—the faculty through which alone we have an immediate knowledge of God. These thinkers may have erred in relying thus exclusively on the moral argument—I believe that they have—but the error, if error there be, shows only the more clearly how convincing that argument has seemed to certain minds, and these assuredly not feeble minds.

There is, besides, valuable truth underlying any exaggerations into which they may have fallen on the subject. There is probably no living practical belief in God which does not begin with the conscience. It is not reasoning on a first cause, nor even admiration of the wisdom displayed in the universe, which makes the thought of God habitually and efficaciously present to the mind. It is not any kind of thinking nor any kind of feeling excited by the physical universe or by the contemplation of society, which gives us an abiding and operative sense of God's presence, and of His relationship to us. It is only in and through an awakened and active conscience that we realise our nearness to God—His interest in us, and our interest in Him. Without a moral nature of our own, we could not recognise the moral character and moral government manifested by Him. We might tremble before His power, or we might admire His skill, but His righteousness would be hidden from us, His moral laws would be meaningless to us, and their sanctions would be merely a series of physical advantages or physical disasters. But a God without righteousness is no true God, and the worship which has no moral element in it is no true worship. As, then, it is only through the glass of conscience that the righteousness of God can be discerned, and as that attribute alone can call forth, in addition to the fear, wonder, and admiration evoked by power and intelligence, the love, the sense of spiritual weakness and want, and the adoring reverence, which are indispensable in true worship—such worship as God ought to receive and man ought to render—the significance of the moral principle in the theistic argumentation is vast indeed.

It follows, however, from the entire course of the reasoning in which we have been engaged, that the moral argument is not to be exclusively relied on. It is but a part of a whole from which it ought not to be severed. It cannot be stated in any valid form which does not imply the legitimacy of the arguments from efficiency and order. If other facts do not refer us back to a primary case, neither will moral facts lead us to the primary moral agent. If order is no evidence of intelligent purpose, moral order can be no evidence of moral purpose. The moral argument proves more, but also less, than the arguments which have been already expounded. It shows us that God is endowed with the highest moral excellence, and is the source of moral law and of moral government, but it does not prove Him to be the Creator of the universe or the Author of all order in the universe. It contributes to the idea of God an essential element, without which that idea would be lamentably defective, but it supposes other elements also essential to be given by other arguments. The office of bearing witness to the existence and character of God can be safely devolved on no one principle alone, even although that principle be conscience. It is a work in which all the principles of human nature are privileged to concur. Either all bear true testimony, or all have conspired to deceive us. The self-manifestation of God is addressed to the entire man, and can only be rightly apprehended by the concurrent action of all the energies and capacities of the soul.[35]

It is, perhaps, especially important in conducting the moral argument to ask ourselves distinctly, Whence ought we to begin? Is there any point, any fact or principle, which we are in reason bound to start from? Inattention to this preliminary inquiry has caused many to try to look at moral facts en masse, as it were, and to endeavour to draw an inference from them in virtue of something common to them all. This can only lead to confusion and error. Moral facts are of two radically distinct classes, and cannot be comprehended under any higher generalisation, which can be taken as the foundation of a theistic inference. The facts need to be distributed and interpreted—to have their characters discriminated; and we must begin with the principle by which this is done—that is, with conscience itself. We need no more attempt to judge of moral qualities without reference to our moral perceptions and feelings—to the information given us through conscience—than to pass a judgment on colours before seeing them, or irrespective of how they appeared to us when we saw them. If we look at the moral facts of the universe from any outside point of view—not from that of conscience—how can we escape ascribing the evil as well as the good to God, and trying His character either from both or from the preponderance of the one over the other? But if we do so,—if we seek to rise to God through an induction from all moral facts—we shall form a miserable notion of God, and we shall, besides, ride rough-shod, as it were, over conscience. For what is it that conscience declares most clearly about moral good and evil, right and wrong? Is it not that they are radically antagonistic—irreconcilable and contradictory,—that they cannot have the same ultimate author—that if the one be the expression of God's will, the other must be the expression of His aversion? If conscience have any testimony to give about God at all, it is that, as the author of good, He must be the enemy of evil. The contemplation of the moral world may perplex us, but conscience is an assurance that evil, however perplexing, is not to be referred to the same source as good.

The testimony of conscience on behalf of God has been presented in various ways, and it need not surprise us to find some of them unsatisfactory. I regard as unwarranted the view that conscience is "the religious organ of the soul," the sole faculty through which the human mind is in contact and communion with God. There is no one specific power or organ of the mind in virtue of which exclusively man is a religious being. It is by the whole make and constitution of his nature, not by a particular faculty, that he is framed for religion. I more than question if we have a right even to ascribe to conscience an immediate intuition of God. It brings us, some have affirmed, in a strict and positive sense into the real presence of God, with nothing intervening between us and Him—He as the absolute personality standing sharply and distinctly over against our personality. This doctrine has, however, one obvious and serious difficulty before it. Conscience—that is a word which has got in ordinary use a very clear and definite meaning. We all know what conscience is as well as we know what the eye or the ear is, and we all know what an act of conscience is as well as we know what seeing or hearing is. It is not more certain that by the eye we see colours, and that by the ear we hear sounds, than that by conscience we discern good and evil. When, therefore, any man comes and assures us that through conscience we have an immediate apprehension of God, it is natural that we should answer at once, You may as well assure us that through sight we immediately hear sounds or smell odours. What we immediately apprehend through conscience is the right or wrong in actions, and therefore not God. Morality is the direct object of conscience; God can therefore only be the presupposition or postulate of conscience,—can only be given in conscience as implied in morality. This, I say, is an obvious objection to the assertion that God is immediately known in conscience. It is an objection which has not been got over, and which, I believe, cannot be got over.[36]

The argument from conscience, like all the other theistic arguments, is extremely simple. It is the obvious inference from the most obvious facts of our moral consciousness. It demands of us no subtle analysis of conscience. It is not dependent on the truth of some one particular theory as to the origin of conscience. It is based directly on what cannot be denied or disputed,—the existence of conscience, the existence of certain moral judgments and feelings common to the experience of all men. Conscience exists. It exists as a consciousness of moral law; as an assertion of a rule of duty; as a sense of responsibility. When it pronounces an action right, it does so because it recognises it to be conformed to law; when it pronounces an action wrong, it does so because it recognises it to fall short of or to transgress law. It acts as the judge of all that we do, and as such it accuses or excuses, condemns or approves, punishes or rewards us, with a voice of authority, which we may so far disregard, but the legitimacy of which we cannot dispute. It claims to rule over body and soul, heart and mind, all our appetites, affections, and faculties; and the claim is implicitly admitted even by those who have most interest in denying it. But it does not rule, nor pretend to rule, as an autocratic authority; it does not give us, nor pretend to give us, a law of its own: on the contrary, it claims to rule in us only in virtue of recognising a law which is over us; its authority is derived wholly from a law which it interprets and applies, but does not create. It thus speaks not of itself but as the deputy of another. It unequivocally declares itself a delegated authority. Some may say that the law of conscience is set by man's own will, and that the will is a law unto itself; but this assertion cannot bear examination. The will apart from reason and conscience is a mere force, not a true will. It has a rational law only through its connection with reason, a moral law only through its connection with conscience. Whoever affirms that the will is its own law must grossly abuse language, and signify by the term will what others mean by reason and will, conscience and will. He must do worse than this, bad as it is. He must contradict the plain dictates of his own consciousness. The will and its law are distinctly felt to be not one but two. The will is clearly realised in our moral experience as not legislative, as not giving itself a law but as being under a law, the law which conscience apprehends. To identify the will and its law is to confound entirely distinct things. For the will to rule the will, it would need at once to command and to obey, to be bond and free, dependent and independent. To be its own rule were for it to be without rule. Conscience claims to rule my will in virtue of a law which cannot be the expression of my will, and which cannot be anything else than the expression of another will; one often in antagonism to mine—one always better than mine—one which demands from me an unvarying and complete obedience. It comes to me and speaks to me in defiance of my will; when my will is set against hearing it, and still more against obeying it; when my will is bent on stifling and drowning its voice. It warns, threatens, condemns, and punishes me, against my will, and with a voice of authority as the delegate or deputy of a perfectly good and holy will which has an absolute right to rule over me, to control and sway all my faculties; which searches me and knows me; which besets me behind and before. Whose is this perfect, authoritative, supreme will, to which all consciences, even the most erring, point back? Whose, if not God's? Those who object that this argument is a mere verbal inference, or that it rests on a double meaning of the word law, do not understand it, simple as it is. They may be honest enough disputants, but their objection is strangely superficial. In the utterly irrelevant criticism of a word they lose sight of a great fact, and so necessarily fail to perceive its momentous significance. From no mere word, whether law or any other, but from that consciousness of moral dependence which no moral creature can shake off, which conscience implies in every exercise, which reveals itself in a thousand ways in the hearts and lives of men, do we conclude that there is One on whom we morally depend, that we have a holy Creator and Judge to deal with. Reason takes no mere name, but it takes the fact that man feels himself under a law of duty, that he is conscious of obligation and responsibility, that he has a conscience which does not counsel but which commands him to do what is right and to resist what is wrong; and it finds this fact inexplicable, this consciousness a delusion, this conscience a false witness—unless there be a holy God, a Moral Governor.

Conscience reveals a purpose as well as declares a law. Its very existence is a proof of purpose. The eye is not more certainly given us in order that we may see, than conscience is given us in order that we may use all our powers in a righteous and beneficent manner. Is it conceivable that any other than a righteous God would have bestowed on us such a gift, such a faculty? Would an intelligent but unrighteous God have made us to hate and despise what is characteristic of his own nature? Would he have made us better than himself? The purpose which conscience reveals is certainly not our own purpose, just as the law which it declares is not the law of our own will. The purpose which finds its expression in conscience, and our own purpose, are often felt by us to be in direct antagonism. Our souls may be tortured by the conflict between them. But in all phases of the conflict we are sensible that it is our purpose which ought to be abandoned; that the purpose which we dislike is that which we are bound to accept and to obey. In this way, also, conscience speaks to us of a righteous God by speaking in His name. If the inference from effect to cause, from manifestation of purpose to intelligence, is good anywhere, it is good here; and it warrants us to believe that the First Cause of conscience is a righteous Being.[37]

All the feelings, emotions, and affections which gather around the apprehension of right and wrong, which accompany the sense of duty or conviction of obligation, point to the same conclusion. The consciousness of good or ill desert, remorse and self-approval, moral hopes and fears, concur in referring to a holy God. They imply that man is a person related not merely to things and laws, but to another person who is his rightful and righteous Judge. The atheist himself, when he grieves even for secret and private sins, or enjoys the inner peace which only his own heart knoweth, mourns and rejoices as if in the presence of a higher personal Being—the God whom he denies. Neither his sorrow nor his satisfaction is fully intelligible if his soul have before it only an impersonal law or the abstract nature of things; both presuppose that he has some kind of consciousness of being under the cognisance of a Person possessed of moral attributes. If men felt that they were responsible for their evil thoughts and words and deeds to no one higher than themselves or their fellows, is it conceivable that the consciousness of guilt and the fear of retribution would have been what experience and history testify them to have been? Would prayers and penances and sacrifices have prevailed so widely, if the law of right and wrong when broken had been merely felt to be broken—if there were no underlying sense of the existence of One behind the law whose righteousness must be satisfied, and whose wrath must be turned away by the breaker of the law? Would there have been in that case any moral conflicts in the human heart akin to those which a Sophocles or a Shakespeare has delineated? Were there no God, there ought to be no fear of God awakened even by crime; but atheism itself cannot protect a criminal when alive to his guilt from being haunted and appalled by fears of a judgment and a justice more terrible than those of man. When we are perfectly willing to bear any pain which the mere laws of nature attach to our sins, and when our reason assures us that we have nothing to fear on account of them from the law or even the opinion of society, why, if our moral natures are not seared and deadened, do we yet fear, and fear most when most alone? "Inanimate things," says Dr Newman, "cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same seeming serenity of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on one receiving praise from a father,—we certainly have within us the image of some person to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being; we are not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we feel shame before a horse or a dog; we have no remorse or compunction in breaking mere human law: yet, so it is, conscience excites all these painful emotions, confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation; and, on the other hand, it sheds upon us a deep peace, a sense of security, a resignation, and a hope, which there is no sensible, no earthly object to elicit. '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; and thus the phenomena of conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive."[38]

It will, I need scarcely say, be objected to the arguments which have now been presented, that conscience is a product of association or a consequence of evolution; that it has been developed either in the experience of individuals or in the course of ages, out of sensations of pleasure and pain, out of benefits and injuries; and that the convictions and feelings implicated in it are due to the circumstances under which it has grown up and the causes which have combined to generate it. But to this it may be answered either that conscience has not been shown to have grown up by association and development out of sensuous experiences, or that even if this were proved the argument would continue good; in other words, either the truth or the relevancy of the objection may be denied. All associationist and evolutionist theories of conscience seem to many of the most competent psychologists to have failed as regards their main object, although they may admit them to contain important elements of truth. This view I share. It does not seem to me that even Mr J. S. Mill, Prof. Bain, Mr Spencer, and Mr Darwin, have been able to show that conscience contains in it nothing original. But, of course, I am aware that the vindication of my dissent would require an adequate examination of associationism and evolutionism as explanations of the origin of conscience. No such examination is here possible. Nor is it required; on the contrary, a discussion of the kind ought, I believe, to be avoided in an inquiry like the present. No psychological investigation of a difficult and delicate nature is, so far as I can judge, essentially involved in the theistic argumentation at any stage. It is certainly unnecessary in conducting the moral argument to engage in any scientific disquisition as to the origin of conscience.[39] For our second or alternative answer will suffice. It does not matter, so far as our present purpose is concerned, whether conscience be primary or derivative. It exists; it bears a certain testimony; it gives rise necessarily to the thoughts and feelings which I have mentioned. Are these thoughts and feelings true? If not, conscience is a delusion; it utters lies; the completest moral scepticism is justified. If they are, the argument stands. The mode in which they have been acquired is in this reference a matter of indifference.

The argument from conscience, I may add, rests on the general and distinctive characteristics of our moral nature; not on the truth of particular moral judgments or the purity of particular moral affections. It cannot, therefore, be affected by the fact that moral perceptions and emotions admit of variation and development, and are sometimes false and depraved. However important in other respects may be the circumstance that men's thoughts and sentiments as to right and wrong are not always identical or even accordant, it is plainly irrelevant as an objection to any of the forms in which the argument for the Divine existence from the constitution of our moral nature has just been stated. It cannot be necessary to do more than merely indicate this, although some who maintain the wholly derivative nature of conscience appear to believe that the moral differences to be traced among men disprove all inferences from the moral faculty which they feel disinclined to accept.

II.

Is the testimony which conscience gives to the existence and character of God confirmed when we look out into the moral world? No one will say that all is clear and unambiguous in that world—that it is nowhere shrouded in unpenetrated, if not impenetrable, darkness—that it contains no perplexing anomalies. There is an enormous mass of sin on earth, and the mere existence of sin is a mystery under the government of an omnipotent God who hates sin. There is a vast amount of apparently prosperous sin, and a vast amount of temporarily suffering virtue, and these are often severe trials of faith in the justice and holiness of God. Pessimism may exaggerate the emptiness and the sadness of life, but it has done service by exposing and discrediting the optimism which ignores the dark features and tragic elements of existence. Can an unprejudiced mind, however, even with all the sins and sufferings of the world before its view, and although consciously unable to resolve the difficulties which they suggest, refuse to acknowledge that the general testimony rendered by the moral world to the being and righteousness of its Author is ample and unmistakable? I think not. The conclusion which we have drawn from the character of the sentiments inevitably excited by the contemplation of virtue and vice, is also that which follows from the natural tendencies and issues of good and evil affections and actions. Virtue does not always meet with its due reward, nor vice with its due punishment, in any obvious outward shape; if they did, earth would cease to be a scene of moral discipline; but internal moral laws of an essentially retributive nature are in incessant operation, and show not obscurely or doubtfully what is the judgment of God both on character and conduct. Virtue is self-rewarding and vice is self-punishing. Virtue tends of its very nature to honour and life, vice to dishonour and death. There are outward bonds between virtue and happiness, vice and misery, which may be severed; but there are also inward bonds which cannot be broken—relations of cause and effect as inflexible as any in the physical world. Virtue may be followed by no external advantages, or may even involve the possessor of it in suffering; but infallibly it ennobles and enriches, elevates and purifies the soul itself, and thus gradually and increasingly imparts "a peace above all earthly dignities." Vice may outwardly prosper and meet only with honour from men, but it cannot be said to be passing wholly unpunished so long as it weakens, poisons, and corrupts the spiritual constitution. Now this it always does, and never more actively than when the individual who is guilty has silenced the voice of his conscience, and when a depraved society encourages him in his wickedness. The law—"he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption"—is never even for an instant suspended, although the growth and ripening of the seed into its fruit may be unobserved. In the very commission of sin the soul violates the conditions of its own welfare, destroys its own best feelings, impoverishes and ruins itself.

"He that has light within his own clear breast,
May sit in the centre, and enjoy bright day;
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts,
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun—
Himself is his own dungeon."[40]

When we look from individuals to societies, we perceive the same truth confirmed on a more comprehensive and conspicuous scale. It is true that in the social world there are bad triumphs and impious successes—that the victory of good over evil is often reached only after a long series of defeats. But it is equally true that the welfare of society is dependent on a practical recognition of moral principles—that the laws of morality are conditions of the progress, and even of the existence, of society. A cynical moralist of the eighteenth century maintained that private vices were public benefits; but, of course, his sophisms were easily exposed: he failed to convince any one of the correctness of his paradox. No inductive truth can be easier to establish, or better established, than that righteousness exalteth a nation, while sin lowers and destroys it. The vicious affections which torment and debase isolated men, equally disturb and degrade a tribe or nation. The virtuous affections which diffuse peace and happiness in a single heart, equally spread harmony and prosperity through the largest community. Thus the general conditions of social life testify that God loves virtue and hates vice. Then, if we examine history as a whole, we cannot but recognise that it has been in the main a process of moral progress, of moral growth. The children of the present day may be born with no better dispositions than those of five thousand years ago, and men may be now as guilty, as wilful sinners against what they know to be right, as ever they were; in that sense there may be no moral progress; but of this there can be, I think, no reasonable doubt in the mind of any impartial student of history, that the thoughts of men have been surely, if slowly, widened as to liberty, chastity, justice, benevolence, piety—and that their feelings have been correspondingly modified, their manners refined, and their laws and institutions improved. There may be no such thing as the inheritance or transmission of virtue, and every step of moral advance may have to be gained by the free exertion of each individual, people, and generation in succession; but, as a matter of fact, our race does on the whole advance, and not recede, in the path towards good. Just as reason, although it may be feebler than the passions in a short struggle, can always conquer them if it get time to collect its energies—so virtue gains and vice loses advantages with the lapse of years; for, while the prejudices which opposed the former subside and its excellences become ever increasingly apparent, as history flows onward, those who leagued themselves in support of the latter quarrel among themselves, its fascinations decay, and its deformities become more manifest and repulsive. Age is linked to age, and in the struggle of good and evil which pervades all the ages, victory is seen slowly but steadily declaring itself for the good. The vices die—the virtues never die. Some great evils which once afflicted our race have passed away. What great good has ever been lost? Justice carries it over injustice in the end. Now, whatever be the means by which moral progress is brought about, the testimony which it involves as to the moral character of God is none the less certain. The successful application of Darwinian principles, for example, to the explanation of human progress, would be no disproof of design in social evolution. If a natural selection, based on force, were shown to have prepared the way for a natural selection based on craft, which in its turn gave place to justice, and that again to love, God must none the less be credited with having contemplated the final result, and that result must none the less be held to be an indication of His character. When what is called the struggle for existence has been proved to lead, not to the deterioration but to the improvement of life—to the greatest abundance of the highest kinds of life possible in the circumstances—it will have been vindicated and shown to have been a means to secure such ends as a wise and benevolent Being would entertain. When it has been proved to have constrained men gradually to recognise that the virtues are the conditions of the most desirable existence, and that the vices are so many obstacles to the attainment of such an existence, it will have been still further vindicated by having been thus shown to be the mode in which righteousness is realised in the world. It matters little, so far as the religious inference is concerned, after what natural process and by what natural laws moral progress has been brought about; for whatever the process and laws may be discovered to be, they will be those which God has chosen, and will be fitted to show forth the glory of His wisdom, love, and justice.[41]

LECTURE VIII.

CONSIDERATION OF OBJECTIONS TO THE DIVINE WISDOM, BENEVOLENCE, AND JUSTICE.

I.

Conscience testifies that there is a God who is good and just; and society and history, on the whole, confirm its testimony. But there are a multitude of moral evils in the world, and these may seem to warrant an opposite inference, or at least so to counterbalance what has been adduced as evidence for the goodness and justice of God as to leave us logically unable to draw any inference regarding His moral character. We must consider, therefore, whether these evils really warrant an anti-theistic conclusion; and as they are analogous to, and closely connected with, those facts which have been argued to be defects in the physical constitution of the universe inconsistent with wisdom, or at least with perfect wisdom, in the Creator, it seems desirable to ask ourselves distinctly this general question, Are there such defects in the constitution and course of nature that it is impossible for us to believe that it is the work of a wise and holy God?

Epicurus and Lucretius imagined that the world was formed by a happy combination of atoms, acting of themselves blindly, and necessarily after innumerable futile conjunctions had taken place. Lange, the most recent historian of materialism, has revived the hypothesis, and represented the world as an instance of success which had been preceded by milliards of entire or partial failures. This is the theory of natural selection applied to account for the origin of worlds; and no one, I believe, who combines the hypotheses of natural selection and atheism can consistently entertain any other conception of the origin of worlds. But where are the milliards of mishaps which are said to have occurred? Where are the monstrous worlds which preceded those which constitute the cosmos? We must, of course, have good evidence for their existence before we can be entitled to hold Nature responsible for them; we must not charge upon her the mere dreams of her accusers. Not a trace, however, of such worlds as, according to the hypothesis, were profusely scattered through space, has been pointed out. It would be a waste of time for us to argue with men who invent worlds in order to find fault with them. We turn, therefore, to those who censure not imaginary worlds but the actual world.

Comte, following Laplace, has argued that there is no evidence of intelligence or design in the solar system, because its elements and members are not disposed in the most advantageous manner. The moon, in particular, we are assured, should have been so placed that it would revolve round the earth in the same time that the earth revolved round the sun. In that case she would appear every night, and always at the full. Storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, and deserts have been often argued to be defects which mar both the beauty and utility of creation. Changes in the polar regions, in the physical character of Africa, in the position of the Asiatic continent, and in the Pacific Ocean, have been suggested as improvements on the constitution of the world. The actual climates of various countries have been maintained to be not the most favourable to life which are possible under the existing laws of nature.[42]

A little reflection will enable us to assign its just value to such criticism of creation. Remark, then, in the first place, that there may be abundant evidence of intelligence where there is not evidence of perfect intelligence. Although very considerable defects were clearly shown to exist in the constitution and arrangements of the physical world, there might yet be ample and unmistakable proof of the vast wisdom of its Author. Were it even true that science could show that the mechanism of the heavens, and the distribution of land and sea, heat and cold, on earth, were not in every respect the best, that would not prove that there was no intelligence, no design whatever, involved therein. The question, Did the earth and the solar system originate with intelligence? is distinct from the question, Was the intelligence in which they originated perfect? It is conceivable that the one question might have to be answered in the affirmative and the other in the negative. It is obvious that the former question ought to be considered apart from and before the latter. The theist proposes, of course, to prove in the end that there is a perfect intelligence, but he is content to establish at first that there is an intelligence. Aware that whoever admits intelligence to be the first cause of the universe may be forced also to admit that the creative intelligence is perfect, he is under no temptation himself to confound two entirely distinct questions, and he is obviously entitled to protest against so illogical a procedure in others.

Remark, in the second place, that we are plainly very incompetent critics of a system so vast as the universe. We are only able to survey a small portion of it, and the little that we perceive we imperfectly comprehend. We see but an exceedingly short way before us into the future, and can form only the vaguest and most general conception of the final goal to which creation, as a whole, is tending. This need not, and ought not, to prevent us from recognising the evident indications of intelligence which fall within our range of apprehension; but it may well cause us to hesitate before pronouncing that this or that peculiarity, which appears to us a defect, is an absolute error or evil. There is no one who would not feel it very unwise to pronounce an apparent defect, even in an elaborate human mechanism with which he was only imperfectly acquainted, an unmistakable blunder, and surely far more caution is required in a critic of the constitution of the universe; for, as Bishop Butler truly observes, "The most slight and superficial view of any human contrivance comes abundantly nearer to a thorough knowledge of it than that part which we know of the government of the world does to the general scheme and system of it." All Nature is one great whole, and each thing in it has, as I have previously had to insist, a multitude of uses and relations, with reference to all of which it must be viewed, in order that a complete and definitive judgment regarding it may be formed. Has this fact been adequately realised by those who have criticised, in the manner which has been indicated, the wisdom displayed in the system of Nature? I think not. In regard to the moon, it would seem that, even if that luminary were intended to serve no other purpose than to give light on earth, it is not the Maker of it who has blundered, but Comte and Laplace. The real consequences of their pretended improvement have been shown to be that the moon would give sixteen times less light than it does, and be in constant danger of extinction. In other words, what they have demonstrated is, that their own mathematical and mechanical knowledge was so inferior to that of the intelligence which placed the moon where it is, that they could not appreciate the correctness of its procedure in the solution of a comparatively simple astronomical problem. But even if the change which they suggested would really have rendered the moon a better lamp to the inhabitants of the earth, they were not entitled to infer that it was an error to have placed it elsewhere, unless they were warranted to assume that the moon was meant merely to be a lamp to the inhabitants of the earth. But that they were clearly not entitled to assume. To give light on earth is a use of the moon, but it is foolish to imagine that this is its sole use. It serves other known ends, such as raising the tides, and may serve many ends wholly unknown to us. So in regard to volcanoes, earthquakes, &c. Any single generation of men and beasts might well dispense, perhaps, with their existence, and yet they may be most appropriate instrumentalities for securing order and welfare in the economy of the universe as a whole. It is not by their relations to the present and local only, but by their relations to all the past and future of the entire system of things, that they are to be judged of. If Greenland were submerged, and the Asiatic and North American continents so altered that no large rivers should flow into the polar ocean, the climate of Iceland and Canada might be greatly improved. Would the world thereby, however, be made better as a whole, and throughout all its future history? He must be either a very wise man or a very foolish one who answers this question by a decided affirmation; and yet he who cannot so answer it has obviously no right to hold that the changes mentioned would really be improvements.

Could we survey the whole universe, and mark how all its several parts were related to each other and to the whole, we might intelligently determine whether or not an apparent defect in it was real; but we cannot do this with our present powers. We can readily imagine that any one thing in the world, looked at by itself or in relation to only a few other objects, might be much better than it is, but we cannot show that the general system of things would not be deranged and deteriorated thereby. Considered merely in reference to man, the relative imperfections of the world may be real advantages. A world so perfect that man could not improve it, would probably be, paradoxical as the statement may sound, one of the most imperfect worlds men could be placed in. An imperfect world, or in other words, a world which can be improved, can alone be a fitting habitation for progressive beings. Scripture does not represent nature even before the Fall as perfect and incapable of improvement, but only as "very good;" and still less does it require us to believe that the actual course of nature is perfect. The true relation of man to nature can only be realised when the latter is perceived to be imperfect,—a thing to be ruled, not to be obeyed—improved, not imitated—and yet a thing which is essentially good relatively to the wants and powers of its inhabitants. No created system, it must further be remembered, can be perfect in the sense of being the best possible. None can be so good but that a better may be imagined. What is created must be finite in its perfections, and whatever is finite can be imagined to be increased and improved. The Creator Himself—the absolutely perfect God—the Highest Good—is, as Plato and Anselm so profoundly taught, the only best possible Being. In Him alone the actual is coincident and identical with the possible, the real with the ideal. Whoever receives this truth as it ought to be received, cannot fail to see that all speculations as to a best possible world, and all judgments of the actual world based on such speculations, are vain and idle imaginations.[43]

I may add, that when a man argues, as Comte does, that we can know nothing of final causes, nothing of the purposes which things are meant to accomplish, and yet that they might have realised their final causes, fulfilled their purposes, better than they do, he obviously takes up a very untenable and self-contradictory position. If we can have no notion of the purpose of a thing, we cannot judge whether it is fulfilling its purpose or not, whether it is fulfilling it well or ill. The denial of the possibility of knowing the ends of things is inconsistent with the assertion that things might have been constituted and arranged in a happier and more advantageous manner.

Organic nature has been still more severely criticised than the inorganic world. There have been pointed out a few fully developed organs, as, for example, the spleen, of which the uses are unknown, and a multitude of organs so imperfectly developed as to be incapable of performing any serviceable functions. Even the most elaborate organisms have been maintained to have essential defects; thus the eye has been argued by Helmholtz to be not a perfect optical instrument, and on the strength of the proof one writer at least has declared that if a human optician were to blunder as badly as the supposed author of eyes must have done, he would be hissed out of his trade. Stress has been laid on the fact that abortions and monsters are not rare. Many seemingly intelligent contrivances, we are reminded, serve mainly to inflict pain and destruction. And the inference has been drawn that the first cause of organic existences was not Divine Wisdom but mere matter and blind force.

The considerations which have already been brought forward should enable us to answer all reasonings of this kind. An organ is not to be pronounced useless because its uses have not yet been discovered. To the extent that evolutionism is true, rudimentary and obsolete organs are accounted for, and the wisdom displayed in them amply vindicated; and if evolutionism be not true, they can still be explained on the theory of types. They are stages in the realisation of the Divine conception; indications of an order which comprehends and conditions the law of use and contrivance for use; keys to the understanding of the Divine plan. Theism cannot have much to fear from the fact that all human eyes are limited in their range and finite in their perfections, or even from the fact that a great many persons have very bad eyesight. Whatever may be its imperfections, the eye, if viewed with a comprehensive regard to its manifold uses and possibilities, must be admitted by every unprejudiced judge to be incomparably superior to every other optical instrument: indeed it is the only real optical instrument; all so-called optical instruments are merely aids and supplements to it. If the eye had been absolutely perfect, its modification or evolution could only have been deterioration, artificial optical instruments would not have been needed, and all man's relations to creation must have been essentially different from what they are. Who can rationally assure us that this was to be desired? Abortions and monsters are at least exceptions. If mind were not what is ultimate in the universe—if nature worked blindly—if there were any truth in what Lange and Huxley have said of her procedure, that it is "like shooting a million or more loaded guns in a field to kill one hare,"—this could not be the case; the bullets which miss would then be incalculably more numerous than those which hit, and the evidence of her failures ought to be strewn far more thickly around us than the remains of her successes; there would be, as it were, no course of nature because of the multitude of deviations, no rule in nature because of the multitude of exceptions. But what are the facts? These: the lowest organisms are as perfectly adapted to their circumstances as the highest, the earliest as the latest; there is a vast amount of death and a vast amount of life in the world, but, whatever some men may thoughtlessly assert, no man can show that there is too much of either, any real waste, if the wants of creation as a whole are to be provided for; abortions and monsters, which are the only things in nature which can be plausibly characterised as "failures," as "bullets which have fallen wide of the mark," are comparatively few and far between; and the monsters, even, are not really exceptions to law and order, are not strictly monsters. The labours of teratologists have scientifically established the grand general result that there are no monsters in nature in the sense which Empedocles imagined; none except in the sense in which a man who gets his leg broken is a monster. A monster is simply a being to whom an accident not fatal has happened in the womb. Why should an accident not occur there as well as elsewhere? Why should God not act by general laws there as well as elsewhere? Who is entitled to say that any result of His general laws is a failure; that any so-called accident was not included in His plan; that a world in which a child could not be born deformed nor a grown man have a leg broken, would be, were all things taken into account, as good as the world in which we actually live? Huxley, Lange, and those whom they represent, have failed to show us any of nature's "bullets which have missed the mark," and have not sufficiently, I think, realised how imperfect might be their own perception of nature's target. The contrivances for the infliction of pain and death displayed in the structure of animals of prey are none the less evidences of intelligence because they are not also, at least immediately or directly, evidences of beneficence. Intelligence is one thing, benevolence is another, and what conclusively disproved benevolence might conclusively prove intelligence.[44]

II.

Let us pass on to the contemplation of greater difficulties; to suffering, which seems to conflict with the benevolence of God—and to sin, which seems irreconcilable with His righteousness.

I cannot agree with those who think that there is no mystery in mere pain; that it is sufficiently accounted for by moral evil, and involves no separate problem. The history of suffering began on our planet long before that of sin; ages prior to the appearance of man, earth was a scene of war and mutual destruction; hunger and fear, violence and agony, disease and death, have prevailed throughout the air, the land, and ocean, ever since they were tenanted. And what connection in reason can there be between the sin of men or the sin of angels and the suffering endured or inflicted by primeval saurians? The suffering of the animals is, in fact, more mysterious than the suffering of man, just because so little of the former and so much of the latter can be traced, directly or indirectly, to sin. But every animal is made subject to suffering; every animal appetite springs out of a want; every sense and every faculty of every animal are so constituted as to be in certain circumstances sources of pain; hosts of animals are so constructed that they can only live by rending and devouring other animals; no large animal can move without crushing and killing numbers of minute yet sentient creatures. How can all this be under the government of Infinite Goodness?

The human mind may very probably be unable fully to answer this question. It can only hope truthfully to answer it even in a measure by studying the relevant facts, the actual effects and natural tendencies of suffering; general speculations are not likely to profit it much. Now, among the relevant facts, one of the most manifest is that pain serves to warn animals against what would injure or destroy them. It has a preservative use. Were animals unsusceptible of pain, they would be in continual peril. Bayle has ingeniously devised some hypotheses with a view to show that pain might have safely been dispensed with in the animal constitution, but they are obviously insufficient. It would be rash to affirm that pain is indispensable as a warning against danger, but certainly no one has shown how it could be dispensed with, or even plausibly imagined how it might be dispensed with. For anything we can see or even conceive, animal organisms could only be preserved in a world like ours by being endowed with a susceptibility to pain. For anything we know or can even imagine, the demand that there should be no pain is implicitly a demand that there should be no animal life and no world like the earth;—a most foolish and presumptuous demand. But however this may be, pain has, as a fact, plain reference to the prevention of physical injury. "Painful sensations," says Professor Le Conte, "are only watchful vedettes upon the outposts of our organism to warn us of approaching danger. Without these, the citadel of our life would be quickly surprised and taken." Now, to the whole extent that what has just been said is true, pain is not evil but good, and justifies both itself and its author. It is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, and its end is a benevolent one. The character of pain itself is such as to indicate that its author must be a benevolent being,—one who does not afflict for his own pleasure, but for his creatures' profit.

Another fact makes this still more evident. Pain is a stimulus to exertion, and it is only through exertion that the faculties are disciplined and developed. Every appetite originates in the experience of a want, and the experience of a want is a pain; but what would the animals be without their appetites and the activities to which these give rise? Would they be the magnificent and beautiful creatures so many of them are? If the hare had no fear, would it be as swift as it is? If the lion had no hunger, would it be as strong as it is? If man had nothing to struggle with, would he be as enterprising, as ingenious, as variously skilled and educated as he is? Pain tends to the perfection of the animals. It has, that is to say, a good end; an end which justifies its use; one which would do so even if perfection should not be conducive to happiness. Perfection, it seems to me, is a worthy aim in itself, and the pain which naturally tends to it is no real evil, and needs no apology. I fail to see that the nearest approximation to the ideal of animal life is the existence of a well-fed hog, which does not need to exert itself, and is not designed for the slaughter. Whatever pain is needed to make the animals so exercise their faculties as to improve and develop their natures, has been wisely and rightly allotted to them. We assign a low aim to Providence when we affirm that it looks merely to the happiness even of the animals. It would be no disproof of benevolence in the Creator if pain in the creatures tended simply to perfection and not to happiness; while it must be regarded as a proof of His benevolence if the means which lead to perfection lead also to happiness. And this they do. The pain which gives rise to exertion and the pain which is involved in exertion are, as a rule, amply rewarded even with pleasure. Perhaps susceptibility to pain is a necessary condition of susceptibility to pleasure; perhaps the bodily organism could not be capable of pleasure and insensible to pain; but whether this be the case or not, it is a plain and certain matter of fact that the activities which pain originates are the chief sources of enjoyment throughout the animal creation. This fact entitles us to hold that pain itself is an evidence of the benevolence of God. The perfecting power of suffering is seen in its highest form not in the brute, but in man; not in its effects on the body, but in its influence on the mind. It is of incalculable use in correcting and disciplining the spirit. It serves to soften the hard of heart, to subdue the proud, to produce fortitude and patience, to expand the sympathies, to exercise the religious affections, to refine, strengthen, and elevate the entire disposition. To come out pure gold, the character must pass through the furnace of affliction. And no one who has borne suffering aright has ever complained that he had been called on to endure too much of it. On the contrary, all the noblest of our race have learned from experience to count suffering not an evil but a privilege, and to rejoice in it as working out in them, through its purifying and perfecting power, an eternal weight of glory.

In the measure that the theory of evolution can be established, the wisdom and benevolence displayed in pain would seem to receive confirmation. So far as that theory can be proved, want, the struggle for existence, the sufferings which flow from it, and death itself, must, it would appear, be regarded as means to the formation, improvement, and adornment of species and races. The afflictions which befall individuals will in this case be scientifically demonstrated to have a reference not merely to their own good, but to the welfare of their kind in all future time. The truth that nothing lives or dies to itself would thus receive remarkable verification. But although it should never receive this verification, although a strictly scientific proof of it shall never be forthcoming, there is already sufficient evidence for it of an obvious and unambiguous kind. Every being, and the animated certainly not less than the inanimate, is adjusted, as I have previously had occasion to show, to every other. "All are but parts of one stupendous whole." This is a truth which throws a kindly and cheering light on many an otherwise dark and depressing fact. Turn it even towards death. Can death itself, when seen in the light of it, be denied to be an evidence of benevolence? I think not. The law of animal generation makes necessary the law of animal death, if the largest amount of animal happiness is to be secured. If there had been less death there must have been also less life, and what life there was must have been poorer and meaner. Death is a condition of the prolificness of nature, the multiplicity of species, the succession of generations, the coexistence of the young and the old; and these things, it cannot reasonably be doubted, add immensely to the sum of animal happiness.

Such considerations as have now been indicated are sufficient to show that suffering is a means to ends which only a benevolent Being can be conceived of as designing. They show that pain and death are not what they would have been if a malevolent Being had contrived them; that they are characterised by peculiarities which only love and mercy can explain. We do not need for any practical spiritual purpose to know more than this. An objector may still ask, Could not God have attained all good ends without employing any painful means? He may still confront us with the Epicurean dilemma: "The Deity is either willing to take away all evil, but is not able to do so, in which case He is not omnipotent; or He is able to remove the evil, but is not willing, in which case He is not benevolent; or He is neither willing nor able, which is a denial of the Divine perfections; or He is both able and willing to do away with the evil, and yet it exists." But only superficial and immature minds will attach much weight to questionings and reasonings of this kind. A slight tincture of inductive science will suffice to make any man aware that speculations as to what God can or can not do, as to what the universe might or might not have been, belong to a very different region from investigations into the tendencies of real facts and processes. It would seem as if, with our present faculties, these speculations could lead us to no reliable conclusions. We clearly perceive that pain and death serve many good ends; but we should require a knowledge of God and of the universe far beyond that which we possess, to be able to state, even as an intelligent conjecture, that these evils could be wisely dispensed with, or that there is anything in them in the least inconsistent either with the power or the benevolence of God.[45]

A large amount of human suffering is accounted for by its connection with human sin. Whatever so-called physical evil is needed to prevent moral evil, or to punish it, or to cure it, or to discipline in moral good, is not really evil. Any earthly suffering which saves us from sin is to be classed among benefits. There is nothing to perplex either mind or heart in the circumstance that sin causes a profound and widespread unhappiness. It is strange that it should sometimes apparently produce so little misery; only a dull conscience, I think, will be surprised that it produces so much. It is merely in so far as physical evil is dissociated from moral evil that its existence is a problem and a perplexity. But the very existence of moral evil is a most painful mystery. The absence of physical evil while moral evil was present would be inconsistent with a moral government of the world; whereas if moral evil were removed no real difficulty would be left. Physical evil may be a relative good, which God can easily be conceived of as causing and approving; moral evil is an unconditional evil, and cannot be the work of any morally perfect being.

Have we any reason, however, to suppose that sin is willed by God in the sense either of being caused or approved by Him? All the sin we know of on earth is willed by man, and all the sin which Scripture tells us of as existing elsewhere is said to be willed by evil spirits; neither nature nor Scripture informs us that there is any moral evil willed by God. In other words, there are no facts which refer us to God as the author of evil. In the absence of facts, we can, it is true, form conjectures, and give expression to them in such questions as, How could God make beings capable of sinning? Why did He not prevent them sinning? Wherefore has He permitted sin to endure so long and spread so widely? But thoughtful searchers for truth, at least after a certain age, cannot feel much interested in, or much perplexed by, questions like these. They will be quite willing to leave the discussion of them to debating societies. They will resolutely refuse to assign the same value to conjectures as to facts.

Sin is not God's work. Moral order may exist without moral disorder, but moral disorder can only exist as rebellion against moral order. The very notion of moral evil implies a moral good which it contravenes, and a moral law by which it is condemned. It can never be thought of as other than a something grafted on nature, by which nature is perverted and depraved. It is not natural, but unnatural; not primary and original, but secondary and derivative; not the law, but the violation of the law.

"The primal Will, innately good, hath never
Swerved, or from its own perfect self declined."

Between this Will and sin there are ever interposed created wills, which are conscious of their power to choose good or evil, obedience or disobedience to God's law. God bestows on His creatures only good gifts, but one of the best of all these gifts includes in its very nature ability to abuse and pervert itself and all things else. Freewill needs no vindication, for it is the primary and indispensable condition of moral agency. Without it there might be a certain animal goodness, but there could be no true virtue. A virtuous being is one which chooses of its own accord to do what is right. The notion of a moral creature being governed and guided without the concurrence and approval of its own will is a contradiction. If God desired to have moral creatures in His universe He could only have them by endowing them with freewill, which is the power to accept or reject His own will. The determination to create moral beings was a determination to create beings who should be the causes of their own actions, and who might set aside His own law. It was a determination to limit His own will to that extent and in that manner. Hence, when He created moral beings, and these beings, in the free exercise of their power, violated His law, sin entered into the world, but not through His will. It resulted from the exercise of an original good gift which He had bestowed on certain of His creatures, who could abuse that gift, but were not necessitated to abuse it. Their abuse of it was their own action, and the action consisted not in conforming to, but in contravening, God's will. Thus, God's character is not stained by the sins which His creatures have committed.

But, it will be objected, could not God have made moral creatures who would be certain always to choose what is right, always to acquiesce in His own holy will? and if He could do this, why did He not? Why did He create a class of moral creatures whom He could not but foresee to be certain to abuse their power of choice between obedience and disobedience to His law? Well, far be it from me to deny that God could have originated a sinless moral system. If anything I have already said be understood to imply this, it has been completely misunderstood. I have no doubt that God has actually made many moral beings who are certain never to oppose their own wills to His; or that He might, if it had so pleased Him, have created only such angels as were sure to keep their first estate. But if questioned as to why He has not done the latter, I feel no shame in confessing my ignorance. It seems to me that when you have resolved the problem of the origin of moral evil into the question, Why has God not originated a moral universe in which the lowest moral being would be as excellent as the archangels are? you have at once shown it to be speculatively incapable of solution and practically without importance. The question is one which would obviously give rise to another, Why has God not created only moral beings as much superior to the archangels as they are superior to the lowest Australian aborigines? and that to still another of the same kind, and so on ad infinitum? But no complete answer can be given to a question which may be followed by a series of similar questions to which there is no end. We have, besides, neither the facts nor the faculties requisite to answer such questions. A merely imaginary universe is one on which we have no data to reason. We who are so incompetent judges of the actual universe, notwithstanding the various opportunities which we possess of studying it, and the special adaptation of our organs and powers to the objects which it presents, can have no right to affirm its inferiority to any universe which we can imagine as possible. The best world, we may be assured, that our fancies can feign, would in reality be far inferior to the world God has made, whatever imperfections we may think we see in it. We ought to be content if we can show that what God has done is wise and right, and not perplex ourselves as to why He has not done an infinity of other things, the propriety of which we cannot possibly estimate aright or as parts of any scheme unlimited in extent and eternal in duration.

Sin, then, is not God's work, and we are unable to prove that He ought to have prevented it. Can we go any farther than this? Yes; we can show that the permission of it has been made subservient to the attainment of certain great ends. Man has the power to choose evil, but God has also the power to overrule it—to cause it, as it were, to contradict itself, to work out its own defeat and disgrace, to promote what it threatens to hinder; and the facts of experience and history show us that this is what He does. There is thus developed in His human creatures a higher kind of virtue than that of mere innocence; a virtue which can only be reached through suffering, and conflict, and conquest. The struggle with moral evil, still more than that with physical disadvantages and intellectual difficulties, tests and exercises the soul, teaches it its weakness and dependence on Divine strength, and elicits and trains its spiritual faculties. Successive battles with vice raise honest combatants to successive stages of virtue. The type of character presented to us in the second Adam is no bare restoration of that which was lost in the first Adam, but one immeasurably superior. The humblest of true Christians now aspires after a far grander moral ideal than that of an untested innocence. Is there not in this fact a vindication of God's wisdom and holiness worth more than volumes of abstract speculation?

Due weight ought also to be given to the circumstance that the system of God's moral government of our race is only in course of development. We can see but a small part of it, for the rest is as yet unevolved. History is not a whole, but the initial or preliminary portion of a process which may be of vast duration, and the sequel of which may be far grander than the past has been. That portion of the process which has been already accomplished, small though it be, indicates the direction which is being taken; it is, on the whole, a progressive movement; a movement bearing humanity towards truth, freedom, and justice. Is it scientific, or in any wise reasonable, to believe that the process will not advance to its legitimate goal? Surely not. The physical history of the earth affords abundant evidence of the realisation of the most comprehensive plans, and no indication of failure. We can have no right to imagine that it will be otherwise in the moral sphere; that the ideals towards which history shows humanity to have been approaching in the past will not be reached even in the most distant future. But if moral progress will, no less than physical progress, be carried on unto completion, the future cannot fail to throw light on the past—cannot fail to some extent to justify the past. The slowness of the progress may perplex us, and yet, perhaps, it is just what we ought to expect, both from God's greatness and our own littleness. He is patient because eternal. His plans stretch from everlasting to everlasting, and a thousand years are in His sight but as yesterday when it is past. We have not the faculties which fit us for rapid movements and vast achievements. We need to be conducted by easy and circuitous courses. "Lofty heights must be ascended by winding paths."

"We have not wings, we cannot soar,
But we have feet to scale and climb
By slow degrees, by more and more,
The cloudy summits of our time."

It must be added that whoever acknowledges Christianity to be a revelation from God, must see in it reasons which go far to explain the permission of sin. There is, it is true, in the authoritative records of the Christian religion, the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, no explanation of the origin of moral evil as a speculative problem. The account of the first parents of the human race introducing sin into the world by yielding to the seduction of a being who had himself sinned, is wholly of a historical character, and can neither be compared nor contrasted with the theories of philosophers as to the nature, possibility, and cause of sin. To measure the one by the others, or to set the one over against the others, is to do injustice both to Scripture and philosophy. But the whole scheme of Christianity must seem to those who accept it the strongest possible of practical grounds for the Divine permission of man's abuse of freewill. The existence of sin has, according to the Christian view, been the occasion and condition of a manifestation of the Divine character far more glorious than that which had been given by the creation of the heavens and the earth. It called forth a display of justice, love, and mercy before which all moral beings in the universe may well bow down in wonder and adoration, and man especially with unspeakable gratitude. If God has really manifested Himself in Christ for the reconciliation of the world to Himself, His permission of sin has certainly to all practical intents been amply justified.

But I must conclude. Let it be in leaving with you the lesson that belief in conscience and belief in God—belief in the moral order of the universe and belief in a moral Governor and Judge—are most intimately connected and mutually support each other. Many of you will remember how Robertson of Brighton,—when describing the crisis of the conflict between doubt and faith in the awful hour in which, as he says, life has lost its meaning, and the grave appears to be the end of all, and the sky above the universe is a dead expanse, black with the void from which God has disappeared,—tells us that he knows but of one way in which a man may come forth from this agony scatheless—namely, by holding fast to those things which are certain still, the grand, simple landmarks of morality. "In the darkest hour," are his words, "through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at least is certain,—If there be no God, and no future state, even then, it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be brave than to be a coward. Blessed, beyond all earthly blessedness, is the man who in the tempestuous darkness of the soul has dared to hold fast to these venerable landmarks. Thrice blessed is he who, when all is drear and cheerless within and without, when his teachers terrify him and his friends shrink from him, has obstinately clung to moral good. Thrice blessed, because his night shall pass into clear bright day." Now there is a great truth, a most sacred and solemn truth, in these words. But it is only a half truth, and it should not be mistaken for the whole truth. It is not less true, and it is true, perhaps, of a far greater number of human souls, that there are dark and dreadful hours when they are tempted to believe that virtue is but a name, that generosity is not better than selfishness, truth not better than falsehood, and the courage which defends a post of dangerous duty not better than the cowardice which abandons it; and in these hours I know not how the soul is to regain its trust in human goodness, except by holding fast its faith in Divine goodness; or how it can be strengthened to cling to what is right, except by cleaving to God. It is as possible to doubt of the authority of conscience as to doubt of the existence of God. There are few souls which have not their Philippi, when they are tempted to cry like Brutus, "O virtue, thou art but an empty name!" Blessed in such an hour is he who, feeling himself to be sinking in gloomy waters, cries to that God who is able to rescue him from the abyss, and clings to that justice in heaven which is the pledge that justice will be done on earth below. Thrice blessed, because he will be guided through the darkness of a sea of doubts even thus terrible to a haven of light and safety. Faith in duty helps us to faith in God: faith in God helps us to faith in duty. Duty and God, God and duty, that is the full truth.[46]

LECTURE IX.

A PRIORI THEISTIC PROOF.

I.

The arguments which we have been considering are not merely proofs that God is, but indications of what He is. They testify to the Divine existence by exhibiting the Divine character. They are expressions of how He manifests Himself, and expositions of how we apprehend His self-manifestations. We have seen that against each of them various objections have been urged, but that these objections when examined do not approve themselves to reason; they leave the arguments against which they have been thrown quite unshaken. These arguments, however, although perfectly conclusive so far as they go, do not, even in combination, yield us the full idea of God which is entertained wherever theism prevails. They show Him to be the First Cause of the world—the Source of all the power, wisdom, and goodness displayed therein. They do not prove Him to be infinite, eternal, absolute in being and perfection. Yet it cannot be questioned that the cultivated human mind thinks of God as the absolute, infinite, eternal, perfect First Cause, and that no lower idea of God can satisfy it. The intellect cannot accept, and the heart also revolts against, the thought that God is dependent on any antecedent or higher Being; that He is limited to a portion either of time or space; or that He is devoid of any excellence, deficient in any perfection. Such a thought is rejected as at once utterly unworthy of its object, and inherently inconsistent.

Are we, then, rationally warranted to assign to God those attributes which are called absolute or incommunicable? This is the question we have now to answer. What has been proved makes it comparatively easy to establish what is still unproved. We have ascertained that there is a God, the First Cause of the universe, the powerful, wise, good, and righteous Author of all things. We are conscious, also, that we have ideas of infinity, eternity, necessary existence, perfection, &c. We may be doubtful as to whence we got these ideas—we may feel that there is very much which is vague and perplexing in them; but we cannot question or deny that we have them. Having them, no matter how or whence we have got them, and knowing that God is, as also in a measure what He is, the remaining question for us is, Must these ideas apply to God or not? Must the First Cause be thought of as eternal or not—as infinite or finite, as perfect or imperfect? Reason, after it has reached a certain stage of culture, has never found this a difficult question. Indeed, often even before freeing itself from polytheism, it has been internally constrained to ascribe to some of the objects of adoration those very attributes of eternity, infinity, and perfection which polytheism implicitly denies. Once it has come to believe that the universe has its origin in a rational and righteous creative Will, it can hardly refuse to admit that that Will must be infinite and eternal. Where it has rejected polytheism without accepting theism, it has been forced to acknowledge the world itself to be infinite and eternal. When it has risen beyond the world, when it has reached an intelligent cause of the world, it cannot, of course, refuse to that cause the perfections which it would have granted to the effect—to the Creator what it would have attributed to the creation. The first and ultimate Being, and not any derived and dependent Being, must obviously be the infinite, eternal, and perfect Being.

The proof that God is absolute in being and perfection should, it seems to me, not precede but follow the proofs that there is a cause sufficiently powerful, wise, and good to account for physical nature, the mind of man, and the course of history. The usual mode of conducting the theistic argumentation has been the reverse; it has been to begin by endeavouring to prove, from principles held to be intuitive and ideas held to be innate, the necessary existence, absolute perfection, infinity, and eternity of God; or, in other words, with what is called the a priori or ontological arguments. This mode of procedure seems to me neither judicious nor effective. If we have not established that there is a God by reasoning from facts, we must demonstrate His existence from ideas: but to get from the ideal to the actual may be impossible, and is certain to be difficult; whereas, if we have allowed facts to teach us all that they legitimately can about the existence, power, wisdom, and righteousness of God, it may be easy to show that our ideas of absolute being and perfection must apply to Him, and can only apply to Him.

Theism, according to the view now expressed, is not vitally interested in the fate of the so-called a priori or ontological arguments. There may be serious defects in all these arguments, considered as formal demonstrations, and yet the conclusion which it is their aim to establish may be in no way compromised. It may be that the principles on which they rest do not directly involve the existence of God, and yet that they certainly, although indirectly, imply it, so that whoever denies it is rationally bound to set aside the fundamental conditions of thought, and to deem consciousness essentially delusive. It may be that the a priori arguments are faulty as logical evolutions of the truth of the Divine existence from ultimate and necessary conceptions, and yet that they concur in manifesting that if God be not, the human mind is of its very nature self-contradictory; that God can only be disbelieved in at the cost of reducing the whole world of thought to a chaos. Whether this be the case or not, some of the a priori proofs are so celebrated that I cannot pass them over in entire silence.[47]

There is a charge which has been very often brought against the a priori proofs, but which may be at once set aside as incorrect. It has been alleged that they proceed on forgetfulness of the truth that the Divine existence is the first and highest reality, and therefore cannot be demonstrated from anything prior to or higher than itself. But in no case that I know of have those who adopted what they supposed to be the a priori line of argument been under the delusion that the ground of the existence of God was not in Himself, but in something outside of or above Himself, from which His existence could be deduced. Such a notion is, in fact, so self-contradictory, that no sane mind could deliberately entertain it. It would imply that theism could be founded on atheism. Whatever a priori proof of the Divine existence may be, it has certainly never been imagined by those who employed it to be demonstration from an antecedent necessary cause.[48]

A priori proof is proof which proceeds from primary and necessary principles of thought. From its very nature it could only appear at a comparatively late period in the history of intelligence. It is only a profound study of the constitution of thought, only a refined reflective analysis of consciousness into its elements, which can bring to light the principles which necessarily underlie and govern all intellectual activity; and it is only on these principles that a priori proof is based. As these principles never exist in an absolutely pure form, as what is universal and necessary in thought is never found wholly apart from what is particular and contingent, no absolutely pure a priori argumentation need be looked for, and certainly none such can be discovered in the whole history of speculation.

Plato was, perhaps, the first to attempt to prove the existence of God from the essential principles of knowledge. He could not consistently reason from the impressions of sense or the phenomena of the visible world. He denied that sense is knowledge, and that visible things can be more than images and indications of truth. He maintained, however, that besides the visible world there is an intelligible world, with objects which reason sees and not sense. These objects are either conceptions or ideas, either hypothetical principles or absolute principles, either scientific assumptions and definitions or necessary and eternal truths which have their reality and evidence in themselves. The mathematical sciences deal with conceptions; but their chief value, according to Plato, is that they help the mind to rise to that absolute science—dialectics—which is conversant with ideas. The apprehension of ideas is the apprehension of the common element in the manifold, the universal in the individual, the permanent in the mutable. Reason contemplates ideas, and participates in ideas, and ideas are at once the essences of things and the regulative principles of cognition. By communion with them the reason reaches objective reality and possesses subjective certainty. They are not isolated and unconnected, but so related that each higher idea comprehends within it several lower ones, and that all combined constitute a graduated series or articulated organism, unified and completed by an idea which has none higher than itself, which is ultimate, which conditions all the others while it is conditioned by none. The supreme idea, which contains in itself all other ideas, is absolute truth, absolute beauty, absolute good, absolute intelligence, and absolute being. It is the source of all true existence, knowledge, and excellence. It is God. In this part of its course the dialectic of Plato is simply a search for God. It is a priori inasmuch as it rests on necessary ideas, but a posteriori inasmuch as it proceeds from these ideas upwards to God in a manner which is essentially analytic and inductive. Only when God—the principle of principles—is reached, can it become synthetic and deductive.

The question, Is the Platonic proof of the Divine existence substantially true? is precisely equivalent to the question, Is the Platonic philosophy substantially true? Of course, I cannot here attempt to argue a theme so vast as Spiritualism versus Empiricism, Platonism versus Positivism. My belief, however, is, that Platonism is substantially true; that the objections which the empiricism and positivism at present prevalent urge against its fundamental positions are superficial and insufficient; that what is essential in its theory of ideas, and in the theism inseparable from that theory, must abide with our race for ever as a priceless possession. The Platonic argument—by which is meant not a particular argument incidentally employed by Plato, but the reasoning which underlies and pervades his entire philosophy as a speculative search for certainty—has been transmitted from age to age down to the present day by a long series of eminent thinkers. Augustine, for example, argues for the existence of God from the very nature of truth. It is impossible to think that there is no truth. If there were none, to affirm that there was none would be itself true; or, in other words, the denial of the existence of truth is a self-contradiction. But what is truth? It is not mere sensuous perception, not a something which belongs to the individual mind and varies with its moods and peculiarities, but a something which is unsensuous, unchangeable, and universal. The human reason changes and errs in its judgments; but ideas, necessary truths, are not the products, but the laws and conditions, of the human reason—they are over it, and it is only through apprehending, realising, and obeying them, that it enlightens and regulates our nature. These ideas—the laws of our intellectual and moral constitution—cannot have their source in us, but must be eternally inherent in an eternal, unchangeable, and perfect Being. This Being—the absolute truth and ultimate ground of all goodness—is God. Anselm reasoned in altogether the same spirit and in nearly the same manner. In one of his works he institutes an inquiry as to whether the goodness in good actions is or is not the same thing present in all; and when he has convinced himself that it is the same thing, he asks, What is it? and where has it a real existence? Ascending upwards by these stages, Good is; Good is perfect; Good is one; the one perfect Good is God,—he comes to the conclusion that the goodness constitutive of good actions has necessarily its source in God, and that the absolutely and essentially good is identical with God. In another of his works he similarly inquires whether there is any truth except mere actual existence. He holds that there is, and argues, as he had done before in regard to the good, that the absolute and ultimate truth must be God. Thomas Aquinas was at one with Anselm thus far. The very nature of knowledge seemed to him to show that it was in man only through the dependence of the human intelligence on an underived and perfect intelligence.

Among the many modern philosophers who have adopted and enforced the same doctrine I shall refer only to a few. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the founder of English deism, is very explicit on the subject. He thought of the human mind as united in the closest and most comprehensive way to the Divine mind through the universal notions of what he called the rational instinct. These notions are the laws which every faculty is meant to conform to and obey—the laws of all thought, affection, and action. As to nature and origin, they are, in Herbert's view, Divine; thoughts of God present in the mind of man; true revelations of the Father of spirits to His children. In apprehending one of them we have truly an intuition of a Divine attribute, of some feature of the Divine character. It is through contact, through communion with the Divine Intelligence, Love, and Will, that we know and feel and act. The Divine is the root and the law of human thought, emotion, and conduct. Not afar off, not to be realised by great stretch of intellect, not separated by innumerable existences which intervene between Him and us, but close around us, yea, with nothing between Him and our inmost souls, is the Being with whom we have to do. "In Him," really and without any figure of speech, "we live, and move, and have our being."

Among the various metaphysical proofs of Divine existence employed by Cudworth, one is in like manner founded on the very nature of knowledge. Knowledge, it is argued, is possible only through ideas which have their source in an eternal reason. Sense is not only not the whole of knowledge, but is in itself not at all knowledge; it is wholly relative and individual, and not knowledge until the mind adds to it what is absolute and universal. Knowledge does not begin with what is individual, but with what is universal. The individual is known by being brought under a universal, instead of the universal being gathered from a multitude of individuals. And these universals or ideas which underlie all the knowledge of all men, which originate it and do not originate in it, have existed eternally in the only mode in which truths can be said to be eternal, in an eternal mind. They come to us from an eternal mind, which is their proper home, and of which human reason is an emanation. "From whence it cometh to pass, that all minds, in the several places and ages of the world, have ideas or notions of things exactly alike, and truths indivisibly the same. Truths are not multiplied by the diversity of minds that apprehend them; because they are all but ectypal participations of one and the same original or archetypal mind and truth. As the same face may be reflected in several glasses; and the image of the same sun may be in a thousand eyes at once beholding it; and one and the same voice may be in a thousand ears listening to it: so when innumerable created minds have the same ideas of things, and understand the same truths, it is but one and the same eternal light that is reflected in them all ('that light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world,') or the same voice of that one everlasting Word that is never silent, re-echoed by them."

Malebranche's celebrated theory of "seeing all things in God" is but an exaggeration of the doctrine that "God is the light of all our seeing." It found a zealous English defender in John Norris of Bemerton. According to Malebranche and Norris, all objects are seen or understood through ideas, which derive their existence neither from the senses nor from the operations of the mind itself but are created in us by the Deity; and which are not drawn from contemplation of the perfections of the soul, but are inherent in the Divine nature. Better guarded statements of the Platonic argument from necessary ideas will be found in Leibnitz, and Bossuet, and Fenelon.

In the hands of Cousin more was again attempted to be deduced from it than it could legitimately yield. We may reject, however, his opinion that reason is not individual or personal, without rejecting with it the substance at least of what he has so eloquently said regarding the necessary ideas which govern the reason, or the reasoning by which he seeks to show that truth is incomprehensible without God, and that all thought implies a spontaneous faith in God. The most recent defenders of theism employ in one form or another the same argument. In the works of Ulrici, Hettinger, and Luthardt, of Saisset and Simon, of Thompson and Tulloch, it still holds a prominent place.

I pass from it to indicate the character of some other arguments, which are of a much more formal nature, but which have by no means commanded so wide an assent. In fact, the arguments to which I now refer have never laid hold of the common reason of men. They are the ingenious constructions of highly-gifted metaphysicians, and have awakened much interest in a certain number of speculative minds, but they have not contributed in any considerable degree either to the maintenance or the diffusion of theistic belief, and have had no lengthened continuous history. They obviously stand, therefore, on a very different footing from the proofs which have already been adduced—proofs which are as catholic as the conclusions which they support, or as any of the doctrines of the Christian system.

The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes, author of the famous Hymn to Zeus, argued that every comparison, in affirming or denying one thing to be better than another, implied and presupposed the existence of a superlative or an absolutely good and perfect Being. Centuries later, Boethius had recourse to nearly identical reasoning. It is only, he maintained, through the idea of perfection that we can judge anything to be imperfect; and the consciousness or perception of imperfection leads reason necessarily to believe that there is a perfect existence—one than whom a better cannot be conceived—God. Cleanthes and Boethius were thus the precursors of Anselm, who was, however, the first to endeavour to show that from the very idea of God as the highest Being His necessary reality may be strictly deduced. In consequence, Anselm was the founder of that kind of argumentation which, in the opinion of many, is alone entitled to be described as a priori or ontological. He reasoned thus: "The fool may say in his heart, There is no God; but he only proves thereby that he is a fool, for what he says is self-contradictory. Since he denies that there is a God, he has in his mind the idea of God, and that idea implies the existence of God, for it is the idea of a Being than which a higher cannot be conceived. That than which a higher cannot be conceived cannot exist merely as an idea, because what exists merely as an idea is inferior to what exists in reality as well as in idea. The idea of a highest Being which exists merely in thought, is the idea of a highest Being which is not the highest even in thought, but inferior to a highest Being which exists in fact as well as in thought." This reasoning found unfavourable critics even among the contemporaries of Anselm, and has commended itself completely to few. Yet it may fairly be doubted whether it has been conclusively refuted, and some of the objections most frequently urged against it are certainly inadmissible. It is no answer to it, for example, to deny that the idea of God is innate or universal. The argument merely assumes that he who denies that there is a God must have an idea of God. There is also no force, as Anselm showed, in the objection of Gaunilo, that the existence of God can no more be inferred from the idea of a perfect being, than the existence of a perfect island is to be inferred from the idea of such an island. There neither is nor can be an idea of an island which is greater and better than any other that can ever be conceived. Anselm could safely promise that he would make Gaunilo a present of such an island when he had really imagined it. Only one being—an infinite, independent, necessary being—can be perfect in the sense of being greater and better than every other conceivable being. The objection that the ideal can never logically yield the real—that the transition from thought to fact must be in every instance illegitimate—is merely an assertion that the argument is fallacious. It is an assertion which cannot fairly be made until the argument has been exposed and refuted. The argument is that a certain thought of God is found necessarily to imply His existence. The objection that existence is not a predicate, and that the idea of a God who exists is not more complete and perfect than the idea of a God who does not exist, is, perhaps, not incapable of being satisfactorily repelled. Mere existence is not a predicate, but specifications or determinations of existence are predicable. Now the argument nowhere implies that existence is a predicate; it implies only that reality, necessity, and independence of existence are predicates of existence; and it implies this on the ground that existence in re can be distinguished from existence in conceptu, necessary from contingent existence, self-existence from derived existence. Specific distinctions must surely admit of being predicated. That the exclusion of existence—which here means real and necessary existence—from the idea of God does not leave us with an incomplete idea of God, is not a position, I think, which can be maintained. Take away existence from among the elements in the idea of a perfect being, and the idea becomes either the idea of a nonentity or the idea of an idea, and not the idea of a perfect being at all. Thus, the argument of Anselm is unwarrantably represented as an argument of four terms instead of three. Those who urge the objection seem to me to prove only that if our thought of God be imperfect, a being who merely realised that thought would be an imperfect being; but there is a vast distance between this truism and the paradox that an unreal being may be an ideally perfect being.

The Cartesian proofs have been much and keenly discussed. The one which founds on the fact of our existence and its limitations is manifestly a posteriori. The other two both proceed from the idea of a perfect being. The first is, that the idea of an all-perfect and unlimited being is involved in the very consciousness of imperfection and limitation. The imperfect can only be seen in the light of the perfect; the finite cannot be conceived of except in relation to the infinite. But can a finite and imperfect cause—like the human mind or the outward world—be reasonably supposed to originate the idea of an infinite and perfect being? Descartes holds that it cannot; that the idea of an infinite and perfect being can only be explained by the existence and operation of such a being. Was he correct in this judgment? Perhaps not; but what has been urged in refutation of it is probably by no means conclusive. It has been said that the ideas of infinity and perfection are mere generalisations from experience. But this is a statement which can only be proved on the principles of sensationalism, and never has been proved. It has been likewise said that these ideas are purely subjective, or, in other words, that there may be nothing whatever to correspond to them. But this is a meaningless collocation of words. No finite mind can conceive the infinite, for example, as within itself at all. The human mind can only think of the infinite as without itself. If the infinite be not objective, the idea of the infinite is false and delusive. The infinite, it has been further objected, means merely what is not finite; and the perfect what is not imperfect. So be it; the argument is as valid if the words be taken in that sense as in any other. Only do not add, as some do, that the perfect and the imperfect, the finite and the infinite, are mere verbal correlatives. Such a proposition can be spoken, but it cannot be thought; and it is most undesirable to divorce thought from speech. It has also been urged that all men have not the idea of perfection; that different men have different ideas thereof; and that in each man who possesses it the idea is constantly changing. This must be granted; but it does not affect the argument, which is founded on the existence of the idea of a perfect being, and not on the perfection of the idea itself.

The second form of the Cartesian argument is, that God cannot be thought of as a perfect Being unless He be also thought of as a necessarily existent Being; and that, therefore, the thought of God implies the existence of God. "Just as because," for example, "the equality of its three angles to two right angles is necessarily comprised in the idea of a triangle, the mind is firmly persuaded that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; so, from its perceiving necessary and eternal existence to be comprised in the idea which it has of an all-perfect Being, it ought manifestly to conclude that this all-perfect Being exists." Kant met this argument thus: "It is a contradiction that there should be a triangle the three angles of which are not equal to two right angles, or that there should be a God who is not necessarily existent. I cannot in either case retain the subject and do away with the predicate. If I assume a triangle, I must take it with its three angles. If I assume a God, I must grant Him to be necessarily existent. But why should I assume either that there is a triangle or that there is a God? I may annul the subject in both cases, and then there will be no contradiction in annulling the predicate in both cases. There may be no such thing as a triangle, why should there be such a Being as God?"

This reasoning of Kant has generally been accepted as conclusive. It does not appear to me to be so. He ought not merely to have asserted but to have shown that we can annul the subject in either of the cases mentioned. We obviously cannot. I can say "there is no triangle," but instead of annulling that implies the idea of a triangle, and from the idea of a triangle it follows that its three angles are equal to two right angles. In like manner I can say "there is no God," but that is not to annul but to imply the idea of God, and it is from the idea of God that, according to Descartes, the existence of God necessarily follows. Kant should have seen that the proposition "there is no God" could be no impediment to an argument the very purpose of which is to prove that that proposition is a self-contradiction. It is futile to meet this by saying that existence ought not to be included in any mere conception, for it is not existence but necessary existence which is included in the conception reasoned from, and that God can be thought of otherwise than as necessarily existent requires to be proved, not assumed. To affirm that existence cannot be given or reached through thought, but only through sense and sensuous experience, can prove nothing except the narrowness of the philosophy on which such a thesis is based.

Cudworth, Leibnitz, and Mendelssohn modified the Cartesian argument last specified in ways which do not greatly differ from one another. It may be doubted whether their modifications were improvements.

In the eighteenth century there were elaborated a great many proofs which claimed to be a priori theistic demonstrations based on the notions of existence and causality. Assuming that something is, and that nothing cannot be the cause of something, these arguments attempted to establish that there must be an unoriginated Being of infinite perfection, and possessed of the attributes which we ascribe to God. The most famous of them was, perhaps, that of Dr Samuel Clarke, contained in the Boyle Lecture of 1704. But Dr Richard Fiddes, the Rev. Colin Campbell, Mr Wollaston, Moses Lowman, the Chevalier Ramsay, Dean Hamilton, and many others, devised ingenious demonstrations of a similar nature. It is impossible for me to discuss here their merits and demerits. Probably not one of them has completely satisfied more than a few speculative minds. They are certainly not fitted to carry conviction to the ordinary practical understanding. Yet it is not easy to detect flaws in some of them; and the more carefully they are studied, the more, I am inclined to think, will it be recognised that they are pervaded by a substantial vein of truth. They attempted logically to evolve what was implied in certain primary intuitions or fundamental conditions of the mind, and although they may not have accomplished all that they aimed at, they have at least succeeded in showing that unless there exists an eternal, infinite, and unconditioned Being, the human mind is, in its ultimate principles, self-contradictory and delusive.[49]

There must, for example, unless consciousness and reason are utterly untrustworthy, be an eternal Being. Present existence necessarily implies to the human intellect eternal existence. The man who says that a finite mind cannot rise to the idea of an eternal Being talks foolishly, for all the thinking of a finite mind implies belief in what he says is inaccessible to human thought. No man can thoughtfully affirm his own existence, or the existence even of a passing fancy of his mind, or of a grain of sand, without feeling that that affirmation as certainly implies that something existed from all eternity as any mathematical demonstration whatever implies its conclusion. And this truth, that the most transient thing cannot be conceived of as existing unless an eternal Being exist, may be syllogistically expressed and exhibited in a variety of ways, because the contradictions involved in denying it are numerous. This is what has been done by the authors above mentioned with much ingenuity, and by some of them in a manner which never has been and never can be refuted. It may be doubted whether they did wisely in throwing their arguments into syllogistic form; but as nobody ventures to undertake the refutation of them, they must be admitted to be substantially valid. The reasonings of men like Clarke and Fiddes, Lowman and Ramsay, have sufficiently proved that whoever denies such propositions as these,—Something has existed from eternity; The eternal Being must be necessarily existent, immutable, and independent; There is but one unoriginated Being in the universe; The unoriginated Being must be unlimited or perfect in all its attributes, &c.,—inevitably falls into manifest absurdities.

This, it may be objected, is not equivalent to a proof of the existence of an infinite and eternal Being. It leads merely to the alternative, either an infinite and eternal Being exists, or the consciousness and reason of man cannot be trusted. The absolute sceptic will rejoice to have the alternative offered to him; that the human mind is essentially untrustworthy is precisely what he maintains. I answer that I admit that the arguments in question do not amount to a direct positive proof, but that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum, which is just as good, and that if they do not exclude absolute scepticism, it is merely because absolute scepticism is willing to accept what is absurd. I am not going to examine absolute scepticism at present. I shall have something to say regarding it when I treat of antitheistic theories. Just now it is sufficient simply to point out that if disbelief in an infinite, self-existent, eternal Being necessarily implies belief in the untrustworthiness of all our mental processes, the absolute sceptic is the only man who can consistently disbelieve in God. Unless we are prepared to believe that no distinction can be established between truth and error—that there is no certainty that our senses and our understandings are not at every moment deceiving us—no real difference between our perceptions when we are awake and our visions when we are asleep—no ground of assurance that we are not as much deluded when following a demonstration of Euclid as any have been who busied themselves in attempting to square the circle,—we must accept all arguments which show that disbelief of the existence of an infinite and eternal Being logically involves a self-contradiction or an absurdity, as not less valid than a direct positive demonstration of the existence of such a Being. If, although I am constrained to conclude that there is an infinite and eternal Being, I may reject the conclusion on the supposition that reason is untrustworthy, I am clearly bound, in self-consistency, to set aside the testimony of my senses also by the assumption that they are habitually delusive. When any view or theory is shown to involve absolute scepticism it is sufficiently refuted, for absolute scepticism effaces the distinction between reason and unreason, and practically prefers unreason to reason.

II.

The a priori arguments have a value independent of their truth and of their power to produce conviction. True or false, persuasive or merely perplexing, they are admirable means of disciplining the mind distinctly to apprehend certain ideas which experience cannot yield, yet which must be comprehended in any worthy view taken of God. They help us steadily to contemplate and patiently to consider such abstract and difficult thoughts as those of being, absolute being, necessary being, cause, substance, perfection, infinity, eternity, &c.; and this is a service so great, that it may safely be said—as some writer whose name I cannot recall has said—that they will never be despised so long as speculative thinking is held in repute.

While believing that several of these arguments on the whole accomplish what they undertake, I am not prepared to maintain that any of them are faultless or even conclusive throughout. They are all, probably, much too formal and elaborate, so far as any directly practical purpose is concerned. It ought to be constantly kept in view that they presuppose an immediate apprehension of the infinite, and that their value consists entirely in establishing that that apprehension implies the reality and presence of God. The simplest mode of doing this must be the best. It may be thought that no reasoning at all is needed; that the intuition does not require to be supplemented by any inference; that if the infinite be apprehended, the living God must be self-evidently present to the human mind. But this is plainly a hasty view. Few atheists will deny that something is infinite, or that they immediately apprehend various aspects of infinity. What they refuse to acknowledge is, that the apprehension of the infinite implies more than the boundlessness of space, the eternity of time, and the self-existence of matter. There is certainly some reasoning needed in order to show that this interpretation of the intuition is inadequate. But such reasoning cannot be too direct, for otherwise the function of the intuition is almost certain to be obscured, and argument is almost certain to be credited with accomplishing far more than it really effects.

According to the view of the theistic argumentation which has been given in the present course of lectures, all that is now necessary to complete the theistic proof is very simple indeed. The universe has been shown to have an inconceivably powerful and intelligent cause, a Supreme Creator, who has dealt bountifully with all His creatures, who has given to men a moral law, and who has abundantly manifested in history that He loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity. We are further conscious of having ideas or intuitions of infinity, eternity, necessary existence, and perfection. We may dispute as to whence and how we have got them, but we cannot deny that we possess them. Were any person, for example, to affirm that he did not believe that there is a self-existent or necessary being—a being which derived its existence from no other and depends upon no other but is what it is in and of itself alone—we should be entitled to tell him either that he did not know the meaning of what he said, or that he did not himself believe what he said. But if we undoubtedly possess these ideas, they must, unless they are wholly delusive—which is what we are unable to conceive—be predicable of some being. The sole question for us is, Of what being? And the whole of our previous argumentation has shut us up to one answer. It must be, Of Him who has been proved to be the First Cause of all things—the Source of all the power, wisdom, and goodness displayed in the universe. It cannot be the universe itself, for that has been shown to be but an effect—to have before and behind it a Mind, a Person. It cannot be ourselves or anything to which our senses can reach, seeing that we and they are finite, contingent, and imperfect. The author of the universe alone—the Father of our spirits, and the Giver of every good and perfect gift—can be uncreated and unconditioned, infinite and perfect.